TRUMP TAKES THE LIMELIGHT
After Donald Trump was given a rapturous welcome at the Republican National Convention days after a failed assassination attempt, attention has started to turn back to US President Joe Biden, with reports suggesting infighting between Democrats over his candidacy has reignited.
Axios reports some are unhappy with the Democratic National Committee’s plans to push ahead with a virtual roll call, expected to start this month, confirming Biden’s nomination two weeks before the party’s convention in August. A letter is said to be circulating among congressional Democrats arguing there is “no legal justification” for an early roll call.
The New York Times reports the committee’s leaders are trying to move swiftly to confirm President Biden as the party’s presidential nominee by the end of July.
There is also said to be concern that Biden is only listening to a small number of aides who are limiting the information he receives, The Washington Post reports, after the president reportedly told Democratic lawmakers he was leading in the polls. Meanwhile, Politico reports former speaker Nancy Pelosi has been hitting the phones since last month in the hope of finding a way to remove Biden from the ticket.
The New York Post reports the widow of Corey Comperatore, the firefighter killed at the Trump rally on Saturday, has refused to speak to Biden when he tried to reach out. “I didn’t talk to Biden. I didn’t want to talk to him. My husband was a devout Republican and he would not have wanted me to talk to him,” Helen Comperatore said.
Questions are continuing to mount for the Secret Service following Saturday’s failed assassination attempt on Trump, with CNN reporting authorities received intelligence on a plot by Iran to try to kill Trump, leading to increased security around the 78-year-old in recent weeks. Sources told CNN there was no indication suspect Thomas Matthew Crooks was connected to the plot.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports local police assigned by the Secret Service to help spot threats in the crowd were inside the building Crooks had positioned himself on the roof of and had alerted a Secret Service command post after spotting a man acting furtively.
Elsewhere, the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has dismissed comments by Trump’s vice presidential pick JD Vance that the country under a Labour government might be the first “truly Islamist” country with nuclear weapons, the BBC reports.
Rayner responded: “Well, I think he [Vance] said quite a lot of fruity things in the past as well. Look, I don’t recognise that characterisation. I’m very proud of the election success that Labour had recently.”
Meanwhile, actor Jack Black has cancelled the rest of his band Tenacious D’s world tour after his bandmate Kyle Gass’ comment about the Trump assassination attempt during a performance in Sydney, the ABC reports.
When asked by Black to make a birthday wish during the show at the ICC Theatre, Gass replied: “Don’t miss Trump next time.” The remark led to significant backlash, with United Australia Senator Ralph Babet calling on the band to be deported.
Tenacious D had already canceled their gig in Newcastle on Tuesday evening before Black announced on Instagram that the tour was over. “I was blindsided by what was said at the show on Sunday. I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence in any form,” he said. “After much reflection, I no longer feel it is appropriate to continue the Tenacious D tour, and all future creative plans are on hold.”
And if all of that is not enough, The Wall Street Journal reports Elon Musk has said he plans to commit around US$45 million (A$67 million) a month to a new pro-Trump super PAC.
BOWEN GOES NUCLEAR
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has claimed the Coalition’s plans for nuclear power would “wreck the renewables rollout” and leave the country with more expensive and unreliable power for longer, news.com.au reports.
Bowen is speaking to the National Press Club in Canberra today and will warn against the Coalition’s “ideological pursuit” of nuclear reactors.
“We don’t have the luxury of delaying investment in new generation for another 15 or 20 years while we wait for a new form of generation that Australia has never had,” Bowen is expected to say.
“Far and away the biggest threat to reliability in our grid is over-reliance on aging coal-fired power stations.”
This sentiment is echoed by the chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), The Age reports. Daniel Westerman has warned nuclear is a “comparatively expensive” power source and would take too long to develop.
“Even on the most optimistic outlook, nuclear power won’t be ready in time for the exit of Australia’s coal-fired power stations,” Westerman said. “And the imperative to replace that retiring generation is with us now.”
The return of the energy debate comes as a record for electricity demand was set in Victoria this week, The Guardian reports, with wind generation in New South Wales also hitting new highs. Windfarms supplied as much as a third of the National Electricity Market’s power on Tuesday morning as a wintery blast swept across eastern Australia.
Meanwhile, with regards to the allegations against the CFMEU, secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Sally McManus, has told ABC’s 7.30 program that information about organised crime syndicates allegedly infiltrating the Victorian branch of the CFMEU was never brought to her attention.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports the government is preparing to appoint an independent administrator to overhaul the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union in the wake of the allegations.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A whale that washed up on a beach in New Zealand might be a species so rare it has never been seen alive, the BBC reports.
The specimen, which washed up on a beach in Taieri Mouth, Otago, earlier this month is now believed by scientists to be a spade-toothed whale. The Associated Press reports no-one knows how many spade-toothed whales there are in the ocean, what they eat, or even where they are located.
“We know very little, practically nothing [about the whale]. This is going to lead to some amazing science and world-first information,” Hannah Hendriks, marine technical adviser for the NZ Department of Conservation, said.
