PHILADELPHIA — Democrats packed a Philadelphia basketball arena to the gills on Tuesday, with more than 10,000 raucous supporters cheering on Kamala Harris and her newly named running mate, Tim Walz. In his first speech since becoming the presumptive vice presidential candidate, Walz roasted Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, as he declared that the next 91 days would not just be about winning the election, but doing it “with a sense of joy.”
The mood inside Temple University’s basketball arena was certainly joyful — ebullient even, bordering on orgiastic. Crowded together under enormous “Harris and Walz” signs and sporting light-up wristbands like the kind Taylor Swift gives out at the Eras Tour, Philadelphians helped Harris and Walz kick off a tour of their own: a five-day blitz through seven battleground states, starting with the most important one on the map for Democrats this November — Pennsylvania.
The pair walked out onstage together early Tuesday evening, just hours after a fleet of black SUVs converged on the Minnesota governor’s St. Paul residence early Tuesday morning and plunged him directly into the center of the 2024 election vortex, and one day after Harris clinched the top spot on the Democratic ticket. Addressing the throngs of screaming supporters, Harris introduced the world to Walz: a teacher, National Guard member, congressman, governor, and coach who helped take a high school football team from a winless season to state championship.
When it was Walz’s turn to speak, he told the crowd that it was his students who inspired him to get into politics. “They encouraged me to run for office. They saw in me what I was hoping to instill in them: a commitment of common good, a belief that one person can make a difference,” Walz said. “And because high school teachers are super optimistic, I was running in a district that had one Democrat since 1892.”
Walz went on to draw a contrast between the work he did when he arrived in Congress — on the Veterans Affairs committee and on behalf of rural communities — with Trump’s priorities as president, and the Republican Party at large.
“Some of us are old enough to remember … when the Republicans were the party of freedom,” Walz said. “It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. In Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and their personal choices that they make — even if we wouldn’t make the same choice for ourselves. There’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”
He also, as he has done in the weeks leading up Harris tapping him as her running mate on Tuesday, went after Trump and Vance. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell,” he said to huge applause. “That’s what you see. That’s what you see.”
Walz even joked about an unfounded rumor that Vance had sex with a couch. “I can’t wait to the debate the guy,” he said before waiting several seconds for the applause to subside. “That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”
If the crowd’s reaction was any indication, they approved of Harris’ choice in a running mate. The vice president had a historically truncated window to consider a decision after she emerged as the party’s choice to take on Trump when President Joe Biden decided to leave the race last month. She chose Walz over Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who was also on hand on Tuesday. Shapiro took the stage to thunderous applause, taking several beats to soak it up before telling the crowd, as if to preempt any accusations of hard feelings, “I love you Philadelphia — and you know what else I love? I love being your governor.”
Harris’ choice has been widely praised online, and certainly in Philadelphia on Tuesday, but even as Walz has received a warm welcome, some attendees at the rally admitted they weren’t well acquainted with Walz before his name began circulating in the veepstakes. Tameka Bates, a SEIU union member, was thrilled to see Harris. But as for Walz? “I don’t know much about him; I’ve just heard about him this morning,” she said.
Jan Ostroff said she had only learned of Walz in the past few weeks as his profile rose as he appeared on TV auditioning for the role of amiable attack dog. “I would have been happy with any of her choices for vice president, but I’m really happy with him, because this way we get to keep Josh Shapiro for ourselves for a little while longer,” Ostroff said.
The near-universal praise of Walz — from figures as far apart ideologically as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Joe Manchin — stood in stark contrast to the Republican party’s reception of Vance just a few weeks before. Vance, who had a favorability of -5 percent when Trump asked him to join the ticket has only seen his standing tank to -14 percent as more Americans have gotten to know him, earning him the distinction of being the least-liked vice presidential pick in history. (It’s hardly surprising considering Vance’s three biggest media moments have revolved around that couch rumor, the ongoing damage control efforts around his 2021 attack on “childless cat ladies,” and a charming anecdote in which he told his son to “shut the hell up” while he was on the phone with Trump.)
Ahead of the lovefest at Temple University, Vance held his own appearance in Philadelphia, attended by a comparatively small smattering of supporters. The Trump campaign made the questionable decision of sending Vance on the road to hold an event in every city that Harris and Walz are set to appear in this week. The split screen in Philadelphia was stark: Vance struggled to fill a room with a one-tenth of the capacity of the arena in which the Democratic ticket appeared. He spoke in front of a banner that read “Kamala Chaos,” but it was hung too low, so seated event attendees blocked out “Chaos,” and at first glance it looked like Vance was at a Harris event.
Trump, meanwhile, is spending the week at Mar-a-Lago, where on Tuesday he met with a seat-sniffing Kick streamer, who may have violated FEC rules by gifting Trump both a Rolex and Cybertruck emblazoned with his image. He has just one appearance planned this week, in Montana.
Donald Trump speaks in front of the American flag at the White House, on May 12, 2026.
