Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

What a wonderful world it won’t be

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.

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)

Politico took a look at what the Trump[ers are plotting in the event he loses the election. It’s a long shot, but it’s theoretically possible:

“No one knows exactly what Trump’s attack on the electoral system will be in 2024,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 select committee. “What will he do this time?”

The answer, according to lawmakers, congressional investigators, party operatives, election officials and constitutional law experts, goes something like this:

— He will deepen distrust in the election results by making unsupported or hyperbolic claims of widespread voter fraud and mounting longshot lawsuits challenging enough ballots to flip the outcome in key states.

— He will lean on friendly county and state officials to resist certifying election results — a futile errand that would nevertheless fuel a campaign to put pressure on elected Republican legislators in statehouses and Congress.

— He will call on allies in GOP-controlled swing-state legislatures to appoint “alternate” presidential electors.

— He will rely on congressional Republicans to endorse these alternate electors — or at least reject Democratic electors — when they convene to certify the outcome.

— He will try to ensure Harris is denied 270 votes in the Electoral College, sending the election to the House, where Republicans are likely to have the numbers to choose Trump as the next president.

Some of the necessary ingredients for this extraordinary campaign are in place. Trump has already embarked on a clear mission to stoke as much uncertainty as possible about the results of the election. He claims that the only way he can lose to Harris is if Democrats cheat — despite no evidence that any significant fraud occurred in 2020 or is underway in 2024. Dutiful allies have amplified these messages. And many of the officials who stood in Trump’s path four years ago have been ousted or retired, ceding power to more compliant Trump-aligned successors. Meanwhile, threats against election officials and growing fears of civil unrest have intensified — potentially at polling places, ballot counting facilities and Electoral College ceremonies — which Trump detractors worry could bolster any election subversion campaign.

Trump allies say the former president is singularly focused on winning the election outright and has not personally engaged in the war-gaming scenarios he might look to if Harris wins. The Trump campaign declined repeated requests for comment about Trump’s plans for the post-election period and whether he has deputized allies to consider all contingencies. Meanwhile, Trump refused again this week to publicly say he would back a peaceful transfer of power.

It’s possible Trump and his allies won’t make a sustained effort to overturn his election defeat. An overwhelming Harris victory would make it harder for Trump to rally Republicans to his side. (If Trump wins, no one expects a comparable effort by Democrats to subvert the election.) But to a person, election observers, elected leaders and some of Trump’s own allies agree on one operating premise: On election night, no matter what the results show, how many votes remain uncounted and how many advisers tell him otherwise, Donald Trump will declare himself the winner.

And from there, he could embark on a risky but plausible challenge to overturn the legitimate election results and install himself in the White House.

Read the rest for the details. I don’t know that he could pull it off. But I think it’s inevitable that he will try.

But first things first. Harris needs to win. It would have been nice to get an overwhelming victory but it doesn’t look as if that’s in th cards. So be prepared. It’s going to be a stressful winter no mattr what happens on election day.

According to the NY Times, members of Trump’s campaign are “growing concerned” that Trump’s “meandering” might be a problem:

They worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.

At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Mr. Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Ms. Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.

Ya think? (I hope….)

They are right to be concerned:

Internal Harris campaign research showed that one of the most effective ways to persuade voters to support the vice president was by portraying Mr. Trump as unstable and Ms. Harris as a steady leader who would strengthen America’s security, according to two Harris officials who insisted on anonymity to describe private data.

In the past two weeks, the Harris campaign has flooded the airwaves in battleground states with a pair of television ads to underscore these themes. One spot features warnings from Mr. Trump’s former top defense officials to paint him as “too big of a risk.” Another features endorsements for Ms. Harris from a bipartisan group of national security officials.

“Even former Trump administration officials agree there’s only one candidate fit to lead our nation — and that’s Kamala Harris,” the narrator says.

A couple of examples:

On Tuesday, John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, asked Mr. Trump about the dollar and whether his policies would drive up inflation.

TRUMP: Yeah, I had four years no inflation. I had four years no inflation. I had four years. It’s better than that. And Biden, who has no idea where the hell he is, OK? Biden went two years with no inflation because he inherited from me. And then they started spending money like drunken sailors. They spent so much money. It was so ridiculous, the money they were spending. They were spending on the Green New Scam, a Green New Scam, the Green New Deal. You know, it was conceived of by A.O.C., plus three. She never even studied the environment in college. She went to a nice college. She came out. She just said — the Green New Scam. She just named all these things.

At a rally in Detroit on Friday, Mr. Trump began talking about his plans to make car-loan interest fully tax-deductible but ended up in a long digression about Elon Musk.

