Philippa Kaur

“Donald was pissed. Boy, was he pissed.”

This is how Fred C. Trump III describes the moment, sometime in the early 1970s, when his uncle, Donald J. Trump, “came stomping” back into the family home in Queens, New York.

As Fred III puts it in his memoir, All In The Family, he had spent a bucolic day

kicking a soccer ball in the backyard before taking a break for a Coke with Gam. Just a normal afternoon for preteen me. Yet I remember it like it was yesterday because of what happened next.

It turns out Donald wanted his nearly ten-year-old nephew to take a look at the car parked in the driveway: his white convertible Cadillac Eldorado. There was “a giant gash, at least two feet long, in the canvas roof. There was another, shorter gash next to it.”

Review: All In The Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way – Fred C. Trump III (Simon & Schuster)

Fred remembers his uncle, in a fit of pique, uttering the N-word twice in quick succession – without proof of his accusations, nor regard for the impact of his words:

Donald hadn’t seen whoever had done this. […] He returned to where he’d left his beloved Eldorado, saw the damage, then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront.

Having made it clear he has no time for such language, Fred turns to the elephant in the room. “So, was Donald a racist?”

Racially charged remarks

Stephen Chueng, Trump’s 2024 presidential electoral campaign spokesperson, clearly doesn’t think so. In a recent statement to ABC News, Cheung flatly refuted Fred III’s claims, dismissing them as fabricated and “fake news of the highest order”.

Moreover, in Cheung’s performatively outraged estimation, it simply beggars belief that “a lie so blatantly disgusting can be printed in media”. He continues: “Anyone who knows President Trump knows he would never use such language, and false stories like this have been thoroughly debunked.”

This rings a bit hollow, given Trump’s racially charged remarks about Kamala Harris’s ethnicity at the National Association of Black Journalists convention. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

And today, from a Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump said of his presidential opponent: “Well … uh, she’s a woman. She represents certain groups of people.”

Donald Trump suggested Kamala Harris ‘happened to turn Black’ at the National Association of Black Journalists convention.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AAP

Indeed, as Jennifer Ho points out, Trump’s comments, which evoke memories of his “birtherism” attacks on Barack Obama, “tapped into the long history of racism in America, where some white people have defined racial categories and policed the boundaries of race”.

In any case, Cheung surely hasn’t spent much time with Trump’s onetime political advisor, cheerleader (and convicted felon) Steve Bannon. According to journalist Michael Wolff, Bannon believed his former employer wasn’t antisemitic, but “he was much less confident that Trump wasn’t a racist. He had not heard Trump use the N-word but could easily imagine him doing so.”

In the end, Fred hedges his bets. “This was Queens in the early 1970s,” he insists:

Back then, people said all kinds of crude, thoughtless, prejudiced things. I don’t need to list them here. In one way or another, maybe everyone in Queens was a racist then. Like many things in life, it was partly a matter of situation and degree.

Not like his sister

Fred C. Trump III.
Simon & Schuster

Equivocations of this sort are the order of the day in Fred’s frustrating, yet undeniably heartfelt account of the Trump clan. It comes four years after the publication of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020), written by Fred’s younger sister, Mary L. Trump.

Mary’s score-settling invective did not go down well with the Trumps. Fred acknowledges this in the closing sections of his book. The collective reaction was unbridled fury. Fred’s uncle, Robert, attempted to block the publication of Mary’s book, citing a breach of confidentiality.

Fred is at pains to distinguish his take on things from that of his sister. “The book was Mary’s point of view, which she had every right to. It just wasn’t mine.”

Mary Trump.
Simon & Schuster

Unlike Mary, Fred is determined, in spite of everything, to maintain vaguely cordial relations with the rest of the Trumps. In part, this explains the measured approach and tone of his memoir, which is characterised by a curious mix of cliché, cruelty and compassion.

While it doesn’t contain all that much in the way of revelatory material or insight, it does offer a fresh perspective on the dynamics of a family whose name has, for better or worse, somehow become inextricably linked with the fate of a nation. “As go the Trumps,” Fred argues, “so goes America.”

Fred is all too aware that he has a name “that is extraordinarily polarizing, and keeps getting more so”. He also appreciates that his book has the potential to ruffle family feathers:

Things could be tense on the gold course the next time Uncle Donald rolls up in his cart. And I am certainly a flawed messenger. I have my faults – many of them. Who doesn’t in this family … or any other? The difference between me and my relatives is that none of them will admit that, and I just did.

‘A win was a win was a win’

The family portrait he paints is far from flattering. “Who planted the seeds of narcissism? When did winning become everything? How did Trump loyalty become such a one-way street?”

These are some of the questions Fred poses at the outset of his memoir, which opens on the day of his grandfather’s funeral. “My father’s father was the Trump who first defined what it meant to be a Trump,” Fred says, “long before Uncle Donald marched the family name into Manhattan and gave it that shiny 1980s glow”.

Fred’s grandfather, with whom he shares a first name, “was an old-style patriarch, presiding over a large, rambunctious family, whose members he managed to dominate and sometimes pit against each other”. Moreover, in Fred’s reckoning, it is impossible to explain the personalities of his grandfather’s five children without understanding “what he did for – and to – each of them”.

