Karen Attiah
Lazy Caturday Reads
Posted: October 26, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Afternoon Reads, American Fascists, cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, news, Patrick Soon-Shiong, politics, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post 12 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the shameful abdication of responsibility by the owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. The Times’s Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Post’s Jeff Bezos interfered with the plans of their editorial boards in fear of what another Trump presidency could mean to their bottom lines. Both owners decreed that their newspapers would not endorse a candidate for president in 2024.
At The Wrap, Ross A. Lincoln has a piece on the extensive project that the LA Times owner chose to shut down: LA Times Planned ‘Case Against Trump’ Series Alongside Kamala Harris Endorsement Before Owner Quashed It | Exclusive.
Alongside its endorsement of Kamala Harris, the Los Angeles Times editorial board had also planned a multi-part series against Donald Trump before the whole thing was quashed by owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, TheWrap has learned.
According to internal memos viewed by TheWrap, the series, tentatively called “The Case Against Trump,” would have ran throughout this week. The endorsement of Kamala Harris would then have been published on Sunday.
However, Soon-Shiong ordered the cancellation 0f the series and the endorsement without explanation, current and now former staffers have confirmed, setting off a massive crisis for the 142-year-old paper.
The South African-American billionaire’s interference in his paper’s editorial independence has sparked a rise in canceled subscriptions and several high profile resignations, and there are also signs of growing unrest among staffers.
On Thursday, editorial writer Karin Klein, and Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Greene, both quit. They followed Editorial Editor Mariel Garza, who resigned in protest on Wednesday. Both Klein and Garza have specifically cited Soon-Shiong’s actions as the reason for their exits.
The owner “vetoed the editorial board’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris for president,” Garza said in her resignation letter. And alluding to the fact that the LA Times has endorsed multiple local/state level candidates, she said canceling the Harris endorsement “undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races.”
“People will justifiably wonder if each endorsement was a decision made by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or through decree by the owner,” she added.
In a dissembling statement of his own posted Wednesday on the social media site formerly called Twitter, Soon-Shiong blamed the editorial team itself for the lack of an endorsement, yet also essentially confirmed he had in fact shut it down. He said the board “was provided the opportunity” to effectively draw false equivalence between Trump and Harris in op-eds laying out the pros and cons of each candidate.
“Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the editorial board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” Soon-Shiong concluded.
“We pitched an endorsement and were not allowed to write one,” Garza shot back in a statement exclusively provided to TheWrap. And Klein, who also called Soon-Shiong a “chickens—,” stated plainly in a note explaining her resignation that “the board was not the one choosing to remain silent. He blocked our voice.”
This is what happens when billionaires control our media.
The Washington Post’s betrayal of their staff and their readers is getting the most attention, because of the newspaper’s long history of speaking truth to power. For example, without the Post’s reporting, Richard Nixon might not have been forced to resign.
When Marty Baron was editor in chief, he inserted the phrase “democracy dies in darkness” at the top of The Washington Post’s front page. Well, the Post has now died and officially no longer supports democracy. The Boston Globe: Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron slams newspaper for not making presidential endorsement.
Marty Baron, the former editor of the Washington Post, blasted the newspaper on Friday for declining to issue an endorsement in this year’s presidential election, framing the decision as a win for Republican nominee Donald J. Trump.
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Baron, also the former editor of the Boston Globe, wrote on X. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” [….]
Baron’s message followed an announcement from Post publisher William Lewis that the newspaper is “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The Post, which is owned by Amazon.com co-founder Jeff Bezos, had drafted an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris, Oliver Darcy reported on his newsletter Status. Top editorial page editors at the Los Angeles Times resigned this week after the newspaper’s owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked a planned endorsement for Harris.
Baron led the Globe newsroom from 2001 to 2012 before taking the helm at the Post. He retired in 2021.
From members of the Post’s opinion page: Opinion:Post columnists respond.
The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020. There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs. That has never been more true than in the current campaign. An independent newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.
Matt Bai
Max Boot
Kate Cohen
E.J. Dionne Jr.
Lee Hockstader
David Ignatius
Heather Long
Ruth Marcus
Dana Milbank
Alexandra Petri
Catherine Rampell
Eugene Robinson
Jennifer Rubin
Karen Tumulty
Erik Wemple
At least The New York Times allowed their editorial board to endorse Harris: The Only Patriotic Choice for President.
It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.
Windy Day, Jamie Shelman
Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.
This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.
For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.
Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.
As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.
The case for Harris:
Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.
Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.
While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.
Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.
Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.
As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.
There’s more at the link.
Commentary on these stunning events:
Dan Froomkin at Salon: Billionaires have broken media: Washington Post’s non-endorsement is a sickening moral collapse.
The shocking decision by The Washington Post not to make an endorsement in the presidential election — breaking with a decadeslong tradition — is an extremely powerful statement. A non-endorsement says Donald Trump is a reasonable choice.
It says: We are so terrified of a Trump presidency that we are bending the knee in advance. Most importantly, it makes clear that owner Jeff Bezos doesn’t want to lose government business in a second Trump administration.
I can’t imagine statements any more inappropriate from the newspaper of Watergate, the newspaper I spent 12 years working my ass off for. It’s heartbreaking. It makes me sick to my stomach.
To be clear: Every self-respecting journalist on both the news and opinion sides should be sounding the alarm about a possible second term for Trump. He poses a threat to democracy and a free press. On the news side, that requires brutally honest coverage of the threats Trump presents, with no false equating of the two parties — one of which has rejected reality and democratic values. The Post newsroom is hit or miss on that count. But on the editorial page, this shouldn’t have been a close call (and reportedly wasn’t, until Bezos got involved)….
The very opposite of sounding the alarm is throwing up your hands and saying “well, you decide.”
The Post’s decision Friday comes just days after the Los Angeles Times also decided to forgo an official endorsement. This is no coincidence. Both papers are owned by billionaires whose business and personal interests are paramount.
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” the billionaire owner of the LA Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, told Spectrum News this week.
This makes it more clear than ever: You cannot be a truly independent news organization if you are owned by an oligarch.
No kidding. This disaster has been developing for decades as the media has become more and more centralized and controlled by corporations.
Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark: The Guardrails Are Already Crumpling.
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, the Washington Post announced that it would not be making an endorsement in the presidential race. After that, a number of things happened very quickly.
First, the paper’s former executive editor Marty Baron called the decision “cowardice.”
Second, at least one senior Post opinion writer resigned.
Third, it was leaked that the editor of the editorial page had already drafted the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris when publisher Will Lewis—who is a new hire, hailing from the Rupert Murdoch journalism tree—quashed it and then released a CYA statement about how the paper was “returning to its roots” of not endorsing candidates. The Post itself reported that the decision was made by the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
By Evelyn Sarah
No one cares about the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement. It will not move a single vote. The only people who care about newspaper editorial page endorsements are newspaper editorial writers.
No one really cares all that much about the future of the Washington Post, either. I mean, I care about it, because I care about journalism and I respect the institution.
But this isn’t a journalism story. It’s a business story.
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the Post leaned hard into its role as a guardian of democracy. This meant criticizing, and reporting aggressively on, Trump, who responded by threatening Bezos’s various business interests.
And that’s what this story is about: It’s about the most consequential American entrepreneur of his generation signaling his submission to Trump—and the message that sends to every other corporation and business leader in the country. In the world.
Killing this editorial says, If Jeff Bezos has to be nice to Trump, then so do you. Keep your nose clean, bub.
