Representation does matter. If we do manage to get the first woman, Black, Vice President in American history it will be a banner day for America.
But at the same time it says something so very sad and depressing that it’s been so fucking hard to get there.
Oh look, Bill Barr’s civil rights division has pulled back from observing elections for compliance with voting rights laws. Surprise!
I wouldn’t be surprised to see them intervene to ensure that white people are given the opportunity to cut in line.
I’ve written more about Bill Barr in the last two years than anyone except for Donald Trump. He is the worst Attorney General in history and that’s including John Mitchell and Ed Meese, both of whom were epic criminal ideologues. But Barr takes the award. His manipulation of the Mueller Report alone was an act of utter betrayal. And there is so much more.
John Oliver did a great piece last night on Barr that’s well worth watching. He wants to serve another term under Donald Trump. Even if there weren’t 10, 000 other reasons to rid this country of that miscreant, this would be enough. Bill Barr is a dangerous, dangerous man:
This is a very good ad:
Eminem, an artist who’s long been guarded about licensing his music, has a career first: He has provided a song — his signature song — to a political candidate.
The Detroit rapper’s “Lose Yourself” is the soundtrack to a new spot from the Joe Biden presidential campaign, a 45-second get-out-the-vote push that arrives just ahead of Election Day. Released online early Monday, the ad, titled “One Opportunity,” features black-and-white footage from locales across the U.S., including Detroit and a recent Biden visit to the Michigan State Fairgrounds.
The ad is interspersed with the message “VOTE” amid the familiar urgent beat of “Lose Yourself” and Eminem’s motivational lyrics: “If you had one shot or one opportunity …”
In providing his song to the Biden campaign, Eminem is essentially giving his official endorsement to the Democratic presidential candidate and running mate Kamala Harris.
The rapper certainly hasn’t been shy about politics through his career, whether bashing then-President George W. Bush via the 2004 song “Mosh” or famously bashing President Donald Trump on freestyles and album tracks.
But the Biden ad marks the first time the 48-year-old star has licensed one of his songs to a political candidate — and indeed, one of the rare instances Eminem has granted a clearance for any type of outside use.
If you are a Democrat watching the polls this weekend and seeing millions of voters standing in line to vote in unprecedented numbers, you should start to feel pretty good about this election. Joe Biden has somewhere around an 8- to 10-point lead nationally and is either within striking distance or ahead in the battleground states, along with a few others that nobody thought would be on the board. If this were a normal election, I think Democrats would be feeling optimistic right now.
But they’re not, and there’s good reason for it. And that reason is not just the semi-joking “2016 PTSD” which everyone says was so damaging that the nervous Nellies can’t allow themselves to look at data rationally. I’m sure there’s a bit of that. I too am having flashbacks of that awful night when I saw Florida called for Trump and then sat there while one battleground state after another went his way. It was a nightmare I won’t soon forget.
But the real reason Democrats are having massive anxiety attacks is that Trump has made clear that he has no intention of accepting the election results if they don’t go his way. He and his henchmen plan to follow through with their plan to contest absentee mail-in ballots that received after Election Day — and possibly, if Trump is to be believed, contest the idea that ballots can even be counted after Election Day.
Speaking of the recent decision to allow mail-in ballots that arrive after the election to be counted in Pennsylvania, Trump said, “I don’t know if that’s gonna be changed …” In the case he’s complaining about, the Supreme Court merely agreed not to make a hasty decision before the election, pointedly leaving the issue hanging to such an extent that the state has told local election officials to set aside any ballots that arrive after Election Day, in case they will have to be discarded.
Jonathan Swan at Axios reported on Sunday that “Trump has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s ‘ahead.'” Evidently, this isn’t just Trump running his mouth at his rallies, and his team has been strategizing this seriously for several months. His top lieutenant Jason Miller appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and explained their logic:
According to Swan, Trump’s campaign is particularly focused on Pennsylvania because his brain trust expects that he may be ahead in the election night tally, and Trump’s discussion suggests that’s where they plan to make their stand. But as Trump seemed to acknowledge in his “chopper talk” on Sunday, the polls show a close race in a number of other states that Trump will need to win as well, meaning they could try to contest the results in states like Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Florida, and possibly even Ohio and Iowa. They seem prepared to do all of that if that’s what it takes.
