Policy. We all know that’s what this presidential election is about. Fence-sitters like New York Times columnist Brett Stephens have inquiring minds. They want to know what policies Vice President Kamala Harris will pursue before voting for her. Even knowing the other entrée choice is, as humorist David Sedaris put it, “a platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it.”
Because everyone knows what Donald Trump’s policy agenda for his second term is: revenge. And lots of tariffs.
Nothing has changed in the intervening years. Trump’s view of the world — of women especially, a pundit said this week — was frozen in amber in the late 1980s when his real estate empire was at its peak. On Trump’s revenge agenda should he win in November is an expanding list of enemies, many of whom he’s never met, against whom he holds grudges. People he wants rounded up by troops and deported. People he thinks should face military tribunals. Or IRS audits. Or federal investigations that upend lives. People he thinks should be put in jail for criticizing Supreme Court decisions or him.
Trump says Americans who criticize the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade should be imprisoned: “These people should be put in jail for the way they talk about our judges and justices” pic.twitter.com/IJtQVZPKXc
This is not theoretical, Michael Schmidt wrote on Saturday in the New York Times. He sought to deploy the Department of Justice as a weapon for personal revenge in his first term. He was frustrated, albeit not entirely, by advisers who sought to stall, dissuade, and divert him:
In an Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump told startled aides that if Attorney General Jeff Sessions would not order the department to go after Hillary Clinton and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, Mr. Trump would prosecute them himself.
Recognizing the extraordinary dangers of a president seeking not just to weaponize the criminal justice system for political ends but trying as well to assume personal control over who should be investigated and charged, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, sought to stall.
Those efforts were not entirely successful. Schmidt and Matthew Cullen detailed ten people on Trump’s enemies list eventually hit with punitive actions that disrupted their lives and cost hundreds of thousands in fines and legal fees.
MSNBC’s “Deadline White House” opened on Monday with a montage of Trump’s musings on revenge. Treason is punishable by death in the Constitution, a reporter noted in May 2019: “Who specifically are you accusing of treason?”
Trump didn’t blink. He cited a list of people he felt had wronged him who should be charged with treason (extremely loosely defined).
“Revenge does take time,” Trump told “Dr. Phil Primetime.”
Trump is biding his. If he wins a second term and anyone opposes him, he told a rally last September, he’ll order his attorney general to indict them.
He’ll go full Queen of Hearts given a second chance at the Oval Office.
Many people say they want Trump to be president again because he is a great businessman and they believe he will lower prices. That’s what he’s promising, after all.
He gave an interview to a friendly reporter, Sheryl Attkisson, who asked him how he planned to do that:
Attkisson: Kamala Harris has been very short on specifics when it comes to the economy other than saying she wants an opportunity economy. What are the specific mechanics of how prices come down. You know the steps that would be taken in a second term for you?
Trump: So first of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions like give me a specific answer. She talks about her lawn when she was growing up. This woman is not equipped to be president She is not equipped to deal with President Xi, — I took in hundreds of billions with him.
And Putin, we had no war with Putin. Remember, and I’m just going to go off just for this. With Bush, they took a lot. Russia. With Biden, they’re trying to take everything. With Obama, they took a lot. With Trump, Russia took nothing, Just remember that. It’s a little, a little chart.
But what happened, and when you look at what took place, it was so sad. When they took over, they cut the oil way down, and oil started going through the roof. It was going to $10 a gallon. It was going to go to numbers that nobody has ever seen. And so they went back to the Trump drilling, They said, let it go back.
That was the only good thing. But they stopped, because I wold be there, but four years later I would be triple what the number was. Right now, they’re just about even where I was. But they only did that because of the fact that they would have an election coming up.
And you remember at the beginning what happened? That’s one of the reasons that Putin went in, because it went to $100 a barrel instead of $40 a barrel. And he could fight all the wars he wants with those kinds of numbers because he’s a big seller of gas and oil. So what happens is they went back to what I was doing just to reopen. Just reopen.
It wasn’t hard. It’s so crazy what they want to do. They’re going to destroy lives. They’re going to destroy — what they have done to this country, and especially in the sense of allowing millions and millions of people come in, because that’s something. You know we can fix the gasoline situation and we can fix the — anything.
Did that answer the question about the specific mechanics of what he’ll do to bring prices down? No? Attkisson (who is a MAGA sympathizer) didn’t seem to think so either.
Attkisson: Do prices come down magically because it’s not them?