TRUMP: I will make interest on car loans fully tax-deductible and we will — they will — so listen to that. What will that do for the cars? Fully tax-deductible interest on a car. You buy a car, you get a deduction. Wall Street called me up. They said, how the hell did you think of that idea? That’s a good one, because affording your car is essential to restoring the American dream, and you can have the American dream finally, you haven’t had it in 50 years.

Working with Elon Musk — is he good or what? I saw that rocket come down three, four days ago, that sucker was coming down. I said, oh my, no, this, like, I never saw anything like it. I was on the phone with a friend. I’m talking about something. I don’t know, something maybe having to do with Detroit. Could that be possible? But I’m talking on the phone, and I see the screen is on and no sound. And I’m saying, wait a minute. I have to put the phone down. I don’t believe what I’m seeing.

And I saw that big monster coming down, that big — it was like a 20-story building or something, coming down, the engine, blowing and they’re firing and spitting, and it’s, I said, it’s going to crash. It’s going to crash into the gantry. Don’t crash! And then you see another engine take it perfectly, and lands right in the spot that it took off. I said, That must be Elon. He’s the only — nobody else. It must be Elon.

So I called up Elon. I said, Elon, was that you? He goes, That was me. I say, Who else can do it? Nobody. I said, Can Russia do it? No. Can the U.S. do it, meaning the U.S. outside of you? He said, No, nobody can do that. I said, You’re the coolest. That’s pretty — and he endorsed me, long time ago, actually, saying it’s the most important election we’ve ever had.

But working with Elon Musk, we will cut trillions of dollars in government waste. He’s very good at that. He knows better than anybody.

I don’t know if anyone cares about this. The polls are tight as a drum and getting tighter. But maybe, maybe the fact that he is literally falling apart on the stage, talking about dicks and swaying back and forth like a toddler will help some people realize that they can’t put their kids’ futures in th hands of this addled freakshow.

The Washington Post published a feature about the CIA whistleblower whose revelations led to Trump’s first impeachment.

He described his experience, which included death threats that upended his life and required the CIA to provide him with round-the-clock protection, in interviews over the past two months. The Washington Post is granting him anonymity because of the ongoing concerns for his safety and has confirmed his account with more than a half dozen former senior officials.

His story mirrors those of dozens of other bureaucrats, diplomats, intelligence analysts, FBI agents, politicians and military officers who stood up to what they saw as efforts by Trump to subvert the country’s democracy. Some of these officials were fired or resigned in protest. Others sought to temper Trump’s demands without alienating him and, in the process, protect themselves and their institutions from retribution.

Trump has routinely described these people as participants in a “deep state” conspiracy to destroy the country and rob his voters of their voice. If elected next month to a second term, he’s vowed to purge them from government.

Think about that for a moment. Then think about this:

On top of that, we have the world’s richest man blatantly trying to buy votes in Pennsylvania:

Elon Musk says on stage at a town hall that America PAC will be awarding $1 million every day until the election to a registered Pennsylvania voter who has signed his petition. Musk awarded the first $1 million this evening to someone at the town hall, bringing the guy onto the stage and handing him a jumbo check, lotto-style. Musk is essentially incentivizing likely Trump voters in PA to register to vote: Petition is to support for 1A and 2A, so basically R voters. But they also have to be registered to vote, so if they weren’t already, they would do it now.

Election Law expert Rich Hasen:

Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal. See 52 U.S.C. 10307(c): “Whoever knowingly or willfully gives false information as to his name, address or period of residence in the voting district for the purpose of establishing his eligibility to register or vote, or conspires with another individual for the purpose of encouraging his false registration to vote or illegal voting, or pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both…” (Emphasis added.)

See also the DOJ Election Crimes Manual at 44: “The bribe may be anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits such as food stamps. Garcia, 719 F.2d at 102. However, offering free rides to the polls or providing employees paid leave while they vote are not prohibited. United States v. Lewin, 467 F.2d 1132, 1136 (7th Cir.
1972). Such things are given to make it easier for people to vote, not to induce them to do so. This distinction is important. For an offer or a payment to violate Section 10307(c), it must have been intended to induce or reward the voter for engaging in one or more acts necessary to cast a ballot.… Moreover, payments made for some purpose other than to induce
or reward voting activity, such as remuneration for campaign work, do not violate this statute. See United States v. Canales 744 F.2d 413, 423 (5th Cir. 1984) (upholding conviction because jury justified in inferring that payments were for voting, not campaign work). Similarly, Section 10307(c) does not apply to payments made to signature-gatherers for voter registrations such individuals may obtain. However, such payments become actionable under Section 10307(c) if they are shared with the person being registered.” (Emphases added.)

I’d like to hear if there’s anyone who thinks this is not a clear case of a violation.

