By Stephanie Lambourne
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump cancelling a bunch of interviews and appearances as well as his bizarre behavior when he has kept to his schedule.
This story is getting even more attention today. It’s interesting, because Trump and his goons claimed for months that Joe Biden was getting senile, and the media and Democrats finally got Biden to step down in favor of Kamala Harris.
Right now, I’m sure the Trump campaign is wishing they were running against Biden instead of the very energetic and enthusiastic Harris. Trump is 78–the oldest man ever to run for president, and he is pooped. You have to wonder if he’ll make it to the finish line.
Margaret Hartmann at New York Magazine: Trump Too ‘Exhausted’ to Do Interviews With Unfriendly Outlets.
Could Donald Trump — the man who memorably branded Jeb Bush “low energy,” claimed Hillary Clinton lacked the “stamina” to be president, and spent much of the current race hounding “Sleepy Joe” — finally have tuckered himself out?
Trump has canceled several recent interviews, and Politico Playbook reported on Friday that a campaign adviser explained to one spurned outlet that the 78-year-old candidate was simply too tired to chat at the moment:
In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
The Trump campaign has already denied this. Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the story “unequivocally false,” then the official Trump War Room campaign account tried to discredit Playbook co-author Eugene Daniels, suggesting that displaying his Beyoncé fandom at a Pride event proves he’s a bad journalist….
It’s easy to see why the campaign would deny this. There are two possible explanations for an adviser offering up the “exhaustion” excuse, and neither is flattering for Trump.
First, he may actually be incredibly tired. Trump is old and seems to have poor sleep habits, as evidenced by him regularly posting to Truth Social after midnight and falling asleep repeatedly in his criminal trial this past spring. A presidential campaign is a grueling ordeal for anyone, and Trump has seemed especially “low energy” at some recent events, from last weekend’s town hall turned listening party to Tuesday night’s rally in Atlanta, where the “strangely muted” former president remarked, “I’ve been doing this for 42 days straight without a rest” [….]
But it’s also possible that “exhausted” was just an excuse the adviser came up with on the fly for why the campaign is calling off interviews where they think Trump is more likely to go off the rails. As Playbook noted, the canceled interviews were all with “neutral media outlets”; in recent weeks he’s backed out of sit-downs with 60 Minutes, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and NBC in Philadelphia. Trump has been doing lots of interviews recently, appearing on various “bro podcasts” and Fox News programs. The one challenging interview he did this week, with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, turned into a bit of a fiasco, and Trump later claimed he “got hoodwinked to go on that.”
The campaign has good reason to limit Trump to lower-stakes and more sycophantic interviews. The New York Times reported on Friday that the Trump team is worried that rambling and erratic behavior is hurting him:
[Some Trump advisers] worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.
Maybe. I think he’s really exhausted. He’s an old man, and his campaign isn’t going well. His audiences are smaller and they aren’t as enthusiastic as they used to be–maybe because when he speaks, he makes no sense.
Marc A. Caputo at The Bulwark: Inside Trump’s Sleepless, Exhausting Mad Dash to Election Day.
Caputo writes that Trump doesn’t sleep when he’s in his private plane, and he doesn’t like anyone else to sleep either–so they are all exhausted.
In the 18 days since the beginning of October, Trump has held at least 28 in-person public events in 25 cities spread across 12 states on both coasts, according to a review of his public schedule and press accounts. And because Trump also likes to sleep in his own bed (usually in Mar-a-Lago), the campaign often flies in and out in a day and seldom spends 48 hours away from Florida. That adds extra sleepless hours on the campaign trail. So too does Trump’s penchant for calling confidants or posting on Truth Social well after midnight.
Les Cinq Chats, Orovida Camille Pissaro
But the high-octane, no-sleep-till-Election-Day pace has come at a cost for the 78-year-old Trump.
In the past week, he’s sounded and looked more tired on the campaign trail. In a bizarre scene Monday, he cut a town hall short after two attendees had medical emergencies that interrupted the event, ordering up music and dancing on stage for 39 minutes. On Friday night, after his microphone stopped working at a rally in Detroit, Trump paced the stage, grimacing and shaking his head for nearly 19 minutes in obvious irritation. Meanwhile, on Friday morning, Politico reported he canceled an interview with the podcast The Shade Room because he was “exhausted,” which his campaign denied.
The truth, according to those who have spoken with and know Trump, is that the exhaustion is real. But it’s also explainable, given the long hours that would wear down anyone—and have worn down many on staff. One’s just not allowed to acknowledge it, let alone complain about it, during a frantic finish to a high-stakes campaign….
Inside Trump world, acknowledging that the campaign’s most punishing leg may, indeed, be taking a toll on the elderly ex-president is verboten. It’s not just that Trump personally recoils at the perception that he’s anything but a horse, it’s that the workaholic, high-energy brand is central to his political appeal.
It’s why aides responded so caustically this past week, as Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign drilled down on the he’s-exhausted attack line in an effort to frame him as weak and unstable. The vice president has launched a new phase of her campaign questioning Trump’s fitness for the campaign trail and accusing him of “hiding.”
“I’ve been hearing reports that his team . . . says he’s suffering from ‘exhaustion,’ and that’s apparently the excuse for why he isn’t doing interviews,” Harris told reporters in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Friday as she chided him for not debating her or participating in a CNN town hall. “We really do need to ask: If he’s exhausted being on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job
Read the rest at The Bulwark.
Nicholas Liu at Salon: Campaign official admits Trump “refusing” interviews because he’s “exhausted”: report.
Former President Donald Trump has pulled out of a string of campaign events and interviews over the last two months, often leaving his hosts frustrated after being promised a visit by the GOP presidential candidate.
The staff of The Shade Room, an entertainment site with wide reach among young and Black audiences, shortly after wrapping an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last week were left feeling that their “feet were being dragged in the Trump campaign,” according to two sources who spoke to Politico Playbook. When they called to reschedule, a campaign official reportedly gave them a concise explanation: the former president was “exhausted.”
By Kaoru Yamada
Because of this, the official continued, Trump was “refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to the two people familiar with the conversations. Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back against the report, telling Playbook that Trump’s alleged exhaustion is “unequivocally false” and that he “has never backed down from an interview.”
She did not provide an explanation, however, for why Trump has been flaking despite his constant criticism of Harris for not making enough media appearances. While Trump did show up to some interviews, most of them have been with friendly hosts like right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham and networks such as Fox News.
Most of the cancellations, on the other hand, have been on territory not predisposed to coddle the GOP nominee. In late August, Trump dropped an interview with The Detroit News, reportedly after he was asked to back up his claims about crime statistics. The cancellations ramped up in October, with Trump ditching a 60 Minutes interview mere hours before the taping, a Squawk Box interview due to “scheduling conflicts,” and an NBC News interview because, according to his campaign, he decided to go instead to Michigan. He also cancelled an appearance at the National Rifle Association and at less overtly political events like the unveiling of a Polish-American Catholic shrine in Pennsylvania.
Last night, Trump exhibited more odd behavior at a rally in Michigan. William Vaillancourt at The Daily Beast: Trump Wanders Rally Stage in Long, Awkward Silence After Microphone Fail.
Former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump’s microphone cut out during a campaign stop in Michigan on Friday night, leaving him fuming on stage in silence for a lengthy 17 minutes.
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary—it‘s not ‘love,’ it‘s not ‘respect,’“ Trump said shortly into his speech, at which point his microphone died. Trump’s most beautiful word is unlikely to be “audio,” or “technician”.
If his comments earlier in the day are any indication, however, he was likely primed to say that the “most beautiful word” is actually “tariff.”
In any event, Trump took the tech fail in his stride—literally, as he meandered around the stage in silence while the crowd gave periodic chants of approval.
After obtaining a working mic, Trump said he would refuse to pay whoever was responsible for either providing or setting up the equipment.
