The Philly Inquirer proposed a set of questions for Donald Trump tomorrow night that would be fantastic:
I wish I had confidence that this is the caliber of questions we can expect but I don’t. Get ready for more questions like “how do you answer Vice President Harris’ accusation that you are anti-democratic?”
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, author of “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.” He warns that anti-democracy forces inside this country are doing what the far right always does: doubling down.
Republicans love few things more than a twofer. They have one in spreading a new conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting in numbers and tipping elections away from decent, All-American white people.
Berman says, “[I]t’s the newest version of the Big Lie, and it’s really a twofer for them because they are fusing voter fraud paranoia with anti-immigrant hysteria. And in doing so, they’re building support both for new restrictions on voting, but also for new restrictions on immigration. So it’s basically taking two of the most important planks of the MAGA agenda and putting them together.”
But that’s just filigree. The real meat of Stop The Steal 2.0 is far more sophisticated than Rudy Giuliani’s Four-Seasons-Total-Landscaping presser and dripping hair dye:
This is a much more organized effort, because they have changed the laws in a number of places to make it easier to effectuate these outcomes. They don’t need to bang on the doors outside the polling place in Michigan anymore, because they’re inside the polling places in a lot of these places now. They are the election officials who will be counting the ballots, or election observers who will be much closer to counting the ballots.
They’re inside the courts too.
Berman continues:
That’s why they changed the rules in Georgia well ahead of time. To get ahead of the thing so they don’t need to challenge it after the election. They’re already laying the groundwork not to certify the election in Georgia. We don’t know if they’ll be successful—it’s very likely their efforts to try to not certify elections will be blocked by the courts ahead of time or blocked by the courts after the fact; I think most people are confident of that.
What I worry about most is that they’re also trying to send a signal to other states and other Trump people to do this ahead of time. I worry that the votes were counted in 2020 and then lawsuits were filed to overturn the votes, but the votes had already been counted. What if the votes aren’t counted? What’s a court going to do then? That changes the whole process. Then you might have disputes that look much more like Bush v. Gore as opposed to what we saw in 2020 and just outright trying to steal an election.
Very clever, these criminal minds. And like Ford’s pardon of Nixon, the legal system going easy on the people behind the insurrection means they’ve just learned from their 2020 mistakes. They’re thinking ahead:
Not only did the “Stop the Steal” people seemingly face no accountability other than maybe being slapped on the wrist here or there, maybe disbarred or losing their license, but basically they have been resurrected to lead “Stop The Steal” 2.0, which is a lot more sophisticated than it was the last time. All of these Trump-aligned think tanks are laying the groundwork for these policy changes this time around. You have the Conservative Partnership Institute raising millions and millions of dollars to work with state officials and to put election deniers in positions of authority.
Berman believes Democrats are fighting asymmetric warfare where it comes to election protection and court battles. The real fight is happening now under their noses.
[Republicans are] not fighting on policy. They don’t care about policy. They’re laser-focused on changing the rules to make sure they can succeed where they failed in 2020. That is the overriding goal of the MAGA movement right now.
And they’ve got a large swath of MAGA voters convinced they are in an apocalyptic fight for “their” country. They’ve built a well-funded network of operatives planning to “win” elections no matter how the votes totals go. Democrats are bringing a butter knife to a gunfight, if I read Berman right.
I’m inquiring into what contingency plans are being made for direct, nonviolent actions if needed in the post-election period to protect the vote count and elector process from physical disruption. Taking nothing away from Marc Elias and his network of election protection lawyers, I worry that we’re going into democratic battle armed with little more than harsh language.
Update: Will Bunch just weighed in on this topic.
“Americans are being impacted by the authoritarian threat right now,” Amanda Carpenter, the disaffected former aide to Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz, posted on X/Twitter, referring to assaults on voting rights in Texas and Florida. “Believe it. This is what authoritarians want to put on steroids and enact on a federal level.”
