Donald Trump is grifting from his cult members as he’s running for president. This is unprecedented. Normally, candidates just beg for money to get themselves elected. But Trump is begging to line his own pockets. And his followers don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it.
Philip Bump at the Washington Post notes that he’s doing so much of it thathis campaign is suffering from a shortage of cash:
The New York Times looked at the “creative bookkeeping” it said the campaign was undertaking to expand its relatively modest coffers. That phrase is a fraught one. Earlier this year Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York for using “creative bookkeeping,” if you will: creative bookkeeping specifically centered on hiding money that was spent to boost his 2016 campaign. That is one way to run a low-cost presidential campaign: skirt the laws around transparency.
Another is to outsource campaign functions. Trump’s team has done this in some obvious ways, including tasking outside groups with running his turnout efforts. But the effort goes well beyond that, with the Times noting that his campaign had only 11 employees on its payroll in August, the most recent month for which full spending data was available.
This is in part because the campaign has offloaded its direct voter contact, which often means setting up offices in targeted states and hiring people to staff them and do the actual outreach. It is in part, too, because the campaign is “bending the rules to their breaking point,” in the words of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Dan Weiner, who spoke to the Times. Consider that in 2020, Trump’s campaign employed more than 200 people in August. And even that was modest: In August 2012, Barack Obama’s reelection bid employed about 900.
If we visualize the August spending by each major-party campaign since 2012, we can see just how small the purple “payroll” sliver is in the 2024 spending for Trump. (The circles below are scaled to total spending.)
Both in terms of raw spending and as a percentage of total August spending, Trump’s 2024 campaign expenditures on staff are modest. (You can also see that a lot of those August 2020 employees weren’t making very much.)
He doesn’t like to pay people. We know that. Bump speculates that if he wasn’t getting his donors to buy his worthless junk to pad his own wallet maybe the campaign would have more money to spend. But then, why bother? He’s got billionaires to pay for his super pacs and paupers to give him their last pennies to buy his hideous sneakers and blasphemous Bibles so why change a thing? Man’s gotta make a living. And he’s tied in the polls…
How is it possible that this lecherous criminal cretin is tied in the polls????
.@PlanetTyrus: Nelson Mandela was trying to come to the United States. You chartered a plane for the entire trip. Why is hard for you to talk about the things you've done?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I love doing it. I don't need praise for it. I just like helping people. I help a lot of… pic.twitter.com/L5aUfXzH2D
If you want to know why Trump is popular, blame social media. That’s the kind of bs that’s making the rounds. This is the truth:
This is a perfect example of the propaganda that’s got millions of people believing myths about Trump, conspiracy theories and lies. It’s a huge problem and I don’t know if anyone has enough juice to counteract it. The attempts that were being made by the platforms themselves a few years ago are gone and there’s nothing to take its place.
Trump thinks he would have settled the slavery question before the civil war. I suspect he thinks he could have “settled” it the way he “settled” the abortion quesiton: by giving the assholes everything they want and then saying it was what everyone wanted all along.
Also:
I know sometimes people post screenshotted transcripts like this as a gag. But nope, this is what Trump actually said. https://t.co/kGcDtjnTi1
Former President Donald Trump has pulled out of a string of campaign events and interviews over the last two months, often leaving his hosts frustrated after being promised a visit by the GOP presidential candidate.
The staff of The Shade Room, an entertainment site with wide reach among young and Black audiences, shortly after wrapping an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris last week were left feeling that their “feet were being dragged in the Trump campaign,” according to two sources who spoke to Politico Playbook. When they called to reschedule, a campaign official reportedly gave them a concise explanation: the former president was “exhausted.”
Because of this, the official continued, Trump was “refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to the two people familiar with the conversations. Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back against the report, telling Playbook that Trump’s alleged exhaustion is “unequivocally false” and that he “has never backed down from an interview.”
She did not provide an explanation, however, for why Trump has been flaking despite his constant criticism of Harris for not making enough media appearances. While Trump did show up to some interviews, most of them have been with friendly hosts like right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham and networks such as Fox News.
He’s not used to all this activity. He spent the last four years watching TV, tweeting, playing golf and entertaining his dinner guests at Mar-a-lago. In other words he’s come out of retirement at the age of 78 to run for president. He’s just not up for it.