Ben Ginsberg is perhaps the most famous Republican election lawyer of the past 40 years — and he’s appalled. He wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday that Trump’s campaign is floundering and “his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters” which he calls “un-American.” Moreover, speaking as someone with vast experience in the field litigating cases for GOP candidates, Ginsberg declares:
Proof of systematic [voter] fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.
Donald Trump, of course, doesn’t listen to experts unless they tell him what he wants to hear. Neither do his followers, who have watched the election campaign unfold on Fox News, which tells them that Trump is winning. As CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote in his newsletter, this is an important component of Trump’s plan:
Fox’s coverage is one of the reasons why Trump’s base might believe that any Biden victory is a fraud, a crime, a hoax. For all the talk of anxious Democrats refusing to believe the polls, there are lots of aggrieved Republicans who feel the same way, due to distorted right-wing media coverage. That’s the Fox factor …
Trump said in his comments on Sunday, “I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. It think it’s a terrible thing that states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after an election is over because it can only lead to one thing and that’s very bad and you know what that one thing is … and I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election on election night. We’re gonna go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers.”
This is, of course, absurd, but he seems to be intent upon pushing this idea that TV should project a winner and then all vote-counting should stop. It’s hard to imagine even this hyper-partisan Supreme Court going along with this, even if Justice Brett Kavanaugh hinted that he was sympathetic to the idea in his opinion in a case in Wisconsin. These are the real counting deadlines, set by law:
Election Day: November 3.
Deadline for states to finish counting votes: November 5–December 8 (it varies by state).
Electoral College votes: December 14.
Congress certifies the Electoral College vote: January 6.
There is ample evidence, that at least four Supreme Court justices are willing to throw away mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but received later, despite the fact that numerous states have long allowed such votes to be counted. It seems like a stretch, but that’s likely why Trump is riling up his base to create an atmosphere of chaos and crisis. It’s a not-so-subtle tactic that’s worked before:
According to Politico, Trump is planning to hold rallies in swing states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina “even as election officials continue to count ballots,” in order to let the president “fire off about the election to crowds.” I wonder what the purpose of that might be?
None of this may come to pass, or at least not in a way that changes the outcome of the election. A lot of what Team Trump is doing can be seen as hype to get their voters out and work the refs, meaning the media, state officials and the federal judiciary. Whether Trump is able to seriously contest the election results will remain unclear until we see how the votes come in, but there’s every indication that when he told some of his extremist fans to “stand by,” they heard him loud and clear.
Let’s hope that the results are decisive and that Trump is persuaded to behave like a mature, responsible leader for once. It would be a welcome irony if the night he loses the election is the night he finally does become a president.
I’m watching the cable news people get a little bit too excited about their “maps” and they’re hyping the election horse race in ways that I think are destructive. This is not going to be a normal election. We are voting in a pandemic with a massive number of mail-in and early votes making the count necessarily longer in many states, a corrupt president trying to hold on by any means necessary and a judicial system that has been purposefully tilted to the right for just this moment. The media must resist falling back into old habits.
Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post:
Almost two months before the 2016 presidential election, Dave Wasserman, an editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, wrote a prescient piece.
The headline? “How Trump Could Win the White House While Losing the Popular Vote.”
Of course, Wasserman wasn’t alone in foreseeing what eventually came to pass. But he was in a minority. Most journalists and numbers-crunchers assumed that Hillary Clinton was an exceedingly good bet to make history as the first female president. Given his proven powers to anticipate the future, it’s instructive to note what Wasserman is worried about now, in an even more consequential moment.
“The political version of hell is scheduled for next Wednesday,” he predicted, “when Dems are freaking out (and GOPers rejoicing) over vote totals that show Trump with large leads in Upper Midwestern states — but it’s a mirage because millions of mail ballots have yet to be counted.”
The “mirage” could turn into a constitutional crisis if President Trump falsely challenges the lagging mail ballots as illegitimate — he’s laid all the groundwork for just that — and provokes mayhem within his base. (Mailed votes may be of greater benefit to his challenger, Joe Biden, because more Democrats were among those requesting the ballots.)
