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Trump The Closer: I’m Insane

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 22, 2024

But he’s their lunatic

IN THE CULT
NOT IN THE CULT

Two weeks from now, Election Day polls will be open. Vanity Fair‘s Bess Levin summarizes what Donald Trump’s been doing with his last days to build a winning coalition.

Policy? Did he finally lay out his health care plan after over eight years of promises? Perhaps explain his plan for resurrecting an America he claims Democrats “destroyed”? Did he explain [timestamp 1:05:00] how he’ll “cut your taxes, end inflation, slash your prices, raise your wages,” etc.? (More on raising wages in a moment.) If Trump promised everyone in Greenville, N.C. a pony yesterday, I missed it.

“Donald Trump’s closing message to voters appears to be: I’m insane,” read the tweet from Vanity Fair promoting Levin’s take:

Instead, he talked about the size a famous golfer’s penis, pretended to be a fast-food worker at a closed McDonald’s, and claimed every single goose in Springfield, Ohio, has has gone missing.

Yes, that’s correct: On Saturday, the Republican nominee for president of the United States told rallygoers in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, that golf legend Arnold Palmer had a huge schlong. “Arnold Palmer was all man, and I say that in all due respect to women—and I love women. But this guy, this guy…this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ’Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’”

The following day, Trump pretended to be a fast-food worker at a McDonald’s that—to be clear—was closed to the public. There, while serving pretend customers, he baselessly claimed that Harris is lying when she says she worked at a McDonald’s during college, telling reporters: “Now I’ve worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala.” Asked why she would fabricate having held such a job, he responded: “Because she’s Lyin’ Kamala.” Note: In case it was not clear, Trump was born with several silver spoons in his mouth; in 2018, The New York Times reported that “By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s empire” and was “a millionaire by age eight.” While being born wealthy does not preclude a person from caring about the working class, there is a laundry list of reasons supporting the notion that Trump does not actually give a crap about such people. In fact, while “working” at the McDonald’s on Sunday, he declined to give an actual answer re: increasing the minimum wage.

But pandering? He’s hell at pandering.

Over the weekend, Trump declared all the geese in Springfield, Ohio, had gone missing (cooked and eaten by Haitian immigrants is implied). He confirmed his belief that America’s real enemies reside within the U.S. The “enemy from within” is you, Dear Reader. And he believes he should use the military against people like you who don’t support him.

On his way to the Greenville, N.C. rally on Monday, Trump blew through here to visit devastated Swannanoa so fast that I missed it while the internet was down again. He stopped adjacent the exit, stepped out of his limousine, and walked a few steps to reach a makeshift podium.

Asked by a Politico reporter if he still urged his voters to support Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson for governor, Trump pretended not to know the man he once called “Martin Luther King on steroids” and who once called himself a “Black Nazi.”

“I’m not familiar with the state of the race right now,” Trump said amidst the dust and wreckage. “I haven’t seen it.”

No Trump stop would be complete without him repeating debunked lies. Swannanoa was no different.

Tom Fiedler of the Asheville Watchdog recounts:

And he repeated several false claims that FEMA is running out of money because funds were being diverted to help “illegal migrants” enter the country with the possible intention of illegally voting for Democrats in the election. 

“It’s all gone,” Trump said. “They [FEMA] spent it on illegal migrants. Many of them are murderers. Many of them are drug dealers. Many of them come out of mental institutions and insane asylums, and many of them are terrorists.

“And they spent money to bring these people into our country and they don’t have money to take care of the people of North Carolina and the other states.”

“Is it helping the recovery effort in North Carolina to keep making these claims that FEMA isn’t doing their job well?” asked a reporter, referencing a supporter arrested for threatening FEMA workers. William Jacob Parsons, Fiedler writes, “said the threats were needed to prevent the FEMA workers from taking the actions Trump falsely claimed they were engaged in.”

