Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Trump stinks up the stage at the Libertarian convention

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

David Weigel/Semafor:

Trump promises Libertarians a cabinet slot — and to free a notorious drug kingpin

Trump walked into a fairly hostile room on Saturday, with plenty of advance warning, and uncertain benefits for a candidate currently leading most swing state polls...

At the convention itself, the reception for Trump wavered between skepticism and contempt. Candidates for the party’s nomination got instant applause when they denounced Trump; some delegates denounced party chair Angela McArdle for inviting Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“We are the party of principle and we reject you outright,” says Lars Mapstead, a Libertarian presidential candidate whose campaign placed signs promoting his plan to deny either Trump or Biden an electoral college majority in the hotel’s lobby, until the Trump campaign got them taken down. “Great for coming. Thanks so much. But now, be gone.”

It could have been worse. Dozens of pro-Trump Republicans, not attending the convention, grabbed seats for the candidate’s speech. In the hours-long run-up, some accepted signs reading “FREE ROSS,” and chatted with Libertarians whose shirts read “TRUMP/FAUCI 2024: Give Us Another Shot.”

But when a critical mass of delegates arrived, McArdle asked Trump’s supporters to move out of the front rows. Later, three party activists delivered short speeches about where the two sides might agree, but why Libertarians didn’t automatically trust Trump — “a great source of comedy,” said LP presidential contender Michael Rectenwald — after creating Operation Warp Speed to fight COVID and adding trillions of dollars to the national debt.

Andy Kroll/ProPublica:

Scenes From a MAGA Meltdown: Inside the “America First” Movement’s War Over Democracy

Across the country, the Republican Party’s rank-and-file have turned on the GOP establishment. In Michigan, this schism broke the party — and maybe democracy itself.

Not long ago, this setting was friendly terrain for [Peter] Meijer. For decades, voters here rewarded sensible, pro-business, avowedly conservative politicians. Meijer fit the archetype of a West Michigan Republican when he first ran for Congress in 2020. He was also basically Michigan royalty as an heir to the Meijer grocery store fortune. In one of the state’s most competitive districts, he won his debut congressional race by a comfortable 6-point margin.

At the Kent County event, however, many attendees seemed to feel nothing but scorn for him. That anger flowed from a single decision Meijer had made in Congress: He voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump. In response, he faced a far-right primary challenger who had served in the Trump administration and said Biden’s 2020 victory was “simply mathematically impossible.” Meijer narrowly lost. Now, as a Senate candidate, he was trying to make amends, even pledging to vote for Trump — whom he had once called “unfit for office” — if the former president won the Republican nomination. But to some, he was still a traitor.

Walter Shapiro/The new Republic:

The Protest Vote That Still Haunts Me 50 Years Later

In 1968, as a college student, I didn’t vote for Hubert Humphrey. I regretted the decision almost immediately—and still do.

Most of us, I suspect, have occasionally found ourselves lying wide awake at 4 o’ clock in the morning as a festival of regrets flashes before the inward eye. I am comparatively lucky since in my predawn melancholy I am not mourning a lost love, a foolish refusal to study podiatry, or an ill-considered major investment in a chinchilla farm.

Instead, what haunts me with surprising frequency these days was my jejune refusal to back Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 out of misplaced antiwar passions. That year, I instead  squandered my vote on Eldridge Cleaver who was running as the candidate of the Peace and Freedom Party. As I wrote in my campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, on the eve of the election, “I cannot endorse the underlying premises of an American foreign policy that places national prestige before human lives. And I cannot vote to support the chief cheerleader of the war in Vietnam.” As a University of Michigan senior casting my first presidential vote, I pulled out all the stops as I melodramatically framed my refusal to vote for Humphrey as “a simple moral act.”

With more than a half-century’s perspective, I realize there was nothing simple or particularly moral about my self-righteous decision to opt out of the two-party system. It was rather the product of my stacking flawed premises on top of each other in the hopes that the entire edifice didn’t topple from the weight of its own illogic. The reason for revisiting my long-ago electoral folly is because I fear that, in similar fashion, a significant number of young, idealistic voters will wrongly conclude that it is more important to bear personal moral witness over Gaza than to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House.

Bloomberg:

Kamala Harris Is Gaining Swing-State Voters' Trust to Step In for Biden

The vice president also was the top choice among Democratic rising stars to run for the White House should Biden be unable to continue his campaign.

Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly endearing herself to swing-state voters, a development that if it persists, stands to neutralize Republican attacks around Joe Biden’s age.

Nearly half of swing-state voters, 48%, say they trust Harris to fulfill the duties of the presidency if Biden were no longer able to serve, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll conducted in early May. The reading marks the highest level of confidence since the survey was first conducted in October.

In recent months, Harris — the first woman, Black or Asian vice president — has held a series of high-profile events that resonate with key parts of the Democratic base. They include a historic visit to a Minnesota abortion clinic, a nod to the rollback of federal reproductive rights that has galvanized women voters, and an impassioned speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, a landmark of the Civil Rights era. Harris and the administration have also leaned into detailing her personal arc and record in public office.

David DeBruijn and H. David Baer/The Unpopulist:

Two of Europe's Right-Wing Leaders Experience Setbacks Hungary's Orbán is facing a major challenger and the Netherlands' Wilders won't be prime minister

In early February, I profiled Geert Wilders for The UnPopulist and intimated that the notoriously Islamophobic Dutch firebrand, the man the Netherlands had seemingly chosen as their next prime minister, could have a rough time forming a government. A month later, Wilders publicly announced he was out of the running. His Freedom Party (PVV) had won the most seats in last year’s election, which put Wilders, its leader, in pole position to form a ruling coalition with him as premier. But, in the end, his decades-long track record as a right-wing agitator effectively made him too toxic to entrust with running the government. This wasn’t the judgment of any one individual but of the parties he could not convince to join him in forming a ruling coalition.

It’s hard to blame them. Wilders really would have been quite the departure from Mark Rutte, the current and outgoing prime minister, in every conceivable way.

Mark Hertling/The Bulwark:

Memorial Day: ‘Make It Matter’

A yearly ritual helps me reflect on the loss of my comrades and the meaning of their sacrifice.

I watch it [Saving Private Ryan] every year during the afternoon on Memorial Day. I usually like to be alone because I don’t like others to disrupt my thoughts or see my emotions.

The competing opening scenes of peace and terror are within a short walk of each other. The immaculately kept Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer—where the old man walks at the beginning of the film, and where 9,388 soldiers, sailors, airmen, uniformed women, and war correspondents have been laid to rest since June 1944—is on a cliff. Down below, those landscapes of brutal violence, Omaha and Utah beaches, have become places of deep personal reflection amid the sound of lapping waves. These sites are sacred ground.

This year, many nonagenarian and a few centenarian veterans will commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the day of those landings—the “four score” remembrance of their generation. They will mourn the loss of those who didn’t come home with them and, even in their late years, they will still recall their comrades’ names.

And those they remember will remain forever young.

And while we’re at it, don’t conflate Veteran’s Day with Memorial Day. Most vets I know really dislike that. They are very much alive.