Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Let’s just say persuasion isn’t on the menu

Ed Kilgore outlines the Trump campaign strategy to “win” the election on election day. It won’t surprise you to learn that they aren’t trying to persuade people to vote for him:

The Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include:

-Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.)

-Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them).

-Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.

-An inside-the-tent effort to place MAGA loyalists in key election-administration positions from the precinct to the county to the state level, where they can not only slow down vote counts but increase the odds of Democratic ballots being thrown out.

In addition to reducing the Harris vote (via a combination of ballot-eligibility challenges or heavy-handed intimidation of voters), all these MAGA boots on the ground can help build the post-election case that a Harris win was tainted with fraud.

There will be bogus lawsuits alleging fraud and intimidation of the vote counters. And Trump will almost certainly declare victory on election night regardless of the actual outcome.

If the race is called for Harris, the cult has been primed to resist. There will be protests but I don’t think anyone can know whether there will be mass demonstrations or discrete acts of violence. Whatever it is, I can’t imagine it will be a replay of January 6th. if nothing else, the authorities will be prepared for it. And one can anticipate more lawsuits and an attempt to get the Supreme Court ot take up the case. Whether any of it will be successful is unknown but you can bet they are going to do everything in their power to make Trump the winner no matter what the voters want.

Here’s the head of the Trump RNC election integrity department basically telling exactly what they plan to do, except she’s saying it’s the Democrats doing it:

CHRISTINA BOBB (GUEST): But if we learned anything from 2020 the lesson is we don’t know what the heck they do on Election Day, right? They come up with something crazy. And we have to be, we, not just the RNC or the conservative party, but Americans, you have to be flexible and you have to be willing to see this through until Donald Trump is actually declared the winner because they’re going to try to cause – I genuinely believe he wins this election like lawfully, legally, on election night, you know, the correct way. 

And I think they’re going do everything they can to try to call that into question and challenge it and just create as much turmoil and chaos around his victory as possible. And so Americans really need to be prepared to stand their ground and not give up any ground to the fact that no, we just won this election outright just because you couldn’t get enough people to cheat on your behalf, you can’t steal our victory.

This Bizarro World fantasy is common among the Trumpers. Here’s Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita talking about how the election isn’t over until the Inauguration. But when you see the whole comment it appears that he tried to cover for his comment by saying that it’s actually the Democrats who will try to prevent Trump from taking office:

“It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day,” LaCivita told Politico’s Jonathan Martin during a Thursday interview at the RNC.

The statement came as Martin asked a question, saying, “One of the things that I’ve said is that, at this point, perhaps the Democrats can’t win the election any longer.”

LaCivita interrupted Martin.

“We don’t even think that way,” LaCivita said. “The way we’re structured, the way we are made … we grind every single day. I mean its not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath. It’s not over til then. It’s not over on Election Day. It’s over on Inauguration Day. Cause I wouldn’t put anything past anybody.”

“What do you mean?” Martin asked.

“There is a well-documented report that talks about all of the efforts that the Democrats had in place in 2020 … about ways to prevent if Donald Trump had quote unquote won. So, like I said we plan for every worse case scenario. That way we are ready for it,” LaCivita said.

Ok. That “well-documented report” is news to me. But there’s also a method to his madness. They’ve convinced their cult that Democrats have plot to steal the election and if Trump wins they’re going to engage in violence, probably on January 6th. I’m not sure what psychologists or cult experts call this particular phenomenon (beyond the simplistic “projection”)It’s like some sort of mass delusion.

Update: This piece by Neal Katyal in the NY Times will send a chill down your spine. (Gift link)

A new biography of Mitch McConnell drawing on his diaries and oral histories has some interesting tidbits:

The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races.

Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve had just enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him.”

“And for a narcissist like him,” McConnell continued, “that’s been really hard to take, and so his behavior since the election has been even worse, by far, than it was before, because he has no filter now at all.”

Before those Georgia runoffs, McConnell said Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered and can’t even figure out where his own best interests lie.”

Trump was also holding up a coronavirus aid package at the time, despite bipartisan support. “This despicable human being,” McConnell said in his oral history, “is sitting on this package of relief that the American people desperately need.”

On Jan. 6, soon after he made those comments, McConnell was holed up in a secure location with other congressional leaders, calling Vice President Mike Pence and military officials for reinforcements as Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Once the Senate resumed debate over the certification of Biden’s victory, McConnell said in a speech on the floor that “this failed attempt to obstruct the Congress, this failed insurrection, only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic.”