Fred Trump I (right, beside wife Mary Trump, who’s between him and Donald) was ‘was an old-style patriarch’ who liked to sometimes pit his family members against each other.
Charles Rex Arbogast/AAP

Much like his domineering father, Donald Trump, “whose ferocious ambition and drive had to compensate for a lack of compassion, subtlety, and book smarts”, has a tendency to view life as a series of zero-sum conflicts and cash grabs. From an early age, Fred understood that to his uncle

a win was a win was a win, whether or not the other person even knew the game was on. There was nothing that couldn’t be turned into a competition and nothing more satisfying than yet another win. And for Donald to be the winner, someone else had to lose.

‘Maybe you should just let him die’

As a case in point, Fred gestures to the ferocious dispute that erupted over his grandfather’s will in 1999. All In The Family details how his Uncle Donald, who had recently suffered a number of massive financial hits, spearheaded not one, but two attempts to cut Fred and Mary out of the Trump estate.

Discovering they had been effectively disinherited, the siblings, as Fred recounts, launched legal action. To say the response – led again by Uncle Donald – to the lawsuit was callous would be underselling things. Fred recalls receiving word that his medical insurance, which his grandfather had provided to all of the family, was being cut off:

Of all the cruel, low-down, vicious, heartless things my own relatives could do to me, my wife, and my children, this was worse than anything else I could possibly imagine. Which, I suppose was the point.

It was the worst thing the Trumps could possibly do because Fred’s youngest child, William, who was born in 1999, has a lifelong neurological disability and requires full-time medical care and assistance.

This brings us to what is arguably the most callous and contentious moment in Fred’s memoir. Decades later, having settled the lawsuit and somehow managed to make peace with his family’s actions, Fred describes how, over the course of a phone call with his uncle (by now US president), the issue of William’s ongoing medical expenses were brought up.

He recalls his uncle taking a second to assess the situation, before letting out a sigh and telling him that William “doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

Shocking as that statement is, the most depressing thing is that Donald Trump, who, as Fred acknowledges, had long contributed to William’s medical expenses, doubles down.

In 2020, Fred Trump visited the White House with fellow advocates for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. After the Oval Office meeting had finished and the visitors had left, Donald called Fred back to the room. He was cheerful. Fred imagined he was “touched by what the doctor and advocates in the meeting had just shared”.

But then his uncle said: “These people … the shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” Horrified, Fred reflects: “He was talking about expenses. We were talking about human lives.”

Little wonder, then, that Fred says he’ll vote for Harris in November. More

If the Yippies – a group of young activists known for political dissent – had their way, Americans would have elected a 145-pound pig named Pigasus as president in 1968.

The Yippies were famous for their unconventional tactics and were at the heart of the 1960s counterculture movement in the U.S. They demanded that Pigasus be treated as a legitimate candidate with Secret Service protection and foreign policy briefings.

Police arrested several Yippies for disorderly conduct after they paraded Pigasus outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Pigasus was taken into “protective custody” by police and eventually wound up at a farm.

Since the first Democratic National Convention in 1832, the event has had a long and storied history with headline-grabbing moments – some of which have left a mark in politics.

The Democratic Party will next converge at its convention in Chicago, Aug. 19-22, 2024. Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will officially accept their party’s nomination as the Democratic candidates for president and vice president.

As a scholar of the presidency, I think it is useful to remember that national political conventions often function like pep rallies, leading up to the big game of the general presidential election. These conventions can be places where new faces are launched, or they can be so dull that the country is functionally put to sleep. Here are a few of the more memorable moments to emerge from a Democratic National Convention.

The Yippies gather with a pig named Pigasus outside the Democratic National Convention in August 1968 in Chicago.
Bettmann/Getty Images

A first lady steps into the spotlight

In 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt became the first first lady to ever address the Democratic National Convention.

Democrats at the convention were divided over both the U.S.’s participation in World War II and the prospect of nominating Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, as he was known, to a third term. No president had served more than two terms at this point. It was about a decade before the 22nd Amendment was ratified and became part of the Constitution, restricting presidents to two terms in office.

FDR was trying to break a two-term presidency tradition that started with George Washington.

Eleanor Roosevelt got up in front of the contentious and squabbling convention and said, “This is no ordinary time. No time for weighing anything except what we can do best for the country as a whole, and that responsibility rests on each and every one of us as individuals.”

Eleanor Roosevelt’s influential speech helped reframe the first lady as a powerful advocate for the president, without being simply a mouthpiece for him. Her depiction of 1940 as “no ordinary time” helped people accept that the country was facing an extraordinary moment in history that needed consistent leadership.

Roosevelt won another two terms and went on to serve as president until his death in 1945 during his fourth term.

Eleanor Roosevelt addresses the Democratic National Convention in July 1940, becoming the first first lady to speak during a national public convention.
Bettmann/Getty Images

A fresh vision

Years later, when John F. Kennedy accepted the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in 1960, he said that voters needed to choose “between national greatness and national decline.” Kennedy’s speech, known as the “New Frontier,” helped show voters that a Kennedy presidency could overcome problems with a forward-looking vision.

“Today our concern must be with that future. For the world is changing. The old era is ending. The old ways will not do,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy also called for a new America that was not weighed down by nostalgia.

Texas politician Ann Richards also supercharged her career with a Democratic National Convention keynote address in 1988. Her speech, funny and sharp, was also a commentary on the growing role of women in politics – and what an achievement it represented.

In her opening words, Richards talked about Fred Astaire, one of the most famous Hollywood movie stars in the 1930s, as well as Ginger Rogers, his co-star and dance partner.

“Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels,” Richards said.