Trump evaded:

“I think you have to let people know how they’re doing,” he replied, apparently referring to his false statements. “. … But, you know, [there are] very bad statements coming out about the job that FEMA and this administration has done.”   

Incumbent NC-11 Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards issued a statement debunking the lies on October 8. He stood by silently on Monday. Except:

Edwards, however, told Trump that by “getting dust on your shoes,” he had done more to view the devastation than the president or vice president.

The fawning and kowtowing Trump cult members exhibit over this obvious (emotionally stunted) career con man in visible mental decline is beyond comprehension. I sat at my parents dinner table in early 2016 and declared him mentally unstable. Nothing he’s done since has undermined that assessment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans dead because of his incompetence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic are beyond commenting.

Froma Harrup:

When you surrender to the MAGA media bubble, you don’t get to choose which items confirm your prejudices, which ones hurt you in service of making you mad at people Trump wants you to be mad at. Some may wake up to the cruel manipulation. Others will be victims to the end.

Witness the difference in the photos at the top.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney framed the choice facing voters in this presidential election as succinctly as anyone. It’s a matter of trust: “If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn’t make that guy the President of the United States.”

Don’t Despair

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

Kamala Harris held some Q&As with Liz Cheney today in an attempt to persuade Republican women to vote for Harris. When asked how she deals with the despair so many are feeling she said this:

Let me just speak to what people are feeling. We cannot despair. We cannot despair. You know, the nature of a democracy is such that I think there’s a duality. On the one hand, there’s an incredible strength when our democracy is intact. An incredible strength in what it does to protect the freedoms and rights of its people.

Oh there’s great strength in that.

And, it is very fragile. It is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it. And so that’s the moment we’re in. And I say do not despair because in a democracy, as long as we can keep it, in our democracy, the people — every individual — has the power to make a decision about what this will be.

And so let’s not feel powerless.

Let’s not let the — and I get it, overwhelming nature of this all makes us feel powerless. Because then we have been defeated. And that’s not our character as the American people. We are not ones to be defeated. We rise to a moment. And we stand on broad shoulders of people who have fought this fight before for our country. And in many ways then, let us look at the challenge that we have been presented and not be overwhelmed by it.

The baton is now in our hands, to fight for, not against, but for this country that we love. That’s what we have the power to do.

So let’s own that? Dare I say be joyful in what we will do in the process of owning that which is knowing that we can and will build community and coalitions and remind people that we’re all in this together.

Let’s not let the overwhelming nature of this strip us of our strength.

That’s how I feel about this.

Words to the wise.

Suppression Everywhere

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

That is not an overstatement:

In a video obtained by CBS News, the leader of an “election protection” activist group of 1,800 volunteers in North Carolina is seen instructing attendees at a virtual meeting to flag voters with “Hispanic-sounding last names” as one way to identify potentially suspicious registrations as the group combs through voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.

“If you’ve got folks that you, that were registered, and they’re missing information… and they were registered in the last 90 days before the election, and they’ve got Hispanic-sounding last names, that probably is, is a suspicious voter,” said James Womack, the leader of the effort, who chairs the Republican Party in Lee County, North Carolina. “It doesn’t mean they’re illegal. It just means they’re suspicious.”

Womack is the president and founder of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a group of self-described patriots dedicated to investigating the election for what they perceive as incidents of fraud in the pivotal presidential battleground state — where polls put the contest at a statistical tie between the Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

Womack describes his organization as comprised mostly of retirees working remotely from their computers to analyze public records related to voting. He says the group has a list of multiple factors they are using to flag suspicious voters, a task he believes is necessary because of flaws in how voter information has been collected in recent years. […]

Juan Proaño, the CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told CBS News it defies logic to expect undocumented immigrants would take the risk of crossing the border and then place themselves in legal jeopardy by registering to vote and actually voting in an election.

“It’s very much a myth,” said Proaño,” but the campaigns have essentially used it as rhetoric, again, to try and suppress and intimidate the Latino vote.” 