Trump: They come down with energy and they come down with interest rates. We’re going to get, as I told you, we’re going to get energy down by 50% in 12 months. We’re going to have it. It’s going to be a major smash on energy.
If you look at the energy for, and I’m not just talking about cars. I’m talking about air conditioning, heating your basic energy — operating a bakery operating any kind of business. It’s all having to do with energy.
That was where they all started wrong when they cut way back on what I did, and again, just so you understand, they let it go back to where it was which was a very smart thing, Otherwise, I think you would have had, I think you would have had a depression, if you want to know the truth.
But energy was rising at a level that nobody had ever seen, and then they said, go back,go back. They would tell people, go back to your wells, go back to drilling, fracking, whatever you have to do. But if they win, the day after they’re going all the way. They were only doing that because of an election coming up. They’re going all the way, What they are doing to our country is madness. And what they’ve done to our country is mad.
I guess that gobbldygook was meant to say that he will lower energy prices by going back to what he did before — except the Biden administration allegedly went back to what he did before already so his plan is to lower energy prices by 50%. (Don’t even ask if he knows anything about whether oil prices can go below their break even price because he’s an imbcile and doesn’t understand anything.)
In addition, aside from all the gibberish, he apparently believes that inflation occurred because Biden changed his energy policy? What?
I’m just taking a wild guess about what he was trying to say so it’s possible I’m sanewashing him. Most of that was him vamping with incomprehensible bullshit because he doesn’t have a clue ab out inflation and doesn’t care.
But sure, he’s a great businessman so let’s put him back in charge. What could go wrong?
Meanwhile:
Reporter asks Trump about economists saying prices will go up if he implements heavy tariffs.
Trump says Congress will approve his tariffs and if they don't, he'll impose them anyway.
He then rambles on for another 9 minutes about Elon Musk, China, coal plants, San Franciso,… pic.twitter.com/LaIFJVn7lp
Trump asked what the future of crypto looks like: “Well, I think it’s a good future. You know, who knows about anything today. I tell you what, you look at values, you look at what’s happening and where it’s come and where it came from, I think crypto’s got a great future.” pic.twitter.com/HN9SzKMhJ2
JV Last reminisces about America’s halcyon days when winning the popular vote meant that you’d also win the electoral college, something we all took for granted until 2000 when we learned otherwise. (Ye, it happened once before in the 1870s but nobody gave it much of a thought after that.)
He talks about all the variables, including the impact of late-breaking news about one side or the other,and how these variables have changed over the years and concludes:
Unless Harris expands her lead over Trump to greater than a +5 margin on Election Day, we’re in coin-flip territory for the next 42 days.
Yeah. This is one of the reasons I really wish the news media would be careful about how they frame the polling.
Here’s the bad news we can definitely count on:
Not being able to see over the electoral horizon is a problem because we know what Trump is going to do on Election Day: He’s going to claim victory.
His voters will believe him, and this in turn will cause Republican elites to support his claims, irrespective of evidence.
We saw how quickly and easily Republican voters believed Trump in 2020, when Biden’s margin of victory was overwhelming and had been anticipated by polls for months.
Within days a supermajority of Republican voters believed that Trump was the winner, even though there was no evidence to support this view and a great deal of evidence against it.
Ask yourself: What are these people going to say—and do—if Kamala Harris is not a heavy favorite going into Election Day? And if no one really knows what’s happening until the returns come in?
As Last says, even if she wins and none of Trump’s attempts to overturn it succeed, he will still say that he won and will convince many Republicans that it’s true. The results of that will be a Republican Party that continues to be required to adhere to the Big Lie even if Trump is out of the picture which means:
[W]e’re going to have another four years in which the price of admission to Republican politics is claiming that the sitting president is illegitimate.
In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender reassignment surgery.
The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.
It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying — and, he seems to hope — politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.
It goes on to describe many of the details, most of which you no doubt are aware of. But I wonder how many so-called “normies” who aren’t paying close attention know about this. Here’s just one example:
Immigration is another topic ripe for Trump’s land of make-believe. For example, the former president repeatedly references Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from “The Silence of the Lambs,” as a way of conflating migrants seeking asylum with people in mental institutions to suggest without evidence — but with dehumanizing language — that those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border are migrants from insane asylums.
“We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told a Wildwood, N.J., crowd in May, after mentioning “the late, great Hannibal Lecter.”
