Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Be not afraid

The owners of Penzeys Spices found themselves in a media spotlight over the weekend after Vice President Kamala Harris stopped by a Pittsburgh store for some cooking supplies. Harris hugged and reassured a tearful woman that everything would be all right: “We’re all in this together,” Harris said.

There was backlash, of course. Especially after Penzeys posted to its website Bill Pezney’s view of what’s become of the Republican Party “over the last half century, and the steep decline/bottom falling out over the last decade.” He writes:

The truth of our time is we’ve arrived at the point where there’s no way to respect the nonsense the Republican Party is promoting and have any hope of overcoming the problems we as a nation and we as a planet face. Given the choice between saving America and planet Earth or saving the feelings of Republican voters, we are choosing to side with saving our country and our world. I’m sorry it’s come to this.

[…]

Going forward we would still be glad to have you as customers, but we’re done pretending the Republican Party’s embrace of cruelty, racism, Covid lies, climate change denial, and threats to democracy are anything other than the risks they legitimately are. If you need us to pretend you are not creating the hurt you are creating in order for you to continue to be our customer, I’m sad to say you might be happier elsewhere.

It’s not the first time Penzey has spoken publicly and bluntly about his politics.

It’s not as if the people Penzey is talking about are shy about sharing their opinions (above). They just get especially riled up at being called out for their hateful views. It hurts their feelings. How dare we!

Also over the weekend on one of my listservs, a user made a rather pithy observation about people on the extreme right who see their entire world view being threatened. I’ve written multiple times about status anxiety and “last place aversion” being a driver of the hostility from the far right. Lyndon Johnson once explained their anger in plainer but cruder terms. But this observation about why many on the extremist right are “panicked and desperate” is much more lyrical. Not surprising, given the borrowed source.

The right is outraged “to find themselves being judged on the content of their character when the color of their skin used to be all they needed.”

The idea of the unaccountable criminal president began that day. Look where it brought us.

Get a load of this one:

Donald Trump on Saturday floated changing the 25th Amendment to allow Congress to impeach a vice president for covering up a president’s incapacity less than two months after President Joe Biden exited the 2024 contest amid concerns about his age and acuity.

“I will support modifying the 25th Amendment to make clear that if a vice president lies or engages in a conspiracy to cover up the incapacity of the president of the United States — if you do that with a cover-up of the president of the United States, it’s grounds for impeachment immediately and removal from office, because that’s what they did,” the former president said during a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin.

Ok. But they can already impeach the Vice President for Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors, which they can define pretty much any way they want to. This has nothing to do with modifying the 25th Amendment. Who put that cockamamie idea in his head?

Furthermore, isn’t he always screaming about how the Democrats staged a “coup” to illegitimately remove Biden from the ticket? Now they were covering for him? What?

We all know what point he was making. But I’d say that it was pretty clear Mike Pence and his whole cabinet were the ones who covered up for Trump’s incapacity when he lost his mind after the 2020 election. They knew he’d gone over the edge and they did nothing to stop him. Even after January 6th when Pompeo and Mnuchin gathered a few others to have the discussion they didn’t move to do it.

If I were Trump, I’d be a little bit worried about Vance in this scenario. He’s only been MAGA for about five minutes. He strikes me as the type to overthrow the king in a heartbeat if the opportunity arose.

I’m sure you’ve heard Trump bellowing his fatuous nonsense about how everyone always wanted Roe overturned so it could go back to the states where people can vote on it and “it’s a beautiful thing.” I’ll admit that I was derelict in seeing where this was going. Leave it to Ron DeSantis to show the way:

Florida voters who signed a petition to place a pro-choice abortion referendum on the ballot this November say they have been visited by police who are investigating claims of fraud at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday.

Last year, DeSantis, a Republican, signed into a law a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. In response, pro-choice campaigners gathered and submitted nearly one million signatures to place on the ballot Amendment 4, a referendum that would overturn the ban and restore reproductive rights in the state.

Now Florida’s Department of State is claiming it suspects fraud in the signature-gathering process. In an email to county election officials, the department’s Brad McVay requested that they hand over their already-verified petitions so that the signatures can be reexamined, claiming without evidence that those who circulated the petitions “represent known or suspected fraudsters,” Tampa Bay television station WTVT reported.

Isaac Menasche, a voter who signed a petition to place the abortion referendum on the ballot, told the Times that he too was contacted by people working for the Florida governor’s office. According to Menasche, a plainclothes police officer came to his home to question him, apparently seeking to verify that the signature on the petition was indeed his.“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche told the newspaper. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”

Another voter, Becky Castellanos, told the Times that she was visited by a state police officer who interrogated her about a family member’s petition signature. She said the incident felt intimidating. “It didn’t surprise me that they were doing something like this to try to debunk these petitions to get it taken off of the ballot,” she told the outlet.

