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Essence of Trumpism

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 18, 2024

Or is it Dumptyism? Trumptyism?

The former Republican Party (now the Party of Trump) sold itself for decades as opponents of the Soviet empire and insistent on upholding law and order. LAW! ORDER! As I’ve said of other professed “values” from that team, those boasts were always a mile wide and an inch deep. The people who for decades of accused the left of being squishy on morality have taken squishy to a new level.

Helpfully, Jonathan Chait offers a kind of phrasebook for interpreting “law and order” as Donald Trump understands it (Intelligencer):

One of the most important and consistent facets of Donald Trump’s thinking is that the law, as most people understand it, is conceptually meaningless. Legal activity, as he understands the term, means anything done by or on behalf of Donald Trump (this can include tax fraud, stealing and refusing to give back classified documents, assaulting police officers in an attempt to overturn an election, or other clear violations of federal criminal statutes). Illegal activity is anything Trump disapproves of or finds harmful: criticizing pro-Trump judges, displaying too many news stories that make Trump look bad, being “stupid,” or almost any action that works against his interests.

Trump’s view of elections flows from this belief system. A fair election is one that Trump wins. An unfair election is one he loses. Trump has begun to define the very existence of Kamala Harris’s candidacy as a crime.

I’d misssed that last part. But yes, I recall him thinking the Democratic Party swapping out its candidate for president was unconstitutional for the private organization which, Chait reminds, “for most of their existence chose nominees without any public voting at all.”

“Conceptually meaningless” has a satisfying mouth feel, don’t you think? And also serves as a fine description of Trump’s notions for replacing Obamacare.

Essence of Trumpism

Anne Applebaum offers yet another reminder in The Atlantic that Trump talks like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with a purpose. It’s calculated, if squishy. But I digress.

Trump’s on an authoritarian roll, and his fans are all in, Chait writes:

Now, in a new message, he pairs a call for removing CBS’s broadcast license (one of his older authoritarian threats) with demands that Harris be removed as his opponent. “Kamala should be investigated and forced off the Campaign, and Joe Biden allowed to take back his rightful place (He got 14 Million Primary Votes, she got none!),” he rants. “THIS WHOLE SORDID AND FRAUDULENT EVENT IS A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY!”

If you try to ask questions like “Investigated for what?” and “Which law does he believe was violated?,” you’re missing the essence of Trumpism. And if you’re willing to support the election of a president who cannot conceive of any distinction between what he wants and what the law permits, you are placing the survival of the Republic at risk.

One might as well have a dialogue with Humpty Dumpty, who famously explained:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
 “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
 “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

It’s the master part that appeals most to Donald John Trump. That’s the part his would-be-serfs followers don’t seem to grasp. People living under Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini learned the hard way what it means to have a master. Most Black people in this country don’t need reminding.

Power Moves

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

Harris handles a protester:

And then there was that debate:

Is she strong enough? You bet she is. And that seems to be the main complaint among those who say they’re not happy with Trump but just don’t think she has the “strength and the stamina” (remember that one?) to be president. It’s sexism, of course. But I think her toughness is obvious now.

She’s making power moves. And it’s impressive.

The Contrast

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

It can’t be any clearer. As it turns out, the same gentleman who asked Trump about January 6th last night also asked Kamala Harris a question at her Univision town hall last week. He asked her about the rumors that the administration wasn’t doing anything for the hurrican victims and what they planned to do in the future.

Watch them back-to-back.

Guess what?

Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump?

Undecided voter: No

Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision?

Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump

No Good Deed

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

Eric Levitz at Vox takes a look at the continuing loss of working class white voters and the analysis shows that unions haven’t turned out to be the great fix everyone thought they would be:

The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions.

After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former.

Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws.

The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis. In his presidency’s first major piece of legislation, Biden bailed out the Teamsters’ pension funds, effectively transferring $36 billion to 350,000 of the union’s members. The president also appointed a staunchly pro-union federal labor board, encouraged union organizing at Amazon, walked a picket line with the United Auto Workers, and aligned Democratic trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO’s preferences. And although he failed to enact major changes to federal labor regulations, that was not for want of trying. In the estimation of labor historian Erik Loomis, Biden has been the most pro-union president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But the political return on Democrats’ investment in organized labor has been disappointing.

Last month, the Teamsters declined to make a presidential endorsement, after an internal survey found 60 percent of its membership backed Trump over Kamala Harris. In early October, the International Association of Fire Fighters also announced that they would not be making a presidential endorsement, despite backing Biden four years earlier.

These high-profile snubs — both driven by rank-and-file opposition to the Democratic nominee — may reflect a broader political trend. According to a report from the Center for American Progress, between 2012 and 2016, the Democratic presidential nominee’s share of union voters fell from 66 to 53 percent. Four years ago, Biden erased roughly half of that gap, claiming 60 percent of the union vote.

But contemporary polling indicates that Democrats have lost ground with unionized voters since then. In fact, according to an aggregation from CNN’s Harry Enten, Kamala Harris is on track to perform even worse with union households than Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

Apparently progrssives are blaming Harris for not being as pro labor as Biden. However, Biden’s numbers with labor are just as bad as hers so it’s not that. And Biden has been the most staunch supporter of labor since FDR.

The question is why these unions are rejecting the politicians who are helping them materially. According to Levitz, Democrats have always believed that unions made their membership more liberal through education and experience but according to studies that isn’t actually true. Unions mostly stay away from partisan politics because their memberships are as divided as everyone else. So, while there is some political benefit to supporting the labor movement, nobody should expect it to be the answer to the loss of the white working class (and apparently quite a few members of Black and Latino working class as well.)

Levitz concludes:

For now, education polarization does not look all that calamitous for the Democratic Party. The share of voters with college degrees is growing over time. In part because she is winning a historically large share of college graduates, Harris is currently competitive with Trump in enough states to win an Electoral College majority, according to Nate Silver’s polling averages. But in order to win comfortable Senate majorities and prevent figures like Donald Trump from remaining competitive in national elections, Democrats will need to improve their standing with working-class voters. Delivering for unions may be necessary for achieving that goal. But if the past four years are any guide, it will not be sufficient.

Soooooo, short of doing what the Democrats tried for decades — moving right by adopting slightly less draconian right wing views on culture — what will work? Because trying to “moderate” on abortion certainly didn’t and neither will any the anti-immigrant, racist or hateful anti-LGBTQ culture war battles. If it isn’t economics, job security, building the middle class, which is exactly what Democratic policies deliver and becoming MAGA lite on culture war issues doesn’t work (and is morally repugnant) I’m not sure what’s left.

How They Plan To “Win”

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

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)

The Gravedigger Of Democracy Is A Loathesome Coward

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

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.

Donald Trump On Climate Change

Published by digby on October 17, 2024

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.

Up Against The Wall In Trump 2.0

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 17, 2024

Keep Jimmy and Dave from Trump’s firing squad

“What’s wrong, tough guy? Did someone grab you by the p#$@y?”

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.

Standing Athwart History, Yelling Fox

Published by Tom Sullivan on 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:

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.

https://youtu.be/jujCV86WEPE?si=-MApGOA7QeHHwEic

“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.

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

Could Dems Get Some House Pick-ups?

Published by digby on October 16, 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…