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Significant shrinkage

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 10, 2024

Trump has “a woman problem”

And worker problem (The New Republic):

It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all.

The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry.

It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry.

Trump’s entire M.O. has been fake it till you fail at it and Daddy bails you out. But Daddy Fred is long gone. Trump plans to steal this election when he fails to win again.

Trump’s incredible shrinking campaign has other problems, reports The Washington Post:

Soon after Donald Trump’s campaign team took over the Republican National Committee earlier this year, a senior Trump aide was asked how to combat news stories that the campaign had an insufficient get-out-the-vote operation.

“We are going to beat the reporters into retardation!” shouted James Blair, one of the two men now leading the operation, on a call with other advisers, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversation. Blair did not respond to a request for comment.

He seems nice.

Trump co-campaign manager Susie Wiles observes that one of her campaign’s challenges is “too much testosterone.” 

Thr Bulwark’s poll mentioned yesterday suggests over a third of Republican primary voters who voted for Nikki Haley will vote for Kamala Harris (despite Haley’s gutless endorsement of Trump). The share of GOP voters surveyed in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows Harris has increased her support among them from 5 percent last month to 9 percent in the new survey. An American University poll shows Trump losing ground to Harris among women on the economy as well.

The gap is more pronounced among independents and White voters than partisans and voters of color. Independent women favored Harris 51 percent to 36 percent, according to a recent CNN poll, while independent men split 47 percent for Trump and 40 percent for Harris. The poll showed Trump ahead among White women 50 percent to 47 percent for Harris, much smaller than his 23-point lead with White men.

Furthermore:

“There’s a pretty big universe of women who think he’s a misogynist, that he doesn’t like women, that he demeans women, that he’s a sexual predator, et cetera, et cetera,” Harris campaign pollster John Anzalone said. “And without a doubt, there’s a group of men who thinks he’s an alpha male who is going to solve all our problems by flexing his muscles.”

They mean the fantasy muscles supporters Photoshop below Trump’s head.

Some staffers said the dynamic has worsened since August when Trump brought Corey Lewandowski, his former 2016 campaign manager, back onto the team. Lewandowski left the 2016 campaign after grabbing a female reporter’s arm (he wasn’t prosecuted), and in 2021 he lost a position in a pro-Trump super PAC after allegations of sexually harassing a donor.

This kind of thing can kill a Democratic operative’s career. Not so among Republicans.

Why is that?

Misinformation Kills

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 10, 2024

MTG’s space lasers misfire

“It’s beyond ridiculous.”

President Joe Biden hit back at MAGA misinformation on Wednesday (TPM):

“But now I want to be clear about something. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies that are disturbing people,” Biden said. “It’s undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken. It’s harmful to those who need help the most. There is simply no place for this to happen.”

But he saved his most biting remarks for Greene, who has been spreading the lie that the federal government (??) geo-engineered (??) Hurricane Helene in order to seize control of lithium deposits (??) in a certain area of North Carolina, called Chimney Rock.

“Now the claims are getting even more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, is now saying the federal government is literally controlling the weather. We’re controlling the weather,” Biden said. “It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop. Moments like this, there are no red or blue states.”

Greene’s suggestsions that “they” can control the weather (with Jewish space lasers?) and direct storms at red states is patently nuts.

Even nuttier — which I guess proves the RW belief that “they” can’t do anything right — the gang that couldn’t shoot straight apparently bullseyed one of their own with their Jewish weather machine. Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, as Pete Buttigieg notes, is attracting antisemitic slurs in the wake of the Helene disaster that destroyed a large chunk of her town.

I’m told by a fellow blogger that “Morning Joe” featured a Dan Abrams clip (?) about a man’s out-of-food father-in-law rejecting help because he’d heard it meant the government would seize his home. It’s not just the threats against relief workers spawned by the lies. The lies are hurting people on the ground.

Sherrod Brown Hits Back

Published by digby on October 9, 2024

This is a terrific ad from Brownaddrssing that grotesque ageism and misogyny from his opponent Bernie Moreno:

I know that nobody likes to see older women — except older women. Many of them probably aren’t crazy about the right’s recent decision to deman them as completely useless except as nannies for their grandchildren. Bit mistake. They vote. A lot.