Trump also regularly claims that the government is putting up undocumented immigrants in “luxury hotels.” In Manhattan, for instance, the city has spent millions converting motels, office buildings and even some upscale hotels into housing for thousands of migrants, but the accommodations are shelter operations, not five-star opulence.
“You have soldiers right now laying on the streets of different cities, all Democrat-run. They’re laying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels, and you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers, as they walk by into a luxury lobby,” Trump said during an economic speech in New York this month. “Is there something wrong with that thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?”
There is another way to describe all this, of course. Donald Trump is a pathological liar and a grotesque demagogue. But this will do.
The problem we have, as I’ve been annoyingly hammering, is that a very large plurality of the public either believes him or admires him for being the demagogic liar that he is because it triggers the libs. These are all people who seem to be in love with hate.
Either way, the fact that we have a man who is portraying America as a dystopian hellhole despite all evidence to the contrary virtually tied in the polls with the person living in the real world is profoundly disturbing.
In her newsletter today, Margaret Sullivan discusses the astonishing fact that media organizations are sitting on a trove of hacked emails from the Trump campaign and refusing to publish them, in stark contrast to their behavior in 2016 when they eagerly pounced on similarly hacked emails from the Clinton campaign. She asks herself, what if it these were hacked emails from the Biden or Harris campaign. Would they be similarly protected?
A group of well-known journalists got together last week to kick this topic around at the behest of Steve Adler, the former top editor of Reuters who now runs an ethics initiative at NYU. Adler moderated a panel including Ben Smith of Semafor who — when he was the editor of BuzzFeed News — famously published the so-called Steele dossier. That dossier was full of unverified and in some cases salacious information about Trump, much of which has turned out to be untrue. The other panelists were Sewell Chan, the new editor of Columbia Journalism Review, and Kathleen Carroll, the former executive editor of the Associated Press.
These media bigwigs agreed, in general, that the standard for publication of hacked information has to be true newsworthiness. In other words, does the public need to know what’s in documents that come from such a tainted source? Smith, though, said he has a strong (and, I would add, well-proven) tendency to go ahead and publish, reasoning that the press shouldn’t be in the business of keeping secrets.
Maybe the media really has learned something from mistakes made that helped get Trump elected. But I’m aware of precious little soul-searching about 2016 campaign coverage — particularly the way Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was vastly and damagingly overplayed. There have been even fewer admissions of wrong-doing or plans for reform, at least that I’m aware of.
So, while I’d like to think that what we’re seeing in the media’s silence about the Iran hacks is mostly “lesson learned,” I’m not convinced. That’s probably one element, with the lack of urgent newsworthiness a bigger part, combined with a desire — however unacknowledged, even to themselves — to avoid inflaming right-wing criticism.
I have absolutely no doubt they would find a reason to publish them. They would rationalize that people don’t really know enough about Harris or that Biden has not been available to the press so they simply have to do whatever is necessary to inform the public.
I think there is a lot to the idea that they are afraid of being called liberal — an old story. And this rationalization from Tara Palmieri at Puck is instructive:
Is this a Reverse Podesta situation? Who knows. The reality is that the media has become more responsible with hacked information, and frankly, it’s hard to imagine anything about Trump that would move the needle post January 6, post-bankruptcies, post-Access Hollywood, post-E. Jean Carroll, post-indictments, post-Arlington, and even after the dog-eating and baby-executing bit.
Since when is their news judgment dependent on what “moves the needle?” By making decisions based on the fact that with Trump “nothing matters” they are moving the needle.
I have no idea if the hacked emails contain anything important. But I do know that the media hugely benefited Trump when they published the DNC emails and turned “butheremails” into the overwhelming theme of the 2016 campaign. And now it seems they are helping the Trump campaign again. Can they not see how this looks to their readers?
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans got a little bit of good news over the weekend with some highly respected polls coming in showing that Kamala Harris is continuing to grow a lead over Donald Trump. According to the NBC poll, Harris leads by 5 points nationally and has received a mind-boggling 16 point bump in favorability since July. NBC reports that it’s “the largest increase for any politician in NBC News polling since then-President George W. Bush’s standing surged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” It appears that the more people see of her, the more they like her.
The CBS News Poll found Harris up 52-48 percent nationally and 51-49 percent in the battlegrounds. Importantly, the poll found that views of the economy have improved a bit and her numbers on that issue have improved with them. Those who are voting on personal qualities favor Harris 66-33% and those who are voting on “policy” are 50% for her and 50% for Trump.
