The Kamala Harris coconut tree meme, explained as best we can : NPR

Choose a Girl

Biden is testing how far a president can lead when his followers go astray. The mantra of former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — “Diversity is our strength. But two days after that July 11 NATO news conference, the president found himself hunched in front of a stone fireplace in his Rehoboth Beach, Del., home, losing his temper. A war hero had just questioned the toll that age took on his ability to lead.

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A long interview with Complex magazine, another with BET, a third with Lester Holt of NBC News. He needed to get out more, to prove his mettle, to replace the images of the doddering debate night in everyone’s mind. History will record that as things got worse, Biden fought harder. Many Democrats described the first three weeks of July as a kind of nightmare — too extraordinary to be real, too unexpected to be believed. While Kennedy denies playing a spoiler role that would hand the election over to Trump, Kennedy has told reporters that he believes Mr. Biden’s odds of beating Trump in November are slim. “For me personally I just like really boring bed sex because I’ve done everything really wild and crazy,” he said.

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The campaign budget had been built on the assumption that tens of thousands of people who are not yet engaged would give millions of dollars. There is no survey data to say whether they will show up in September with $10 or $25 checks. There is no poll to predict whether the party comes back together. Even before the debate, approval of Trump’s remembered presidency was running well ahead of Biden’s current one. Democrats assumed that Trump would get a bump out of his convention and probably a further boost in favorability once the trauma of the failed assassination was digested by voters.

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• The former president also shared details about his attempted assassination during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday and the phone call that followed between him and President Biden.
• The terrible Biden debate was followed by a far more terrible attempted assassination of Trump on live television July 13, from which the former president rose triumphant — fist in the air, blood streaked across his face.
• Put another way, Harris — even being 59 and the incumbent vice president —represented something new in a campaign defined by old.

And I think the coconut tree clip is a perfect example of that,” said Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent at Vox covering internet culture. “My mother … would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ ” Harris said with a laugh. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

• Some of the world’s most famous adult actors are exposing themselves in a very different way — speaking out about how their kinky careers have adversely impacted their personal lives.
• She would have a plethora of promising choices to balance the ticket, including Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, all of whom won in places where Trump performed well.
• There is no poll to predict whether the party comes back together.
• Kennedy’s son, Bobby Kennedy III, who posted the video before deleting it a couple hours later, wrote on X “[Trump] could have picked a unity ticket instead he picked JD “fire all the unvaccinated nurses” Vance,” Bobby Kennedy III wrote.

The X-rated rompers were probed on the Australian TV series “You Can’t Ask That,” which went to air Down Under on Wednesday. Some of the world’s most famous adult actors are exposing themselves in a very different way — speaking out about how their kinky careers have adversely impacted their personal lives. Harris’ background as a prosecutor could prove advantageous in a future debate. Rather than sparring with fellow Democrats over health care and education policy, she would be boring in on Trump’s criminal conviction in Manhattan. But after the debate, she struggled to offer a consistent answer to whether she believed federally mandated busing should be used to integrate schools.

The campaign has been comforted by internal data showing that most of the people Biden has lost since the debate are unlikely to vote for Trump, suggesting they may come back. But polling matters little when your party infrastructure is not behind you. Political polling and analytics deal in probabilities, not absolutes like “No way.” They create snapshots in time, out of focus.