All of us who write about politics are writing these “what if he wins” pieces. It’s terrifying. I truly believe that his administration will implement as much of Project 2025 as he can get away with because he doesn’t ever have to face the voters again. (Either he will leave under the normal constitutional order or he’ll suspend elections and stay past his term under some BS emergency order.) He would also be unshackled by the rule of law now that the Supremes have given him immunity. Combined with his obviously degraded mental state and bitterness over his loss in 2020 and the legal consequences of his criminal behavior, he’s going to be on a mission.
Rolling Stone’s entry into this genre has some chilling quotes that I haven’t head before:
It was the second year of his presidency, and Trump was seething about gang members and drug lords. He wanted to see their bodies piled up in the streets. Specifically, he sought a series of mass executions — with firing squads and gallows, and certainly without the quaintness of an appeals process — to send a chilling message about the scope of his power.
Trump, who’d taken office inveighing against “American carnage,” wanted to create some of his own.
This violent fantasy became an obsession, according to former Trump administration officials. The 45th president brought up the topic so often during the early years of his presidency that one former White House official tells Rolling Stone they lost count. “Fucking kill them all,” Trump would say. “An eye for an eye.” Other times he’d snap at his staff: “You just got to kill these people.” Invoking the brutality of dictatorial regimes that Trump wanted to emulate, he’d add, “Other countries do it all the time.”
For Trump, the spectacle was crucial. “He had a particular affinity for the firing squad,” says one of the former White House officials. He’d say, “They need to be eradicated, not jailed.” Administration officials privately referred to this demand as Trump’s “American death-squads idea,” comparing it to the drug-war bloodbath carried out by Filipino strongman Rodrigo Duterte. (The sources, some still very much within Trump’s circle, requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about sensitive conversations.)
“Other countries do it all the time.” In his mind that means he shouTld be able to do it too. This is because he has no morals, principles or respect for democracy and the constitution. He is a monster.
Apparently, almost half the country either thinks he’s all talk (which, considering what he’s talking about, should still disqualify him) or they like what he’s saying. That’s a flashing red warning for our freedom.
Get ready for the latest conspiracy theory: (Black, of course) Haitians are eating people’s pets. I’m not kidding.
When you're fixated on the same stories as the weirdest people in politics and media you end up pushing a lot of BS… "Springfield police say no reports of pets stolen, after viral social media post" https://t.co/17rGMLmhiNhttps://t.co/0sgCUiHR8A
Vance got this “report” from a random Facebook post. Now it’s everywhere:
They went from migrants as Hannibal Lecter eating people to migrants eating pets. If you had a migrant eat your pet, vote for Trump. Everyone else vote for Harris. pic.twitter.com/nCdsGue4hV
Charlie Kirk amplifies debunked social media rumor about Haitian immigrants: “Allegedly, Haitians are going around and taking people's pets and eating them” pic.twitter.com/k2cMdfZofE
In case you were wondering who it was who used his account and algorithm to amplify the hoax to help Trump, it was Leon. It’s always Leon. pic.twitter.com/4Ee10B4lH2
Is it just me or does this smack of desperation? I know there’s no bottom for these people but this is really reaching. And it’s being amplified by the VP candidate for president. Of course, the actual GOP candidate for president will be screaming about it at every rally so that’s nothing.
Judging from the fact that Jim Jordan is on this, I won’t be surprised to see the House Republican freak show holding hearings on it and I guess that gives permission to nominally normal GOP voters to either believe it or just ignore it as they vote one more time for Orange Julius Caesar.
After Donald Trump once again demonstrated his monumental ignorance with his answer to a question about child care at the NY Economic Club last week, I was curious about what people in that audience thought about him. There was some clapping and cheering but it wasn’t his usual rally crowd so it’s hard to tell how enthusiastic they were. (The person who asked the question was on CNN and said his word salad answer was insulting, which is true.)
But what did the Big Money Boyz in the crowd think of Trump’s “economic” agenda which was focused on tariffs and tax cuts and not much else that you could figure out from his rambling presentation. Well, here’s the Washington Post’s White House economics reporter on that:
The GOP-leaning business elite I talk to are convinced the Trump tariff threats are ultimately bluster, position-taking, bluffing. All the evidence from what he keeps saying is to the contrary https://t.co/7Ugi6dnxOV
Trump benefits in numerous ways from being the world’s greatest liar. People can believe what they wants to believe and these Masters of the Universe are free to think that he’s just “blustering” and “buffing” and doesn’t actually mean that he will impose policies that are likely to crash the economy. One suspects they think he’ll just do what Republicans always do which is hand out tax cuts to the wealthy, cut regulations, raise military spending and slash domestic programs wherever they can get away with it.
