July 16 2024
RNC begins; Vances is Trump’s VP pick; Trump’s document case tossed; Musk to donate massively to Trump; banks worry about low-income consumers; Biden to get DNC nom next week
FLASH Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee
1 Trump picks OH Senator JD Vance, 39, as VP running mate
2 Trump’s classified document case dismissed as unconstitutional
3 Musk and other donors pledge $45 million/mo to Trump
4 Big banks warn of stress among lower-income consumers
5 Biden to receive Dem nomination next week, despite widespread misgivings
7/16/1945 The first atomic bomb successfully tested
see ad astra on x @greg_loving
FLASH Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee
1 Trump picks OH Senator JD Vance, 39, as VP running mate
For nearly nine years, Donald J. Trump has been the singular face of Republican politics and the undisputed leader of the Make America Great Again movement. On Monday, the former president came as close as he may ever come to anointing a successor. The choice of J.D. Vance as Mr. Trump’s running mate, a politician nearly 40 years his junior, immediately vaults the first-term senator to the forefront of a G.O.P. future that is not so far away.
Mr. Vance, 39, is the first millennial to make a major presidential ticket, a Marine veteran and a politician who has thoroughly remade himself as a full-throated MAGA enthusiast. In recent months, it was Mr. Vance’s aggressive defense of Trumpism and Mr. Trump, even on mainstream news outlets, that helped him stand out for the former president as a worthy inheritor.
JD Vance authored Hillbilly Elegy about his working-class family struggling in post-industrial America
Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually one of their grandchildren would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that J.D.'s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, never fully escaping the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. With piercing honesty, Vance shows how he himself still carries around the demons of his chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir, with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.
Article Source: NYT, Amazon
2 Trump’s classified document case dismissed as unconstitutional
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s classified documents case threw out all of the charges against him on Monday, ruling that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed the indictment, had been given his job in violation of the Constitution. In a stunning decision delivered on the first day of the Republican National Convention, the judge, Aileen M. Cannon, found that Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel was improper because it was not based on a specific federal statute and because he had not been named to the post by the president or confirmed by the Senate. She also found that Mr. Smith had been improperly funded by the Treasury Department.
Article Source: NYT
3 Musk and other donors pledge $45 million/mo to Trump
Elon Musk has said he plans to commit around $45 million a month to a new super political-action committee backing former President Donald Trump’s presidential run, according to people familiar with the matter. Other backers of the group, called America PAC, include Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins, former U.S. ambassador to Canada Kelly Craft and her husband, Joe Craft, who is chief executive of coal producer Alliance Resource Partners. Formed in June, America PAC is focused on registering voters and persuading constituents to vote early and request mail-in ballots in swing states, according to one of the people. The coalition assessed that the Democrats have historically had very robust “get out the vote” campaigns and took note of the amounts of money that the Biden camp has dedicated to so-called on-the-ground efforts in swing states. America PAC will try to counter that.
Article Source: WSJ
4 Big banks warn of stress among lower-income consumers
Big US banks have warned that lower-income customers are showing signs of financial stress just a few months ahead of the presidential election. In second-quarter results on Friday, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and BNY cautioned about consumers grappling with lower savings and higher prices. Government stimulus programmes during the Covid-19 pandemic helped insulate Americans from inflation in recent years, but as households have spent the money, the financial health of the consumer could play a crucial role in the outcome of November’s presidential vote. Consumer sentiment remains “stubbornly subdued” and fell to an eight-month low of 66, according to the latest University of Michigan survey released on Friday. Profits at Citi’s US consumer lending business, which includes credit cards, plunged 74 per cent from a year ago. The bank’s chief financial officer, Mark Mason, said consumer spending was slowing overall, with account balances now lower than they were before Covid. US consumers were more cautious than they had been in a while, he added. “We are not seeing the same growth in consumer spending that we had in prior quarters,” said Mason. “There was less traffic in the retail venues that we partner with.”
Article Source: FT
5 Biden to receive Dem nomination next week, despite widespread misgivings
Leaders of the Democratic National Committee are moving swiftly to confirm President Biden as his party’s presidential nominee by the end of July, according to four people briefed on the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations. The move would formalize Mr. Biden as the nominee at a moment when Democrats are torn over whether he should run again after his poor debate performance. Since May, he has been set to be confirmed through a virtual roll call, weeks before the Democratic National Convention in August. But as Mr. Biden faces persistent doubts from within his party, some delegates involved with the behind-the-scene bureaucratic process are eager to end the public conversations about his future that are unfolding during a fiercely contested campaign. Not everyone agrees: In a previously unreported move, a group of House Democrats who question whether he should forge ahead is trying to rally support for changing the nominating path to allow for potential challenges at the convention. Donors and prominent strategists have floated ideas that would open the door to other candidates, but party insiders have dismissed those proposals as fanciful. The process will effectively begin when the rules committee of the Democratic National Convention meets on a video call at 11 a.m. on Friday, followed by another party group on Sunday. All of the more than 4,000 delegates are expected to begin casting their ballots as soon as Monday, a process that is likely to take about a week. After that, the committee is expected to quickly hold the roll call, a tradition that typically occurs on the convention floor but is being held virtually this year.
Article Source: NYT
7/16/1945 The first atomic bomb successfully tested
Sources
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/us/politics/trump-vance-running-mate.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare; https://a.co/d/aBmUqpK
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/us/politics/trump-document-case-dismissed.html
4. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/elon-musk-has-said-he-is-committing-around-45-million-a-month-to-a-new-pro-trump-super-pac-dda53823?st=jupny40k0y94z6r&reflink=article_copyURL_share
5. https://on.ft.com/4bFLvcB
6. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/us/politics/dnc-biden-nominee.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Thanks for reading!