I wonder if Trump is hiring incompetent people because he doesn’t pay his bills and no one wants to work for him.
The Sleeping Cat, by Lucian Freud
And then there was the Al Smith Dinner in New York on October 17. Nicholas Liu at Salon: “Horrible mess”: Trump called out for “ungodly” profanity-laced tirade at Catholic event.
The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, an annual Catholic charity event in New York City, has traditionally been a place for the two major party presidential nominees to throw lighthearted barbs at each other, with other public figures also catching strays. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris left a recorded greeting so that she could attend a campaign event in Wisconsin, leaving former President Donald Trump to deliver a profanity-laden speech on his own to the white-tie audience Thursday evening.
Trump, complaining about his legal troubles and tossing around transphobic cracks, lashed out at Harris (“I can’t stand her”), President Joe Biden (“President Biden couldn’t be here tonight. The DNC made sure of that”), former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (“Crazy Nancy”) and others in remarks that appeared to resemble grievance more than jest. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who was seated next to the podium, also received fire, though Trump punctuated this part of the routine with seemingly half-hearted assurances that the New York senator was “a good man.”
Trump might have encapsulated his performance in one sentence during his speech. “I don’t give a s**t if this is comedy or not,” he declared, before calling former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio a “terrible mayor” who did a “horrible job — that’s not comedy, by the way, that’s a fact.” He did warn the attendees of what was to come at the beginning of the speech, too. “I’m supposed to tell a few self-deprecating jokes,” he told them. “So here it goes… nope. I’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing!”
“I guess I just do not see the point in taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a long time,” he added.
Many of Trump’s jokes relied on the old lines of attack he has used on the campaign trail, including Harris’ laugh.
“But I must say, I was shocked when I heard that Kamala was skipping the Al Smith dinner,” he said. “I’d really hoped that she would come, because we can’t get enough of hearing her beautiful laugh. She laughs like crazy. We would recognize it anyplace in this room.”
At times, Trump sought to take on two rivals at once. “We have someone in the White House who can barely talk, barely put together two coherent sentences, who seems to have mental faculties of a child, is a person that has no intelligence whatsoever — but enough about Kamala Harris,” he said, clearly insinuating that those same qualities applied to Biden as well.
Trump also took shots at the transgender community, suggesting that if Harris lost, Schumer could still become the first woman president given “how woke” the Democratic Party has become. Schumer forced an uncomfortable smile as Trump mocked him for looking so “glum,” the second time in a fake-baby voice and accompanied by a back-rub.
What a fucking asshole he is.
Trump supposedly plans to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27. Sidney Blumenthal at The Guardian: A week before the election, Trump will hold his most unsettling spectacle yet.
For the apotheosis of his entire “poisoning of the blood” campaign, Donald Trump has planned a spectacular extravaganza in Madison Square Garden on 27 October, a week before the election. When JD Vance sings Trump’s fulsome praises to introduce him, his ominous tribute will not inspire comparison to the night in the Garden of 19 May 1962, when Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr President to John F Kennedy.
By Mary Fedden
Trump’s climactic rally will not be in the spirit of any past presidential event ever held there. His gathering for the great racist replacement theory will be the culmination of his spiraling descent since the Charlottesville rally in 2017 when neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us.” “Fine people on both sides,” Trump said then. Now, at his night at the Garden, Trump will revive the memory of the infamous American Nazi mass rally held there on 20 February 1939 through his reflected Hitlerian rhetoric.
In the last week, Trump has pledged to deploy the military against “the enemy within”, domestic opponents he claims are worse than foreign adversaries – those Hitler called “Feind des Volkes”, or “enemy of the people”. Trump has threatened to destroy CBS, ABC and the New York Times. About ABC, after it conducted the debate in which he performed disastrously, he called to “take away their license”. After Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview, having refused his own, he tweeted on 10 October: “TAKE AWAY THE CBS LICENSE.” About the Times, he said on 9 October: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do with them.” He has singled out by name journalists for the Times and the New Yorker as “FAKE OBAMA LOVING ‘JOURNALISTS”. At every rally he denounces the “fake news”, a drumbeat for years, echoing Hitler’s pejorative slur, “die Lügenpresse” – “the lying press”.
Trump traveled on 11 October to Aurora, Colorado, where he claimed a Venezuelan gang had seized control, “scum” and “animals” who have “invaded and conquered” and “infected” the town, a description dismissed as false by its Republican mayor. “We have to clean out our country,” said Trump. His language represented the Nazi idea of “Rassenhygiene” – “race cleansing” that required purification, not an academic interest in genetics but a program of eugenics for designating inferior races to be isolated or eliminated.
As Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation in all its manifestations. A disintegrated national character is the inevitable consequence of a process of disintegration in the blood.”
The former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, retired general Mark Milley, according to Bob Woodward in his new book War, told the veteran journalist: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump. Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.” Trump had stated that for Milley’s communication with his counterparts in China on January 6 to reassure them that the US military was stable, he deserved “DEATH” – to be executed.
At least one person in the media is taking Trump’s fascism seriously. But what about the voters? There have been so many reports of voters complaining about the economy and demanding specific policy information from Harris, but not from Trump. Do these low information voters have a clue about what Trump is threatening to do to our country? I don’t think so.
More stories to check out today:
The New York Times: Harris and Liz Cheney Will Team Up for a Pitch to Blue-Wall Suburbs.
NBC News: Harris says it is part of the American tradition for VPs not to criticize the president.
AP: Right-wing influencers hyped anti-Ukraine videos made by a TV producer also funded by Russian media.
Pema Levy at Mother Jones: Trump Has a Plan to Win Without the Votes—and the Fight Is On to Stop Him.
Hailey Fuchs and Meredith McGraw at Politico: Trump considers bucking presidential transition system.
Rachel Levy and Alexandra Ulmer at Reuters: Exclusive: Pro-Trump group funded by Musk struggles with outreach targets.
Franklin Foer at The Atlantic: What Elon Musk Really Wants. The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.
Brandi Buckman at HuffPost: More Jan. 6 Evidence That Trump Tried To Keep Hidden Is Out.
Michaela Bramwell at HuffPost: JD Vance’s Most Recent Comment About His Wife Having Three Kids Is Going Viral Because People Think It’s Really, Really Creepy.
My insomnia is worse than ever these days. I don’t know how I’m going to survive until November 5. I was up last night until around 5AM and then I slept until 9 or so. I’m hoping I can stop worrying for awhile today and take a nap. Sending my love to anyone who reads this post and to all the wonderful people who have visited this blog over the years.
Elizabeth Blackadder, Cat and Irises, 2001, watercolor
It’s a long weekend here in Massachusetts (Indigenous Peoples Day), and I’m planning to try to relax and read something other than politics news. Lately I can’t tolerate watching cable news, but I’ve been obsessed with keeping up with everything that is happening in the presidential campaigns. I spend too much time on social media, but it’s the only way to find out what Trump is really up to, because of the legacy media’s compulsive sanewashing of Trump’s demented behavior and speech patterns.
If you use social media, you may have seen Trump’s bizarre behavior during his speech at the Detroit Economic Club. The speech was supposed to be about economics but, since Trump has no comprehension of economics, he did his usual nonsensical rambling act. The New Republic: Watch: Trump Completely Loses Train of Thought in Awkward Speech.
Donald Trump drifted in and out of coherency during an awkward, weaving speech Thursday at the Detroit Economics Club, where he ranted about tariffs and railed against government mandates on electric vehicles….
But while explaining his fears that Kamala Harris’s policies would cause domestic manufacturing to leave the United States, Trump seemingly got carried away by the tide of his own weave and swept out into a sea of complete nonsense.
“And, it’s so simple, I mean, you know. This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they wanted to land,” Trump said. “Or, he gets the … engines back—that was the first I realized, I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming—cylinders, no wings, no nothing—and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace, with a circle, boom!”
“Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right?” Trump said, seemingly referring to President Joe Biden’s campaign events that took precautions for Covid-19, in an awkward non sequitur.
“He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill ’em up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. He couldn’t fill up the eight circles, I always loved those circles, they were so beautiful, so beautiful to look at,” Trump continued.
Trump claimed that Biden “used to have the press stand in those circles, cause they couldn’t get the people. And then I heard we lost, no we’re never gonna let that happen again.”
“But—” he continued. “We’ve been abused by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.”
There are more examples of Trump’s insane rambling at the TNR link. But it’s not just rambling–it’s dementia; and it seems to be getting worse all the time. He flits from tangent to tangent, because his executive functioning is failing, likely from damage to his frontal lobes. You can watch the video clip at the TNR link.
This is disgusting, but I’m going to post it anyway. Trump appeared to either break wind (or foul his diaper) at least twice during his speech in Detroit. This is something that was happening even when he was in the White House. Reporters also noticed it happening during his fraud trial. WTF?!
Trump also slammed the city of Detroit during the same speech. The Guardian: Trump insults Detroit during speech … in Detroit.
Donald Trump attacked the city of Detroit in a speech he was giving while stumping for votes in Detroit.
The former US president and Republican nominee was speaking on Thursday at the Detroit Economic Club in the city, which is the biggest city in Michigan – one of the most crucial swing states in the 2024 US election.
But Trump, whose speeches are frequently rambling and lengthy discourses rather than set piece deliveries, could not stop himself from lambasting the city in which he was speaking by pointing to Detroit’s recent history of economic decline from its heyday as the home of American car production.
As he was speaking about China being a developing nation, Trump said: “Well, we’re a developing nation too, just take a look at Detroit. Detroit’s a developing area more than most places in China.”
He later returned to the theme, warning of an economic disaster if his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, wins in November’s election.
“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands,” Trump said….
Democrats in the state reacted angrily to the insults and saw a chance to score political points.
Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer posted on Twitter/X: “Detroit is the epitome of ‘grit,’ defined by winners willing to get their hands dirty to build up their city and create their communities – something Donald Trump could never understand. So keep Detroit out of your mouth. And you better believe Detroiters won’t forget this in November.”
More frightening Trump news:
Alternet reports that Trump is planning to continue and perhaps escalate his violent, racist attacks on immigration and immigrants: ‘That’s how you lose’: Trump refusing aides’ requests to tone down anti-immigrant attacks.
Former President Donald Trump is aware his rhetoric about migrants has become increasingly toxic, yet he has decided to double down on that strategy in the final weeks of the campaign cycle.
According to Rolling Stone’s Naomi Lachance and Asawin Suebsaeng, the ex-president is even rebuffing advice from his campaign team to “play it safe” as voters prepare to head to the polls on November 5. Lachance and Suebsaeng cited two unnamed sources close to Trump in their report, writing that Trump intended to “slam his foot on the gas” rather than pull back on his anti-immigrant message.
Agnes Miller Parker, Siamese Cat and Butterfly, 1950, wood engraving
“That’s how you lose,” Trump reportedly said in response to one of his aides.
The publication’s other unnamed source said the ex-president paid close attention to which lines at his rallies garnered the biggest reactions from his audiences. This includes not only his false claim that there are 13,000 undocumented immigrants freely roaming the United States who have been convicted of murder elsewhere (most of those 13,000 are currently incarcerated), but also his call to be a “dictator” on “day one” of a second term….
The former president recently demonstrated his willingness to take his condemnation of migrants to a new low on Friday night, posting a lengthy screed to X (formerly Twitter) in which he promised to use an 18th century law to round up, detain and deport immigrants. That law — the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — would allow for the detainment of migrants without trial based solely on their country of birth. The last time that law was used was to force Japanese-Americans into detention camps during World War II.
“November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America,” Trump tweeted. [W]e will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY.”
And you’re not safe if you’re a legal immigrant, as Trump and Vance have both made clear in their attacks on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio.
The Guardian has another excerpt from Bob Woodward’s new book: Mark Milley fears being court-martialed if Trump wins, Woodward book says.
Mark Milley, a retired US army general who was chair of the joint chiefs of staff under Donald Trump and Joe Biden, fears being recalled to uniform and court-martialed should Trump defeat Kamala Harris next month and return to power.
“He is a walking, talking advertisement of what he’s going to try to do,” Milley recently “warned former colleagues”, the veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward writes in an upcoming book. “He’s saying it and it’s not just him, it’s the people around him.”
By Elizabeth Blackadder
Woodward cites Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign chair and White House strategist now jailed for contempt of Congress, as saying of Milley: “We’re gonna hold him accountable.”
Trump’s wish to recall and court-martial retired senior officers who criticized him in print has been reported before, including by Mark Esper, Trump’s second secretary of defense. In Woodward’s telling, in a 2020 Oval Office meeting with Milley and Esper, Trump “yelled” and “shouted” about William McRaven, a former admiral who led the 2011 raid in Pakistan in which US special forces killed Osama bin Laden, and Stanley McChrystal, the retired special forces general whose men killed another al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in Iraq in 2006.
Milley was able to persuade Trump to back down, Woodward writes, but fears no such guardrails will be in place if Trump is re-elected.
Woodward also describes Milley receiving “a non-stop barrage of death threats” since his retirement last year, and quotes the former general as telling him, of Trump: “No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.”
More threats of violence are coming from Trump pal Roger Stone. The Guardian: Roger Stone calls for ‘armed guards’ at polling spots in leaked video.
The longtime Donald Trump ally and friend Roger Stone said Republicans should send “armed guards” to the polls
in November to ensure a Trump victory, according to video footage by an undercover journalist.
The video, first published by Rolling Stone, shows an embittered Stone, still angry about the 2020 election and ready to fight in 2024. Stone described the former US president’s legal strategy of constant litigation to purge voter rolls in swing states.
“We gotta fight it out on a state-by-state basis,” said Stone. “We’re already in court in Wisconsin, we’re already in court in Florida.”
When the journalist, posing as a member of a rightwing voter turnout organization, pressed Stone for details on efforts to make sure Trump wins in 2024, Stone told him that the campaign has to “be ready”.
Mary Feddon, Tabby
“When they throw us out of Detroit, you go get a court order, you come in with your own armed guards, and you dispute it,” said Stone. In Detroit in 2020, there was a chaotic scene at a ballot counting center when GOP vote challengers pounded on the walls of the center and demanded to be let in.
Filmed at an August event in Jacksonville, Florida, called A Night with Roger Stone, the footage also reveals Stone’s lasting anger toward former attorney general Bill Barr, who he calls “a traitorous piece of human garbage”.
While in office, Barr acted as a staunch Trump ally, even pushing for a lighter sentence for Stone, when the operative was found guilty of witness tampering and obstruction of justice in connection with a congressional inquiry into Russian interference during the 2016 election. Barr lost favor with the former president when he declined to publicly back Trump’s false claims of a stolen election, drawing outrage from Trump’s closest allies.
“Once we get back in, he has to go to prison,” Stone exclaimed. “He has to go to prison, he’s a criminal.”
This is from the usual suspects at The New York Times (Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Shane Goldmacher): A Frustrated Trump Lashes Out Behind Closed Doors Over Money.
Donald J. Trump took his seat at the dining table in his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower on the last Sunday in September, alongside some of the most sought-after and wealthiest figures in the Republican Party.
There was Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who finances Republican campaigns and pro-Israel causes, and Warren Stephens, the billionaire investment banker. Joining them were Betsy DeVos, the billionaire former education secretary under Mr. Trump, and her husband, Dick, as well as the billionaire Joe Ricketts and his son Todd.
Some politicians might have taken the moment to be charming and ingratiating with the donors.
Not Mr. Trump. Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances.
He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more and help him more.
By Miroco Machiko
He disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded.” He complained about the number of Jews still backing Ms. Harris, saying they needed their heads examined for not supporting him despite everything he had done for the state of Israel.
