Politico reports that the Clinton campaign is wooing Condoleezza Rice, James Baker, George Shultz, and Kissinger, the granddaddy of them all. This is in keeping with the strategy the Clinton campaign unveiled at the DNC: It really, really wants to win over Republicans who are disgusted with their party’s nomination of Donald Trump.

In the abstract, there is some merit to this strategy. The only path Donald Trump has to victory is by winning an overwhelming margin of the white vote. To make up for an expected loss of non-college-educated white voters, the Clinton campaign has set its sights on college-educated suburban Republicans—the last two days of the DNC were all about these voters. Winning over Republicans, who are by definition white, creates a firewall, especially in the key swing states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

But what does Kissinger, a veritable war criminal, do to help win over these voters? Are there pockets of Main Line Philadelphia waiting to hear what Kissinger thinks about the election? In truth, he represents no single constituency besides foreign policy elites based in Washington, D.C. And, while there can be no doubt that Clinton is a hawk, the decision to chase after Kissinger, who is anathema to the party’s left-wing and any person with a sense of morality, further alienates progressives. (Sanders voters, who are also quite white, could also serve as a firewall, but many are reluctant to vote for Clinton because of shit like this.)

Another, more troubling way of thinking about this outreach, however, is that it’s earnest. There has always been something insecure about the hawkishness of the Clintons—a willingness to prove to the country and the world that the Democratic Party is no longer the party of draft-dodgers and hippies. The wooing of bomb-happy right-wingers is in keeping with that insecurity: The Clinton campaign knows it has a negligible electoral benefit, but seeks the endorsement of a discredited status quo to seem respected and important. Of course, for Clinton, Kissinger has never been discredited—instead, he’s been her mentor for years.

It’s that awkward moment when a man emasculates your father for months and months and disparages your mother multiple times and then you endorse that man to be president.  

We’re talking here about Jeb Bush’s son, George P. Bush, an up-and-comer in Texas politics, who just threw his support behind Donald Trump, just a few months after Trump drummed his “low energy” father out of politics in humiliating fashion, and claimed Jeb’s immigration platform was relatively dovish toward “Mexican illegals” because his wife, Columba, is Mexican. 

That’s the juicy Bush family psychodrama angle of this story, but the endorsement is also a preview of an even juicier political drama that’ll begin to play out after the election. George P.’s decision is an inauspicious one for Republicans hoping this election will discredit Trumpism. At least in states like Texas, Trump’s footprint is large enough that young conservatives building political careers feel they can’t be seen opposing him—blowout or no blowout. Even if Trump loses badly, in other words, there will be a price to pay in Texas for those Republicans who resisted Trump’s candidacy. If Liddle George is right about that, then Republican politics will remain a white ethno-nationalist redoubt for a long time to come. 

George’s fellow Texan Ted Cruz (among others) is making the opposite bet. Only one of them can be right. 

then it’s hard to see how he pulls out a victory in November. It’s hard to think of a person more inclined to vote for Trump than the longtime New York Post columnist. She’s called cyclists in New York “terrorists on wheels” and “assassins in Spandex.” Her favorite jokes are prison-rape jokes. She prefers Jay Leno. She described Huma Abedin as a “furious internet cuckold” during the Anthony Weiner sexting controversy (the second one). She once implied that President Obama is gay, questioning whether one of his gaffes was a “minor slip” or “a rude insight into the brain of Obama, a man as comfortable in the company of women as Tom Cruise.” This woman, Andrea Peyser, now declares, “I can no longer justify calling myself a Trump supporter,” citing his feud with the Khans and his general “lunacy and bigotry.” She’s also had it with his sexism:

When I visited about two months after his lovely wife, Melania, now 46, gave birth to the couple’s son, Barron, now 10, the infamous germophobe boasted that after fathering five children, he’d never changed a diaper.

I enthused that Melania, who stood quietly nearby aboard 5-inch stilettos, had lost all her baby weight. Trump corrected me: “She’s almost lost all the baby weight.’’

I was embarrassed for the mother of his youngest kid, who ignored the dig. Trump staffers asked a photographer and me to put sterile cotton booties over our shoes so as not to sully the carpet. It was time to get the hell out of the loony bin.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Andrea Peyser is right.

Maybe this hasn’t come through on NBC’s tape-delayed infomercial of an exclusive broadcast, but the 2016 Summer Games aren’t going over too hot in Brazil. Videos of protests being quashed with rubber bullets and tear gas have gone viral. Over the weekend, police removed spectators from Olympic stadium grounds for displaying signs calling for the resignation of interim President Michel Temer.

Demonstrations were always to be expected, with Brazil hosting an unprofitable $12 billion corporate giveaway even as its economy slides into crisis. But in a country just decades removed from military dictatorship, the authoritarian nature of the crackdown—there are 85,000 security forces patrolling the streets of Rio, twice as many as in London 2012—has raised understandable concerns. 

This is especially true given that a congressional coup may be underway in Brasília. Later this week, twice-elected President Dilma Rousseff will likely be impeached on fraudulent charges by Temer’s PMDB—“the party that ruined Rio,” as The New York Times has referred to it. What might otherwise have been a diffuse backlash at the Games now seems to be consolidating around Fora Temer—Out With Temer.   

The irony is that it was Dilma’s Workers’s Party that brought the Games to Brazil and approved the atrocious Olympic Law now being used to suppress dissent. Temer hoped the Olympics would strengthen his tenuous grip on power. It may end up strengthening his grip on a ticking time bomb instead. 

