Vox Sentences: Donald Trump out-Nixons Nixon

We'll find out who Hillary Clinton's VP pick is when you do; Trump trades in "Sad!" for "Scary!"; the head of the IMF goes on trial for mismanaging money.

TOP NEWS

"VP TK" was the placeholder hed here, and I guess we'll have to go with that

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• Hillary Clinton successfully trolled the political press corps Friday, teasing us by saying she'd announce her VP selection to her supporters via text (in advance of a planned event Saturday unveiling the nominee) — and then, as of press time, not doing so.

  [CNN / Dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny]

• (Hillary Clinton hates the political press. She probably has good reason to.)

  [Washington Post / Callum Borchers]

• As of this writing, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine appears to have the best odds of Clinton's possible picks. Kaine's a solid moderate and a swing state senator, has the approval of both Bill Clinton and President Obama, and — oh, yeah — speaks fluent Spanish from his time in Honduras.

  [Washingtonian / Benjamin Freed]

• He is also, frankly, boring.

  [Politico / Annie Karni]

• If Clinton wants to shake things up, she might pick Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, a "feisty Latino progressive" (in the words of NBC's Alex Seitz-Wald) who's the son of Dominican immigrants.

  [NBC News / Alex Seitz-Wald]

• Or maybe she'll pick New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. Or Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

  [CNN / Dan Merica and Jeff Zeleny]

• Or any of the half-dozen other people who've been named as "shortlist" candidates over the past month (many of whom have, mysteriously, appeared in one or another article about the "final three" Clinton is choosing from as late as this week).

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• At this rate, you and the rest of America will probably find out whom she's picked in a 3 am text message. That's how Obama announced his pick of Joe Biden. I (Dara) am not staying up for it.

  [NYT / Adam Nagourney and Jeff Zeleny]

Make America Freak the Heck Out Again

Alex Wong/Getty Images

• Donald Trump's speech formally accepting the Republican Party's nomination for president last night was ... really something. It's worth reading, if you didn't watch the speech live last night.

  [Donald J. Trump]

• Of course, Trump said some things that were patently false. And, of course, Vox (and other outlets) fact-checked him exhaustively.

  [Vox ]

• But fact-checking Donald Trump often feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

  [Vox / Tara Golshan]

• The purpose of this speech was to make its listeners feel afraid — in particular, to make its white listeners feel that their fears of black and brown people in their neighborhoods were not merely justified but in fact good survival instincts.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• Trump deliberately modeled his speech on Richard Nixon's 1968 nomination speech. Except that Nixon's was actually much less dark and despairing, even though it had more reason to be dark.

  [The Atlantic / David Frum]

• For one thing, Trump spoke about disorder in the streets after several days of remarkably peaceful protesting in Cleveland outside his Republican National Convention (which remained peaceful largely because police officers took care not to unnecessarily escalate situations).

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Labeling the speech bad for democracy doesn't faze Trump, of course. But it was also a failure in terms he understood: TV ratings. Fewer people watched his speech (at least on conventional TVs) than watched Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008.

  [Variety / Oriana Schwindt]

• Then again, Trump has always been an imperfect messenger for Trumpism. Picture Trump's policy agenda filtered through the sunny disposition of his daughter Ivanka (whose speech introducing her father seemed incongruously feminist in the context of US politics, but appropriately natalist in the context of the European far-right tradition her father's platform really represents)...

  [NPR / Asma Khalid and Dana Farrington]

• ...or the strangely magnetic billionaire Peter Thiel, whose stated reasons for supporting Trump (the space program???) bear no resemblance to reality, but who could flourish as a "CTO and shadow CEO" of a post-democratic Trumpist state.

  [Medium / Samuel Hammond]

Not an ideal situation for the head of a major global financial institution

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

• Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, has been ordered to stand trial on negligence charges for an improper court payment she authorized when she was finance minister of France.

  [Independent (UK)]

• In 2008, the French mogul Bernard Tapie was awarded 403 million euros in a suit against a publicly held French bank, which he argued had undervalued his stake in Adidas. But the award was made in a highly unusual out-of-court arbitration, and has since been reversed.

  [City AM / Caitlin Morrison]

• (Tapie himself is a colorful figure: Among other things, he's a business mogul who then made a name for himself hosting a television show in which young entrepreneurs competed for his affections. In case that sounds familiar to you.)

  [FT / Anne-Sylvaine Chassany]

• Lagarde signed off on the payment and is now criminally liable for having done so. (She could spend up to a year in jail if convicted.)

• The trial and possible prison sentence casts an understandable pall over Lagarde's second five-year term at the IMF, which starts this month.

  [FT / Chris Giles and Shawn Donnan]

• It's been pending since Lagarde won reappointment in February, but it wasn't enough of an issue to stop her from being reselected. Lagarde doesn't have many friends in Greece (who's been squeezed tight by IMF repayment terms after its government bailout), but she's won praise from the developing world and from liberal developed nations for her focus on things like inequality and climate change.

  [The Guardian / Philip Inman]

MISCELLANEOUS

More than 100,000 Texas prisoners don't have air conditioning. That's not just inhumane — it's deadly. [Time / Jeff Edwards and Scott Medlock]

• Forget everything you knew about lichens! We're living in a whole new world now.

  [The Atlantic / Ed Yong]

• The first use of "hawk" to mean "militarist" is credited to … Thomas Jefferson.

  [New Republic / Alice Robb]

• RNC Chair Reince Priebus used his speech to tell the story of former General Motors president William Knudsen. What Priebus left out was that Knudsen contributed thousands of trucks to the war effort of the Third Reich, which he called the "miracle of the 20th century."

  [Slate / Josh Levin]

• BoJack Horseman is one of the funniest, darkest, weirdest shows on television — and its creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, has more than a little in common with its main character.

  [NYT Mag / Stephen Rodrick]

VERBATIM

"People talk about 2016 being a particularly disastrous year, but for a historian, there’s nothing new about people fighting for power or useless leaders with bad ideas gathering widespread support. All the current political upheaval is nothing compared with 1348, when the Black Death took hold." [Slate / Peter Frankopan]

• "What America needs is a leader who understands both that people need the freedom to deliver ice at a profit after a hurricane, and that people need the government’s help to cope with the poverty and the prejudice caused by the free market."

  [Medium / Jason Green-Lowe]

• "Milo Yiannopoulos is a charming devil and one of the worst people I know. I have seen the death of political discourse reflected in his designer sunglasses."

  [Medium / Laurie Penny]

• "With his legions of online followers and savant’s knowledge of Pepe the Frog memes, Milo seems like a singularly contemporary thinker. Yet he has also revived an older trope, which may be more indicative of our current moment: the decadent, gay, fascist sophisticate."

  [NY Mag / Park MacDougald]

• "We can take selfies in front of the wallpaper in their formal dining room, which is hand-painted with what can only be described as baffling, big-titted Native American-Chinese scenes."

  [GQ / Caity Weaver]

WATCH THIS

Why red light cameras are a scam [YouTube / Gina Barton]

Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images