In all the years of Trumpy absurdity, putting an antivax conspiracy theorist in charge of Health and Human Services might be the most terrifying. pic.twitter.com/S5liJVGx62
Sure he might have trouble getting RFK Jr confirmed. But he learned to get past all that inconvenient folderol by making his minions and henchmen “acting” officials. He would be happy to let RFK Jr. do whatever he wants. After all, Trump will never have to run for president again. (Either he’ll be term limited, he’ll just refuse to leave or he’ll die in office.) He has nothing to lose.
This @StrictScrutiny_ convo with @nyuniversity's @ruthbenghiat was so sobering that I had to lie down in the fetal position afterward. And the two Chicago Recording Company audio techs who helped me tape were similarly shooketh.
— Melissa Murray (@ProfMMurray on Threads 🧵) (@ProfMMurray) August 26, 2024
With all the mockery and joy and good feelings, I hope none of us lose sight of the threat we are facing.
To those of you who listen to podcasts, I highly recommend this one:
To wrap up our Project 2025 series, Kate, Leah and Melissa are joined by NYU’s Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present to share her perspective as a historian on the Heritage Foundation’s terrifying plans for the country.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro 2:17 Trump Continues to Hide His Project 2025 Connections
As Donald Trump emerged to a thunderous roar of approval in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Rust belt, he was back in his comfort zone among the people who once put him in power.
But by the time he stepped off the stage nearly two hours later, even some of the former US president’s supporters were wondering whether his rallies are doing his re-election campaign more harm than good.
Apparently this county is indicative of the entire region where Pennsylvania could be decided by turnout. The Republican party there has been overwhelmed by infighting with hardcore MAGA weirdos who have recently taken over the local party so they really need Trump to get out the vote.
Frank Scavo, a businessman and ardent Trump supporter who was part of a coup that took hold of the county Republican party earlier this year, was clear before the rally about what he wanted to hear from Trump.
“These rallies fire up the base to go out there and knock on doors. His base will walk on fire for him, but plenty of other Republicans don’t vote. Are they demoralised? Do they think their vote doesn’t count? Most of it is apathy. But if we don’t get people out there knocking on doors, Trump’s not going to win Luzerne county,” he said.
That’s not how things worked out.
Trump repeatedly broke away from the prepared speech about economics to make rambling claims that Harris was both a fascist and a communist, to attack her laugh as that of “a crazy person” and a “lunatic”, and to claim he was more beautiful than the vice-president. He also spent time debating aloud with himself how to pronounce the name of the CNN anchor Dana Bash.
By the time he stopped speaking 100 minutes later, a large number of the arena’s 8,000 seats had emptied.
Some people were just not impressed:
“He reminded me why I’m not going to vote for him this time,” said Jenny, a local businesswoman who did not want to give her full name because she didn’t want to alienate customers.
“I voted for him in 2016 and had a Trump flag in the front yard. I voted for him again in 2020 but didn’t put the flag out that time. I’ve been thinking of voting for him again because Biden’s been so bad for the economy and Kamala won’t be any better. But after listening to that, I’m actually afraid of Trump being president again. I don’t know what he was talking about half the time. Perhaps he was always like that but he seems worse, more unstable.”
He is. She’s not mistaken about that. (She is mistaken about the economy but you can’t blame her with the way the news — and not just the right wing media — talks about it.)
As I wrote a few days back, I traveled through rural Pennsylvania recently and was quite surprised to see the lack of Trump paraphenalia festooning the small towns. In 2016 and 2020 it was everywhere. You’d even see people flying big Trump flags alongside confederate flags at Gettysburg. Not this year. There was some but it was very subdued compared to what it has been in the past.
Trump is further hampered by the fact that people like Jenny want him to be more focused and serious but his MAGA freakshow wants the crazy. That’s what they come for. Similarly, as he is trying desperately to neutralize his anti-abortion record by implying that he won’t do anything drastic if he gets elected, his evangelical base is getting very upset:
My advice is, when you’re in a hole, stop digging. This week made clear: the DNC has the corner on the abortion market. Trump is not only suppressing his own support, he is going to hurt the vast majority of Republican candidates who are 100% pro-life. pic.twitter.com/1NbCKOmvKP
No matter how many times he winks and nods at them saying “first ya gotta win elections, ok?” they demand public affirmation of their extremist views.