UPDATE: Musk said at his rally that one had to be a petition signer to be eligible for the $1 million prize. (“So– we really want to try to get as many people as possible to sign this petition. So. I have a surprise for you [crowd cheers] which is that we’re going to be awarding a million dollars, randomly, to people who have signed the signed the petition every day from now until the election.”) I’ve also learned that to get the $100 bounty one also must be a petition signer. And who can sign the petitions? Only registered voters in swing states, which is what makes it illegal. See the screen shots of the offers below:

If Trump wins, Musk will be highly influential. If Harris wins I doubt anything at all will be done about this either. We crossed the oligarchy moment some time ago, I’m afraid.

I know that I’m leaning hard on the outrage today (and frankly feeling little bit stressed) but I had one of those moments this morning as I was watching the Sunday shows and reading one quote after another from voters who are clearly deluded in which it came home to me again just how terrifying a Trump win will actually be. Yes, I know we all fear it and expect that he’ll be a hundred times worse than he was before. But at this point in the election you tend to get caught up in the contest and think too much in terms of winning qnd losing and forget about the stakes a little bit.

The stakes have never been higher. In fact, someone said to me this morning, “it’s the greatest threat since Hitler” and I honestly don’t think that’s hyperbole. It’s beyond terrifying that it’s even slighty close.

She turns 60 today. She’s just the right age for the first woman president. She’s had enough time to gather the experience any woman would be required to have (unlike a man who vcan get away with none, apparently) and yet she’s young and vigorous enough to get the job done.

This was nice:

I don’t know if everyone knows that Kamala Harris has a rabid fan base that’s been with her ever since the 2020 primaries. It’s called the KHive and they are true believers of the kind only Obama and Trump can boast. This was their birthday present to her.

Have we ever had to think about genitalia in political discourse more than we have since Donald Trump came on the scene? Actually, did we ever have to think about it in politics before? We’ve heard about his own dick size constantly, starting when he talked about it in a presidential primary debate all the way back in 2015. We heard him say that he liked to grab women by the pussy and dozsens of women have testified to the fact that he did that routinely. He’s been found liable of doing even worse to e.jean carroll. Stormy Daniels also testified about the size and shape of his penis.

Just this week, as his closing argument apparently, Trump can’t stop talking about genitals. He complained about Harvbey Weinsten being “schlonged” and then dropped this insane comments:

He also said he could hit a golf ball farther than Palmer which I guess means his dick is actually bigger?

This story seems to be getting a lot of traction in the media today which I guess is good? I just don’t know anymore. I’m feeling so cynical about the half of the American people who are going to vote for this cretin that I wonder if this will actually help him.

Maybe Trump is right and we really are a nation in decline. His candidacy does sort of prove it.

To follow up on Tom’s post below, Democracy is great and all but … damn:

“Trump is obviously insane, and then Harris, I don’t think she has a plan,” said Clayton Ewing, a 63-year-old retiree from Shelby Township, Mich. who has voted for Trump in prior elections.

Ewing said he may wait until he gets to the polls to make a final decision.

Regina Gallacher, a 58-year-old physical therapist from Rochester Hills, Mich., said she is looking for a third party candidate because Trump “really scares me” but and she doesn’t “get warm fuzzies” when she hears Harris talk and found her replacement of President Biden on the ballot “very slimy.”

Her husband, a union Democrat, is voting for Trump for the first time but they don’t talk about it at home because Gallacher, who grows repulsed when Trump appears on television, would rather avoid a heated conversation with her husband, who is unlikely to change his mind. If she has to choose between the two, it will be Harris, she said. But she is unsure.

“We’ll get through it” if Trump wins, she said. “I just won’t be happy about it.”

He started the conversation saying he would vote for Trump for the third time because he’s going to “stop the flood of people coming to this country.”

“You know, I shouldn’t be saying that, because I am a foreigner,” said Fram, who moved from Jordan in 1981.

He is angry about a recent break-in at his brother’s mansion by Ecuadorian migrants here illegally, he said. And he pointed to sky-high unemployment in Jordan, which has one of the world’s highest refugee populations, as a cautionary tale.

But the conversation flipped when he began discussing Trump’s refusal to concede the 2020 election and his increasingly authoritarian rhetoric.

“I don’t really like that,” Fram said. “The reason we first immigrated to this country was to be free and to get rid of those dictators.”

He put his current odds of supporting Trump at 60% and said it would depend on a meeting with his large family.

These people ll seem to be acting in good faith so I’m not going to say they are MAGA jerks. (Maybe they are and are just being more polite to a reporter.) But they are just not being rational. I don’t know what we an do about it.

And because she asked

Don’t hold me to these back-of-the-napkin figures, but an out-of-state friend asked this morning if Hurricane Helene was impacting voter turnout here in Asheville. Here’s how I replied (edited to add post-coffee clarity):

Current statewide registration: Ds: 31%, Rs: 30%, UNAffiliated (registered independents): 38%

Despite the lines we saw on Th and Fr (my tweet has almost 10 million views), turnout is down about a third from 2020. The hurricane took out 4 of our planned 14 early voting sites and shortened daily voting hours to 9-5 in this county. We’ve got new voting machines adding to slowing the process. Can’t speak to other WNC counties. 