Richards skewered the perception that Astaire was the bigger star by pointing out Rogers was every bit as capable and talented – and even did it in uncomfortable shoes.

At the time, Richards was the treasurer of Texas. But her witty speech propelled her into the national spotlight and helped her become governor of Texas in 1991.

The introduction of hope

In 2004, Barack Obama, then a 43-year-old Illinois state senator, launched himself on the national scene with his speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Obama gave a passionate speech paying tribute to his background, stating, “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

And he offered a self-deprecating observation, saying the country embodied “the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!” These ideas of hope and unity later became key hallmarks of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Obama’s speech outshone the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, and helped position him as the party’s rising star. News commentator Chris Matthews noted after Obama’s speech, “We’ve just seen the first black president.”

Michelle Obama addresses the Democratic National Convention in August 2008.
Associated Press

A political blunder

Some speeches are so memorable, they are even recycled.

Michelle Obama, the wife of then-Sen. Barack Obama, memorably stressed the importance of dignity and hard work in her speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention – the convention at which her husband was formally nominated for president. Obama said that she and Barack were raised with the same values: “That you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.”

Melania Trump heavily paraphrased this speech in her 2016 Republican National Committee speech. She, too, said that her parents raised her with values – “that you work hard for what you want in life, that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise, that you treat people with respect.”

Trump’s speechwriter, Meredith McIver, took responsibility for the blunder, since she thought the draft speech shared with her contained Melania’s words. But in reality, Trump had given her Obama’s speech as an idea for what she wanted incorporated in her own speech.

Potential for magic

I believe that national party conventions matter only for moments of mistake or magic. While these events are supposed to motivate voters and help reach out to the undecided, modern conventions more often are uninspired echo chambers of blather.

They do little to sway swing voters and only offer confirmation to voters already committed to their choice. Everyone in the audience is there to cheer and be energized by their home team.

Moments of greatness are far and few between at national conventions. But when lightning strikes, it can turn a phrase into an iconic moment that encapsulates an entire era. More

Hours after Kamala Harris announced her choice of running mate for November’s election, she and her vice-presidential pick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz were on stage at a rally of 12,000 people in Philadelphia. Turning his sights on Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, the schoolteacher and football coach turned politician gave a taste of the rhetorical style which is said to have won him his place on the ticket.

“Donald Trump sees the world a little differently than us,” he said. “First of all, he doesn’t know the first thing about service. He doesn’t have time for it because he’s too busy serving himself”. Putting the focus on Trump’s legal woes, he added: “Violent crime was up under Donald Trump … That’s not even counting the crimes he committed.”

Harris had announced Walz’s vice-presidential candidacy earlier in the day with an Instagram post in which she extolled his personal history and political achievements.

In a typical vitriolic attack, the Trump-Vance campaign immediately called Walz a “dangerously liberal extremist” and that he had spent much of his governorship “spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda far and wide” – in a negative reference to Harris’s background as a Californian.

Read more:
To win the White House Kamala Harris must first overcome the ‘California curse’

But, speaking to NBC news, former House speaker Nancy Pelosi countered this narrative, insisting that “to characterize [Walz] as left is so unreal. He’s right down the middle. He’s a heartland-of-America Democrat.”

Former US president, Barack Obama, released a statement saying that not only did Walz have “the values and the integrity to make us proud” but also “the experience to be vice president”.

As Obama insisted, Walz certainly has an extensive resume. A former high schoolteacher and football coach, who served in the National Guard for 24 years, he was elected to the US Congress in 2006 and won the governorship of Minnesota in 2018.

Read more:
Walz pick turns focus on what a VP brings to White House — 3 essential reads

He says he governed on the principle that “you win elections to burn political capital and improve lives”. This meant policies such as legalising recreational marijuana and expanding background checks for prospective gun owners.

Harris pointed to Walz’s record of ensuring access to abortion rights in Minnesota as one of the outstanding features of his governorship. With the subject likely to be a key part of Harris’s campaign, this will underline the Democrats commitment to protecting those rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022.

But it’s not just abortion rights where Walz would be a significant benefit to the Democrat’s campaign for the White House. Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Action Fund said the Harris-Walz partnership was “the winning ticket on climate”.

This is likely to increase his appeal to millennial and Gen Z voters. Walz has enacted some of the more progressive climate policies at state level, such as mandating zero-carbon electricity by 2040.

People I have spoken to in midwestern America have called Walz “a normal guy” that would relate to everyone from small business owners to veterans, from ethnic minorities to rural families, progressives to centrists to unions. The Harris-Walz ticket now has the sort of broad appeal that could prove crucial in gaining votes in those key “flyover” states, many of which traditionally lean to the Republican Party.

Changing the dynamic

The announcement of Walz as Harris’ running mate was accompanied with a considerable spike in reported fundraising by the Harris-Walz campaign. Harris is now reported to be outdoing the Trump campaign by a considerable margin.

It’s a completely different atmosphere to the stuttering Biden campaign of last month, when several high-profile donors were reported to have withdrawn their funding support.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn chairman and a major Harris donor, called Walz “a lifelong public servant who represents the best of our country”. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, another big Harris donor, posted on X that Walz would appeal to those tired with ideologues who and want to vote for somebody they can relate to.

Walz attracted national media attention when he called Trump and Vance “weird” in an interview on MSNBC. The comment went viral and has become a label many online users have applied to Republicans.