Read on for Last’s comparison of what is happening here to Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia.
Benjamin Wittes at The Bulwark: The Washington Post Bends the Knee to Trump.
I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE THE DAY when the Washington Post would kneel before Donald Trump.
These are not Senate Republicans or conservative donors. This is not a group of people who cower in the face of authoritarianism. The Post editorial board, the writers who write anonymous opinion essays in the name of the paper itself, is a group of bold, pro-democracy intellectuals who have traditionally taken—individually and collectively—courageous stands about democracy and human rights around the world.
The Post’s editorial page is also the institution in which I grew up professionally. I worked there for nearly a decade under both of the last two long-time editorial page editors, Fred Hiatt and Meg Greenfield. It is an institution I revere.
And it is one that has not previously wavered with respect to Trumpist authoritarianism.
Yet today we learn that the editorial board has been stripped of its authority to endorse presidential candidates, having previously decided to endorse Kamala Harris. Instead, the paper announced in a statement from the publisher, William Lewis, that “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” [….]
…[T]he Post kneels without offering a word of praise for Trump. It’s just that, for high-minded reasons that it doesn’t really bother to specify, it’s getting out of this whole presidential endorsement business altogether. That was its traditional position, it archly informs us, back in the good old days before Watergate sent the Post on an aberrant jag. And, you see, while it’s perfectly understandable why the Post betrayed its high-minded above-it-allness in the wake of Nixon—when emotions were running high and all—having thought about it, it’s time to once again remove ourselves to the heights of Olympus where we can peer down on the foibles of mortals:
We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions—whom to vote for as the next president.
Yet it is a submission nonetheless: One week before the mortals finish voting and might elect an authoritarian, one whose former chief of staff calls him a fascist, the Washington Post has decided that silence is the best way to guide its readers.
Silence, after all, will not offend the authoritarian should he win. Silence, after all, is more than Trump can reasonably expect from the Post. Democracy may die in darkness, as the Post’s motto goes, but silence is apparently a good hedge.
Read the rest at the Bulwark.
Tomorrow, Trump will hold a rally in Madison Square Garden, site of the famous 1939 American Nazi rally.
ABC News: Trump to rally in iconic Madison Square Garden.
In the final week of his campaign, former President Donald Trump will cross off a campaign bucket-list item on Sunday: a rally in the iconic Madison Square Garden. The avid Broadway enthusiast will deliver a matinee performance, complete with musical guests and a host of Republican allies.
It’s a moment Trump has long said he wanted to have in the state where he has faced criminal and civil trials, becoming a convicted felon and mounted a business empire.
“I think it’ll be a great time, and it’s going to be really a celebration of the whole thing, you know, because it’s coming to an end a few days after that. The campaigning; I won’t campaign anymore. Then I’ll be campaigning to make America great,” Trump said about the upcoming Madison Square Garden rally during a local radio interview with Cats & Cosby on Thursday….
In an arena format symbolizing confidence and celebrity status, Trump’s appearance will serve as his closing argument. In contrast, Vice President Kamala Harris makes hers on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., where Trump spoke on Jan. 6, 2021, ahead of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The former president, reminiscent of the last nine years campaigning for the highest office in the land, has coined the event as a “celebration of the whole thing.”
“Well, it’s New York, but it’s also sort of, it’s the end of my campaigning. When you think, I mean, I’ve done it now for nine years, we’ve had two great elections. One was better than the other,” Trump said.
On Sunday, Trump will be joined by several surrogates who have appeared with him on the campaign trail — including North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Vivek Ramaswamy. House Speaker Mike Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik will also be in attendance as well as several family members and donors.
Supposedly Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk will also be there.
Eric Bradner at CNN: Madison Square Garden versus the White House Ellipse: where Trump and Harris are making their final pitches.
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have honed their closing arguments – and now they’re both turning to famous venues to try to help those messages break through just 10 days from Election Day.
The former president is returning to his hometown on Sunday for a rally in one of New York City’s most iconic landmarks, Madison Square Garden. Two days later, the vice president is holding an event at the Ellipse, the park just outside the South Lawn of the White House, where Trump’s fiery speech nearly four years ago set in motion the attack on the US Capitol.
The two events could deliver key moments in a race that is on a razor’s edge, with CNN’s final nationwide poll showing each candidate with the support of 47% of likely voters.
Both campaigns are urging supporters to cast their ballots early and attempting to reach the vanishingly small pools of undecided voters – or those who know which candidate they prefer but are not sure whether they will vote.
Harris and Trump have made clear the issues they’re highlighting in the campaign’s last days. Harris is leaning into her support for abortion rights, a political winner for Democrats since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. She’s also contrasting her character with Trump’s – a strategy aimed at reaching independents and moderate Republicans.
“Either you have the choice of a Donald Trump, who will sit in the Oval Office stewing, plotting revenge, retribution, writing out his enemies list,” she told reporters Thursday, “or what I will be doing, which is responding to folks, like the folks last night, with a to-do list.”
Trump is hammering the vice president on border security, using dehumanizing language aimed at undocumented immigrants as he focuses on an issue that’s been at the core of his political identity for all three of his presidential runs. It’s part of his broader case that Democrats in four years have undercut the stability and economic successes of his tenure in the Oval Office.
The goals of the two candidates for the rest of the campaign:
In staging a rally at Madison Square Garden, Trump is betting on his own showmanship and celebrity – expecting he can fill the arena in the deep-blue city and hoping that the spectacle will reach television and phone screens in all seven battleground states.
Previewing the final sprint to Election Day, a senior Harris campaign official said to “expect to see more” of the vice president invoking the former president’s description of political opponents as “enemies within” while also describing the race as a decision between Trump’s “enemies list” and her own “to-do list.”
Her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, also deployed that framing for the first time Thursday, as he campaigned in North Carolina.
“She’s got a to-do list. He’s got an enemies list,” Walz said.
Harris’ star-studded rally Thursday night in Georgia – her first campaign appearance with former President Barack Obama, and one that featured several other celebrities – kicked off what the senior campaign official described as the homing in of the campaign’s closing argument. That argument illustrates what a Harris administration would look like compared with the threat Harris says Trump poses, the official said.
The vice president continued that celebrity-fueled push Friday night in Texas – a rare visit to a state that is not a presidential battleground.
I’m going to end there. I will add some other interesting stories in the comment thread. Take care everyone!
Wednesday Reads
Posted: October 23, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: 2024 Presidential Election, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, Michael Kelly, news, October surpises, politics, Trump and HItler, Trump disrespect for U.S. troops 9 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Trump was hit with a couple of October surprises. I have no idea whether they will make a difference, but it was a pretty good one-two punch. First The Atlantic published an article by editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s dismissive attitude toward the members of the U.S. military. Second, The New York Times’ published an interview with Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly, by Michael Schmidt in which Kelly says that if elected, Trump “would rule like a dictator.”
Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic: Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had.’
Goldberg opened his article with an anecdote about a woman soldier Vanessa Guillén, who was murdered.
In April 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.
Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.
In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with that,” he said. “I’ll help you out. Financially, I’ll help you.”
A subsequent investigation by the Army found a number of problems at Fort Hood.
Five months later, the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, announced the results of an investigation. McCarthy cited numerous “leadership failures” at Fort Hood and relieved or suspended several officers, including the base’s commanding general. In a press conference, McCarthy said that the murder “shocked our conscience” and “forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves.”
According to a person close to Trump at the time, the president was agitated by McCarthy’s comments and raised questions about the severity of the punishments dispensed to senior officers and noncommissioned officers.
