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JD Vance and Project 2025 are all over his latest “I am your protector” rhetoric

As a politician, Donald Trump has always exhibited a very creepy form of paternalism. He often says things like “No one has done as much for the Black community as I did” or “I’ve been better for Jews than anyone in history.” It’s as if he’s bestowing on the people a special gift from the king and they should be grateful to him personally. Of course his boasts are always lies so they tend to fall on deaf ears, but it reveals how he sees himself as president.

Although he’s long exhibited this rhetorical tic, in recent days he’s really outdone himself. Sounding much more like a cult leader than a politician in a modern democracy, the passages in his speeches about women are downright disturbing. It started with a weird Truth Social post on September 20th:

The womenfolk are depressed but Big Daddy Trump is going to fix all that and they’ll be so happy they won’t even think about abortion. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY BEAUTIFUL AND GREAT AGAIN.” All that’s missing is “OR ELSE!”

You’ll note that he said he will “protect women at a level never seen before” as if women are abandoned children who are desperate for him to come and rescue them from all their travails. When is the last time you heard a major politician in America infantilize women like this? It sounds like something out of the 19th century.

He took this all a step further in his speeches over the weekend making it clear that this is an official campaign message delivered from the teleprompter (with a few off-the-cuff embellishments.) In this rendition, women are complete basketcases, barely able to function which, for some bizarre reason, is why they care about abortion rights.

This is nearly identical to how Warren Jeffs spoke to women in his cult. https://t.co/h4HQaf59nv

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) September 24, 2024

It truly does have the tenor of a patriarchal cult leader speaking to his followers.

He went on like this for a while, complaining that all women are talking about is abortion (because they are so unhappy, unhealthy and depressed) but he’s going to make it all better. It’s beyond condescending, but as my colleague Amanda Marcotte points out [INSERT LINK] it betrays Trump’s frustration that women aren’t falling in line as they are supposed to do so he’s resorted to speaking to them as if they’re children.

It’s profoundly insulting although you cannot help but notice the wild cheering from the women in his audience ecstatic at the idea of Dear Leader “protecting” them. (Why anyone would believe that a man who is on tape bragging about assaulting women and has been found liable for it in a court of law is some kind of “protector” is beyond me.)

But at one point in the speech as he was defending the GOP’s record on IVF (even though the congressional Republicans just voted unanimously against a bill that would protect the right to the procedure) he made this comment:

We want beautiful babies in our country! We want you to have your beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby. We want those babies and we need them.

We want those babies and we need them? Who is we? And why do we need them?

Has he been chatting with JD Vance? Because while Trump may just be clumsily trying to finesse the abortion issue and shrink the massive gender gap with his creepy rhetoric, Vance has some very well developed thoughts on that issue.

As we all know, Vance has extreme contempt for childless women. In fact, in his view they are to blame for many of the problems in modern life because they are, you guessed it, so unhappy:

JD Vance says women who haven’t given birth like Kamala Harris are “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives,” and have “no direct stake” in America. pic.twitter.com/3DJY3pQTGe

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 22, 2024

That wasn’t a one-off comment. This is something he has thought deeply about and (at least for the moment, until he changes his identity again) it’s something that very much informs his political philosophy. He believes that women who don’t bear children should not be full citizens and perhaps aren’t even fully human. Like his close pals at the Heritage Foundation who put together Project 2025, his platform is one which would give massive government incentives only to heterosexual couples with large families while also discouraging outside child care. (Who needs it when mom stays home and the otherwise useless post-menopausal grandma is forced to help?)

Vance’s contempt has caught on big in GOP circles. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas’ Aunt Lydia from the Handmaid’s Tale, made a snide comment the other day about Kamala Harris not having birthed her own children. (She’s a stepmother to two kids.) And Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno whined over the weekend about suburban women wanting to have abortion all the time — and wondering why any woman over 50 would care. It’s catching on.

Much of this is just good old fashioned sexism and patriarchal yearning but there is more to it than that. Vance has been pushing pronatalism for some time, which gets us back to Trump’s blathering about how he wants women to be happy and content so they can have beautiful babies because “we need babies.”

A couple of months ago the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot wrote a long, definitive piece on Vance’s pronatalist views which she defined this way:

Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.

