the morning after on the record revelations about a candidate’s admiration for Hitler and the generals who crushed Tiananmen pic.twitter.com/YZDwSZnGjJ
Fox host Brian Kilmeade justifies Trump wanting German generals
Kilmeade: I can absolutely see him go it'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever pic.twitter.com/6lpjH6foEk
The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters:
Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.
This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.
What did move the needle was this message:
Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.”
As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.
I’m going to guess that his own chief of staff calling him a Hitler loving fascist might have an effect.
Back in 2015, before the Republican primaries when Donald Trump was considered nothing more than a circus sideshow, some of us were noting that his rhetoric and agenda bore the hallmarks of the “f” word: fascism. Historian Rick Perlstein wrestled with it as early as September of that year. I wrote about it just a couple of months later.
At the time, Trump was extolling the virtues of torture, talking about a massive surveillance program to be used again American Muslims and promising to send Syrian refugees, including children, back to their war torn country. He hadn’t yet declared his intention to ban all Muslims from coming to the US but it was easy to see the writing on the wall. It was also very easy to see that fascism was on the menu in the the United States of America if Donald Trump won the election
That was nine years ago and there have been zillions of pixels spilled about Trump’s dishonesty, corruption, unfitness as well as his authoritarian philosophy. We’ve learned over the years, through many reports, memoirs and tell-all books that Trump tried to govern in dictatorial fashion at every turn but was either too mentally undisciplined to follow through or was held back by people around him who kept him from acting on his worst impulses.
This campaign has shown him ratcheting up the fascist rhetoric to previously unseen heights, saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” and calling his political opponents “vermin” and “enemies within” that must be purged.
Trump follows in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini by calling his opposition "vermin" during an alarming Veterans Day speech. pic.twitter.com/HC6ShJ8XAN
Lately he’s even suggested that he would call out the military against “the enemy from within.:
Trump to Bartiromo on what worries him about election day: "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within … sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military." pic.twitter.com/twRsilNJnz
Yet Trump has very little respect for the military either. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled his odd antipathy toward it during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed bya Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the NY Times in their book The Divider: Trump in the White House and the NY Times’ Michael Schmidt in his book Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, among others. They all relied on former General and Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump’s contemptuous references to service members as “suckers and losers” and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally.
Goldberg has published a piece in the Atlantic this week with some new revelations about Trump’s disdain for the military, quoting from witnesses and contemporaneous notes an episode in which Trump exploded over the cost of a funeral for a service member which he’d promised to help pay for:
“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
The lawyer for the family said he never paid it but members of the family say he did. His loyal henchman Meadows naturally denies that he ever said those things. Nobody can say that it doesn’t sound like something he would say.
Goldberg also recapitulates the stories about Trump’s fascination with Adolph Hitler as told to him and the other authors by John Kelly. Trump had said to Kelly at one point, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” and Kelly explained that those German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times and almost succeeded. Trump didn’t believe him, insisting that they were totally loyal. Kelly went on the record with about that conversation this week:
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Trump also asked at one point who the “good guys” were in WWI. Apparently, he missed that semester in military school.
Michael Schmidt also got Kelly on the record for the NY Times yesterday and published voice recordings of his comments. Schmidt asked him if he thinks Trump is a fascist:
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said. He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said. Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.
Watch w/ Sound up! "I'm looking at the definition of fascism. It’s a far-right movement with a dictatorial leader and forcible suppression of opposition — So certainly in my experience, he falls into the definition of a fascist." – General John Kelly Trump's Chief of Staff in… pic.twitter.com/7nEjAX32Tx
Kelly isn’t the only former general saying this. Just a week or so ago, Bob Woodward reported in his new book “War” that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley describes Donald Trump as “fascist to the core” calling “the most dangerous person to this country.” Woodward told The Bulwark podcast that former Defense Secretary and Retired Gen. James Mattis agreed with this assessment.
It’s good that these former high ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on 60 Minutes or at least cut an ad so that people who aren’t reading the Atlantic and the NY Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There’s no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I’m afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they just don’t want to be in the line of fire it’s a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.
Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s an ignorant fascist, but there’s really no requirement for education to be one. It’s driven by an authoritarian, nationalist, racist instinct and that he has in spades. He may not have been fully able to accomplish his true desires in his first term since he was so unfamiliar with even the rudimentary levers of power but he’s no longer afraid to go for it. Here’s Trump on the campaign trail just yesterday:
“As president, you have tremendous — it’s called extreme power. You have extreme power. You can, just by the fact, you say, ‘Close the border,’ and the border’s closed. That’s it. Very, very simple. You don’t need all of this nonsense that they talk about.”