At one point, Mr. Trump seemed to suggest that these donors had plenty to be grateful to him for. He boasted about how great he had been for their taxes, something that some privately noted wasn’t true for everyone in the room.
The rant, described by seven people with knowledge of the meal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, underscored a reality three weeks before Election Day: Mr. Trump’s often cantankerous mood in the final stretch. And one of the reasons for his frustration is money. He’s trailing his Democratic rival in the race for cash and has had to hustle to keep raising it.
Not only does Ms. Harris have far more money to buy ads and pay for staff after raising $1 billion in less than three months as a candidate — a sum greater than the total Mr. Trump raised all year — but she has also been freed from having to plead directly to donors anymore. She raised more than twice as much as Mr. Trump in July, August and September.
Good! Let him keep wallowing in self-pity, driving away people who could donate to his campaign.
I’ll end with something truly unbelievable: On October 16, Fox News and Trump are planning a town hall on women’s issues! From the press release:
FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Harris Faulkner will present a town hall with Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump focusing on issues impacting women ahead of the election and news of the day at Reid Barn in Cumming, Georgia. The event, which will be held with an audience entirely composed of women, will pre-tape on October 15th and air on October 16th on The Faulkner Focus (11 AM-12 PM/ET). FOX News has a standing invitation to Vice President Harris for a townhall event of equal stature which has been extended to her campaign multiple times since she became a candidate for president in August.
In commenting on the town hall, Faulkner said, “Women constitute the largest group of registered and active voters in the United States, so it is paramount that female voters understand where the presidential candidates stand on the issues that matter to them most. I am looking forward to providing our viewers with an opportunity to learn more about where former President Trump stands on these topics.”
Orovida Pissarro, Cat and Mouse, 1966
Faulkner joined FNC in 2005 and currently serves as the anchor of The Faulkner Focus and a founding co-host of Outnumbered. At 11 AM/ET, The Faulkner Focus features interviews with top newsmakers and analysts and is cable news’ most-watched program in the timeslot, averaging nearly 2 million viewers. Outnumbered features an ensemble of four female panelists and one male breaking down the day’s headlines from all perspectives and dominates the competition at 12 PM/ET with 1.8 million viewers. Both programs outpace broadcast program’s NBC’s TODAY Third Hour, TODAY with Hoda & Jenna, The Kelly Clarkson Show, NBC News Daily, ABC’s GMA3, CBS’ The Talk and The Drew Barrymore Show.
As the first Black woman to helm back-to-back weekday cable news programs, Faulkner has also played integral roles in FNC’s election coverage over the last several cycles. She is the lead of the network’s “Voter’s Voices” segments and recently presented a series titled, ”Families in Focus,” where she interviewed the family members of the then-presidential candidates during the 2024 primaries. Additionally, Faulkner has hosted a variety of primetime specials and townhalls focused on current events, including forums focused on policing in America, the ongoing conversation of justice in the country and education during the COVID-19 pandemic, among other topics.
That should be good for a laugh.
Have a nice weekend everyone!!
“I’m sorry, but Leon Musk deserves Mr Trump’s Purple Heart after taking one for the team instead of all this ridicule.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Could the next big October Surprise be the media deciding to report how unfit DonOld is for office? Rumors are that his new brofriends are about to get him elected only to turn around and do a 25th Amendment so that we get J Dank Vance as POTUS sooner than we expected. Who would put Elon Musk in charge of a national ground game? Why would anyone want to hear or see Mister Pasty? Let’s get right to it. This is from Politico. “Musk the surrogate: The tech titan will hit the campaign trail for Trump. Those close to Musk say his primary focus is on Pennsylvania.” This report is by Alex Isenstadt. So, DonOld can’t do the rally thing very well, so they’re sending Elon? What kind of Hail Mary pass is this?
Tech billionaire Elon Musk will ramp up his personal efforts to elect Donald Trump in the remaining weeks of the election — including making visits to Pennsylvania to campaign for the former president.
Musk intends to appear in the swing state in the four weeks leading up to Nov. 5, according to a person who has spoken with his team and was granted anonymity to speak freely because they weren’t authorized to do so. He is expected to make the stops with the backing of America PAC, a pro-Trump super PAC he formed. He may make other appearances in the state independent of his super PAC — as he did on Sunday evening, when he showed up to the Pittsburgh Steelers game wearing a MAGA hat and was greeted by Steelers owner Art Rooney II, among others.
Musk, the world’s richest person, took his most aggressive steps yet over the weekend to personally show his support for Trump. Musk appeared at Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, where during a brief speech he lavished praise on the former president and urged attendees to “vote, vote, vote.” After the rally, he joined Trump backstage where he participated in a tele-town hall event.
Also over the weekend, Musk changed his profile icon on his account on X to an image of him wearing a black MAGA hat and added to his bio a link to the America PAC account. He also repeatedly promoted posts from the PAC, which is running a pro-Trump voter turnout effort with financial backing from Musk and his associates.
And on Sunday afternoon, Musk unveiled a new program in which he promised to pay $47 to people who register voters in seven swing states — Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Musk has a history of using reward initiatives: He recently unveiled a referral program for Tesla, the electric car company he owns. In the program, buyers and their referrers are awarded $500 or $1,000 in credits which can be used toward Tesla products.
“Ya gotta love Dork MAGA.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Talk about your Dark Money and what is this all about? Dark MAGA? Does this reek of desperation or what? Let’s get back to why he’s sending in the clowns. This is from The New Republic by the great Michael Tomasky. “The Media Is Finally Waking Up to the Story of Trump’s Mental Fitness. On Sunday, The New York Times finally ran a brutal piece on the topic. Let’s hope others follow—and this kick-starts the conversation the country desperately needs to have.”
If things go the way I hope they go in November, it may well turn out that Sunday’s terrific New York Times piece by Peter Baker and Dylan Freedman on Donald Trump’s age and fitness for office could stand as the single most important piece of journalism in this election. If you’ve been reading me and Greg Sargent and Parker Molloy and our Breaking News desk, then you know that The New Republic has been pretty obsessive about the topic of Trump’s mental fitness—and more importantly about the media’s general refusal to discuss it.
This is what has come to be known as the “sanewashing” of Trump: the practice by media outlets of covering him like a normal candidate and not telling their audiences in detail about all the monstrous, false, disjointed, and plain old nonsensical fountains of gibberish he serially spouts at every public appearance he makes.
We (and others) have been critical of the press in general and the Times in particular, mainly because the Times is still the most important news outlet in the country. So let’s give credit where it’s due. The Baker-Freedman piece was a deeply reported analysis that wasn’t afraid to say things most mainstream outlets won’t say. I’d also note that in recent days, Michael Gold, the paper’s Trump correspondent, has written a couple pieces that are more blunt and direct in calling out Trump’s lies and quoting some of his more outrageous comments.
The Sunday Times article puts it on the line: “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought—some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own ‘beautiful’ body. He relishes ‘a great day in Louisiana’ after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is ‘trying to kill me’ when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.”
That’s just for starters. The gist of the piece argues—with statistical analyses of Trump’s tropes and speech patterns—that his rhetoric is very different from what it was in 2015 and 2016. Which is to say, it’s worse in every way: more long-winded, more disconnected, more rambling; also coarser, far more prone to swearing. In sum, the article is devastating about whether Trump, who is now the old one in the race and who would be 82 at the end of a second term, is simply capable on a mental level of doing the job of president.
This is the offering today from the Lincoln Project. They always find a way to amp DonOld’s paranoia volume knob up to 11.
Trump did an interview with Hugh Hewitt, and he’s amped the Hitler rhetoric up to 11. This is written by Sydney Blumenthal at The Guardian. “Donald Trump’s Hitlerian logic is no mistake. The former president claims to have never read Mein Kampf. But his use of blood and soil rhetoric is deliberate.”
