CHRIS CRUCIAL: The 'chaos candidate' 🤯

PLUS: Is the American Dream dead?

Welcome to Chris Crucial. Check out my mission statement on why you should invest in me. I’m now just 70(!) paid subscribers away from 3,500!! Help me make that goal! It’s $6 a month/$60 for the year. Do it today!👇

1. Chaos, thy name is Donald Trump

Back in the early days of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, Jeb(!) Bush said something profound about Donald Trump.

Here it is:

“He’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.”

I am not even sure Jeb(!) knew how prophetic that sentence would wind up being.

I was thinking of Jeb today when I read the news that there had been an incident/altercation/episode at Arlington National Cemetery on Tuesday during Trump’s visit to lay a wreath at the graves of the 13 servicemen killed in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.

Here’s how the New York Times wrote it up:

Members of Donald J. Trump’s campaign team and an official at Arlington National Cemetery confronted each other during the former president’s visit to the cemetery on Monday, the military cemetery said in a statement on Tuesday.

The altercation was prompted, according to Trump campaign officials, by the presence of a photographer in a section of the cemetery where American troops who were killed in recent wars are buried. The cemetery released a statement saying that federal law prohibits political campaigning or “election-related” activities within Army cemeteries, including by photographers.

An official with the cemetery tried to “physically block” members of Mr. Trump’s team, Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement. Mr. Cheung added that the cemetery official was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode” and that the campaign was prepared to release footage of the confrontation to support its account of the clash. The campaign did not provide that footage after several requests.

Chris LaCivita, a top Trump campaign adviser, added in a separate statement that the cemetery official was “a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.”

The pushback throughout the day from Trumpworld and its supporters was that the families of the fallen had said they could shoot campaign video at the cemetery which, I guess, supersedes the federal law that says that you can’t film in that part of the cemetery.

But, I don’t even want to get caught up in the particulars of what the law says and what the “right” thing to do is — or should be.

Instead I want you to imagine Kamala Harris going to Arlington National Cemetery and her entourage being part of any sort of disagreement or altercation. Or George W. Bush. Or Barack Obama. Or Mitt Romney. Or John McCain. Or, hell, Ron DeSantis. Or Nikki Haley. Or Ted Cruz.

My point is this: No other major politician of either party would EVER have an incident like this. Not one.

Which leads me to: Jeb Bush was right. Chaos follows Trump. There is drama around him. Always.

This was true when he was a candidate. It was true when he was president. (Listen to this 9-minute broadcast from the Times that nicely summarizes the chaos of the Trump term.) And it will DEFINITELY be true if Trump gets elected again.

This is not a partisan statement. It is a fact. Trump creates chaos wherever he goes. He believes he thrives in it. He thinks it gives him a competitive advantage because no one knows what he will do next.

The problem for Trump is that chaos is not what most people want — and by “most people” I mean people outside of the Trump base.

A conversation I had with a prominent Democratic media consultant a few months ago — when Joe Biden was still the nominee — has stayed with me ever since. This guy told me that Biden’s attempts to make capital “D” Democracy the main issue of the campaign would not work. That the message might be important to the Democratic base but that the average swing voter simply did not believe that democracy was on the line in this election.

What message would work against Trump, I asked. “Chaos,” he responded. “Another Trump term would mean chaos. And people are tired of chaos.”

It took a while but the Democratic nominee — not Biden but Kamala Harris — appears to have finally realized that the “chaos” message works.

“The question we face is what kind of country do we want to live in,” Harris said at a recent rally in North Carolina. “Do we want to live in a country of freedom, compassion and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear and hate? We each have the power to answer this question.” 

And then there was this from former President Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention: “We do not need four more years of bluster and bumbling and chaos. We have seen that movie before, and we all know that the sequel is usually worse.”

That, to me, is a message that can cut through partisan spin and polarization. Voters may not remember every little thing that happened during the Trump presidency but their overarching takeaway from those four years was that it was just, well, a lot.

