Photograph by Bill Clark/Getty Images.

Dear Commons Community,

Mitch McConnell said after the 2020 election that then-President Donald Trump was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being” and a “narcissist,” according to excerpts from a new biography of the Senate Republican leader that will be released this month.

McConnell made the remarks in private as part of a series of personal oral histories that he made available to Michael Tackett, deputy Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press. Tackett’s book, “The Price of Power,” draws from almost three decades of McConnell’s recorded diaries and from years of interviews with the normally reticent Kentucky Republican.

The animosity between Trump and McConnell is well known — Trump once called McConnell ” a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack.” But McConnell’s private comments are by far his most brutal assessment of the former president and could be seized on by Democrats before the Nov. 5 election. The biography will be released Oct. 29, one week before Election Day that will decide if Trump returns to the White House.

Despite those strong words, McConnell has endorsed Trump’s 2024 run, saying earlier this year “it should come as no surprise” that he would support the Republican party’s nominee.

McConnell, 82, announced this year that he will step aside as Republican leader after the election but stay in the Senate through the end of his term in 2026.

McConnell was ‘counting the days’ until Trump left office

The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races.

Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”

“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”

Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

On Jan. 6, soon after he made those comments, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Once the Senate resumed debate over the certification of Biden’s victory, McConnell said in a speech on the floor that “this failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.”

McConnell then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was “ practically and morally responsible ” for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.

Years of doubts and criticism

In a statement to the AP on Thursday, McConnell referenced two fellow Republican senators — JD Vance of Ohio, the vice presidential nominee, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, both of whom are strong Trump allies after harshly criticizing him during his first run in 2016.

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

McConnell also had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.

The book channels McConnell’s inner thoughts during some of the biggest moments after Trump took office, as McConnell held his tongue and as the two men repeatedly fought and made up.

In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint news conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”

After the passage of a $1.5 trillion tax overhaul that same year, McConnell said, “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.”

He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”

“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” McConnell said.

Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump’s behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he kept pushing false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.

By 2024, McConnell had again endorsed Trump. He felt he had to if he were to continue to play a role in shaping the nation’s agenda.

“It was the price he paid for power,” Tackett writes.

McConnell is a hypocritical Republican who puts his party before the country.

Tony

 Marie Curie (right) with her eldest daughter and mentee, Irène PHOTO: OXFORD SCIENCE ARCHIVE/PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

Dear Commons Community,

When pressed to write a memoir, Marie Curie—two-time Nobel Prize winner and the only person to win for two different fields of science—said that her life could be summed up in three sentences: “I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.” Fortunately, a number of other authors have felt more details were warranted, and Curie has since been the subject of many acclaimed biographies.

Her latest biography,  The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science by Dava Sobel has just been published and was reviewed in today’s edition of Science.  Below is the entire review. 

I have just ordered my copy.

Tony

Curie’s intellectual offspring

In Section Books et al. | Science Lives

The scientist did much to inspire and advance the careers of other women researchers

By Vijaysree Venkatraman

When pressed to write a memoir, Marie Curie—two-time Nobel Prize winner and the only person to win for two different fields of science—said that her life could be summed up in three sentences: “I was born in Warsaw of a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I have done my work in France.” Fortunately, a number of other authors have felt more details were warranted, and Curie has since been the subject of many acclaimed biographies, including one written by her younger daughter, the journalist Ève Curie (¹).

What then remains to be said of the scientific icon? In The Elements of Marie Curie, Dava Sobel offers a vivid narrative that uses Curie’s well-known story as scaffolding for tales of the brilliant young women who trained in her lab and became part of her scientific legacy. Sobel, a 2000 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, has unearthed these stories from letters, scientific publications, and articles or books written about Curie’s mentees.

