On Monday morning, as American stock markets were following Asian markets downward, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) challenged Vice President Harris to \u201cimmediately \u2014 without a script \u2014 explain her economic policies.\u201d If she couldn\u2019t do that, he said, she was unfit for the presidency.<\/p>\n
Stephen Miller, one of former president Donald Trump\u2019s longest-standing advisers, escalated the rhetoric \u2014 as he does. The vice president, he said, \u201cmust hold a news conference or resign.\u201d The plunge in the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average, it seemed, was the sort of thing that made or broke political careers. If Harris couldn\u2019t rise to the occasion? Well, she would have to step down from her position, according to objective observer Stephen Miller.<\/p>\n
Over on Truth Social, Trump posted a video titled, \u201cKAMALA KRASH.\u201d<\/p>\n
The S&P closed down about 3 percent, and the Dow closed down 2.8 percent. There were numerous days during the Trump administration when the markets showed similar drops \u2014 even before the tumult accompanying the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n
In February 2018, for example, there were larger drops in each index more than once in the span of a week. Trump did not hold a news conference in the immediate wake of the first drop, much less hours into the decline. Representatives of his administration were asked about the drop, mostly because Trump himself had been so committed to using the market as a thermometer for his performance as president.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, Trump decided to report publicly that the drop was a function of there being \u201cso much good (great) news about the economy.\u201d When stocks dropped again later in the year, it was because (in his presentation) investors were waiting to see what happened in the midterms. When they fell in February 2020, obviously as a function of concern about the emerging pandemic, Trump suggested that it was also a response to the performance of Democratic presidential candidates in a debate.<\/p>\n
The defining characteristic of Trump\u2019s politics, of course, is the lack of subtlety. This is a guy who tried to take credit for the lack of plane crashes during the first year of his presidency. Who just recently tried to take credit for Los Angeles getting the 2028 Olympics, a process that was nearly complete before he took office. If it\u2019s good, he claims it. If it\u2019s bad, he attributes it to someone else. It\u2019s no more complicated than that.<\/p>\n
But let\u2019s step back to Miller and Cotton. The Arkansas senator, no doubt recognizing that Harris was in the middle of determining her running mate, offered a standard bit of political rhetoric trying to put Harris on the defense in response to breaking news. Miller took it further, earning more reposts than Cotton for his trouble.<\/p>\n
For some time on Monday, \u201c#KamalaCrash\u201d was trending on X. That, of course, is the site formerly known as Twitter and the one on which Cotton and Miller posted their comments about Harris. The name change accompanied Elon Musk\u2019s purchase of the site and his transformation of it into a place of overt hospitality to fringe-right rhetoric. There has long been a right-wing echo chamber, one far more robust and well-policed than any on the left. Musk\u2019s revamp of Twitter expanded that bubble dramatically, appending to it a large platform that had come to be identified with breaking news.<\/p>\n
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), tapped to serve as Harris\u2019s running mate on Tuesday morning, triggered a new line of attack recently when he summarized Trump and his supporters as \u201cweird.\u201d It\u2019s a succinct way of noting the ways in which Republican rhetoric often spills over into surreality, a tendency driven by Trump\u2019s style but accentuated by a conversational universe that rewards extremism. Cotton can score a point by arguing that Harris should detail her economic policies. Miller can score more points by demanding she resign \u2014 a demand that his team would have scoffed at had it been made of Trump (much less Mike Pence!) in 2018.<\/p>\n
This is an underrecognized element of the political conversation. There are few checks on rhetorical extremism on the right, particularly on social media. Instead, there\u2019s an arms race. It\u2019s easy, then, to find examples of people close to Trump seizing upon arguments that can justifiably be called \u201cweird.\u201d It\u2019s less a political movement than an out-over-your-skis competition.<\/p>\n
As of this writing, both the Dow and the S&P are up slightly. Had Trump announced his vice-presidential pick on Tuesday, he\u2019d likely cite that as the reason for the rebound. Instead, he and his allies (like Miller) have moved on. There are attacks on Walz to be made instead, ones that themselves are working their way through the right\u2019s evolutionary process to maximize their base\u2019s outrage. Trump\u2019s campaign, for example, welcomed the Walz pick by claiming in a fundraising email that the Minnesota governor will \u201cunleash HELL ON EARTH.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is, unquestionably, a weird claim.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On Monday morning, as American stock markets were following Asian markets downward, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) challenged Vice President Harris to \u201cimmediately \u2014 without a script \u2014 explain her economic policies.\u201d If she couldn\u2019t do that, he said, she was unfit for the presidency. Stephen Miller, one of former president Donald Trump\u2019s longest-standing advisers, escalated […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7365,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}