It’s absurd. The last thing an undocumnted migrant wants to do is get involved in some highly regulated American legal ritual. Fergawdsakes.

But this is really about intimidating Hispanic voters because they have traditionally been a Democratic constitutency. With all the talk ab out Trump making huge headway with that group you’d think thay’d contemplate whether this is so smart but then these are Republicans we’re talking about.

I keep hearing that there are Democratic lawyers in place in all the battlegrounds to defend the vote. I hope that’s true because the Republican yahoos have been trained to challenge anyone they see as “an enemy within” whether it’s Latinos. Black voters, college students whatever. We’re already seeing signs of it:

A junior at Franklin & Marshall College was wrongfully turned away from the Lancaster County elections office on Tuesday, told he was ineligible to vote in Pennsylvania unless he could prove he was not registered in his home state, Connecticut.

The student was already a registered voter in Pennsylvania and had voted by mail in Lancaster County in 2022, according to records obtained by LancasterOnline last year from the Department of State. 

The student went to the county elections office in downtown Lancaster last week to apply for a mail-in ballot. His plan was to fill it out immediately and submit it in person. 

It turns out it was illegal:

Marian Schneider, an attorney for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said the removal of the student’s voter registration violated federal law, which prohibits removing people from the voter rolls in the final 90 days before a national election. 

She said Pennsylvania law is also clear about the right of out-of-state college students to register and vote in the county where their college campus is, so long as they meet all the other criteria for voting. The F&M student met all of those criteria.

“They should restore that registration. They had no business removing it,” Schneider said.

How many people are going to go to the trouble to contest these petty disqualifications? Not all of them, I can guarantee.

God Help Us

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

LISTEN TO THIS:

His closing argument is: Vote for me. I’m batshit insane!

Biting The Hand That Votes For Him

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

This should be devastating for Donald Trump but since his cult has been trained not to believe anything bad about him, it probably won’t have much of an impact. Still, it’s pretty shocking for a man who depends on older people to vote for him:

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign plans would significantly accelerate the already-fast-approaching date when Social Security is projected to run out of money, a nonpartisan budget group said Monday.

Trump’s agenda would make the popular government program, relied upon by millions of American seniors, insolvent in six years — shrinking the current timeline by a third, the group found.

The Republican nominee’s proposals would also expand Social Security’s cash shortfall by trillions of dollars and lead to even steeper benefit cuts in the coming years, said US Budget Watch 2024, a project of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

“We find President Trump’s campaign proposals would dramatically worsen Social Security’s finances,” the CRFB budget group said in a blog post.

They didn’t find that Harris’s polities would do the same. The reasons Trump is draining the system include his tariffs, of course, but also his proposal to ends all taxes on Social Security, tips and overtime and lowering taxes on corporations.

When asked about it the campaign said that deporting migrants would restore social security solvency.

They are very, very confused because it’s obvious that Trump is just randomly pandering like crazy without any serious contemplation of the consequences of his policies. I cetainly hope no one is counting on his actually enacting any of these plans with the exception of tax cuts for corporations and rich people. But be advised that if he does it won’t be pretty.

Can He Be Any Worse?

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

Yeah, I know he entertained his crowd over the weekend with talk about Arnold Palmer’s allegedly huge male member and then shut down a McDonalds so he could pretend to work there for 15 minutes to somehow prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. But I think this is yet another low point:

I hope he didn’t mean that FEMA would do a better job if they knew that armed gunman would shoot them if they didn’t. But you never know. I think he meant that it was important that people tell them when they’re not doing their jobs but in reality he’s saying that they should be able to lie with impunity during a disaster for political purposes. It never ends…

The chef’s kiss? The guy with the beard standing over Trump’s left shoulder is this guy:

Even Republicans are getting fed up with MAGA’s hurricane conspiracy theories. Representative Chuck Edwards of North Carolina is one of them.

In a press release put out on Tuesday, Edwards condemned the misinformation about Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Helene that has been circulated online by the likes of Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The right has always been pretty pro-slavery but I didn’t think they wanted to be slaves themselves.

