Welcome to Thunderdome. The month of Kamala Harris’s rise has been marked by a few major factors, but none has been more significant than the total buy-in of the decrepit husks of media organizations desperate after so many years to find someone, anyone, to elevate in opposition to Donald Trump. They love to love this candidate, who is in almost no sense of traditional terminology a candidate — no platform, positions thoroughly malleable, an operation in branding and vibes at a moment when branding is dying and vibes are utterly out of step with the demands of the moment — she is more machine now than woman, and this embarrassingly inadequate media is loving every minute of it. That there is no hesitation about this TIME magazine cover, no qualms about seeming too biased, no pause in the acceleration toward her eminency’s expected exultant arrival as the savior of the future.

It feels like nothing so much as the marketing for Captain Marvel: you must like her, you will like her — and if you don’t like her even a little bit, prepare for your punishment as an admitted hater of all things future and female.

What strikes me as particularly risky about this gambit is how much it concedes the current acceleration of the Trump coalition within the male communities where its hold has been so strong. Ethan Strauss has an excellent piece on this today, noting the cultural impact of this trend may be more apparent than the electoral. He’s probably right about that, but if there is a “shy Trump” impact at the polls, it could very well come from the population he describes:

The Wall Street Journal has been on this phenomenon, most recently with a research laden article titled, “America’s New Political War Pits Young Men Against Young Women.” The takeaways are difficult for my millennial mind to fathom, given that I came of age during the young male-approved Barack Obama phenomenon, at a time when conservatism was simply synonymous with “old people.”

Some bullet points from the article and associated research:

• Trump is polling twenty-nine points better than his margins in 2020 with young men overall
• Young American men are the only US population group to turn more conservative over the past decade
• Per Gallup, young men identifying as Republican went from 36 percent in 2016 to 49 percent today

So this is happening, and we don’t quite know to what extent it keeps happening. It runs counter to traditional assumptions about young people and their political outlook. Some of the shift is anchored and galvanized by a controversial presidential candidate who’s seventy-eight years old. As an aside, I noticed Trump’s tired wheezing when he played golf with reigning US Open champ Bryson DeChambeau. The video, currently at 11 million views, was one of a few Trump ventures into male-coded content world. The former president held his own on the course, but there’s a striking contrast in overall energy between candidate and athlete. Anyway.

Outside of the WSJ and a few others, the male zoomer shift has largely occurred right under legacy media noses. Sure there’s the occasional hand-wringing article about Andrew Tate and radical manosphere voices corrupting your son, but rarely is it depicted as part of a massive sea change. But this has been building for awhile. Six years ago, Barstool fans were egging on Republican politicians to happily shout the site’s “Saturdays Are For the Boys” slogan. As I said of those days:

SAFTB isn’t technically political, but it’s attitudinally political. You couldn’t imagine any organization in good progressive standing engaged in the promotion of an exclusively male space, sports included.

Even though SAFTB isn’t about policy or laws, it reads as political because the representatives of one party would gleefully say it, whereas the representatives of the other party would somberly intone “trust women.” Or, as old school Democratic strategist James Carville put it recently, his party’s messaging is dominated by “too many preachy females.”

In terms of the 2024 impact this could have, it’s too early to say. But it really does feel like the more the media pushes Kamala’s inevitability, her awesomeness, her undeniable qualification for this role, the more a backlash becomes likely — and if it comes from a larger than usual activity among younger men, the conversation about 2024 will take on a whole new tenor of gender tension. Hold on to your Handmaid costume: you just might need it again come November.

Trumpworld brings back crazy Corey

Well this is a move.

Lewandowski, who has remained an informal Trump advisor since his first campaign, is being brought on to advise the campaign’s senior leadership team, according to a person familiar with the move and granted anonymity to speak freely. He joins several other former Trump aides who will play similar roles.