McConnell then went to his office to address his staff, some of whom had barricaded themselves in the office as rioters banged on their doors. He started to sob softly as he thanked them, Tackett writes.

“You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this,” he told them.

The next month, McConnell gave his harshest public criticism of Trump on the Senate floor, saying he was “ practically and morally responsible ” for the Jan. 6 attack. Still, McConnell voted to acquit Trump after House Democrats impeached him for inciting the riot.

[…]

McConnell also had doubts about Trump from the start. Just after Trump was elected in 2016, as Congress was certifying the election, McConnell told Biden, then the outgoing vice president, that he thought Trump could be trouble, Tackett writes.

The book channels McConnell’s inner thoughts during some of the biggest moments after Trump took office, as McConnell held his tongue and as the two men repeatedly fought and made up.

In 2017, as Trump publicly criticized McConnell for the Senate’s failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump and McConnell had a heated argument on the phone. Weeks went by with no contact. Then Trump invited McConnell to the White House and called a joint news conference without telling him first. McConnell said the event went fine, and “it’s not hard to look more knowledgeable than Donald Trump at a press conference.”

After the passage of a $1.5 billion tax overhaul that same year, McConnell said, “All of a sudden, I’m Trump’s new best friend.”

He blamed Trump after House Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterm elections, Tackett writes. Trump ”has every characteristic you would not want a president to have,” McConnell said in an oral history at the time, and was “not very smart, irascible, nasty.”

In 2022, as Trump continued to criticize McConnell and made racist comments about his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, McConnell told Tackett that “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be criticized by than this sleazeball.”

“Every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” McConnell said.

Also in 2022, McConnell said in his oral history that Trump’s behavior since losing the election had been “beyond erratic” as he kept pushing false allegations of voter fraud. “Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said.

By 2024, McConnell had again endorsed Trump. He felt he had to if he were to continue to play a role in shaping the nation’s agenda.

“It was the price he paid for power,” Tackett writes.

He is a despicable piece of work, a total sell-out to everything America stands for. And he does it knowing what harm it causes.

Get a load of this “statement” to the AP about this story:

“Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now,” McConnell said.

He’s more responsible for that atrocity we call a Supreme Court than Trump is and he will go down in history as one of the worst congressional leaders American has ever produced. He’s 82 years old and knows what Trump is. But he backs him anyway to maintain power, which is literally all that really matters to him. All his “private” acknowledgements of Trump’s unfitness show that he’s an even more loathesome creature than we knew.

People all over the world are losing everyything they have from hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and fires. This is what Trump has to say about all that:

Fact check, he did not have the cleanest air and water on record, not that it’s relevant to this conversation. He will make everything worse.

He’s a moron who has no clue what he’s talking about. But you knew that.

Keep Jimmy and Dave from Trump’s firing squad

You know it. I know it. Mike Johnson and Jim Jordan know it. Donald Trump knows it all the way down to the toenails he can’t trim.

Elect Kamala Harris or else Jimmy Kimmel and Dave Bautista will be among the first up against the wall in a Trump dictatorship.

I wrote this cause it’s what I always wanted to say about Trump pretending to be a tough guy.  But we got the amazing @DaveBautista to say it SO much better.  Thanks Dave.  #TrumpIsAWeakLittleBabyBitch pic.twitter.com/Mo4ZMpOPVH

— Jesse Joyce (@jessejoyce) October 17, 2024

Fox interview goes all gotcha, all the time

You saw it. I saw it. We all saw it. Vice President Kamala Harris did an interview Wednesday with Fox chief political anchor Bret Baier and, as The New York Times framed it, got a debate instead.

Ahead of a third presidential election with Donald Trump — now a convicted felon indicted for inciting an insurrection — as their candidate, MAGA Republicans routinely dodge answering, 1) Did Donald Trump lose in 2020? and 2) Will he/you accept the results? For voters not wanting a replay of Jan. 6, those are pertinent election issues.

No, no, no, those are “gotcha” questions, Republicans object, as Speaker Mike Johnson did. (Will no reporter demand they explain what they expect to “get” if they answer?)

Inside Fox’s Earth 2 bubble, Baier was all “gotcha” all the time. Baier asked Harris questions to which he really did not want her answers. He was not interested in revealing for his viewers her vision for America’s future. He was litigating the past. Baier interrupted. He talked over. He badgered. He baited. He oh-so-obviously tried to make Harris say Trump voters are stupid. Baier tried to reframe the election as a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, asking when she first noticed Biden’s diminished mental faculties.

