When former President Donald J. Trump walked onto the stage at his rally in Atlanta on Saturday, fog machines shot white plumes of smoke into the air, heralding his arrival.
If you looked closely, you could almost imagine steam pouring out of his ears, too. All week long, something had been giving him the vapors.
“Crazy Kamala,” he fumed a minute into his speech. “She was here a week ago — lots of empty seats — but the crowd she got was because she had entertainers.”
Four days earlier, Vice President Kamala Harris had packed about the same number of people (10,000) into the arena, the Georgia State University Convocation Center. It was the first major rally of her newborn campaign, and she had two rappers (Quavo and Megan Thee Stallion) on hand to hype up her crowd.
Mr. Trump, who has been shunned by much of the entertainment industry, spun this as somehow cheating in the all-important competition over crowd size.
“I don’t need entertainers,” he said on Saturday. “I fill the stadium because I’m making America great again.”
Actually, Trump’s crowds have thinned over the years. Sure he has a hard core cult of Trump Deadheads. But he doesn’t draw like he used to. It was certainly thinner in Atlanta.
Mr. Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people. “We have beautiful cameras set up for the overflow crowds,” he said. A massive screen flashed to a live video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-degree heat.
In Mr. Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” he said. […]
Thirty minutes into his speech, he became distracted again by the seating: “There’s some seats right up there — they could let them come in.”
He complained about the venue to Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Republican of Georgia, who was sitting in the front row: “It’s obviously, Marjorie, a very liberal school, I guess, right? I’m not happy with the school.” He claimed that “they don’t want to show that we’re successful.”
And then he was back, once again, on Ms. Harris and her crowd size. “She has to go get entertainers,” he repeated. “They start leaving as soon as she opens her mouth.”
[…]
Still, an hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual. (Like Madonna, he often keeps his crowds waiting for an hour or more past the scheduled start time, which doesn’t help the situation.) Large splotches of blue had blossomed across the upper stands, and people on the floor had started to sneak away, too.
That’s because he’s incredibly boring.
Trump truly believes that his crowd sizes are indicative of his popularity in the country. He says he doesn’t believe in paying for polls when you have to do is look at them to see that he’s the winner. And he lies about the numbers of course.
It appears that Harris may be able to draw in ways that Clinton and Biden were not and the direct comparison between her crowd and his in the same arena has him rattled:
But there was something about Ms. Harris’s star turn at the same arena that had unsettled Mr. Trump. He seemed to be pining for the glory days of his first campaign, back when his rollicking rallies were but a harbinger of a stunning victory to come. He said that seeing two rappers open for Ms. Harris reminded him of how Mrs. Clinton used musicians to help summon the kinds of crowds he could command with ease.
“She got the idea from Hillary,” he told his supporters. “Hillary got Bruce Springsteen, I’ll never forget, and the place was pretty full.”
“Not full like our places are full,” he quickly added. “I don’t have a guitar. But our places are bigger — we get more people than anybody. I don’t care how many guitars they have.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch is pushing back against President Joe Biden’s recent proposals to restructure the Supreme Court.
“I just say: Be careful,” Gorsuch warned in an interview that aired on “Fox News Sunday.”
Less than a week after Biden announced he was reversing course and supporting 18-year term limits for justices and legislation to create a binding ethics code for the high court, the first of President Donald Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees encouraged Americans to think long and hard before taking steps that might undermine the independence of the judicial system.
“The independent judiciary … What does it mean to you as an American?” Gorsuch asked about Biden’s new plan during an interview linked to a new book Gorsuch is releasing this week. “It means that when you’re unpopular, you can get a fair hearing.”
“If you’re in the majority, you don’t need judges and juries, to hear you, to protect your rights, if you’re popular,” Gorsuch continued. “It’s there for the moments when the spotlight’s on you — when the government’s coming after you. And don’t you want a ferociously independent judge and a jury of your peers to make those decisions?”
That’s a very odd thing to say. People in the “majority” (however that’s defined for this purpose) don’t need judges and juries to protect their rights because they’re popular? Is that how this works? That’s news to me. I thought the judiciary was there to protect the rights of everyone regardless of their relative popularity. Good to know.