If he wins there will be no John Kellys or Mark Milleys to stand in the way. He’ll only be served by accomplices who agree with him.
Don’t expect his minions to balk:
Scott Jennings on CNN just dismissed this by saying “if you’re worried about Hitler there are thousands of Hitlers running around college campuses” https://t.co/NKfNtKXKCS
Crowd of Trump supporters marching on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, ultimately leading the building being breached and several deaths. Photo by TapTheForwardAssist (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Despite minimal evidence, a full-bore effort is underway to make Democrats think Kamala Harris is losing the election. This effort is abetted by preternaturally anxious Democrats expressing their concerns on social media.
I have written a lot recently about the vibe shift in Democrats after Kamala Harris’s nomination. I don’t think the data validates such an extreme shift in emotions. However, I won’t shame anyone for being on edge these last two weeks. The stakes are enormous. Reproductive freedom, health care, democracy, and the planet are on the line in an election that could be decided by the weather in a random suburban Wisconsin county.
Simon Rosenberg has been on about Republicans flooding the zone with conservative “red wave” polls meant to skew polling averages in Donald Trump’s favor. This is a GOP psyop meant to a) depress Democrat enthusiasm and, b) lay the groundwork for another “stop the steal” movement post-Nov. 5. And if you’ve been paying attention, it’s clear that that that is when the Trump campaign expects to win the presidency. Not at the polls on Election Day. Look at how he’s campaigning.
Pfeiffer admits he tends to hang out “on the dark side,” but offers a counter to the GOP effort to psych out their opponents. Hope, he writes, “is a powerful force.” There are several reasons why Harris may have the advantage.
Kamala Harris is Better Liked
Harris Has a (Slightly) Easier Path to 270
Trump is Not Closing Strong
Harris Runs the Better Field Operation
Pfeiffer offers reasons behind all those. But there are wild cards beyond those four. Trump’s campaign has nowehere to grow. A large percentage of the Republican base voted for Nikki Haley in the primaries, even after she dropped out on March 6. She garnered 23 percent of the vote on March 5 in the swing state of North Carolina. Will those Haley voters return to the Trump cult fold or what?
The large expansion in independent voter identification over the last four years (where voters register that way) means that simply counting Ds and Rs as early voting continues is all but meaningless. How they will vote this year is anyone’s guess. They still tell pollsters that the economy is a top issue. Nate Silver’s “gut” this morning acknowledges reasons why polling may underestimate Trump support, or else be biased against Harris. (See Rosenberg above.)
The best Silver can offer is, “Don’t be surprised if a relatively decisive win for one of the candidates is in the cards — or if there are bigger shifts from 2020 than most people’s guts might tell them.”
Then of course, there is the Dobbs decision. Elections where women’s reproductive rights measures were on the ballot consistently tipped in Democrats’ favor even in conservative states. The horror stories of pregnant women bleeding out in parking lots have been powerful. The backlash against Trump and Dobbs has not gone away.
We just don’t know how it will all play out. Just don’t get psyched out. We are, as Dem strategists insist, within the margin of effort.
One of my favorite TV scenes was in a show called “6 Feet Under” in which Kathy Bates brings her friend to a department store and tells her to go ahead and shoplift because once a woman goes through menopause she’s invisible. It’s kind of true …
New polling shows Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump with women over the age of 50 by more than any presidential candidate since 2016. The survey shows that 54% of women in that demographic plan to vote for the vice president, over just 42% for Trump.
It’s a huge improvement from Joe Biden, who only led Trump by three points with women over 50 in January. The numbers are also better than Hillary Clinton‘s numbers in 2016, who polled 48%-40% over Trump.
[…]
‘Our polling over the years has shown them to be a key swing voting bloc,’ said AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond.
In the same survey, Democrats led Republicans 51%-42% on votes for who should control Congress. Overwhelmingly, women over 50 say that the economy and affordability are their biggest issue.
‘Without abortion, the women love me,’ Trump insisted.
They may be invisible but they vote. They really vote. And they affirmatively like Kamala Harris. On the other hand, I would guess hat quite a few of them really hate Donald Trump and JD Vance who said just the other day that post menopausal women’s only purpose in life is to watch the grandkids or Bernie Moreno in Ohio who said that women over 50 have no reason to care about abortion rights.