Maybe they’re right, although I don’t think we can be sure since Trump is surrounding himself with extremists and weirdos and has lost whatever fragile grasp he once had on reality. But they feel confident he won’t disturb their fortunes, perhaps because he has one of his own, and that’s all they care about.
Trump also made a startling comment in Wisconsin over the weekend about his plan for mass deportation of migrants. He said “getting them out will be a bloody story.”
Trump yesterday in Wisconsin on his promised mass deportation: "Getting them out will be a bloody story." pic.twitter.com/JlcpdWkUG4
That’s more than a little bit disturbing. It’s clear that he’s priming his followers to support violence across America as police and the military carry out the Project 2025 policy of round-ups, internment camps and deportation of tens of millions of people.
David Frum in the Atlantic assures us that this won’t actually happen because the logistics are too complicated and the cost is much too high. I find it hard to believe that Trump will just give up on this signature policy but perhaps Frum is right and they’ll only succeed in forcefully removing a million or so families and possibly only build a few camps instead of the thousands that would be necessary if he followed the proposed program to the letter. Frum points out that the Japanese internment in WWII was met with the cooperation of the 150,000 internees and required ten full scale internment camps. Imagine how much more complicated and expensive it would be to remove millions of unwilling people?
You have to assume, however, with rhetoric like this, calling his deportation scheme the “conquest and great liberation of America” that he won’t follow through at all:
Trump, pretending immigrants have taken over swaths of America, says that "as soon as I'm back in the White House the conquest will & the great liberation of America will begin…we will take back every single square inch of territory that has been invaded by these migrant gangs" pic.twitter.com/YFAOTP3Obs
Many Americans have been worked up into a frenzy over immigration but it’s always possible that just as the Big Money Boys don’t take him seriously on the issue of tariffs, most voters know in their heart of hearts that Trump is just hyping it up for electoral purposes and they don’t really care if he’s able to deport 100% of what he calls the “vermin” who are making out economy function. But it’s certainly exciting for them to fantasize about,
Does he really mean any of that stuff? Who knows? Tariffs and immigration are the only traditional “issues” Trump has talked about for years, even as he obviously doesn’t really understand them. But do they really mean anything to him? I doubt it. Trump only cares about himself and these two issues are just talking points (kind of like NATO dues or “take the oil”) that he came up with years ago and continue to be his answers when anyone asks him about “policy.”
But there is one thing he keeps bringing up in his speeches and his rallies that I think he is very, very serious about. I’ve written about it here manytimes over the years because it is the one philosophical belief that he has spoken about consistently for decades: vengeance. He famously wrote in his book “Think Big”:
I love getting even when I get screwed by someone. … Always get even. When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder. You do it not only to get the person who messed with you but also to show the others who are watching what will happen to them if they mess with you. If someone attacks you, do not hesitate. Go for the jugular.
Just last year he announced to his ecstatic CPAC audience “I am your retribution” and posted a word cloud with the word “revenge” featured prominently on his Truth Social platform:
I didn’t do that to Crooked Hillary. I said, that would be a terrible thing, wouldn’t it? Putting the wife of the President of the United States in jail. But they view it differently, I guess, nowadays, but that’s okay.
And they always have to remember that two can play the game
Over the weekend he posted a threat to prosecute “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters and Corrupt Election Officials” to the “fullest extent of the Law which will include long prison sentences” over alleged “cheating” which, of course, isn’t actually happening.
This rant was followed up the next day by another screaming post declaring that Tucker Carlson had interviewed an “expert” who said that 20% of Pennsylvania mail-in ballots are fraudulent and called on the FBI to investigate. Pennsylvania ballots have not gone out yet so it’s nonsense but he’s already building his case.
If he loses, he’ll once again try to rile up his disappointed followers and who knows what will happen then. But he’s not president anymore and it’s unclear how that will help him do anything but salve his ego.
If he wins all bets are off.
