Friday Insights-August 9, 2024
A good week for Democrats as Trump falters.
Happy Friday, and welcome to Dean’s Friday Insights, my weekly look back on the week ending today.
If you are a Democrat, it has been a good week. Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are off to a roaring start. I watched over an hour of their kick-off rally in Philadelphia and was impressed. The pair looked unbeatable, and the large crowd was exuberant.
The joy of the Harris-Walz rally is contrasted by more lunacy from Trump. One example is a pair of Trump posts early in the week on Truth Social:
Shortly after I learned about the posts (reported on MSNBC, naturally), I shared them with a friend. She warned me to double-check that the posts were real. “Democrats may want to give Trump some of his own medicine,” she said after finding the statements so bizarre.
The posts are not fakes. I cut and pasted them right off the Truth Social platform.
Trump also held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that was a disaster. The encounter was “unhinged” and is fueling speculation that Trump’s mental decline is accelerating. Among Trump’s comments was a claim that the size of the crowd for his January 6, 2021, rally was larger than the 250,000 people that gathered for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1964. True to form, Trump said King’s crowd was a million but that his crowd was larger.
Trump also reversed his decision to back out of the September 10 ABC debate with Vice President Harris. That decision may make Trump look weak to his followers. Trump is proposing a total of three debates.
Two things are obvious: Trump has yet to figure out how to respond to Harris and is starting to scare people in his own party.
What do you do when advisors are suggesting that your public events may be hurting your campaign? You stay home. And that is what Trump did this week. He was largely absent from the campaign trail.
It is far too early to assume Trump is imploding, but one must wonder how he will hold up for the next seven weeks, especially with the likelihood he will be sentenced in New York in September. Trump won’t be going to jail and is not likely, in my view, to get a jail sentence, but voters will get a fresh reminder of the Republican nominee’s criminal record.
One more thing on Trump—his running mate. It has been interesting this week to see the press start to lose interest in J.D. Vance. I still read the occasional story about how Trump regrets the decision to choose the Hillbilly Elegy author. Trump will not admit he made a mistake and replace Vance. He’s stuck with him. And that is welcome news for Democrats.
Spaceflight
Other news this week is a bit more esoteric. I have long been a follower of the space program. As a youth, I followed every spaceflight religiously, especially the Russians. I still follow spaceflight and confess to having watched at least 50 SpaceX launches and landings over the last two years.
We live in a time of revolution in human spaceflight, largely thanks to SpaceX. Later this month, I hope, SpaceX will launch the fifth flight of Starship. I recommend watching it. SpaceX plans on catching the booster with two large mechanical arms as the rocket returns to its own launch pad. If SpaceX pulls this off, it will be historic.
In contrast to SpaceX, we have Boeing. Its spaceship, the Starliner, is currently docked at the International Space Station. NASA announced that the capsule’s crew will not return to Earth until February 2025 and that they may make the trip in a SpaceX capsule due to leaks and malfunctions on the Starliner that make it risky to fly home with crew abroad. This is a sad story for Boeing, NASA, and American taxpayers, who paid for this lemon.
Stock Market
A wise person once told me that stocks go up and they go down. On Monday, they went down, costing American investors billions in losses. The next day, the market was back up. A good friend, now deceased, once commented that he hated the stock market because it was nothing more than gambling. At the time, that seemed to be going too far. Speculation is at the heart of the market, but investors who do their homework do better than the fools who through darts at a list of ticker symbols.
I’m starting to think that amateur investors should avoid retail stock trading. It is dangerous to swim with sharks.
Rebranding, Already?
Issues & Insights has a tiny following, but today, I am changing its name to Dean’s Issues & Insights. Earlier this week, I poked around on the web and found another Issues & Insights. I am adding my name to my title to avoid confusion and apologize for the error. I didn’t find the other Issues & Insights when I looked a couple of weeks ago, so I adopted the name—one that I used for a newsletter published by my public affairs firm for many years.
Substack readers are well served when those of us who write here do our best to avoid confusion.
That’s it for this week. I’ll be posting Monday Issues on, you guessed it, Monday. I will also be posting my column from this week’s Spy Community Newspapers that ran on August 8th.
Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
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