Here he is giving Trump a big wet kiss:

The New Coalitions And What They Mean

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

The 2024 election is just a little over two weeks away now and most Democrats are down to their last nerve with worry. This is nothing new, of course. That’s just the way they roll. Republicans meanwhile are already cracking the champagne strutting around saying they have it in the bag no need to worry. That’s how they roll. Both of these phenomenons are indicative of a certain kind of temperament but they are also real political strategies and it’s worth taking a look at them.

I’ve written before about the Republicans’ love of the bandwagon effect which really just holds that if you act like Donald Trump and pretend that you know you’ve got it won, some people will naturally follow because they want to go with the winner. They’ve actually been doing that long before Trump came along but nobody in politics has ever been more naturally adept at deploying it than he is. And we’ve discussed ad nauseum how the Democrats are suffering from post-2016 PTSD and are just more likely to believe the sky is falling, mainly because these races have been so close for so long and they are rationally worried that it will fall the wrong way.

Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer explained why these two behaviors may just be counterproductive this time, particularly on the GOP side. The political strategy behind the bandwagon effect was specifically targeted at the high propensity voters to whom Republicans have traditionally appealed: older and mostly college educated people who always turn out. That is why they would win the lower interest mid-term elections while the Democrats would win big popular vote victories with their lower propensity voters (those who vote only sporadically or not at all) attenuating the GOP base of regular voters in the presidential years.

Therefore, Democratic strategists turned up the hand wringing at the end of a campaign to ensure their base knows their vote matters (otherwise they might just say “why bother?”) and the Republicans pushed the illusion of momentum to motivate any stragglers to go with the perceived winner. But Pfeiffer points out that the coalitions have changed rather dramatically since 2016 and the strategies that worked with the older configurations may not make as much sense today.

He quotes a Cook Political Report finding:

Our final poll finds Harris leading 51%-47% among high-engagement voters — a remarkably stable four-point lead the same as the previous two polls — only this time with just 2% remaining undecided. But Trump has bounced back to a seven-point lead with low/mid-engagement voters, 52%-45% — smack dab in between his 10-point lead over Biden among those voters in May and his three-point lead over Harris in August. The likely explanation? Since August, Trump has consolidated more Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters and other third-party voters to his column, allowing him to increase his low/mid-engagement vote share from 48% to 52%, while Harris’s share among that group has remained stagnant at 45%.

The GOP’s bandwagon strategy may not work with Trump’s low/mid propensity voters who figure they don’t need to turn out if he already has it won. They can just keep playing Call of Duty or scrolling through pornhub without having to worry that their “gangsta” leader won’t win. Without the hardcore high propensity voters they used to count on, the Republicans may be making a mistake by acting overconfident. Of course, they really have no choice. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about.

The Democrats don’t have the same worries. They don’t lose any of the college educated types by being nervous nellies. In fact, it may get them out to vote early. And they’re still working hard trying to get out their own low propensity types, the young progressives, various ethnic and racial minorities who tend to have very busy lives and need to be contacted and persuaded. They’re even working in the rural areas to try to cut Trump’s margins even a little which can make a difference in the close swing states. Those voters will know that the Harris campaign needs their votes.

The big question for both campaigns at this point, with the race so close, is whether their field operations are up to the task. Early voting appears to be robust in the swing states so far, but comparisons with 2020 are useless because that was such an unusual circumstance. And who knows what Republicans are thinking about Trump’s inconsistent directives about early voting or constant carping about the elections being rigged?

When Trump engineered the ouster of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel and brought in his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and N. Carolina operative Michael Whatley to run it, he made it clear that he didn’t think they needed a get out the vote operation. He instructed them to focus on “election integrity” by which he means vote suppression, poll watching, contesting results, that sort of thing. He believed that his presence alone is enough to get out the GOP vote.