Watch it again for yourselves here:

Here is the full interview with Vice President Kamala Harris on the Fox News Channel with Bret Baier.

Just under 27 minutes in length. pic.twitter.com/Qz88hLbtzd

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 17, 2024

But Harris the prosecutor was having none of it. The Democrat now endorsed by over 100 Republicans parried and turned questions on immigration policy into accusations on Donald Trump’s and Republicans’ records on preserving a broken immigration system as a campaign issue rather than a problem to fix.

“Brett, Joe Biden is not on the ballot,” Harris snapped. “Donald Trump is on the ballot,” she replied citing former Trump administration officials and national security experts who insist Trump is unfit to be president.

Harris made sure to end with a rapid summary of her goals to address affordable housing, strengthening the economy, and ensuring a strong military. If Fox viewers expected a woman easy to “get,” they were disappointed, and certainly not enlightened. Baier was both.

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop,” William F. Buckley famously wrote in the 1950s. Trump’s fascist-adjacent MAGA movement stands athwart it, yelling Fox.

John Harwood wrote at Zeteo on Wednesday that Trump’s MAGA movement is rooted in the Confederacy’s legacy of slavery, America’s original sin. A Red America stands against moving on from race-based politics and resentments while Blue America looks forward.

Charles Blow sees among some Black men the draw of patriarchy, an older and deeper tradition. That tradition is even older than the yearning of the world’s oligarchs for a return to feudalism, as I’ve argued.

As is, one American party stands for public service. The other led by Trump, for preserving the Ancien Régime through overturning democracy for autocracy, if not outright fascism.

Anand Giridharadas addressed that this morning on MSNBC. The Fox interview was interruption as a metaphor for a minority Old Guard objecting to and trying to silence a more pluralistic America and the future Harris represents as vanguard of a new generation. MAGA is future-shocked, Giridharadas tweeted. That itself is a fine metaphor, but not one that new generation will get any more than Bret Baier.

Bret Baier encapsulated the resentful, future-shocked minority of Americans who want to interrupt progress itself.

But the rising new America will speak, and the future will not be interrupted.

pic.twitter.com/6nXzy6JQvc

— The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) October 17, 2024

Update: Couldn’t locate this clip at post time. It was a key moment in the Harris interview.

Hayes: Do you see what they did there? On their own network. He repeated they are the enemy within, they are sick people, they’re evil. And then he was like let me play you what he said and he just cut out the big chunk. pic.twitter.com/0eZX0Hq4XD

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 17, 2024

Sure. The House races are as close as the presidential race.

Scott Perry is one of the worst MAGA congressmen in the country. And he’s in trouble:

Perry, a former chair of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was first elected in 2012, had reportedly done plenty to aid former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The FBI seized Perry’s cellphone in 2022, which led to the revelation of text messages showing his extensive attempts to install an attorney general who would help keep Trump in office. Perry’s preferred candidate was Jeffrey Clark, a now-indicted Department of Justice official whose main qualification was spreading claims of election fraud.

I started by noting that Perry was the one who’d introduced Trump and Clark. He cut me off.

“An introduction?” he said, incredulously. “Is that illegal now?” Perry accused me of repeating “a narrative that has been promoted by the left” that the mainstream media have refused to verify. “Somebody said, Can you introduce me? I said sure,” he explained, saying it was no different than if he had introduced me to one of his aides standing nearby. “So no, I’m not embarrassed.”

Whether Perry agrees with it or not, the “narrative” about his role ahead of the January 6 assault on the Capitol is part of why he’s the most vulnerable Trump loyalist in the House. “For a lot of normie, older Republicans, all that January 6 stuff was really a line of demarcation,” Christopher Nicholas, a GOP strategist who lives in Perry’s district, told me. In their hunt for a House majority, Democrats are targeting Perry like never before, and they’re running a candidate, the former local-news anchor Janelle Stelson, who can match both his regional fame and his fundraising.

The race could help determine the House majority, and in the state that could decide the presidency, Perry is once again sharing a ballot with the ally he tried to keep in office four years ago. The issues that have defined Trump’s comeback attempt—immigration, abortion, trying to overturn the 2020 election—have also figured prominently in Perry’s race. Until this year, Perry had demonstrated even more political resilience than Trump; he outran him in 2020, winning his district while Trump narrowly lost Pennsylvania. That might not be the case in November. 