Tim Murtaugh, who was the communications director on Trump’s 2020 campaign, will also be joining. So, too, will be Alex Pfeiffer and Alex Bruesewitz, who were top officials on the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. super PAC. Bruesewitz is known for having a wide following on social media. Politico reported early this week that Taylor Budowich, who had been leading MAGA Inc., had left the super PAC to join the Trump campaign in a senior capacity.

“As we head into the home stretch of this election, we are continuing to add to our impressive campaign team,” Trump co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement. “Corey Lewandowski, Taylor Budowich, Alex Pfeiffer, Alex Bruesewitz and Tim Murtaugh are all veterans of prior Trump campaigns and their unmatched experience will help President Trump prosecute the case against Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, the most radical ticket in American history.”

Vance versus Walz, October 1

At least one VP debate is now on the schedule.

Minnesota governor Tim Walz said earlier this week that he had accepted the October 1 invitation, meaning the two running mates will share the stage at least once before the election.

Vance also said that he accepted an invite from CNN for a VP debate on September 18. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to Axios’s question as to whether Walz will accept the September 18 debate invite. Having multiple VP debates would be unprecedented. In each of the past ten presidential cycles, the running mates have debated a single time.

“The American people deserve as many debates as possible, which is why President Trump has challenged Kamala to three of them already,” Vance wrote on X.

“Not only do I accept the CBS debate on October 1, I accept the CNN debate on September 18 as well. I look forward to seeing you at both!”

RFK’s locked up ballot access. Is he over?

The third-party candidate’s been racking up wins in terms of ballot access, but has Harris’s rise closed off his appeal? From Semafor:

Harris’s surge has also cratered support for third-party candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now polling in the mid-single digits down from a peak of 22 percent, Semafor’s David Weigel noted. With Harris on the ticket, third-party candidates can no longer bank on “voter dread” over Biden and Trump to help them break through, he added. Kennedy in particular faces an uphill battle, the Wall Street Journal reported, owing to controversies including sexual assault allegations and the dead bear cub episode, combined with legal challenges over whether he can appear on the ballot in some states. But Kennedy could still have an impact in key midwestern swing states, where “every single vote is going to count,” a politics expert told the Guardian.

One state where he’s struggling to get on the ballot is New York, where he actually has his residence and has voted for years.

Citing New York election law, Ryba defined a residence as a “place where a person maintains a fixed, permanent, and principal home and to which he or she, wherever temporarily located, always intends to return.” State courts have held that voters and candidates with multiple homes can choose one, provided they can demonstrate “legitimate, significant and continuing attachments” to a residence and “an intent to reside there, coupled with physical preference, without an aura of sham.”

Kennedy’s team argued that he had continuously maintained his ties with New York. He is a partner in a law firm based in the state and a licensed attorney in New York — but not California. He also has active falconry and driver’s licenses in New York, according to trial testimony, and has voted in New York for decades.

On the witness stand, Kennedy said he moved to California to support his wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, in her career. “My intent is to return to New York, and that’s the only requirement for residency,” Kennedy said in court.

The RFK preference was driven by disgust with both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, so his appeal now is primarily to people who dislike Kamala and Trump — a smaller number to be sure, but also potentially significant.

One more thing

Joe Biden is becoming more open about the process that led to his exit from the 2024 race, and it’s completely at odds with Nancy Pelosi’s claims.

“She did what she had to do” in order to give Democrats the best chance to win in November, Mr. Biden is said to have told one of his close associates. Sources in Mr. Biden’s inner circle told him the day before he dropped out that they believed Ms. Pelosi, eighty-four, would publicly raise concerns about his campaign — a move that would have humiliated her long-time ally… A senior White House official said Mr. Biden views the former speaker as “ruthless” and willing to set aside long-term relationships to keep the Democrats in power.

The Pelosi gambit is critical to understanding 2024, because its success or failure could prove to be her swan song as a public official. If Pelosi knifed Joe Biden only for Kamala Harris to lose Pennsylvania and Georgia to Donald Trump, what does that mean for how she is viewed?