It’s the Corruption, Stupid
Let’s say it plainly: There has never been a president as corrupt as Donald Trump. There is no close second in our history.
Take two days in May as Exhibit A. Americans just found out that in the first quarter of this year, Trump’s stock portfolio made 3,600 trades — an average of nearly 60 a day. This is a rapacious pace that would make a day trader on meth blush. Many of these appear suspiciously timed to benefit from actions approved by the president himself. For example, his Nvidia stock surged after Trump announced the company would be permitted to sell its cutting-edge AI chips to China. Similar suspiciously well-timed calls were made ahead of big government moves involving other companies, from Intel to Palantir to Boeing. The Trump Organization says all trades are made by a third-party investment advisor. If so, they appear to be psychic.
But the apparent insider trading scam being run from within the Oval Office is small change — merely millions of dollars — compared to the self-dealing plunder of $1.8 billion tax-payer dollars being pushed through the DOJ and IRS.
There’s never been a sitting president who sued his own government for $10 billion. That’s because it’s absurdly corrupt. But that’s what Donald Trump did, arguing he had suffered damages from prosecutions pursued before he was reelected. Trump, like many of his supporters, persistently confuses persecution with prosecution.
The judge who heard the case convened an independent panel to review the suit, suspecting it might be a scam. Before the case could be dismissed, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — who had previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer — declared that the bogus suit would be preemptively settled, not for $10 billion, but for the symbolic sum of $1.776 billion, which Trump said will be distributed to persecuted political allies.
This is a shakedown. The president is compelling a Justice Department he controls to redirect money from taxpayers — that’s you — to his most fervent supporters. This slush fund will set off a cash grab among MAGA lawyers and be used to reward partisan fanatics who attacked the U.S. Capitol — and police officers — on his behalf.
If that wasn’t enough of a blatantly illegal use of presidential power, it was revealed that the “settlement” deal included a pledge signed by the acting attorney general that would ensure — in the hysterical all caps of a Trump tweet — that the government would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing” any tax claims, audits or related prosecutions against Trump, his family or their businesses. This is an attempt to get a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card for the Trump family — a license to steal.
All of this is insane. All of it is unethical, and much of it is illegal and impeachable — but our system was not designed to deal with a shamelessly self-dealing president, a spineless Republican Congress, and a complaint conservative Supreme Court that has refused to enforce the emoluments clause of the Constitution and ruled that Trump has immunity for actions he takes as president. That ruling may prove to be the most consequential — and most corrosive — act of judicial abdication in American history. Against this partisan-group think, individual acts of courage matter. So kudos to the top lawyer at the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, who at least had the integrity to resign rather than oversee this tax-payer funded plunder.
Just to close out the corruption-palooza, Trump announced that he would endorse the Lone Star State poster-boy of corruption, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, in his primary against incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn. Paxton’s scandals include a truly buffoonish array of fraud and bribery charges that resulted in him nearly being impeached by the state legislature. But corruption is a feature, not a bug, of Trumpland.All this smacks of late Rome and you’d be forgiven for half expecting Trump will next appoint a horse to an open Cabinet position, with Republicans rationalizing the need for more equine representation. It is no more absurd that the cavalcade of Trump appointees refusing to say that Biden won the 2020 election during their confirmation hearings in the Senate. The decision to parrot unreality for partisan gain defines deviancy down.
But in the search for something hopeful to hold onto in dark times, you can find some comfort in the fact that corruption is often the thing that turns the tide against authoritarian-adjacent administrations. And there is evidence this is happening.
Trump’s billions in self-enrichment, his reflexive twisting of U.S. policy to sell out long-term national interests and enduring values, comes at a moment when nearly half of Americans say they are feeling extremely anxious about their own financial situation.
That anxiety is driven by the widening gap between Main Street and Wall Street, a gap set on fire by a trade war and a real war Trump started, which has no end in sight but promises to further raise energy prices, fertilizer prices, and strangle the global economy. While CEOs embrace the transactional nature of this president, kissing his ring and offering vigs, the situation is grim if you’re not lining up at the Trump trough. At a time when the super-rich are getting richer, everyone else is told to go to hell by the man in the White House.
These are precisely the kinds of conditions that turn people against an aging, autocratic president who shows contempt for the very people who put him in office. It is not just that Trump’s approval numbers have plummeted to the point where two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he is doing. It is that Trump, for the first time, is opposed by a majority of non-college-educated white voters — a.k.a. his base — and they feel betrayed because Trump is raking in billions of dollars while they struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Trump has dismissed and discounted their concerns, turning a blind eye to the anger about rising costs that carried him back into the presidency.
Trump’s aim is to make his thievery so blatant that we collectively become numb to it and disfigure our democracy in the process. Once upon a time conservatives warned about the dangers of “crony capitalism” and corruption. Now they are silent and complicit. It is the temporary triumph of partisanship over principle. Patriotism demands that we reassert the basic American idea that no man is above the law and that our presidents are not kings.