If you want to know why Trump is popular, blame social media. That’s the kind of bs that’s making the rounds. This is the truth:
This is a perfect example of the propaganda that’s got millions of people believing myths about Trump, conspiracy theories and lies. It’s a huge problem and I don’t know if anyone has enough juice to counteract it. The attempts that were being made by the platforms themselves a few years ago are gone and there’s nothing to take its place.
Trump thinks he would have settled the slavery question before the civil war. I suspect he thinks he could have “settled” it the way he “settled” the abortion quesiton: by giving the assholes everything they want and then saying it was what everyone wanted all along.
Also:
He looks tired. Does he have the “strength and the stamina” to be president for four more years? I don’t think so:
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.”
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.
He’s not used to all this activity. He spent the last four years watching TV, tweeting, playing golf and entertaining his dinner guests at Mar-a-lago. In other words he’s come out of retirement at the age of 78 to run for president. He’s just not up for it.
In September of 2020, 200,000 Americans had just died of COVID. There was no vaccine, unemployment was at 8%. The whole world had just been shut down and was only slowly coming back to life. Donald Trump was pushing snake oil cures and pretending the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem.
And yet 55 percent of Americans believed they were better off than they’d been four years ago.
And only 39 percent believe that now.
WTF?
We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She’s holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews even going on Fox and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump inspired accusations from anchor Brett Baier who didn’t seem to want her to actually answer them. (She showed she cannot be intimidated which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn’t being available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you’ll see her there.
Trump, on the other hand, is as present as always by holding looney rallies and post on crazy comments on Truth Social, but is refusing to debate Harris again and has cancelled numerous scheduled interviews this week. Yet he’s holding events in California and New York which aren’t even on the radar.
According to Tara Palmieri at Puck, the Mar-a-lago insiders say this is all because Trump is so assured he’s going to win that he’s just letting his freak flag fly and the campaign figures that Trump’s “self-assurance” may create a bandwagon effect as voters decide they want to go with a winner. Republicans do love the bandwagon effect strategy, but Trump is seeming off his rocker in a way that doesn’t easily read as “confident” except to the extent he may believe his “election integrity” plans will ensure that he “wins” even if he doesn’t win.
Trump did do some events this week and it’s a big leap to say he showed self-assurance. There was the now notorious “swaying to the music” town hall that I wrote about earlier. That appearance was so bizarre that it actually managed to dominate the conversation for a couple of days which is really saying something in this frenzied news cycle.
Then he held a taped Fox News town hall with host Harris Faulkner, who sat him down with a group of allegedly undecided women. We know that a large majority of women voters in this country loathe him and they’d like to mitigate that by allowing him to beguile a few of them with his suave charm. They did seem rather weirdly ecstatic by his presence, but that’s because they were all Republican party shills and ardent supporters brought in by Fox. It even turned out that Fox edited out one of the questions that gave away the scheme.
But Trump did do one event this week that may turn out to be important because of the substance of what he said. He appeared on the Spanish language network Univision for a town hall with Latino voters. I think we all know what an important demographic this is and have heard that Trump is garnering a larger percentage of Hispanic men than ever before. I suspect he believed that it would, therefore, be an easy exchange like the one with the women plants the day before. So he wasn’t prepared for the kind of questions he got.
A man named Ramiro Gonzales, who identified as a Republican, asked Trump why he should support him when people from his own administration, including his Vice President, refuse to do so? He said January 6th and his COVID mismanagement had disturbed him but he wanted to give him a chance to win back his vote.
Trump replied that 97% of people in the former administration supported him and said that January 6th was “a day of love”, “nobody was killed”, and “we didn’t have guns, the others had guns but we didn’t have guns.” You can see from the look on Gonzales’s face and that of the people in the audience, that they knew he was full of it.
Gonzales later said that he would not be voting for Trump.
Trump has been charged with several felonies related to the January 6th insurrection. He claims that he bears no responsibility for any of it. And yet here he said that “we” didn’t have guns, the others had guns, by which he can only mean the police. One imagines that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will be looking at that footage with keen interest. (Needless to say, there were plenty of guns among the rioters and certainly many of those whom Trump calls “hostages,”and promises to pardon on day one, were charged with violent acts against the police. )
But there was another question that interested me the most because I’ve been dying for someone to ask it for months. A 64 year old man named Jorge Velazquez, who described himself as having spent many years working with his hands “hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli”, asked Trump who he thought was going to do this type of work if he deported all the undocumented workers who account for most of the agricultural work force.
