| | | | |  | | By Calder McHugh | | Presented by |  | | | |  At right, Benjamin Ingman, a former student of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, speaks alongside former members of Walz's high school football team on Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention. | Francis Chung/POLITICO | PATRIOTS DAY — In a week of convention programming awash with chants, one has often been louder, more enthusiastic and more constant than others. It’s an old standby: “USA! USA! USA!” Every four years, both parties do their best to wrap themselves in the flag and put forward a working theory on why they represent America better than the other team. But it’s a sentiment that Democrats have often struggled to convey and as a result, Republicans have seized on the patriotism front as if it’s their own. That history is what makes the carefully tailored language, messaging and imagery of this year’s Democratic National Convention especially striking. The frequent “USA!” chants are not a coincidence. Speaker after speaker has strutted onto stage and delivered their own take on why Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democrats as a party are the quintessence of modern American patriotism. Convention organizers have handed out signs that simply read “USA,” including before Harris’ surprise convention appearance on Monday. Take a walk around the United Center, and everywhere you look there’s Chicago Bulls’ red harmonizing with the blue and white DNC logo to make the place appear bathed in America’s colors. Or take vice presidential nominee Tim Walz’s appearance on Wednesday evening. Before he took the stage, a litany of middle aged men wearing football jerseys — Walz’s old high school players — stood on stage to introduce him and talk about the good ol’ days on the gridiron. What’s more American than that? Then Walz began his speech with the line, “We’re all here tonight for one beautiful, simple reason: We love this country.” His speech was one in a long line of addresses paying homage to Uncle Sam. On Monday, Steve Kerr, fresh off coaching the United States men’s basketball team to gold in Paris, spoke directly about how and why representing his country meant so much. “[Winning gold] was the proudest moment of my whole life … The joy, the passion, the commitment to our country that we saw at the Olympics, that is what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have,” he said. Kerr’s exaltation to country was particularly resonant given his personal background: His father was shot and killed simply for being an American in the wrong place while serving as the president of the American University of Beirut. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, also speaking on Wednesday, sought to reframe and recontextualize what it means to love America in 2024, with all of its warts and complications. “Loving your country does not mean lying about its history,” he told the audience. “Making America great means saying, ‘The ambitions of this country would be incomplete without your help.’” The Democratic brand of patriotism isn’t easily distilled into simple slogans. And it’s led to a relative unease with unabashed expressions of love of country: A Gallup poll published in 2023 showed that while 60 percent of Republicans reported being “extremely proud” to be an American, only 29 percent of Democrats reported the same. Independents came in at 33 percent. In the past, Democrats have been content to cede the patriotic high ground to the GOP. This year’s Democratic convention isn’t willing to do that. It’s a tacit acknowledgment of the political costs of allowing the opposition to fill in the blanks — Donald Trump, for example, constantly lobs attacks at Democrats for being socialists, or communists, or hating America — but also reflective of the party’s renewed confidence in being able to articulate its own vision of patriotism. Oprah Winfrey, of all people, was among those laying it out from the convention stage. “I’ve seen racism and sexism and income inequality and division. I’ve not only seen it, at times, I’ve been on the receiving end of it,” she said Wednesday in her surprise DNC appearance. “But more often than not, what I’ve witnessed and experienced are human beings, both conservative and liberal, who may not agree with each other, but who’d still help you in a heartbeat if you were in trouble. These are the people who make me proud to say that I am an American.” Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at cmchugh@politico.com or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @Calder_McHugh. PROGRAMMING NOTE: Nightly is taking its annual end-of-summer hiatus starting Monday, Aug. 26. We’ll be back Tuesday, Sept. 3, just in time for the election homestretch.
| | | | A message from Johnson&Johnson: We’re restoring the true meaning of healthcare—developing advanced treatments and smarter and less invasive solutions for today’s most complex diseases. See how we're connecting the best of Health&Care for every patient and provider. Learn more. | | | | | — With cease-fire in Gaza looking less likely, officials press for release of hostages: The U.S. is focusing much of its efforts in the ongoing Gaza cease-fire negotiations on one major issue: The release of the remaining hostages. While the return of hostages from Gaza has always been part of the talks related to a cease-fire in Gaza, it was one point among many that the U.S., Egypt and Qatar have weighed including in a formal agreement. The Biden administration has also long made the need to ramp up the delivery of humanitarian aid a priority. But in recent weeks, Biden officials have refocused much of their efforts at the negotiating table on fine-tuning details around how and when the hostages will be released under the bridge proposal recently endorsed by Israel, according to two Israeli officials, a U.S. official and a Western aid representative briefed on the negotiations. As in previous discussions, the hostages would be traded for Palestinian prisoners. — Arkansas Supreme Court blocks abortion measure: Republican officials and anti-abortion activists have spent the last two years trying to stop abortion-rights initiatives from reaching the ballot. Today, they scored their first victory: blocking an Arkansas measure that offered voters the opportunity to significantly loosen the state’s near-total ban on the procedure. The state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 in favor of Attorney General Tim Griffin, who had accused the abortion-rights initiative’s backers of failing to submit the proper paperwork. — USPS proposes changes to save $3B per year, starting in 2025: The U.S. Postal Service wants to save $3 billion annually on changes that reflect its greater reliance on streamlined regional networks — while retaining local mail delivery times of one to three days and track some delivery schedules with greater precision. Election mail won’t be affected, officials said. The proposal, announced today, would adjust mail delivery times while maintaining a commitment to a maximum five-day delivery for the flagship “Ground Advantage” nationwide and a maximum three-day delivery for local first-class mail. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said the changes to take place next year are necessary to “enable us to operate more efficiently and reliably, grow our business and give us a chance for a viable future” after an 80% drop in first-class mail since 1997 and a corresponding growth in packages. All told, the Postal Service has amassed more than $87 billion in losses from 2007 through 2020.
