Aug. 26, 2024: The Empire vs. the Rebel Alliance

Israel and Hezbollah trade blows; Again, who is president?; Telegram CEO arrested in France

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The Big Story

Shortly after we sent out The Scroll on Friday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had been polling around 3%-4% as an Independent presidential candidate, announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and endorsing Donald Trump. 

In a speech announcing his decision, Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat and the face of the most prominent American political dynasty of the 20th century, denounced the Democratic Party as the party of “war, censorship, corruption, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Ag, and Big Money,” and excoriated what he described as its efforts at “dismantling” democracy:

The DNC deployed aligned judges to throw me and other candidates off the ballot and to throw President Trump in jail. It ran a sham primary that was rigged to prevent any serious challenge to President Biden. Then, when a predictably bungled debate performance precipitated the palace coup against President Biden, the same shadowy DNC operatives appointed his successor, also without an election. They installed a candidate who was so unpopular with voters that she dropped out in 2020 without winning a single delegate. 

In explaining his decision to endorse Trump, Kennedy mentioned “three great causes”: free speech, the war in Ukraine (which Trump has promised to end), and “the war on our children”—Kennedy’s term for the unprecedented rise in chronic diseases, such as autism, obesity, and diabetes, among American children over the past four decades, which he attributes to ultraprocessed foods, pesticides and other chemicals used in industrial agriculture, and vaccines, among other causes. After a series of calls and meetings with Trump, Kennedy said, “I was surprised to discover we were aligned on many key issues.” 

Those issues might be collapsed into one: a generalized skepticism of, if not outright hostility to, the American power structure as currently constituted, and thus the official version of everything. Trump’s concessions to Kennedy were instructive. At a Friday night rally in Arizona welcoming Kennedy into the MAGA fold, Trump promised to establish an independent commission to release all documents related to the JFK assassination, and reiterated an earlier pledge to establish a panel of experts—now including Kennedy—to “investigate what is causing the decadeslong increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases,” something we wouldn’t have predicted would be a major applause line at a Trump rally, but was. The rally also saw Kennedy making one of the more impressive entrances we’ve seen in America politics:

In retrospect, it all made a certain sense. Who better to join Trump’s crusade against the U.S. intelligence community than the only politician with a better cause to hate it than him? How better to broaden Trump’s anti-establishment appeal than by roping in a Democrat with a famous name whose bête noir is the most sacred of all liberal sacred cows, the public health bureaucracy?

Democrats have dismissed the RFK endorsement as meaningless, and pollster Nate Silver argues it is unlikely to make a difference—Trump gains marginally from Kennedy dropping out, but Harris still leads in both Silver’s and RealClearPolitics’ polling averages (by +4.0 and +1.5, respectively). In a weekend memo, however, Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio argued that in all seven swing states, where RFK had between 3% and 5% of the vote before dropping out, RFK’s vote breaks for Trump—by a narrow +2 margin in Michigan, but by a significant +13 margin in the critical battleground of Pennsylvania, and by even larger margins in Arizona (+25), Nevada (+50), Wisconsin (+30), and North Carolina (+36). As Fabrizio notes, if turnout in 2020 predicts turnout in 2024, that would give Trump an additional 41,000 votes in Arizona: four times Biden’s winning margin. That’s in the context of a race that “top strategists and tacticians in both parties” agree is a “tie,” even after Harris’ successful convention, according to Puck’s John Heilemann. 

The endorsement is also important on a symbolic level. RFK is, after all, a Kennedy—and a far better known one than any of the dozen-odd minor Kennedys who have been rolled out to denounce Bobby in the wake of the endorsement. And by teaming up with a rogue Kennedy to fight the Democratic Party on the issues of speech, censorship, and war, Trump can frame the election not as a conventional battle between the Democrats and Republicans, but as the machine vs. the outsiders. Or, as the writer Richard Fernandez put it on X: the “Empire vs the Rebel Alliance.”