In a meeting to discuss the investigation Trump asked about the funeral and how much it had cost.
According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.
Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
Goldberg’s conclusions from this episode:
The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)
A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.
Retired General Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me that Trump does not comprehend such traditional military virtues as honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes,” McCaffrey said. “It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”
There’s much more at the Atlantic link. There’s no paywall on this article, so I hope you’ll read the whole thing if you haven’t already.
Michael S. Schmidt at The New York Times: As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator.
Few top officials spent more time behind closed doors in the White House with President Donald J. Trump than John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff.
With Election Day looming, Mr. Kelly — deeply bothered by Mr. Trump’s recent comments about employing the military against his domestic opponents — agreed to three on-the-record, recorded discussions with a reporter for The New York Times about the former president, providing some of his most wide-ranging comments yet about Mr. Trump’s fitness and character….
In the interviews, Mr. Kelly expanded on his previously expressed concerns and stressed that voters, in his view, should consider fitness and character when selecting a president, even more than a candidate’s stances on the issues….
He said that, in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.
He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic.
Kelly agreed to make the audio of his comments available.
Some excerpts:
In response to a question about whether he thought Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Kelly first read aloud a definition of fascism that he had found online.
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said.
He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
Kelly said Trump chafed at limitations on his power.
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said.
Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.
“I think he’d love to be just like he was in business — he could tell people to do things and they would do it, and not really bother too much about whether what the legalities were and whatnot,” he said.
Trump on “his generals” and Hitler, according to Kelly:
“Certainly, a big surprise for him, again, was if you remember at the beginning of the administration, he would talk about ‘his generals,’” Mr. Kelly said. “I don’t know why he thought that — but then a very big surprise for him was that we were — those of us who were former generals and certainly people still on active duty — that the commitment, the loyalty was to the Constitution, without question, without second thought.”
Mr. Kelly added: “That was a big surprise to him that the generals were not loyal to the boss, in this case him.”
Trump told him that “Hitler did some good things.”
Mr. Kelly confirmed previous reports that on more than one occasion Mr. Trump spoke positively of Hitler.
“He commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did so me good things, too,’” Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump told him.
Again, there’s much more. Some of the comments are familiar, such as Trump’s distaste for wounded veterans and his inability to understand why anyone would choose to serve in the military and risk injury or death fighting for the country and the values in the Constitution. Here is gift link to the article.
Another story with warnings about the threat of another Trump presidency by David Folkenflik at NPR: Jailed reporters, silenced networks: What Trump says he’d do to the media if elected.
Former President Donald Trump often basks in the glow of press attention. Just as often, he trashes the press and threatens journalists.
On the campaign trail and in interviews, Trump has suggested that if he regains the White House, he will exact vengeance on news outlets that anger him.
More specifically, Trump has pledged to toss reporters in jail and strip major television networks of their broadcast licenses as retribution for coverage he didn’t like.
“It speaks directly to the First Amendment — and the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy,” Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, tells NPR.
To be clear, the government does not license national networks like those targeted by Trump, but the FCC does license local TV and radio stations to use the public airwaves….
Trump’s declarations arrive at a time of increasing concern about his more autocratic impulses. And press advocates say he is intentionally fueling a climate hostile to independent reporting….
a new survey of hundreds of journalists who received safety training from the International Women’s Media Foundation finds 36% say they have faced or been threatened with physical violence on the job — and they have felt especially threatened at Trump campaign rallies.
“Journalists reported feeling at high risk while covering Trump rallies and ‘Stop the Steal’ protests, especially when some Trump supporters and protestors openly carry weapons,” the report states.
While campaigning for Republican congressional candidates in 2022, Trump repeatedly pledged to jail reporters who don’t identify confidential sources on stories he considered to have national security implications….
Last year, Trump called for NBC News to be investigated for treason over its coverage of criminal charges he faces. After his lone debate with Vice President Harris this summer, it was ABC’s turn to face Trump’s wrath. Trump expressed anger over moderators’ decision to fact-check him. He popped up on Fox & Friends the next day with a warning.
“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” Trump said. “I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They oughta take away their license for the way they do that.”
This month, Trump has been back at it, slamming CBS repeatedly over its handling of the vice presidential debate and of the network’s interview with Harris on 60 Minutes. He pointed to two versions of an answer Harris had given — one that aired on 60 Minutes and the other on the show Face the Nation — to argue CBS was deceiving viewers to aid the Democrat.
“Think of this,” Trump told attendees at a rally in Aurora, Colo., this month. “CBS gets a license. And a license is based on honesty. I think they have to take their license away. I do.”
And on Sunday, Trump repeated his complaint to Fox News’ Howard Kurtz. “It’s the biggest scandal I have ever seen for a broadcaster,” Trump said. “60 Minutes, I think it should be taken off the air, frankly.”
There’s much more at the link.
Joseph Goebbels and Stephen Miller resemble each other.
It’s difficult to understand how this election could be so close, according to the polls. I suppose one reason is that the MAGA faithful do not read The Atlantic or The New York Times–they only watch Fox News and other right wing outlets. But still, they hear Trump saying these things in his rallies, so they much approve of his attitudes and his crass beha
Stephen Robinson writes at Public Notice: How the hell is this even close?
The presidential election remains a coin toss, which in and of itself isn’t unusual. Most presidential elections since 2000 have been very close. Even 2008, the lone blowout, was a nail-biter until the very end of the campaign.
What makes this election so nerve-wracking are the stakes: Donald Trump is an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon. He’s currently free on bail after being convicted of 34 felonies and under indictment in multiple jurisdictions. An embittered, increasingly radical, and obviously decompensating Trump openly campaigns on racial scapegoating and retribution against his political enemies. He makes no effort to hide his authoritarian and dystopian vision for a second term.
Trump is also unraveling before our eyes. His rally speeches are increasingly meandering and incoherent even by their previous low standards. His race his redder and his makeup worse than ever. During a Pennsylvania rally last weekend, Trump rambled for more than 10 minutes about the late golfer Arnold Palmer, with a bizarre focus on his penis size. Meanwhile, on social media, Trump rants like an online troll you’d immediately block….
Yet the race remains more or less tied because about 46 percent of voters think Trump is a canny businessman and masterful negotiator who’ll revitalize the economy and stand up to Vladimir Putin. Or something. Maybe they just believe they have nothing to lose and want to make the libs cry. In any event, Trump’s enduring appeal to a large swath of the electorate is evidence something is deeply wrong in our politics.
Robinson argues that there’s still hope:
Democrats who later went on to win commanding Electoral College victories often performed worse in the polls than Kamala Harris has. During the summer of 1992, Bill Clinton trailed both President George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot. Even Barack Obama’s 2008 election was not a certainty — at one point, John McCain had a five-point national lead. In August of that year, Politico declared that Obama had “hit a ceiling in public opinion polling” because he’d consistently failed to cross the 50 percent threshold of support. (He’d eventually win 53 percent of the popular vote.)
Politico argued that Obama should’ve been running away with the election because of the fundamentals: Incumbent President George W. Bush had about 30 percent approval at the time. Eight in 10 Americans believed the country was on the wrong track. The economy was in free fall with unemployment at six percent and rising.
“If everything is so good for Barack Obama, why isn’t everything so good for Barack Obama?” asked ABC News’s Gary Langer. Fast forward 16 years, and New York Times columnist David Brooks raised a similar question last week about Harris in his op-ed headlined, “Why the heck isn’t she running away with this?”