There is a new vibrancy to the Democrat campaign, one which already has captured the attention of voters. Isaac Chandler, 30, from Oklahoma, told the BBC that the Harris-Walz partnership was “more representative of the wider American public than the Vance-Trump ticket”.

This is in stark contrast to the Republican campaign which has seemingly stalled after such a promising start. Less than a month ago, opinion poll surveys put Trump as much as five points ahead of any Democrat contender for the White House.

The attempted assassination of Trump gained further public support for the former president. It forced Democrats to rethink their strategy of identifying Trump as a threat to American democracy.

The Republican convention which followed appeared to be a coronation ceremony for the former president. And the announcement of Trump’s selection of Vance as his vice-presidential candidate was praised by many as an astute way of wooing working class voters.

Since then, however, the campaign has gone into free fall. Vance’s attack on Harris’s parenting skills and general comments on childless couples’ place in American society, coupled with Trump’s disastrous performance at a Q&A session with the National Association of Black Journalists, has had a disastrous impact on Trump’s polling.

If the Democratic campaign’s momentum can be maintained over the next couple of months, the recent swing in the polls in favour of Harris could prove to be even more significant and have an impact on the result in this November’s election. More

Kamala Harris has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for US president for less than a fortnight, but some key themes are becoming clear from her campaign. One of those is abortion, about which she has spoken frequently since Joe Biden declared her his preferred successor.

Just over two years ago, the US Supreme Court overruled the 49-year-old precedent of Roe v Wade and withdrew constitutional protection for the choice to terminate a pregnancy. In the June 2022 majority judgment in the case of Dobbs v Women’s Health Organization – the case that overturned Roe v Wade – Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Roe v Wade had been “egregiously wrong from the start”. He concluded that: “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.”

Under the guise of undoing this wrong, the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion law to state jurisdiction. Americans have been watching the consequences unfold ever since, as various states have passed laws restricting or banning women from being able to terminate pregnancies.

Harris led the Biden administration’s response to this decision, visiting an abortion clinic and speaking out about reproductive freedom. Even before she took on the presidential candidacy, campaign rallies and adverts from the Democratic campaign were focused on the decision restrict women’s reproductive freedom.

The results of the 2022 midterm elections suggest this could be a useful strategy. The Democrats did significantly better than expected – and abortion was considered a major factor. Certainly successful ballot initiatives in California, Michigan and Ohio (which added constitutional protections) and defeats for abortion restriction measures in Kansas, Kentucky and Montana suggested an increased turnout of Democrat voters.

This November, a possible 11 states could have abortion-related initiatives on the ballot, including Arizona, a key swing state in this election. In such a tight race, parties are looking for any possible advantage.

Possibly mindful of this – and of the fact that most Americans continue to support some access to abortion – the Republican party recently softened its official stance, removing language calling for a federal abortion ban which appeared in both 2016 and 2020. Some Republican state legislators have urged caution about strict abortion bans that may alienate potential voters.

Widespread impact

Speaking regularly about reproductive rights also helps keep in voters’ minds the widespread consequences of the Dobbs decision on abortion and how it affects pregnant women and medical professionals across much of the country.

Only half of states protect abortion, at least until the point of foetal viability. These states – particularly those which border two or more states with abortion bans such as Illinois and Ohio – have become centres for those seeking abortion care and who are able to travel.

Fourteen states have outright bans on abortion access. Some have exceptions for cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the pregnant women, but many do not. Another 11 states have gestational limits that are earlier than the previous 24-week limit. Some are so early that most pregnant women don’t even yet know they are pregnant.

More than half of states have other restrictions: waiting time requirements, mandated counselling, required ultrasounds, multiple visits to the doctor, spousal or parental consent laws and others.

The most recent estimates suggest 48% of women now live in states with some form of abortion restrictions. That figure rises to 57% for black women and higher for Native American women. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organisation, estimates that almost one in five pregnant women now have to travel out of state for abortion access.

Indirect attacks on access

By speaking out on abortion, the Harris campaign is also seeking to galvanise pro-choice voters by reminding them that the threats come in many forms.

In June, an attempt to undermine access to the abortion pill, mifepristone, was rejected by the Supreme Court. The case was, in effect, a back door attempt to further restrict abortion access.

There was a fierce and immediate backlash to the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v Wade.
EPA-EFE/Etienne Laurent

And, although interstate travel is constitutionally protected in the US, some localities in Texas have been trying to prevent use of their roads by those seeking to leave the state to access abortion care.

Two University of Texas at Austin professors sought the legal right to academically fail students who take time off for abortion care, while Idaho academics were warned they could no longer advise students about anything relating to abortion.

And, as the New Republic reported, anti-abortion laws are increasingly being used by domestic abusers to threaten and harass partners.

Healthcare consequences

As anti-abortion advocates continue to press for greater restrictions across the US, data from the Guttmacher Institute show that they continue to fail to achieve their aim of reducing abortion rates. In 2023, abortion rates were higher across the country than in previous years.

But, as many doctors are pointing out, the restrictions are regularly putting the lives of pregnant women at risk. Mimi Zieman, an obstetrician from Georgia wrote: “If I were finishing my training today and choosing somewhere to practice, I would not come to this state or anywhere with these restrictions on practice.”

Many agree with her. Recent studies suggest as many as 70% of gynaecology students in the US are less likely to consider residency in a state with abortion restrictions.