The mailing of over 100,000 North Carolina absentee ballots in-state and to armed service members and others residing overseas will be delayed for weeks. (Dare we again use unprecedented?) North Carolina’s state Supreme Court on Monday ruled for RFK Jr. on his demand that his name/party that he fought to include on state ballots now be removed. One hundred county Boards of Elections have already printed roughly 3 million in-person and absentee ballots with Kennedy’s name on them. His delay in withdrawing from the presidential contest to endorse Donald Trump means strapped county boards must pay reprinting costs.
As we noted on Saturday, “2,348 ballot styles will have to be reformatted, reproofed, reprinted, mailings re-prepared by staff, and voting machines recoded in 100 counties.” The cost of Kennedy’s vanity project to North Carolina taxpayers and delay to voters will be considerable.
State law requires absentee ballots to be mailed 60 days ahead of the general election. That was Friday, September 6. The court split 4-3 to circumvent that law , with one Republican justice joining two Democrats in dissent (WRAL):
Democratic Justice Allison Riggs, who is also on the ballot this year as she seeks to retain her seat against state Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin, wrote in dissent Monday that Kennedy’s request wasn’t worth missing what could end up being close to a month of the state’s mail-in voting period.
She referenced the fact that until recently, Kennedy had been fighting to get onto the ballot in North Carolina and said that it’s not clear if he has actually dropped out of the race.
“Elections — the cornerstone of our democracy — are not games or exercises in ego-stroking,” she wrote. “With a disturbing disregard for the impact on millions of North Carolina voters, [Kennedy] seeks to have his cake and eat it, too. Forcing the state to put his name on the ballot, creating for the state costs both practical and legal, he now wants to reprint millions of ballots because he has decided to suspend his campaign without actually ending it or foreclosing the possibility of his election.”
“It amounts to a suspension of state law not mandated by the representatives of the people and grants a favor to one candidate not extended to other candidates, namely, additional time to decide whether to stand for office,” Democratic Justice Anita Earls wrote in her dissent.
State officials have said that will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and could delay the start of mail-in voting for weeks, blowing well past the deadline Friday set by state law. They made those points to the Supreme Court, asking for a reversal of the Court of Appeals order so that they can go ahead and send out the ballots they’ve already printed with Kennedy’s name. They also question Kennedy’s true motives, noting that even as he claims he will face “irreparable harm” if his name appears on the ballot in North Carolina, he’s also fighting separate legal battles to make sure his name does appear on the ballot in other states including New York and Mississippi.
“It’s hard to know what the answer is as far as what Kennedy’s thinking?” said Shawn Donahue, a political science professor at New York’s University of Buffalo of Kennedy’s efforts to get placed on the ballot in New York. In denying RFK Jr. access, a New York court found that the address Kennedy used in his petition was a sham, and that he exhibited (NPR) a pattern of “borrowing addresses from friends and relatives” while actually living in California.
Republican control of the courts both federal and state mean that thumbs are on the scale. The GOP is pulling out every stop and working every lever to gain advantage in this election. GOP operatives display remarkable creativity in devising new ways to monkey-wrench democracy to thwart the will of the people. If only they applied those talents to solving problems Americans face day to day, to improving people’s lives. That they do not, compounded with their rejection of democracy, their embrace of authoritarianism, and promotion of a convicted criminal for president, testifies to the fact that power is their political project, not governing. They’d rather rule.
You have probably heard about Tucker Carlson’s interview with a pro-Hitler, Holocaust revisionist whom he called “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” a few days back. Yeah.
This article in Vox wonders if the GOP is going to go along with him on this. Guess what?
The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson.
[JD] Vance, who has pre-taped a Carlson interview and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, refused to denounce Carlson after the Cooper fiasco — with a spokesperson saying in a statement that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.” A Trump campaign source told the Bulwark that while it’s “not ideal timing” for Vance to appear twice with Carlson before Election Day, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. is also scheduled to attend.)
It is what it is.
What’s more interesting is the reaction among conservative-aligned commentators and intellectuals — many of whom are expressing shock at what Tucker had done.
“Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who wrote a tribute to his “friend” Carlson after his April 2023 firing from Fox, tweeted on Wednesday that he “can’t get over … the fact that Tucker saw fit to lend [Cooper] an uncritical platform.” (Elon Musk tweeted the Carlson interview approvingly — only to delete the tweet later.)
Such expressions of shock feel absurd. For Carlson’s entire run on Fox News, liberals had been warning that his show had become a vector for racist and neo-Nazi ideas — while people on the right dismissed those concerns as the woke PC police trying to silence a prominent conservative voice.
The liberal position has now been proven correct — yet again. The only question is whether conservatives will learn a broader lesson about how far-right ideas infiltrate their movement — with their own tacit support.
I’m going to guess no. This was inevitable. Carlson is immensely popular with Neo-Nazis and has been for years.
“Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally,” Andrew Anglin, the publisher of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, wrote in 2016. “I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews.”
Carlson did quite a bit to merit this fan base. He worked assiduously to mainstream the idea of the “great replacement theory,” the white supremacist idea that mass immigration is a secret elite plot to replace the native-born whites with minorities. He took white nationalists’ false ideas about a “white genocide” in South Africa and brought it to then-President Donald Trump’s attention. He claimed that immigrants were making America “dirtier” and fearmongered about the alleged threat to America from “gypsies.”
The link between Carlson and the radical right was quite direct. In 2020, his head writer Blake Neff resigned after CNN reported that he had made racist and sexist comments on an anonymous web forum. In 2022, the New York Times reported that Carlson’s segments were at times directly inspired by stories published by racist and neo-Nazi websites.
Tucker has some cute rhetorical tricks that he uses when he’s disseminating fascist propaganda, like always insisting that he’s not a racist which is all it takes to satisfy any wobbly right wingers. It’s only a matter of time before these ideas are mainstream in the Republican party.
There’s more on this “historian” Darryl Cooper in this article on MSNBC. He’s extremely popular on the right. Yeah.
I wish the Atlantic offered gift links because this is one I’d really love to share with you. Here’s a gift link to this article in the Atlantic. It’s from Mark Liebovitch and it’s about the invertebrate cowards in the Republican Party. Donald Trump had them pegged:
In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.
But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.
“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.
You have to read the whole thing if you can. It’s such a stunning indictment of Republican Party. He takes us through the early days of Trump’s ascension and the short lived fierce resistance to him among the party’s luminaries through the presidency, January 6th the official takeover of the RNC, the pilgrimages to Mar-a-lago and the Manhattan courthouse and more. It’s astonishing to see it all in one place.
He writes that after Trump’s ignominious loss in 2020 and January 6th it seemed inevitable that the party would want to move on. (I didn’t think so FWIW …) But it wasn’t to be:
[T]he speed with which Trump has settled back into easy dominance of his party has been both remarkable and entirely foreseeable—foreseen, in fact, by Trump himself. Because if there’s been one recurring lesson of the Trump-era GOP, it’s this: Never underestimate the durability of a demagogue with a captive base, a desperate will to keep going, and—perhaps most of all—a feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers (“weak like a baby”).
Ain’t that the truth. Trump has shown us something no one else has ever been able to do. What a perfect storm.
And, by the way, make note of the fact that the feeble and terrified opposition of spineless ciphers he refers to aren’t the Democrats. They have been stand-up guys and gals in this whole thing even going so far as to beat him at the ballot box and then pass a bunch of very liberal domestic policies while the Trump clown car continued to run around in circles. They set aside their differences to fight the opposition because the stakes are so high. They are the only real political party in America.
Good. There’s no need to rattle him during the debate because he’ll do that to himself. Rattle him before the debate.
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.
Vance got this “report” from a random Facebook post. Now it’s everywhere:
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:
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.”
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:
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 many times 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:
At the economic club speech last week, he alluded to it again, whining about his legal travails:
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.
Salon
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.”
From past posts:
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.”
Read the entire piece at New York Magazine .
