You’ll notice that’s from the Wall St. Journal. It comes on the heels of a scathing editorial board editorial condemning Trump.
Here’s an excerpt and a gift link to the whole article. Oh my:
City Manager Bryan Heck fielded an unusual question at City Hall on the morning of Sept. 9, from a staff member of Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The staffer called to ask if there was any truth to bizarre rumors about Haitian immigrants and pets in Springfield.
“He asked point-blank, ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” recalled Heck. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”
By then, Vance had already posted about the rumors to his 1.9 million followers on X. Yet he kept the post up, and repeated an even more insistent version of the claim the next morning.
That night, former President Donald Trump stood on a Philadelphia debate stage and shot the rumor into the stratosphere. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said to 67 million viewers. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country.”
There’s more, a lot more. The tensions in the town had been mounting for a while, with the white residents obviously agitated by the arrival of Black foreigners who made them mad with their black and foreign ways. An old story. But then the white supremacists came to town to really stir up trouble. Read the whole thing.
You have to see this one anecdote to really understand the grotesque dishonesty of JD Vance. It’s been clear from the beginning that there was no pet-eating going on and that the local racists had just worked themselves up into a frenzy.
Vance, meanwhile, has continued to defend his claims.
A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.
Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.
This actually made me feel a little bit better. Yes, it’s probable that this woman freaked out in a racist fury that had been ginned up in her neighborhood. But in the end she was able to admit she was wrong and actually apologized to the neighbors she had unfairly targeted. She is a much better person than Donald Trump and JD Vance who have never in their lives apologized for anything.
It’s a small thing but it suggests that some of them aren’t so far down the rabbit hole they’ll never be able to climb back out.
Update:
Vance is really pushing the Nazi propaganda with this one:
Check this out:
María Teresa Kumar told The Hill that Harris is tapping into a cultural phenomenon with the under-40 crowd.
“For older voters and for donors coming in, it’s like, ‘We could actually beat Trump.’ I think for young people, it’s a genuine, authentic enthusiasm. And I say this because … the moment she announced, we saw young voters tick up,” Kumar said.
“It was nuts. So we were registering roughly 60 to 100 voters a day on Friday. On Monday, it jumped to 3,000. By [the next] Friday, it was 8,000. It was super exciting. Night and day. It’s a very cool chart.”
According to numbers from Voto Latino, which targets young Latinos for registration, the group facilitated 36,000 registrations in the six months leading up to July 21. In the weeks since, Voto Latino has registered 120,000 additional voters.
Of those voters, 59 percent are under 30, and 29 percent are in their 30s.
Those age groups, Kumar said, are connecting to Harris’s message not only on new platforms, but through language that’s lost on older demographics.
“I do think that we’re not giving the phenomena that is happening on TikTok enough credit. The moment that that young woman said, ‘Kamala is brat,’ it distinguished the right and the misogyny of how they were trying to place her. They were trying to place her as ‘she laughs too much, she’s not organized, she’s not focused,’ you know? And basically, Gen Z is like, ‘she’s messy, we’re messy. But we’re also smart, so don’t get confused,’” said Kumar, referring to pop star Charli XCX’s labeling of Harris as “brat.”
But traditional Democratic strategists haven’t fully caught up, according to Kumar.“I’ve been in these kitchen cabinet meetings with all these consultants trying to figure out how they were going to go against the misogyny of that ‘They don’t like her voice.’ … You know, people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it literally took one tweet from one Gen Zer to encapsulate and emasculate the other side. I mean, brilliant, right?”
The Harris campaign has an excellent social media tram and they are killing it, especially on the platforms where the youngs hang out. They are also launching a major Latino outyreach campaign:
The Harris campaign is launching its largest effort yet to reach Latino voters, with new spending on Spanish-language radio and an organizing push around boxing matches and baseball games as National Hispanic Heritage Month kicks off this weekend.
The investments come as early voting is set to begin soon in some of the critical battlegrounds that are home to sizable Latino populations, like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Vice President Kamala Harris will address the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s annual conference on Wednesday, according to a senior campaign official, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is expected to pitch Latino voters in swing states in the coming weeks. Surrogates will be a part of the travel plan as well, the official said in plans first shared with NBC News.
If you read the whole thing you’ll see that it’s a major initiative with top surrogates, ad campaigns and lots of on-the-ground contact. That is very good news.
There’s been a lot going on this week so you may have missed Donald Trump introducing his latest business venture on X on Monday. You read that right. He may be in the final stretch of his presidential campaign but he found the time to formally introduce his latest money making scheme to the public. And what a scheme it is. The Trump family is getting into the cryptocurrency game.