Does any of this mean Trump won’t win Pennsylvania? Nope. He certainly could. Most of these people will vote for him even if they think he’s lost it. But as the article says, there are a lot of voters who don’t usually vote in this region and Trump has to get them all out to win. (And yes, Harris needs to cut into the margins.) But the “Trump magic” of being able to get his crowds super excited and rushing out to join his MAGA crusade may be wearing off a bit. In a close election that could be decisive.
If faced with a Democratic Donald Trump what would you do?
Someone once asked me who I thought would be the Democratic equivalent of Donald Trump would be and I said Kanye West. He’s world famous, extremely wealthy, narcissistic, unstable, politically ambitious, totally unself-aware and manifestly unfit — except it turned out that he’s actually a right wing anti-semite. I might have said Robert F. Kennedy Jr too at one time, except he’s now endorsed Donald Trump. I’m sure there must be some truly crazy lefty out there who would be a bridge too far for many Democrats but that combination of authoritarianism, pathological character flaws, overwhelming ignorance and demagogic talent seems to inevitably drift toward the right these days.
But the Trump phenomenon is different from those examples because he is so manifestly unfit for office that it has shaken many Americans’ belief in democracy. How could our system allow such a person to dominate our political culture for more than eight years and be within striking distance of the presidency again after having been roundly defeated in the last election?
I thought about that as I watched the Democratic Convention last week as a small group of Republicans and former Republicans took the stage to speak out against their former president and exhort their erstwhile comrades to vote for Kamala Harris instead. It wasn’t the first time members of the opposing party spoke at a convention. I think of Jeane Kirkpatrick a Democratic foreign policy expert who drifted into the right wing with those other Democratic apostates known as the neoconservatives. At the 1984 Republican National Convention, she gave the keynote speech, calling the Democrats the “Blame America First crowd” for their alleged lack of patriotism.
Back in 2004, former Georgia Gov Zell Miller, a Democrat, also gave the keynote speech at the GOP convention to re-nominate President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. It was brutal. Still in the throes of the Iraq war, he condemned John Kerry and the Democratic Party as weak on national security.
And 2024 wasn’t the first time that Republicans spoke at a Democratic convention either. In 2020 former GOP Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey gave speeches exhorting voters not to vote for Donald Trump. This year we heard from former Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham. former Georgia Lieutenant Gov. Geoff Duncan and a few others as well.
But it seems to me that the big difference between these GOP apostates and the Democrats who left the party to join the Reagan Revolution or back George W. Bush is that fact that the Democratic apostates left their party over policy differences. They didn’t like what they saw as the leftward ideological drift of the Democrats so they moved over to the Republicans, There were plenty of voters who went that way too, especially during the Reagan years.
But the Republicans who’ve spoken at the last two Democratic conventions have done so almost exclusively out of disgust with Donald Trump personally and his lack of ideological principles. It’s true that there was some talk about the Democrats being better on foreign policy with support for Ukraine and opposition to authoritarian tyrants like Putin and Kim Jong Un. But for the most part their entreaties to vote for Harris were simply based upon the need to defeat Trump because of his bad character, criminality and dangerous unfitness. Some have even gone so far as to say that Harris needs to be elected in order to save the Republican party from the MAGA cult.
These people represent the Never Trump faction which has set ideology aside for the moment in order to create a popular front to defeat Trump. Some of them are openly endorsing Kamala Harris, telling their followers that she is preferable to Trump in some ways on issues but mostly arguing that policy difference just don’t matter at the moment because the threat of Trump is so dire.
But they aren’t the only Republicans who know the threat exists. Former Attorney General Bill Barr knows that Trump tried to overturn a legitimate election. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell understands that Donald Trump was a disaster as president. Former S. Carolina Gov.Nikki Haley made it clear that she thinks Donald Trump is unfit to hold office. Yet they are voting for him anyway. Whether it’s because they have Fox News Brain Rot and are convinced that antifa is the greatest threat America faces, as Bill Barr does or that loyalty to the GOP brand is paramount as McConnell does, they are simply incapable of reacting seriously to the threat.