Robinson offers a number of explanations, but this is the most convincing:
A major reason that Harris isn’t “running away with this” is because an overwhelming majority of white voters don’t find Trump’s malicious nature and fundamental unfitness disqualifying.
An Emerson College poll from last Friday has Harris with a slim one-point lead over Trump, but the demographic breakdown is telling: Harris leads with Hispanic voters 61 to 35 percent and Black voters 81 to 12 percent. However, Trump carries white voters 60 to 38 percent. For context, Mike Dukakis had better numbers among white voters against George H.W. Bush in 1988. (The white electorate was smaller then.)
Obama’s white voter support dropped from 43 percent against McCain to 39 percent against Romney. If Trump lost comparable ground among white voters, this nightmare would be over.
This goes beyond rigid partisanship — Republicans just flat out love Trump. Consider that his primary challengers earlier this year were major players, not the Republican equivalents to Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson. And those challengers had fully embraced almost all the MAGA positions except perhaps for Trump’s obsession with the big lie.
Still, Trump, while under criminal indictment, soundly defeated Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, once lauded as Trump without the baggage. In fact, primary exit polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina revealed that GOP voters actually like his baggage. The majority claimed Trump “shared their values,” and it wasn’t as if they were uninformed about his criminal charges. They just didn’t care, with an overwhelming majority in both states saying they still considered him fit to serve even if convicted of a crime.
If Harris wins, it’s because just enough voters accept the rule of law and reality itself. That’s probably why we remain so nervous about the outcome. The election won’t merely determine the next president. It’ll define who we are as a nation.
Again, there’s much much more at the link, and there’s no paywall.
At The New Republic, Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky write: “Red Wave” Redux: Are GOP Polls Rigging the Averages in Trump’s Favor?
Last month, a GOP-friendly polling firm presented itself, and its data, in a highly unusual way. Rather than maintain a nominally neutral public-facing profile, this pollster acted more like a cavalry brigade for Donald Trump’s campaign. And the firm did so explicitly, openly, and proudly.
It all went down in mid-September, at a time when the FiveThirtyEight polling averages showed the slightest of leads for Kamala Harris in North Carolina, a must-win state for Trump. Her edge was short-lived: The averages moved back to favoring Trump. And Quantus Insights, a GOP-friendly polling firm, took credit for this development. When a MAGA influencer celebrated the pro-Trump shift on X (formerly Twitter), Quantus’s account responded: “You’re welcome.”
The implication was clear. A Quantus poll had not only pushed the averages back to Trump; this was nakedly the whole point of releasing the poll in the first place.
To proponents of what might be called the “Red Wave Theory” of polling, this was a blatant example of a phenomenon that they see as widespread: A flood of GOP-aligned polls has been released for the precise purpose of influencing the polling averages, and thus the election forecasts, in Trump’s favor. In the view of these critics, the Quantus example (the firm subsequently denied any such intent) only made all this more overt: Dozens of such polls have been released since then, and they are in no small part responsible for tipping the averages—and the forecasts—toward Trump.
Coming at a time when right-wing disinformation is soaring—and Trump’s most feverish ally, Elon Musk, is converting X into a bottomless sewer pit of MAGA-pilled electoral propaganda—these critics see all this as a hyper-emboldened version of what happened in 2022, when GOP polls flooded the polling averages and arguably helped make GOP Senate candidates appear stronger than they were, leading to much-vaunted predictions of a “red wave.” Most prominently, Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg and data analyst Tom Bonier, who were skeptical of such predictions in 2022 and ultimately proved correct, are now warning that all this is happening again.
In their telling, GOP data is serving an essential end of pro-Trump propaganda, which is heavily geared toward painting him as a formidable, “strong” figure whose triumph over the “weak” Kamala Harris is inevitable. This illusion is essential to Trump’s electoral strategy, goes this reading, and GOP-aligned data firms are concertedly attempting to build up that impression, both in the polling averages and in media coverage that is gravitationally influenced by it. They are also engaged in a data-driven psyop designed to spread a sense of doom among Democrats that the election is slipping away from them.
Of course, even if Harris wins the Electoral College, there’s no doubt that Trump will contest the election. I’ve read a number of scenarios about what could happen, and I don’t even like to think about them. Yesterday Harris was asked about one such scenario in an interview with NBC’s Hallie Jackson. Alex Seitz-Wald at NBC News: Harris says ‘of course’ her team is prepared if Trump declares victory before votes are counted.
In an interview with NBC News’ Hallie Jackson on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris said she’s preparing for the possibility that former President Donald Trump declares victory before the votes are counted next month.
Sitting down at her official residence in the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., Harris said that her campaign is prepared for the possibility that the Republican former president tries to subvert the election, but that she’s focused on trying to beat him first.
“We will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that,” Harris said.
When pressed on the possibility that Trump will try to declare victory before the votes are counted and a winner is projected by the news networks and other media outlets, Harris said she is concerned.
“This is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people who incited a violent mob to attack the United States Capitol, and 140 law enforcement officers were attacked, some who were killed. This is a serious matter,” Harris said, referring to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol where Trump supporters tried to prevent the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
“The American people are, at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very, very serious decision about what will be the future of our country,” Harris added.
Read more at the NBC News link.
That’s where things stand in the election today, as I see it. What do you think?
Lazy Caturday Reads: Old Man Trump is Exhausted
Posted: October 19, 2024 Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, just because, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, news, politics, Trump 3 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
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.
Wednesday Reads: State of the Race and Dementia Don
Posted: October 16, 2024 Filed under: 2024 presidential Campaign, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris 2024 | Tags: cognitive decline, dementia, Donald Trump, economics, Kamala Harris, November 2024 Elections, politics, tariffs, Trump, violence 8 CommentsGood Day!!
Weeping Woman, Pablo Picasso
There are only 19 days to go until November 5. I believe that Kamala Harris will win, but I was also sure Hillary Clinton would win in 2016.
Both Harris and Trump have been holding rallies and giving interviews. She speaks in complete sentences and discusses her policies in a coherent fashion. He can’t complete a sentence, mispronounces words, rambles nonsensically, and has no understanding of his own policies. And, of course, he is a pathological liar.
Harris is a former prosecutor who is committed to the rule of law. Trump is a convicted felon out on bail, with multiple indictments hanging over his head. How can the race be close?
One positive development is that Trump’s dementia and his violent rhetoric and threats are getting more attention in the media. He and his advisers may well live to regret driving Joe Biden out of the race.
I feel as if my life is on hold until I know who will win this election. If Harris wins, my life will continue on its current track. If Trump wins, everything will change–and not in a good way. In addition, the chaos we have all lived through in the past 9 years will continue and most likely get much worse. That’s where things stand right now, as I see it.
State of the Race
In the latest national polls, Harris leads by a few points.
Marist Poll: Harris +5 Points Against Trump Nationally.
In the presidential contest, Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump by five points among likely voters, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. The race gets closer, however, among registered voters nationally. Here, three points separate the two candidates.
- Harris (52%) leads Trump (47%) among likely voters nationally, including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate. Earlier this month, two points separated Harris (50%) and Trump (48%) among likely voters.
- The contest is tighter among registered voters. Among the general electorate, Harris receives 51% to 48% for Trump. In early October, the same margin separated Harris (50%) and Trump (47%) among the broader electorate.
- Trump (54%) leads Harris (44%) among independents who are likely to vote, widening the 4-point edge Trump (50%) had against Harris (46%) previously.