If genealogy is destiny, as Donald Trump believes, then “poison in the blood” – a phrase Trump repeatedly uses – determines the fate of nations. By Trump’s logic, “blood” is the true and final measure. Trump, like Hitler, appears to classify people and countries by “blood” on a scale of their innate racial characteristics. Those features define the essence of nations, which are themselves delineated on a racial pyramid, with the purest and whitest, the most Aryan, at the pinnacle. True to his doctrine, the Nazis on his family tree must explain his penchant for Hitlerian rhetoric.
“Poison in the blood” was the core of Hitler’s race doctrine as well. Hitler, too, believed it explained the rise and fall of civilizations. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” stated Hitler. It is also Trump’s fundamental trope. “We’re poisoning the blood of our country, and you have people coming in, think of it, mental institutions all over the world are being emptied out into the United States,” he said on Fox News in March. “Jails and prisons are being emptied out into the United States. This is poisoning our country.”
Just recently, on 31 August, addressing Moms For Liberty, a rightwing group devoted to book-banning, he raised again the menace of “poison in the blood”: “But what’s happening to our country, our country is being poisoned, poisoned!”
At a rally on 18 September, Trump elaborated: “They’re coming from the Congo, they’re coming from Africa, they’re coming from the Middle East, they’re coming from all over the world – Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia … And what’s happening to our country is we’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we’re not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people.”
“Blut und Boden” – blood and soil – was adopted as an official slogan of the Nazi regime to express its ideal of the nation rooted in the authentic unity of Aryan blood. The community of its people – Volksgemeinschaft – comprised only those of shared ethnic blood. Aliens corrupting the blood, principally Jews, but also Slavs, Poles and Roma, were described as disease carriers and “vermin” – Volksshadlinge – and posed an existential threat. Only those people of the blood belonged to the Heimat, a concept the Nazis cast as the racially pure home, intrinsic to Blut und Boden.
Jews were Heimatlos – a people separate from the Heimat, without a true home, wanderers, cosmopolitans and globalists, a menace to the sanctity of the culture and the identity of the nation. They were not simply outsiders, or the Other. They were a different species – subhumans, Untermenschen – and must be eradicated to preserve the blood of the race. “Although it has features similar to a human, the subhuman is lower on the spiritual and psychological scale than any animal,” instructed a pamphlet entitled Der Untermenschen, illustrated with distorted photographs of these lower beings to depict the “bestial” nature of the subhuman Jews and Slavs. Four million copies were published in 1942 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.
“In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion,” Trump said this March. “But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.” When they are removed, it will be, says Trump, “a bloody story”.
Here’s the report from HuffPo on the Hitler Language by Matt Shuman. “Trump: Immigrants Have Brought ‘Bad Genes’ Into The Country. The Republican presidential candidate has long been obsessed with the racist talking point that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America.”
During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday, Donald Trump said immigrants were filling the country with “bad genes” and used lies about decades-old crime statistics to make his point.
Trump has long been obsessed with the idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America — echoing Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric. For years, he has lied that other countries are purposefully sending criminals to the United States.
As part of his recent weekslong racist smear campaign, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), falsely said Haitian immigrants had raised the infectious disease rate in Springfield, Ohio. And Trump has been touting his mass deportation agenda, which he says he’ll enact as soon as he’s in office.
“How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers?” Trump told Hewitt, referring to the Biden administration. “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now, a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here that are criminals.”
The xenophobic claim that immigrants are genetically predisposed to committing violent crimes is shocking and false — but xenophobia is also a cornerstone of Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump’s numbers are based on heavily manipulated statistics about the criminal conviction records of people with cases in immigration court — cases that span several decades, some long before President Joe Biden was in office, and which include people currently serving prison time.
You may read, hear and see more on the latest Hugh Hewitt interview today at this link. “Former President Trump On The Anniversary Of The 10/7 Massacre In Israel.” Yes, that is an weird headline, isn’t it?
HH: If Israel hits Iran and goes after the nuclear sites, will you applaud Israel and back them up?
DT: Well, you want to do what they want to do. Now they may be making a deal with Iran right now. You know, to be honest with you, because Iran’s not looking so good. You know, Iran is not looking like they looked two months ago, if you want to know the truth. They could be making a deal. They could be doing some very smart things right now. There are a lot of things they can do. But the nice thing is they’re entitled to an attack, and nobody will be upset if they attack, because they’re entitled. Because Iran hit them with 187 missiles. And by the way, how good is the shield? And the United States should have a shield.
Here’s the hot take from Morning Joe from Raw Story for what it’s worth. “
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough warned Monday that an “increasingly desperate” Donald Trump is inciting civil war in anticipation of another election loss.
The former president returned to the scene of his first apparent assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, where he baselessly accused Democrats of trying to kill him and his family members presented the November election as a choice between “good versus evil.
The rhetoric left the “Morning Joe” host disgusted and disturbed.
“The level of un-American activity that you just saw is stunning,” Scarborough said. “That is un-American. They know they’re lying, Donald Trump knows that’s a lie. He will tell you that the Secret Service, he thought, did the best job they could do. The fact that J.D. Vance and Trump’s family would come out and out and say what they said, takes the threat of violence, takes the threat beyond where it was even leading up to Jan. 6.
“This is an increasingly desperate person, an increasingly desperate family, who is preparing for civil war. They just are. Talking about they’re trying to kill him, Democrats are trying to kill him, and the lies. Think about this.”
“I saw part of Donald Trump’s speech this weekend,” Scarborough continued. “It was remarkable, the lies. Not just on these things, but on policy. He’d make up things and throw it out there. I was shocked that the audience was really that stupid, to believe the crazy lies that he was throwing out there.
This was a shock to me. It also comes from Raw Story, as reported by David McAfee. ‘Is that a threat?’ Trump stuns observers with a comment about Harris voter ‘getting hurt.'”
Donald Trump shocked observers on Sunday with a comment he made about a potential supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris at one of the former president’s swing-state rallies.
Trump, who has been accused of fostering violence that occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, gave a speech in Wisconsin over the weekend. At that rally, the ex-president battled a fly on stage and called his own campaign members “so stupid.”
At that same rally, Trump made an off-hand comment that had some political onlookers sounding the alarm.
“Is there anybody here who’s going to vote for lyin’ Kamala?” Trump asked his rally attendees. “Actually, I should say don’t raise your hand, it would be very dangerous. We don’t want to see anybody get hurt. Please don’t raise your hand.”
Harris’ campaign shared the video on social media, writing, “Trump says it’s ‘very dangerous’ for Kamala Harris voters to identify themselves because they’ll ‘get hurt.'”
Retired research engineer David Rommel voluntarily identified his voting preferences:
“I’m voting for Kamala! I’m a republican that is not opposed to taking on that challenge,” he wrote. “The only thing that scares me is Trump winning another term. When Trump is in prison and they are all arrested for rioting we can all take a breath of fresh air.”
A popular account called CALL TO ACTIVISM, founded by attorney Joe Gallina, replied, “What the hell does this mean? Donald Trump says it’s ‘very dangerous’ for Kamala Harris voters to identify themselves because they’ll ‘get hurt.’ Is that a threat??”
DonOld’s economic policy platform has gotten the attention of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. It’s like he’s purposefully going to tank the US economy. These folks are always deficit hawks. Here’s their bias/leaning report from Media Bias/Fact Check.
Overall, we rate The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) as slightly right-center Biased based on advocacy for a reduction in entitlement spending. We also rate them High in factual reporting based on regularly being used as a resource for IFCN fact-checkers.
And here’s their numbers and analysis.
Under our central estimate, Vice President Harris’s plan would increase the debt by $3.50 trillion through 2035, while President Trump’s plan would increase the debt by $7.50 trillion.