Now it makes more sense, doesn’t it? Vance’s hostility to women who haven’t given birth fits right in with the rest of this pronatalist agenda, particularly when it comes to immigration and the Great Replacement Theory which pushes for native-born women to have more children to alleviate the need for immigrant labor which pollutes the culture. It also keeps women in their place which is just as important as keeping the bloodlines pure.

This is yet another example of the influence of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on the politics of the far right in America. Vance is a big fan and has endorsed Orbán’s policies to raise Hungary’s birth rate (and marginalize non-traditional families, particularly those that are blended and LGBTQ+.) Vance may not be the only influential member of the far right pushing these views (Tucker Carlson is another) but he’s probably the most powerful elected politician in America to make it a central part if his philosophy.

I doubt seriously that Donald Trump has even the slightest awareness of the ideological underpinnings of the speeches he’s giving about being women’s “protector” and saying “we need babies.” He’s not exactly an intellectual. But whoever is writing them certainly is and that person is pushing a JD Vance/Project 2025 agenda whether Trump knows it or not.

Salon

How far he’s come from humble beginnings

I lived for a stretch in Sen. Lindsey Graham’s one-stoplight hometown in South Carolina. He tended bar in the restaurant/bar/pool hall/liquor store his parents owned. A neighbor was converting an old church into a home and building a second floor out over the sanctuary (above). Checking Google Maps, there’s nothing left now of the decrepit “ghost house” we lived in but the foundation. They’ve moved the police department and post office out of “downtown.” Built some apartments for university kids. Not a lot else has changed.

But Lindsey Graham sure has. From The ReidOut blog:

Appearing on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham tried his hardest to separate Donald Trump from the controversy surrounding North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson. The South Carolina Republican is predictably standing by his man Trump, but the irony in his excuses is too obvious to ignore.

CNN reported last week that Robinson, whom Trump has called “Martin Luther King on steroids,” had once described himself as a Black Nazi and longed for the return of slavery on a pornographic website’s message board; Robinson has denied making the posts.

Graham said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” over the weekend that Robinson must defend himself. Speaking with Sean Hannity a day later, he sounded ready to throw Robinson under the bus.

Democrats are “trying to make people believe that Donald Trump somehow’s involved with Mar— with the Robinson guy,” Graham said, obscuring Robinson’s name.

Of course, it’s not all that hard to make people believe Trump is somehow involved with Robinson, considering that the former president has endorsed him and repeatedly praised him — and even held a fundraiser for him at Mar-a-Lago.

Graham also told Hannity: “It would be unfair to say that somebody you wrote a letter about or even your own pastor — you own every stupid thing they did. We’d be crucified politically if we did that.”

Ja’han Jones continues:

Of course, Republicans did do what Graham described — to Barack Obama, when they attacked the then-presidential candidate in 2008 over remarks made by Jeremiah Wright, his pastor at the time.

Wright and Robinson are not one and the same. But it’s worth noting that Obama ultimately did denounce Wright. And Republicans still sought to use Wright as a cudgel to attack him years later.

It’s exhausting to even point out the hypocrisy anymore. They have no shame. In its place is breathtaking enmity towards immigrants.

(h/t BF)

“This is the feeling we want to hold onto”

Didn’t know Anthony Ramos before. I do now.

“Why would we not want to hold onto this feeling?”

Enjoy.

LOL Anthony Ramos crushed his intro of @tim_walz today in Pennsylvania. He’s right, we know what we get with Trump. It was terrible. And we are not going back! pic.twitter.com/EM63LrAK1N

— Alida Garcia (@leedsgarcia) September 21, 2024

Trump has a new chant at his rallies: “Send Them Back!” Isn’t that great?

Former president Donald Trump continued attacking the immigrant population in an Ohio town during a campaign rally Monday in Pennsylvania, saying, “You have to get them the hell out.”

As Trump spoke in Indiana, Pa., the crowd chanted, “Send them back!”

For weeks now, Trump has singled out Springfield, Ohio, over its Haitian population, echoing baseless claims that immigrants are eating pets and calling the immigrants illegal, despite their legal status. His attacks have upended life in the small town, where the Republican mayor has pleaded for civility amid bomb threats and event cancellations for security reasons.

Trump made his latest comments about Springfield at Monday’s rally while accusing Democrats of wanting to “inundate Pennsylvania communities” with migrants, “changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever.”