Vance 2017

Published by digby on October 9, 2024

The weirdo once again says something that’s easily fact checked:

Ok:

There were many personal heroes in my life: aunts and uncles, a protective sister, a father who re-entered my life at the right time. But I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth.

It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. 

Speaking of lying:

I think he may be a worse liar than Trump. He is the future of MAGA.

Memory Problems?

Published by digby on October 9, 2024

2017:

Last night 2024:

The Liz Cheney Strategery

Published by digby on October 9, 2024

I wrote about the Harris strategy of reaching out to disaffected Republicans last week and it wasn’t exactly universally applauded. A lot of Democrats aren’t happy with all the accolades given to the likes of Liz Cheney and I can understand that. I guess my feeling is that this election is so vital that whatever it takes to cobble together a coalition to get Harris over the line is worth doing.

I have no worries that disgruntled Democrats will vote for Trump or stay home because of this so in the short run I’m confident that this won’t cost votes. We can argue about policy later — and I’m pretty sure there are going to be some arguments.

For now, it appears that the strategy may be working. The Bulwark reports on the ever elusive “Haley voters” with an exclusive survey. (Haley herself is an absolute disgrace, appearing on Fox, making the case against Harris.)

If the election were held today, Donald Trump would win just 45 percent of those who backed Haley in the GOP primary while 36 percent said they’d back Harris, the new poll shows, according to the survey of 781 registered Republicans and independents conducted by the new Democratic-leaning polling outfit Blueprint. The poll did not include Democrats or Democrat-leaning Independents who supported Haley.

Trump’s level of support from Haley voters in the poll represents a significant drop in support for Trump, who won those same voters against Joe Biden by 59-28 percent. That 22 percentage point change in preference (from plus 31 percent for Trump in 2020 to plus 9 percent in this survey) could represent a swing of millions of votes.

The findings are among the most substantive analyses of Haley supporters. They come on the heels of a New York Times/Siena College poll showing that Harris has made major inroads among GOP voters, with 9 percent saying they planned to support the vice president, up from 5 percent from a survey last month.

“Between 5 and 10 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are Nikki Haley supporters,” said Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for Blueprint, which conducted the poll between September 28 and October 6. “If Harris can indeed win a third or more of them in the general election, it will provide a boost of a couple percentage points. In such a close race where the margin of victory will be razor-thin, particularly in the swing states, it’s clearly worth pursuing these voters.”

If that pans out it will have been worth it.

Trump Plans A New “Night At The Garden”

Published by digby on October 9, 2024

Feel the magic:

Former President Trump is scheduled to hold a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City later this month in the run-up to Election Day, a campaign official confirmed to The Hill.

The New York Post first reported that the event will take place Oct. 27, just more than a week before Election Day.

It’s totally predictable. Here’s a piece I posted about an earlier MSG gathering of “America First.” (That picture above tells that story as well as anything.)

This is from Jonathan Schwarz talking about a new film called “A Night at the Garden.” The following is just an excerpt of his piece a accompanying the film. Be sure to click over for the rest of the story. It will haunt your dreams:

Curry’s film is just six minutes long, and is a tiny masterpiece. It should be taught in history and filmmaking courses, as well as in classes about human psychology.

On its surface, it’s simply about a rally held by the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan.

The Bund – meaning “federation” – never metastasized to any appreciable size. Estimates vary, but its dues-paying membership did not top 25,000. However, it was allied with the Christian Front, an organization inspired by the notorious anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Tens of millions of Americans tuned into Coughlin’s weekly radio show; one of his slogans was “Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.”

The Christian Front helped turn out a capacity crowd of almost 20,000 people. It’s particularly notable that this was possible in New York, then as now a symbol of liberalism, and suggests both organizations enjoyed significant passive local support far beyond those who attended.

The marquee outside reads that it is a “Pro American Rally” — to be followed the next day by the Rangers playing the Detroit Red Wings, and the day after that by Fordham facing Pittsburgh in college basketball. The night begins with marchers filing in with dozens of American flags and then standing before a huge backdrop of George Washington.