Jeffrey Goldberg has published a story in the Atlantic compiling many of the grotesque commnts from Trump about the military. I guess I’m not shocked by it anymore but I confess I’m still pretty stunned that Republican voters don’t care. I suppose they believe it’s all lies but on some level they do know he’s lying and have chosen to pretend to believe him when he says it didn’t happen. I will never understand what makes them so attracted or loyal to this man but that’s another story.
I’m linking with a gift link so that you can read the whole story. Much of it isn’t new but it’s still good to see it all in one place.
The newest piece is here. Trump had offered to personally help pay for funeral expenses for vaness Guillen a young soldier who had been killed by a fellow soldier. Months after the fact, he asked if they had ever received a bill:
According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.
Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.
That comment was recorded contemporaneously. And then there’s this which I will never understand:
In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”
Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”
This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I.
Ok, so he’s an uneducated cretin and became president without knowing who “the good guys” in World War I were. And we know he probably has never read a whole book in his life. But he grew up in the shadow of WWII and should have ar least seen a boatload of movies like “The Longest Day” or “The Desert Fox” where he would have heard of Rommel. Most people his age, especially men, were steeped in WWII lore and would have known the story of the assasination plot by Hitler’s Generals.
Did he just spend all of his time as a young person looking in the mirror and giving himself affirmations? WTF?
Trump’s contempt for the military is well documented by now. I guess the flag waving, “love-it-or-leave-it” Republicans are equally contemptuous nowadays. This is yet another bit of hypocritical BS we won’t ever have to listen to them bleat about now.
If they start waving the flag in our faces in the future we should just call them suckets and losers. They’ll know what they means…
I share this after having watched a bunch of evangelicals drool all over Trump as if he’s the second coming and I’m reminded that we don’t have to listen to the Christian Right about morality ever again. There was a time when they’d be trotted out as the avatar of Real American values. No more. They showed themselves to be simply lackeys for a demagogic cult leader. I don’t think we have to have any doubt WJWD.
Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk taking over the Trump field operations may be one of the worst decisions he’s made and that’s saying something:
Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undercut by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.
The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.
A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door-knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.
The video, shared with a few hundred canvassers, walks through the setup: a user downloads a GPS-spoofing app to falsely place themself at the door of a Trump voter, fakes responses to the survey and takes steps to cover up the fraud by varying the survey responses to make it believable.
The scope of the GPS-spoofing practice is unclear because it is difficult to catch cheaters without cross-referencing data with another tracker. It is also not a problem limited to America Pac; GPS spoofing has been a problem for years and it has become increasingly resource-intensive to catch cheaters.
[…]
The video comes as America Pac has struggled to grapple with 24% of the door knocks in Arizona and 25% of the door knocks done in Nevada last week – by less sophisticated cheaters working for Blitz – being flagged internally as potentially faked or fraudulent, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
I’m shocked that a hastily assembled operation in which many of the people already working were fired in September and nobody knows who’s reponsible for what, may not be working efficiently. Musk has reportedly spent $75 million since the PAC was formed three months ago, with $30 million going to this GOTV work. He’s also giving away a million dollars a day to someone who signed his bogus petition. Sounds great.
This whole thing seems very haphazard. They’ve got money but you have to know how to spend it…
This piece by Josh Marshall takes an in-depth look at the GOP ground game. It’s well worth reading if you’re interested in this subject.
One of Obama’s top strategy and data guys, Patrick Dillon, has written a statement today that I think you may want to read. It’s not just phony Hopium, it’s based on educated analysis, experience and possibly some inside knowledge.
Anyway, I don’t know if this will be real or not and he admits he doesn’t know either. But this is his best guess. An excerpt:
My texts are full these days of “are we gonna be okay?” and, then, a beat later, “are you really sure?” Over and over, my answers are basically “yes” and “as sure as I can be.”
I also used to get paid to make big presentations this time of year to tell clients what was going on and what might happen. That process forced me to be rigorous in assessing every bit of data I could lay my hands on, and keep myself honest.
That said, I’m no Nate (neither Silver nor Cohn.)3 I still believe at the end of the day campaigns are more art than science. Call it 51% gut / 49% data.
And I believe the pool of modern, comparable presidential elections is such a small sample that each is sui generis: from which we may draw lessons, but not much in the way of hard and fast rules.
So, to save some time and in the spirit of “to hell with it,” here in one place is what data and my gut tell me I believe: she’ll win and outperform the polls. Trump will be rejected, as he has been in every election since he first became president – 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 – either where he was on the ballot directly or by proxy through candidates closely identified with him, including in multiple of the same swing states we’re all obsessing over now.