This risks leaving pregnant women without both abortion access and good, reliable, accessible reproductive healthcare. In a country that already has the highest maternal mortality rate among developed nations, this suggests further declines.

Testimony from practitioners overwhelmingly indicates that threats to medical licences and risk of prison terms are deterring doctors from undertaking vital healthcare provision.

And pregnant women are suffering as a result. Stories now abound of women like Kate Cox, who was forced to travel outside of Texas for an abortion when the state refused to determine that her case was sufficiently life threatening to qualify under their exemption. Or that of Nicole Miller, airlifted to a nearby state because the abortion she required to medically stabilise her was unavailable in her home state of Idaho.

Harris and the Democrats want voters to remember these stories as they go to the polls in November. And they want voters to remember that it was Trump, and his Supreme Court appointees, who made it possible. More

A former teacher and football coach who a majority of Americans had never heard of before is now running for vice president of the United States alongside Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

While the two names at the top of the Democratic and Republican tickets – Harris and Donald Trump – will largely define the next three months in the US presidential race, both campaigns will still focus considerable attention on defining Tim Walz, Harris’ largely unknown running mate.

So, who is Walz? And what will his addition to the Democratic ticket mean for Harris and the Democrats’ chances of winning the election?

Teaching in rural public schools

Walz undeniably has strong roots in rural and working-class America, despite being a member of a Democratic Party that has become increasingly urban and highly educated in recent years.

Born in a small Nebraska town to a school teacher father and a school administrator mother, Walz enrolled in the National Guard at 17. He later graduated from a small public university with a degree in social science education.

Walz met his wife, Gwen, while teaching in rural Nebraska. She soon persuaded him to move to her home state of Minnesota, where they got jobs teaching at the same school.

Walz devoted the next decade of his career to the school in Mankato, Minnesota, where he was a social studies teacher, American football coach and faculty adviser for the student gay-straight alliance.

One particular incident then spurred Walz’s decision to embark on a career in politics. In 2004, he took a group of students to a rally for then-presidential candidate George W. Bush. They were initially denied entry because one of the students had a campaign sticker for Bush’s rival, John Kerry.

Walz was reportedly irate – and signed up to volunteer for Kerry’s campaign the next day. He then ran for Congress himself in a rural southern Minnesota district bordering Iowa, which he won in 2006.

As a former command sergeant major, he was the highest-ranking enlisted military member in the history of Congress. And as a representative, he become known as a workhorse, eventually leading the Veterans Affairs Committee.

After winning six terms in a row in a once reliably Republican district, Walz ran for and won the Minnesota governorship in 2018. He was re-elected in 2022.

Then-gubernatorial candidate Tim Walz, along with his wife, Gwen (left), celebrates with supporters after winning the Democratic governor’s primary in Minnesota in 2018.
Anthony Souffle/Star Tribune/AP

Walz’s political positions

In his first congressional campaign, Walz presented himself as a moderate Democrat, touting endorsements from the National Rifle Association.

As a veteran and one of very few Democrats to represent a mostly rural district, Walz bucked the party line on some issues, including opposing a decrease in military spending. A key reason was his concern about China.

Walz taught English for a year in China and spent his honeymoon there. He and his wife even started a company leading student tours of China.

Given this history, Walz has a deep familiarity with the country. When he got to Congress, he joined the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a legislative group monitoring human rights and the rule of law in the country. He co-sponsored a number of resolutions condemning China’s human rights abuses and poor environmental standards.

Walz has also championed democracy activists in Hong Kong and regularly meets with exiled Tibetan leaders, including the Dalai Lama.

He and his wife were even married on June 4 1994 – the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989 – because, his wife said, he “wanted to have a date he’d always remember”.

Walz’s time as governor of Minnesota – a state that is more Democratic-leaning than neighbouring Wisconsin or Michigan – has undoubtedly seen him turn more progressive.

Aided by the fact Democrats hold a small majority in the Minnesota legislature, Walz’s tenure has led to a number of progressive legislative wins, including:

Governor Tim Walz listens as President Joe Biden speaks in Minnesota in November 2023.
Andrew Harnik/AP

Defining Walz

From teaching on a Native American reservation to a school in China not long after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Walz’s life story has had many diverse turns. So much so, his staffers once called him Forrest Gump, after the Tom Hanks character with a colourful life.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are now angling to define his latest chapter.

The Harris campaign is hoping Walz’s straight-talking, Midwestern dad persona, combined with his background as a National Guardsman familiar with everything from turkey hunting to repairing pickup trucks, will make him relatable to a wide swathe of voters in middle America. He’s a conventional politician.

This is particularly important given his running mate, Harris, is anything but “conventional” – if she wins in November, she would be the first woman, first Black woman and first South Asian president in US history. She’s also from California – a state that hasn’t produced a president since Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The campaign will also seek to juxtapose Walz’s perceived normalcy against the Trump-Vance ticket, which it is depicting as “weird”.

Walz first used this word to describe the Republican ticket, and it instantly went viral. He’s since become referred to as a “cool dad” online and has become the source of a stream of memes in recent days.

For the Trump campaign, they are hoping to define Walz by his more progressive tenure as Minnesota governor, ultimately alienating more moderate voters.

In the hours after Walz was announced as Harris’ running mate, Republicans began highlighting the unrest in Minnesota that followed the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020 and criticising Walz for being too slow to call in the National Guard to quell the violence.

While Walz would ultimately call in a sizeable number of National Guardsmen, the Republicans have nonetheless zeroed in on this attack line – even highlighting how Harris sought to raise funds for protesters who had been arrested in Minnesota.