These estimates come with a wide range of uncertainty, reflecting both different interpretations and estimates of the policies. Under our low- and high-cost estimates, we estimate Vice President Harris’s plan could have no significant fiscal impact or increase debt by $8.10 trillion through 2035, while President Trump’s plan could increase debt by between $1.45 and $15.15 trillion. Our analysis will be updated if additional policies are introduced.
So, you can see that even deficit hawks recognize Trump’s plan as a run on the Treasury for billionaires. Things are not going very well for Trump, which is why he’s acting out so many ways, but this may not mean we’re rid of him. Don’t forget that behind the scenes in many states are crazy Maga Supporters like Tina Peters. We still have to consider the threats of violence. We also need to realize there’s a lot of damage to the country and our democracy done already. This headline from the AP is a frightening reminder. “Supreme Court declines Biden administration appeal in Texas emergency abortion case.”
The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.
The justices did not detail their reasoning for keeping in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations if they would break Texas law. There were no publicly noted dissents.
The decision comes weeks before a presidential election where abortion has been a key issue after the high court’s 2022 decision overturning the nationwide right to abortion.
The justices rebuffed a Biden administration push to throw out the lower court order. The administration argues that under federal law hospitals must perform abortions if needed in cases where a pregnant patient’s health or life is at serious risk, even in states where it’s banned.
Complaints of pregnant women in medical distress being turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere have spiked as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate strict state laws against abortion.
The administration pointed to the Supreme Court’s action in a similar case from Idaho earlier this year in which the justices narrowly allowed emergency abortions to resume while a lawsuit continues.s
Finally, decades of ignoring climate change have led to the fast development of Hurricane Milton into a Category 4 aimed at Tampa. This is from the Washington Post. Hurricane Milton reaches Category 5 strength on approach to Florida. The storm is expected to produce a devasting surge along Florida’s west coast, which could include the Tampa Bay area. Some decrease in strength is forecast ahead of landfall.
Milton, a top-tier Category 5 hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico, is intensifying at near-record speed as it churns toward the west coast of Florida. The storm is expected to make landfall Wednesday or early Thursday as a “large and powerful hurricane,” according to the National Hurricane Center. It is predicted to produce a potentially devastating ocean surge over 10 feet in some areas, including perhaps in flood-prone Tampa Bay.
Since Sunday night, the storm’s rate of strengthening has reached extreme levels — its intensity leaping from a Category 1 to 5. The storm’s peak winds Monday afternoon were up to 175 mph, an 85 mph increase in 12 hours.
The Hurricane Center described the storm’s rate of intensification as “remarkable.” The explosive development has occurred over record-warm waters in the Gulf, with the extreme warmth linked to human-caused climate change.
Fuck the entire “Drill baby Drill” krewe of death. Every time I hear the name Milton, I can only think of my drunk great-grandfather, who was murdered while coming home from a bar in KCMO. His death led to my mother’s parents having to take care of my grandmother’s sisters. That story has stayed with me for decades. So, anyone in the path of this thing should really get out of there. That advice comes from me, who fled Katrina with dogs and cat in tow at the very last minute. If you’re on the Gulf side of this thing there will be surreal surge levels that nothing can survive. I also can’t imagine how stretched FEMA, the country’s National Guard, and every disaster response NGO will be. Prepare like you’ll be on your own for a while because you may be. I am forever thankful that I had incredible primitive camping chops via the Girl Scouts. You’ll need all those skills to survive this.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Last night’s VP debate wasn’t anything to write home about. (I admit that I didn’t watch every minute of it.) Tim Walz seemed nervous at first, but eventually got in some meaningful jabs. J.D. Vance was confident, glib and polished, but he had a some shameful moments that will probably be remembered far longer than his mostly smooth delivery of lies and obfuscation. The instant polls either called it a tie or gave Vance a slight edge.
Politico: The big VP debate takeaway: Neither candidate delivered the goods.
Tim Walz and JD Vance spent much of Tuesday night defending their running mates’ records. They were less successful promoting their bosses’ plans for the future.
The two vice presidential candidates spent the 90-minute debate relitigating the last eight years just as much as they focused on their visions for the next four, sparring over the intricacies of Donald Trump’s first term, President Joe Biden’s policies — and their own political baggage, including Walz’s false claim he was in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests and Vance’s past harsh criticisms of Trump.
The result was a wide-ranging, policy-heavy back and forth that often pushed Walz and Vance to play defense for the presidential nominees, affording them little opportunity to make a fresh and forceful case to undecided voters just weeks before they head to the polls.
At the same time, they missed opportunities to use much-used attack lines against one another: Vance didn’t grill Walz on his military record while the Minnesota governor didn’t go after Vance over his “childless cat ladies” comment.
On immigration, Vance spent a large portion of his time defending Trump’s border policies, as Walz attacked the former president for only building less than 2 percent of the wall when he was in office. Vance used questions on the economy to argue that Trump delivered rising take-home pay and lower inflation, while slamming four years of Harris’ leadership on the economy. On health care, the men sparred over the Affordable Care Act and prescription drug costs under their running mates. And on foreign policy, they engaged in lengthy back and forth, both blaming each other’s parties for deteriorating global instability….
With no additional debates on the books, Tuesday night’s showdown may be the last significant national campaign event before November, increasing the weight of the vice presidential contenders’ closing arguments for their running mates. Polls show Harris and Trump in a neck-and-neck race, and Tuesday night was a chance for both men to pitch themselves and their party’s vision for the next four years.
Harris campaign co-chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said Walz “spoke passionately” about Harris’ “vision for a new way forward” and specifically highlighted Vance’s refusal to say Trump lost the 2020 election during what was perhaps the sharpest exchange of the night.
“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said, after Vance was pressed multiple times on the issue.
And that is likely to be the most memorable moment from the debate. Will Saletan writes at The Bulwark: The One Question That Mattered in the VP Debate.
IN TUESDAY NIGHT’S VICE-PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE, JD Vance and Tim Walz covered lots of issues: inflation, housing, guns, abortion, immigration, health care, and much more.
But there was only one question on which the vice presidency—the job for which these two men are competing—really matters. That question was whether they would certify the results of the next presidential election. And on that subject, Vance gave a non-answer that instantly disqualifies him: He refused to acknowledge that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.
Certification of elections was a central factor in Vance’s audition to become Trump’s running mate. Other contenders for the job demonstrated, as Vance did, that they were sufficiently right-wing or loyal to MAGA. But, as Thomas Joscelyn has pointed out in The Bulwark, Vance stood out in one respect: He was the one who signaled most clearly that he was willing to push constitutional boundaries to do Trump’s bidding.
In February, Vance went on ABC’s This Week and made it clear that unlike Mike Pence, he would have collaborated in Trump’s scheme to block the certification of electoral votes on January 6, 2021.
Q: Would you have certified the election results had you been vice president?
Vance: If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors. And I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.
Three months later, in an interview with Ross Douthat of the New York Times, Vance defended Trump’s scheme and explained how a vice president could have executed it. “You would try to marshal alternative slates of electors, like they did in the election of 1876,” said Vance. “The entire post-2020 thing would have gone a lot better if there had actually been an effort to provide alternative slates of electors and to force us to have that debate. I think it would’ve been a much better thing for the country.”
Vance dismissed the argument that courts had already rejected Trump’s allegations of election fraud. “You can’t litigate these things judicially; you have to litigate them politically,” Vance told Douthat. “And we never had a real political debate about the 2020 election.”
When Douthat suggested that pursuing Trump’s scheme “would have pushed America into a crisis,” Vance refused to concede that the scheme was illegal. Trump “was using the constitutional procedures,” Vance argued. “He was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.”
In short, Vance made it clear that he believed 1) Congress could second-guess and override election results submitted by states; 2) politicians, not judges, should decide these matters; and 3) any scheme could be rendered presumptively constitutional by inventing a new interpretation of the Constitution. As a Yale Law grad, he surely knows better.
Read the rest at The Bulwark.
At The Washington Post, Dana Millbank describes another moment that will likely be remembered: At debate, Vance whines: You weren’t supposed to fact-check me!