The main speaker is Fritz Kuhn, a naturalized German immigrant and head of the Bund. On the one hand, everything about him screams that he’s a buffoon and a grifter. He declares they are there “to demand that our government shall be returned to the American people who founded it” in a heavy accent that makes him sound exactly like Adolf Hilter. Even Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the U.S. found Kuhn embarrassing, once describing him as “stupid, noisy, and absurd.”

But on the other hand, no one in the Garden seems to notice or care. To the crowd’s delighted laughter, Kuhn speaks about how “the Jewish-controlled press” continually lies about him, depicting him as “a creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and a long tail.”

Then one man, 26-year-old Isadore Greenbaum, rushes the stage. Kuhn’s uniformed minions immediately seize and beat him. At some point, as the New York police grab Greenbaum and hustle him offstage, his pants are pulled down. Kuhn smirks, and the audience erupts in glee.

The movie ends with a soprano trilling the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

The next day the New York Times reported that the Bund had raised almost $8,500, the equivalent of about $150,000 now. Later that year Kuhn was convicted of embezzling all that and more — $250,000 in today’s money — from his devoted followers.

The Times article quotes leftist protesters claiming that they “were trampled by mounted police and brutally beaten by uniformed and plainclothes policemen” outside the Garden. A retired colonel complained that the costumes of many of the Bund men “would mislead the people” that they were “wearing a part of the United States uniform.”

Finally, the Times notes, the journalist Dorothy Thompson was present, and at one point was temporarily evicted for laughing. Years before, Thompson had been the Berlin bureau chief for the New York Post, and covered the rise of fascism before she was expelled from Germany in 1934. At the time of the Bund rally, she was married to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote “It Can’t Happen Here.”

Several years after the events of “A Night at the Garden,” Thompson contributed a famed article to Harper’s Magazine called “Who Goes Nazi?” In it she describes a “macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.”

“Nazism,” Thompson said, “has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. … The frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi.”

Curry learned about the Bund rally six months ago from a friend writing a screenplay that takes place in 1939. At first, he says, he was incredulous, because he was sure that if there had been an enormous rally of American Nazis in the middle of New York City, “I definitely would have heard about that.”
But it had happened. It had simply dropped out of history. Curry found previous documentaries that used short snippets of film from that night, and engaged archival researcher Rich Remsberg to try to locate more.

Remsberg found footage scattered across the country, including at the National Archives and UCLA. There were two remarkable things about it. First, much of it was 35 mm, rather than the standard 16 or 8 mm for newsreels, so the images are surprisingly high-quality. Second, everything captured inside Madison Square Garden appears to have been shot by the Bund itself. The staging is done so skillfully it seems certain they had studied Nazi Germany’s cinematography.

Curry took the footage and used it to assemble a film that is crafty in the extreme. There are no talking head historians or narration to tell you what to feel. Instead, it leaves you with the space to decide how to feel about it for yourself.

Most notably, there is no mention of the present day United States. “Regular, nonpolitically minded Americans who watch it,” Curry hopes, “will become a tiny bit more aware of the way that, throughout history, demagogues [have] used sarcasm and humor and mob violence to whip up audiences that were otherwise decent people.”

In particular, he points to a pan of the roaring crowd after Greenbaum has been attacked and degraded: “You can see thousands of people who are in suits and dresses and hats who were probably nice to their neighbors.”

Yeah. I can relate.

Here’s the movie:

What Are Trump And Putin Chatting About?

Published by digby on October 9, 2024

I think we know…

Exactly eight years ago this week, the Obama administration formally accused the Russian Government of hacking the Democratic National Committee and many others for the intended purpose of interfering with the U.S election. The statement from the government said, “We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” The assumption was that they were fingering Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. And considering the fact that it was only the Democrats who were being hacked it was obvious that the intended beneficiary of this interference was Donald Trump.