In September of 2020, 200,000 Americans had just died of COVID. There was no vaccine, unemployment was at 8%. The whole world had just been shut down and was only slowly coming back to life. Donald Trump was pushing snake oil cures and pretending the whole thing wasn’t much of a problem.
And yet 55 percent of Americans believed they were better off than they’d been four years ago.
We have officially entered the manic stage of the presidential election in which the candidates are suddenly everywhere. At least Kamala Harris is everywhere. She’s holding huge raucous rallies all over the swing states, appearing on podcasts and mainstream interviews even going on Fox and subjecting herself to a barrage of hostile Trump inspired accusations from anchor Brett Baier who didn’t seem to want her to actually answer them. (She showed she cannot be intimidated which was probably the point of the interview in the first place.) Nobody at this point should complain that she isn’t being available to the public. Just turn on your TV and you’ll see her there.
Trump, on the other hand, is as present as always by holding looney rallies and post on crazy comments on Truth Social, but is refusing to debate Harris again and has cancelled numerous scheduled interviews this week. Yet he’s holding events in California and New York which aren’t even on the radar.
According to Tara Palmieri at Puck, the Mar-a-lago insiders say this is all because Trump is so assured he’s going to win that he’s just letting his freak flag fly and the campaign figures that Trump’s “self-assurance” may create a bandwagon effect as voters decide they want to go with a winner. Republicans do love the bandwagon effect strategy, but Trump is seeming off his rocker in a way that doesn’t easily read as “confident” except to the extent he may believe his “election integrity” plans will ensure that he “wins” even if he doesn’t win.
Trump did do some events this week and it’s a big leap to say he showed self-assurance. There was the now notorious “swaying to the music” town hall that I wrote about earlier. That appearance was so bizarre that it actually managed to dominate the conversation for a couple of days which is really saying something in this frenzied news cycle.
Then he held a taped Fox News town hall with host Harris Faulkner, who sat him down with a group of allegedly undecided women. We know that a large majority of women voters in this country loathe him and they’d like to mitigate that by allowing him to beguile a few of them with his suave charm. They did seem rather weirdly ecstatic by his presence, but that’s because they were all Republican party shills and ardent supporters brought in by Fox. It even turned out that Fox edited out one of the questions that gave away the scheme.
Fox did not disclose even basic information about who was asking the questions at their Trump town hall with women voters. And even more egregiously, they edited out one woman *making that disclosure* pic.twitter.com/hwfG3Wk812
But Trump did do one event this week that may turn out to be important because of the substance of what he said. He appeared on the Spanish language network Univision for a town hall with Latino voters. I think we all know what an important demographic this is and have heard that Trump is garnering a larger percentage of Hispanic men than ever before. I suspect he believed that it would, therefore, be an easy exchange like the one with the women plants the day before. So he wasn’t prepared for the kind of questions he got.
A man named Ramiro Gonzales, who identified as a Republican, asked Trump why he should support him when people from his own administration, including his Vice President, refuse to do so? He said January 6th and his COVID mismanagement had disturbed him but he wanted to give him a chance to win back his vote.
Trump replied that 97% of people in the former administration supported him and said that January 6th was “a day of love”, “nobody was killed”, and “we didn’t have guns, the others had guns but we didn’t have guns.” You can see from the look on Gonzales’s face and that of the people in the audience, that they knew he was full of it.
Q: I am a Republican, but no longer registered. I was disturbed by January 6. People from your own administration don't support you. Your own Vice President doesn’t support you. So why would I want to support you?
Gonzales later said that he would not be voting for Trump.
Trump has been charged with several felonies related to the January 6th insurrection. He claims that he bears no responsibility for any of it. And yet here he said that “we” didn’t have guns, the others had guns, by which he can only mean the police. One imagines that Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will be looking at that footage with keen interest. (Needless to say, there were plenty of guns among the rioters and certainly many of those whom Trump calls “hostages,”and promises to pardon on day one, were charged with violent acts against the police. )
But there was another question that interested me the most because I’ve been dying for someone to ask it for months. A 64 year old man named Jorge Velazquez, who described himself as having spent many years working with his hands “hunched over picking strawberries and cutting broccoli”, asked Trump who he thought was going to do this type of work if he deported all the undocumented workers who account for most of the agricultural work force.
Trump went into his usual rant about criminal immigrants, showing once again that he is completely clueless about how anything actually works. Trump seems to think they’re taking the jobs away from American citizens, specifically “African Americans and Hispanics” who are suffering as a result. These are the “Black jobs” he was talking about.