An early protégée, Ellen Gleditsch, a trained pharmacy assistant and radioactivity enthusiast from Norway, would be the first woman chemist to be elected to the Academy of Sciences and Letters in her home country. Curie’s last lab “daughter,” Marguerite Perey, who topped a Parisian class of female lab technicians, arrived without a letter of recommendation from any top scientist. She went on to discover the element francium. One notable mentee was, of course, Irène Joliot-Curie, Curie’s eldest daughter. After Marie’s death, Irène and her husband Frédéric won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for what they described as the “synthesis of artificial radioelements.”

Forty-five female researchers passed through Curie’s lab in her lifetime. Some left early, when it became clear that their mentor, who was frequently hospitalized, would not be accessible during their planned period of stay. Others, like Gleditsch, came back for additional stints and became advocates for research opportunities for women.

During World War I, when x-ray technology was still new, Curie’s innovative mobile x-ray units ensured that surgeons did not have to operate blindly on injured soldiers. She tapped her alumnae network to train personnel, including women with no more than an elementary education, for the vital job of x-ray technician. The army dubbed its truck-based mobile units “petites Curies.”

The wartime service did much to restore Curie’s reputation, which was tarnished in 1911 by an affair with a married colleague, the physicist Paul Langevin. (There was no public outcry when the same man, still unhappily married, later fathered an illegitimate child with a former student, Sobel notes.)

When a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences advised Curie not to receive her second Nobel Prize in person because of this scandal, she refused to back down. In her acceptance lecture, delivered in Stockholm that December, she described the steps she took to place radium, and the much rarer polonium, on the periodic table. Enraged by the public’s preoccupation with her personal life, fellow scientist Albert Einstein wrote to her that same year expressing his admiration for her intellect, her drive, and her honesty.

Others were compelled by Curie’s simplicity. Marie Mattingly Meloney, an American journalist for a women’s magazine, was reportedly so moved by the “gentle woman in a black cotton dress” that she vowed to procure an additional gram of radium—then prized at $100,000—for the scientist’s research. The target was accomplished, largely thanks to the generosity of women in the United States. To thank her benefactors in person, Curie toured the United States in 1921, despite her failing health.

Curie’s radium research, always arduous, would ultimately prove fatal. Sobel notes the cognitive dissonance common among “radioactivists,” who were better equipped than anyone to appreciate the destructive power of the elements they handled but often believed that the health setbacks they caused could be alleviated by, say, a brief holiday.

After winning the 1903 Nobel Prize, Curie told reporters who visited the lab: “In science, we should be interested in phenomena, not in individuals.” She was only partially right. Even during her lifetime, she would inspire many young women to study radioactivity, which she described as “an entirely separate kind of chemistry… which we might well call the chemistry of the imponderable.” This superbly rendered portrait of Curie and her intellectual offspring could inspire many bright minds to follow in the scientist’s footsteps for generations to come.

Dear Commons Community,

More than 100 former national security officials from Republican administrations and former Republican members of Congress endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris yesterday after concluding that their party’s nominee, Donald Trump, is “unfit to serve again as president.” As reported by The New York Times.

In a letter to the public, the Republicans, including both vocal longtime Trump opponents and others who had not endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, argued that while they might “disagree with Kamala Harris” on many issues, Mr. Trump had demonstrated “dangerous qualities.” Those include, they said, “unusual affinity” for dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and “contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior.”

“As president,” the letter said, “he promoted daily chaos in government, praised our enemies and undermined our allies, politicized the military and disparaged our veterans, prioritized his personal interest above American interests and betrayed our values, democracy and this country’s founding documents.”

The letter condemned Mr. Trump’s incitement of the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, aimed at allowing him to hold onto power after losing an election, saying that “he has violated his oath of office and brought danger to our country.” It quoted Mr. Trump’s own former vice president, Mike Pence, who has said that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”

The letter came not long after former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, both said they would vote for Ms. Harris. Democrats featured a number of anti-Trump Republicans at their nominating convention last month, including former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. Mr. Pence has said he will not endorse Mr. Trump but has not endorsed Ms. Harris.