Trump went into his usual rant about criminal immigrants, showing once again that he is completely clueless about how anything actually works. Trump seems to think they’re taking the jobs away from American citizens, specifically “African Americans and Hispanics” who are suffering as a result. These are the “Black jobs” he was talking about.
Trump made a point of saying that he wants laborers (who love our country) to come legally which suggests he’s talking about something like the old bracero program which was replaced by the issuance of H-2a and H-2b visas. The problem is that his agenda, as articulated in Project 2025, wants to discontinue all temporary worker visas. His immigration guru, Stephen Miller, has made it very clear that he intends to drastically curtail legal immigration as well.
Trump’s grotesque xenophobic rhetoric, whether or not he fully understands it, is paving the way for the GOP’s mainstream adoption of “The Great Replacement Theory” which holds that all foreigners from the so-called “shithole countries” must be barred, not just because they are criminals or are taking all the “Black jobs” but because they are supposedly destroying the culture of America. When Trump reads Stephen Miller’s screeds on the stump about immigrants “poisoning the blood,” there is no distinction between legal and illegal.
His new best friend Elon Musk is pushing the Great Replacement Theory constantly, having signed on to the idea that Democrats are trying to import immigrants so they will vote for them, an old standby promoted by the likes of Ann Coulter in her book “Adios, America.” One would think that with all the talk about Latinos voting in large numbers for Trump this time they’d stop and think about whether this is a good long term strategy for them but they’re so hooked on the idea that migrants are marauding gangsters who are also inexplicably motivated beyond reason to vote, that they aren’t thinking clearly on the subject.
On a more material level, I have to wonder how everyone’s going to like the prices at the grocery store when strawberries and broccoli are necessarily selling at 20 times what they cost today from the combination of labor shortages and tariffs on imported food. Trump may not ever eat a vegetable but I’d guess even Republicans like to eat a salad once in a while.
While I doubt that Trump’s ever read a treatise on The Great Replacement Theory, he’s fully on board with it and we know that because he’s recently promised to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield despite the fact that they are here legally, are working at jobs that others didn’t want and profess to love America. He believes they’re polluting the culture of Springfield Ohio and need to go back where they came from. That’s what this is all about. And that, my friends, is fascism with a capitol F.
In another smackdown for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lackeys, a federal judge on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order against state threats to prosecute TV stations that run ads in support of Florida’s abortion-rights amendment:
The temporary restraining order addresses a lawsuit filed against the state by Floridians Protecting Freedom, a group campaigning for Amendment 4, which will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker’s sharply worded ruling prevents the department from “taking any further actions to coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions” against broadcasters for airing the ads or “undertaking enforcement action” against them.
In citing one case used in his ruling, he offered a brief summary:
“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
“Political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment. The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false,’ “ wrote Walker, of the U.S. District Court Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee.
Is that plain enough for you, Ron? (I’ll bet not.)
The lawsuit was the latest in a series of legal tussles between the DeSantis administration and advocates for amendment, which would protect the right to abortion until fetal viability. It would override the state’s ban on abortion in most cases after the first six weeks of pregnancy.
The commercial, produced by Floridians Protecting Freedom, features a Tampa woman describing how she was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant, ahead of state restrictions that would have blocked the abortion she received before treatment.
On Oct. 3, the health department, part of the DeSantis administration sent a cease-and-desist letter to several Florida broadcasters threatening criminal prosecution if they did not stop airing the commercial. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the injunction is scheduled.
The law and order party, friends. When they read the Constitution, it means just what they choose it to mean. That is, it’s no protection for you when they are the ones defending it and appointing judges who think as they do. (Walker was appointed by Barack Obama.)
The former Republican Party (now the Party of Trump) sold itself for decades as opponents of the Soviet empire and insistent on upholding law and order. LAW! ORDER! As I’ve said of other professed “values” from that team, those boasts were always a mile wide and an inch deep. The people who for decades of accused the left of being squishy on morality have taken squishy to a new level.
Helpfully, Jonathan Chait offers a kind of phrasebook for interpreting “law and order” as Donald Trump understands it (Intelligencer):
One of the most important and consistent facets of Donald Trump’s thinking is that the law, as most people understand it, is conceptually meaningless. Legal activity, as he understands the term, means anything done by or on behalf of Donald Trump (this can include tax fraud, stealing and refusing to give back classified documents, assaulting police officers in an attempt to overturn an election, or other clear violations of federal criminal statutes). Illegal activity is anything Trump disapproves of or finds harmful: criticizing pro-Trump judges, displaying too many news stories that make Trump look bad, being “stupid,” or almost any action that works against his interests.