But despite that depressed vote and a strong first-day vote by Republicans here, we seem back to our normal pattern of Ds outvoting Rs in Buncombe County by over 2:1. What’s more (recognize UNAffiliated registrants statewide have overtaken Ds & Rs since 2020), the UNA vote is UP in Buncombe almost 40% (over Rs by 2:1) from 2020, and in this county they vote with Ds by 56%.  But I warn freshman candidates: Republicans bat last. 

Turnout will be determinative across North Carolina, but not D turnout. Ds statewide are outvoting Rs by only 12k votes as of Saturday and nearly 300k UNAs have voted (31% of votes cast by 38% of the registrants). But UNAs don’t vote with Democrats statewide. They voted 58% against Democrats in both 2020 and 2022. UNA turnout in our big, blue counties will decide our electoral vote. Under 45 they lean heavily our way, but don’t vote. (See graphic.) I’m hoping Anderson Clayton (26) can get a big boost out of the 30-and-unders. Just don’t get me started on why Ds won’t think outside the box and target more of the friendly UNAs for GOTV. I have tried, both here (and in AZ).

Note how NC registration has changed since January when it was Democrats: 33%, Republicans: 30%, UNAffiliateds: 36%. That UNA spike may reflect a bump in younger voters that Old North State Politics noticed after Kamala Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee. Total registration in NC is up 5% since January. But like “signs don’t vote,” registrations don’t either. People who vote vote. And Early Voting Data Are Not Predictive of Final Election Outcomes.

Michael Bitzer wrote on August 6:

Before July 21, registered Republicans were ahead of Democrats, but Unaffiliateds dominated both (with the one exception of July 14th with the GOP spike). After July 21, registered Democrats took the advantage over Republicans, with Unaffiliateds still dominating.

This unaffiliated dominance isn’t surprising, simply due to who is registering: namely, Millennials and Generation Z, who are more likely than not to register non-partisan.

In North Carolina, non-partisan is UNAffiliated, and Millennials and Generation Z are under 45. And over half of voters roughly 45 and younger identify as independents. The question is will those young-uns (new registrants and existing) turn out where it counts for Democrats: in urban precincts where UNAs lean heavily blue? Will Democrats’ turnout operations target enough of these (from their database’s perspective) relative “unknowns”?

As I’ve said before of urban UNAs who don’t turn out like their voting UNA neighbors:

Chicken or egg? Are these lower-propensity voters not turning out like their independent neighbors because they are simply less-engaged? Or because Democrats are not engaging them?

We’ll know soon enough.

What Michael Sokolove found in a tiny Pennsylvania town

Comprehending what’s become of a large faction of Americans and a majority of the Republican Party will be the object of study for historians and psychologists for decades. Reporting from Riegelsville, Pa., a hamlet of 800 that voted in 2020 for Donald Trump by a mere two votes, Michael Sokolove found not one of the 60 Republican and Democrat voters he spoke with is changing sides this election. Just why will be the subject of doctoral dissertations (gift link):

Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate. Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care” (October 2014) was one of my earliest observations on this site.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

Among the Harris voters I talked with was Jaycee Venini, 23, who grew up in Riegelsville and works as a landscaper. “She is actually a human being,” he said. “I feel like that’s a minimum requirement. And she’s not full of greed or a convicted felon.”

The Good Liars clearly cherry-pick the videos they post of Trump supporters absolutely certain of what Trump has done for them until asked to name it. Mitigating their cherry-picking is how many they find. These people are almost impossibly uninformed. What people who believe Trump incorruptible because he’s rich miss is this: the more people have, the less secure they feel and the more they feel they need.

In this exchange from “The Rise of the New Global Elite” (2011), Chrystia Freeland recounts:

As an example, she described a conversation with a couple at a Manhattan dinner party: “They started saying, ‘If you’re going to buy all this stuff, life starts getting really expensive. If you’re going to do the NetJet thing’”—this is a service offering “fractional aircraft ownership” for those who do not wish to buy outright—“‘and if you’re going to have four houses, and you’re going to run the four houses, it’s like you start spending some money.’”

The clincher, Peterson says, came from the wife: “She turns to me and she goes, ‘You know, the thing about 20’”—by this, she meant $20 million a year—“‘is 20 is only 10 after taxes.’ And everyone at the table is nodding.”

As out of touch with them are the Trump voters Sokolove encountered. On Trump’s Chinese menu of character defects, “they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.”

In this Hallmark town, Sokolove expected to find people who had grown tired of the divisiveness and chaos he spawns. He was disappointed.

I was wrong. One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

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