Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Howie Klein has a very fun contest going about a very useful political project. If you’ve maxed out on campaign donations or you’re looking to donate to something ongoing (which we will need desperately) this would be a good place to start:

Born On A Pirate Ship

Blue America has teamed up with Jamie Raskin’s office to give away a rare, collectible, mint-condition, RIAA-certified Barenaked Ladies gold record award for Born On A Pirate Ship. We’ll tell you how to win it in a moment. Or, if you’re in a rush… just go here.

First we want to tell you a little something about Jamie Raskin’s celebrated Democracy Summer project, which this year trained and deployed more than 1,000 high school and college students to participate as Democracy Summer Fellows in critical Democratic campaigns in 44 states across America.   

Every summer, Democracy Summer fellows not only canvass neighborhoods, knock on doors, register voters, and engage in digital organizing, but participate in seminars on the historical struggles for democracy and freedom in America and on the contemporary threats we face to strong democracy and civic freedom. They learn from leading policy experts, academics, union organizers and Democratic officials, who explain GOP voter suppression tactics, right-wing gerrymandering of state and federal legislative districts, right-wing judicial activism and the serious ethics and legitimacy crisis on the Supreme Court, the reactionary dynamics of the filibuster, the struggle for a national popular vote for president along with Ranked Choice Voting and campaign finance reform, and the statehood drives among large disenfranchised communities in our country, including Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico.

Founded by Raskin in 2006, when he ran for the state Senate, as a way to involve his own three children and dozen nieces and nephews in his campaign, Democracy Summer has educated, energized and inspired thousands of young Americans who are ready to become the next generation of Democratic organizers and leaders. We propose to use the Born On A Pirate Ship gold record as a means to raise funds for Democracy Summer. Contribute any amount to Democracy Summer on this ActBlue page and you get a chance to win the framed BNL gold award.

Reminder for non-BNL fans: They recorded Born On A Pirate Ship in 1995, before the band had broken through in the U.S. “The Old Apartment,” was the first of their singles to get significant American radio play, with a video directed by Jason Priestly. Another song from the album, “Shoe Box,” was part of the Friends soundtrack. After the big BNL breakthrough album Stunt went multiplatinum, new fans found Born On A Pirate Ship and it started selling and went gold in 2000. The gold record award is extremely rare because only a small handful were ever made. This one was awarded to Blue America co-founder and then-Reprise Records president Howie Klein who donated it to this Democracy Summer 2024 promotion.

We’re not trying to embarrass Rep. Raskin, but he’s probably the most brilliant member of Congress. He’s also one of the most inspiring. Last month he helped define the Democratic Party for his social media followers: “We Democrats,” he wrote, “are the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt. They saw fascists marching down the boulevards of Europe and did not see very fine people on both sides of the street— they knew America must stand strong on the side of democracy and freedom.”

It didn’t end there. “We are the party of the women’s movement and the Equal Rights Amendment and comprehensive health care and freedom to make your own choices regardless of what the right-wing theocrats tell you to do. We are the party of Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act because we believe healthcare is a right of all the people and not a luxury good for the wealthy. We are the party of the labor movement and the National Labor Relations Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. We are the party of the environmental movement and we are the party of science, facts and data— not fake news, conspiracy theory and disinformation.”

Enough? Nope “We’re the party that passed the most sweeping climate change legislation in American history. We’re the party that ended Big Pharma’s power to set sky-high drug prices for our people on Medicare without negotiating with the government. And we’re the party that says billionaire corporations must pay their taxes too. So while Lincoln’s party of ‘liberty and Union’ becomes Trump’s cult of chaos and disunion, Democrats will continue fighting hard to make democracy deliver for the American people, just as we always have.”

The contest ends on Sunday night, October 20 at 9 PM (Pacific Time). If you want to win but don’t want to contribute online, rush a check made out to Blue America PAC to PO Box 207201, Los Angeles, CA 90027. And, if you want to try to win but times are too tough to contribute, just send a post card to that same PO Box and let us know you want to enter too.

The official, FEC-mandated version of the rules are long and boring but if you’re a masochist with no life you can read them here. Again, this is where you can enter for the random drawing: Barenaked Ladies Democracy Summer.

On VP Kamala Harris:

“Every president has to cut their own path. That’s what I did. I was loyal to Barack Obama but I cut my own path as president. That’s what Kamala’s going to do. She’s been loyal so far but she’ll cut her own path… Kamala’s perspective on our problems will be fresh and new. Donald Trump’s perspective is old and failed and quite frankly totally dishonest.”