Whether they liked or hated Trump — or were one of the few people who vacillated on what they thought of him — they were exhausted by his four years in office. The constant late-night tweets. The fights he picked — with Democrats, yes, but also with his own party and with dictators like Kim Jong Un. The constant staff turnover. The name-calling. The bullying. The bluster. The bullshit.

Trump’s always-on, chaos-creating personality just wears people out. No one can pay attention to all of the drama he creates. And people start to get sick of it.

It’s why saying that he would be “normal” was so powerful for Joe Biden in 2020. And why Harris highlighting Trump’s character of chaos can work again in 2024.

And Trump keeps making it worse — or at least providing more current examples of the chaos that forever follows him. The Arlington National Cemetery episode isn’t, by itself, going to change a whole lot of votes. But it will be part of a broader sense that voters may well have this fall that electing Trump again is a guarantee of four more years of nonstop chaos.

My bet is that voters don’t want to go through that. Again.

2. RIP, American Dream

Listen to a Donald Trump’s campaign speech and you are very likely to hear him say that the American Dream is dead — or at least on the verge of dying, especially if Kamala Harris wins the election.

Turns out an increasingly-large number of Americans agree with him, according to a new poll from the Wall Street Journal and NORC.

Just to be clear what you are looking at: Just over 1 in 3 (36%) voters believe that if they work hard they will get ahead. (That’s how the pollsters described the American Dream.)

That’s a steep decline from even a decade ago when a majority of the country believed the American Dream was, well, alive and kicking.

It’s a very interesting data point when you consider the remarkably different ways that Harris and Trump have of talking about the country while on the campaign trail.

Harris’ campaign has been centered on joy and optimism — the sense that the best days are ahead of us and anything is possible. Trump, on the other hand, paints a dark vision of America — a place teetering on the brink of World War III and a massive Great Depression if Harris wins.

Typically voters want to vote their hopes and dreams, not their fears and anxieties. But we may be in a uniquely pessimistic time where dire warnings about the future resonate more strongly with voters than optimistic promises.

3. What’s wrong with Republicans?

When Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher announced he wouldn’t run for reelection this fall, I noted that it said something profound about how miserable Republican politics had become.

Why? Because in a different age — and in a different Republican party — Gallagher, a former Marine who members on both sides of the aisle praised for his smarts and ability, would be a potential candidate to lead the GOP.

Now? He’s headed for the exits.

David Ignatius at the Washington Post talked to Gallagher about his decision in a recent column. It’s well worth reading the whole thing but here’s the snippet that jumped out to me:

But Gallagher’s departure tells us something else. Congress in the age of Trump is becoming a toxic echo chamber. Members and their families are targets of extremist rage. When a talented, sensible politician like Gallagher decides to quit to protect his family, you know that something is badly wrong.

Make no mistake: Gallagher is very conservative. He’s a devout pro-life Catholic who prays the rosary nearly every day. He’s a hawk on such traditional Republican issues as the deficit and national security. But he fears that conservative values aren’t the defining point for Republicans any longer. “How conservative you are can’t be measured by loyalty to the party or the president,” he told me.

Yup.

Read the whole thing.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“Donald Trump was a terrible president” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in July, less than two months before he endorsed Donald Trump for president

ONE GOOD CHART

Viewership to political conventions appears to have peaked in 2008. The 2020 and 2024 conventions were far lower rated than other recent gatherings.

SONG OF THE DAY

Yasmin Williams rocks. Her 2021 album “Urban Driftwood” was one of my favorites of that year. The multi-instrumentalist is back with the follow-up to that album that is out next month. In the meantime, she’s released the first song off of it; it’s called “Virga” and features Darlingside!

Thanks for reading! This nightly newsletter brings you ALL of what you need to know from the world of politics. Think of it as a daily cheat sheet! If you want to get it in your email inbox every night at 7:30 pm, become a subscriber today!