The 111 signatories included former officials who served under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush. Many of them had previously broken with Mr. Trump, including two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and William S. Cohen; Robert B. Zoellick, a former president of the World Bank; the former C.I.A. directors Michael V. Hayden and William H. Webster; a former director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte; and former Gov. William F. Weld of Massachusetts. Miles Taylor and Olivia Troye, two Trump administration officials who became vocal critics, also signed.

We need more sitting Republican officials to come out for Harris and put the country ahead of their party.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I watched Vice President Kamala Harris’ tense interview with Bret Baier last night on Fox News. During one of the more hostile moments, Harris  told host Baier he was diminishing one of Donald Trump’s most inflammatory remarks.

The exchange began after Harris called out the former president’s recent comments labeling “radical left lunatics” as “the enemy from within” and asserting they should be “handled” with military force.

“He’s the one who talks about an enemy within… suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people,” Harris said of her Republican rival for the presidency.

Baier responded that Fox News asked Trump about those remarks earlier , then played a clip of Trump defending his words. In the clip, Trump says his opponents have exaggerated his comments and that he’s the one who’s been cast as an enemy.

Harris wasn’t having it.

“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’ that he has repeated when he is speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed,” she said.

Harris and Baier spoke over each other for a while as he began defending his use of the clip.

“Here’s the bottom line: He has repeated it many times, and you and I both know that,” Harris said. “And you and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him.”

The president should be “able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it,” she added.

That exchange followed another combative moment when Baier asked Harris if she thinks Trump’s supporters are “stupid.”

The 30-minute interview started on a tense note, with Baier asking Harris to estimate how many “illegal immigrants” she thought the Biden administration had “released into the country in the last three-and-a-half years.”

As Harris began her answer, Baier repeatedly interrupted her in an attempt to have her provide a hard number.

“I’m in the middle of responding to the point you’re raising,” Harris told Baier. “I’d like to finish.”

From there, the clashes continued. Here are other major takeaways from the interview.

Harris denies she wants to decriminalize unauthorized border crossings

During the initial back-and-forth on the subject of immigration and border security, Harris said she did not and does not support decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings into the United States.

“We have a broken immigration system that needs to be repaired,” she told Baier. “I am very clear — as is Tim Walz — that we must support and enforce federal law, and that’s what we will do.”

Harris also went after Trump for opposing a bipartisan border security proposal, saying the former president would rather “run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

Baier highlighted the cases of Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley and Rachel Morin, all young women who were allegedly killed by men who came to the U.S. illegally and who are frequently referenced during Trump rallies.

“Do you owe these families an apology?” Baier asked Harris.

“Those are tragic cases. There’s no question about that,” she responded. “It is also true that if a border security [bill] had actually been passed nine months ago, it would be nine months we would have had more border agents at the border, more support for the folks who are working around the clock trying to hold it all together to ensure that no future harm would occur.”

Harris: ‘I will follow the law’ on gender-affirming surgery for transgender inmates

During one exchange, Baier played portions of a Trump campaign ad that sharply criticizes Harris over her past support for using taxpayer funds for gender-affirming surgery for transgender inmates, including those who are undocumented.

When asked by Baier if she still supported the idea, Harris said, “I will follow the law.”

“It’s actually a law Donald Trump followed,” she added. “Under Donald Trump’s administration, these surgeries were available to — on a medically necessary basis — to people in the federal prison system. And I think that ad from the Trump campaign is a little bit of throwing stones when you live in a glass house.”

The federal law has been in effect since February 2018. While the Trump administration stiffened treatment guidelines previously set by the Obama administration for who is eligible for transgender surgery, it remained available during Trump’s presidency.

Baier pointed out that “Trump aides” have said that no surgeries happened during his presidency, which is true — the first operation was in 2022. Still, Harris shot back that Trump was trying to scare voters with the ad.

“[Trump] spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters because he actually has no plan in this election that is about focusing on the needs of the American people,” Harris said.