I think that’s a very generous comment by the Prez, particularly considering that it calls attention to his own age. He isn’t failed and he isn’t dishonest but he is old and he knows very well that it knocked him out of the race.

This is so stupid I hardly know what to say. Kamala Harris put out her medical report and this was Trump’s hysterical response:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic grown man in my life.

This gave me a chuckle, maybe it will make you laugh too.

The day the Vice President was diagnosed with allergies. pic.twitter.com/qfBRZ3InoR

— Dr. Annie Andrews (@AnnieAndrewsMD) October 15, 2024

Is Donald Trump losing it for real this time? That’s a question being asked and answered all over social media and cable news this week in the wake of his bizarre performance in Pennsylvania on Monday night. I know his weird behavior is something we’re all very aware of and also unfortunately aware that it has been normalized over the past few years to the point that it hardly even gets mentioned by the mainstream media much less analyzed with the same focus and fervor given to Joe Biden’s verbal stumbles or Hillary Clinton’s emails. But Monday night’s very eccentric performance even got the Washington Post’s attention which described it with this headline:

Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode

After the Trump campaign left thousands of people stranded in the desert in the middle of the night after his Coachella, California rally over the weekend, they once again dropped the ball by holding his crowded Oak, Pennsylvania Town hall in a venue without air conditioning and a couple of people fainted shortly ater it began. (Trump later posted on his social media site that they fainted from the excitement. He really does think he’s Elvis.)

They halted the program briefly as they often do when these things happen but this time once they played a little musical interlude from Trump’s playlist, he abruptly decided he didn’t want to take any more questions and instead had his minions continue to play his very eccentric song selection for almost 40 minutes as he danced his little jerk dance on the stage with the sycophantic moderator, North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, awkwardly trying to join in.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Trump has seen that the Harris campaign has a DJ entertaining poeple at her rallies and thought he could replicate it with his special Mar-a-lago DJ playlist featuring Pavarotti and Sinead O’Connor. But watching him try to get down with Slash’s ripping guitar solo on Guns and Roses’ November Rain was so embarrassing one had to look away. It was a trainwreck and the campaign knew it.

That’s why they assembled every surrogate, henchman and TV pundit supporter to fan out on Tuesday the minute Trump finished his event at the Chicago Economic Club to pretend that it was a triumph in a vain attempt to swallow up the growing public realization that Trump is far more addled and mentally chaotic than what we’ve seen previously.

Hannity: In one of his all time greatest moments on the campaign trail, Trump absolutely schooled Bloomberg’s editor.. Trump frankly masterfully navigated the situation, laid out what was a clear vision for American prosperity pic.twitter.com/aBRWyL0Q8V

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 16, 2024

That’s ridiculous. Trump was unable to answer any questions directly, instead meandering from one topic to another, clearly out of his depth when pressed for details and often just outright lying. At one point he was asked about whether Google should be broken up and he answered that he couldn’t get it out of his mind that the Justice Department had intervened in a voting rights issue in Virginia. That’s not a rational response to that question.

At another point he got angry at the interviewer, John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, when he tried to bring him back on topic, telling Micklethwait that he was doing “the weave”, his recent excuse for the mental incontinence he displays on the stump, now being used to ratinalize his inability to keep a single train of thought or give a straight answer in an interview:

Trump: You gotta be able to finish a thought because it’s very important. This is big stuff. 

Micklethwait: You’ve gone from the dollar to Macron

Trump: It’s called the weave pic.twitter.com/j2UYp9jkQu

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 15, 2024

He finally regressed to his usual juvenile belligerance and insulted Micklethwait and the Wall St. Journal saying they don’t know what they’re talking about.

This is an awful event for Trump, now he’s throwing a fit and attacking the Wall Street Journal and the moderator: What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you. pic.twitter.com/7oH9tSuScF

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 15, 2024

You’ll note the cheering and laughing at Trump’s ignorant insult from the audience. Now, it’s possible that the Trump campaign managed to fill the room with his fans but it seems unlikely that Chicago, home of the highly influential University of Chicago school of economics, wouldn’t have mostly serious members of its Economic Club in attendance. But in both the New York and Detroit events as well, the audience seems to have given Trump a very enthusiastic reception and it makes you wonder how savvy these so-called pillars of the financial community really are.