Meanwhile., Judge Chutkan is right out of the gate on the J6 case via TPM:
After its ponderous sojourn at the Supreme Court, the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump was officially returned Friday to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., and she immediately picked it back up again and started moving it forward.
Among her initial actions, notably undertaken over the weekend, Chutkan:
–denied a pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on statutory grounds, but gave him the chance to re-up it once the immunity questions in the case are resolved.
–denied a pending Trump motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.
And just like that, the case was up and running again. But don’t hold your breath that this will go to trial before the election. Time is simply too short at this point.
The elephant in the room is the Supreme Court’s expansive ruling in this very case on presidential immunity, how much that narrows the indictment, what kind of evidentiary hearings Chutkan needs to address presidential immunity, and the still-unknown ways in which the high court’s unprecedented ruling effects this and the other Trump prosecutions.
Hanging over all of that will be at least one more trip to the Supreme Court to give it a chance to weigh in on whether Chutkan properly jumped through all the hoops it has put in her way. Again, there’s no way for all this to happen before Election Day.
In her order denying Trump’s motion to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution, Chutkan used some of the same direct and non-nonsense language that had marked her earlier handling of the case:
At the outset, the court must address—as it has before—Defendant’s improper reframing of the allegations against him. … At this stage, the court cannot accept Defendant’s alternate narrative.
Well!
Sadly, the Supreme Court majority seems to have decided that Trump is a persecuted minority who needs their protection so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Sure, he refused to accept the results of the election and incited an insurrection but you can’t hold him responsible because his allegedly powerful political rivals are the ones trying to hold him to it.
Musk has long been a champion of the pivot to electric vehicles. His company Tesla has largely led the way in developing the industry, which for a time made Musk a darling of the climate-conscious left.
But Musk has more recently embraced conservative politics, especially the issue of free speech. Musk bought Twitter in 2022, rebranded it to X, and has dismantled many of the checks and balances meant to limit hateful speech and misinformation on the platform.
Musk has publicly supported Trump since the assassination attempt last month. Musk, however, has denied reports that he pledged a $45 million donation to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Musk is backing a corrupt “get out the vote” PAC which is now under investigation for election interference:
Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has said he created and helped fund the America PAC, which is supporting former President Donald Trump. Musk has a net worth of over $225 billion, according to Forbes.
The committee has been acquiring detailed voter information from those living in Michigan and other battleground states after people submit their personal data through a section on the PAC’s website that says “register to vote.”
After clicking on the “register to vote” tab on America PAC’s website, users in states like Michigan can submit a ZIP code, address and phone number. People with a Michigan address are brought to a page that says “thank you” and asks users to “complete the form below” to help wrap up the voter registration process. As of Sunday afternoon, though, there was no other form to complete below the words “thank you.”
“Every citizen should know exactly how their personal information is being used by PACs, especially if an entity is claiming it will help people register to vote in Michigan or any other state,” a spokeswoman for the Michigan secretary of state’s office said in a statement to CNBC.
“While the America PAC is a federal political action committee, the Department is reviewing their activities to determine if there have been any violations of state law. We will refer potential violations to the Michigan Attorney General’s office as appropriate,” the spokeswoman added.
CNBC first reported on the group’s efforts and how the site does not directly register people to vote for those with an address in a swing state.
A person with direct knowledge of the PAC’s operations told CNBC that, at one point since the group registered with the Federal Election Commission in May, the links on the website were functioning properly — but admits now they’re not.
The group is planning to launch a new website in the coming weeks, this person explained. The person declined to be named in order to speak freely about private matters.
Five secretaries of state plan to send an open letter to billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, urging him to “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI chatbot Grok, after it shared with millions of users false information suggesting that Kamala Harris was not eligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.
The letter, spearheaded by Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and signed by his counterparts Al Schmidt of Pennsylvania, Steve Hobbs of Washington, Jocelyn Benson of Michigan and Maggie Toulouse Oliver of New Mexico, urges Musk to “immediately implement changes to X’s AI search assistant, Grok, to ensure voters have accurate information in this critical election year.”
Within hours of President Biden’s announcement that he was suspending his presidential campaign on July 21, “false information on ballot deadlines produced by Grok was shared on multiple social media platforms,” the secretaries wrote.