The suspicion had been out there for a while. Hillary Clinton even brought it up in the presidential debate and Trump denied it saying it could just as easily be “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” But this was an official acknowledgement that the Russian Government was behind all the hacking and if it hadn’t been for the fact that the press was hysterical that FBI Director James Comey had inexplicably announced that the agency was re-opening the inane email investigation, it would have been another scandal potentially derailing the Trump campaign.

As it was, just before the election, the NY Times ran a piece headlined, Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia and everyone went to the polls on election day believing that Hillary Clinton was caught up in a never-ending scandal that would cripple her presidency while Donald Trump had been cleared of wrongdoing. That story should have been seen as an in-kind gift to the Trump campaign.

We all know what happened after that. From the moment Trump received Clinton’s concession and began his transition, he was weirdly and constantly involved with Russia in one way or another leading to the firing of his national security advisor over unauthorized communications with Russia, the subsequent firing of the FBI Director over his unwillingness to let that national security advisor off the hook and the massive Special Counsel investigation into the whole thing. There’s no need to rehash all that now. We all remember it like it was yesterday which is practically was.

One of the less discussed aspects of the whole Trump and Russia association is the fact that his first impeachment, brought on because he tried to coerce the Ukrainian president into announcing a bogus investigation into his then top rival Joe Biden, stemmed largely from his sycophantic “friendship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The trained KGB operative Putin is a much more sophisticated and savvy judge of character than Trump, who simply loves anyone who loves him back, and he had Trump’s number from the beginning.

Their private “meetings with no notes” and Trump’s embarrassing public genuflecting to the Russian leader over the years had been fully reported. The former president went out of his way to be accommodating to Putin, always against the advice of his national security expert advisers. But this in-depth report by  Mark Mazzetti and Adam Entous of the NY Times reveals that from the get-go, Putin had a plan to invade Ukraine and he knew that Trump could be manipulated into helping him do it.

They report that at the very first face-to-face meeting between the two men in Hamburg, Germany in July of 2017, Putin began disparaging Ukraine and advised Trump not to send them any weapons. Trump listened to him and over time the push-back among the national security professionals became so urgent that Putin realized he need to pull back a bit or risk blowing up his strategy. So he engaged a “network of proxies” to covertly advance his plot.

Trump already had built a bit of a grudge against Ukraine before the meeting happened, something which Putin no doubt already knew. During the 2016 campaign, Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, had been forced to resign when a Ukrainian investigation showed that Manafort had received millions in undisclosed payments working for a pro-Russia party in the country. Trump was convinced that this was evidence Ukraine was working on Hillary Clinton’s behalf. Every time he met with Putin, his beliefs were validated. He ended up being impeached because he’d become convinced that Ukraine was corrupt and subject to his blackmail.

The article goes into much more depth about Rudy Giuliani, Lev Parnas, the belief that the Ukrainians actually hacked the DNC and moved the server to Kyiv, all that nutty stuff. But the point is that Putin had already invaded Crimea and received very little pushback for it and was softening up this naive, narcissistic US president to allow his move on the rest of Ukraine. Then the pandemic hit, Trump lost and he ended up invading in 2022, perhaps with the knowledge that Trump was planning to run again in 2024.

The new president Joe Biden didn’t make it as easy for him as Trump would have done. We know that Trump would never have approved the same level of military support and would have actively worked to divide NATO, possibly even finding an excuse to withdraw from the alliance all together. But if Trump happens to win next month, Putin’s work will have paid off anyway. Trump promises to “end” the war on the day after he declares victory and while he hasn’t personally said what he’ll do, his running mate, JD Vance and Hungary’s President Viktor Orban have shared that he will withdraw military support from Ukraine and “negotiate” a peace deal which, as Vice President Kamala Harris said during Ukrainian President Zelensky’s recent visit, amounts to Ukrainian surrender.

The Office of Director of National Intelligence reported last month that Russian Government operatives are once again attempting to interfere in the election and they are more sophisticated than in the past. And yes, they are trying to help Donald Trump win. You can see why.