A Harris presidency ‘will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s’

Baier played clips from two of Harris’s recent interviews where she’s asked about what she’ll do differently from the Biden administration, including an Oct. 8 interview on The View during which she responded, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

“Let me be very clear: My presidency will not be a continuation of Joe Biden’s presidency,” Harris told Baier. “Like every new president that comes into office, I will bring my life experiences, my professional experiences, and fresh and new ideas. I represent a new generation of leadership.”

Baier also pressed Harris about her previous advocacy for Biden’s mental fitness for office before he ended his reelection campaign. Harris reiterated that Biden has the “judgment” and “experience” to be president and then turned the question around to be about Trump.

“Joe Biden is not on the ballot, Donald Trump is,” she said. “He’s unfit to serve. He’s unstable. He’s dangerous. And people are exhausted.”

Bottom line, Kamala Harris gave a great interview and kicked Bret Baier in the butt!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The new Grand Egyptian Museum will open its main galleries today including 12 halls that exhibit aspects of ancient Egypt, as part of a trial run, officials say. 

It will be the largest archaeological museum complex in the world and will house King Tut’s entire treasure collection.  Located just 2km away from the Giza pyramids (of which it will have a panoramic view), the Grand Egyptian Museum will be home to a collection of some 100,000 objects and artifacts, as well as a 3D cinema and a museum dedicated to children.

The museum was first scheduled to open in 2015, however building works have been fraught with delays and costs have spiraled from an estimated US$500 million to somewhere around the US$1 billion mark.

Hopefully none of those things will matter once the spectacular 500,000 sqm space opens.

The video below (courtesy of AP Video: Ahmed Hatem) provides a preview of what to expect.  It looks magnificent.

Tony

Courtesy of CNN.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times’ reporter Maggie Haberman yesterday picked apart  Donald Trump’s increasingly rambling answers to questions, which he has repeatedly tried to spin as a speaking tactic called the “weave.”

Haberman told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “we are used to seeing him have a discursive speaking style but it has gotten more rambling, it has gotten more incoherent and it’s gotten longer.”

Trump’s speeches “were much shorter when he was in office” but now can stretch to 90 minutes long, Haberman noted. “His aides have been working to try to get them down for a while. But no, I think calling it the ‘weave’ is PR to try to explain why he’s talking this way.”

Haberman, who has reported on Trump for years and drawn his fury on multiple occasions, elsewhere during the discussion suggested Trump sometimes now seems “like he’s devoid of context” and “like he’s just sort of showing up and behaving in various ways.”

She put it partly down to Trump’s age.

Trump turned 78 in June and in July became the oldest ever presidential nominee after President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection campaign and endorsed his vice president, now-Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

“I think he’s older,” Haberman said of Trump. “I think there’s less of a filter than there used to be which is what happens when people get older.”

Sources close to Trump also say he’s “seemed somewhat different” since the attempt on his life in July and Biden’s decision to drop out of the race, Haberman added.

See the exchange with Kaitlin Collins below.  The discussion of the weave takes place at about the 3:20 mark.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading a new book by Rachel Kousser entitled, Alexander at the End of the World:  The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great. Kousser is a professor of ancient history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Anyone interested in ancient Middle Eastern history will find this book filled with interesting stories and background on Alexander’s quest to conquer the known world in the 4th century BC.  A good deal of the book is devoted to Alexander’s knowledge of military strategy.  However, it is one of the only books I have ever read which devotes an entire chapter describing the thousands of non-military people who traveled with an army – the philosophers, musicians, women and children. Kousser makes clear the difficult logistics of moving the entire entourage over difficult terrain such as deserts, mountains and flooded rivers.  Kousser also provides provocative insights into Alexander such as the possibility of his complicitness in his father’s (Philip of Macedon) death.  The author also makes clear that Alexander’s admiration of Persian culture was a major source of friction with his Macedonian friends and generals.

In sum, I found this an informative read.  I highly recommend it if you have any interest in Alexander.

Below is a review published in The New York Times.

