Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

So I thought he was evil but he wasn’t stupid. Now I’m not so sure. This is very dumb:

The loathing for America among the leaders of the Republican Party continues to be stunning. As long as I can remember, they were the “love it or leave it” crowd, insisting that it was the greatest country in the history of the world and pretty much perfect in every way. Now that they’ve joined a dystopian cult led by a man who clearly hates everything America stands for they’ve all decided that we are little more than poor third world outpost because of all the immigrants. (Also, hippies, gays, feminazis and Black people …)

James Fallows had this to say about Vance’s comments:

Because immigration *is* the centuries-long US path to prosperity (and innovation, and rejuvenation, and “soft power” through connections around the world, and most powerful global culture), the US is by far the most productive and wealthy and innovative country.

Inability to handle immigration a major limit for Japan, most of Europe, China as well. A major US strength. Just ask any American who, unlike Vance, has spent a lot of time outside the country. Of the crystal-clear dividing lines in the campaign—hope-vs-resentment, “us” vs “them,” forward vs backward—visceral view on immigration is near the top.

Does it grow and expand the pie? Or divide the pie? US history suggests: GROW.

I always thought that the US had a tremendous advantage in the world because of our immigrant experience and that everyone on some level understood that. Boy was I wrong. Racism and xenophobia remain so strong among a certain group that an opportunistic demagogue like Trump can crank it up to 11 very easily.

Trump has a very small vocabulary for a supposedly educated person and speaks at a 4th grade level according to experts. There’s nothing new in that. And repeating himself is part of his strategy to convince people his lies are the truth. The sheer audacity of lying constantly even in the face of absolute proof seems to be seen by many people as proof that you’re not lying. (I can’t understand it either…)

His “cognitive tests” (which he says he “aced” like nobody’s ever aced them before) notwithstanding, he is getting worse. He can’t seem to keep a single train of thought and that’s actually new. He’s calling this rambling “the weave” and says his English professor friends call it brilliant. (He has no English professor friends.)

Psychiatrist Richard Friedman in the Atlantic says it’s concerning:

The speech Trump excuses as the “weave” is one of many tics that are starting to look less strategic and more uncontrollable. Last week, David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic that the former president has a penchant for describing objects and events as being “like nobody has ever seen before.” At the debate, true to form, Trump repeatedly fell back on the superlative. Of the economy under his presidency: “Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” Of inflation under the Biden administration: “I’ve never seen a worse period of time.” Of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan: “That was one of the most incompetently handled situations anybody has ever seen.” Harris, for her part, also showed some verbal tics and leaned on tired formulations. For instance, she invited viewers more than 15 times to “understand” things. But Trump’s turns of phrase are so disjointed, so unusual, and so frequently uttered that they’re difficult to pass off as normal speech.

Trump’s speech during the debate was repetitive not only in form but also in content. Politicians regularly return during debates to their strongest topics—that’s just good strategy. Harris twice mentioned Project 2025, which voters widely disapproved of in recent polling, and insisted three times that Americans want to “move forward” or “chart a new way forward.” Trump likewise expounded at every opportunity on immigration, a weak issue for Harris. But plenty of the former president’s repetitions seemed compulsive, not strategic. After praising the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, Trump spoke unprompted, at length, and without clarity about gas pipelines in the United States and Europe, an issue unlikely to connect with many voters. A few minutes later, he brought up the pipelines again. The moderators cut him off for a commercial break. Even in cases where Trump could have reasonably defended himself, he was unable to articulate basic exculpatory evidence. When Harris raised his infamous “very fine people on both sides” remark regarding the 2017 white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump could have pointed out that even at the time, he had specified, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists—because they should be condemned totally.” But he did not.

In psychiatry, the tendency to conspicuously and rigidly repeat a thought beyond the point of relevance, called “perseverance,” is known to be correlated with a variety of clinical disorders, including those involving a loss of cognitive reserve. People tend to stick to familiar topics over and over when they experience an impairment in cognitive functioning—for instance, in short-term memory. Short-term memory is essentially your mental sketch pad: how many different thoughts you can juggle in your mind, keep track of, and use at the same time. Given the complexity of being president, short-term memory is a vital skill.