Half an hour into Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, JD Vance lodged a whiny protest.
“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!”
Cats of the Louvre, a graphic novel by Taiyo Matsumoto
There are just 37 days remaining until election day, November 5. While Trump continues to display his growing cognitive issues as well as his ignorance of public policy, Kamala Harris has been making substantive appearances in which she intelligently spells out what she will do as president. Earlier in the week she spoke about her economic plans. Yesterday she visited the border in Arizona and gave a speech outlining her proposed immigration policies and attacking Trump’s failures.
Vice President Kamala Harris went on the offensive against former President Donald Trump on immigration Friday during her visit to the southern border in Arizona as she tries to turn a political vulnerability on its head.
Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 presidential election, with polls showing voters placing more trust in Trump to handle the issue than Harris.
Democrats, grappling with years of border crises, have tried to gain ground by pointing to the bipartisan border measure that congressional Republicans blocked earlier this year after Trump came out against it. Harris on Friday lambasted Trump for his role in stymying that bill.
“It was the strongest border security bill we have seen in decades. It was endorsed by the Border Patrol union. And it should be in effect today, producing results in real time, right now, for our country,” she said at a rally in Douglas, a town on the US-Mexico border.
“But Donald Trump tanked it. He picked up the phone and called some friends in Congress and said, ‘Stop the bill,’” she said. “He prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
She said she would ask Congress to pass the measure if she is elected, and would sign it into law. She also laid out a series of proposals that she said were “not just about some rhetoric at a rally,” but would help stem the flow of migrants into the United States.
A bit more:
“Solutions are at hand if we focus on fixing a problem and not running on a problem,” Harris said.
She said she’d work with Congress to create a pathway to citizenship for “hardworking immigrants who have been here for years, for years, and deserve to have a system that works,” as well as “Dreamers” – undocumented immigrants brought into the United States as children, who are allowed to live and work in the US under an Obama-era program but generally cannot become citizens under current law.
“They are American in every way. But still, they do not have an earned pathway to citizenship. And this problem has gone unsolved at this point now for decades,” Harris said. “The same goes for farmworkers who ensure that we have food on our tables and sustain our agricultural industry – and they too have been in legal limbo for years because politicians have refused to come together and fix our broken immigration system.”
Earlier this year, Biden announced an executive action severely limiting the ability of migrants to seek asylum at the US southern border if they crossed unlawfully – a departure from decadeslong protocol. Immigrant advocates have likened the executive action to Trump-era policies.
The measure can be turned on and off and lifted when there’s a daily average of fewer than 1,500 encounters between ports of entry, among other criteria. It remains in place.
Homeland Security officials have credited the action for driving down border crossings to the lowest point since 2020.
The Washington Post: Harris, in visit to border, proposes new restrictions on immigration.
DOUGLAS, Ariz. — Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign on Friday proposed new border restrictions that would go further than the emergency rules the Biden administration deployed in June, making the announcement during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border Friday in an effort to confront one of her biggest political vulnerabilities.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
Harris’s proposed executive action would build on President Joe Biden’s current policy of essentially closing the U.S. asylum system unless illegal border crossings stay below 1,500 daily crossings for a week. Harris would lower that threshold and extend the period it must be met, advisers said, although exact figures were not immediately available.
The action might have a limited practical impact, at least in the short term, but the proposal appeared designed to send a message that Harris is taking a more assertive immigration posture than the administration in which she serves and that she is not ceding the issue to Donald Trump, who consistently scores higher marks among voters on border security and immigration.
In what her campaign had billed as a major speech in this community, which sits on the border, Harris also emphasized her support for an enforcement-heavy border security bill crafted by a bipartisan group of senators earlier this year. She decried Trump’s central role in derailing it, noting that he had urged Republicans in Congress to oppose the legislation.
“Donald Trump tanked it,” she said, standing amid six different signs that said in capital letters, “Border Security and Stability.”
“Because, you see, he prefers to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” she added. “And the American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games and their personal political future.”
Read more details at the WaPo link.
NPR: At the border in Arizona, Harris lays out a plan to get tough on fentanyl.
Vice President Harris walked along the U.S. border with Mexico on Friday alongside a stretch of border wall built during the Obama administration, talking with border officials about their work.
It was a photo op meant to illustrate that she supports border security — one of the biggest concerns voters have about Harris — and to try to defang criticism from her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump.
Later, she embraced a mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose, and made her most extensive remarks to date on how she would address border security and immigration reform.
“I will reach across the aisle and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done,” she said….
She said her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general gave her experience to tackle the fentanyl problem.
“I’ve seen tunnels with walls as smooth as the walls of your living room, complete with lighting and air conditioning, making very clear that it is about an enterprise that is making a whole lot of money in the trafficking of guns, drugs and human beings,” she said.
“Stopping transnational criminal organizations and strengthening our border is not new to me, and it is a long standing priority of mine. I have done that work, and I will continue to treat it as a priority when I am elected president of the United States,” Harris said.
Read more at NPR.
Trump very much has not been focusing on policy, and if you’ve paid attention to his rallies and other public appearances, you know that he’s simply not capable of doing so. Even though he was “president” for four years, he has learned nothing about how the government works or about serious issues. He is incapable of learning, and why the media keeps propping him up is a mystery. Here are a couple of “issues” raised by the Trump camp over the past couple of days.
The New York Times: Trump Threatens to Prosecute Google for Showing ‘Bad Stories’ About Him.
Former President Donald J. Trump threatened Friday to prosecute Google if he was elected to the presidency a second time, claiming that the tech company had been “illegally” showing only “bad stories” about him and only “good” ones about Vice President Kamala Harris.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
It was the latest instance of Mr. Trump threatening to prosecute his perceived opponents should he return to office. This month, he called for the prosecution of lawyers, political donors and operatives if they engaged in “unscrupulous behavior.”
Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Thursday that the former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be prosecuted in connection with the security lapses by which a mob of his own supporters attacked the Capitol during the transfer of presidential power on Jan. 6, 2021.
And on Friday, in Michigan, he called for an attorney general “somewhere, like in a Republican territory” to investigate Ms. Pelosi and her husband over reports that Mr. Pelosi had sold Visa stock ahead of the Justice Department’s filing an antitrust lawsuit against the company.
It was not immediately clear what prompted Mr. Trump to make the statement about Google on his social media website, Truth Social.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Mr. Trump wrote.
“This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections,” he added. “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
Google said it did not manipulate search results to favor any candidate.
“Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of search for relevant and common search queries,” a Google spokesman said.
The New Republic: Trump Is So Mad About His Bad Press That He’s Unleashed a New Threat.
The source of Trump’s claim appears to be the right-wing Media Research Center, which published a report on Wednesday covered this week by Fox News and The New York Post.
MRC’s report “analyzed the Sept. 6 Google search results” for the terms “donald trump presidential race 2024” and “kamala harris presidential race 2024.” The group alleges that the results favored outlets with “a history of leftist bias,” and that, while Trump’s campaign website appeared sixth in his search results, Harris’s campaign website appeared third in hers.
Dismissing MRC’s report, a Google spokesperson told Fox, “Both campaign websites consistently appear at the top of Search for relevant and common search queries. This report looked at a single rare search term on a single day several weeks ago, and even for that search, both candidates’ websites ranked in the top results on Google.”
Trump’s Truth Social post recalls his previous claims that Google search results are biased against him, which Google has denied.
It is also yet another example of Trump promising to prosecute his perceived political foes if he retakes the White House. Earlier this month, for example, Trump posted to Truth Social that, if he wins, “those people that CHEATED”—such as “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials”—“will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences.”
This is what Trump is preoccupied with a month before the November election.
Oh, and JD Vance continues to say the quiet part aloud when it comes to women’s control over their own bodies and lives. Recently, close Trump adviser did it too.
Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: Trump Camp Says State Menstrual Surveillance Programs are A-OK.
