Mostly Monday Reads: Size Matters

“The desperation is real. The next fake elector coup is coming.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

It was inevitable that the incredible crowds that the Harris/Walz appearances have been attracting would eventually impact Donald’s psyche.  One of the first signs was the amount of disinformation being packaged by right-wing sites and news.  The KKKult is falling for it.  I even had to fact-check someone myself. I’ve never seen a group of more gullible people in my life.  They’re even rehashing some of the crap they tried to pass in 2020.  We’ve also seen poorly photoshopped pictures of crowds in Trump’s appearance, where the same obvious guys appear in four different stadium sections. We’ve now advanced to AI conspiracies.

Marcy at emptywheel has a delightful account of this current bout of fake crowds. It’s filled with pictures and videos of the size issue. “In Which Ian Miles Cheong Understands Trump’s Campaign Better than NYT. The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.”  Indeed.

This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.

This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.

And a Black woman created it.

Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.

And sure enough, it did melt his brain.

Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.

After these many years of dealing with this emotionally disturbed man with his plethora of Personality Disorders, we know his defense is projection. I know you are, but what am I! Donald has crowd-size envy, so it has to be resolved by calling it fake photos, fake videos, and fake reporting!  Marcy brings the tape and photos to show how deluded he is.  So deluded that even social media right-wing troll Malaysian Ian Miles Cheong.  This guy jumps for red meat but can’t even with the entire AI crowd thing.  Marcie continues with this.  Wait for it. She mercilessly goes straight from the well-known troll to WAPO and NYT.

And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.

And that’s where things start to get weird.

Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.

But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.

In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.

Read more for details. It’s true. We’ve all had fun with Trump waving his hands to a nonexistent crowd at airports and in front of Trump Tower.  Watching Trump meltdown over his dwindling crowd size has been epic fun.  This is from Brett Bachman from The Daily Beast. “Dem Rep: Trump’s Latest Conspiracy Is Evidence He’s in ‘Dementia Land.’

Rep. Ted Lieu had some harsh words for Donald Trump Sunday after the former president falsely suggested that Vice President Kamala Harris had somehow digitally altered photos of her rally at a Detroit-area airport over the weekend. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Lieu attacked the conspiracy theory during an appearance on MSNBC, saying that Trump was “really going bonkers off the edge into dementia land.” Lieu added: “He’s now fantasizing that all these rallies are not real and that somehow, Air Force Two is not real and that the rally she had in Michigan was not real. I think the American people realize that Donald Trump is not suited for office in any way whatsoever.”

So, yeah, they’re going for the paid actor thing yet again.  Why not? In fact, it seems they’ve just doctored some of the stuff they used in 2020, as I said. But, here’s world-class troll Ian Miles Cheong at least copping to them not being AI.  Michael Tomasky writes this for The New Republic. “Grab the Popcorn. Donald Trump Is Freaked Out in Ways He Never Imagined Were Possible. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are getting under his skin, and it’s a beautiful sight to behold.”

The Harris-Walz campaign proved two important things last week. First, it proved that sometimes all you really have to do is answer attacks—the mere fact of answering them deflates their momentum. Second, it proved that Democrats have finally learned something from brazen Republican presidential campaigns over the years: Convert your perceived weakness into strength and their perceived strength into weakness.

The campaign did both of these things effectively last week. And it drove Donald Trump, and Republicans generally, nuts. Democrats aren’t supposed to do that! It’s like Cinderella saying she’s not doing the dishes. But Democrats are saying it, and it’s effing awesome.

…

Republicans have understood this for years. Seeing a Democratic presidential campaign finally get this is exhilarating to me personally but, more important, potentially game-changing.

And Donald Trump is freaked out in ways he never imagined were possible. He has faced a lot of opponents—from 1980s New York Mayor Ed Koch to all his many creditors to the 16 dwarves he ran against in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that thought the race was over to prosecutors he has known for years how to slow down, especially with corrupt hack judges having his back. But Trump has never had an opponent that made him go: “Oh fuck, these people mean business.”

Now he does. And that it’s a Black woman who means this business makes it so great, so much better. The New York Times reported over the weekend that he is so shell-shocked by the turnabout in this race that he’s doubling down on racism and “stop the steal” delusions. He is in full-blown meltdown mode, in other words.

All the pressure is on Trump now. Can he come back? Can he respond? Can he prove, contra George Conway’s brilliant ads, that he is not a pathetic psychopath? Can he make up these polling gaps, like his sudden four-point deficit in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan?

In 2016, we had a Trump who expected and even wanted to lose, who had no investment in winning. In 2020, we had a Trump with a deep investment in winning, and who expected to win. In 2024, we had a Trump—while he was running against Joe Biden—who fully expected to win.

But now we have a new Trump. He really isn’t sure. We’ve never seen this animal on the loose. Hide the wives and children. The Democrats are hitting him where it hurts. And it’s about damn time.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson believes that “Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice of Minnesota governor Tim Walz to be her running mate seems to cement the emergence of a new Democratic Party.” Her analysis was posted yesterday in her SubStack Letters from an American.