The secretaries cited a post from Grok that circulated after Biden stepped out of the race: “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” the post read, naming nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington.
You bet Trump is backing Elon’s company. Elon is delivering for him in a very big way.
“Here in Georgia, we’re watching as Trump and his allies prepare to sabotage the 2024 election by changing the rules around certification election results,” tweeted Max Flugrath on Sunday.
The thread by the communications director of Fair Fight Action raises the alarm over weirdness out of the ordinary for Donald Trump. At his Georgia rally on Saturday, Trump praised three Georgia State Election Board members by name.
Yesterday at Trump's Georgia rally, his lie-riddled & rambling speech had all the usual hits: false election conspiracies and attacks on VP Harris.
But one part of Trump's remarks stuck out.
And it may be a preview of his strategy in November.⬇️
It’s jarring enough that Trump name-checked these previously-obscure officials — and that they received such a warm reception from the crowd — but it’s even more concerning that he praised some of their work specifically. Trump is not a man of details. The importance of him even being aware of a rule of such election minutiae as that passed at the SEB’s last meeting is a shocking alarm bell that he and his campaign are highly aware of the mechanisms they need to employ in order to get their way in Georgia in November.
Put more simply: Trump knows about certification, and his comments Saturday night are surely reflective of a much-deeper understanding of the issue within the highest ranks of the Republican party, signaling a clear plan to weaponize certification to their greatest advantage on election night.
Of the three SEB members Trump praised — and who were apparently in the audience Saturday night — Jeffares and Johnston are confirmed election deniers, as I reported here at American Doom and for the Guardian. The third, King, is probably one as well, or is simply climbing her way up through the ranks of the Georgia Republican Party and doing whatever she’s told by her handlers in her capacity as a member of the SEB.
Flugrath again:
First, more context on the Election Board: It’s now a Trump-aligned government body. One new member is a former Republican Party operative.
Their meetings are chock full of false election conspiracy theories, many are based on Trump’s 2020 election lies.
The Georgia Republican Party & Republican National Committee emailed the GA Election Board members the text of these proposed election rule changes with talking points to use in meetings.
These proposed election rules changes effectively make the certification of election results discretionary.
But, Georgia law states that local election board officials **shall** perform their duties. Their duties are mandatory, not discretionary.
Another of the proposed election rules changes would increase workload demands on overburdened election workers, which could overwhelm county elections offices and ultimately slow down or stop the certification of the 2024 election results.
If you’re a Georgia resident & think these election rule changes are dangerous, please consider emailing a public comment of the GA State Election Board.
The deadline for accepting public comments is before 12:00 PM tomorrow, August 5th: SEBPublicComments@sos.ga.gov
Let’s not forget, in 2020, a Coffee County, GA elections official delayed certification of President Joe Biden’s victory, refusing to validate recount results and using MAGA-backed election conspiracies as the reason.
In the wake of Fulton County’s 2024 primary, Fulton County Election Board member Julie Adams filed a lawsuit to enable local elections officials to refuse certification.
Adams is connected to the Election Integrity Network, founded by Trump ally Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump’s infamous ‘find me votes’ call to Secretary Raffensperger.
Here in Georgia, we’re watching as Trump and his allies prepare to sabotage the 2024 election by changing the rules around certification election results.
Trump’s election sabotage plan seems more concentrated in Georgia than any other state.
If these election rule changes are approved and MAGA-aligned officials obstruct the certification of the 2024 election results, our votes are crucial.
Check your voter registrations status. Encourage friends, family, and your community to register + vote. Volunteer if you can.
Early voting starts soon, make a plan.
Consider serving as a poll worker.
Volunteer with your local/state Democratic Party’s voter protection efforts.
Our collective participation is crucial to stopping Trump’s election sabotage scheme.
If we turnout and make our voices heard at the ballot box, we can protect American democracy. But we have to show up.
Please RT this to help spread the word.🙏
Be on watch for this. Election protection attorney Marc Elias warned in the recent Rolling Stone reporting that “we are going to see mass refusals to certify the elections.” As you can see from Trump’s pleased blathering, Republicans are “counting on the fact that if they don’t certify in several small counties, you cannot certify these statewide results.”