- Trump (53%) leads Harris (47%) among men who are likely to vote while Harris (57%) has the advantage over Trump (42%) among women.
- While members of Gen X divide (51% for Harris to 48% for Trump), Harris has majority support among GenZ/Millennials (53%) and among Baby Boomers/the Silent-Greatest Generations (55%).
Read more details at the link.
Reuters: Exclusive: Harris holds steady, marginal 45%-42% lead over Trump, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
Summary:
— Harris leads Trump by 3 points in Reuters/Ipsos poll
— Voter enthusiasm higher than in 2020
— Harris favored on healthcare, Trump on economy
Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris held a marginal 3-percentage-point lead over Republican Donald Trump – 45% to 42% – as the two stayed locked in a tight race to win the Nov. 5 U.S. presidential election, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
While the gap between the two remained steady compared with a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a week earlier, the new poll, which closed on Sunday, gave signs that voters – particularly Democrats – might be more enthused about this year’s election than they were ahead of the November 2020 presidential election when Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump.
Some 78% of registered voters in the three-day poll – including 86% of Democrats and 81% of Republicans – said they were “completely certain” they would cast a ballot in the presidential election. The share of sure-to-vote poll respondents was up from 74% in a Reuters/Ipsos survey conducted Oct. 23-27, 2020, when 74% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans said they were certain to cast ballots.
The poll had a margin of error of around 4 percentage points.
Tension in Red, Wassily Kandinsky
Early voting has begun. CNN reports: Record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state.
A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.
More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “So with the record breaking 1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” he said.
The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.
The swing state is one of the most closely watched this election, with former President Donald Trump trying to reclaim it after losing there to President Joe Biden by a small margin four years ago, leading Trump and his allies to unsuccessfully push to overturn his defeat.
Those efforts have loomed large this year as new changes to how the state conducts elections have been approved by Republican members of the State Election Board, leading Democrats and others to mount legal challenges, many of which have yet to be resolved even as Election Day nears.
Despite the massive turnout on Tuesday, the process appeared to go smoother this year for some Atlanta-area voters who spoke with CNN.
“Last time I voted, I voted in the city and the lines were out the door. They only had like, maybe like three people working,” said Corine Canada. “So people honestly just started leaving because it was like that. Yeah, like, ‘This is too long. I can’t sit here (and) wait, I have to go back to work.’ But here, no, it was easy.”
Dementia Don
Yesterday Trump appeared at the Economic Club of Chicago and gave a disastrous interview. He mostly talked about his plan to put high tariffs on imports, and continued to claim that these tariffs would be paid by foreign countries and not by Americans paying higher prices. Other news from the interview: he would not commit to allowing a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election.
Nikki McCann Ramirez and Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone: Trump Crumbles When Pressed on Economic Policy in Tense Interview.
Donald Trump continued his pre-election economic event tour on Tuesday with a lengthy interview with Bloomberg at the Economic Club of Chicago. It was a total mess.
Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he’s running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.
Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews.
Micklethwait didn’t weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump’s total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased….
The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods.
When questioned about the specifics of his plan, and if he was aware of its pitfalls, Trump seemed ignorant of basic economic principles, insisting that other countries, not American consumers, would pay for the tariffs.
A bit more:
Micklethwait tried to explain the actual impact. “Three-trillion worth of imports and you will add tariffs to every single one of them, and push up the cost for all of these people to buy foreign goods,” he said. “That is just simple mathematics.”
Trump countered that he was “always good at mathematics,” and that high tariffs — and thus costs — would force companies to move production into the United States.
Anxiety, by Edvard Munch
“That will take many, many, many years,” Micklethwait said, to which Trump replied that high enough penalties would make the move immediate as if companies could simply wand wave production plants, orchards, wineries, factories, and the like into existence.
The former president also insisted that his tariff proposal would not result in the loss of jobs that are dependent on trade, because companies that moved to the U.S. would not be subject to the tax. “All you have to do is build your plant in the United States and you don’t have any tariffs,” he said…..
Micklethwait’s attempts to keep Trump on topic earned him no grace from the former president, who hates few things more than being contradicted.
When Micklethwait asked Trump to address a report by The Wall Street Journal estimating that his economic proposals would raise the national debt by upwards of $7 trillion, the former president fell back on his standard playbook: bashing the interviewer.
“What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong,” Trump replied, crossing his arms and curling into his seat.
“You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff,” he added.
There’s more at the link. I didn’t encounter a paywall when I clicked on the link at Memeorandum.
At The Washington Post, Jeff Stein and David J. Lynch write about the effects of Trump’s proposed tariffs: ‘Off the charts’: How Trump tariffs would shock U.S., world economies.
Former president Donald Trump is campaigning on the most significant increase in tariffs in close to a century, preparing an attack on the international trade order that would likely raise prices, hurt the stock market and spark economic feuds with much of the world.
There’s more about the interview at the link. There’s no paywall.
More news from the Micklethwait interview from Mini Racker at The Daily Beast: Trump Gives Ominous Clue About What May Happen If He Loses.
Donald Trump on Tuesday dodged the question of whether he will allow for a peaceful certification of election results if Kamala Harris defeats him in three weeks.
During an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait asked Trump if he would commit “to respecting and encouraging a peaceful transfer of power,” especially in light of Jan. 6, 2021, which the journalist called “unruly and violent.”
Trump didn’t answer the question. Instead, he rejected the premise and blamed Micklethwait as “a man that has not been a big Trump fan over the years.” He also falsely claimed that he allowed for a peaceful transfer of power in 2020, when Joe Biden defeated him.
“Come on, President Trump, you had a peaceful transfer of power compared to Venezuela, but it was by far the worst transfer of power for a long time,” Micklethwait insisted.
The audience booed and Trump thanked them. The former president then admitted that people were angry when they arrived in Washington to protest the results that January—but according to him, they were perfectly behaved.
“It was love and peace, and some people went to the Capitol,” Trump said. “And a lot of strange things happened there, a lot of strange things, with people being waved into the Capitol by police.”
For perhaps the first time, Trump downplayed his crowd size.
He added that he left the White House the morning he was supposed to and that only a fraction of the protestors were among those who breached and defaced the Capitol.
“Not one of those people had a gun, nobody was killed, except for Ashli Babbitt,” he said.
That is a lie, of course. A number of guns were confiscated, and there were probably many more, since none of the insurrectionists were detained and searched. As for deaths, four of his supporters died that day, and a capitol police officer died from injuries inflicted in the riot.
There is a growing discussion in alternative media of Trump’s age obvious cognitive decline, and some in the legacy media are also beginning to call attention to it. Examples:
Aaron Rupar at Public Notice: Trump’s campaign is trying to hide his sad state from voters.
MAGA-friendly CNBC host Joe Kernen dropped an interesting nugget right as Squawk Box went to commercial break on Tuesday.
“Well, Trump canceled, and he was going to come on,” Kernen said.
Not only did Trump once love going on CNBC, but Kernen’s revelation comes on the heels of Trump declining or canceling a number of other high-profile opportunities to make a pitch to voters on mainstream TV. Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris a second time, which would’ve aired on CNN. Trump then refused CNN’s offer to host a town hall. And Trump of course also recently backed out of a 60 Minutes interview.
Still Tension, Wassily Kandinsky
The explanation for all this is not that Trump has suddenly become camera shy. It’s that his campaign undoubtedly realizes his rapidly degrading condition doesn’t play well with audiences beyond the MAGA cult. As a result, they’re retreating to the safer terrain of nonstop rallies and fawning Fox hits….