We’ve collected Harris’s and Trump’s stances on the most important issues including abortion, economic policy, immigration and more.

“Do you think Springfield will ever be the same?” Trump said. “The fact is — and I’ll say it now — you have to get them the hell out. You have to get them out. I’m sorry. Get them out. Can’t have it. … They’ve destroyed it.”

Trump’s campaign promoted a video clip of Trump’s comments on X.

After the chants, Trump added: “It’s terrible to say, and it’s a tough thing to do.”

Trump has long promised mass deportations in his 2024 campaign for the White House, though he has not provided much detail. And his comments Monday appeared to continue conflating the situation in Springfield with concerns about illegal immigration.

“What’s going on in Springfield is just fundamentally different,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said in a recent TV interview. “These people are here legally. They came to work. These are good people.”

Today he said:

Trump on Springfield: The mayor is actually looking for interpreters.. because they can't understand. The language is totally different. What the hell. I'm sorry. You have to move the people back to the country from which they came. You have to. pic.twitter.com/7puXVmG5aC

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 24, 2024

The language is French but I don’t expect Trump has ever heard of it.

He wants to ethnically cleanse America of foreign born people from the countries he has deemed to be shitholes. (He won’t be hunting down Norwegian or German tourists or students who have overstayed their visas I’m quite sure.) Don’t kid yourself. That’s what his mass deportation plan is. And frankly, he doesn’t care about the citizenship status of any of these people, particularly not the minor American children of undocumented immigrants who he plans to deport along with their parents.

And don’t be sure the country will rise up en masse against this. Most Republicans think the constitutions shouldn’t provide citizenship for anyone born here in the first place. And according to at least one recent poll, a majority of Americans are in favor of the ethnic cleansing program.

This is a real threat, I hope people realize it. Most of the country has been brainwashed into believing that immigrants are the source of all their problems. They will enjoy seeing them suffer.

Oh right. She’s a woman. How could I forget?

You just can’t underestimate misogyny. And, by the way, a lot of people wearing these degenerate t-shirts and carrying these signs happen to be MAGA women.

As depressing as this is, the subtext of this election is that Donald Trump is a real man and Kamala Harris is a dumb whore.

Ben Wikler, the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party tweeted this this morning:

Vice President Harris joined Wisconsin Public Radio and talked about what she’d do as president:

* affordable housing
* water quality
* reproductive rights

… and more. Everyone should know what she said: 

Okay, let’s dig into the Harris interview with Kate Archer Kent of “Wisconsin Today” on @WPR. (above)

The first question in the @KamalaHarris interview on Wisconsin Public Radio was on a topic on *many* voters’ minds: Wisconsin’s shortage of affordable housing. 

Wisconsin Today (WT) to VP Harris: “The medium home price in our state has jumped by 41% since September of 2020. You proposed up to $25,000 in down payment assistance for first time homebuyers. What would it take to be eligible for that type of assistance?” 

Harris answered directly: to qualify for the $25,000 in down payment assistance, you just have to be a first-time homebuyer.Again. Buying your first home? $25,000 in down payment assistance.This will change a lot of lives. This will help more folks buy homes—which, naturally, will increase demand. So the other part of the equation is increasing supply. 

That’s the other part of her plan: “work with the private sector and home builders to create incentives for them to build three million new homes by the end of my first term.”

KH: “But let me just back up for a moment. Look, I grew up a middle-class kid. My mother worked long days, she worked weekends, and she was able to save up so that by the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy our first house.” 

KH: “And so I understand being a renter and also what it means for families to aspire to own a home. But, you know, it takes a lot of time, and that was many, many years ago, and the American dream of homeownership has become even more elusive.” 

KH: “People just need help, literally and figuratively, getting their foot in the door and, once they’re able to do that, having enough for a down payment.” 

KH: “Folks work hard. They save up, and the monthly payments will be more within their reach, but that down payment piece is really one of the big obstacles for first time home buyers to be able to…build up their ability to buy a home.” 

KH: “And frankly, home ownership is one of the best ways that people create wealth for their family and intergenerational wealth. So I’m very clear about the connection between this point and what can be a lifetime of economic opportunity for an individual or a family.” 

Okay, so what is Harris’s plan to ensure these homes actually get built? Wisconsin Today asked: “How do you incentivize the building of new housing that’s affordable for the people who need it most?” 