Saying they will write in someone else’s name as former Vice President Mike Pence and former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton are saying they will do is a silly affectation. And those others who have written books and given interviews spilling the beans from the inside on what an utter catastrophe Trump’s first term was and yet are refusing to step up and publicly endorse Harris or even go on TV to condemn Trump, the only reasonable explanation is that they are, as The Bulwark’s Tim Miller writes, “chickenshit.” Apparently they can’t be bothered.
Miller calls out people like former WH Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, former defense Sec. Gen Jim Mattis, Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates and a number of others including former Chief of Staff H.R. McMaster who is out with a new book declaring that Russian President Vladimir Putin had Trump wrapped around his little finger. (Yet he went on TV this weekend and absurdly claimed that he believes by writing his book it will persuade Trump not to let Putin do that in the future.)
Miller writes:
There are two options for president. On the one hand you have a woman who just presented herself as a mainstream Democrat who plans to respect and uphold the fundamental American political traditions at home and abroad.
On the other you have a candidate who you have acknowledged is the most flawed person you have ever encountered, a danger to the country, and an existential threat to our system of government—a convicted criminal, an abuser of women, and a moron. How in God’s name do you justify silence in the face of that choice? This is not a close call!
It is not a close call.
I don’t know if I will ever be faced with a situation like this. But I would like to think that if some famous loon were to capture the imagination of Democratic voters and he or she threatened the future of the nation, I would have the guts to oppose him or her and throw my lot in with the saner other party. Anyone’s first responsibility should be to stop a dangerous demagogue and argue about ideology and policies later. If you don’t do that, as Trump himself likes to say, “you won’t have a country anymore.”
The Harris campaign is trying some mind-fuckery with the former president over debate rules. Donald Trump is still looking for a way to back out and complained Sunday night about holding the next debate on ABC, reports The New York Times:
“I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” he wrote.
He continued, misspelling the name of the Democratic strategist Donna Brazile and using a disparaging nickname for the news anchor George Stephanopoulos: “Will panelist Donna Brazil give the questions to the Marxist Candidate like she did for Crooked Hillary Clinton? Will Kamala’s best friend, who heads up ABC, do likewise. Where is Liddle’ George Slopadopolus hanging out now? Will he be involved. They’ve got a lot of questions to answer!!! Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
Hand the nuclear codes again to that infant?
The Harris campaign responded:
“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement, referring to the scheduled Sept. 10 debate and to an additional debate in October that the campaign has said it is open to negotiating. “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”
The Trump campaign insists it was Joe Biden who demanded muted mics. The Harris team knows this, of course. The prosecutor is messing with him.
It doesn’t require and advanced degree in psychology to see it. Donald Trump has grumbled his entire adult life that “the world” is laughing at “us” (meaning the United States). Mr. Bundle of Insecurities harbors deep anxieties about being laughed at himself.
He’s not very bright. He’s undereducated. He’s overweight. He’s a “tycoon” who sucks at business and cheats at golf. He got where he is with daddy’s money. Underneath the bluster and bullying in recesses of his psyche he dare not explore (self-examination is for the weak), he knows it.
Throughout the sad history of Trumpism, comedians have garnered tons of laughs at Trump’s expense. At the White House Correspondents’ dinner in 2011, Seth Meyers famously quipped, “Trump said he’s running as a Republican. Which is surprising; I just assumed he was running as a joke.”
The audience roared. Trump seethed.
“That evening of public abasement, rather than sending Mr. Trump away, accelerated his ferocious efforts to gain stature within the political world,” wrote The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns. “And it captured the degree to which Mr. Trump’s campaign is driven by a deep yearning sometimes obscured by his bluster and bragging: a desire to be taken seriously.”
Until recently, the aging Democratic political class, including President Biden, thought it too impolitic to lampoon Trump as a political leader, and thus struggled to land blows that would undercut his support without also mocking his supporters. Call him a serious threat, yes. Call him an unserious fool, no.
The Harris campaign has less trouble learning new tricks, writes Michael Tomasky at The New Republic:
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear, but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences — but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious. … Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
Trump the Cowardly Bully needs to be respected and feared. Calling him a fascist or an authoritarian empowers him, feeds his ego;. In his mind, it brings him one step closer to admission to the brotherhood of dictators whose acceptance he most desperately desires.
“Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in,” Tomasky writes. He fears being laughed at? Pummel him with guffaws.
But, I’d advise, spare his supporters the “deplorables” label. Insults may motivate them. Some are too far gone, yes. But others may yet either stay home in the fall or leave the top race blank.
Tomasky recommends:
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Exactly. It’s stunning that Republicans think branding an opponent “communist” or “socialist” still bites 35 years after the Berlin Wall fell. I’ve said before, if Republicans expect to lead in the 21st century they might first try living in it.
And after all the flag-waving at the DNC convention (I have mine here), “Communist Kamala” is sauce as weak as Trump’s other schoolyard taunts.
Trump may yet rally. That is, if his decaying mind is not already too far gone. With Trump, what passes for strategy is simply feral instinct. That may survive the decay of what limited higher functions Trump ever had.
Joe Biden’s departure resets the board. Tomasky writes, “Against Joe Biden, Trump looked credible to swing voters, simply because of Biden’s age. Against Harris, he looks old (because he is), confused (because he is), far less intelligent than she (because he is), and less genuinely patriotic (because he is).”
Trump is cut over the eye. Go out and work the eye.
The headline for this NYT review of David Rhode’s new is puzzling. It says
I thought the story was going to be about DOJ employees being afraid of getting in trouble if they spilled the beans to David Rhode. But it doesn’t really reveal anything like that except a passing reference to the fear for their jobs if Trump wins in November and to say that Merrick Garland wanted to preserve the norms of the Justice Department and that was hard because Trump is such a lying criminal.
Trump was the first president since Nixon to utterly reject the idea that federal law enforcement should operate independently of the president’s personal desires or prejudices. Rather, he sought to use the attorney general, special prosecutors, U.S. attorneys and the F.B.I. as instruments to help himself and his friends and to punish his enemies.
Although Rohde doesn’t hide his conviction that Trump undermined democracy with his salvos against the Justice Department’s independence, he nonetheless writes in measured, restrained language that should hold up well in the light of history. “Where Tyranny Begins” is a work of reporting and sober analysis, not polemic. While his title might sound shrill, it’s actually an allusion to words from John Locke: “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”
Importantly, Rohde understands that there’s tension and ambiguity in the Justice Department’s charge: It’s expected to carry out the president’s policies yet simultaneously to investigate him and his associates neutrally. After Watergate, America enacted reforms to strengthen the latter part of the mission — to preserve the department’s autonomy. Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi issued guidelines for ensuring impartiality should Watergate-style criminality again pervade the White House.
That framework began to change under the first President Bush. In perhaps the greatest abuse of presidential power since Watergate, Bush issued pardons to six former Reagan administration officials indicted in the Iran-contra scandal, including Reagan’s secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, in part so that Weinberger wouldn’t be compelled to give testimony at trial that would implicate Bush himself. The erosion of norms upholding Justice Department autonomy continued under the second President Bush, who in 2006 fired several U.S. attorneys for plainly political reasons — a scandal that led to his attorney general’s resignation.
There is a bit of a myth that “the guardrails held” and that nobody in the Trump administration actually let him get away with his crazy schemes. To be sure, they sometimes did and we know that it will be worse in a second term because he’s got people around him who have learned the system’s weaknesses and Trump himself is ready to take it to the limit.
But it’s a fact that they succeeded in many norm-busting assaults on the rule of law and just because Bill Barr finally balked at the end, it doesn’t make him a hero. Look at what he actually did do.
Apparently, Rhode got some of the DOJ people to spill how they were pressured into doing Trump and Barr’s will and hating themselves for doing it. And he spends a lot of the book looking at how Garland and his deputies have been trying to resuscitate the Justice Department’s credibility and reputation.
I haven’t read the book and so I can’t say whether ot not that speaks well of the Garland DOJ or not. Rhode writes about “the pernicious consequences of the department’s politicization, as Garland drew fire from the right, for being too partisan, as well as from the left, for not being partisan enough.” I would argue that the left wasn’t ever saying that Garland wasn’t being “partisan enough.” They were arguing that by being so cautious and deliberate he was giving Trump privileges that no other American would receive which is the opposite of the United States’ alleged dedication to equal justice under the law.