The reason Trump’s campaign isn’t keen to get him in front of swing voters on mainstream platforms was on stark display Tuesday when Trump did a rare event that wasn’t a festival of sycophancy.
By any objective standard, Trump’s Economic Club of Chicago interview was a disaster. He came out of the gates with an asinine proposal for 2,000 percent tariffs on imported cars, then was quickly reduced to insulting the moderator, Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, when Micklethwait rightly pointed out that his his economic proposals are an inflationary disaster. (Watch below.)
Trump repeatedly refused to answer questions Micklethwait asked him, instead going on self-absorbed rants about how Google is unfair to him or about how he could do a better job as Federal Reserve chairman than Jerome Powell.
By the end of the event, Trump had veered into making an impassioned defense of the big lie and his coup attempt, bragging about his crowd size on January 6 and absurdly claiming the events of that day were just “love and peace.” (Watch below.)
Marianne LeVine at The Washington Post: Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode.
OAKS, Pa. — The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention.
And so Trump, after jokingly asking the crowd whether “anybody else would like to faint,” took a different approach.
“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.
For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.
He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night….
As Trump stood onstage in his oversize suit and bright red tie, swaying back and forth, it was almost as if he were taking a trip back to decades past. Trump’s decision to cut short the question-and-answer portion of the town hall and instead have the crowd stay to listen to his favorite songs was a somewhat bizarre move, given that the election was only 22 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and questioned his mental acuity.
Some in the crowd began to leave. Some looked around, wondering whether he was done speaking for the night and how much longer the dance — or sway — session would last. Many stayed holding their cameras and watched as Trump took in the music, at times looking over at a screen beside him that showed videos of James Brown singing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’sWorld” and Sinéad O’Connor performing “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Eric Schmeltzer at Newsweek: Dancing Donald Trump Is Clearly in a Steep Decline | Opinion.
For 38 minutes or so, former President Donald Trump was in a happy place. After some people collapsed at his town hall, Trump got frustrated, decided he’d had enough softball questions from Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and asked to play music. For nearly 40 minutes, Trump kept asking for more music, swaying oddly in front of the crowd, occasionally closing his eyes, and retreating to a comforting place in his mind, like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
The Anxiety Monster, by Jeremy Campbell
For those of us who’ve had family members slip into dementia, it was a familiar sight. Both of my grandmothers suffered it near the ends of their lives. Even before they were sent to nursing homes, they started to exhibit increased frustration and even anger. My maternal grandmother accused her caretaker of purposely turning the shower knob too tight so she would have to come in and see my grandmother naked. But she also liked to sing old-time songs she remembered. She had her happy place—an oasis in a time of increasing confusion. Then, there were other times she was completely lucid. She would talk about the situation in the Middle East (which was still a thing back then, too) with total clarity. There were good days and there were bad days.
It isn’t like we haven’t seen Trump’s behavior with our own eyes. It isn’t like media hasn’t noticed it, either. And yet, no one seems to want to talk about the distinct possibility that Trump is well on the way to the same state my grandmothers found themselves in and that millions of Americans find friends and family in – severe cognitive decline, if not outright dementia.
For 38 minutes or so, former President Donald Trump was in a happy place. After some people collapsed at his town hall, Trump got frustrated, decided he’d had enough softball questions from Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) and asked to play music. For nearly 40 minutes, Trump kept asking for more music, swaying oddly in front of the crowd, occasionally closing his eyes, and retreating to a comforting place in his mind, like being wrapped in a warm blanket.
For those of us who’ve had family members slip into dementia, it was a familiar sight. Both of my grandmothers suffered it near the ends of their lives. Even before they were sent to nursing homes, they started to exhibit increased frustration and even anger. My maternal grandmother accused her caretaker of purposely turning the shower knob too tight so she would have to come in and see my grandmother naked. But she also liked to sing old-time songs she remembered. She had her happy place—an oasis in a time of increasing confusion. Then, there were other times she was completely lucid. She would talk about the situation in the Middle East (which was still a thing back then, too) with total clarity. There were good days and there were bad days.
It isn’t like we haven’t seen Trump’s behavior with our own eyes. It isn’t like media hasn’t noticed it, either. And yet, no one seems to want to talk about the distinct possibility that Trump is well on the way to the same state my grandmothers found themselves in and that millions of Americans find friends and family in – severe cognitive decline, if not outright dementia.
Politico noted that Trump’s language is getting darker and angrier than it used to be. Doctors have noticed his speech patterns point to decline, as well. His campaign has bizarrely and very abruptly canceled interviews with 60 Minutes and CNBC. He confuses the gender of people he talks about. He keeps saying that he is running against President Biden. He confused the name of his doctor, when talking about his cognitive test.
Clips of him in 2016 and now show a very sharp decline and inability to maintain a train of thought.
Angry, frustrated, confused, unable to focus. And now, he retreats to his happy place in a time of stress. Put it all together and ask yourself if that’s someone you’d trust to take care of your kids in a house with a working stove.
Lisa Lehrer and Michael Gold at The New York Times on Trump’s violent rhetoric: Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy.’
With three weeks left before Election Day, former President Donald J. Trump is pushing to the forefront of his campaign a menacing political threat: that he would use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.
In a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mr. Trump framed Democrats as a pernicious “enemy from within” that would cause chaos on Election Day that he speculated the National Guard might need to handle.
A day later, he closed his remarks to a crowd at what was billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania with a stark message about his political opponents.
“They are so bad and frankly, they’re evil,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re evil. What they’ve done, they’ve weaponized, they’ve weaponized our elections. They’ve done things that nobody thought was even possible.”
And on Tuesday, he once again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power when pressed by an interviewer at an economic forum in Chicago.
With early voting underway in key battlegrounds, the race for the White House is moving toward Election Day in an extraordinary and sobering fashion. Mr. Trump has long flirted with, if not openly endorsed, anti-democratic tendencies with his continued refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, embrace of conspiracy theories of large-scale voter fraud and accusations that the justice system is being weaponized against him. He has praised leaders including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary for being authoritarian strongmen.
But never before has a presidential nominee — let alone a former president — openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy. As he escalates his threats of political retribution, Mr. Trump is offering voters the choice of a very different, and far less democratic, form of American government.
“There is not a case in American history where a presidential candidate has run for office on a promise that they would exact retribution against anyone they perceive as not supporting them in the campaign,” said Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel under Barack Obama who leads the advocacy group Protect Democracy. “It’s so fundamentally, outrageously beyond the pale of how this country has worked that it’s hard to articulate how insane it is.”
Harris and Waltz are also calling attention to Trump’s cognitive issues and threats. They have three weeks left to educate the public an get legacy media to focus on Trump’s age and obvious dementia.
Friday Reads: Under Pressure
Posted: July 12, 2024 Filed under: 2024 Elections, 2024 presidential Campaign, Biden Harris 2024, Black Women Lead | Tags: @repeat1968, Ashley Al, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Project 2025, Racism, Republicans, Russia, U.S. Politics, Viktor Orban 7 Comments
“How much clearer can one be, President Biden is not stepping down.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Okay, here is my punditry. This entire mess is basically due to two things. The Democratic Party is just being the Democratic Party. It always looks like a huge public pie fight until they reach a consensus. President Joe Biden is just being himself with a bit of age and a lot of presidenting weighing on him. Also, let the man get some sleep! My Dad was perfectly functional into his 90s. This can be the case for a lot of seniors.