At that point, it could become not just a political version of hell but an almost literal one.
Note, too, that Wasserman is talking about Wednesday — not about Tuesday night, when a polarized nation of Americans, who may not have been paying all that much attention to the details of the presidential election, finally tunes in to find out the definitive answer to the big question.
But any answer that arises on Tuesday night — or maybe far beyond — could be misleading, incomplete or just plain unavailable.
“The public has been conditioned to expect a winner within hours of the polls closing, but the numbers collected on election night are not necessarily decisive,” wrote veteran news executive Vivian Schiller in Columbia Journalism Review. She and Garrett Graff, the former editor of Politico Magazine, offer 10 recommendations for journalists, based on discussions at the Aspen Institute, where they both now work.
At least one of their pieces of advice seems close to impossible for the mainstream media, as we’ve come to know and love it, to ever achieve: “Don’t parrot premature claims of victory.”
Journalists at this fraught moment carry a heavy burden to do something that is not in their nature: to be patient, to linger with the uncertainty and to explain relentlessly rather than join a rush to judgment.
“This is a watershed moment for American journalism,” Alan Miller, founder of the News Literacy Project, recently wrote. “The stakes for democracy are sky-high.”
Network anchors, both broadcast and cable, will carry a particularly key responsibility. As Miller, a Pulitzer-winning former investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, puts it: “They need to provide contextual reporting and analysis, explaining that delay does not necessarily signal dysfunction and careful counting does not automatically suggest corruption.”
Just as important, though, will be those who run the network and wire service “decision desks,” which determine whether to “call” a particular state as having been won by one candidate or the other. Fox News — somewhat surprisingly, given its longtime conservative and now extremely pro-Trump bent — has one of the most trustworthy of these. And in this moment, the pressures will be great on Fox News’s in-house deciders.
One of the trickiest tests is that journalists — especially political reporters — have been immersed in this subject for months, even years. They understand very well that the extraordinary number of mail-in ballots brings a particular challenge; in some states, election officials can’t start counting them until Election Day. Journalists have also been keeping track of the various court decisions, including ones in swing states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, that could have profound effects on which ballots are counted and when.
But most Americans, even if they care deeply about the election’s outcome, probably haven’t followed those ins and outs. As in the 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore, they just want to know who won.
Paradoxically, it’s that long-fought 2000 aftermath, and the 2016 outcome that stunned so many, that gives me some optimism about how journalists will handle this. (At least those who work for the reality-based press; I hold out no such hope for Fox News’s Sean Hannity and others of his Trump-cheering ilk.)
Plenty of journalists — and I include myself — remember all too well what it’s like to be wrong.
More recently, the cable-news crowd, in particular, should recall the confident declarations of “no blue wave” in the early coverage of the House of Representatives midterm elections in 2018.
Scarred by those misjudgments, journalists and news organizations may be feeling particularly cautious. I sure hope so.
We have our failings, as the past few years clearly testify. But not many of us want to go down in history as a cause, however minor, of American democracy unraveling.
Decades ago, CBS anchor Dan Rather would utter the word “courage” as he wrapped up his evening newscast. As Tuesday approaches, I’ll urge a different virtue, both for those who transmit the news and those who consume it:
Patience.
I’m not seeing a lot of evidence of that in the run-up. Let’s hope they calm down.
We are not out of the woods by a long shot. But Cook Political’s Dave Wasserman believes the election has the potential to be a landslide.
The House looks good too. Particular Senate races will be nail-biters.
But this is just trolling. FiveThirtyEight gives Trump a 10% chance of winning the election. Biden gets 90. So what does ABC want to ask about?
Yeah, what if that 10% chance comes through? The media needs a horse race.
You’ve heard fear has a smell? It also has a sound. It sounds like this:
The sound is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, and furthermore terrible.
It is the sound of a man who mistakes himself for a king, a would-be king who fears the voice of the governed, who sees the law not as a vehicle for justice but as a weapon to smite his enemies. Over 93 million Americans voted in this election to date, hoping their voices will be heard by politicians like him who prefer hearing only their own voices.
