If you thought Sen. Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Nikki Haley and Marco Rubio set the lowest standard for selling out previously stated views for political advantage, take a look at “JD Vance, Trump’s VP pick, once called him a ‘moral disaster,’ and possibly ‘America’s Hitler’” by Andrew Kaczynski and Ern Steck at CNN Politics. As the authors write: “Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick Ohio Sen. JD Vance was once a fervent critic of the former president. In private messages, he wondered ahead of Trump’s election whether he was “America’s Hitler” and in 2017 said the then-president was a “moral disaster.” In public, he agreed Trump was a “total fraud” who didn’t care about regular people and called him “reprehensible.”….“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler,” Vance wrote in a message to a friend in 2016. “How’s that for discouraging?”….In 2016 and 2017, Vance, then best-known for penning the best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy” said Trump was “cultural heroin” and “just another opioid” for Middle America. He told CNN ahead of the 2016 election that he was “definitely not” voting for Trump and he also contemplated voting for Hillary Clinton (he ultimately said he planned to vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin.)….,“Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us,” he tweeted after the “Access Hollywood” tape was published in 2016….Vance also liked tweets that said Trump committed “serial sexual assault,” called him “one of USA’s most hated, villainous, douchey celebs,” and harshly criticized Trump’s response to the deadly 2017 White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia….“There is no moral equivalence between the anti-racist protestors in Charlottesville and the killer (and his ilk),” Vance wrote in a deleted-tweet….“I’m definitely not gonna vote for Trump because I think that he’s projecting very complex problems onto simple villains,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper ahead of the 2016 election….“Trump makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible. God wants better of us,” he wrote in October 2016.”

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, interviews Stuart Stevens, a Lincoln Project consultant and writes,”Regular cable news viewers will know that Lincoln Project consultant Stuart Stevens has been steadfast in arguing that the Democrats should stick with the president. Regular TNR readers will know that most of our columns have argued otherwise. Here, Michael Tomasky asks Stevens to make the case. “I’m just hard-wired that in a campaign, you’re going to have incredibly difficult moments,” Stevens said. “The instinct shouldn’t be to run for the lifeboats. You fix it.” Watch to see what Stevens thinks the Democrats need to emphasize to win, and what he and the Lincoln Project are doing between now and November.” The interview:

An excerpt from “How Blue-Collar Candidates Could Change Politics” by Barry Yeoman at The Assembly: “About half the U.S. labor force qualifies as working class: people with manual, service-sector, and clerical jobs. They rarely see themselves reflected in their elected bodies….People with current or recent working-class jobs make up 1 percent of all state legislators, and 0 percent in North Carolina, according to data compiled by political scientists Nicholas Carnes at Duke University and Eric Hansen at Loyola University Chicago. If you add leaders of unions that represent working-class people, the national figure rises to 1.6 percent. The number is higher for city councils in the United States, but still hovers around 10 percent. A notable outlier is Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a former factory worker and now the Republican candidate for governor….Nor do working-class voters have a clear champion in either political party. Democrats carried that mantle for much of the 20th century—and, to some degree, still do—in part because of their alliance with organized labor. But that alliance was eroding by 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law. North Carolina’s manufacturing sector cratered after NAFTA, as factories closed and jobs moved to Mexico….“That was a demarcation point,” said Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Down Home’s senior narrative strategist. “The Democrats started to feel more elite, feel very metropolitan, and [weren’t] talking about bread-and-butter issues.”….Carnes and Noam Lupu, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, examined survey data from 1,000 Americans who, in 2015, were asked to compare hypothetical political candidates. Factory workers fared about 2 percentage points better than business owners in these matchups, though the difference was not statistically significant. “[Voters] tend to perceive politicians from working-class jobs as maybe having a little less competence, but a little more warmth or concern for their problems,” Carnes said. “The two things kind of wash out in the end.”

In “Republicans Just Handed Down a Death Sentence to the Nation’s Coal Miners,” Kim Kelley writes at In These Times: “It is shameful that some in Congress would play politics with the lives of the coal miners who too often sacrifice their health to power our country,” commented Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy for the clean-energy advocacy group Appalachian Voices, in a statement. ​“Make no mistake: blocking the silica dust standard will cost lives. It is imperative that Congress strike this reckless provision as the legislative process moves forward.”….This rule, for which so many workers fought for so long, is a part of what these Republican committee goons call a ​“destructive and anti-worker regulatory agenda.” The final vote was 31 to 25, which likely means that every single Republican voted for this — and a Democrat joined them (and I for one am awfully curious about who that is). The irony is painful, particularly when one considers the Republicans’ cringeworthy push to position themselves as a ​“blue-collar party” that fights for ​“American workers” against out-of-touch liberal elites. Even Donald Trump, who used to yammer constantly about how much he ​“loved” coal miners and how he was going to bring back the coal industry, has largely abandoned both during his current campaign of destruction….When a coal miner is stricken with black lung and left unable to work, the absolute highest monthly payment that they can receive from the federal black lung benefits fund is $1,545.00, provided they have three or more dependents; if they’re all alone, it’s capped at $772. Meanwhile, members of Congress have access to the best medical care in the nation, thanks to their low-cost, gold-plated healthcare plans and six-figure salaries, both of which are paid for with workers’ tax dollars. Each one of the Representatives who voted to defund the silica rule brings home at least $174,000 per year. Aderholt himself is worth about $9 million, and took home $3.8 million in federal farm subsidies in 2023 for his spouse and businesses. All that filthy lucre could probably buy a lot of oxygen tanks for the coal miners that he and his colleagues just doomed….“It’s very disheartening to see a handful of Washington politicians try and undo all this hard work on a whim,” said Robinson of the National Black Lung Association, in a statement. ​“If this policy becomes law, it will put the lives of countless miners at risk. Mining families deserve better, and we urge Congress to throw out this dangerous policy and get to work helping miners, not making their lives much harder.”