A few days back former president Barack Obama held a rally for Harris in Pennsylvania in which he made a case that’s especially relevant in the context of Trump’s ongoing chest thumping about his supposedly historically successful economy. Obama pointed out that Trump inherited a thriving economy only made possible by Obama’s hard won rebuilding from the financial crisis (which he inherited from the previous GOP president George W. Bush.) Obama is right about that. The data is clear.

Even more galling, Trump is trying to do the same thing again. The country’s economy was in shambles from his mishandling of the once in a century pandemic and he left the mess for Joe Biden to clean up, which he has done impressively. Trump is making the rounds to these economic clubs all over the country and is babbling incoherently about tariffs and “drill baby drill” saying that all of his ideas will be paid for by “growth” which Biden and Harris have failed to achieve which is a lie, of course. On virtually every measure, the economy is doing very well and even if you remove the year of Covid, growth under Biden exceeded Trump. The cover story of this week’s Economist magazine is “The American economy, the envy of the world.”

The Wall St Journal polled economists on their expectations should Trump or Harris win the election:

WSJ survey of economists. This is as close to unanimity as the profession gets pic.twitter.com/6Jd1rNyMym

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 14, 2024

I missed this in the WSJ economist survey: by almost 4 to 1, economists believe that Trump’s policies would *reduce* manufacturing employment pic.twitter.com/VOh0WvKAYJ

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 15, 2024

The NY Times actually interviewed some of the audience at the Detroit Economic Club event and all seemed to be business and financial types you might expect to be concerned with their bottom lines above everything else. They rationalized their support for him by saying they didn’t believe Trump would actually carry out all those unseemly threats he makes about deporting millions of people or going after his political enemies. They told the reporter they believe the media blows it all out of proportion or it’s all just an act. And despite their protestations it’s an act they apparently enjoy quite a bit.

According to the Times, Trump was just an avuncular fella, entertaining the folks with some funny stories about his body, his hair, muscle cars and Elon Musk with just a few “rough edges” about stolen elections and the like. I watched that speech. It was the usual rambling, incoherent, ignorant nightmare:

Incredible — here's the full footage of Trump getting a question about his parenting style at the Detroit Economic Club, then going on a nearly 8 minute rant that culminates in him calling for drug dealers to be put to death. His brain just flits around. pic.twitter.com/Ry3WjAtEfU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 10, 2024

I’m not sure if it’s more alarming that he said it or that the Times and the allegedly sophisticated financial whizzes in the audience all thought it was charming and reassuring.

It’s been very difficult for many of us to understand how this race can be so close considering all we know about Trump’s unfitness. It’s clear there is a hardcore base of Trump followers who cannot be budged from their support. You see them interviewed at his rallies and they are so far down the conspiracy rabbit hole that they are no longer in touch with reality.

But I think we imagined that the type of people who belong to the Economic Club of a major city might be able to rationalize their support for him in service of their portfolios but it is a bit surprising to realize that they actually like all the things they purport not to believe are true about him. Just listen to that laughter when he insults the Wall St. Journal and the editor of Bloomberg News. That’s not about their wallets. Their wallets are fine. That’s about their ids.

These are the respectable members of the cult and it explains why we might only be able to count on a small percentage of Republican voters to cross over and vote for Harris. MAGA isn’t just the people waving around the huge Trump flags. It’s the people in the pin striped suits laughing at his puerile insult “comedy” and loving watching him sticking it to the libs. The Trump cult contains multitudes.

Salon

Be a cool kid

North Carolina in-person voting starts Thursday. It started Tuesday in Georgia.

Record number of early votes cast in Georgia as election gets underway in battleground state (CNN):

A record number of early votes have been cast in Georgia on Tuesday as residents headed to the polls in a critical battleground state that is grappling with the fallout from Hurricane Helene and controversial election administration changes that have spurred a flurry of lawsuits.

More than 328,000 ballots were cast Tuesday, Gabe Sterling of the Georgia secretary of state’s office said on X. “So with the record breaking 1st day of early voting and accepted absentees we have had over 328,000 total votes cast so far,” he said.

The previous first day record was 136,000 in 2020, Sterling said.

Please, be a cool kid. Whether you live in a swing state or not, vote on Day 1 of early voting. It’s about enthusiasm. It’s about showing Democratic strength. It’s about providing “social proof” that tells neighbors voting is what all the cool kids are doing.

It’s also about helping Democratic campaigns focus their resources on a smaller pool of harder-to-turn-out voters than you. (It will also quickly stop your campaign calls and door knocks.)