G Elliot Morris of 538, posted this on Sunday night:
Harris up 3 nationally per our 538 average; 2.7 in Michigan, 1.9 in Wisconsin and 1.5 in Pennsylvania. Plus GA, AZ, NC and NV all within a point. Harris modestly leads this race but a normal amount of polling bias could see Trump win (or Harris 350 EVs)https://t.co/cdR35ysBkE
That does throw some cold water on any euphoria Harris supporters might be feeling. The race remains very close and it’s hard to understand how that can be after everything that’s happened over the past eight years of Trump dominating our politics. In fact, it’s downright disorienting.
The good news is that he has, for the first time, said that he won’t run again. Of course, he’s not exactly a man of his word so I wouldn’t take that to the bank. If he loses this time and disputes the results and continues to run a shadow government from Mar-a-lago I’d say the chances are pretty good that even at the age of 82 he’ll be primed for another comeback, especially if the GOP is still drowning is weirdo extremism.
Despite the Trump campaign insisting that their own polls are showing that he’s far ahead in the battlegrounds, Trump’s behavior indicates that he knows he’s not running away with it. And he’s very disappointed about that since he had probably already told Melania she could make plans to follow up her hideous destruction of the White House rose garden with plans to dig up the rest of the grounds and turn them into a putting green and Christmas tree sculpture garden. He thought it was a foregone conclusion and he didn’t expect that he would have to actually do anything. And so far, he has not been able to rev himself up to campaign very much.
He was even doing more rallies in 2020 during the pandemic. And, as Harris pointed out in the debate (much to Trump’s chagrin) they just aren’t the raucous, fun events they used to be. She described how people are leaving early, “bored and exhausted” which is absolutely true. He held a rally this past weekend in North Carolina that once again had people streaming out while he was still speaking. The MAGA magic isn’t what it used to be. And Trump isn’t the candidate he used to be.
The Washington Post reported on the state of the Trump campaign as we head into the final stretch of the campaign and it’s looking pretty frayed around the edges. Not only is Harris outraising and outspending them, the Trump campaign is experiencing serious internal problems. What was considered to be the most disciplined, professional campaign Trump has ever run has devolved into yet another edition of the Trump show.
The Post runs down some of the events of just the past two weeks, pointing out that Trump’s “chaotic and widely criticized debate performance” didn’t happen in a vacuum. He had already brought back the troublesome Corey Lewandowski into the fold, who had immediately challenged the authority of the campaign leadership and Trump was travelling around the country with far right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. That’s not all:
Trump picked a fight with the international icon, posting last Sunday on social media, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” — the sort of impulsive, impetuous display that has become increasingly common in recent weeks. In a single 24-hour span at the end of last month, for example, he amplified a crude joke about Harris performing a sex act; falsely accused her of staging a coup against President Joe Biden; promoted tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory; hawked digital trading cards; and became embroiled in a public feud with staff and officials at Arlington National Cemetery.
One Trump insider told the Post, “the through-line is his campaign is 96 percent him. It’s not even ‘Let Trump be Trump. It’s ‘Let Trump be unsupervised at all times.’ They just feel like, ‘We can’t control him, so let’s hope he wins anyways.’”
Imagine what he’ll be like when he’s back in the White House, knowing that he has immunity from virtually any criminal accountability and will not need to seek the approval of the voters ever again. I can’t imagine that Donald Trump will spend much time worrying about his “legacy.” He believes that he will be remembered as the greatest president in American history and probably the greatest leader in world history. And if others disagree he will spend the rest of his life saying it on a loop, sure that if he just says it enough people will agree it’s true.
According to the NY Times, which published a similar story on Sunday, Trump’s antics have the rest of the party worried. Not only has he been agitating for a government shutdown under the ignorant assumption that because he was blamed for one when he was president, Biden/Harris will be blamed this time, his incoherence on the stump is potentially bringing down the rest of the ballot. (Apparently, Speaker Johnson defied Trump and agreed to a deal to avert he shut down without the provision Trump demanded. No word from Trump yet, but his protege Laura Loomer had angry words for “Rino” Johnson.)
As Harris said in the debate, he’s having a very difficult time processing that fact which should have disqualified him from the presidency and would have it the party had been willing to take responsibility and convict him in the second impeachment trial.
People often comment on social media about Democrats being nervous nellies about the election, never able to feel confident while the Republicans just march on regardless of how daunting the electoral challenge. Democrats know despite Harris’s slight lead and the fact that her campaign is operating smoothly while the Trump campaign is a chaotic mess Donald Trump could win this campaign.