He says that if he had a patient with the “verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech” that Trump shows, he would definitely refer him for a thorough neuropsychiatric evaluation. Also, those characteristics make him completely unqualified to be president of the United States.

I’m not a psychiatrist but would just add that he’s also a puerile, self-centered asshole who only cares about himself which is also disqualifying.

I’ve written enough words about this over the past nine years. So I’ll let Jon Stewart say it for me today:

lindaronstadtmusic14h

A Statement From Linda Ronstadt
Sept. 11, 2024
San Francisco
 
 
Donald Trump is holding a rally on Thursday in a rented hall in my hometown, Tucson. I would prefer to ignore that sad fact. But since the building has my name on it, I need to say something.
 
It saddens me to see the former President bring his hate show to Tucson, a town with deep Mexican-American roots and a joyful, tolerant spirit.
 
I don’t just deplore his toxic politics, his hatred of women, immigrants and people of color, his criminality, dishonesty and ignorance — although there’s that.
 
For me it comes down to this:  In Nogales and across the southern border, the Trump Administration systematically ripped apart migrant families seeking asylum. Family separation made orphans of thousands of little children and babies, and brutalized their desperate mothers and fathers. It remains a humanitarian catastrophe that Physicians for Human Rights said met the criteria for torture.
 
There is no forgiving or forgetting the heartbreak he caused.
 
Trump first ran for President warning about rapists coming in from Mexico. I’m worried about keeping the rapist out of the White House.
 
Linda Ronstadt
 
P.S. to J.D. Vance:
 
I raised two adopted children in Tucson as a single mom. They are both grown and living in their own houses. I live with a cat. Am I half a childless cat lady because I’m unmarried and didn’t give birth to my kids? Call me what you want, but this cat lady will be voting proudly in November for @kamalaharris and @timwalz .

She’s the best.

Sharing power is anathema on the right

When in 1619 settlers on this continent imported the first abducted Africans, they thought they were creating an enslaved labor force, cheap farm hands and house servants. They were creating something else centuries before we had a term for it: a social safety net.

For white people.

African slaves were laborers, yes, but their presence in the colonies represented a social floor below which no white man or woman could fall, not matter the lowliness of their family’s status or emptiness of their pockets. Slavery wasn’t sold that way, but having a caste of untouchables was a fringe benefit even non-slave owners would fight a civil war to protect. Skin color simply made the untouchables easy to identify in a crowd so everyone knew who was whom and who was better than whom.

Settlers did not trade in human flesh to create that informal safety net, but they created it nonetheless. By the 19th century, it was simply a cultural understanding. Six years after Brown v. Board, Sen. Lyndon Johnson explained why whites across the South were so upset to see holes poked in the safety net to which they’d grown up entitled.

If you can convince the lowest white man that he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll even empty his pockets for you. — Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas to Bill Moyers (1960)

Then came the civil rights legislation under Johnson’s presidency. The Southern Strategy followed. With the election of the country’s first Black president, the backlash against America’s ideal of equality has strengthened. With the election of an openly racist and misogynist president, white supremacists had a new champion for the 21st century and a campaign slogan not so far removed from “old times there are not forgotten.”

Hatred of non-whites and immigrants, and the propagation of dehumanizing memes about Mexicans and Somalis and Muslims and Indians by the MAGA “legion of doom” is racially tinged, sure, but it’s ultimately about power. Voter suppression laws and fantastic rumors about non-citizens voting are less about race than about power. About which of us has it and which does not. About status anxiety. About the loss of a social safety net that provided even the lowest white people the comforting warmth that no matter how low they fall, at least they’re not one of those people. The insistence that women’s worth lies solely in being baby factories is not about race but about men losing their power to dominate them.

Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs,” and his Tuesday rant about Haitians eating pets is more of the same. Now he faces defeat at the hands of a powerful Black-Asian woman. In the words of Stephen Stills, he and his MAGA cult are scared shitless.

It’s a cliché to hear American politicians proclaim after some outrage that America is “better than that.” We have yet to live up to that boast.