Rohde reveals that Garland felt pained that norms of impartiality meant that his department had “a hand tied behind its back, compared to a political actor.” But Rohde adds that for Garland to have discarded these venerable norms just because Trump had done so would have only made things worse. “We would not want to be a political actor,” Garland proclaimed. “That is the end of the rule of law.” As Trump advances toward a possible second presidential term, we would all do well to reread our Locke.
I get that this is a complicated call. And there are political actors who have even more responsibility for what Trump has done (such as Republicans who refused to convict him in his second impeachment trial which would have ended the specific threat of Trump in 2021.) But being a stickler for norms that the other side doesn’t recognize is a recipe for being run over. I understand the need to keep them alive but I’m not sure they couldn’t have survived more aggressive action to hold Trump accountable.
As we know, the MAGA cult (aka the Republican party) has epic piles of chutzpah and sheer gall. But their new attack on Tim Walz as a pathological liar has got to be the most audacious projection they’ve ever done.
Let us investigate the vast history of lying by Gov. Tim Walz as alleged by the Trump campaign:
Retired from the National Guard as a command sergeant major. He did rise to the rank of command sergeant major, but upon retirement his rank reverted to master sergeant.
Had children via IVF. Walz almost always refers only to “fertility treatments,” but a couple of times has used the term IVF. In fact he and his wife underwent IUI, commonly referred to as IVF but actually a different, more affordable fertility treatment.
Won an award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce (2006). It was the Junior Chamber of Commerce,
Taught in China for a year through a program at Harvard University (2006). It was a program affiliated with Harvard.
Earned the title of Nebraska Citizen-Soldier of the Year (1989). He did indeed earn this award, but so did 51 other people. I’m not sure how this counts even under the strictest definition, but I’m including it for completeness.
Referred one time to “weapons of war, that I carried in war” (2018). Has admitted this was a misstatement.
Denied he had been drinking when he was pulled over in 1995 for speeding (2006). Possibly the only serious falsehood, from 18 years ago. However, he corrected the record himself six years ago when he ran for governor.
To my knowledge he hasn’t done this:
PolitiFact published its 1,000th fact check of a claim made by Donald Trump. The publication, which usually refrains from wading into political discussions or weighing in on a politician’s overall character, took the opportunity to release an analysis of those years of work. Its finding? Trump lies a lot.
“American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy,” the authors wrote. “Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, we have encountered a firehose of claims.”
The analysis found in particular that Trump’s immigration-related claims tended toward inflammatory falsehoods and that more than 70 percent of PolitiFact’s checks on immigration, foreign policy, crime, COVID, and health care were largely false. It concluded, also, that “Trump’s falsehoods have fueled threats to democracy.”
Virtually everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth is a lie., but the biggest of all was that he actually won the 2020 election, which he began saying before the ballots were even counted.
It is utterly ridiculous that we’re even discussing Tim Walz at all in this context. Insane.
“You saw a hate fest full of insults. And Donald Trump said to Barack Obama, you’re a nice man after President Obama insulted and and jabbed President Trump continuously,” Graham said. “It was designed to draw him into an exchange of insults.”
“It was light on policy, heavy on insults. So I told President Trump, then and now, you’re going to win this thing if you focus on policy,” he added.
Graham then noted that people are not “joyful” on several matters including inflation and cost of living, and pitched a Trump second term. Democrats have been using themes of “joy” heavily since Harris became the nominee.
“I think President Trump offers the best solution to change the trajectory of the country. And finally, if you’re waiting on Kamala Harris to come up with new policies, you’re going to die waiting, because she will continue what they’ve been doing for the last four years,” Graham said. “That’s why she has no new policies to offer, because they’re going to keep doing the same old thing.”
This policy line is just hilarious. What are Trump’s new policies? Who knows? He’s just blathering about “drill baby drill” and “growth” being the solution to every problem. He makes ridiculous claims that everyone in the country wanted to return Roe v Wade to the states and everyone is very happy with it. (Has anyone asked people like Graham or JD Vance if they agree with that? I’d like to know.) It literally could not be more fatuous.
Graham is trying hard to get back in Trump’s good graces:
Graham also responded to a clip of Trump earlier this week where the former president said he did not care what the South Carolina senator has to say.
“I will be by his side in this election. I am proud of what he did as our president,” Graham said.