His campaign’s relentless focus on anti-trans ads will come to be seen as an epic strategic blunder, in addition to unforgivably morally repugnant. We’ll acknowledge that the supposedly disciplined, well-planned campaign to beat Biden never quite found its footing ever again once the candidate changed. We’ll remember that his one and only, and very close, win in 2016 came when he was, despite controversy, new and fresh and funny (to his people at least – and no small amount of journalists.) He was energetic, went EVERYWHERE, and was able to at least occasionally give the impression of being in on the joke and enjoying himself. In 2016, he had an underrated strategic ambiguity on what kind of Republican he was, whether promising to protect Social Security or maintaining a wink-wink ambivalence on abortion, aided by voters’ inability to truly imagine him doing the most outrageous things, or the horror of Roe being overturned. In his own way, he had a kind of disciplined, positive and constructive message about what he would do: make America great again, build the wall, drain the swamp. In 2024, he has none of it, much less the vitality and clarity of eight years ago.
We’re going to see afresh what’s been staring us in the face since 2022: Dobbs was a political earthquake, with aftershocks still reverberating out. It wasn’t just digested and processed in 2022 and now behind us. As much as Roe catalyzed a new movement for its opponents, brought in new groups of voters (many crossing old partisan lines), and energized activists for decades; Dobbs is doing the same here and now.
To the extent poll error happens, I believe it is likelier to be in her favor than his after eight years of pollsters obsessively focused on how to not miss Trump supporters. We are all understandably so traumatized by 2016’s loss, and so many were surprised by 2020’s margin (though notably, not the Biden campaign itself) that, even though there are fairly convincing theories for how each happened, we’ve become hostages of superstition and anxiety – even when we can’t quite articulate a good theory for why it would happen this time. And all this despite the various modeling geniuses gently and repeatedly reminding us there’s no iron law that every error happens in the same direction cycle after cycle, indeed that it might be a little weird for it to happen three cycles in a row.
In particular, while his gains with voters of color and young voters are real and absolutely need long-term attention, I believe we will find that they were nonetheless meaningfully overstated in polling for a variety of reasons; including that these groups are hard and getting harder both to poll and to turn out.
We will also find, like Democrats in Virginia in 2021 when we were painfully shown that we could fall even further in the rural reaches, the floor even lower than we imagined, that Republicans in 2024 had further to fall in the suburbs and among college-educated voters – and did.
The almost comically late and slapdash, make it up as we go along, build the plane in the air, field effort run by people with more money than political or managerial sense (ahem, Elon) will, unsurprisingly, fail at the one thing they admit they very much need: sufficiently getting his low-propensity supporters to the voting booth. And it will be substantially outclassed by the massive, well-trained and targeted first-Biden now-Harris field operation that has been building on the ground all year.
We’ll also realize all the rush to analyze early vote returns on here and extrapolate to unsupported conclusions, and the attendant panics, was off base because 2024 is not like 2022 is not like 2020. And for either campaign to win, they’re simply going to need to have won some number of what will initially look at first like votes for the other team.
I’ll keep saying what I’ve been saying for months. To me, an obsessive political observer, this feels more like 2012 than 2016. At this point in that campaign the Republicans were measuring the drapes and I just didn’t see it. In fact, Obama won by four. Of course, 2016 changed me as it did everyone else and I’ve never trusted my gut since then. But if I had it would have told me that the Democrats were going to overperform in every election since then and they have.
So, for what it’s worth, I think that’s true again this time. Trump is a fasacist, criminal imbecile and while it shakes me to the core that so many of my fellow Americans seem to love that about him, I’m just not convinced that there are enough to put him back in the White House.
I would also read between the lines in this Ron Brownstein analysis of where the Harris campaign says they are. I’ve been listening to David Plouffe out there saying over and over again that the race is razor thin and they aren’t taking anything for granted. I’m sure that’s true. But I also think there’s just a bit of spin on that and not in a bad way. I detect just the tienies bit of confidence in his statements. (Of course that may just be what I want to see ….)
Brownstein’s analysis is very good. Way better than refreshing 538 once an hour.
I’m staying away form the horserace polls. But some of the other questins are interesting. Like this one:
“Voters who made their decision on who to support over a month ago break for Trump, 52-48%, while voters who made up their mind in the last month or week break for Harris, 60-36%.” Voters who say they could still change mind? Harris +5
I don’t know if that’s meaningful. I can’t imagine why so many people haven’t been sure that they would vote for a fetid pile of garbage over Donald Trump. But if they’re coming around, that’s good news.