But after an FEC ruling last March that allowed more coordination between the campaigns and outside Super PACs, the Republicans ddid decide to try an experiment and outsource their field operations to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and Elon Musk’s Save America PAC (previously Ron DeSantis’s very grifty primary PAC) who are focusing all their energies on those low propensity voters. Nobody knows whether it will work and the signs are that having gotten a very late start and being run by people with no experience it’s pretty disorganized.

The AP reports that people on the ground aren’t seeing much activity and the technology that was supposed to revolutionize their new approach doesn’t work half the time. They were firing some of their vendors and subcontractors and replacing them as recently as this month.

Meanwhile Elon Musk has taken matters into his own hands and is camped in Pennsylvania until election where he’s holding rallies and paying people a hundred dollars to sign a petition ostensibly supporting the 1st and 2nd Amendments which is obviously a thinly disguised list building exercise. He’s now giving away a million dollars to a random signer every day, creating a sort of electoral lottery. This is of very dubious legality but Musk doesn’t care. He believes he is operating with impunity and he’s probably right. The real question is why he needs this list at this late date? And why shouldn’t Harris voters rush to sign these petitions and get in on the action? It’s just more weirdness from the Trump camp.

The Democrats have been building their ground game for many months, prepared as they were for the fact that Joe Biden’s unpopularity was going to require them to work extra hard to get out their own voters. Harris’s entrance into the race changed that dynamic with massive new enthusiasm and fundraising and that operation has only grown. Whether that’s enough to turn out their own low propensity voters and cut into Trump margins in those battleground states remains to be seen.

But considering the GOP’s new coalition, Trump bragging that he’s already got it won may be a big mistake and when you combine it with the fact that his ground operation is run by grifters and megalomaniacs I can understand why just about every Democratic strategist you hear from says, “it’s too close for comfort, but I’d rather be us than them.” 

Liz And Mike Are Fighting

Published by digby on October 21, 2024

So Mike Johnson textd with is erstwhile friend Liz Cheney after her appearance on Meet the Press last week. He told Axios they “agreed to disagree.” Liz says, not so much:

Cheney disputed Johnson’s characterization of the exchange, telling Axios that she and the speaker “used to be friends, but we did not ‘agree to disagree.'”

Johnson said he had not spoken to Cheney in a “very long time,” but decided to text her after “she said some very uncharitable things.”“I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations,” Cheney told NBC on Oct. 13.

Johnson told Axios he shared “how disappointed I was in that, to make things personal, because I’ve not done that. … We had a little debate in conversation, on text message, back and forth and agreed to disagree.”

Cheney stood by her accusations against Johnson, taking issue with his comments that he will commit to certifying if “the election is free and fair and legal.” […]

In a further statement she said:

“Mike knows this is a conscious choice between right and wrong and can’t honestly rationalize supporting Trump on this.”

Cheney is critical of Johnson for his lead role in the bogus amicus brief challenging the results and she’s right about that. Of course we should all be suspicious thathe will do something similar this time if hegets the chance.

Johnson whines:

“You know the idea that President Trump is somehow a danger to the Republic, and that any of us who support him are a danger or would not fulfill our constitutional obligations, all these things that have been said are it’s just nonsense,” Johnson told Axios in an interview.

“She knows, she knows me. She used to know me well and knows that I’m a constitutional conservative, and I take all matters at this level very seriously, and I will fulfill my constitutional oath. And to say otherwise is just dishonest,” he continued.

Bullshit. Donald Trump is an existensial danger to the Republic and these GOP enablers are helping him do it. If he really believes that helping that monster attempt another coup is fulfilling his constitutional oath he’s eityher delusional or he’s lying. I think it’s the latter.

Cheney told Axios she has repeatedly told Johnson “there was never any good faith basis for the stolen election allegations,” and alleged “Mike knows Trump is dangerously unstable.”

“Had Mike been acting as a lawyer representing Trump, he would have been sanctioned, disbarred or indicted for taking those positions — just as several Trump lawyers were. The courts, including several conservative judges appointed by Trump, rejected each legal argument Mike makes,” she told Axios.