As it happens, Tablet’s David Samuels interviewed Kennedy at the start of his presidential run, back in April 2023. You can read that interview here.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Armin Rosen gathers his thoughts after a week at the DNC

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The Rest

→On Sunday morning, Israel struck more than 40 Hezbollah launch sites in southern Lebanon to preempt what it described as an impending “major attack” from the Iran-backed terrorist group. Hezbollah responded with a less-than-impressive barrage of drones and rockets, the vast majority of which were intercepted by Israeli air defenses, and which caused no significant damage, according to Israeli officials. Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah declared victory, as usual, and both sides appeared to signal on Sunday that they were anxious to avoid further escalation. On Monday evening, however, Israeli fighter jets bombed more Hezbollah sites in Lebanon, while drone infiltration sirens sounded throughout northern Israel. 

While it is difficult to assess from media reports whether the Israeli attacks hit anything important, our guess is probably not, given how pleased the Biden-Harris administration seems to be with the results. YNet News reported Sunday that Washington had indicated it was “content” with Israel’s “limited” retaliation, and an Israeli official and an unnamed “Middle Eastern diplomat” told The Washington Post Monday that the tit-for-tat had constituted little more than “public relations management” from both sides. In the diplo-speak of the post-Obama Democratic Party, that means the Israelis likely didn’t hit anything of real value to Hezbollah and Iran—otherwise we’d be hearing warnings about Israel’s reckless escalation and plans to drag America into a “regional war.” 

→We say “Biden-Harris” administration out of convenience, but it remains an open question who is currently governing the country. Harris is busy campaigning, fundraising, and attempting to quietly distance herself from the incumbent administration, and at any rate doesn’t have any formal authority. Biden, on the other hand, is doing literally nothing: On Monday, he began his second straight week of vacation, with the presidential schedule completely blank—the only event in that two-week window being his Monday, Aug. 19, speech to the Democratic National Convention. Today, The Daily Mail reported that the morning after that speech, which was pushed past prime time on the East Coast in an apparent attempt to hide the president from a national television audience, Biden was seen “visibly shaking” as he disembarked from Air Force One. But if Harris isn’t governing, and Biden can’t, who does that leave?

→Pavel Durov, the CEO of the encrypted-messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France on Saturday night for his alleged complicity in fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, and the “promotion of terrorism and cyberbullying,” according to French media reports. Although it is not entirely clear from media reports what Durov is accused of doing, it appears that French police are charging him for his failure to moderate private Telegram chat rooms where illegal activity took place, or to cooperate with law enforcement investigations. A French Russian citizen, Durov fled Russia in 2014 after refusing government requests to censor opposition activists on his VKontakte social media platform, which he sold. If French authorities choose to press charges against Durov, he could face up to 20 years in prison. 

→Chinese artificial intelligence engineers are using decentralized computing services to access Nvidia microchips, which are banned from being exported to China, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation. Chinese companies are barred by U.S. export controls from importing Nvidia’s advanced chips, and are often restricted in their ability to contract with major U.S.-based cloud computing services that make use of the chips, such as Google and Amazon Web Services, but they have discovered a workaround: “smart contracts” hosted on the blockchain, paid for in cryptocurrency, in which sellers can rent out computing power to buyers, with both parties to the transaction remaining anonymous. And while such smart contracts generally cannot muster the sort of computing power needed for the most sophisticated AI models, such as ChatGPT, some entrepreneurs are building dedicated server farms to rent out Nvidia computing power to Chinese buyers. The Journal notes that in June, Chinese entrepreneur Derek Aw’s company “loaded more than 300 servers with the [Nvidia H100 chips] into a data center in Brisbane, Australia.” Three weeks later, “the servers began processing AI algorithms for a company in Beijing.”  

→Three people were stabbed to death, and eight others were injured, on Friday night at the “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, Germany. The assailant was a 26-year-old Syrian asylum seeker who, according to German police, was motivated by his “radical Islamist convictions” to kill as many nonbelievers as possible. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the attack, and German police have arrested two other suspects in connection with the murders: a 15-year-old boy who knew of the attack but failed to warn police, and an unidentified man who was arrested Saturday in a police raid on a home for asylum seekers.

