Barack Obama gave a barnburner of a speech in Pittsburgh tonight. It’s funny and pointed and very inspiring. This is the part Dan Pfeiffer calls the closing argument of the campaign.
I like it.
I thought this part was the most important, however. It seems so obvious but apparently it isn’t relevant to tens of millions of our fellow Americans. It’s a simple call for common decency.
Interesting that Trump was just in Detroit today talking about how terrible Detroit is. I guess he’s just seeding the ground.
Trump the coward said today that there would absolutely be no debate because he knows that she wiped the floor with him and will be humiliated again. At this point he’s avoiding anything but his safe spaces. (Check out today’s Detroit Economic Club Q&A fluffing, for instance.) Harris, on the other hand, is everywhere:
Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in a town hall with CNN on Oct. 23, her campaign announced Thursday.
Harris’ participation comes after former President Donald Trump has declined to face the vice president in another debate before the Nov. 5 election. CNN also offered Trump a town hall, and his campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from POLITICO.
“Trump may want to hide from the voters, but Vice President Harris welcomes the opportunity to share her vision for a New Way Forward for the country. She is happy to accept CNN’s invitation for a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement.
Trump recently declined an interview with “60 Minutes” and has been attacking CBS for its editing of a recent interview with Harris. Harris has done a slew of interviews with both traditional and non-traditional media in recent days, including an appearance on the podcast “Call Her Daddy.” Trump is also making the rounds, including a recent appearance on comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast as well as spots on Fox News and other conservative media outlets.
I would be shocked if he agrees to do a CNN town hall. He’s obviously just trying to juice the base, period and may gather a few bros from podcasts that Don Jr listens to.
The alpha leader is actually a late Liberace weirdo who may not even care anymore if he wins legitimately. If he does, great. If he doesn’t he’ll contest the outcome and get his cult riled up. He sees it as win-win.
He did it again:
Can a reporter please, please please ask Trump to explain what he means when he says that NATO countries are “delinquent?” He clearly believes they are supposed to pay money to the “club” or maybe to him and doesn’t understand that the financial commitment is actually to commit a certain percentage of GDP to defense.
The truth is that he is hostile to Europe and has been for decades. They’re “laughing at us” and they gave him trouble with his golf courses. Europeans make him feel inferior. But clearly “NATO has to pay its dues” is the only policy idea he’s ever had so that’s what he’s gone with and nothing has changed in 8 long years.
And, it’s also clear, that his phone pal Vladimir Putin, has been telling him for years now to withdraw from NATO. As we know, Trump believes him over his own experts and staff.
BTW, only 8 out of the 31 countries are not currently meeting or exceeding their commitment and all of those are very close. When they fell short in the last decade it was largely due to the Great Recession caused by the financial crisis. Of course they should meet their commitments but Trump’s claims that they’ve always just been free riders is BS. It’s just that he’s is so ignorant about foreign policy and the world generally that it’s the only thing he can think of.
Today we have yet another GREAT piece by Rick Perlstein about our weird political culture. He takes a look at America’s current obsession with “cult-culture” as a way people are trying to explain our politics to themselves. Boy, do I relate to that. I’ve been reading books and studies and psychology papers as well as watching the movies and series Perlstein outlines in his piece. (He notes a few that I haven’t seen which I excitedly made note of for weekend binging.) I have been obsessed with this subject for the past few years for obvious reasons.
Here’s an excerpt but do read the whole thing if you’re as concerned about this phenomenon as I am:
THE ASSOCIATION OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did. But what would a docuseries about MAGA-as-cult—the one Netflix, Hulu, Max, or CNN would never produce, because that would make them unduly “partisan”—look like?
It could start with the truism that cult formation, as my binge-watch last week makes clear, works best among a population already primed for it: prosperity gospel evangelicals, psychedelic searchers, woo enthusiasts.
Or the modern Republican Party, since its capture by the conservative movement.
Amanda Montell, author of the bestseller Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, has a fun podcast called Sounds like a Cult, each weekly episode devoted to a phenomenon along a spectrum from obviously sickeningly and terrifying (the sex-slaver Keith Raniere; two documentary series about him, Max’s The Vow and Seduced: Inside the NXIVM Cult on Starz, both from 2020) to, well … really? (Though the episode on pickleball is surprisingly convincing.)
The episode on conservative youth activism is somewhere in between. It’s centered on an interview with an apostate, journalist Tiffany Nguyen, who got me thinking about one of those things us adolescents learned in our cult awareness trainings in the 1980s: Be wary of innocent-seeming, attractive-sounding inducements. Like a free vegetarian meal, which was how the Hare Krishnas got you, or a psychological reading, in the case of Scientology. Or a free journalism training summer camp. That is how aspiring scribes like Nguyen got hooked.