The New York Times Editorial Board observes that, in New York City alone, a “decrepit, incompetent, self-dealing board of elections” has long made having their voices heard a challenge there. Yes, there is a “but”:
But across the country, the group most responsible for making voting harder, if not impossible, for millions of Americans is the Republican Party. Republicans have been saying it themselves for ages. “I don’t want everybody to vote,” Paul Weyrich, a leader of the modern conservative movement, told a gathering of religious leaders in 1980. “As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”
This strategy has become a central pillar of the G.O.P. platform. It is behind the party’s relentless push for certain state laws and practices — like strict voter-identification requirements and targeted voter purges — that claim to be about preserving electoral integrity but are in fact about suppressing turnout and voting among groups that lean Democratic.
The strategy also is behind the partisan gerrymandering that Republican state lawmakers have mastered over the past decade, redrawing district lines to keep themselves in power even when they lose a majority of the statewide vote. (Democrats gerrymander when they can, too, but the most egregious examples of the past decade have been by Republicans.)
The Times offers more examples and adds:
Representative democracy works only when a large majority of people participate in choosing their representatives. That can happen only when those in power agree that voting should be as easy and widely available as possible. Yet today, one of the two major political parties is convinced it cannot win on a level playing field — and will not even try.
Ya think? Sunday night, election law expert Rick Hasen began a list of ways Republicans have work against making voting easier and safer during this election. He was up to 16 the last I looked. There is almost no end to ways the G.O.P. works to suppress the vote and/or ensure Democratic voters do not see representation proportional to their votes. I recently counted 20 tactics. Ari Berman counts 29.
To borrow an expression, this is not a voting accident!
Amidst a deadly pandemic Trump refuses to tackle, with already 230,000 dead and no end in sight so long as he occupies the Oval Office, Americans— real-American Real Americans — have had enough (Washington Post):
Millions of Americans have also wanted to be heard. In a year when the act of voting felt more precarious than ever, more than 93 million had voted in the 2020 election by Sunday, casting their ballots early or by mail in record numbers in virtually every state in the nation. Tens of millions more will don masks, and in many places warm clothes, to vote the old-fashioned way — in person, on Election Day. They’ll do it despite — and in many cases, because of — the isolation and obstacles of this unusual year.
Those who have voted have lost jobs or loved ones to the pandemic or have battled the coronavirus themselves. They have withstood rain and heat and lines that lasted from morning until dark to register their electoral choices, risked exposure to the virus and navigated dizzying rule changes about signature requirements and drop boxes and ballot envelopes. They have been inundated with unsubstantiated attacks by President Trump on the integrity of the election.
Bitterly ironic, isn’t it, coming from a man who has none?
The Post credits the “unseen labor of thousands of state and county election administrators” who organize and oversee our elections with dedication and integrity. Local Republicans and Democrats alike, with little power of their own, do this work because they believe deeply in the democratic process whether or not they approve the outcome. Few know who they are or appreciate the work they do. Certainly not Donald Trump who has declared their work criminal if what he hears displeases him.
What I wrote after the Super Tuesday primaries bears repeating before Election Day 2020 tomorrow:
There were six peopIe working my little precinct on March 3. There are 80 precincts in Buncombe County. In North Carolina there are 2,670 precincts spread among 100 counties, plus the staffs and county boards in each and the state Board of Elections team in the capitol. That’s an army division mobilized for one day to make democracy possible — in one state of which there are 50. Plus the territories and the District of Columbia. And 3,142 counties and county equivalents in the 50 states.
You don’t have to do the math. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has done it for you. “During the 2016 elections,” the EAC website reports, “local election officials operated 116,990 polling places, including 8,616 early voting locations, across the country. These polling sites were operated by 917,694 poll workers.” That’s about 75% the size of the U.S. Army in 2016 mobilized for a single day, yet invisible to the typical voter. They see the same handful of retirees each election day and give no thought to the massive logistical effort behind them.
Republicans in leadership and Dear Leader himself have no respect for that if election workers will not bend the results to their liking. Those who would lead the world’s longest-enduring democracy declare it openly.
The foul may cry foul but the people will be heard.
Another Trump caravan tied up traffic for miles in New Jersey today. And threats against a Biden rally in Georgia caused it to be cancelled today.