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The Rabbi, by Tzvi

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Can Kamala Lose?

by Armin Rosen

Whenever I could this week, I posed a Bayesian query to delegates and smart-aleck political rubberneckers: What is the likeliest reason for a future Kamala Harris defeat? If she loses, it’ll be because the Democrats will have gone too negative, one Florida political veteran mused to me—Trump’s truculent negativity will pierce the “joy” bubble and the ensuing bad feelings will cause the undecided to tune out the election. Plausible!

A party finance chair from a major city in the eastern half of the country said word from the field is that this will be “a persuasion election, not a turnout election,” with the whole thing coming down to, say, concerns over the decay of Pennsylvania’s hospital systems, or rising housing costs in Arizona.

My editor, who parachuted in for the last night of the convention, proposed a third possible germ of a future defeat: Perhaps a decisive number of Americans won’t buy the Democrats’ slickly produced version of reality, which is internally consistent but differs too radically from their personal experience of the past four years, thereby underlining its own candy-spun nature.

The Democrats are tremendous reality-constructors, though. In Chicago they successfully wiped away every recent source of potential embarrassment: The words “structural racism” and “Brett Kavanaugh” were rarely spoken from the rostrum, assuming they were spoken even once. A few years ago, football was a racist brain-scrambling, neo-Roman militarist American bullfighting ritual; in the era of Coach Walz—“Defensive Coordinator Walz,” though more truthful, is cumbersome and lacking in metric balance—football is now the wholesome nontoxic masculine pastime of a now-unthreatening heartland. On Wednesday, the delegates greeted those former Mankato High defenders in uniform as if they were veterans of the most just and righteous of all wars, the high school football wars.

Instead of frontal attacks on the sensibilities of a majority of the country, a new lexicon of gauzy euphemisms was rolled out to keep the 2020 nostalgists satisfied: “letting children be who they are” instead of “protect trans lives,” “freedom” for “abortion,” or whatever. My favorite DNC neologism is the accusation that Trump’s planned tariffs amount to a “national sales tax,” a formula that obscures Democratic opposition to tariffs, which might be bad for the country as a whole but are popular in states that Harris really needs.

Is the Democratic Party overmanaging itself into oblivion? Has a unified party now confidently marched down a path whose folly will only be obvious on Nov. 6? Who knows.

When I arrived in the convention hall on Thursday night, the floor heaved to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”—everyone knew there was a gap in the prime-time schedule; maybe we’d soon see the Angel of History manifest above us in the United Center while the leading American issued the divine benediction to Kamala Harris right before our unworthy eyes. No, there wasn’t going to be a surprise Swift appearance, TMZ reported—instead, Beyonce would endorse and introduce Kamala Harris at the night’s climax. The funniest possible surprise, I decided, would be an onstage reconciliation between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, a real-life, real-time healing of bitter divides. Perhaps it would be Charli XCX introducing Harris, though despite the ubiquity of black text on pale green in Chicago I didn’t hear a single song from Brat across four days, and I have a hunch that few of the people on hand have any idea who Charli XCX is.

It turned out there was no surprise guest, and that joy-intoxicated partisans and the political press had once again projected their fantasies onto a Democratic Party that doesn’t exist in reality. Despite appearances the Democrats are not magic; they can’t just make Taylor Swift appear. Beyonce is bigger than any politician and any political convention. Why would she be here either? Maybe it’s good they weren’t here, and the party is smart not to feed the pathetic nerd fantasy that it’s the overmind of American celebrity culture any more than it already does. On Thursday we got to see Pink, Eva Longoria, Kerry Washington, Tony Goldwyn, DL Hughley. It was like the crappy first hour of the Oscars! Except Americans hate the Oscars, and are generally grossed out by overly dense, overly public concentrations of their betters.