All the cool kids on Vote on Day 1 people. Be a cool kid. Vote on Day 1. https://t.co/6d3y6vNKAh

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) September 24, 2024

A caution

But don’t get overconfident about those big numbers in Georgia.

My early vote caution to excited freshman candidates here in NC when they see Democrats outvoting Republicans by 2 to 1 is this: Republicans bat last.

Nevertheless, here in N.C., we’ve got game. The GOP has Donald Trump and Mark Robinson.

It’s no secret that Josh Stein is in the driver’s seat in the race for governor against Robinson, but despite polls showing other statewide races being close, internal polls show Democrats in positive territory. The election is, as they say, within the margin of effort.

About having “game,” this from The New York Times (shared article):

In the final weeks of the 2024 election, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are staking their chances on two radically different theories of how to win: one tried-and-true, the other untested in modern presidential campaigns.

Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.

Interviews with more than four dozen voters, activists, campaign aides and officials in four pivotal counties — Erie County, Pa., Kenosha County, Wis., Maricopa County, Ariz., and Cobb County, Ga. — reveal a diffuse, at times unwieldy Republican effort that has raised questions from party operatives about effectiveness in the face of the more tightly structured Harris campaign operation. Democrats, in many places, are outpacing Republicans in terms of paid staff and doors knocked, and are counting on that local presence to break through a fractured media environment and to reach voters who want to tune out politics altogether.

Rep. Jeff Jackson, candidate for N.C. attorney general, told a group here over the weekend that the numbers of field contacts this year rivals the Obama campaign of 2008. The number of Harris field offices and staff here is perhaps unprecedented. Another potential game-changer is what’s happening in Mecklenburg County (Charlotte). Maricopa in Arizona and Meck in N.C. are two counties of keen interest in this election.

Mecklenburg has traditionally been a drag on Democrats’ statewide performance, but that may be changing. Drew Cromer, Meck’s new under-30 chair, has brought new energy and big fundraising to his county, as well as an organizing effort not seen before.

Simon Rosenberg and his Hopium community have raised over $700k for the state party led by Anderson Clayton. Out-of-state groups like Swing Blue Alliance are directing funding and volunteers to Meck. If they can boost Meck’s turnout a point or two that will be huge. 

So go vote tomorrow, all y’all in North Carolina!

The GOP’s phony Red Wave 2024

Donald Trump’s ever-tenuous grip on realty is spiraling downward like the price of shares in his media company. The Dow Jones briefly halted trading in Trump Media Tuesday when the bottom dropped out. The decline in Trump’s mental state has become too obvious for the press to ignore. At issue in these next few weeks is whether voters who’ve bought into Trumpism will dump it too. Or will they be duped again into buying the BS the Trump campaign is selling?

There are signs they may not. Anecdotal, perhaps, but signs.

But first, as predictable as the fall leaves, Democrats are engaging in their traditional pre-election panic attack. Polls are nail-bitingly close. What if Trump and his Nazi-adjacent supporters regain the White House? What country is safe to flee to? What do I do with all my my stuff?

“Republicans are going to extraordinary lengths right now – red wave polls, releasing ‘nternals,’ Polymarket voodoo – to try to make it look like Trump is winning the election when he isn’t,” Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg cautions. “Democrats should not be helping them.”

Republicans are going to extraordinary lengths right now – red wave polls, releasing "internals," Polymarket voodoo – to try to make it look like Trump is winning the election when he isn't. Democrats should not be helping them. https://t.co/0VfjNmaz0m

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) October 10, 2024

Those close polls are another red mirage. The horse-race press naturally laps them up like mother’s milk. Yet, Democratic strategist Rosenberg warned a month ago that Republicans would flood the zone with fake polls just ahead of voting to deceive the public into believing that Trump was doing better than he really is.

And it’s happened, Rosenberg explained in a Tweet thread:

“Of last 15 general election polls released in PA, 12 have right/GOP affiliations. Their campaign to game the polling averages and make it appear like Trump is winning — when he isn’t — escalated in last few days.

“I urge journalists and researchers to dive into FiveThirtyEight and see how the red wave pollsters have flooded the zone again. MT, PA, NC were initial targets but now it’s all 7 battleground states.

“This 2024 red wave op is much larger and involves many more actors and polls than the red wave campaign in 2022. It also involves new players — Polymarket, Elon — and feels far more desperate, frenetic, unhinged. Trumpian.”