And that’s the problem. Considering all we know and everything that’s happened, how in the world is it even possible that it’s this close? Even if Harris wins and Trump finally shuffles off into obscurity that’s the question that will haunt us as a country for many years to come.
N.C. Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, Republican candidate for governor, had a pretty lousy weekend. He’s looking at a blue Monday too (CNN):
Several top operatives on Republican Mark Robinson’s campaign for North Carolina governor have stepped down, just days after a CNN report uncovered inflammatory comments the candidate made on a porn website.
Robinson’s campaign announced Sunday evening that general consultant and senior adviser Conrad Pogorzelski III, campaign manager Chris Rodriguez, finance director Heather Whillier and deputy campaign manager Jason Rizk have stepped down from the campaign. Pogorzelski confirmed the news when reached by CNN.
“The reports are true that I, along with others from the campaign have left of our own accord,” he told CNN in a statement.
Republicans expect Robinson to lose. Reports suggest he is persona non grata at Trump-Vance rallies in the state. Trump frets that Robinson’s drag on the slate will cost him North Carolina’s 16 electoral votes and the presidency (and in due course, his freedom).
WUNC reports that the only Robinson staff who remain are “two campaign spokesmen and a bodyguard.” Where to find anyone to man his rapidly sinking ship this late in the campaign?
Oh! There’s Jack Burkman volunteering!
Sources say that Mark Robinson’s campaign is receiving palliative care and has less than 24 hours to live. pic.twitter.com/WjgP9INIgw
“For those not familiar with Jack and his partner, Jacob Wohl, be sure to Google them,” tweeted one FKA Twitter user. “Jack and Jacob are the political version of the burglars in Home Alone.”
Burkman is on a two-year probation after conviction for a telecommunications fraud felony involving false robocalls in Ohio. This guy attended the Baghdad Bob School of Political Flackistry and has a long history of false claims. This is likely another.
I’m old enough to have watched The Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Deadpan comic Jackie Vernon was a regular. He’d stand on stage with a slide clicker and blandly narrate his unseen “vacation slides” from the Everglades.
[CLICK!] Here’s the guide I got. His name was Guido. Very famous guide, in fact he was known as Guido the Guide.
[CLICK!] Here’s Guido the Guide leading me around a bed of quicksand.
[CLICK!] Here’s Guido the Guide from the waist up.
[CLICK!] That’s his hat right there.
[CLICK!] Here’s my next guide, Son of Guido the Guide.
[CLICK!]
[CLICK!]
[CLICK!] That’s his hat.
Change that to North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp and that’s Mark Robinson’s campaign about now.
Popular Information has a report on corporate sponsors backing Robinson’s campaign through the Republican Governors Association (RGA).
Sam Elliot has had lots of memorable film roles, but perhaps none more memorable than the The Stranger in The Big Lebowski (1998). The Lincoln Project recruited the voice of that icon of manliness to pitch Kamala Harris to the dudes out there who need to hear it.
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation again,” Elliot begins. “Are we really going back down that same fucking, broken road? Or are we moving forward? Towards hope? Towards freedom? Towards change?”
This is an incredible ad by The Lincoln Project narrated by Sam Elliott!
“It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman,” made me burst out laughing. That’s pretty damned unsubtle. Hope it has an impact with the target audience.
I guess he thinks those videos on Truth Social hawking his trading cards and commemorative coins make up for it?
Maybe he’ll pick up the pave in October but I doubt it. His heart hasn’t been in it all year. I don’t think he’s having any fun.
The campaign says he’s planning to do more rallies down the stretch but it’s highly unlikely he’ll do five a day as he sometimes did in 2016. You have to love this from Axios:
Breaking it down: People in Trump’s camp give three primary reasons he’s hitting the road less this time, Axios’ Sophia Cai reports:
He’s a known quantity. The campaign feels less need to define him or his candidacy for voters this time around.
Rallies are expensive. Trump’s campaign managers this cycle are keeping a closer hold on the purse strings.
He’s older, and more inclined to spend his time at Mar-a-Lago.
Gosh, I’m so old I remember when such an observation would have caused the entire beltway establishment to rise up as one questioning whether he has the stamina to be president for four years. In fact, it might have been seen as totally disqualifying.
I guess they figure that all that bonzer and Tresseme hair spray are elixers that will keep him going despite the demonstrable dementia on the stump and his low energy level.