“Mike does not have constitutional authority to overrule the courts. Ignoring those rulings is tyranny Trump’s own White House lawyers testified against him. Trump’s campaign lawyers testified against him. Trump’s Justice Department officials testified against him. So did his VP,” she added.

“If Trump is somehow elected, neither Mike nor anyone else will be able to control him.”

Of course not. And I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t want to control him. I think they are all very much on board the Project 2025 agenda and Trump will let them do whatever they want as long as he can exact revenge on his enemies, lick Putin’s boots, enact tariffs and terrorize immigrants. And I’m not even sure he really cares about the latter two that much unless it’s to pay off a pal or punish someone for looking at him sideways.

Mike Johnson sees the theocratic autocracy he’s always dreamed of within his grasp. He’ll do whatever it takes to get it. Others want the police state and others still see the financial benefits. Trump is their instrument.

Margins Of Victory

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 21, 2024

First they ignore you….

https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/1848327608435413365

The Washington Post this morning offers a “narrative busting” poll, says Simon Rosenberg. But still within the margins of error or, as activists put it, within the margin of effort:

Among these key-state voters, Harris runs strongest in Georgia, where she has an advantage of six percentage points among registered voters and four points among likely voters, which is within the margin of error of plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. Harris also is slightly stronger than Trump in the three most contested northern states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — but by percentages within the margin of error.

The seventh battleground state, Nevada, is tied among likely voters though Harris is three points stronger than Trump among registered voters.

Naturally, the polling from North Carolina has me concerned. I’ve repeatedly made my pitch for turning out more neglected independents in heavily blue urban precincts where they underperform Democrats. But shaving GOP margins in rural areas is also part of a winning equation. Democrats’ state chair Anderson Clayton and friends at groups like Down Home North Carolina are on it. So is North Carolina’s Kate Barr. The Washington Post headline spelled out her mission: “She’s running with all she’s got for a seat she can’t win. That’s the point.“

@underthedesknews #northcarolina #genz @Anderson Clayton ♬ original sound – UnderTheDeskNews

Rural Organizing is also working to narrow rural margins. Kamala Harris hired executive director Matt Hildreth as her rural engagement director. Director of Organizing Shawn Sebastian writes at their substack:

In one of the biggest developments this week, the Harris/Walz campaign unveiled their Plan for Rural Communities. As the Associated Press reported on Tuesday, the plan “marks a concerted effort by the Democratic campaign to make a dent in the historically Trump-leaning voting bloc in the closing three weeks before Election Day. Trump carried rural voters by a nearly two-to-one margin in 2020, according to AP VoteCast. In the closely contested race, both Democrats and Republicans are reaching out beyond their historic bases in hopes of winning over a sliver of voters that could ultimately prove decisive.”

Governor Walz spoke about it at an event in Pennsylvania where he said, “When people think rural America, farm policy matters … crop insurance matters. Trade matters, tariffs matter. But you’re bigger than that. Your families, your health care matters, your education matters, your roads matter, your retirement matters, all those things matter.”

Rural America is more diverse than the MAGA stereotype, and shaving GOP margins there can be margins of victory both for local and statewide candidates. “We are bigger than just agriculture issues,” writes Sebastian.

It’s been our mission to make sure Democrats  focus on turning out their small-town and rural bases — which do exist! — and to demonstrate their commitment to investing in rural America. Harris and Walz are showing rural voters that their concerns have been heard. This really is the plan we’ve been waiting for and we look forward to making it a reality. 

They are also showing how life can improve when elected officials deal with real issues instead of just trying to divide us. The top of the ticket is committed and that’s great to see, but we are also seeing amazing engagement in rural downballot races. For too long, national Democrats have ignored state legislative races, but that’s where so much of the action is. Gerrymandering and voter suppression have been toxic in states. 