This is not a new GOP approach to “fixing” elections. It’s an upgrade, writes Elias, to their democracy downgrade.
Democrats’ switcheroo on presidential candidates is turning more than Republican and pundit heads. On top of polling showing Vice President Kamala Harris picking up support among Black voters, The New Republic has a scoop this morning regarding growing support for Harris among Latino voters:
Harris leads Trump by 55 percent to 37 percent in the head-to-head finding, which sampled 800 Latinos across Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina. The survey—provided to The New Republic in advance of its release on Monday—was conducted July 23-26, well after Biden stepped aside on July 21.
The poll dovetails with other national polls finding similar advantages for Harris among Latino voters. But, significantly, the larger Latino sample size in the survey—commissioned by the voter engagement group Somos PAC and conducted by Latino pollster Gary Segura—provides a stronger basis for confidence that Harris’s lead among Hispanics is real.
“Harris enters as the nominee with a very strong lead among Latinos,” says Segura, whose firm BSP Research did the poll (Segura’s business partner, Matt Barreto, polls separately for the Harris campaign). “We focused only on the battlegrounds, with a large enough sample in them to arrive at a confident estimate of the two-party vote in the states that will actually decide the election—not in states where the outcome is already determined, like Texas and California.”
SCOOP –> Kamala Harris leads Trump by 55-37 among Latino voters in the seven key swing states, according to the first large-sample poll of Latinos taken since she entered the race.
“Harris has strengthened and consolidated support,” Melissa Morales, president and founder of Somos PAC, tells Greg Sargent. Trump has “very low favorability within the Latino community. The more we remind them who Trump actually is, the more we expect that to go down.”
Harris seems to be putting Sun Belt states back into play for Democrats.
Among Latinos overall, 34 percent are more excited to vote Democratic now that Harris is running, versus only 10 percent who are less excited. Separately, when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other third party candidates are included in questioning, Harris leads Trump by 46-31, mirroring other polls.
The poll also challenges certain media narratives about this race. It has often been said that inflation and the economy are what enabled Trump’s economic “populism” to cut deeply into Biden’s Latino support. The poll does find that 63 percent of Latinos view the cost of living and inflation as their top issue—vindicating arguments that the economy now far outpaces immigration in that regard.
The polling reveals that Latino voters warm to a progressive populist message stressing Trump’s intent to reward the rich and corporations with more tax breaks and a Harris agenda of raising their taxes and holding them accountable for price gouging.
Sen. Bernie Sanders commissioned a poll of over 1,150 voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that reveals a progressive agenda is overwhelmingly popular.
For instance, the poll shows that increasing taxes on the wealthy is supported by a 71%-27% margin overall. Even Republicans favored it by a 55%-43% majority.
Raising taxes on large corporations was also popular. A full 67% of respondents supported this, compared to 29% who said these companies should pay the same as they are now or less.
And there was very strong backing for increasing the minimum wage, with fully 89% saying the current $7.25 per hour rate needs to be boosted. Raising the rate to $17 per hour was backed by 70% of respondents, the majority of those strongly. The Senate rejected Sanders’ effort to increase the minimum wage to $15 back in March 2021, although many states have boosted it themselves.
Other elements Sanders has long advocated win similar support.
Sanders has not yet formally endorsed Harris but will appear on a “Progressives for Harris” organizing call tonight. and will use this poll to convince Harris to advance progressive policies that that continue President Joe Biden’s legacy Build Back Better agenda.
“What I want to make sure — and what this all is about — is to get the point not only to the vice president but to every Democratic candidate that if you run on issues, economic issues of concern to the working class of this country [that] we have ignored for too many years, you can win this election. That’s the main thrust of this poll.”
All this is good news for Democrats no matter what dark lining the press will inevitably highlight.
Those of you already working to turn out voters, do not take your feet off the gas/hybrid/EV. Accelerate out of the turn.
CBS has a new one and it shows that Harris has made up the ground Biden lost but it’s still looking like hand to hand combat… for now, anyway:
Boosted by Democrats, younger and Black voters becoming more engaged and likely to vote, and by women decidedly thinking she’d favor their interests more, Vice President Kamala Harris has reset the 2024 presidential race.