| | CALL IN SHOW — Former President Donald Trump, in a wide-ranging and unfocused “Fox and Friends” interview this morning, slammed Tim Walz as a “total lightweight” after the Minnesota governor delivered his vice presidential nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last night. In the live phone interview, Trump attacked Walz and Vice President Kamala Harris while also distancing himself from Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for a potential Republican administration that has become a frequent target for Democrats. The hosts struggled to keep him on topic as Trump spoke for more than 30 minutes on issues including crime, the border, Russia-Ukraine, abortion, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — with one of his favorite subjects being bashing Chicago, the DNC host city. FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE — Since taking over for President Joe Biden as her party’s presidential nominee, Harris has touted her past as a prosecutor and has been vocal about her ability to take on Donald Trump. Much of what she knows came from the couple of years in the mid-90s she spent as a deputy district attorney, assigned to the child sex crimes unit. It was there that Harris distinguished herself quickly from other young prosecutors, impressing her colleagues and superiors with a combination of compassion for the young victims and toughness inside the courtroom that was necessary to get convictions in notoriously difficult cases. THE DNC-FLUENCERS — On the ground floor of the United Center, amid throngs of delegates and press pushing past one another to get to the floor or to meetings or events around the Democratic National Convention grounds, there’s a small area guarded by a DNC staffer that’s clearly demarcated as separate from the other proceedings: The “Creator Lounge.” This is the first year that either convention has credentialed creators; the Republican convention had about 70. And though they’re small in number, the creators who have descended on Chicago for the week have made their mark — it’s impossible to walk through the hall without seeing one of them filming videos, hyping up the crowd or pausing for selfies.
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A local volunteer looks at a building damaged by Ukrainian strikes in Kursk on August 16. | Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP via Getty Images | BRING IN THE REINFORCEMENTS — Reinforced concrete shelters will be installed across the Kursk region, local Russian authorities announced today as Ukraine keeps up its daring attack on Moscow’s territory. “Today we began to install reinforced concrete shelters in Kursk. On my instructions, the Kursk city administration identified key points for placing concrete modular shelters in crowded places,” Aleksey Smirnov, Kursk’s acting governor, said in a statement. Ukraine’s surprise cross-border incursion earlier this month caught the Russians on the hop, and Kyiv’s forces have expanded their offensive, capturing more towns and territory with little resistance. The attack aims to tilt the battlefield in Ukraine’s favor — even while Russia advances in Ukraine’s Donetsk region — in a full-scale war instigated by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022 during which his forces initially aimed to quickly topple Ukraine’s leadership and subjugate the country. But back home, Russian authorities now plan to equip 60 main public transport stations in Kursk with reinforced concrete shelters. Smirnov said similar shelters will be installed in the cities of Zheleznogorsk and Kurchatov in the Kursk region. EU ANGST — Hungary’s government says it’s ready to give every migrant trying to enter the country a one-way ticket to Brussels if a top EU court ruling forces Budapest to adopt a “no-detention” refugee policy. “After the asylum procedure, we will offer all migrants at the Hungarian border the opportunity to be transported to Brussels voluntarily and free of charge,” said Gergely Gulyás, a minister in Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office, at the government’s weekly briefing today. “If Brussels wants migrants, it can have them.” Gulyás added that asylum-seekers “can then negotiate there with the European Commission about their own care.” The minister outlined the idea in response to a €200 million ($222 million) fine issued against Hungary in June after the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled Budapest was ignoring EU asylum laws as well as an earlier judgment against it.
| | | | A message from Johnson&Johnson:   | | | | | | | | | | | TECHNO TOURISM — For Kosovo, 2024 included two big milestones: The 25th anniversary of the end of the bloody Kosovo War, and the country’s long-awaited entrance into Europe’s Schengen Zone. The latter, which allows people with a Kosovo passport to move freely throughout Europe, has opened up the small country. And now, they’re in the process of exporting one of their creative industries — the making of techno music. Kosovo’s brand of techno, and its clubs that play it, differs somewhat from famous European techno spots like Berlin. Lale Arikoglu reports for Conde Nast Traveler on how the music scene has become a symbol of resilience, and pays homage and considers the country’s past and its future.
| | |  On this date in 1940: Natalia Sedova, wife of slain Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, arrives at the cemetery for his funeral services in Mexico City, Aug. 22, 1940. Trotsky was attacked two days prior with a pickax and fatally wounded. | Montes de Oca/AP | Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
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