New Zealand’s Indigenous peoples consider whales a taonga — a sacred treasure — of cultural significance, The Guardian reports and quotes Te Rūnanga ō Ōtakou chair Nadia Wesley-Smith as saying: “We place importance on any species that is having a significant or out of the ordinary situation or incident that’s affecting them.”
The beached whale has been transported to cold storage and researchers will work with local Māori iwi to plan how it will be examined, the Associated Press adds.
Say What?
I am happy to defend myself for trying to take conversations offline rather than online.
Barry O’Rourke
The retiring MP for Rockhampton has defended his actions after admitting to using the electoral roll to find people who abuse him on social media and then doorknocking their homes, the ABC reports.
CRIKEY RECAP
The huge rise in infrastructure costs, particularly of major projects, has forced big changes in the level of investment by governments, with projects delayed and taxpayers on the hook for big blowouts. The causes of these blowouts — skill shortages, higher building material costs, poor business cases by governments, poor project selection — have been well known.
Now it’s clear that in Victoria, and likely in New South Wales and the ACT, the CFMEU has made its own spectacular contribution to infrastructure blowouts. And it was enabled by a Labor government with a truly rotten culture.
Andrea and Brad told me that God had intervened to stop the bullet from hitting Trump. I heard this numerous times throughout the day. Meanwhile, at a broadly left-wing protest in Red Arrow Park, a couple of blocks from the convention centre, someone told me that the shooting was staged, a fake; that Donald Trump had dropped to the ground, then he (or one of his cronies) splashed fake blood on his face. Someone else suggested that in a real active shooter situation, there was no way the Secret Service would allow Trump to put his head back up like he did, nor to stand onstage for so long.
Americans with differing political views are living next to each other, but they exist in completely different universes. Their worlds might overlap in certain places, but their worldviews are fundamentally unrecognisable to each other, and increasingly so. This is a cliché, but it’s also my first time experiencing the cliché for myself, on the ground, and it’s wild.
That’s how things have been for a while, and with a sense of grinding invariance, which is why there’s a curious lack of intensity to this assassination attempt. Can you feel it slipping away into the background? Weird isn’t it? It’s got all the elements of a great assassination, it’s a lot like the JFK shooting, and yet it feels like it has little real impact. Everyone’s talking about the Evan Vucci photo as one of the great photos of the century blah blah. Does it feel that way? Not at all. It has about the same impact as any one of a half a dozen shots on your phone.
But the media and political establishment desperately want it to be a moment, an event. They want Trump either to be vengeful, or to come to the centre and bring everyone together, for something to happen. But things don’t happen like that anymore. The relationship between politics, media and events is moving beneath the surface. Hence the grasping at that image, as if it was a Life magazine classic — because there is a desire for the historical moment such as existed back in the day, when one magazine carried the world to us in photos.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Six people found dead in Bangkok luxury hotel in suspected poisoning (The Guardian)
French PM Attal resigns but will remain in caretaker role amid political deadlock (France 24)
At least six killed in Oman mosque attack (Al-Jazeera)
Woman wins payout after boss coughed in her face during Covid pandemic (The Independent)
Gibraltar accuses Spanish players of ‘hugely offensive’ remarks during Euro 2024 celebrations (Sky News)
THE COMMENTARIAT
Elon Musk is making a bad situation worse — Helen Lewis (The Atlantic): Power corrupts, the saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. At his coronation, Napoleon Bonaparte notoriously took the crown out of the pope’s hands and placed it on his own head, recognising no authority higher than his own. Power went to his head, in the most literal sense possible. Elon Musk is in a similar situation today, although his vanity makes Napoleon look like a humble soldier from Corsica. Musk loves posting so much, he spent billions to ensure unimpeded access to the ability to reply “lol” to terrible memes and “!!” under the kind of grim stuff that used to be confined to Breitbart’s Black Crime vertical.
Now, if Elon Musk wants to suppress his basic common sense about how the world works so he can better indulge his most paranoid fantasies, that’s his own business. But, as his reaction to the terrible shooting of Donald Trump shows, he has turned X into a machine for validating his prejudices. And that, unfortunately, is making the rest of us dumber too.
Never doubt the instincts of Donald Trump, who just appointed ‘never Trump guy’ as his running mate — Marina Hyde (The Guardian): The rest of us, meanwhile, might ponder the historic events in Pennsylvania at the weekend and marvel at our own ability to already be talking about other things. To adapt that old Steve Bannon line, the zone seems flooded with more shit than ever. As arguably the most significant dopamine druglord in modern politics — the El Chapo of discourse spikes — Trump has himself been a significant part of the shift to a world where there are about 37 news cycles a day and where, three days after an assassination attempt, all sorts of people have already moved on.
The experience of watching such an extraordinary historic event fail to stop everything for a while has been unsettling. But then, perhaps “moving on” is the defining corrosive dynamic of our age. We scroll on, literally and metaphorically. And yet, it’s just possible that this moving on has been in one direction, and that it isn’t a good one. The chaos of the past few days suggests there has never been a better time to stand still and take stock — yet it feels as if we are hurtling somewhere at twice the speed we were even last week.