She has a 1-point edge nationally — something President Biden never had (he was down by 5 points when he left the race) — and Harris and former President Donald Trump are tied across the collective battleground states.
Looking ahead, voters are also defining why the next few weeks could be critical.
On one hand, Harris has additional edges with the wider electorate that Mr. Biden did not: she’s leading Trump on being seen as having the cognitive health to serve, a measure that was of course central to the campaign before Mr. Biden stepped aside.
And on policy generally, Harris is seen as a little different from Mr. Biden, opening some possibility of defining her stances for the electorate now, either way.
But to Trump’s advantage, some critical things have not changed: he keeps his sizable lead on voters saying they’ll be financially better off with him and that his policies would decrease migrants at the border.
The percentage of Democrats who say they’ll “definitely vote” has risen to its highest point this year. That narrows the partisan “turnout gap” we’ve seen throughout the campaign.
And today much higher numbers of Black voters say they’ll vote, compared to July when Mr. Biden was the nominee.
More generally, all this points to how the election might well hinge on turnout and specifically on marginal-turnout voter — those who don’t always show up to vote.
For example, among those who generally describe themselves as “sometimes” or “rarely” voting — but say they’ll definitely vote now — Harris is currently winning.
Related to this, the gender gap has widened some from earlier in the campaign. Harris leads Trump among women by a bigger margin than Mr. Biden had, while holding roughly the same support Mr. Biden had among men.
Most Democratic voters, and nearly half of voters overall, say that Harris as the Democratic nominee makes them feel more motivated to vote. (There is some countering effect, too: about a third of Trump voters are also more motivated to vote now that Harris is the nominee.)
It’s not just that Democrats are more excited, but also on a number of candidate qualities they feel they’ve gotten a candidate that can match up more closely with Trump.
Harris has an advantage over Trump on being seen as having the mental and cognitive health to serve, which was a critical deficit for Mr. Biden.
Black voters think Harris will look out for everyone, including Black people.
Republicans and Trump voters think Harris will help the interests of Black people more so than of White people; Harris’ voters think she’ll look out for everyone across gender and race lines.
Trump’s voters also think he’ll help the interests of everyone, though the wider electorate tends to think he’ll help the interests of men and White people more so than others.
Watching Trump the last few days it’s been obvious to me that he’s stressed and upset about the race. He didn’t get any kind of bump from his assassination attempt and the RNC which was no doubt a huge shock to him. (Hubris is his middle name, after all.) The new polls show Kamala now slightly ahead with momentum and it’s driving him crazy.
Two weeks ago, Donald Trump was riding high, envisioning a landslide victory against Joe Biden after beating an assassination attempt, briefly proclaiming himself to be a new man, and enjoying a drama-free convention that felt like an early victory party. Days later, of course, Biden euthanized his campaign, elevating his vice president as his presumptive replacement and definitively resetting the table. Trump, who is now at parity in the polls with Kamala Harris, has responded with his own stages of grief: complaining at the unfairness of a new challenger; befuddled by the inability of his campaign to land a punch against Harris; furious at the suggestion, proffered by his own team, that her gains were inevitable; and annoyed at having to clean up J.D. Vance’s messes.
Predictably, the campaign’s loss of elevation has all manner of Trump courtiers and advisors blaming each other for the past week’s various fuckups and distractions—including at least one major unforced error by the principal, himself. “It’s just two weeks, and I’m like, what the hell is going on,” one stunned Mar-a-Lago denizen told me.
In many ways, their frustration is understandable. For months now, Trump’s campaign has been lauded for its eerie proficiency under the co-management of political professionals SusieWiles and ChrisLaCivita. And yet, in recent days, Wiles has faced an unusual degree of criticism in Trumpworld, after she quickly jumped on the Vance train and was charged with vetting him. LaCivita, for his part, is getting lashed for publicly gloating about Trump’s ostensible path to 320 electoral college votes. Some detractors blame both Wiles and LaCivita for not having a backup plan for Harris (a source familiar countered that they were “exceptionally ready”); others are frustrated over the statement Wiles and LaCivita issued celebrating the resignation of Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, after Democrats made it politically toxic. “They danced on the grave after Dans resigned,” said one Washington insider. “It was a ‘Let this be a warning to anyone who claims to have the president’s ear,’ but with a knife.”