This is the work of DeSantis’s Stasi-style “Office of Election Crimes and Security” which has over a million dollars at its disposal to intimidate voters.

Of course they would claim voter fraud. That’s how they will be able to rationalize these ballot measures showing support for reproductive rights. I don’t know what the chances are of them removing it from the ballot. But they really don’t have to. All they need to do is claim that the vote was “stolen” — as all votes that don’t go their way these days — and they will have at least set the stage for more attempts to ban abortion. I’m sure we’ll see more of this.

Update. Oh right. We already are:

Trump excited the crowd yesterday with promises of bloodshed with his mass deportation policy.

They wouldn’t have it any other way.

Just as a reminder:

Two former officials who handled immigration issues for then-President Donald Trump say that a “whole of government” approach costing billions would be needed to mount the “largest deportation effort in American history” promised in the Republican convention platform if Trump is re-elected.

The exact number of people who would be deported in a second Trump administration is hard to pin down.

During the June 29 presidential debate, Trump claimed there were 18 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. One of the two former Trump officials said it could be as high as 30 million.

The last official estimate in 2022 was under 11 million, but when you count the American children and other Americans caught up in the raids by mistake, they can probably get to 20 million or so.

Last week, according to Semafor, a former acting ICE director under Trump who is seen as a possible Department of Homeland Security chief in a second Trump administration told a conservative conference, “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”

“Trump comes back in January,” Tom Homan said, “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”

So, what’s it going to take?

NBC News asked acting ICE Director Patrick J. Lechleitner about what would be required to deport millions of people.

“It’s not only putting them on planes and flying them, which is expensive, we got to have airplanes. We also have to deal with host nations. We have to get travel documents, we have to do all the logistics involved with that.”

He said for some people who are not in detention, the path to deportation can take years. “We have to monitor them that whole time. That’s resource intensive,” he said.

Abigail Andrews, a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of California, San Diego who has been studying deportation data for the past 10 years, said she’s highly skeptical about how a mass deportation effort would unfold.

“There is no logistical way to track down 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants with the ICE employees they currently have,” she said.  

They’ll have plenty of help from other law enforcement and the military

Blair said an effort of the size proposed would require heavy involvement from local law enforcement — and he said border cities are already handling enough. “We don’t have the manpower or space to handle,” he said. “The federal spending would have to flow to these local agencies.” He also said the optics of deporting children could create significant backlash.

Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump, said mass deportations should prioritize those who have committed serious crimes rather than families. He said enforcement could be via additional funding to ICE as well as consequences for cities that refuse to cooperate. 

“One thing I think we need to do is go after the sanctuary cities to take away their funding,” said Morgan, now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.Experts say costs would quickly mount with an operation of this size.

Yep:

As for families with mixed status such as those with children who are citizens and parents who are undocumented, one of the former Trump officials sees it as an opportunity, hoping that the threat of removing one member will propel whole families to leave. “Your parents can’t use you as a prop to justify their illegal presence,” the former official said.

The former Trump officials said cooperation across the entire federal government, not just from DHS leadership, would be needed.

One of the ex-officials said the effort would require a “trigger puller,” someone at DHS who would not be afraid to go in front of Congress and defend the deportation effort.

The former Trump officials said buy-in and resources would be needed from agencies like the Pentagon, which would be asked to participate in either setting up detention camps or relocating migrants to foreign military bases. The Interior Department would be called upon because federal land might be needed for deportation sites. They said cooperation from the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care and custody of unaccompanied children, would also be required to facilitate removals. 

I’m sure the tariffs and the massive unprecedented “growth” (Trump’s only economic plan) will pay for all of it and more.

Trump says this will be bloody and his followers are thrilled at the prospect.

These are your fellow Americans:

Not that it matters. The “vibe” remains horrifically negative and the economy is what people point to to explain it. The reality is that for half of America, the world is going to shit because Donald Trump is telling them to believe his lies instead of their lyin’ eyes, and they love him so much that they’re happy to do it. For the rest of us, the world is going to shit because the other half worships that orange imbecile and it simply defies all sense and logic leading to a sense of dread about the future that is beyond disorienting.

How can it be that half the country has succumbed to this addled demagogue? I don’t know, but it does help explain how some very bad things happened in the 20th century. It’s got something to do with mass communications, propaganda and groupthink and it’s terrifying.

From polling expert Larry Sabatp:

The oracle of Delphi NY Times poll dropped today and that is what it showed.

Ok. That’s that. The race, as I’ve been saying all year, is about two coalitions: the fascists vs the anti-fascists. And it’s a shockingly, disturbingly tight race.