Red wave pollster/Polymarket update:
– More than 25 orgs now involved in red wave 2024
– Last week they dropped 27 polls. This week it's more
– Ferocity of effort to make it look like Trump is winning clearly means they don't think he is.
More 👇https://t.co/8LETKBgIOj

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) October 11, 2024

Republicans did it in 2022. They’re doing it again, says Rosenberg, as part of “red wave 2024.”

With three weeks to go we should note that Rs have dropped more than 60 polls into the polling averages over the last few weeks to red wave 2024.

The only reason they would be doing that is that if they though they were losing. https://t.co/p0AwV6wH6v

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) October 14, 2024

In fact, Trump is losing bigly among white women. His margin with them is six points lower than in 2020, CNN’s Harry Enten explains. (Could it be … I don’t know. ABORTION?!)

“In fact, he is doing the worst if this holds for a GOP candidate, this century among White women.”

“So when we are talking about five, six-point shifts, seven-point shifts in Kamala Harris’ direction, we are talking about that among a major part of the electorate and that can actually move the overall electorate more than ginormous shifts among a considerably smaller part of the electorate,” Enten said, meaning supposed Trump gains among Black men.

CNN: Trump's Margin Among White Women Six Points Lower Than 2020, Lowest For A Republican In A Century

More – https://t.co/2MZAGTV8BZ

"He still leads, but it is well within the margin of error. He is doing six points worse than he did four years ago. In fact, he is doing the… pic.twitter.com/5VCmcsGdi8

— RCP Video (@rcpvideo) October 15, 2024

So, let’s get to one of those anecdotes. CNN visited Brantley County, Georgia, where 90% of voters vote Republican. They found plenty of Trump supporters, strong ones. But also some dissenters. Old white ones at that.

“I ain’t gonna vote for no criminal,” said Corbet Wilson, a Republican-voting independent, citing the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“The last time you saw him talking did you watch his lips?” asks Donald Lewis. “Were they moving? He’s lying.” He won’t be voting for Trump this time. (He doesn’t say he did before.)

“I feel about it like he’s anti-American. He’s trying to overthrow our government.” His choices are to vote for Harris or not vote.

“She’s the only choice other than Trump,” Wilson chimes in.

It won’t take a lot of dissenters like them to sink Trump. Okay, maybe not in Georgia.

WATCH: In most pro-Trump country in GA, two voters say why they won't vote for Trump:

On January 6th: "I feel like he's anti-American. He's trying to overthrow our government"

"Last time you say him talking did you watch his lips? Were they moving? He's lying." pic.twitter.com/PNPwVBcRlw

— James Singer (@Jemsinger) October 15, 2024

Believe them. They carry out their agenda when they get the power to do it:

Photo of Gov Huckabee smiling after signing rollbacks to child labor laws, 2 Aug 2023. https://t.co/ACPpdJGz1J pic.twitter.com/mR1O2cmLaX

— Average Dad 🌻 Beer League Hockeyist (@dsundahl) October 15, 2024

Trump talks a lot about the 1890s as America’s golden era. That’s when he thinks America was great. Child labor was a big part of that:

Court documents unsealed in the Western District of Arkansas reveal accusations of child labor at Tyson processing plants, which have since prompted searches by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Applications for inspection warrants were filed in September 2024 for Tyson Foods Rogers and Tyson Foods Green Forest.

The applications, which included narratives from an investigator at the Houston District Office for the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor, claim that there is reason to believe minors are employed in violation of labor laws at the Tyson locations in Rogers and Green Forest.

The warrants were seeking records relating to the employment of minors, and the searches were meant to gather records relating to employees for Tyson Foods or affiliates and contractors of Tyson Foods, according to the applications.

Court documents said reviews of the processing plants began in June 2024 after anonymous complaints were received by the Wage and Hour Division.

For the Rogers application, the Wage and Hour Division cited an anonymous tip from a teacher at a nearby school, who reported that one of her 14-year-old students discussed working at the Tyson facility with his mother for the summer.

For the Green Forest application, the complainant said she was a mother of middle schoolers and overheard children between 11 and 13 years old discussing their employment at the Green Forest plant on the night shift, which runs from 11 p.m. to 7 or 8 a.m. The children were allegedly heard talking about not knowing how to get money from their paycheck out of the ATM, the documents said.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is as MAGA as it comes. And she thinks child labor is a-ok, even signed a bill that loosened the laws against it. I think we can be fairly sure that a Trump labor department will agree with her.

You won’t be surprised that the latest head of the NRA is a charter member:

Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time.