It’s obvious that Trump was completely clueless about how his new business, called World Liberty Financial, works. When asked why it is so important for America to lead in cryptocurrency, Trump started talking about how AI requires a lot of electricity. (Luckily he didn’t digress into shark attacks.)
Later he extolled the expertise and brilliance of his 18 year old son Barron, who he said has “four wallets” and is named as the new company’s “DeFi visionary” (that stands for decentralized finance.) Trump himself is the “Chief Crypto Advocate” and Trump’s oldest sons, the alleged movers and shakers of this deal, are both called “Web3 Ambassadors.”
The Trumps have a couple of very interesting partners in this new venture, exactly the kind of people you’d expect a president to be involved with. The first is a self-described “dirtbag of the internet” named Chase Herro who once famously said of the crypto market, “You can literally sell s–t in a can, wrapped in p–s, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it. I’m not going to question the right and wrong of all that.” The other partner is Zachary Folkman who, according to the NY Times, used to teach classes on how to seduce women. You can see why the Trumps jumped at the chance to get in business with them.
It is unprecedented for a presidential candidate to launch a new business less than two months before the election. As those of you who were around before Trump poisoned all ethics and morals in politics will recall, candidates actually divested themselves of their businesses, often putting them in a blind trust in order to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest. It all seems so quaint now.
Trump is also hawking bibles, tennis shoes, NFTs and even pieces of the suit he was wearing during the assassination attempt in August, as if it was a holy relic. And in a matter of days he could conceivably come into a huge windfall when the “lock-out period” on his Truth Social stock ends and he can sell his shares. Wall Street has inexplicably valued the failed company at $3 billion and he owns 57% of the shares so if he decided to sell he’d finally be a real billionaire. The stock price would plummet even more than it already has and other investors, many of them his fans who’ve invested their nest eggs, would be ruined but I think we know that would be of no concern to Donald Trump.
He claimed last Friday that he has no intention of selling and as you know he cannot tell a lie so that’s that. Also, now that he’s said he won’t do it, he could be subject to SEC investigations and shareholder lawsuits if he did but I have a sneaking suspicion he isn’t too worried about that. After all, they’ll have to get in line.
Both his crypto scheme and the Truth Social stock present an obvious conflict of interest if he wins the presidency as he would have control of the regulatory agencies that oversee them. But Trump’s criminality and corruption as president is already well established so what would be a major scandal for any other candidate is irrelevant when it comes to him. (One can’t help but think about the Republicans dragging every member of the Biden family through the mud for four years over a legal business deal that took place when Joe Biden was out of office but that’s just how it works in Trump’s America.)
Trump’s been getting away with scams, cons and crimes his entire life and always wriggles out of them. A new book by NY Times reporters Ross Beutner and Suzanne Craig called “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered his Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” says it all about Trump’s long history of fraudulent business failures and his unique ability to convince people to keep giving him money anyway.
The point out that Trump’s had two big financial windfalls in his life, neither of them based on even the slightest talent for business. The first was his daddy, who bankrolled him for decades with hundreds of millions of dollars and bailing him out repeatedly. He did manage some early success with Trump Tower and a couple of other buildings on which he’d been partnered with some people who knew what they were doing. But apparently, that was when the narcissism really kicked in and he bought into his own hype. He never listened to anyone ever again and virtually everything he touched failed — casinos, an airline, a football league, buildings in Chicago, a development for the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, money losing golf resorts, all of it.
The second windfall came from The Apprentice which came at a moment when Trump badly needed money. They basically created the illusion of wealth that the show sold to America and Trump cashed in with a product placement deal that brought in a ton of money. (He even cheated his collaborator Mark Burnett, the producer who created the show, but they were all making money so they just let him do it.) His personal licensing deals — the steaks, the vodka, the ties etc. — apparently never made much money, however. He is simply terrible at business.
According to the authors he makes the same mistakes over and over again. He pays way too much, he doesn’t believe in research, and always thinks that his name on a project is the magic that will make it work — and it never does. And he’s done the same thing in politics. He has one talent and that’s convincing people that he’s successful even though he’s not. And he’s been doing it his entire life.
The big question is whether at the age of 78 he can pull it off one more time. Will he be able to cash in for more than a billion dollars with his failed social media company? Will he be able to parlay his political losses since 2016 into another term as president? We’d better hope that this loser’s luck has finally run out.