He may or may not follow through on his inane tariffs or mass deportation, but he damned sure believes in vengeance and there is no doubt he will follow through with that if he happens to eke out another win, especially now that he’s been granted immunity by his friends on the Supreme Court. Nothing matters more to him than getting even. He means it.
People launched the Harris campaign before there was one
Rebecca Traister just published the New York Magazine piece she was working on when I spotted her at the DNC in Chicago. It’s long. I just finished and don’t have time to synthesize anything. But I’ll note something said about organizing.
Traister describes how Kamala Harris pulled together her campaign for president on a very short schedule. More specifically, how grassroots supporters leapt at the chance to make her their candidate after Joe Biden stepped aside on July 21.
Stacey Abrams commented on the work of grassroots organizing:
“In organizing,” Abrams told me, “one of the terms of art is ‘If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.’”
“You can see people reaching in and wanting to be a part of this and fuel it,” said Whitmer, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign and now of Harris’s. “Normal people. People that were sitting on the sidelines are now activated, people that were at the Women’s March and see that this is the moment where we can use organizing to push Kamala Harris over the finish line. The reason we’re having so much success as a campaign is because that work has been done — not finished, but the ground game has been growing — at that grassroots level over the last eight years.”
At a Raleigh fundraiser the night before Biden stepped aside, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi asked to meet privately with our county’s organizers attending the dinner. A Pelosi acquaintance had talked up our accomplishments. We have been building infrastructure for twenty years. Abrams’ comment reflects what we do.
Most presidential years, someone asks in January when we are going to start preparations for November. Our answer: We started preparing for November the day after the last election. “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”
I tell this story in my trainings about how good planning builds on itself:
You all know these guys. They show up every presidential election. You’ve never seen them, don’t know their names. All they want is a yard sign. But if at your storefront they see volunteers arriving for a phone bank, signs bundled and staged to go out, people with clipboards headed out to canvass? I’ve seen this multiple times: People who are never going to knock a door or pick up a phone get their signs and – unprompted – pull out a checkbook and ask, “Who do I make the check out to?” And leave $100.
Because they can see with their own eyes your team has got it going on. And they don’t even know what It is. But it smells like victory and they want a piece of it.
The grassroots wanted a piece of the Harris campaign before party leadership. They were itching for it. Ready for a woman to take the Oval Office. They could see themselves in her.
What Harris and her sprawling, stitched-together team were expert at was capably crowd-surfing the happy-to-be-there energy that rose to meet her, reflecting the release from purgatory right back at the cameras and crowds, flashing her enormous smile and letting loose her wacky laugh. “One of the superpowers that she has,” said Butler, “is all those videos out there of her dancing with young people, cussing, marching with workers on picket lines or talking about her experience at McDonald’s — it’s like the grass roots can see themselves in her.”
“Great organizers,” said Poo, “embody that Maya Angelou quote, which is that people don’t remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel.” Harris was making people feel good and hopeful about the future, and she seemed to understand in her gut how important that was to actually winning an election. Early on, CNN reported that veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin had advised the campaign to stop saying “We’re not going back” and using the term weird. Harris declined to follow Garin’s advice, CNN noted, asserting that she “wasn’t going to listen to the pollsters herself and would instead trust the instincts she had buried under self-doubt for so long.”
The owners of Penzeys Spices found themselves in a media spotlight over the weekend after Vice President Kamala Harris stopped by a Pittsburgh store for some cooking supplies. Harris hugged and reassured a tearful woman that everything would be all right: “We’re all in this together,” Harris said.
Penzeys being bombarded w/ hate after @VP was seen hugging people, which got Fox to read from their website: "Going forward, we would still be glad to have you as customers, but we're done pretending the Republican Party's embrace of cruelty, racism, COVID lies, climate change…
There was backlash, of course. Especially after Penzeys posted to its website Bill Pezney’s view of what’s become of the Republican Party “over the last half century, and the steep decline/bottom falling out over the last decade.” He writes:
The truth of our time is we’ve arrived at the point where there’s no way to respect the nonsense the Republican Party is promoting and have any hope of overcoming the problems we as a nation and we as a planet face. Given the choice between saving America and planet Earth or saving the feelings of Republican voters, we are choosing to side with saving our country and our world. I’m sorry it’s come to this.