While Biden worked hard to make his administration reflect the demographics of the nation, tapping more women than men as advisors and nominating more Black women and racial minorities to federal judicial positions than any previous president, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who emphasized the right of all Americans to be treated equally before the law.

She was the first member of the administration to travel to Tennessee in support of the Tennessee Three after the Republican-dominated state legislature expelled two Black Democratic lawmakers for protesting in favor of gun safety legislation and failed by a single vote to expel their white colleague. She has highlighted the vital work historically Black colleges and universities have done for their students and for the United States. And she has criss-crossed the country to support women’s rights, especially the right to reproductive healthcare, in the two years since the Supreme Court, packed with religious extremists by Trump, overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

To the forming Democratic coalition, Harris brought an emphasis on equal rights before the law that drew from the civil rights movements that stretched throughout our history and flowered after 1950. Harris has told the story of how her parents, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, who hailed from India, and Donald J. Harris, from Jamaica, met as graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and bonded over a shared interest in civil rights. “My parents marched and shouted in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” Harris wrote in 2020. “It’s because of them and the folks who also took to the streets to fight for justice that I am where I am.”

To these traditionally Democratic mindsets, Governor Walz brings something quite different: midwestern Progressivism. Walz is a leader in the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which formed after World War II, but the reform impulse in the Midwest reaches all the way back to the years immediately after the Civil War and in its origins is associated with the Republican, rather than the Democratic, Party. While Biden’s approach to government focuses on economic justice and Harris’s focuses on individual rights, Walz’s focuses on the government’s responsibility to protect communities from extremists. That stance sweeps in economic fairness and individual rights but extends beyond them to recall an older vision of the nature of government itself.

Philip Bump of the Washington Post believes Donald’s most recent behavior is ominous. “‘AI’ crowds and unskewed polls: Trump prepares to reject another loss. The former president’s recent rejection of obvious realities indicates that he is not planning to treat a negative 2024 outcome as legitimate.”  As I mentioned on Friday, shenanigans are afoot.

The first person who I noticed spreading the idea that images of Vice President Kamala Harris’s rally in Michigan had been manipulated was conservative moviemaker Dinesh D’Souza.

On Saturday evening, D’Souza posted a photo on social media of Harris exiting her airplane with a crowd of supporters looking on. Two reflections from the airplane were circled in red, illustrating that, despite the crowd, no one was visible in the reflection.

“Does this look like a real picture to you?” D’Souza asked. Within hours, similar questions were everywhere on social media — and by Sunday had popped up in former president Donald Trump’s feed at Truth Social.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Trump wrote. “She was turned in by a maintenance worker at the airport when he noticed the fake crowd picture, but there was nobody there, later confirmed by the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane.”

That D’Souza was at the leading edge of this argument is not surprising. It was D’Souza, you may recall, who produced a feature-length movie arguing without evidence that the 2020 election had been stolen by “mules” who collected and submitted ballots on behalf of Joe Biden. Then, as now, D’Souza’s claims were rooted in a trivial misrepresentation of digital information.

There was a crowd in Michigan to meet Harris, as shown below in a photograph taken by a Washington Post photographer. You can also see why the reflection from the plane didn’t show the crowd; it was angled away from the speaking platform.

No AI. No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no “cheating” by Harris.

Why would Trump and his allies spread a false claim about attendance at a rally that was covered on C-SPAN? In part because many elements of Trump’s base have embraced rejections of basic reality (like the existence of “mules”) for years. In part, it’s confirmation bias, with partisans being more likely to accept false information as true when it supports their preexisting beliefs. But in part, it’s because Trump and his allies are already eagerly raising questions about the reliability of measures of Harris’s support — and by extension, the reliability of the results in November.

Bump makes a strong case that the Trump campaign will reject the election results and chaos will follow. The response will be in Biden’s court.  Recent Polls show that “Democratic attacks on JD Vance are working.”  This is from Semafor and reported by Kadia Goba.

New polling shared exclusively with Semafor shows Democrats’ attacks on JD Vance’s views on abortion, divorce and “childless cat ladies” are sticking with voters.

A pair of surveys by Blueprint, the centrist Democratic pollster backed by Reid Hoffman, one taken July 21 – July 22, two days after Vance was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, and then again two weeks later on August 4, showed Vance’s net favorability falling from -7 to -11 with fewer voters unsure either way. That’s similar to other public polling, which has also shown Vance making a poor first impression since joining the Republican ticket.

The main shift in how respondents viewed Vance: He’s become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician. Presented with a list of options to describe Vance in August, the most common answers were “conservative,” “anti-woman,” and “weird,” while more positive options like “young,” “smart,” and “businessman” declined from July. The percentage calling him “extreme” shot up 13 points.

So, it appears to be the crazy season, even if it isn’t even Labor Day yet.  However, constant craziness just naturally comes with anything DonOld does.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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