Naturally, there’s an emerging consensus that this insider squabbling, reminiscent of an earlier chaotic era, is distracting from the race. In one pointed example, twentysources took the time to blame Kellyanne Conway for leaking negative stories about J.D. Vance to The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo. “A lot of people are very frustrated. There are cracks within the ranks and team, why are the consultants knifing Kellyanne in the Bulwark?” said another Trump ally. “They should be focusing on Kamala.”
Until this week, I’m told Trump was still enjoying the honeymoon stage with Vance, and largely ignoring the brutal savaging his V.P. pick has received on social media. In particular, he was distracting himself with the promise of the Silicon Valley money that Vance might haul from tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. Now, however, Trump is said to be perplexed that the furor over Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment hasn’t died out, forcing him to waste time defending an underling. As I’ve previously reported, Trump has long viewed the requirement that he pick a vice president as unnecessary, a perspective he shared openly this week, when he toldFox News’s Harris Falkner that Vance would have no impact on the election. “If he keeps slipping in the polls, he’ll blame J.D. Vance, but he would never take him off the ticket,” said the Mar-a-lago denizen. “That’s a very drastic move. He’d have to admit he made a mistake.”
I hadn’t heard that Trump thinks he shouldn’t have to name a VP. Lol!
It becomes more obvious every day that he’s lost a step. Vance didn’t have a honeymoon for him to enjoy.. The cat lady and couch stuff was all over social media and it’s going to dog him (no pun intended) for the rest of his career. I certainly believe he was busy counting the money from the tech bros but if he thought things were going well he needs to get out of the Mar-a-Lago fever swamp.
This campaign has been endlessly promoted in the media as super professional and extremely well run. It’s hype. There’s no evidence that they’ve put together any kind of ground game and they obviously didn’t bother to vet Vance. They clearly have no influence on Trump. He’s unlikely to make any changes unless he really starts to slip in the polls. (And he’ll just say that the polls are rigged and so is the election so…)
Just before rallying supporters in Atlanta on Saturday, Trump unleashed a tirade on the state’s popular Republican governor, Brian Kemp, whose vaunted ground game operation Trump may need in November, ripping into him on Truth Social for “fighting Unity and the Republican Party.”
And when Trump took the stage, he went at him even harder.
“He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor,” Trump told supporters, eliciting boos toward Kemp from the crowd.
The attack — on social media and in person at the Georgia State University Convocation Center — marked an escalation of Trump’s longstanding criticism of Kemp. And it instantly unsettled Georgia Republicans, who warned Trump’s comments threaten his already shaky prospects in the state.
“I’m sitting here scratching my head,” Bobby Saparow, a Republican operative and Brian Kemp’s former campaign manager, told POLITICO. “Attacking the popular governor of a pivotal swing state makes zero sense. If we want to actually unite, ask for the support of the guy who beat your endorsed primary opponent by 52 points and handily defeated Stacey Abrams.”
Or, as Erick Erickson, the Georgia Republican and radio host, told POLITICO: “Over 30,000 people refused to vote for [Trump] in Georgia in 2020 and he lost by about 12,000 votes. All he’s doing is reminding everyone why they don’t like him. And he has no Georgia ground game and will have to rely on Kemp. It’s going to hurt him.”
Many Republicans inside and outside of Georgia still nurse raw feelings about how Trump’s fixation on the 2020 election in the state contributed to a major setback for the party in the 2021 Senate runoffs. Democrats won two Senate seats in Georgia that January, when Trump’s false claims about a stolen election were widely credited with dampening Republican turnout
He has said publicly that he doesn’t believe he needs a ground game because his followers love him and will come out for him if he tells them to. He wants the campaign to concentrate on suppressing and contesting the vote so this makes sense to him. That arena not being full last night should tell him that his strategy may be flawed but I doubt he will see it.
If you are wondering where JD Vance, Elon Musk et al are getting their creepy ideas, they stem from one very creepy guy:
In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed “not productive”: “convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses.”