Harris: “So part of it is tax credits, and creating tax credits for home builders, but home builders who are going to do the work of building homes that are affordable to middle class people, to working people, to families.”

KH: “The second is to cut through the red tape…we don’t unnecessarily burden the ability to create this additional housing that brings down the cost of homeownership and rents. I have a plan to take on corporate landlords who have to be held accountable.”

KH: “We’ve seen in so many places around our country. These corporations come in, buy up a bunch of property, then jack up the prices. It becomes too expensive for people to actually be able to afford to live where they work and where they want to live.”

KH: “The factors contributing to high rents and housing affordability are many. My plan is to attempt to address many of them at once, so we can actually have the net effect of bringing down the cost and making homeownership renting more affordable.” 

The second big topic in the interview was toxic “forever chemicals” that are found in tons of drinking water in Wisconsin: PFAS. 

Wisconsin Today asked: “Communities all over Wisconsin are struggling with toxic PFAs in their water supply. … If you win the White House, would that lead to further federal regulation of PFAs?” 

Harris: “Well, let me start with this. My commitment to these issues is long standing. You may know it. Twenty years ago, when I was elected DA of San Francisco, I created one of the first environmental justice units of any DAs office in the country.” 

KH: “I, as Attorney General of California, was a real leader on making sure that we enforced rules and standards that were about reducing PFAs, about what we need to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and also hold polluters accountable.”

.@KamalaHarris then outlined work she’s been doing as Vice President in the Biden Administration—including delivering nearly $2B in funding to help Wisconsin and communities within Wisconsin address PFAs chemicals.

Harris described how this administration is delivering $3B for replacing lead pipes in cities, including Milwaukee. And the Vice President talked about her administration’s work to protect the Great Lakes from the climate crisis.

The third big topic was a central one for Wisconsin voters—and for voters across the country.

Abortion.

Wisconsin experienced a near-total abortion ban for 451 days after Dobbs fell. Now it’s tied up in court. One bad election could rip away reproductive freedom here. 

Wisconsin Today: “You said you want to work with Congress to pass a federal bill to codify abortion rights. How do you plan to get enough support in Congress to restore abortion rights when you’d likely need to pass the Senate filibuster?” 

Harris: “Well, let me first say to all your listeners, you must reelect your Senator, @TammyBaldwin, because we need the votes in Congress to do exactly what you are saying.” YES!

“It is well within our reach to hold on to the majority in the Senate and take back the House.” 

Harris: “We should eliminate the filibuster for Roe.”

That’s the key. If you do that, you don’t need 60 Senate votes. 

Harris: “51 votes would be what we need to put back into law the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.” 

To make this happen, we need 50 Democratic Senators… and a Democratic Vice President. VP Harris cast a record number of tie-breaking votes as VP. VP Walz could cast the tie-breaking vote on Tammy Baldwin’s Women’s Health Protection Act and send the bill to President Harris. 

So there you go! A substantive interview on topics voters actually care about, answered with clarity and candor by a candidate who wants to lift us up, not divide us. Refreshing, isn’t it? And, this being public radio, the conversation ended with usual warmth and civility:

Wisconsin Today: “Vice President Harris, thank you for joining us.”

Kamala Harris: “Thank you. It’s good to be with you. Thank you so much.” 

It’s all the more interesting because the last time Donald Trump did a public radio interview was in January 2022. Here’s how that interview ended. He lied about the 2020 election—then cut off the interview and stormed off. A… contrast with VP Harris.
npr.org/2022/01/12/107…

Trump has been ducking nonpartisan public radio interviews ever since.Just like he’s ducking the second debate.

Want a candidate who can answer substantive questions with… substance?

As David Roberts quipped:

The Supreme Court refused to block the execution of Marcellus Williams last night in a 6-3 decision with the liberals all dissenting. Of course,

From an X thread on the story:

Marcellus Williams was fifty-four when Missouri killed him tonight. Or was he murdered? For over two decades, he sat on death row, convicted of a crime he had always insisted he didn’t commit—the brutal 1998 stabbing of Felicia Gayle, a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter.