This headline is from NPR and is worth putting right here as the first suggested read today. It’s reported by Domenico Montanaro. “After Biden’s debate performance, the presidential race is unchanged.” I’d say most of us are less worried about Biden’s stutter and senior moments and more terrified of Donald Trump in his entirety. Why would we want to put the country through another 4 years of him when he was such a nerve-wracking failure the first four? What’s our goal here? It’s to stop Trump. The Republican Party is incapable of taking the moral high ground.
The race for the presidency remains statistically tied despite President Biden’s dismal debate performance two weeks ago, a new national NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds.
Biden actually gained a point since last month’s survey, which was taken before the debate. In this poll, he leads Trump 50% to 48% in a head-to-head matchup. But Biden slips when third-party options are introduced, with Trump holding the slightest advantage with 43% to 42%.
Those numbers, though, do not represent statistically significant differences, as the margin of error in the survey is +/- 3.1 percentage points, meaning results could be 3 points higher or lower.
The poll also found that, at this point, no other mainstream Democrat who has been mentioned as a replacement for the president on the ticket does better than Biden.
The results reflect the hyperpolarized political environment in the country and the reality that both of the major parties’ presumptive nominees bring with them significant disadvantages. Majorities of those surveyed continue to say they have a negative opinion of both men, and neither, they say, should be on the ballot at all.
The Marist Poll folks characterized the race thusly. “Contest for President Still “Up for Grabs. Biden +2 Percentage Points Against Trump, Despite Concerns about Biden’s Mental Fitness.” So now the strategy is to just fucking keep reporting about everything that is wrong with Trump and remind the American Public how awful things were under his regime.
With just days to go before the start of the Republican National Convention, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump continue to be closely matched among registered voters in both a head-to-head matchup and a multicandidate field. Biden’s support remains relatively unchanged from last month despite the view of many Americans that he lacks the mental fitness to serve as president. However, Biden outperforms Trump on whether either candidate has the character to be President of the United States, and by more than two to one, Americans are more concerned about a president who lies than they are about someone who is too old to serve. Both candidates remain flawed in the eyes of Americans, and majorities say neither should be on the ballot. Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, and Gretchen Whitmer do not improve the Democrats’ chances against Trump.
This is Ashley Allison, a resident Harvard Fellow at the Institute School of Politics at the Kennedy School.This is a microphone drop moment if I have ever listened to and seen one.
Builder, creator, advocate, and organizer, Ashley Allison is an Obama-Biden Administration and Biden-Harris campaign senior staffer with more than 15 years of experience building campaigns and strategies that lead to victory. As the National Coalitions Director for Biden-Harris 2020 presidential campaign, she led nearly 500 staff and paid fellows to activate the most robust coalition of voters in modern history. Ashley’s commitment to racial equity and civil rights has been proven throughout her career.
The Washington Post reports this news about last night’s presser and the President’s scheduled Rally in Michigan today. “Biden heading to Michigan for rally after high-stakes news conference. The president is visiting the must-win state after a mixed session with reporters that showcased his knowledge but also included verbal stumbles.” Yasmeen Abutaleb has the lede. So are these folks experts that never “stumble” and now what could cause it like stress, tiredness, age, or a life-long stutter? Trump’s speeches are unhinged and full of lies and gobbledygook. Former aids won’t vote for him because they say he’s a malignant narcissist? Can we examine him and his Personality Disorders, history with the law, and his failure to tell the truth every time he opens his mouth or puts some nonsense on Truth Social?
President Biden is set to hold a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday following a news conference that received mixed reviews from other Democrats, in which Biden showed command of complex foreign policy issues but stumbled through some answers and mixed up names.
Many Democrats predicted privately that defections could increase markedly on Friday, and both supporters of Biden and those who argue he should end his candidacy were watching carefully to see the number of dissenters who might step forward. Some in the party have been waiting for the end of the NATO summit in Washington, and others were holding their fire until the news conference.
Do they constantly list every single trouble Donald has getting up or down stairs or his many verbal falsehoods and weirdness? Where is their coverage of Dotard Donald? Here’s the LA Times Editorial Board listing the various disasters surrounding Donald.
It’s unbelievable that the nation is spending so much time on the question of Biden’s verbal acuity, when the greatest concern ought to be that his challenger is a self-aggrandizing felon and twice-impeached election-denier. Trump fomented the Jan. 6 insurrection, shows contempt for the rule of law and shamelessly lies in pursuit of more power. He’s an authoritarian who admires murderous despots, wants to jail his political enemies and has publicly flirted with declaring himself a dictator on his first day back in office.
With fervent support from the Republican Party, he peddles cruelty, racism and misogyny, demonizing immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” demeaning women‘s looks and intelligence, and using disgustingly fascist language to criticize his opponents as “vermin.” He’s a man who lied about his wealth for years to cheat on his taxes, whose business was convicted of criminal tax fraud, and who’s been denounced by many former aides and Cabinet members as a “malignant narcissist” who recklessly puts himself before the American people.
Trump is the only man in the presidential race manifestly unworthy of holding a position of power, and has no business ever returning to the White House. If the GOP had any decency left, its members would be discussing whether to dump Trump for a candidate who isn’t out to bulldoze democratic institutions in favor of autocracy.”
Now that’s more like it! Dear Political Pundits, Reporters, and Podcast Dudes! Take note that this is the way you do it! This is what we face if we don’t do a Trifecta in the Beltway come November. This is reported by Anna Conkling at The Daily Beast. “GOP Rep Delivers a House Floor Speech Straight Out of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. In a speech before the House that seemed lifted right out of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic, Rep. Glenn Grothman said he wants the U.S. to go back to 1960.” Oh, Hell NO!
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI) on Thursday accused “the angry feminist movement” of emasculating men and said the U.S. should “work our way back” to 1960 if former President Donald Trump wins in November.
In a House floor speech that could have been lifted from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Grothman went after supporters of government-funded childcare programs and said President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty “took the purpose out of the man’s life, because now you have a basket of goodies for the mom.” He added, “They’ve taken away the purpose of the man to be part of a family. And if we want to get America back to, say, 1960, where this was almost unheard of, we have to fundamentally change these programs.”
Grothman said “the breakdown of the family” was caused by the U.S. government in the 1960s and “people like Angela Davis, well-known communist, people like the feminists who were so important in the 1960s.”
“So I hope the press corps picks up on this, and I hope Republican and Democrat leadership put together some sort of plan for January, in which we work our way back to where America was in the 1960s,” he added.
Grothman, a fervent supporter of Trump, hailed the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, saying after the decision: “Over the years, millions of children have had their dreams stolen before seeing the light of the day. But today marks a brighter future for the hearts and minds of unborn children, women, and families.
“I commend the six justices who voted to overturn Roe for having the courage to base their decision on sound legal principles rather than a fashionable line of thinking that rules academia, Hollywood, and the mainstream media.”
Here’s Heather Cox Richardson today on her SubStack Letters from an American.
Yesterday, Raw Story reported that Ivan Raiklin, Trump’s self-declared “Secretary of Retribution” has compiled a “Deep State target list” of 350 people he wants to see arrested and punished for “treason” if Trump is reelected. The list includes Democratic and Republican elected officials, journalists he considers to be Trump’s enemies, U.S. Capitol Police officers, and witnesses against Trump in his impeachment trials and the hearings concerning the events of January 6, 2021.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) told Raw Story: “His hit list is a vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans and a clear and present danger to the survival of American democracy and freedom.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Raiklin said the list was just the beginning. “This is the scratching of the surface of who is going to be criminalized for their treason, okay?”