Hamlin pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty brought against him and four of his fraternity brothers in 1980, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The charge was brought against Hamlin under a local Ann Arbor ordinance. All five members of Alpha Delta Phi were later expelled from the fraternity.

The details of the case, described in local media reports at the time, are gruesome. The house cat was captured, its paws were cut off, and was then strung up and set on fire. The killing, which occurred in December 1979, was allegedly prompted by anger that the cat was not using its litterbox.

The case caused such a furore locally that some students and animal rights activists wore buttons and armbands in memory of BK.

Hamlin was the president of the fratermity and was singled out by the judge for failing to stop it.

I feel sick just thinking about it. But I can’t say I’m surprised that someone involved in such an atrocity would become the head of the NRA. After all, most serial killers started off as animal torturers and killers. It makes sense.

Here’s a story in the NY Times about a phenomenon that should have been investigated long before now. We know there are a bunch of true believers out there who dress up in stars and stripes regalia and deck out their trucks and boats for Trump. But that’s just the hardcore of the Trump base. What about the rest of them?

The Times interviewed some of them at Trump’s Detroit economic club interview. They know he’s a liar so they think he’s lying about all the terrible stuff he plans to do in his second term. So they’re fine with him:

There were a few hundred people there. They were not the sorts of people one encounters at a Trump rally. They weren’t construction workers or truck drivers or forklift operators; they carried business cards and had very active LinkedIn pages. They did not wear red hats or T-shirts with images of Mr. Trump’s bloodied face; they wore windowpane suit jackets and loafers and rather conspicuous cuff links.

They did not want to hear about “one really violent day” or about the deep state or the Marxists or the fascists or any of the other radical or antidemocratic visions that Mr. Trump describes in baroque detail at his rallies. They just wanted him to tell them that he would be good for business.

So, he did. For nearly two hours. There were rough edges in his remarks, and some talk of a stolen election, but mostly he made them feel content in their choice to vote for him. They chuckled at his self-deprecating wisecracks about his age, his body, his hair and his wealth. He talked about American muscle cars and regaled them with tales of how he went toe-to-toe with various world leaders and about his new buddy, Elon Musk. They cooed when he told them his daughter Tiffany was newly pregnant, and clapped when he said, however improbably, that he would work with Democrats to get stuff done. This was the version of Mr. Trump in which they (and their 401ks) wanted to believe.

They found it easy to tune out the other versions of him.

“I think the media blows stuff out of proportion for sensationalism,” said Mario Fachini, a 40-year-old Detroit man who owns a book publishing company. His black hair was gelled back and he had on a boxy, black pinstriped suit with a gold pocket square peeking out. There were tiny model globes hanging from his cuff links. He held up his wrist and gave one a spin.

Asked if he believed Mr. Trump would purge the federal government and fill its ranks with election deniers, Mr. Fachini sipped his iced tea and thought for a moment. “I don’t,” he said. So why was Mr. Trump saying he wanted to do that? “It could just be for publicity,” Mr. Fachini said with a shrug, “just riling up the news.”

Mary Burney, a 49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station, described herself as an independent-turned-Trump-voter. She did not believe the former president would really persecute his political opponents, even though he has mused about appointing a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and members of his family. “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do,” she said. “No, no.”

Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.

“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

Did Mr. Pierce, a former chief financial officer, believe Mr. Trump would actually levy a 200 percent tariff against certain companies? “No,” he said. “That’s the other thing. You’ve got to sometimes scare these other countries.” (Indeed. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Trump said, “I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”) Mr. Pierce added, “He’s not perfect. And I don’t necessarily care for his personality, but I do like how we had peace and prosperity.”

I’m not conviced they are so deluded that they look at their balance sheets and their 401ks and fail to see that the economy is roaring right now. Sure, they’re looking for the invitable GOP tax cuts but really, they’re no different than the silly cultists singing YMCA at the rallies.

They just don’t want to admit that they like what this monster is saying.

The utter chaos of his first administration, his denunciation of long time allies and cozying up to dictators, the endless lies, the handling of the pandemic and then the Big Lie and January 6th does not qualify to any thinking person as “peace and prosperity.” They’re onboard with the chaos.

They’re liars and they admire him for being a liar. They are cultists too.

Bob Woodward’s book “War”:

Steady and purposeful. That’s what we all signed on for in 2020 and for the most part we got it. (Israel-Gaza remains a conundrum…)

Biden’s legacy is secure, especially considering his Washingtonian exit. He did well under very difficult circumstances.