Despite DNA evidence that excluded him as the source of male DNA found on the murder weapon, the state of Missouri pushed ahead with his execution. Williams wasn’t just a faceless inmate confined to a cell. Over the years, he earned two college degrees while incarcerated, using his time to pursue self-improvement despite the looming death sentence. His story is one of resilience and transformation. He often mentored younger inmates, encouraging them to pursue education as a way to reclaim their humanity in a system designed to strip it away. H

His sister, Patricia Davis, once said, “Marcellus never gave up on hope. He believed the truth would set him free.” Even as his legal team fought to prove his innocence, Williams inspired those around him.

Yet, even the victim’s family—who lost a loved one in a horrific crime—expressed doubts about Williams’ guilt. As new DNA evidence emerged that excluded Williams as the source of the male DNA found on the murder weapon, the Gayle family called for leniency, believing that life without parole was a more just sentence given the uncertainty surrounding his conviction. Despite these pleas, Missouri moved forward with the execution, sparking outrage and disbelief among many who followed the case.

Felicia Gayle’s murder remains a tragic loss, and the urgency to bring justice to her case is understandable. However, the rush to execute Williams without fully addressing the new evidence creates a deeply unsettling question: could the real murderer still be free? By not allowing for a thorough re-evaluation of the case, the state may have failed both the Williams family and the Gayle family. Rather than achieving justice, the legal system may have prematurely closed a case that still had questions left unanswered. This rush to finality failed to provide the truth for either family, leaving them both with an unresolved sense of justice.

Missouri’s decision to execute William did not occur in a vacuum—it’s part of a much larger and troubling legacy of racial disparity in the state’s justice system. His conviction rested heavily on the testimony of two incentivized jailhouse informants, both of whom had much to gain by testifying against him. There was no physical evidence linking Williams to the crime. Despite DNA testing showing that Williams’ DNA did not match the male DNA on the murder weapon, Missouri courts never conducted a full evidentiary review of this critical fact. The courts proceeded forward, ignoring exculpatory evidence in favor of maintaining the status quo.

It’s sickening.

Paul Waldman has an excellent analysis of the tiresome elite media lament that the Kamala Harris isn’t giving them enough attention:

You can read many complaints about Harris’s lack of media accessibility (see here or here or here or here), though reporters seem unconcerned about the fact that Donald Trump does no interviews with them either. He talks to Fox News, other right-wing outlets, and dudebro podcasts, but he does not sit down with major newspapers or television networks, and somehow they don’t seem to mind. But as always, Democrats are held to a higher standard, scolded for failing to uphold the most elevated democratic norms while Republicans’ violation of those norms is taken for granted. 

[…]

Let’s take a look at one New York Times column that I think reflects the prevailing sentiment. Written by Todd Purdum, who was a longtime Times political reporter and then moved on to positions at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, it’s presented as friendly advice, explaining to Harris why she should want to give reporters the face time they crave. Purdum starts by saying it took too long for Harris to get to the meaty policy details in an answer she gave about the economy in an interview with a Philadelphia TV station. She needs to offer more “direct, succinct answers and explanations,” he writes, because “Being known as a straight shooter would also help persuade restive political elites, pundits and journalists that Ms. Harris is grappling with such scrutiny, and I think she’s apt to be rewarded in the end for it.”

This is unintentionally revealing. Purdum has little to say about whether Harris’ ideas are good ones; what he’s advising is that she put on a better show. She doesn’t have to be a straight shooter, she just has to appear to be a straight shooter, and then she’ll be rewarded not just by the voters but by the elites who pretend to care about substance, but actually don’t.

That is correct. This is mostly theatre criticism. When they get the chance to ask substantive questions they rarely ask them. They ask about the horse race or the accusations by the other side or typical gotcha questions. It’s why they are so happy with Trump’s press availability which is completely devoid of reason and substance and is all show.

As Waldman notes:

But if she follows Purdum’s advice, reporters will only reward her for it if they judge her to be a compelling performer and if they feel she has been properly deferential to them, which I suspect she and her campaign understand. 

He also discusses the fact that all of this “advice” is delivered with an implicit threat — either do what we want you’ll pay. And we have a very recent example of what that looks like, don’t we?

Waldman references a piece by Judd Legum author of the popular newsletter Popular Information. Legum reports that he has received the hacked Trump emails, allegedly purloined by Iran, which were previously delivered to The Washington Post, Politico, The NY Times and Puck. (There are probably others.) They have all refused to publish these emails which are about the vetting processes for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Doug Burgham and apparently some legal matters.