Reports from the field

“The Trump campaign is tasking the far-right Turning Point network with spearheading its ground game despite having no track record of success,” Bill Scher noticed back in June:

CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA. 

Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist. 

None of Turning Point’s 2022 efforts in Arizona “had any discernible impact” on Republicans’ fortunes there, Scher wrote.

The Washington Post reported more on Trump’s reliance on PACs for his field operations in early August before Democrats’ celebratory national convention in Chicago:

With fewer than 100 days before the election, local GOP officials in battleground states have raised alarms about the scant presence of Trump campaign field staff. For the large armies of paid and volunteer door-knockers and canvassers who typically drive turnout in presidential elections, the campaign is largely relying on outside groups such as America First Works, America PAC and Turning Point Action.

The Trump campaign’s shrunken in-house operation resulted from its takeover of the Republican National Committee in March, when Trump secured the nomination. The RNC had been planning an extensive field program, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. Those now-discarded plans included 88 staff members and 12 offices, and goals to knock on 3 million doors and make 2.4 million phone calls, in Pennsylvania. In Arizona, the RNC’s plan called for 62 staffers and seven offices, aiming for 558,000 voter contacts.

A month later we are seeing the results here in my swing state. Apparently fully assimilated by the Trump campaign, the North Carolina Republican Party is bombarding registered Democrats with anti-Harris flyers like these photographed by a friend. Even the flip sides of the bottom two promoting Trump attack Harris. My spouse received three of these in a single day.

Thomas Mills reported last week from a rural Brunswick County, North Carolina adjacent coastal Wilmington that in 2020 went for Trump by 62 percent and that Democrats lost by about the same amount in 2022: “Four years ago, virtually every yard sported a Trump sign and Trump flags proudly waved above dozens of motor homes in a muscular show of support. This year, I saw very few Trump yard signs and even fewer Trump flags. The difference is stark.”

Caleb Rudow, Democrats’ candidate for Congress from NC-11 in the western mountains, told me Saturday that he’s noticed a similar lack of Trump signs and flags in his heavily rural district. Puzzled Democrats are asking him why they too are receiving a flurry of anti-Harris mailings. I can only speculate that the Turning Point Action, etc. brain trust is behind them. They’ll make money off the Trump campaign no matter how wasted their expensive mailings are. I have no reports on what Republican voters are seeing.

While a few statewide GOP candidates have appeared at regional fairs and parades he’s attended, Rudow has seen little evidence of any coordinated Republican efforts. Not even at the annual Mountain State Fair where WNC Republicans typically have a booth within view of the Democrats’ installation. A couple of GOP candidates have thinly staffed booths, Rudow said, but that’s it. He speculates that Republicans are keeping their distance from Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson who is running for governor against Democrat Josh Stein.

The Harris-Walz campaign, meantime, is fully engaged and accelerating. Here are a couple of anecdotal reports, one with more tears.

People are stressed, tired of the hostility, the darkness, and chaos of Trumpism. Trump has jumped the shark. His whiny, poor-me story has become tiresome. Democrats’ joyful warriors are not just offering something to vote against but something to vote for. Something more human.

Please sign up to help get out the vote.

Trump goes all but “Off with their heads!”

Heather Cox Richardson is hardly the only one to notice that as the prospect of losing the election (and facing criminal judgment) haunts Donald Trump’s every waking moment, he’s going full apocalyptic. Trump on Saturday warned that not even his rallies are safe spaces in a country “overrun by criminals.” He promised that expelling migrants en masse “will be a bloody story.” But that’s only the beginning. Trump is going full Queen of Hearts:

Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.” 

Is it the Justice Department indictments that showed Russia is working to get him reelected? Is it the rising popularity of Democratic nominees Kamala Harris and Tim Walz? Is it fury at the new grand jury’s indicting him for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election and install himself in power? Is it fear of Tuesday’s debate with Harris? Is it a declining ability to grapple with reality?

Whatever has caused it, Trump seems utterly off his pins, embracing wild conspiracy theories and, as his hopes of winning the election appear to be crumbling, threatening vengeance with a dogged fury that he used to be able to hide. 

Trump went out of his way on Friday to remind voters (to borrow from an old commercial) that he’s a chocolate mess (via Digby):

If any voters had forgotten that Donald J. Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day.

Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, took a break from debate preparations on Saturday to visit a spice shop in Pittsburgh. (She cooks, you’ll recall.) She immediately embraced a woman who was in tears. Whether from joy at seeing Harris or from worry over tensions in the country (or both), the woman seemed to need a hug and reassurance. Harris provided both.

“We’re all in this together,” Harris said. It’s all going to work out. We’re going to be fine.

Choose your champion.