Salon
Early in my tenure here, I wrote about the right wing trafficking in lies as standard procedure. Back in the day, there were the pass-it-on emails I received filled with lies, distortions, and smears. It was the kind of propaganda fathers warned kids against in the early 1960s when it was the “commies” threatening to undermine the U.S. from within. Decades later, it was (TPM) “hundreds of thousands of mailers with false information about voter registration sent by Americans for Prosperity” in 2014.
There was a pattern of misinformation. Larry Haake, the general registrar in Chesterfield County, Virginia, told an area paper, “Most of their information is wrong. They know it’s wrong and they don’t care.”
“It Was All a Lie,” Stuart Stevens wrote about his former political party. Republicans had become the people of the lie. And it wasn’t recently.
Marcy Wheeler drives home that point in a column for The New Republic:
There was some surprise on Sunday when vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance argued that the “American media totally ignored” the plight of Springfield and Vance’s own claims about immigration “until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes.” He seemed to suggest that it was OK to use a false story if it made people pay attention. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he thundered to Dana Bash, “then that’s what I’m gonna do.”
Even before Donald Trump screeched about cats and dogs on the debate stage last week, Vance took to X to encourage his followers to keep spreading debunked claims about Haitians eating cats: “Don’t let the crybabies in the media dissuade you, fellow patriots. Keep the cat memes flowing.” Such racist claims were worthwhile, Vance asserted, because it was “confirmed” that “a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here,” a reference to the accidental death of an 11-year-old boy in a car accident with a legally admitted but unlicensed Haitian immigrant driver last year.
In other words: It was worthwhile to spread cat memes, Vance argued, because it brought attention to other claims that are also false (claims that the boy’s father has begged people to stop making).
Vance’s proud adoption of spreading false memes may have shocked people. But if you’ve been watching these people as closely as I have over the years, you know it’s not new. The ploy of using false memes to direct mainstream media attention has a storied tradition. For years, right-wing internet influencers—self-described trolls—have deliberately aimed to use “shitposting” to get the mainstream media to cover their favorite topics.
Marcy goes on to describe (as only she could) the trolling culture of far-right chat rooms on 4Chan and Reddit where trolls work up false memes, some humorous, to seed right-wing propaganda into the mainstream in a way that news organizations find they have to cover.
Vance, Trump’s blogger turned senator running mate, may not have grown out of the far-right chat rooms to which Trump’s son got added, but his ethic is the same: to use seemingly harmless memes normalizing false claims to force the mainstream media to adopt a far-right frame for an event, as has happened in Springfield. Imagine what we’re in store for over the next 50 days.
“They know it’s wrong and they don’t care” still applies. Truth is irrelevant. Who gets hurt is irrelevant. Achieving the goal is the only thing that matters, as the Third Reich’s chief propagandist knew: “That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent; its task is to lead to success.” Success in this context is returning Donald Trump to the White House where he and his Project 2025 allies can reduce the republic to a Potemkin democracy and carry out a nationwide campaign of intimidation and deportation against nonwhite immigrants.
I’m reminded of one of the opening scenes in Lawrence of Arabia. It’s meant to foreshadow that Lawrence has a taste for pain. He playfully puts out a match with his fingers. Another soldier who tries it shouts, “It damn hurts.” Certainly, Lawrence responds.
“Well, what’s the trick, then?” the singed corporal asks.
“The trick,” says Lawrence, “is not minding that it hurts.”
Trump and our extremist neighbors don’t mind if the country gets hurt either. No trick.
This morning’s news about Israel’s pager attack against Hezbollah in Lebanon is at once fascinating and appalling. Let’s get the basic outlines out of the way (CNN):
Hezbollah has vowed to respond to an Israeli attack that killed multiple people and injured thousands across Lebanon on Tuesday when pagers belonging to members of the Iran-backed militant group exploded almost simultaneously, exposing a massive security breach and demonstrating the scale of Israeli intelligence.
A child was among at least nine killed in the blasts, which wounded about 2,800 people, Lebanese Health Minister Firass Abiad said. At least 170 people are in a critical condition, he said, though the nature of the other injuries is unclear.
Two children died, say updated reports: an 8-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. The death toll is now reported at 12, with several wounded in Syria and over 200 listed in critical condition, per Al Jazeera.
On the technical side, it is a coup for Israeli intelligence. Somehow, the service uncovered news that Hezbollah meant to purchase, thousands of pagers for its members. Israel secretly intercepted the devices at some point in the manufacturing process, slipped small amounts of powerful explosive charges into the devices, and remote-triggered them about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, producing the chaos and injury mentioned above. The sophistication of the attack is mind-boggling.