Crime is a challenging issue for Democrats. When pollsters asked Americans last year which political party does better on crime, Democrats trailed Republicans by ten percentage points.

Where to from here?

Ultimately, Harris made clear what she views as Walz’s addition to the Democratic ticket, highlighting his background as a school teacher and National Guardsman. She also told him on Tuesday, “you understand our country”.

Over the next few months, we’ll see how accurate that statement is – if Walz’s understanding of the country actually helps Harris to win the race in November. More

Who is Kamala Harris?

Though Harris has had a very public life in politics for decades, speculation about who exactly she is and what she stands for has circulated across social media platforms and news stories for several years.

Many of these conversations focus on the historic nature of Harris’ presidential candidacy, since she is a mixed-race, Jamaican and Indian woman who does not have biological children and who was born to two immigrant parents in Oakland, California.

As I’ve previously written about Harris’ mixed-race identity, some have questioned how authentic her Black or Asian identities are. Interest in Harris’ familial background and race was reignited on July 31, 2024, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely suggested that Harris has misled voters about her racial and ethnic identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump asked during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

By saying this, Trump tapped into the long history of racism in America, where some white people have defined racial categories and policed the boundaries of race.

More than 33 million Americans identify as multiracial and likely see themselves reflected in Harris’ layered background. But many Republicans are also trying to use Harris’ identity against her.

For ardent Trump supporters, Harris may seem to represent all that they oppose, including woke politics and Democrats being “controlled by people who do not have children,” as Trump’s running mate JD Vance has said.

For Democrats, Harris represents the U.S.’s multiracial, feminist future.

Which means, what people believe about Harris largely depends on the party they already plan to vote for more than who the Democratic presidential nominee really is.

A Kamala Harris supporter holds a sign following President Joe Biden’s July 22, 2024, announcement that he will not seek reelection.
Loren Elliott/Getty Images

Harris and her many firsts

Many political observers and voters alike agree that Harris has breathed new life into the Democratic Party, precisely because she is a Black-South Asian woman. Many Asian American, Black, Latino and female voters see elements of themselves in Harris: the celebration of her ethnic cultures, her achievements as a person of color, and her unprecedented and pathbreaking model being a woman of color who is the nominee of a major party seeking the highest office in the country.

A variety of fundraising meetings in July and August centered on the identities of those who support Harris.

Black women for Harris, Black men for Harris, white women for Harris, white dudes for Harris, South Asians for Harris, LGBTQ+ people for Harris, among others, have all gathered in Zoom meetings that had tens of thousands of attendees – one even had a record-breaking 200,000 attendees. These online gatherings have jointly raised more than $15 million for Harris.

The number and diversity of people rallying for Harris shows her widespread appeal. Harris’ white male supporters – a key voting demographic for Democrats – also show how Harris’ candidacy is inclusive to many different kinds of people.

Inclusivity may be a keyword of Harris’ campaign, especially in opposition to her rival’s campaign. Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies has spawned endless memes tapping into the rancor of people who recognize the insensitivity and ignorance of such a remark.

Harris’ supporters have responded to the GOP’s critiques of her and turned them into positive political memes celebrating her identity, attesting to Harris’ popularity with a younger, media-savvy electorate.

Using Harris’ identity against her

Republicans, meanwhile, are questioning Harris’ qualifications precisely based on her ethnic and racial identity, calling her a “DEI” candidate. This is a reference to the term “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The exact definitions of DEI can vary, but in workplaces or school settings it can look like treating everyone equally and fostering a culture where all people, regardless of their background or identities, feel welcomed. DEI policies intend to respond to the historic oppression that marginalized people have faced.

As the scholar Susan Harmeling wrote recently, “The term ‘DEI hire’ actually implies that only heterosexual, white men are qualified for such high leadership positions.”

Some in the GOP have renamed the DEI acronym “Didn’t Earn It.” U.S. Reps. Tim Burchett and Harriet Hageman both have disparaged Harris as a DEI hire, with Hageman going a step further by saying that Harris is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

The gender factor

Harris is the second woman major-party presidential nominee, following Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. So far, Harris doesn’t seem to be facing persistent questions about whether women are fit to lead, as Clinton once did.

But Harris has faced both sexist and racist comments, particularly online. One 2021 study found that 78% of disparaging sexist and racist comments on Twitter, now called X, during November and December 2020 were directed at Harris.

Some Republicans have continued making sexist attacks on Harris in this election campaign. In a July 3, 2024, social media post, Jackson Lahmeyer, the head of the group Pastors for Trump, called Harris a “ho,” or whore, riffing off a right-wing meme of “Joe and the Ho.”

Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau took to social media on July 22 to call Harris a representative of the “spirit of Jezebel.” Other conservative pundits have claimed that Harris slept her way to the top, citing an early relationship she had with Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic politician from San Francisco and later speaker of the California State Assembly, as the reason for her success.

This false story of Harris’ romantic past aligns with old stereotypes of Black women being promiscuous, rooted in the rape of Black women by white slave owners during antebellum slavery.

And the tactic of questioning Harris’ authentic racial background could apply not just to Harris but to nearly all multiracial people.

Yet there are millions of Americans who identify as multiracial and see in Harris their own story. More

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s place on the short list of potential Democratic vice presidential nominees has vaulted him to a national profile. That’s not surprising to someone like me who follows Pennsylvania politics closely.