Challengers have been hard to come by, but the #NeverTrump dream will never die. The problem is that no Republican with a national profile would want to run as a third-party candidate because every Republican with a national profile has their eye firmly planted on 2020. So the schemers trying to stop Trump have had to settle for people with no national experience or any realistic chance whatsoever of striking a meaningful blow against Trump.

First, there was David French, the National Review weirdo who was Bill Kristol’s chosen candidate. That hope died, however, when French himself said he wasn’t into the idea. Now, Republican strategist and dogged anti-Trumpkin Rick Wilson has found his horse: Evan McMullin, a former CIA operative who is the chief policy director of the House Republican conference. How does McMullin compare to French, you ask? Here’s BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins, who broke the story:

Unlike National Review writer David French, another conservative courted by anti-Trump Republicans to launch a long-shot third-party bid, McMullin has virtually no public profile. He doesn’t appear regularly on television, and has just 135 followers on Twitter. His most high-profile recent appearance seems to have been a TEDx talk about genocide he gave at London Business School in April.

Lol.

But McMullin does have one thing going for him: He’s a Mormon and a graduate of Brigham Young University and is expected to campaign in Utah, whose Mormon-heavy electorate does not like the profligate and profane Trump. Could he swing enough votes away from Trump to turn Utah blue? The election is 90 days from now and this guy has 135 Twitter followers.

Fox News reports that Trump will endorse Ryan at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on Friday evening. This will be something of a turnaround for Trump, who when asked about the possibility of an endorsement earlier this week passive-aggressively said he is “not quite there yet.”

Ryan is in a primary battle against Paul Nehlen, a motorcycle-riding whack job who wants to deport all Muslims and is being supported by Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. Earlier this week, it was reported that some of Trump’s former aides were helping Nehlen’s campaign.

Trump’s refusal to endorse Ryan (and John McCain and Kelly Ayotte) revived the storyline that Trump has started a civil war within the GOP. His endorsement is clearly meant to put out that fire, or at least to try to move the conversation elsewhere. (It’s worth pointing out that, despite dragging his feet, Ryan did tepidly endorse Trump.)

If history is any judge, Trump’s endorsement will mostly be negging, or talking about Trump. Donald Trump does not do full-throated endorsements. And no matter what Mike Pence says, the distance between Ryan and Trump is very real. Furthermore, Ryan doesn’t even need the endorsement; he is leading Nehlen by 66 points. This is an endorsement that only serves one purpose: to try to stop a narrative that has dominated the last year of Republican politics. It probably won’t.

The reform conservative movement is perhaps best defined by its abiding faith that conditions are finally right for a revolution. That’s the message they took to Jackie Calmes of The New York Times: Donald Trump represents the winter of their discontent. But something odd happened over time as the Republican Party moved ever father from reformocon ideals, and then lurched in an unabashedly ethno-nationalist direction. The agenda, which was once distinct and most definitely not liberal, turned into this.

■ Reject additional tax cuts for those making more than $250,000 a year, but expand breaks for low- and middle-income workers through tax credits for children, the earned-income tax credit or a new wage subsidy that would provide a guaranteed minimum income.

■ Promote the benefits of global trade agreements, but help displaced workers.

■ Rule out privatizing Social Security and Medicare, and reassure workers they will be exempt from cost-cutting.

■ Acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay, but push for market-oriented changes.

■ Disavow mass deportations and promote the economic benefits of legalizing longtime workers who are in the country illegally, but reduce the legal entry of less-skilled immigrants.

For many reform conservatives, all of these objectives are subsidiary to their opposition to abortion, which will keep them out of the Democratic Party no matter how well the rest of their agenda lines up with standard-issue liberalism. But for the rest, it seems being politically homeless is more rewarding than taking yes for an answer.

May’s jobs report was bad—the economy added fewer than 25,000 jobs—and Trump ran with it, treating it like it was a devastating blow to Obama-Clinton-nomics and proof that his message of American despair was right.

But Trump was quieter about June’s report, which showed that the economy had added nearly 300,000 jobs. July’s report is another sign that the economy is humming: The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Friday that the economy had added another 255,000 jobs.

Trump has been banking on economic anxiety—among other anxieties!—to carry him to the White House and these numbers, when combined with Trump’s total shitshow of a campaign, suggest that the number of Americans who may be susceptible to his rhetoric may be shrinking. At the convention, Trump said “I alone can fix it” in response to, well, every single problem the country faces. But it’s hard to run on fixing a growing economy.

Still, while Gallup’s consumer confidence index may have hit a four-month high, it remains at -10. The last two jobs reports are going to be trotted out as proof that the economy is doing fine, but that’s not what you’d hear from plenty of people in the country. So the Trump campaign probably won’t change his message of economic anxiety because it’s still effective and because the Trump campaign has always been a fact-free environment. And if the jobs report does come up, Trump can just say it’s rigged.

The latest domino in the sequence of non-political-figures-and-non-insane-Republicans to fall against Donald Trump is former CIA Director Michael Morell.

The thrust of his New York Times op-ed endorsing Hillary Clinton is that she knows how to do the job, whereas Trump is an erratic menace who cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons, and his pathological narcissism has allowed Vladimir Putin to conscript him “as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

Trump’s conservative apologists don’t really have an answer to this but to pretend Morell is a Democratic Party sleeper agent, or...this, from conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt.

We might wish this election were about many things, but it all comes back to IT practices.