Sebastian adds:

“Reverse coattails” or “closing the margins” or “lose less:” However it’s described, it’s an important strategy that we’ve been pushing for a long time.

It’s an electoral version of “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

So get out and vote, willya? Knock some doors. (Brian Beutler did yesterday for the first time!) Make come calls if MAGAland is not the America in which you care to live.

Trump Don’t Know Much About Geography

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 21, 2024

What a wonderful world it won’t be

From “Autocrats trying to close the global commons.” Image: Voice of America.

Noah Smith (Noahpinion) published a grim picture of what the world might look like if Donald Trump regains the U.S. presidency. He’s admittedly not an expert on geoplitics. Neither am I. But you should read it. It’s compelling.

So much of our focus is captured by concerns closer to home: to women’s reproductive freedoms in our country, to our economy, to the threat Trump and Project 2025 pose to the future of our adolescent republic, to the horse-race dynamics of our presidential contest, etc. Smith asks us to pull back and consider the global implications of a second Trump presidency on a world threatened by what he calls the New Axis: North Korea, Russia, and China. Smith warns, “The free world is teetering on the edge of a knife.”

The United States since World War II has been the indispensable nation, the anchor for the western alliance that held the Soviet bloc in check during the Cold War. That was our pride. That was the problem:

But the U.S.’ importance to the democratic alliance system always represented a single point of failure. If America’s political will ever collapsed, it would leave Europe and Asia abruptly vulnerable to the might of a rising China or a resurgent Russia. During the 2000s and 2010s, there were ominous signs that such a collapse might happen. Political polarization increased alarmingly, the legislature became increasingly dysfunctional, government shutdowns and debt ceiling fights became routine, and progressives and conservatives developed their own largely disconnected media bubbles. Then Donald Trump was elected, and the nation descended into four years of nonstop culture wars and political shouting.

Trump don’t know much about geography (or anything else). He was hostile to NATO from the beginning. He’s more interested in seeing his name on a hotel in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow than in protecting the long term interests of the United States and our allies.

Source: ISW

The U.S. has grown complacent. The financialization of the economy and globalization placed corporate profits over national interests. We pulled back from producing our own steel, microchips, ships, etc., and allowed China’s economic expansion to go unchecked. We sold our birthright (and our strategic advantage) for a mess of cheap, Chinese consumer goods. (I’m paraphrasing.)

Donald Trump’s policies did absolutely nothing to reverse this trend or revive American industrial strength. But his aggressive rhetoric toward China, and his rhetorical focus on U.S. manufacturing and trade imbalances, changed the country’s attitudes in important and needed ways. It destroyed the old free trade consensus, and paved the way for a new era of industrial policy — even if those policies were enacted by Biden rather than Trump. Meanwhile, Trump’s export controls, inbound investment restrictions, and hunt for Chinese spies were not always effective, but they represented the first glimmers of U.S. resistance to Chinese power.

Joe Biden, more seasoned and far wiser than the orange enfant terrible, took up where Trump’s miserable rhetoric left off.

Biden unleashed major export controls on China’s semiconductor industry that went far, far beyond anything Trump had done. Those export controls have been highly effective so far, slowing down China’s cutting-edge chipmaking efforts dramatically.

Biden implemented two major industrial policies to revive U.S. manufacturing. These were the CHIPS Act for semiconductors — the most strategic product of all — and the Inflation Reduction Act for batteries and other green tech. (Note that batteries are the essential component of FPV drones, which have become the essential weapon of the modern battlefield.) Those efforts are now bearing fruit, in the form of soaring factory construction in America.

It’s not enough, Smith believes, but it’s a beginning. And it puts the U.S, and its allies on a firmer footing for resisting Chinese and Russian expansion. None of that penetrates Trump’s pea brain. His rhetoric and his actions demonstrate no grasp whatsoever of geopolitical realities. He just wants membership in the Autocrats Club to stroke his own ego.