He then concluded that the “best humane alternative to genocide” is to “virtualize” these people: Imprison them in “permanent solitary confinement” where, to avoid making them insane, they would be connected to an “immersive virtual-reality interface” so they could “experience a rich, fulfilling life in a completely imaginary world.”
Yarvin’s disturbing manifestos have earned him influential followers, chief among them: tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his onetime Silicon Valley protégé Senator J.D. Vance, whom the Republican Party just nominated to be Donald Trump’s vice president. If Trump wins the election, there is little doubt that Vance will bring Yarvin’s twisted techno-authoritarianism to the White House, and one can imagine—with horror—what a receptive would-be autocrat like Trump might do with those ideas.
Trump’s first campaign was undoubtedly a watershed moment for authoritarianism in American politics, but some thinkers on the right had been laying the groundwork for years, hoping for someone to mainstream their ideas. Yarvin was one of them. Way back in 2012, in a speech on “How to Reboot the US Government,” he said, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.” He had also written favorably of slavery and white nationalists in the late 2000s (though he has stated that he is not a white nationalist himself).
Both Thiel and Vance are friends of Yarvin. In The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power, reporter Max Chafkin describes Yarvin as the “house political philosopher” of the “Thielverse,” a term for the people in Thiel’s orbit. In 2013, Thiel invested in Tlön, a software startup co-founded by Yarvin. In 2016, Yarvin attended Thiel’s election night party in San Francisco where, according to Chafkin, champagne flowed once it became clear that Thiel’s investment in Donald Trump would pay off.
Since entering politics, Vance has publicly praised—and parroted—Yarvin’s ideas. That was worrying enough when Vance was only a senator. Now that he could soon be a heartbeat away from the presidency, his close ties to Yarvin are more alarming than ever. Superficial analyses of why certain tech billionaires are aligning with Trump tend to fixate on issues like taxes and regulations, but that’s only part of the story. Tech plutocrats like Thiel and Elon Musk already have money. Now they want power—as much as money can buy.
Here’s a sample of the kind of thing our potential VP (and very likely eventual president since Trump is old as dirt) is involved with:
Yarvin is the chief thinker behind an obscure but increasingly influential far-right neoreaction, or NRx, movement, that some call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Among other things, it openly promotes dictatorships as superior to democracies and views nations like the United States as outdated software systems. Yarvin seeks to reengineer governments by breaking them up into smaller entities called “patchworks,” which would be controlled by tech corporations.
“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions,” he wrote in Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century.
Each patchwork would be ruled by a “realm”: a corporation with absolute power. Citizens would be free to move, but every other realm would also be ruled by corporate governments with chilling impunity. For example, Yarvin says the tech overlords of the San Francisco realm could arbitrarily decide to cut off its citizens’ hands with no fear of legal consequences—because they’re a sovereign power, beholden to no federal government or laws.
The realm, having sovereign power, can compel the resident to comply with all promises. Since San Francisco is not an Islamic state, it does not ask its residents to agree that their hand will be cut off if they steal. But it could. And San Francisco, likewise, can promise not to cut off its residents’ hands until it is blue in the face—but, since it is a sovereign state, no one can enforce this promise against it.
In “Friscorp,” as Yarvin calls the San Francisco realm, an all-seeing Orwellian surveillance system would enforce public safety: “All residents, even temporary visitors, carry an ID card with RFID response. All are genotyped and iris-scanned. Public places and transportation systems track everyone. Security cameras are ubiquitous. Every car knows where it is, and who is sitting in it, and tells the authorities both.”
It’s like something out of science fiction. But it’s real.
These people are exceptionally weird. And incredibly rich.
"No, that's actually not what he said. He said he would pardon those who assaulted police officers. Do you support that or not?" — this interview was a disaster for Byron Donalds. George Stephanopoulos was not putting up with his BS, which is why MAGA Republicans rarely go on… pic.twitter.com/zDkkoqhuix
Good for Stephanopoulos for pushing back but it’s like talking to a wall. These people will never concede … anything.
By the way, the AP headline Donalds refers to said that Harris was the first Indian American Senator because she was. She was not the first Black Senator which is why they didn’t mention that she was Black. It makes me feel crazy that we have to make that clear. Which is the point.