📌 A Latino farmer asks Donald Trump who will do the hard jobs if he deports undocumented immigrants.
Trump made a point of saying that he wants laborers (who love our country) to come legally which suggests he’s talking about something like the old bracero program which was replaced by the issuance of H-2a and H-2b visas. The problem is that his agenda, as articulated in Project 2025, wants to discontinue all temporary worker visas. His immigration guru, Stephen Miller, has made it very clear that he intends to drastically curtail legal immigration as well.
Trump’s grotesque xenophobic rhetoric, whether or not he fully understands it, is paving the way for the GOP’s mainstream adoption of “The Great Replacement Theory” which holds that all foreigners from the so-called “shithole countries” must be barred, not just because they are criminals or are taking all the “Black jobs” but because they are supposedly destroying the culture of America. When Trump reads Stephen Miller’s screeds on the stump about immigrants “poisoning the blood,” there is no distinction between legal and illegal.
His new best friend Elon Musk is pushing the Great Replacement Theory constantly, having signed on to the idea that Democrats are trying to import immigrants so they will vote for them, an old standby promoted by the likes of Ann Coulter in her book “Adios, America.” One would think that with all the talk about Latinos voting in large numbers for Trump this time they’d stop and think about whether this is a good long term strategy for them but they’re so hooked on the idea that migrants are marauding gangsters who are also inexplicably motivated beyond reason to vote, that they aren’t thinking clearly on the subject.
On a more material level, I have to wonder how everyone’s going to like the prices at the grocery store when strawberries and broccoli are necessarily selling at 20 times what they cost today from the combination of labor shortages and tariffs on imported food. Trump may not ever eat a vegetable but I’d guess even Republicans like to eat a salad once in a while.
While I doubt that Trump’s ever read a treatise on The Great Replacement Theory, he’s fully on board with it and we know that because he’s recently promised to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield despite the fact that they are here legally, are working at jobs that others didn’t want and profess to love America. He believes they’re polluting the culture of Springfield Ohio and need to go back where they came from. That’s what this is all about. And that, my friends, is fascism with a capitol F.
Federal judge slaps down Florida’s surgeon general
In another smackdown for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his lackeys, a federal judge on Thursday issued a temporary restraining order against state threats to prosecute TV stations that run ads in support of Florida’s abortion-rights amendment:
The temporary restraining order addresses a lawsuit filed against the state by Floridians Protecting Freedom, a group campaigning for Amendment 4, which will appear on the Nov. 5 ballot. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled.
Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker’s sharply worded ruling prevents the department from “taking any further actions to coerce, threaten, or intimate repercussions” against broadcasters for airing the ads or “undertaking enforcement action” against them.
In citing one case used in his ruling, he offered a brief summary:
“To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
“Political advertisement is political speech — speech at the core of the First Amendment. The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false,’ “ wrote Walker, of the U.S. District Court Northern District of Florida in Tallahassee.
Trumptyism
Is that plain enough for you, Ron? (I’ll bet not.)
The lawsuit was the latest in a series of legal tussles between the DeSantis administration and advocates for amendment, which would protect the right to abortion until fetal viability. It would override the state’s ban on abortion in most cases after the first six weeks of pregnancy.
The commercial, produced by Floridians Protecting Freedom, features a Tampa woman describing how she was diagnosed with brain cancer when she was 20 weeks pregnant, ahead of state restrictions that would have blocked the abortion she received before treatment.
On Oct. 3, the health department, part of the DeSantis administration sent a cease-and-desist letter to several Florida broadcasters threatening criminal prosecution if they did not stop airing the commercial. This order expires Oct. 29, when a hearing on the injunction is scheduled.
The law and order party, friends. When they read the Constitution, it means just what they choose it to mean. That is, it’s no protection for you when they are the ones defending it and appointing judges who think as they do. (Walker was appointed by Barack Obama.)
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.
I don’t know the outcome. But this and stuff like the Fox interview are the closing message. All power moves. That’s the message. https://t.co/xmwFJYXpsP
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.
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.
Q: I am a Republican, but no longer registered. I was disturbed by January 6. People from your own administration don't support you. Your own Vice President doesn’t support you. So why would I want to support you?
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 primaryprescriptions 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 sometimesdefied. 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.