Shapiro is no stranger to both the modern realities of Trumpism in the Republican Party and the nitty-gritty work of legislating across the aisle. An important part of his rise is his “get shit done” mentality, the phrase he readily uses to describe his approach to politics.

Who is Josh Shapiro? And what might his experience with building consensus in the swing state of Pennsylvania mean in the current veepstakes?

Early political ambitions

Shapiro is the consummate politician. He worked as a staffer for several members of Congress before outhustling his competition to earn his own seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives.

While in the House, Shapiro built a reputation as a pragmatic reformer and bipartisan operator. He was known for his ambition but also for his engagement with policy.

His most famous consensus-building act was being at the center of bipartisan negotiations in 2007 that resulted in Republican state Rep. Denny O’Brien becoming speaker of the house, even though the Democrats had won a single-seat majority in the chamber.

O’Brien repaid the favor in 2022 when he, along with eight other prominent Republican figures, backed Shapiro for governor over his Republican rival.

As a state representative, Shapiro sponsored an unsuccessful amendment to the state constitution that would have changed Pennsylvania’s partisan judicial elections to a merit appointment system, which echoes the current push from the Biden administration for U.S. Supreme Court reforms.

And he led a bipartisan effort in 2009 to reinstate hate crimes protections for sexual orientation, gender identity and disability after the state’s Commonwealth Court struck down those protections.

Notably, this push failed and has become a perennial debate in Pennsylvania, most recently after the murder of transgender teen Pauly Likens Jr.

County commissioner to attorney general

Shapiro left the Pennsylvania House in 2012 after winning a seat on the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners. The three-member board is essentially the legislature for the county, and Shapiro’s election shifted it from Republican to Democratic control.

His record of “getting shit done” continued as a county commissioner, and he drew praise from the lone Republican commissioner, Bruce Castor, for being “the best county commissioner I ever knew” and “very good at arriving at consensus.”

Leveraging his success and a statewide profile, Shapiro then successfully won two terms, in 2016 and 2020, as Pennsylvania’s attorney general – a position widely considered a steppingstone to the governor’s mansion.

As attorney general, Shapiro was involved in the high-profile investigation of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church as well as the prosecution of Penn State’s former football coach Jerry Sandusky for the same, and former Penn State President Graham Spanier for covering it up.

He later became the face of the legal fight against the Trump campaign’s claims of election fraud in Pennsylvania in 2020.

An anti-MAGA candidate

Shapiro ran for Pennsylvania governor in 2022. The Democratic Party cleared the field for him, and he continued to assume the anti-MAGA mantle in his race against Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano.

Mastriano was a key figure in Republican denial of the election results in the 2020 race and proved to be a very weak candidate. In fact, Republican donors largely gave up on Mastriano’s campaign.

In the current veepstakes, some commentators have pointed to Shapiro’s landslide victory in 2022 as a liability. They argue that he has not been tested or vetted enough for a national campaign by running in a tough race.

But during his first two years as governor, Shapiro has held true to his consensus-building persona.

He coordinated the effort to repair a vital bridge on Interstate 95 near Philadelphia in just 12 days, after its collapse from a truck fire rendered the vital highway impassable.

He also appointed Republican Al Schmidt to oversee Pennsylvania’s election system as secretary of state. Shapiro’s argument that “running an election should be a nonpartisan exercise” was another rejection of the election denialism that emerged in the state in 2020.

About-face on school vouchers

Shapiro’s work toward consensus building has at times caused problems for him within his own party.

For example, in 2023, Shapiro appeared to be cruising to an on-time bipartisan state budget. This is something his Democratic predecessor Tom Wolf struggled with.

However, an offer to the Republicans controlling the Pennsylvania Senate – a $100 million school voucher program – angered his allies in the House, narrowly controlled by Democrats.

Shapiro pulled his support, using his line-item veto power to strike the voucher program from the budget after Senate Republicans had passed it.

This move understandably angered Republicans and diminished the chances for other compromises needed on both a spending bill for higher education and the enabling legislation needed to spend the money from the budget.

As a result, state spending, including critical education and human services funding, was delayed for 5½ months until the final budget negotiations were concluded and enabling legislation was passed.

Moderate and bipartisan bona fides

Shapiro has also proven pragmatic on other issues that are central to Pennsylvania politics, but which may not be well accepted by more liberal Democrats in other states.

For example, he backed away from his predecessor’s attempt to have Pennsylvania join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a carbon cap-and-trade system in the Northeast. Shapiro has long been skeptical of the initiative and its potential effect on union jobs in one of the top natural gas-producing states in the country.

Shapiro’s support for private school vouchers wasn’t popular with his party in Pennsylvania and also won’t be with national Democrats.

Shapiro has also been at the forefront of several controversies roiling the Democratic Party more broadly. He condemned as “shameful and unacceptable” University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill’s disastrous testimony before a U.S. House committee investigating campus protests over the Israeli war in Gaza. On the left, the Republican-led committee’s work was largely seen as an attack on higher education.

More broadly, Shapiro, who is Jewish, has been a staunch supporter of Israel at a time when the war in Gaza is roiling the Democratic Party.

If on the ticket, however, Shapiro will not be running in a partisan primary but a general election. That means that all of these stances could help bolster his moderate and bipartisan bona fides nationally.

Harris-Shapiro political chemistry?