Tony

——————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Think Our Political Leaders Are Selfish? Imagine Working for Alexander the Great.

 By Justin Marozzi

Justin Marozzi is the author of “Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World” and the editor of “A Thousand Golden Cities: 2,500 Years of Writing From Afghanistan and Its People.”

July 14, 2024

ALEXANDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, by Rachel Kousser

It is difficult to reach the end of the world when you don’t know where it is. That was the recurrent, ultimately insurmountable, challenge faced by the empire-building Macedonian king Alexander the Great during the last seven years of his life, a tumultuous period now under review in “Alexander at the End of the World,” by the classicist Rachel Kousser.

Her story begins in 330 B.C. just before the assassination of the Persian king Darius III, whom Alexander defeated at the Battle of Gaugamela the previous year, and concludes with Alexander’s death at Babylon in 323 B.C. Between those dates Alexander led an increasingly cosmopolitan army across much of what was, to Mediterranean people, the known world, rampaging through Iran and into Central Asia, over the Hindu Kush mountains and into the Indian subcontinent, subduing everyone and everything before him and picking up local warriors to fight for him along the way.

Unable to stand still, the 32-year-old conqueror was on the cusp of invading Arabia when death intervened. It was this final stage of his military career — teeming with brutality, conspiracies, compromises, failures, reversals and near mutinies — that, Kousser argues, made him great.

Her prose is bracing and her descriptive powers rise admirably to the task of portraying the world in which Alexander operated. Fresh from razing the Persian capital of Persepolis in 330 B.C., the Macedonian led an army of 17,000 toward the city of Ecbatana in northwestern Iran. The beginning of his journey was bucolic, the countryside “blanketed with the bright green leaves and pale blossoms of spring,” a vista of apple, mulberry, pear, quince and pomegranate trees. “On the plains,” she writes, “cattle and horses nibbled tender new grass, while along the rivers, a rich variety of aquatic birds taught their hatchlings to swim and fly.”

Kousser summons new archaeological evidence, some of which is persuasive, to support her argument that Alexander was more of an integrationist than is generally recognized. Cultural assimilation could go both ways, too. South Asian representations of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, to give one example, testify to the widespread emulation of Alexander’s signature hairstyle.

The author’s characterization of the relationship between the king and his men as the campaign wore on — mutual adoration shot through with flashes of bitter recrimination — is especially convincing. Tensions quickly flared as Alexander attempted to meld his newly acquired Persian soldiers (soon to be joined in an ever-expanding army by Scythians, Bactrians, Sogdians and Indians) to his Macedonian military core. The Macedonians resented their king’s quick-fire embrace of Persian dress, customs and a wife, Roxane, along with his appointment of Persians to senior political and military commands.

Cultural fluidity aside, one sympathizes with Alexander’s mostly loyal, long-suffering and battle-weary Macedonian warriors. Alexander was a difficult, often reckless leader who at times needed saving from himself. On a hunt in 328 B.C., their glory-seeking king insisted on killing a lion single-handed. After he had shoved aside his bodyguard and killed the beast with a single throw of his spear, the Macedonians decreed that he was no longer allowed to hunt on foot and must always be accompanied by officers. Fat chance. “They were trying to bottle lightning,” Kousser writes.

At the heart of this book lies the defining question asked both by Alexander’s soldiers and by generations of historians ever since: Why did he keep campaigning so relentlessly, ever farther east? Why, for instance, did he seek to conquer India in 327 B.C.?

In seeking to answer this, Kousser faces the same difficulties encountered by Alexander’s earliest biographers, none of whose works survive in their entirety. In the fullest account, left by the Greek historian Arrian half a millennium after Alexander’s death, the Indian campaign was fueled by the king’s pothos (Greek for “a strong desire”) to have what he did not possess. He may have been equally driven by the fabulous riches India offered, as well as by simple curiosity. Heading south through the Indus Valley from pacified Afghanistan might also have appeared a sensible way to reach the elusive, encircling “Ocean,” which Aristotle, Alexander’s childhood tutor, considered to be the end of the world — the natural limit for conquests, mortal or divine.