[…]
Going forward we would still be glad to have you as customers, but we’re done pretending the Republican Party’s embrace of cruelty, racism, Covid lies, climate change denial, and threats to democracy are anything other than the risks they legitimately are. If you need us to pretend you are not creating the hurt you are creating in order for you to continue to be our customer, I’m sad to say you might be happier elsewhere.
It’s not as if the people Penzey is talking about are shy about sharing their opinions (above). They just get especially riled up at being called out for their hateful views. It hurts their feelings. How dare we!
Also over the weekend on one of my listservs, a user made a rather pithy observation about people on the extreme right who see their entire world view being threatened. I’ve written multiple times about status anxiety and “last place aversion” being a driver of the hostility from the far right. Lyndon Johnson once explained their anger in plainer but cruder terms. But this observation about why many on the extremist right are “panicked and desperate” is much more lyrical. Not surprising, given the borrowed source.
The right is outraged “to find themselves being judged on the content of their character when the color of their skin used to be all they needed.”
Donald Trump on Saturday floated changing the 25th Amendment to allow Congress to impeach a vice president for covering up a president’s incapacity less than two months after President Joe Biden exited the 2024 contest amid concerns about his age and acuity.
“I will support modifying the 25th Amendment to make clear that if a vice president lies or engages in a conspiracy to cover up the incapacity of the president of the United States — if you do that with a cover-up of the president of the United States, it’s grounds for impeachment immediately and removal from office, because that’s what they did,” the former president said during a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin.
Ok. But they can already impeach the Vice President for Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors, which they can define pretty much any way they want to. This has nothing to do with modifying the 25th Amendment. Who put that cockamamie idea in his head?
Furthermore, isn’t he always screaming about how the Democrats staged a “coup” to illegitimately remove Biden from the ticket? Now they were covering for him? What?
We all know what point he was making. But I’d say that it was pretty clear Mike Pence and his whole cabinet were the ones who covered up for Trump’s incapacity when he lost his mind after the 2020 election. They knew he’d gone over the edge and they did nothing to stop him. Even after January 6th when Pompeo and Mnuchin gathered a few others to have the discussion they didn’t move to do it.
If I were Trump, I’d be a little bit worried about Vance in this scenario. He’s only been MAGA for about five minutes. He strikes me as the type to overthrow the king in a heartbeat if the opportunity arose.
I’m sure you’ve heard Trump bellowing his fatuous nonsense about how everyone always wanted Roe overturned so it could go back to the states where people can vote on it and “it’s a beautiful thing.” I’ll admit that I was derelict in seeing where this was going. Leave it to Ron DeSantis to show the way:
Florida voters who signed a petition to place a pro-choice abortion referendum on the ballot this November say they have been visited by police who are investigating claims of fraud at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday.
Last year, DeSantis, a Republican, signed into a law a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. In response, pro-choice campaigners gathered and submitted nearly one million signatures to place on the ballot Amendment 4, a referendum that would overturn the ban and restore reproductive rights in the state.
Now Florida’s Department of State is claiming it suspects fraud in the signature-gathering process. In an email to county election officials, the department’s Brad McVay requested that they hand over their already-verified petitions so that the signatures can be reexamined, claiming without evidence that those who circulated the petitions “represent known or suspected fraudsters,” Tampa Bay television station WTVT reported.
Isaac Menasche, a voter who signed a petition to place the abortion referendum on the ballot, told the Times that he too was contacted by people working for the Florida governor’s office. According to Menasche, a plainclothes police officer came to his home to question him, apparently seeking to verify that the signature on the petition was indeed his.“I’m not a person who is going out there protesting for abortion,” Menasche told the newspaper. “I just felt strongly and I took the opportunity when the person asked me, to say yeah, I’ll sign that petition.”
Another voter, Becky Castellanos, told the Times that she was visited by a state police officer who interrogated her about a family member’s petition signature. She said the incident felt intimidating. “It didn’t surprise me that they were doing something like this to try to debunk these petitions to get it taken off of the ballot,” she told the outlet.
This is the work of DeSantis’s Stasi-style “Office of Election Crimes and Security” which has over a million dollars at its disposal to intimidate voters.