Both Trump’s rhetoric and his record in office indicate that he’s likely to cancel many of the policies Biden has been using to stand up to China. He’ll keep or increase Biden’s tariffs, of course. But he could cancel export controls, as he canceled the controls on ZTE in his first term, in exchange for empty Chinese promises or personal favors. He won’t make TikTok divest. He shows little interest in industrial policy, believing (wrongly) that tariffs are the main tool of reindustrialization. He has declared his intent to scrap the IRA, leaving America with little battery manufacturing capacity (and thus little drone manufacturing capacity).

What does it all mean if Trump regains the White House and sets about turning the U.S. into an autocracy?

If the U.S. abandons resistance to China and Russia, it will go very badly for America’s allies. Europe will probably fracture again, with some states (probably including Germany) falling all over themselves to appease the Russians. Russia will then become a sort of de facto hegemon in Europe. In Asia, China would probably conquer Taiwan, cutting off U.S. semiconductor supplies and establishing Chinese hegemony in East Asia. Japan and South Korea would then be forced to choose between either becoming nuclear powers or becoming de facto satrapies of the new Chinese empire. Essentially, America’s major allies would fall to America’s enemies.

Americans — or, at least, Trump supporters — might yawn at these developments. But if Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and America’s other allies fall, it will dramatically weaken America’s ability to defend itself. Remember that China is four times the size of America, and manufactures well over twice as much. Without its coalition of allies, the U.S. just doesn’t have the size to stand up to China.

And even if they de facto conquered Asia and Europe, China and Russia would not simply ignore America and let it go on its merry way. The specter of a U.S. revival would haunt them. They would therefore do everything they could to weaken America. Obvious steps would include 1) economically strangling America by cutting it off from trading routes and natural resources, and 2) sowing continued internal dissent in America in the hopes of causing it to collapse into a civil war.

They’re doing that now via propaganda news networks and social media bots, if you hadn’t noticed. “We are heading to a future where words have no meaning,” actor John Cusack warned recently. They are dissolving external reality. Hannah Arendt warned that that is the goal of totalitarians over a half century ago. What you’re seeing now is a foretaste of what’s to come.

Roger Berkowitz wrote at the Hannah Arendt Center:

The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it. It is to foster cynicism so that we don’t know what to believe and come to believe that nothing is true, no facts are reliable, and the world is simply a battlefield for partisan ideas. In such a world, truth retreats behind success as the value to be sought. What matters is victory, no matter the cost. Arendt understood that when factual truths are denied and substituted for by lies, the result is “an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.” Such cynicism, Arendt argues, is the true goal of totalitarians: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” 

The Republican Party, once the supposed guardians against communist relativism has succumbed already. Donald (if his lips are moving, he’s lying) Trump has made numbly repeating his lies a mark of membership in his authoritarian cult of personality. In the name of putting America first, they are undermining America’s global authority and economic strength. MAGA’s won’t get their pottage either.

Smith concludes:

Bereft of its coalition of allies, America would be far less able to resist those efforts. Americans would suffer economically even as China and Russia stoked their hatreds and divisions. The worst ideologies of Trump’s first term — alt-right fascism, leftism, radical identitarianism, and so on — would all come back with a vengeance, encouraged by diligent Chinese and Russian online propagandists. Only now they’d also have a bad economy to fuel their anger.

Witnessing the hateful disinformation flooding my region in the wake of Helene flooding, it’s clear Trump’s foot soldiers are determined to “attribute to malice” every action they don’t understand. Unlike saucer cultists, they don’t see aliens wherever they look, but Deep-State FEMA agents and liberals bent on harming Real Americans™.

If you think a United States run by such people is a scary prospect, Jonah Smith invites you to consider (apologies to Sam Cooke) what a wonderful world it won’t be to live in one run by them. Remind friends reluctant to vote, as Martha and the Vandellas warned, there’ll be “nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide.”

So get out and vote, willya? Knock some doors. Make come calls if MAGAland is not the America in which you care to live.

(h/t SR)