In the end, political scientists will say the hype around choosing a swing-state politician – even a popular one like Shapiro – is unlikely to make any difference in the outcome of the election.

But when it comes to Harris selecting her running mate, Shapiro checks two important boxes. Most importantly, he appears to meet the requirement of do no harm to the ticket. As has been seen in recent days with concern among some Republicans over Trump’s choice of U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio as a running mate, a presidential candidate does not want a partner who will potentially drag down the ticket.

Properly vetting and selecting the right candidate who is qualified to be a heartbeat away from the presidency is another important optic in choosing a running mate. Shapiro would seem a safe choice from this perspective, although campaigns often bring out flaws candidates miss.

The pair also came up in politics together. They share a history as state attorneys general, with Shapiro coming into office in 2017 as Harris moved from California attorney general to the U.S. Senate. But they first met in 2006 at a bipartisan seminar for future political leaders, sponsored by the nonpartisan Aspen Institute.

Moreover, Shapiro endorsed Harris in her presidential run in 2019.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia. More

Last week, presumptive US Democratic nominee Kamala Harris delivered one of the most important messages of her presidential campaign so far:

I’ve heard that recently I’ve been on the ‘For You’ page, so I thought I would get on here myself.

She wasn’t speaking to a typical crowd of supporters at a campaign rally, or to journalists at a White House press conference – but to an audience of 20 million TikTok users.

Following President Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance in early June, Harris has ignited an explosion of memes and viral content online.

And with fewer than 100 days until Americans cast their vote, it’s clear her campaign is trying to speak the digital language of Gen Z and harness youth-dominated social media platforms to gain traction with young voters.

Coconut trees and a ‘brat summer’

Harris is no stranger to viral moments. In her past three years as Biden’s vice president, she has been relentlessly mocked and meme-fied online for her so-called “word salads” and overuse of trademark phrases.

In recent weeks, however, her digital footprint has taken on a life of its own. Harris’s passionate online fandom is dubbed the “K-Hive” in a nod to the name of Beyoncé’s dedicated fanbase, the “BeyHive”.

The K-Hive is embracing Harris’s personality and political style in a wave of viral videos inspired by Gen Z trends and cultural touch points.

Let’s take Harris’s coconut tree comment as an example. Last year at a White House event in May, the vice president jokingly said, quoting her mother, “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

This now-viral quote has resurfaced and spawned endless online content. Many online users (and particularly young people) are referencing the quote in their posts, describing themselves as “coconut pilled” and lining their social media bios with coconut emojis.

The clip of Harris speaking has been stitched and reposted thousands of times by TikTok users, remixed to the music of iconic Gen Z artists such as Chappell Roan and even used as a soundtrack to a viral dance associated with Charli XCX’s song, Apple.

Harris’ campaign appears to be leaning into the joke, with the bio of the official Kamala HQ TikTok and X accounts now being just two words: “Providing context.”

Even the header image of Kamala’s X account (pictured at the top of this article) is a reference to British pop singer Charli XCX’s recently released album Brat. According to the singer – who sent the internet into a frenzy when she tweeted “kamala IS brat” last week — the archetypal brat is

just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile.

You’d be forgiven for thinking these might be undesirable traits for a presidential candidate. But by leaning into the “brat summer” brand and tapping into trending audios, Harris’s campaign is leveraging youth culture to position herself as a relevant and contemporary candidate for Gen Z.

Young social media users have largely embraced Harris’s chaotic and excitable energy. In a way, the very personality quirks that Republicans have tried to construe as baggage to take Harris down have emerged as one her greatest assets in connecting with younger voters.

Injecting new life into the Democrats’ campaign

In recent months, poll after poll found young Americans were switching off from a redux of the Trump–Biden matchup.

While Biden was still in the race, polling showed an overwhelming 82% of voters below age 30 thought he was too old to be an effective president – more than any other age group.

Harris could not strike a stronger contrast with Biden in her public persona. With her relative youth and engagement with meme culture, she has injected fresh life into the presidential race and the Democrats’ campaign platform.

Since entering the race, Harris has reinvigorated young Americans – a key Democratic voter base Biden was struggling to hold onto.

In the 48 hours after Biden stepped aside and formally endorsed Harris, almost 40,000 people registered to vote. This is the largest spike reported this election cycle. Most of these newly registered voters (83%) were aged 18–34.

Harris has also raked in celebrity endorsements from massive pop culture names, including rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who performed at her first presidential campaign rally in Atlanta – coining the slogan “Hotties for Harris”. Other star endorsements have come from rapper Quavo, pop singer Olivia Rodrigo and actor Kerry Washington, to name a few.

From online popularity to the polls

Harris’ campaign is harnessing social media to drill down on campaign messages in a way that might appeal to young audiences online.

In tweets and interviews, Democrats are branding Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance as “weird” for their views on issues such as abortion access and women’s rights. They are adopting the bite-sized, quick-witted humour that defines Gen Z to mount policy attacks.

Beyond making the case against Trump, Harris is also positioning herself as a younger candidate with a vision for the future. For instance, her first presidential campaign ad strikes an optimistic tone set to the soundtrack of Beyoncé’s song Freedom, as Harris embraces the rallying cry of “we choose freedom”.

It’s this future-focused messaging that Harris’s camp hopes will appeal to younger voters — and an angle Biden struggled to articulate, given his age and deteriorating public speaking skills.

That said, the real test for Harris will be whether she can convert this groundswell of momentum into votes come election day in November. More