In case you missed it:
This piece by Michael Kruse is one of the most interesting pieces I’ve read about Donald Trump during the interminable five years that he has been at the center of everyone’s nightmares. After I was done with it, I was struck by the fact that while he is obviously a very seriously psychologically damaged person, the model he has shown to America — or, more accurately, reflected about America — is the model of a deeply unethical, immoral faction of our fellow citizens. That 40-45% of Americans admire this monstrous demagogue is extremely worrying:
It has been well-documented that the 45th president operates with evident disregard for norms and rules. But over the past 5 ½ years of reporting I have determined that he abides by a firm code of conduct as predictable as it is confounding. In more than 60 stories in the Politico Magazine oeuvre that came to be known as “Trumpology,” I documented how his unswerving allegiance to a certain set of principles, unprincipled as they might seem to some, elevated him to the pinnacle of global power. If widespread polling holds true on Election Day, these same traits and tics, and rock-ribbed beliefs, might also be the reasons he’s ousted from office.
Much has been made recently of this election as a referendum on the president not just as a politician with a set of policies, but as a person. This list—compiled using excerpts from my pieces and my interviews with sources who have known him most of his life—is the distillation of his worldview, a condensed sketch of Donald Trump as a man. And no matter what happens, and whether or not he retains his grip on the White House or decamps in defeat to Mar-a-Lago, these truths will continue to guide his behavior—and the way we perceive it.
1. Attention is power
“He is of the mindset,” according to the late Jim Dowd, who did public relations for Trump, “that the more his name is dropped, the more a kind of hypnosis, for lack of a better word, there is to the American public.” “If people pay attention, that’s what matters,” Trump once said. “You can be a horrible human being, you can be a truly terrible person, but if you get ratings, you are a king.” The central gambit of Trump’s entire life is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity—“that,” as I once wrote, “if you’re watching, he’s winning.”
2. Words don’t matter
“He’s always understood it,” Roger Stone once told me. “That how you look is more important than how you sound. How you come across is more important than the words you use.”
3. Everything’s a show
“Donald Trump is the host of his own show,” longtime Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf once told me. “A performance artist,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said. “He sees himself as a Broadway character,” former “Apprentice” contestant Sam Solovey said. He’d “stage-managed Miss Universe,” Newt Gingrich said. “He’d stage-managed professional wrestling.”
4. People are props
Men? “Central casting.” Women? “Accessories to his brand.”
5. The crowd knows
“He’s not a book-reader so much as a room-reader,” I wrote; “an instinctual gauger and tweaker and torquer of crowds,” I wrote. Crowds, for him, are “rolling, roiling, visceral focus groups.”
6. Conflict is the key
“Trump’s energy,” a former close associate told me, “comes from conflict.”
7. Nothing motivates like fear
And he is a product of New York of the ’70s and ’80s:
Trump, who in the ’70s had identified the city’s insecurity and fear and found a way to benefit from it, now tried to do so again. He paid a reported $85,000 to put in four New York newspapers a full-page ad that called for the death penalty. “What has happened to our City?” he wrote in the ad. “What has happened to the respect for authority, the fear of retribution by the courts, society and the police for those who break the law, who wantonly trespass on the rights of others? What has happened is the complete breakdown of life as we knew it.” He seethed about “roving bands of wild criminals” and “crazed misfits” and longed for a time when he was a boy, when cops in the city roughed up “thugs” to give people like him “the feeling of security.” …“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts,” Trump said in the ad. “I do not think so. I want to hate.”
8. Division works
And politics, in the estimation of Stone, Trump’s longest-running, off-and-on adviser, is a Machiavellian combination of showmanship and combat—not about “uniting people” but about “dividing people.”
9. Life’s a fight
It’s one of his most consistent convictions:
That Trump would so quickly in the wake of the Mueller investigation commit a brazen act some critics say representsan egregious and impeachable abuse of power has mystified many observers. How could he have so blithely ignored the lessons of the nearly three-year investigation? But those who know him best say this is merely the latest episode in a lifelong pattern of behavior for the congenitally combative Trump. He’s always been this way. He doesn’t stop to reflect. If he wins, he barely basks. If he loses, he doesn’t take the time to lie low or lick wounds. … Regardless of the outcome—up, down or somewhere in between—when one tussle is done, Trump reflexively starts to scan the horizon in search of a new skirmish. “The discomfort he feels in the moment of peace that follows a victory is so intense that he will do whatever it takes to find new fights,” biographer Michael D’Antonio told me.