Trump’s view of elections flows from this belief system. A fair election is one that Trump wins. An unfair election is one he loses. Trump has begun to define the very existence of Kamala Harris’s candidacy as a crime.
I’d misssed that last part. But yes, I recall him thinking the Democratic Party swapping out its candidate for president was unconstitutional for the private organization which, Chait reminds, “for most of their existence chose nominees without any public voting at all.”
“Conceptually meaningless” has a satisfying mouth feel, don’t you think? And also serves as a fine description of Trump’s notions for replacing Obamacare.
Anne Applebaum offers yet another reminder in The Atlantic that Trump talks like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with a purpose. It’s calculated, if squishy. But I digress.
Trump’s on an authoritarian roll, and his fans are all in, Chait writes:
Now, in a new message, he pairs a call for removing CBS’s broadcast license (one of his older authoritarian threats) with demands that Harris be removed as his opponent. “Kamala should be investigated and forced off the Campaign, and Joe Biden allowed to take back his rightful place (He got 14 Million Primary Votes, she got none!),” he rants. “THIS WHOLE SORDID AND FRAUDULENT EVENT IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”
If you try to ask questions like “Investigated for what?” and “Which law does he believe was violated?,” you’re missing the essence of Trumpism. And if you’re willing to support the election of a president who cannot conceive of any distinction between what he wants and what the law permits, you are placing the survival of the Republic at risk.
One might as well have a dialogue with Humpty Dumpty, who famously explained:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
It’s the master part that appeals most to Donald John Trump. That’s the part his would-be-serfs followers don’t seem to grasp. People living under Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini learned the hard way what it means to have a master. Most Black people in this country don’t need reminding.
Harris handles a protester:
And then there was that debate:
Is she strong enough? You bet she is. And that seems to be the main complaint among those who say they’re not happy with Trump but just don’t think she has the “strength and the stamina” (remember that one?) to be president. It’s sexism, of course. But I think her toughness is obvious now.
She’s making power moves. And it’s impressive.
It can’t be any clearer. As it turns out, the same gentleman who asked Trump about January 6th last night also asked Kamala Harris a question at her Univision town hall last week. He asked her about the rumors that the administration wasn’t doing anything for the hurrican victims and what they planned to do in the future.
Watch them back-to-back.
— Ms. M 🪷 Read Project 2025 (@MsMalarkey24) October 17, 2024
Something tells me Mr. González is undecided no more. pic.twitter.com/I35zz3zPY4
Guess what?
Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump?
Undecided voter: No
Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision?
Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump
Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump?
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024
Undecided voter: No
Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision?
Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump https://t.co/LHAsYkjdkb pic.twitter.com/EeEzzrDUOx
Eric Levitz at Vox takes a look at the continuing loss of working class white voters and the analysis shows that unions haven’t turned out to be the great fix everyone thought they would be:
The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions.
After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former.
Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws.
The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis. In his presidency’s first major piece of legislation, Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to 350,000 of the union’s members. The president also appointed a staunchly pro-union federal labor board, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And although he failed to enact major changes to federal labor regulations, that was not for want of trying. In the estimation of labor historian Erik Loomis, Biden has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
But the political return on Democrats’ investment in organized labor has been disappointing.
Last month, the Teamsters declined to make a presidential endorsement, after an internal survey found 60 percent of its membership backed Trump over Kamala Harris. In early October, the International Association of Fire Fighters also announced that they would not be making a presidential endorsement, despite backing Biden four years earlier.
These high-profile snubs — both driven by rank-and-file opposition to the Democratic nominee — may reflect a broader political trend. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, between 2012 and 2016, the Democratic presidential nominee’s share of union voters fell from 66 to 53 percent. Four years ago, Biden erased roughly half of that gap, claiming 60 percent of the union vote.
But contemporary polling indicates that Democrats have lost ground with unionized voters since then. In fact, according to an aggregation from CNN’s Harry Enten, Kamala Harris is on track to perform even worse with union households than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
Apparently progrssives are blaming Harris for not being as pro labor as Biden. However, Biden’s numbers with labor are just as bad as hers so it’s not that. And Biden has been the most staunch supporter of labor since FDR.
The question is why these unions are rejecting the politicians who are helping them materially. According to Levitz, Democrats have always believed that unions made their membership more liberal through education and experience but according to studies that isn’t actually true. Unions mostly stay away from partisan politics because their memberships are as divided as everyone else. So, while there is some political benefit to supporting the labor movement, nobody should expect it to be the answer to the loss of the white working class (and apparently quite a few members of Black and Latino working class as well.)