“Tuesday was like something out of a bizarre James Bond movie,” writes The Washington Post’s David Ignatius. At once ingenious and diabolical.
How is this not terrorism?
The point of the attack itself is elusive (The New York Times):
“This is an amazing tactical event,” said Miri Eisin, a fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, an Israel-based research organization.
“But not a single Hezbollah fighter is going to move because of this,” said Ms. Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer. “Having amazing capabilities does not make a strategy.”
Israelis are divided about whether the attack was born from short-term opportunism or long-term forethought. Some believe that Israeli commanders feared that their Hezbollah counterparts had recently discovered Israel’s ability to sabotage the pagers, prompting Israeli commanders to immediately blow them up or risk losing the capability forever.
Others say that Israel had a specific strategic intent. Israel may have hoped that the attack’s brazenness and sophistication would ultimately make Hezbollah more amenable to a cease-fire in the coming weeks, if not immediately.
But that sounds like rank rationalization. The attack likely throws sand in the gears of any ceasefire efforts with Hamas in Gaza (already at an impasse) and the release of Israeli hostages. From embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s perspective, perhaps that is the point. Freeing the hostages frees Israelis to rid themselves of Netanyahu.
Except such an operation and its timing may have little connection to Netanyahu. In fact, one hand in may not know what the other is doing:
More generally, the attack also highlighted the dissonance between the discipline of Israel’s intelligence agencies, which have the ability to plan operations months or even years ahead, and the messy short-term thinking of Israel’s political leadership.
The attack followed days of reports in the Israeli press about an intention by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire his defense minister, even as [defense minister Yoav ] Gallant was overseeing the planned operation in Lebanon.
Hezbollah will surely retaliate, but must wonder what else Israel has up its sleeve.
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (via Al Jazeera):
“Even if the attacks seem to have been targeted, they had heavy, indiscriminate collateral damages among civilians, including children among the victims,” Josep Borrell said.
“I consider this situation extremely worrying. I can only condemn these attacks that endanger the security and stability of Lebanon, and increase the risk of escalation in the region,” he added.
He said that the European Union wants to avert an all-out war because it would have “heavy consequences for the entire region and beyond”.
I’m left shaking my head. How is this not terrorism from one of the United States’ strongest allies?
Update: If a violent Islamist faction did this, there would be no question what we’d call it.
Check this out. It’s masterful:
You want issues?
She is very good. But I’m sure the media will continue to dog her for constant press conferences, tarmac comments etc because that’s what Donald Trump does. She can do this her own way and it will be fine.
JD Vance’s dance across the Sunday shows is one for the ages. We’ve already discussed his admission that they “create stories” (such as immigrants eating pets) in order to “draw attention” to the issues they think benefit them. But he said other things that are almost as interesting — and damning.
What asked about Trump’s “concept of a plan” about replacing Obamacare (which just demonstrated in living color the fact that Trump had no plan despite promising for 9 long years) Vance replied:
You want to make sure that preexisting coverage – conditions are covered, you want to make sure that people have access to the doctors that they need, and you also want to implement some deregulatory agenda so that people can choose a health care plan that fits them. Think about it: a young American doesn’t have the same health care needs as a 65-year-old American. A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition. And we want to make sure everybody is covered. But the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach that puts a lot of people into the same insurance pools, into the same risk pools, that actually makes it harder for people to make the right choices for their families.
Maybe Vance was busy changing identities during the heath care debates of 2009, but anyone who was listening during that period knows that this is fatuous nonsense. You can’t guarantee that pre-existing conditions are covered without regulating the insurance market and that requires:
That handy list comes from Brian Beutler who discusses this in his newsletter today pointing out that essentially what Vance was saying is a lie and a big one. He writes:
The Trump-Vance policy is to rip out the second and third tentpoles and go back to the old way. They intend, per Vance, to segregate young from old, and healthy from sick, so that people who don’t yet have costly medical needs can free ride, and those who already do will lose the benefits of risk pooling, sending their premiums soaring.
Vance wants people to believe that “pre-existing conditions are covered” under such a plan, and his fig leaf is that the law will still nominally require plans to cover treatment for pre-existing conditions. But that law will be meaningless to the millions of people who suddenly won’t be able to afford their coverage.
It would take us back to the time when I was denied health insurance because I had periodontal disease. (I’m not kidding.) When I finally found a health insurer who would cover me ( I was otherwise completely healthy) it cost well over a thousand dollars a month and it had a gigantic deductible. That’s the market we were living in if we didn’t have employer or government insurance. Vance wants to take us back to that and people really should know that.