Nevertheless, the faithful were pumped. The only seat I could find in the hall was the bare crawl space of a concrete ledge behind a low fence over a portal in the upper deck. I was not alone up there. Sitting cross-legged to the left of me was a recent immigrant who worked at a startup that turns mushrooms into high-protein snacks—his office is located in Chicago’s former Union Stockyards, once the largest meat production facility in the entire world. Someone found a century-old meat hook during construction and it now hangs in the office, symbol of the cleansing of a bloody and violent inheritance and of the sideways paths America is always taking toward self-renewal. Sitting to my right was a middle-aged Black woman in sharp red Chuck Taylors, an actual delegate who had been kicked off the floor when they shrunk the capacity in anticipation of Harris’ speech. “I gave up Missy Elliot tickets for this,” she said, noting the rap legend’s concert in Rosemont, way across town. I suspect she bought her ticket during the first minutes of the Trump-Biden debate, the purchase being a legacy of this having once been a confused old man’s reelection convention, his coming acceptance of the nomination being too sad and awkward to witness in person. Who wouldn’t prefer Missy Elliot?

But it’s a new world now—tonight, no one’s choosing Missy Elliot over Kamala. A plausible standard for success had nevertheless been raised from up here on our hard, gray perch: To fully satisfy, Kamala would have to have something of the intangible world-conquering power of the big stars everyone thought they might get to see tonight. She had to show she belonged in their ranks, the way Obama did.

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Mass political gatherings are a horrible, impersonal slog, but it is worth going to them to see astronomically powerful people in something much closer to their true human nakedness than you could get through the unreal window of a screen. She came out at exactly 9:30 in a black suit that was sharp but not harsh, anchored with a subtle black neckerchief that looked like a wavy extension of the suit’s hemline. The vice president wore pinpoint gold earrings that flashed from behind thick amber trellises of hair, and a tastefully small version of one of those lapel pins where the American flag is frozen in mid-flutter. She spoke against a pixelated gold background that looked distractingly like the Trump Tower lobby, and indeed it cannot be ruled out that this design was meant as a subliminal signal to the ex-president’s tens of millions of supporters.

In person, Harris is most powerful at the softer and slower registers, which like the rest of her presentation connoted gravity and earnestness. When she is quiet you can be certain that she is saying something very important, something you should really listen to—something that sounds too true to actively question. Her account of her origins was moving, unimpeachable, and not so intense as to make her seem too lofty for our mortal world. She described her immigrant mother’s divorce from her immigrant father, chess games with the neighbors in the Bay Area flatlands, the inspiration of Thurgood Marshall’s example, the sexually abused high school friend whose plight convinced her to become a prosecutor—it is the story of hundreds of millions of people in this ever-wondrous land, and also the story of presidents, of which we can have only one at a time.

Her hands spoke with authority, the comforting and noncoercive kind: She placed a hand over her heart at “faith,” chopped the air at “ideals we cherish,” softly pumped both fists downward at “awesome responsibility.” There was little in the way of memorable rhetoric. Policy ideas were scant, and she can be dinged for not really talking about causes of American anxiety that are not directly Donald Trump-related, like inflation or fentanyl deaths. President Harris will create “what I call an opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed”—as opposed to what exactly? The textures of the speech were compelling enough, though. Here was someone you could trust holding power over you and over the entire country and world.

Few people thought of Kamala Harris that way a couple of months ago. Way back in, say, early June, Harris was some combination of erratic and invisible as vice president, a tyrant to her staff, an especially unlikable figure in an unpopular administration. There was no evidence she had any real national appeal and her political instincts were suspect, tending toward self-immolating outbursts of pettiness, like her botched debate-stage gambit over Joe Biden’s ancient opposition to forced busing during the 2020 primary campaign.

I had seen Harris speak two other times before and found her a Chuck Schumer-level political retailer. That’s not how I think of her now: This was a new person on Thursday night. Harris and the Democratic machinery, in all their efficiency and imagination, had constructed a reality where the candidate, like her party, could unburden herself and the entire world of who and what had so recently been. The risk is that the change is too stunning and too abrupt, that there is some unknown and unsettling essence of character that the national divining rod that is the autumn of a tied presidential race cannot fail in surfacing between now and November.

On Thursday I saw a possible Kamala Harris. Whether she wins or loses—especially if she wins—we’ll eventually get to find out how real it all was.