Levitz concludes:
For now, education polarization does not look all that calamitous for the Democratic Party. The share of voters with college degrees is growing over time. In part because she is winning a historically large share of college graduates, Harris is currently competitive with Trump in enough states to win an Electoral College majority, according to Nate Silver’s polling averages. But in order to win comfortable Senate majorities and prevent figures like Donald Trump from remaining competitive in national elections, Democrats will need to improve their standing with working-class voters. Delivering for unions may be necessary for achieving that goal. But if the past four years are any guide, it will not be sufficient.
Soooooo, short of doing what the Democrats tried for decades — moving right by adopting slightly less draconian right wing views on culture — what will work? Because trying to “moderate” on abortion certainly didn’t and neither will any the anti-immigrant, racist or hateful anti-LGBTQ culture war battles. If it isn’t economics, job security, building the middle class, which is exactly what Democratic policies deliver and becoming MAGA lite on culture war issues doesn’t work (and is morally repugnant) I’m not sure what’s left.
Ed Kilgore outlines the Trump campaign strategy to “win” the election on election day. It won’t surprise you to learn that they aren’t trying to persuade people to vote for him:
The Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include:
-Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.)
-Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them).
-Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
-An inside-the-tent effort to place MAGA loyalists in key election-administration positions from the precinct to the county to the state level, where they can not only slow down vote counts but increase the odds of Democratic ballots being thrown out.
In addition to reducing the Harris vote (via a combination of ballot-eligibility challenges or heavy-handed intimidation of voters), all these MAGA boots on the ground can help build the post-election case that a Harris win was tainted with fraud.
There will be bogus lawsuits alleging fraud and intimidation of the vote counters. And Trump will almost certainly declare victory on election night regardless of the actual outcome.
If the race is called for Harris, the cult has been primed to resist. There will be protests but I don’t think anyone can know whether there will be mass demonstrations or discrete acts of violence. Whatever it is, I can’t imagine it will be a replay of January 6th. if nothing else, the authorities will be prepared for it. And one can anticipate more lawsuits and an attempt to get the Supreme Court ot take up the case. Whether any of it will be successful is unknown but you can bet they are going to do everything in their power to make Trump the winner no matter what the voters want.
Here’s the head of the Trump RNC election integrity department basically telling exactly what they plan to do, except she’s saying it’s the Democrats doing it:
CHRISTINA BOBB (GUEST): But if we learned anything from 2020 the lesson is we don’t know what the heck they do on Election Day, right? They come up with something crazy. And we have to be, we, not just the RNC or the conservative party, but Americans, you have to be flexible and you have to be willing to see this through until Donald Trump is actually declared the winner because they’re going to try to cause – I genuinely believe he wins this election like lawfully, legally, on election night, you know, the correct way.
And I think they’re going do everything they can to try to call that into question and challenge it and just create as much turmoil and chaos around his victory as possible. And so Americans really need to be prepared to stand their ground and not give up any ground to the fact that no, we just won this election outright just because you couldn’t get enough people to cheat on your behalf, you can’t steal our victory.
This Bizarro World fantasy is common among the Trumpers. Here’s Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita talking about how the election isn’t over until the Inauguration. But when you see the whole comment it appears that he tried to cover for his comment by saying that it’s actually the Democrats who will try to prevent Trump from taking office:
“It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day,” LaCivita told Politico’s Jonathan Martin during a Thursday interview at the RNC.
The statement came as Martin asked a question, saying, “One of the things that I’ve said is that, at this point, perhaps the Democrats can’t win the election any longer.”
LaCivita interrupted Martin.
“We don’t even think that way,” LaCivita said. “The way we’re structured, the way we are made … we grind every single day. I mean its not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. It’s not over til then. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day. Cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”
“What do you mean?” Martin asked.
“There is a well-documented report that talks about all of the efforts that the Democrats had in place in 2020 … about ways to prevent if Donald Trump had quote unquote won. So, like I said we plan for every worse case scenario. That way we are ready for it,” LaCivita said.
Ok. That “well-documented report” is news to me. But there’s also a method to his madness. They’ve convinced their cult that Democrats have plot to steal the election and if Trump wins they’re going to engage in violence, probably on January 6th. I’m not sure what psychologists or cult experts call this particular phenomenon (beyond the simplistic “projection”)It’s like some sort of mass delusion.
Update: This piece by Neal Katyal in the NY Times will send a chill down your spine. (Gift link)