10. Chaos is fuel
“The prince of chaos,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me. “Chaos creates drama, and drama gets ink,” former Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg explained. “This is a new kind of presidency. He’s followed the tabloid model, and it got him to where he is, and it’s the model that will be followed until it doesn’t work. And it has worked. He’s sitting in the Oval Office.”
11. There’s no such thing as going too far
Even if it’s not always helpful:
When Trump is riding highest, he is simultaneously at his most manic and self-destructive. He overreaches and oversells. He doubles down. In the arc of Trump’s life, from his fevered buying spree in 1988 in the wake of the fame-spiking sales of The Art of the Deal to his wild couple of years in the aftermath of the image-laundering launch of “The Apprentice” to his rowdy and improbable political ascent, the craters of his most marked failures follow closely on his most consequential successes. He is this way, say people who know him well, because of his unshakable self-assurance and nerve but also because of his insatiable appetite for attention and conflict.
“It’s true of everything he goes into,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “He will hunker down and do something well—and then he thinks he’s Zeus.” And that’s when the trouble starts. “Because he’s not Zeus.”
12. Bigger is always better
In the ’80s, on the Upper West Side, he wanted to build a “mammoth mall” and a “giant garage” and apartments “above the clouds.” “New Yorkers want to have the world’s tallest building,” he said. “And frankly, so do I.”
13. The answer to any problem is always more Trump.
It’s part of how the Trump show gets old: Even as its numbers dipped, heinsisted [“The Apprentice”] was still on top; he picked fights with critics and blamed others; and maybe most notably, he took on an even bigger role. Rewatching the show’s first season, he is the star—no question about that—but it’s surprising how infrequently he appears; he introduces the tasks, and then mostly vanishes as his teams bicker and compete until the climactic boardroom scenes when he fires somebody. But in the second season, things change. There’s less team, more Trump. He makes more appearances in the middle, and the boardroom scenes are longer. And it’s not only that he’s there more. The volume is turned up. He’s meaner. More performative. There are more soaring shots of his plane. More over-the-top shots of his scowl. It’s hard to quantify, but it’s hard to miss, too.14. Exhaust the enemy
“He sues,” former Trump Organization executive vice president Barbara Res told me. “He uses it to wear people out, whether it’s financially or emotionally,” former Trump casino executive Jack O’Donnell told me. “Did he learn from the Television City debacle that he shouldn’t get too big, too fast, too loud? No,” Brendan Sexton, a former president of New York’s Municipal Art Society, told me. “Maybe what he learned is … think big, talk big, make a big splash. And let the other guys fight to keep up with him.”15. It’s good to be selfish
“He’s not going to be that concerned with the actual competent administration of the government,” Michael D’Antonio said days before his inauguration. “It’s going to be what he seems to be gaining or losing in public esteem.” “More than any person I’ve ever met, he’s focused on how things impact him,” former Trump Shuttle president Bruce Nobles told me.16. Altruism is for losers
It’s on the long list of lessons he learned from his two most important mentors: What Fred Trump and Roy Cohn had in common was their deep immersion in patronage politics—old-school, clubhouse-style favor-trading, used to grasp private gain under the guise of public good. “You take care of the boss and the boss takes care of you,” as veteran New York political operative Hank Sheinkopf described it to me. Operating within the Democratic machines of Brooklyn and Queens, Fred Trump for decades made shrewd connections and large, dutiful donations in exchange for preference in properties, pricing and zoning. And Cohn? Cohn was a virtuoso in “the trade of human calculus,” his biographer wrote, “of deal making, swapping, maneuver, and manipulation.” Watching and emulating these two, the canny younger Trump reportedly looked, too, to fabled Brooklyn boss Meade Esposito as a model. Esposito once was caught by an FBI wiretap saying there should have been an 11th Commandment: “Think of Thyself.”