It’s more

So much of what Donald Trump does and says is not strategy so much as pathology. And feral instinct. His fanboys handle strategy.

The emergence of the Haitians eating animals story this week was serendipitous. (Was it?) But J.D. Vance promoting it is creepy as hell. Everyone non-MAGA (especially the media) is treating Trump repeating the Haitians eating pets tale as a crude, racist smear, and more evidence of Trump’s mental decline. It is. But it’s also worse, isn’t it?

“I know it feels like all fun and games with the eat dogs comment,” my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio tweeted. It’s not.

The Washington Post offers “Anatomy of a racist smear” to explain where and how this vicious meme about Haitian immigrants spread:

Kathleen Belew, a historian of U.S. white-supremacist movements, wrote on X on Tuesday that such demonization campaigns are an old tactic that should be taken seriously. The debunked claims about Haitian refugees aren’t “just nonsense,” Belew warned: “The people spreading this rhetoric either know exactly what they’re doing, or they should know. But violence follows. Every time.”

The online right went nuts with the cats and ducks memes. It’s hard to read how many of the “crank” & file think they’re simply trolling the left, how many actually believe the propaganda, how many are going Radio Rwanda in preparation for a Trump 2.0 pogrom against immigrants (or anyone else Trump designates as his enemy), and how many are going Radio Rwanda without being fully conscious that’s what they’re doing.

If it’s Stephen Miller doing it, sure. I can’t look at the guy without picturing him in a black SS uniform with a death’s head on his cap. He’d go Radio Rwanda in a skinny minute.

But I don’t have a read on where the broader MAGA cult is at on this. 

JV Last at the Bulwark asks the right question:

What will it say about America if Trump’s numbers don’t drop over the next week?

We have had every chance to reject Donald Trump.

We saw him mishandle a crisis, resulting in an economic collapse and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

We saw him attempt a violent coup.

When voters said, “I don’t love Trump, but that other candidate is super old . . .” Democrats went and swapped out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris.

Harris has been a good candidate. She has run as a rock-solid moderate. She just curb-stomped Trump in front of tens of millions of voters.

What else do people want?

I’m serious about this: What else could Harris possibly do? Because it looks to me like she’s an above-average candidate, running in a good economic environment, playing near-perfect baseball against a guy who says he wants to be a dictator.

And the response of the American people is: Harris +1.1.

What happens if, a week after last night’s demonstration, this race is still a toss-up? What does that tell us about the long-term viability of American democracy?

It tells us that the battle will not be over on election day. Whatever comes next is not going to be Mitt Romney or even Ronald Reagan. We’re in for a long siege.

Still, we have to win one battle at a time so …

What’s he thinking about, I wonder? This maybe?

The share price of Trump Media plunged more than 13% on Wednesday, a day after majority shareholder Donald Trump gave a widely panned presidential debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris.

The company’s stock price was at its lowest intraday level since the Truth Social app owner began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq in late March.

Investing in Trump Media stock is often seen as a way to bet on the political fortunes of Trump, the former president and current Republican nominee.

Trump Media has said its business hinges at least partly on Trump’s popularity, and analysts say the company’s value will rise or fall based on his electoral prospects.

He’s going to cash out in a few days with at least a billion dollars. It will destroy his investors but he doesn’t care about that. At this point he’s got to cramble to grift as much as he possibly can before the whole thing comes crashing down.

Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight. If you haven’t already, now is a great time to do your research on the issues at hand and the stances these candidates take on the topics that matter to you the most. As a voter, I make sure to watch and read everything I can about their proposed policies and plans for this country.

Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.

I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos. I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate @timwalz, who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.

I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make. I also want to say, especially to first time voters: Remember that in order to vote, you have to be registered! I also find it’s much easier to vote early. I’ll link where to register and find early voting dates and info in my story.

With love and hope,

Taylor Swift
Childless Cat Lady

Her timing was puuuuurfect. Will it make a difference? Yes:

Some reactions:

Some fun:

I just loved this one:

And then there was this… ugh

That’s real. And it is alarmingly creepy.