In the final analysis, conquerors need to conquer and Alexander’s appetite, as Kousser makes clear, was insatiable. In Arrian’s words, “it seemed to him that there was no end to the war while an enemy remained” — a forerunner, perhaps, of the 21st-century, U.S.-led war on terror, once called the “Forever War.”

The costs of this obsession became clearer after his death. Had Alexander spent more time administering his empire, and less on its never-ending expansion, it might have been set on firmer foundations and not disintegrated almost immediately. Kousser does not press the comparison, but both the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan and his Turkic successor Timur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, emulated Alexander’s epic feats of arms, but added longer-lasting imperial legacies to their astonishing achievements.

Dear Commons Community,

Vice President Kamala Harris has agreed to a sit-down interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, the network announced yesterday.

The interview will be taped in Pennsylvania and is expected to consist of 25 to 30 minutes of questions. It’s scheduled to air on Oct. 16 (tomorrow) at 6 p.m. EST, on Baier’s show, “Special Report with Bret Baier.”

Baier serves as the network’s chief political anchor.

Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, won’t be the first on the ticket to enter hostile territory. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), has appeared on “Fox News Sunday” the past two weekends.

Harris’ media appearances have ticked sharply upward in recent weeks, with interviews on “60 Minutes,” “The View,” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” She also sat for a live interview on “The Howard Stern Show” and appeared on “Call Her Daddy,” a popular podcast.

Meanwhile, Harris’ Republican rival, former President Donald Trump, backed out of a scheduled interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” he’d agreed to. In a furious rant, he then demanded the century-old network be pulled off the air.

David Plouffe, a senior adviser to Harris, said Trump flaked on the CBS interview because he’s “afraid” of lots of things.

“Afraid of the debate stage,” Plouffe tweeted on Oct. 1, referencing Trump’s unwillingness to debate Harris a second time after they faced off in September. “Afraid of 60 minutes. And his campaign team ― after the last three days of increasingly unhinged and unstable ranting at his rallies ― is clearly afraid of exposing him beyond comfortable confines.”

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung called the story “fake news,” and disputed that Trump had ever agreed to a “60 Minutes” interview beyond “initial discussions.”

I would have preferred if Kamala Harris was being interviewed by Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto. He is far more “fair and balanced” than Baier.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Speaking in Warren, Michigan last week, Tim Walz accused Trump of allowing U.S. manufacturing jobs to be outsourced during his presidency, saying he’d been “asleep at the wheel.”

“He awarded $425 billion in federal contracts to companies that offshored federal jobs,” Walz said.

“Trump’s all talk when it comes to being tough on China,” he went on. “We just found out his Trump-branded Bibles — are printed in China. This dude even outsourced God to China.”

It was a reference to the recent controversy over a version of the Bible endorsed by Trump that has also been hawked to Oklahoma public schools.

“I’m going to try to be generous here,” Walz added. “I don’t blame him. He didn’t notice the ‘Made in China’ sticker because they put it inside, a place he’s never looked, in the Bible.”

Ouch!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, had a piece yesterday urging Kamala Harris to be more assertive in the final three weeks of the presidential campaign. Entitled, “Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?” Dowd reminds us that Hillary Clinton became complacent in the 2016 election and took for granted states like Wisconsin and Michigan.  Dowd also cites Democrat pundit, James Carville, who is quoted as saying:

“Time is short, really short. They (Harris campaign) need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”

I agree with Dowd and Carville.  Harris and her handlers have been too nice with the bully, Trump.  He needs a few slaps in the nose.

Below is the entire column.

Tony

The New York Times

“Where Is the Fierce Urgency of Beating Trump?”

Oct. 12, 2024

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington

Barack Obama got blunt in Pittsburgh on Thursday. He chided Black men who are not supporting Kamala Harris, saying that some of “the brothers” were just not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president.”