This is one reason why the revelations in Bob Woodward’s new book “War” about Trump holding secret conversations with Putin since he’s been out of the White House are alarming. It’s one thing for former presidents to hob nob with foreign leaders it’s quite another for a former president who is also running for the office again to be secretly conversing with a major adversary without notifying or consulting with the current government. That the same former president has been indicated under the espionage laws for absconding with classified documents, many of which still have not been accounted for, makes it yet another mind-boggling threat to America’s and its allies’ security at the hands of Donald Trump.

Considering the history I just outlined it’s not hard to imagine what Trump and Putin are discussing in these little clandestine chats. How many lives have been lost and will be lost as these two pals plot the future of Ukraine and Europe? How many more will be lost if Trump manages to eke out another electoral college win with the help of Vladimir Putin? It won’t stop with Ukraine, we can be sure of that.

Salon

Are You Man Enough?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 9, 2024

Are you Dad enough?

Winston Carter @winstonious in Instagram ad by Jacob Reed @typographynerd.

To support a woman for president?

To choose your own daughter over a felon and adjudged rapist?

The Lincoln Project asks the latter question: Are you Dad enough to choose your own daughter’s safety over a felon and adjudged rapist? Especially if you did in 2016 and 2020? Will you once again vote with a political party that’s made obvious lying company policy?

Ugh. After that vid, perhaps a lighter chaser.

And finally, a philosophical tool custom-made for the disaster in North Carolina and the one coming to Florida (checks watch) about 2 p.m. CT today. By that, I mean the disinformation maelstrom.

Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

What prompts this citation is an incident a couple of days ago in Burnsville, NC. A North Carolina National Guard (NCNG) Black Hawk helicopter looking to deliver generators could not spy a space large enough and safe enough to set down in the Sav-Mor Foods parking lot. They hovered over the parking lot for a bit trying to decide what to do and then flew off, scattering a pop-up tent and some supplies with their rotor wash. Dumb move.

Naturally, the Black Hawk was, you know, black. And you know what that means. Let the conspiracy fantasies begin. “So who were they? Why did they do this?”

Last night, the NCNG responded on X:

The North Carolina National Guard (NCNG) is aware of an incident involving a NCNG UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter during a delivery of generators at the request of a local civilian organization to power their distribution outpost in western North Carolina.

While attempting to land, rotor wash caused items to blow away from the local distribution set up by a group of civilians in the area. The crew immediately identified the situation, aborted the landing for safety reasons, and departed the area.

This incident is currently under investigation and the crew has been grounded until the investigation is complete. The NCNG is working with the identified local civilian organization to assess the level of damage caused by the rotor wash.

Safety is the NCNG’s number one priority, especially with the high volume of air operations currently happening across the region. While the NCNG strives for precision in every mission, sometimes things don’t go as planned.

When that happens, the NCNG takes it very seriously and are committed to addressing and correcting any issues to prevent future occurrences.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

“It’s Not You”

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 9, 2024

It never was

Kamala Harris’s communications team is top notch. Tuesday’s headlines about Donald Trump secretly sending COVID-19 testing equipment to Russian President Vladimir Putin for his personal use (amidst test shortages here) became an attack ad before Harris appeared last night with Stephen Colbert.

For those not glued to social media, Harris herself drove home the message on “The Late Show.” Trump thinks Putin is his friend.

“What about the American people? They should be your first friend.” Harris responded.

Trump has not had a good week. Little Lord Flauntleroy has gotten away his entire life with spouting bald-faced lies. A conman at heart, he trades in bullshit in place of facts he’s never possessed the bandwidth to master. Sychophants — people like Speaker Mike Johnson even — smile and nod and parrot what he says without blinking. But now there’s blood in the water. Even Laura Ingraham of Fox News is fact-checking Trump to his face. He cannot abide being called out for his lies. Unfair. UNFAIR!

Afraid to face fact-checking by CBS News, Trump chickened out of his scheduled and “60 Minutes” interview. Scott Pelley explained on air why Harris would get the national air time that Trump rejected.

Colbert last night told his viewers rather bluntly why Harris would appear on his show but not Trump.

Saving you some trouble, here are some clips.

One has to wonder how many prior MAGA voters are figuring out after all these years that, like Putin not being Donald’s friend, Donald is not theirs. We’ll have to wait until Nov. 5 to find out.