Legum won’t publish the emails because he was peripherally involved in the Russian DNC hack back in 2016 and he doesn’t see any reason to perpetuate this sort of thing. I’m not sure I agree with that in this case. It just seems like one more way to benefit Trump at a time when the stakes are monumental. Nobody’s principles in matters like this are going to matter much when he starts rounding up his enemies.

But Legum does at least give a scathing indictment of the media’s outrageous behavior last time, when it was the much hated Hillary Clinton they went after as part of their years long quest to take her down. (And they wondered why she didn’t much like talking to them…)

Waldman writes:

According to Legum, in the waning days of the 2016 campaign, the New York Times published an incredible 199 articles mining Democratic emails — stolen by the Russian government and passed to Wikileaks — for juicy tidbits. But that obsessive coverage, the Times said in an editorial published that October, was actually Hillary Clinton’s fault. “Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release,” they wrote. “Journalists and the public could have waded through them, discussed them, written about them — and by now, everyone would have long since moved on.” 

Which of course they wouldn’t have; the press had long before decided that Clinton was corrupt, and they were going to paint her that way no matter what (you may have noticed that reporters’ passion for policing proper email practices was decidedly muted when it was Trump administration officials using private emails for government work). 

We see some variant of that excuse again and again, questionable or even appalling news judgments rationalized with “This would have gone better for you if you had given us what we wanted,” an assertion that is not only implausible but echoes the abuser’s victim-blaming. Look what you made us do. You brought this on yourself.

Of course. And one thing we know for sure: they will never take even the slightest responsibility for their role in any of it.

I guess the death penalty states are now racing to execute people at a record pace:

Death row inmates in five states are scheduled to be put to death in the span of one week, an unusually high number of executions that defies a yearslong trend of decline in both the use and support of the death penalty in the U.S.

If carried out as planned, the executions in Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas will mark the first time in more than 20 years — since July 2003 — that five were held in seven days, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions.

This country is in the grip of a death cult. Maybe it always has been.

I will never understand how a country can call itself civilized if it allows the state to kill people under a system that is nearly random and fraught with corruption and inequity. It’s pretty clear that it’s only done as a form of ritual punishment by the government to show that it can.

Update: Check out this piece by Bolts about the violent, criminal guards who carry out the secretive executions on Alabama. Yes, it’s barbaric.

It’s all about “policy” you see. As Philip Bump writes:

You will often hear that Trump has an advantage on policy; that, if the campaign set aside all of the fluff of personal emotion, Trump would prevail simply by virtue of the popularity of his positions. That his support is rooted in what he stands for, not who he is.

This is not true.

First of all, efforts to present Trump’s campaign as centered on policy are derailed more than a little by the paucity of policy proposals he’s offered. He had something he called “Agenda 47” that was the policy arm of his primary campaign, but it was mostly videotaped riffs about whatever furies were animating the right at any given moment.

This is why the effort to tie Trump to the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” has been so successful. Here was an actual outline of policy proposals, written by people close to Trump and/or who’d served with him. Trump’s ability to dismiss the outline as nonrepresentative is weakened by the lack of a campaign counterweight. (Polling released over the weekend by NBC News shows that most Americans have heard of “Project 2025” — and don’t like it.)

What Trump supporters mean when they say that he wins in a campaign focused on policy is that they think an election centered only on specific policy issues — the economy, inflation, immigration — is one that favors Trump. It’s not that Trump has a detailed paper explaining how he plans to steward the economy; his agenda can be summarized as “lots of tariffs” and “wasn’t 2019 cool?” The argument is instead that focusing on those things positions Trump more favorably than focusing on other stuff — like abortion or the stability of American democracy.

Another factor here is that many of Trump’s allies use “policy” as a way to minimize his toxic or bizarre rhetoric. We can see that in polling conducted by YouGov for CBS News that was released over the weekend.

About 9 in 10 Americans said that the candidate’s policies were important to their vote when asked, including 84 percent of Democrats, 86 percent of independents and 89 percent of Republicans. When asked whether personal qualities were important, a bit over half said they were — with a wide partisan gap. About 7 in 10 Democrats said personal qualities were important to the their vote; only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Because, you know, Trump supporters are simply focused on policy.

Also, he is a cult leader. That means he is right about everything. No need to sweat the details.