Of course they would claim voter fraud. That’s how they will be able to rationalize these ballot measures showing support for reproductive rights. I don’t know what the chances are of them removing it from the ballot. But they really don’t have to. All they need to do is claim that the vote was “stolen” — as all votes that don’t go their way these days — and they will have at least set the stage for more attempts to ban abortion. I’m sure we’ll see more of this.
Update. Oh right. We already are:
More in anti-abortion attacks on democracy: Republicans are trying to push the Missouri pro-choice amendment off the November ballot using bullshit technicalities https://t.co/vINVqYwMAk
Two former officials who handled immigration issues for then-President Donald Trump say that a “whole of government” approach costing billions would be needed to mount the “largest deportation effort in American history” promised in the Republican convention platform if Trump is re-elected.
The exact number of people who would be deported in a second Trump administration is hard to pin down.
During the June 29 presidential debate, Trump claimed there were 18 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. One of the two former Trump officials said it could be as high as 30 million.
The last official estimate in 2022 was under 11 million, but when you count the American children and other Americans caught up in the raids by mistake, they can probably get to 20 million or so.
Last week, according to Semafor, a former acting ICE director under Trump who is seen as a possible Department of Homeland Security chief in a second Trump administration told a conservative conference, “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”
“Trump comes back in January,” Tom Homan said, “I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen.”
So, what’s it going to take?
NBC News asked acting ICE Director Patrick J. Lechleitner about what would be required to deport millions of people.
“It’s not only putting them on planes and flying them, which is expensive, we got to have airplanes. We also have to deal with host nations. We have to get travel documents, we have to do all the logistics involved with that.”
He said for some people who are not in detention, the path to deportation can take years. “We have to monitor them that whole time. That’s resource intensive,” he said.
Abigail Andrews, a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of California, San Diego who has been studying deportation data for the past 10 years, said she’s highly skeptical about how a mass deportation effort would unfold.
“There is no logistical way to track down 10 to 12 million undocumented immigrants with the ICE employees they currently have,” she said.
They’ll have plenty of help from other law enforcement and the military
Blair said an effort of the size proposed would require heavy involvement from local law enforcement — and he said border cities are already handling enough. “We don’t have the manpower or space to handle,” he said. “The federal spending would have to flow to these local agencies.” He also said the optics of deporting children could create significant backlash.
Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump, said mass deportations should prioritize those who have committed serious crimes rather than families. He said enforcement could be via additional funding to ICE as well as consequences for cities that refuse to cooperate.
“One thing I think we need to do is go after the sanctuary cities to take away their funding,” said Morgan, now a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.Experts say costs would quickly mount with an operation of this size.
Yep:
As for families with mixed status such as those with children who are citizens and parents who are undocumented, one of the former Trump officials sees it as an opportunity, hoping that the threat of removing one member will propel whole families to leave. “Your parents can’t use you as a prop to justify their illegal presence,” the former official said.
The former Trump officials said cooperation across the entire federal government, not just from DHS leadership, would be needed.
One of the ex-officials said the effort would require a “trigger puller,” someone at DHS who would not be afraid to go in front of Congress and defend the deportation effort.
The former Trump officials said buy-in and resources would be needed from agencies like the Pentagon, which would be asked to participate in either setting up detention camps or relocating migrants to foreign military bases. The Interior Department would be called upon because federal land might be needed for deportation sites. They said cooperation from the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care and custody of unaccompanied children, would also be required to facilitate removals.
I’m sure the tariffs and the massive unprecedented “growth” (Trump’s only economic plan) will pay for all of it and more.
Trump says this will be bloody and his followers are thrilled at the prospect.
Voters rank the economy as their top concern, yet polls show widespread pessimism despite strong economic indicators. David Pogue explores why with economics professor Justin Wolfers. https://t.co/UzlL12tKdipic.twitter.com/gdjIm0naww
Not that it matters. The “vibe” remains horrifically negative and the economy is what people point to to explain it. The reality is that for half of America, the world is going to shit because Donald Trump is telling them to believe his lies instead of their lyin’ eyes, and they love him so much that they’re happy to do it. For the rest of us, the world is going to shit because the other half worships that orange imbecile and it simply defies all sense and logic leading to a sense of dread about the future that is beyond disorienting.
How can it be that half the country has succumbed to this addled demagogue? I don’t know, but it does help explain how some very bad things happened in the 20th century. It’s got something to do with mass communications, propaganda and groupthink and it’s terrifying.