That left me mulling again: Is Harris in a dead-even race against a ridiculous person because of her sex or is that just an excuse?

Hillary Clinton did not lose because she was a woman. She lost because she was Hillary Clinton. She didn’t campaign hard enough, skipping Wisconsin and barely visiting Michigan. She got discombobulated about gender and whinged about sexism.

I asked James Carville if Kamala’s problem is that too many Americans are still chary about voting for a woman, much less a woman of color. The Ragin’ Cajun chided me.

“We’re not going to change her gender or her ethnic background between now and Election Day, so let’s not worry about it,” he said. “Time is short, really short. They need to be more aggressive. They don’t strike me as having any kind of a killer instinct. They let one fat pitch after another go by. I’m scared to death. They have to hit hard — pronto.”

Her campaign, he said dryly, “is still in Wilmington.”

Kamala spent a week answering questions on “60 Minutes” and “The View” and on the shows of Stephen Colbert and Howard Stern. And she didn’t move the needle.

“She needs to stop answering questions and start asking questions,” Carville said. He thinks that, for her closing message, she should put the issue of Jan. 6 and who won the election on the back burner.

Instead, he said, she should ask:

“How dare JD Vance say with a straight face that Trump is the father of Obamacare when Trump tried to kill it 50 times?”

She should display pictures of right-wing judges who Trump could appoint to the Supreme Court, and ask if Americans are ready for an even more fanatical court.

She should ask: “Do you know how destructive tariffs can be? They will kill your freaking jobs.”

She should say she’s going to end the Trump tax cuts for the rich and ask voters if they would rather use those trillion-plus dollars to help young people afford their first home.

In other words, he said: “She should scare the crap out of voters. You know, Trump is just taunting us, having a rally at Madison Square Garden just like the Nazis did in 1939.

“Black men and young Black men have to think about what they have at stake in the election. Donald Trump tells you that you have nothing to lose. Well, you have health insurance you could lose, you have a job you could lose.”

Other Democratic strategists I talked to agreed that Harris needs to let her guard down, cut loose and turn on the afterburners. Mainly, her pitch is that she’s not Donald Trump. And that’s an excellent pitch.

But she needs to make the case for herself more assertively.

It’s hard to understand why she didn’t sit down with a yellow pad or laptop long ago and decide why she wanted to be president, what her top priorities would be and how she would get that stuff done. The Vision Thing. Even when getting softballs from supportive TV hosts, Harris at times seemed unsure of how to answer.

She didn’t learn to tack to the center in bright blue California. When asked on “The View” whether she would have done anything different than Joe Biden, she said “there is not a thing that comes to mind” — a flub if you want to convey change.

Harris should distance herself from Biden when she needs to; she should just admit what we all know, that the border policy was bollixed up and that Biden was not tough enough with the execrable Bibi.

Kamala’s guarded nature leaves people feeling that she’s not fully revealing herself. Her reluctance to do serious interviews made her look fearful. She should have been interacting more with the media as a way of getting off the teleprompter and giving a sense of who she is as a person.

She does her homework but her delivery seems more scripted than from the kishkes. Even though it can get weird and duplicitous, Trump is better at riffing.

As Harris grinds it out, trying to woo white women who are ambivalent about Trump, she does have one big advantage: Abortion rights are on the ballot and, as a woman, she can conjure the medieval nightmare that Trump and Vance threaten.

When Harris linked her story about caring for her mother, dying of colon cancer, to her plan to get Medicare to cover some in-home care, she effectively offered a specific policy idea while revealing her vision for a kinder America than Trump has in mind.

His lies about the federal response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton have consequences. When Trump says the government is not helping people in red locales, those affected might not apply for aid. Perhaps Trump’s most ludicrous whopper is that he would be the Protector of Women.

It’s disturbing that Harris can’t get over the hump and outpace Trump. As Carville says, we need less mulling and more action in a do-or-die moment. She needs to do so we don’t die.