I also like what Beutler said about Vance revealing this when Trump has been vague about specifics (mostly because he doesn’t understand them.)
Most of the MAGA politicians who want to take up Trump’s mantle have pickled their brains with racism. Unlike Trump, though, many of them have at least a touch of intellectual vanity.
Before entering politics, Trump never labored for the admiration of national political elites or legal elites or media elites. His neuroses attached to other forms of status—he wanted to be admired and accepted by the Manhattan upper crust, but his try-hard affect marked him as an interloper.
Below Trump on the political totem pole, aspiring MAGA leaders like Vance suffer from an analogous form of striving. They were groomed by elites. They want to oppress, but they also want smarty-pants cred. Trump will lie for passing advantage, and bluster when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but in a contest of intellect, he’ll simply claim superiority (“the best people” “Wharton school of finance”).
The people coming up behind him want to demonstrate it. They’ll lie with Trumpish insouciance, but then, like Vance, they’ll explain their true intent, as if to flaunt the intellectual scaffolding beneath the lies.
On Meet the Press that meant claiming to support pre-existing conditions protections, then describing a plan that would unravel them. On CNN it meant lying about immigrants, and then explaining, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
This is not a disciplined con artist trying to conceal motive with distraction. It’s the conduct of someone too arrogant to be so calculating.
Beutler rejects the idea that Trump and Vance are consciously trying to distract (“deadcatting” ) and are instead just following their own insecurities. I kind of agree with him (despite writing about the distraction tactic earlier.) I know that Trump is rarely so calculating, at least to the extent that he sits down with his team and maps out a strategy. He has a feral survival instinct that he trusts implicitly and it often works for him. And Beutler makes an excellent point about Vance.
Maybe both of them really are just winging it.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, two of he best legal analysts and Supreme Court observers, take a cold hard look at Chief Justice John Roberts’ newly revealed behavior in the big Trump cases last term and ruefully cop to being wrong about him. They discuss his seemingly centrist position in a number of important cases in which he found himself in the minority and his endless paeans to court legitimacy and conclude that he never really cared about the latter and just got tired of losing:
Two years ago, in his solo Dobbs concurrence, Roberts faulted both the majority and the dissent for their “relentless freedom from doubt.” We can only guess that some time thereafter, he decided doubt was, in fact, for suckers, and embraced the aggressive activism of his colleagues to the right. We get it: Losing is no fun, and in the early days of the 6–3 court, when Roberts tried to find a middle ground, he sometimes faced the sting of defeat, and rebukes from his own party. His solution, we surmise, was not to take a principled stand of dissent when the far-right bloc went too far, too fast, but to join them and lead them to new heights of extremism. If you can’t beat them, it surely can be more enjoyable to join them, especially when any fears of breaking the republic can be washed away with your colleagues’ sweet, soothing sycophancy.
The sycophancy they refer to are the private comments revealed from Gorsuch and Kavanaugh sounding like they’re speaking to Kim Jong Un — or Donald Trump.
Constitutional expert Steve Vladek also weighs in on this, having been suspicious for some time that Roberts’ alleged fealty to institutional legitimacy was BS:
Mine wasn’t the only piece over the summer that was sharply critical of Chief Justice Roberts—or that called into question how much he actually does worry about public perception of the Court in contexts in which he has some control over events. What the Kantor/Liptak piece drives home is that he does worry, but only to a very superficial degree. Thus, it was important to Roberts for the immunity case to be heard this term—even if he knew which way it was going to come out. It was important to Roberts for the Colorado case to be unanimous—until he couldn’t get the justices to his left to go as far as he wanted. It was important to Roberts to take Alito’s name off of Fischer—even though it wasn’t important enough to leverage him to recuse, or to so much as acknowledge, at any point in his majority opinion, the deeply fraught, conspiracy-laden narrative into which the Court was necessarily wading. Ultimately, it’s not high constitutional politics driving the bus; it’s optics. And as these episodes underscore, those just aren’t the same thing.
This court has now completely lost whatever legitimacy it once had, not that they care. And why should they? If there is a truly imperial institution in our system it’s the Supreme Court. We’ve already seen that impeachment is a paper tiger, only possible if one party has a super majority in the Senate so that’s off the table. The chances of court reform are next to nil as long as the GOP is batshit crazy and I see little chance of that changing any time soon.
Roberts clearly realized that there would be no price to pay for going for it. So he did. And there is no reason to believe he won’t continue to.