17. Trusting is for losers
“There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former associate told me. Trump has a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal” and “cruel.” Through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big. “They want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife.”18. Loyalty is for losers
“Despite Trump’s protestations about the utmost importance of loyalty, biographers and others have said his notion of the concept evokes a cross between the Mafia and the urban political machines of the past,” I once wrote. “You take care of the boss, and the boss takes care of you,” as Sheinkopf put it. Trump’s definition of loyalty is, and always has been, the opposite of complicated, according to those who know him the best. “Support Donald Trump in anything he says and does,” in Stone’s words. “I never particularly thought,” Nobles told me, “that he was loyal to … anybody.”19. Taking blame? For losers
“He won’t say anything that happened was his fault,” longtime New York public relations expert Paul Holmes told me. “Every failure he’s ever had,” O’Brien said, “he has blamed it on outside forces.”20. Losing is for losers
It’s how he succeeds without succeeding: He flopped as the owner of a professional football team, effectively killing not only his own franchise but the league as a whole. He blew up his first marriage, married his mistress, and then divorced her, too. He bankrupted his casinos five times over the course of nearly 20 years. His eponymous airline existed for less than three years and ended up almost a quarter of a billion dollars in debt. And he has slapped his surname on a practically never-ending sequence of duds and scams (Trump Ice bottled water, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump University—for which he settled a class-action fraud lawsuit [in 2017] for $25 million). Other risk-taking businessmen might periodically cop to falling short while pivoting to what’s next. Not Trump. He has dealt with his roster of losses largely by refusing to acknowledge them as anything other than wins.“If you knock Donald on his ass, he will tell you the best position to be in is on your ass,” a former Trump Organization executive told me. “He knows of no other way,” former New York Daily News writer George Rush told me, “and that is to spin until he’s woven some gossamer fabric out of”—he searched for the right word—“garbage.”
“My main purpose in life is to keep winning,” Trump once said. “And the reason for that is simple: If I don’t win, I don’t get to fight the next battle.”
There are 25 more insights on page 2, all them spot on. It’s is just shocking that such a demented person could assume power in the first place. But as I said, it’s even more shocking that so many people admire him.
President Trump has told confidants he’ll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he’s “ahead,” according to three sources familiar with his private comments.
That’s even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.
Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.
Trump’s team is preparing to falsely claim that mail-in ballots counted after Nov. 3 — a legitimate count expected to favor Democrats — are evidence of election fraud.
Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state’s final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.Trump’s team is preparing to claim baselessly that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have “stolen” the election.
Trump’s advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions.
Asked for comment, the Trump campaign’s communications director Tim Murtaugh said, “This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he’s going to say so.”Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller predicted that Trump “will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results.”
Mail-in ballots counted after Election Day as set forth in state-by-state rules are as legitimate as in-person votes recorded on Nov. 3.Many states won’t be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night.
In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.
Night-of counts may be deceptive. It could be days, if not weeks, before we know who won Pennsylvania. If it’s a close race this could also be true for other states, given the record numbers of Americans who voted by mail this year.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” today that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, “so, yes, it will take longer” to count.
“I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that’s mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days,” Boockvar said.
Miller, on ABC’s “This Week,” predicted 290+ electoral votes for Trump on election night, and claimed Democrats are “just going to try to steal it back after the election.”He described any prospective challenges by Democrats as “hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense.”
Trump advisers are more optimistic about winning than they were three weeks ago, based on my conversations with multiple senior campaign officials over the past week, including two officials with direct knowledge of sensitive internal data.They said analyses of early-vote totals in battleground states indicate he’s doing substantially worse in Iowa and Georgia compared with this point in 2016, but better than expected in Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin.
Just a few weeks ago, senior Trump advisers were bearish about Wisconsin and had reduced TV advertising there to an insignificant figure. A senior campaign official told me, then, that the state didn’t figure in his paths to 270 electoral votes.
But that appears to have changed. In recent days, senior Trump advisers have privately expressed growing optimism about Wisconsin, based on their analysis of early vote data.
I’m fairly sure these “advisers” are lying about what they’re seeing in the polls Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin. That’s a pretty crude fake out. And they aren’t being subtle about how they plan to do it.
Their strategy is to steal it declaring victory and then filing cases wherever it’s close to challenge votes counted after election day. And since Trump is planning to do rallies after election day I think we have to prepare for him to be ginning up violence by his followers. Why else would he do that?