Former president Donald Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, has tried to distance himself from the radical extremist blueprint outlined in Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation. Today, videos surfaced of Trump cheering the project on from the start. At a Heritage Foundation dinner in 2022, Trump, slurring his words, said: “Our country is going to hell…. This is a great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do…when the American people give us a colossal mandate to save America. And that’s coming.”
On a right-wing podcast yesterday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said that Trump’s agenda and Project 2025 have “tremendous” overlap. “There are some quibbles and differences of opinion here and there, which not only is okay, but it’s actually good,” Roberts said. “I mean, we’re gonna be able to sort those out once the presidential administration declares what their priorities are.” He said that Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the project was “a political tactical decision.” Media Matters uncovered a video in which Project 2025 director Paul Dans said that Trump is “very bought in with this.”
The Heritage Foundation, the key author of Project 2025, is a sponsor of the Republican National Convention.
Today the Heritage Foundation preemptively accused the Biden administration of cheating in the 2024 election and warned that Biden might try to hold the White House “by force.” It said that Biden and his administration could “circumvent constitutional limits and disregard the will of the voters should they demand a new president.”
There is no indication that Biden, who has repeatedly said he will accept the election results, will try to launch a coup against the United States government. In contrast, Trump, who has refused to say he will accept the election result unless he agrees with it, has already done exactly what Heritage is trying to pin on Biden: Trump tried to stay in office against the will of the voters in 2021.
Trump is currently under criminal indictment for that attempt, although the Supreme Court’s eye-popping July 1 decision in Trump v. U.S. declaring that a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties” means Trump can challenge those indictments. Indeed, in the wake of that decision, Trump’s lawyers have filed a motion to vacate the jury’s conviction of Trump on 34 felony counts related to the falsification of business records in his attempt to skew the 2016 election, and to dismiss the indictment.
While the U.S. and our allies celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Erin Banco of Politico reported yesterday that Trump advisors have told foreign officials that Trump plans to scale back U.S. cooperation and support for NATO, including reducing the sharing of intelligence with NATO countries.
This seems likely to be related to the news that the U.S. intelligence discovered a series of Russian plots to assassinate executives from European defense companies that are supplying arms to Ukraine. Americans took that intelligence to Germany and foiled a Russian plot to kill the chief executive officer of a German arms manufacturer.
During the NATO summit, he’s also edged closer to Hungary’s Viktor Orban. Orban did not meet with President Biden, but he scuttled down to Flordia to chat with Donald. No doubt, he’s passing on what Putin wants Donald to know and do. This is from Marcie at Empty Wheel. TRUMP MAY ATTEMPT TO DISAVOW PROJECT 2025 — BUT HE’S NOT DISAVOWING VIKTOR ORBÁN. Just so you know, Kansas is larger than Hungary. Hungary is about 2.3 times smaller than Kansas.
Kansas is approximately 211,900 sq km, while Hungary is approximately 93,028 sq km, making Hungary 43.9% the size of Kansas. Meanwhile, the population of Kansas is ~2.9 million people (6.8 million more people live in Hungary). That’s about the Population of Houston.
Project 2025 is the American instantiation of a authoritarianism adopted from Viktor Orbán, right along with his apology for Russia.
As Casey Michel laid out in the New Republic in March, Orbán has been using the Heritage Foundation as a beachhead to sustain Hungary’s influence operations during the Biden Administration.
Enter the Heritage Foundation. While Heritage grew to prominence in the 1980s as a font of Reaganite policy, in recent years the organization has undergone a monumental shift in terms of both policy and priorities. Rather than persist in its stolid dedication to conservative values, Heritage has swung in a far more reactionary—and far more authoritarian—direction in recent years. Across the policy landscape, Heritage has become little more than an intellectual breeding ground for Trumpist ideas.
While much attention has understandably focused on Heritage’s so-called “Project 2025,” which provides a roadmap for Trump to seize as much power as he can, such a shift has extended to foreign policy. This has been seen most especially in Heritage leading the effort to gut funding for Ukraine. But it’s also evident in the way Heritage has endeavored to anchor its relations with Orbán, making Budapest once more America’s preferred partner in Europe—regardless of the cost.
Much of that shift is downstream from Heritage’s leadership, overseen by Kevin Roberts. Appointed as Heritage’s president in 2021, Roberts immediately began remaking Heritage’s priorities with a distinctly pro-Orbán bent—and began opening up Heritage as a vehicle for Hungarian influence in the U.S.
Part of that involved things like last week’s confab, one of many meetings between Roberts and Orbán. (After one 2022 sit-down, Roberts—who, among other things, has said he doesn’t think Joe Biden won the 2020 election—posted that it was an “honor” to meet with Orbán, praising his “movement that fights for Truth, for tradition, for families.”) But the relationship is structural as well: Heritage finalized what they refer to as a ‘landmark’ cooperation agreement with the Danube Institute, a Hungarian think tank that appears to exist only to praise Orbán’s government.*
The Budapest-based Danube Institute is largely unknown in the U.S., but it has transformed in recent years into one of the premier mouthpieces for propagating Orbánist policies. While it is technically independent, it is, as Jacob Heilbrunn notes in his new book on the American right’s infatuation with dictators, located “next to the prime minister’s building and funded by Orbán’s Fidesz party.” Indeed, the Hungarian think tank is overseen by a foundation directly bankrolled by the Hungarian state—meaning that the Danube Institute is, for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.
[snip]
Most important, however, is the man currently running the Danube Institute: John O’Sullivan, a British conservative who once served as the director of studies at—you guessed it—the Heritage Foundation. “With his extensive connections in the conservative universe, [O’Sullivan] became Orbán’s conduit to the American Right,” Heilbrunn noted.
Unsurprisingly, the key to O’Sullivan’s and the Danube Institute’s outreach to American conservatives has been the Heritage Foundation. A post in early 2023 from the Hungarian Conservative noted that the Danube Institute and the Heritage Foundation had “signed a landmark cooperation agreement, deepening Hungary’s transatlantic relations.”
Trump may be disavowing Project 2025 — or attempting to. But he’s not disavowing Orbán.
On the contrary, he and Orbán seem intent to run, hand in hand, to clothe a Transatlantic authoritarianism in the face of Christian nationalism.
Here’s a good reference to figure out what exactly Project 2025 is.
Recently, it’s been encouraging to see so many Americans waking up to the danger of Project 2025. Celebrities such as Taraji P. Henson, who spoke repeatedly about it during the recent Black Entertainment Television awards, as well as a grassroots effort on social media to raise awareness, have caused Google searches for Project 2025 to soar, with recent searches eclipsing even Taylor Swift.
Public awareness is important because polls have shown that the more people learn about Project 2025, the higher its negatives grow. Opposition among independents soars from net -15 to -66 according to polling and research by Navigator. Among all voters, the trend is also clear.
The more Trump is tied to Project 2025, the more likely voters will reject the two of them together. Perhaps this is why Trump has sought to distance himself from the people behind the project—even though nearly all of them have ties to the first Trump administration.
We need to all be talking more about this and hanging it around Donald’s turkey neck, along with his gobbledygook moments.
So, that’s a lot of to you to read. We’re still here trying to inform everyone who wants to keep the good life. My granddaughters turn 3 next week. I definitely do not want Project 2025 to rule their future. We have enough stuff to take out with the damage from the Supreme Court MAGATs. Have a peaceful and pleasant weekend.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
jjlo
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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