One of the most toxic and politically explosive parts of the current abortion rights debate is tied the complexities and perhaps inanities of leaving national abortion policy up to individual states. And a comment yesterday from Trump spokesman Jason Miller put the question right back into the center of the campaign.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term….
…[Y]esterday in an interview on Newsmax of all places, a host asked Trump spokesman Jason Miller whether Donald Trump supported or wouldn’t aim to prevent states from enforcing their own menstrual surveillance regimes. It was one of those Fox-like interviews in which the host seems to go out of his way to signal what the right answer is. You wouldn’t do this, right?
“But he wouldn’t support monitoring pregnancies, even if a state decided to do that?” the host asked.
Miller responded that “he’s [i.e., Trump’s] made it very clear that he’s not going to go and weigh in and push various states on how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s going to be up to the states.”
So he went there. It’s totally up to the states. Trump’s “leave it up to the states” approach applies to all these menstrual surveillance and travel restriction regimes as well. It’s a new opening for the Harris campaign to focus attention on an issue that hasn’t yet gotten enough attention — not just abortion rights as a general issue but states and county sheriffs’ effort to restrict women’s travel, access their medical records and current state of menstruation or gestation, and bar access to legal medications.
What else is on Trump’s befuddled mind these days? He’s “obsessed” with Olivia Nuzzi/RFK Jr. story.
The Daily Beast: Trump Is ‘Obsessed’ With RFK Jr.’s Sexting Scandal.
Donald Trump has become “obsessed” with the sexting scandal surrounding his new ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi, according to a report.
The former president even called up the 70-year-old Kennedy—who’s married to Curb Your Enthusiasm star Cheryl Hines—to ask if the bombshell reports about him and the 31-year-old journalist were true, and if the relationship ever went beyond the sending of “demure” nudes, according to Puck News.
“[Kennedy] denied the whole thing to Trump,” a source with direct knowledge told the outlet. “He said he hardly knows her. He said he met her one time.”
Trump was also apparently close to making a public statement about the alleged digital dalliance, having “almost posted to Truth Social, his social media platform, ‘My condolences to Ryan Lizza…’” according to the Puck report. Lizza, a Politico journalist, ended his engagement to Nuzzi last month after learning of her relationship with Kennedy, according to Vanity Fair.
Trump apparently exercised more restraint than his adviser, Corey Lewandowski, who tweeted and then later deleted his own post sharing the Kennedy gossip.
Nuzzi had interviewed Trump for a piece published earlier this month which, in part, featured a detailed description of the GOP nominee’s ear bandaged up following the attempt on his life at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania in July.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
I’m sure he’s read the latest gossip about the scandal at Page Six. The Daily Beast: ‘Madly in Love’ Olivia Nuzzi Had ‘Incredible’ FaceTime Sex With RFK Jr: Report.
The forbidden love between New York magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chronicled in a new report that reveals even more details of their dalliances.
The Page Six report, which cites only anonymous sources, claimed Friday the 31-year-old Nuzzi fell “madly in love” with the Kennedy scion, 70, after he “love bombed” her and sparked a virtual relationship during his campaign.
The two reportedly exchanged “I love yous” and had an affair that lasted nearly a year, complete with the duo having “incredible” FaceTime sex and speaking on “long calls.” The report also alleged that Nuzzi and Kennedy shared “endless texts” with each other.
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s supposed relationship kicked off as Nuzzi worked on a profile of the failed presidential candidate for New York.
Nuzzi, who was engaged to Politico’s Ryan Lizza at the time, traveled to Los Angeles to interview Kennedy during a hike together in October 2023. It was on that hike that Kennedy, who has been married to the actress Cheryl Hines for 10 years, reportedly made his first pass at Nuzzi and grabbed her arm “as a romantic overture.”
Page Six reported that Nuzzi and Kennedy’s relationship heated up after the journalist contacted Kennedy with follow-up questions as she wrote her profile. The relationship reportedly remained under wraps for months, but word of it had reached Lizza by August.
Vanity Fairreportedthat Lizza had a “heated” call with Kennedy over the alleged affair upon learning of it. It remains unclear how Lizza caught wind of the reported fling, but the Daily Beast exclusively revealed this week that Kennedy had been bragging about receiving nude photos of Nuzzi.
I hope this will be the end of Nuzzi’s career in journalism, but it probably won’t be. She could always go to Fox News.
I’ve tried to keep this post light, because the news overall has been so depressing lately. In that spirit, I’m going to end with another hilarious, gossipy story about a Republican candidate.
Rolling Stone: Childless GOP Candidate Borrows Friend’s Wife and Kids for Photo Ops.
Republicans have taken umbrage with the notion that they’re weird — specifically when it comes to accusations that they’re weird about people (usually women) who don’t have children.
The sentiment in Republican politics that childless Americans are — as JD Vance put it — disorienting and disturbing has become so prevalent that one GOP candidate has taken to borrowing his friends’ wife and children for photo ops.
According to a Friday report from The New York Times, Derrick Anderson — a former Green Beret running for the House of Representatives in Virginia — has repeatedly featured a woman and her three daughters in campaign materials.
One photo features the group posing close together in an image that you could probably find framed on a grandmother’s mantle, the type of photo that your parents made your uncle with a DSLR camera take because “we never get nice pictures together.” https://twitter.com/JacobRubashkin/status/1839759803729752271
In one campaign video, Anderson is seen walking side-by-side with the same woman. In another video, which was featured on the National Republican Campaign Committee’s website and on his YouTube channel, shows Anderson speaking to the woman and the three girls while seated in a home dining room.
According to the Times, the woman and girls are “the wife and children of a longtime friend.” Anderson’s campaign website does not mention a wife or children, but notes that he “lives in Spotsylvania County with his dog, Ranger, a Dalmatian.” The Republican candidate recently revealed on social media that he is engaged to his girlfriend, Maggie, and has posted pictures of her — she is decidedly not the woman featured in the photos and videos.
By Taiyo Matsumoto
You can see the “family photo” in this article at Mediaite: Anti-Abortion GOP Candidate Borrows Friend’s Wife and Daughters for Campaign Photo Op.
A Friday article at The New York Times, headlined “G.O.P. Candidates, Looking to Soften Their Image, Turn to Their Wives,” reported how “male Republicans struggling to appeal to female voters concerned about their records on reproductive rights are unleashing their spouses to make the pitch on their behalf.”
Male GOP candidates who are worried about getting dragged down by the abortion issue in November are putting their wives front and center in their campaign ads. That’s hardly a new phenomenon — candidates have showcased the stereotypical [husband + wife + at least two children + probably a dog or two] family photo for ages — but the Republican angst about Dobbs is so acute, at least one candidate resorted to faking an entire family for his ads.
These GOP ads included anodyne images of “women in softly lit living rooms and pristine kitchens vouching for their husbands’ characters,” “a wholesome family gathering around the dining room table,” and moms “driving S.U.V.s with young children in the back seat as they stop for gas and groceries, talking about how their husbands are champions for their families, and can be champions for yours, too.” [….]
So what do you do if you’re running for Congress with an R after your name but don’t have your own wife and kids?
If you’re Derrick Anderson, a candidate running in an open race for Virginia’s seventh congressional district, you borrow a wife and daughters from a friend.
The campaign of Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District, has posted footage of him posing with a woman and her three daughters in what looks like a photo that might be used for an annual holiday card. In another scene filmed for potential use in a campaign ad, Mr. Anderson is seated around the dining room table with the same woman and three girls, chatting and smiling.
But the people are not relatives. They are the wife and children of a longtime friend. Mr. Anderson, who announced this month that he was engaged, does not have any children of his own. His campaign website says he lives with his dog and does not display any of the photos.
Isn’t it strange that Trump is never accompanied by his wife and family, but the media never mentions it?
That’s it for me today. Please take care, especially if you are/were in the path of Helene.
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