If Perry loses his seat in Pennsylvania, I would guess Trump will lose too. If that fellow quote above is right, that it’s January 6th that has freaked out the “normie, older Republicans” then the man who instigated the whole thing is going to lose their vote too. Fingers crossed…

I have often mused about the belief that the American Constitution is the best of all possible worlds, as least as it was taught when I was in school many moons ago.The Bill of Rights (with one notable exception) is great, laying out the ideals the country was founded on even if we’ve rarely fully lived up to them.

The structure of our system, however, isn’t all that great. I’m not sure federalism was such a fabulous idea although I certainly understand why it happened. But there’s a reason no democracy in the world has adopted our system and that most of them have instead a parliamentary system which, frankly, just works better.

The Senate was a mistake and the electoral college has turned out to be the train wreck quite a few of the founders predicted it would be. Other countries that once used such a system have gotten rid of it. We should too:

The United States is the only democracy in the world where a presidential candidate can get the most popular votes and still lose the election. Thanks to the Electoral College, that has happened five times in the country’s history. The most recent examples are from 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and 2016, when Hillary Clinton got more votes nationwide than Donald Trump but lost in the Electoral College.

The Founding Fathers did not invent the idea of an electoral college. Rather, they borrowed the concept from Europe, where it had been used to pick emperors for hundreds of years.

As a scholar of presidential democracies around the world, I have studied how countries have used electoral colleges. None have been satisfied with the results. And except for the U.S., all have found other ways to choose their leaders.

There is an alternative but it’s really been hard for it to pick up steam. And it’s imperfect too:

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, currently agreed to by 17 U.S. states, including small states such as Delaware and big ones such as California, as well as the District of Columbia, is an agreement to award all of their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate gets the most votes nationwide. It would take effect once enough states sign on that they would represent the 270-vote majority of electoral votes. The current list reaches 209 electoral votes.

A key problem with the interstate compact is that in races with more than two candidates, it could lead to situations where the winner of the election did not get a majority of the popular vote, but rather more than half of all voters chose someone else.

When Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Finland and France got rid of their electoral colleges, they did not replace them with a direct popular vote in which the person with the most votes wins. Instead, they all adopted a version of runoff voting. In those systems, winners are declared only when they receive support from more than half of those who cast ballots.

Notably, neither the U.S. Electoral College nor the interstate compact that seeks to replace it are systems that ensure that presidents are supported by a majority of voters.

Why not just elect presidents by popular vote? We’re supposed to be one nation so we should elect national leaders …nationally.

Sadly, until the Republicans start losing elections via the electoral college, I doubt we’ll ever be able to change the Constitution to get rid of it. And that’s not likely to happen any time soon, if ever.

Footage of all the undecided swing voters in Trump's "women's issues" Fox News town hall https://t.co/TALHsLdP5n pic.twitter.com/5sbOpbIhDT

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 16, 2024

Donald Trump held a Fox News town hall with undecided women voters in Georgia and they all ended up loving him. Of course, they were all Trump voters:

As soon as Trump arrived in the rustic barn with its wood panels, he received rapturous applause. Throughout the town hall hosted by Harris Faulkner, questioners seemed enraptured by him.

“I feel like when he when he came out, everybody was so excited to see him and his enthusiasm,” Emily Harris told TheIndependent. “It was just great to be in the room with him.”

And there was good reason, given that many of the attendees in an intimate setting were from Republican groups around the area whom Fox News invited.

At least, that’s what some of the women told The Independent. Harris, for example, is the vice president of the Republican Women of Forsyth.

“We got a personal invitation from Fox News,” she said. “We were ecstatic. We were we were all very, very excited.”

It was the same case with Cynthia Brown from Cumming, who was the treasurer for Republican Women of Forsyth County.

“We love Donald Trump and President Trump, and what he has done in America, and what he is doing for women,” she told The Independent.

…Trump famously said at a rally in Iowa “Suburban women, please like me.”

“I don’t know where that comes from,” Brown said. “Because everyone I talk to just loves and appreciate what he is doing, because he’s protecting our children, protecting women from sex trafficking, human trafficking and all the all the things that bringing, having open borders allows.”

Lol.

A couple of highlights:

Trump describes Katie Britt as "a young, just a fantastically attractive person" pic.twitter.com/ZY5e5Ug6at

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2024

after saying he'll give police blanket immunity, Trump incoherently says that "people know the bad apples" and those cops won't have immunity pic.twitter.com/IbbHoVpf1V

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2024

He’s like a child. That’s not how this works. It’s not how any of this works…

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.