The name of the sponsor, the “Leadership Institute,” sounded no alarm bells; they’re usually bland. They advertised their value neutrally as well, noting their alumni who’d gone on to big print gigs (Malcolm Gladwell!) or the network news. The inducements into a world of us-vs.-them thinking come slowly, embedded in useful tips like what a lede is and how to do an interview. Dropping claims that only the right values free speech, and the left subverts it, might serve as a red flag, if you’re sophisticated—which is why, like so many cultish formations, the right prefers to scoop them up when they’re too young to know better.
In another cultish hallmark, novitiates move up a ladder of engagement, each new step a marker of trust that allows them to glimpse the entirety of the project. For Nguyen, that meant being placed with a mentor—who happened to be a white nationalist. Then, by the time they’re placed with a conservative organization, they’ll have accepted certain principles on faith: that they’re not merely reporting on the world but fighting evil, so the ends justify the means. They’ll be armed with an arsenal of what the pioneering scholar of coercive thought Robert Jay Lifton calls “thought-terminating clichés”—like, when in doubt, to ask a Democratic official what they think the definition of “woman” is.
Perlstein shows that the cultishness existed long before Donald Trump came along, which is super important. As with everything else in his life, he exploited something that was built by others, he didn'[t create it himself. It finally found its full potential when he showed up.
THE QUALITATIVE SHIFT THAT SIGNIFIES the post–Tea Party Republican Party as having finally passed into the realm of what I call fascism was the arrival of that missing piece, a leader taken as worthy of being worshipped, as if a prophet or saint or even God in the flesh. His “followers” experience him as a charismatic presence with mystical powers far beyond those of a normal being. Not merely someone who administers a government; someone who smites demons instead, cheating death through the grace of the Almighty.
The very stable genius said this just yesterday:
As Perlstein points out, these cult leaders always take their followers’ money, isolate them from their families, and their sexual exploitation and violence is always ignored or forgiven by the faithful flock. Sound familiar? It sure does to me.
Is this too much, roping together January 6th and the mass suicide at Jonestown? Well, one of the attractive things about Amanda Montell’s book and podcast is that she understands the word “cult” as a heuristic, that cultishness is a continuum, and always context-dependent. In the case of MAGA, Tina Nguyen and Montell point to its “very specific plan to effectuate a vision that makes no sense to outsiders.” Cults have a built-in sunk cost dynamic: They depend upon ingraining people so deep within them that they feel like nothing without the cult.
This is what I worry about. If Trump finally shuffles off to Mar-a-lago, what happens to the cult? Does it continue under other leaders? Sometimes they do.
Just read the whole thing. It’s important to know what we’re really dealing with here. It’s not politics, at least as we have understood them in the past. It’s got all the hallmarks of one of the all-American cults but it’s fascist at its core. And as Perlstein notes, all of that has been inexplicably normalized and those of us who are watching this with increasing horror are left sounding like the crazy people for pointing out.
Gallup measured some attitudes:
Perceptions of Trump are similar to what Gallup found at the same time in 2020, except voters are now slightly more likely to believe he would display good judgment in a crisis, up six percentage points to 52%. (How soon they forget…)
Here’s why she doesn’t get points for being a strong and decisive leader:
It’s the sexism, stupid, (although why anyone thinks that the guy who wears more make-up and hairspray that last year’s winner of RuPaul’s Drag race and whines like a little bitch 24/7 is some kind of alpha male, I’ll never understand.)
As for Trump being able to get things done … lol. They clearly haven’t looked at his record from 2017-2021. How gullible Americans are, how pathetically eager they are to be conned.
Trump’s rating for being honest and trustworthy is higher now than his 38% rating in 2016 when he won the election. However, even at that lower level, Trump’s honesty rating exceeded Hillary Clinton’s, at 31%. This changed in 2020 when, despite seeing his “honest” score improve to 41%, Trump trailed Joe Biden by 11 points on this character dimension.
In fact, in the three presidential election cycles since 2012, when Gallup first measured presidential qualities this way, the candidate with the higher honest/trustworthy score has won. Other characteristics have not been asked frequently enough to observe their track record.
That’s an interesting little tid-bit dropped in the middle of all this, isn’t it? (It’s hard to believe that Trump scored higher on honesty and integrity than Clinton but that just goes to show you what 20 years of propaganda and a relentlessly hostile media can do.)
Three presidential elections isn’t enough to draw any conclusions about that metric, unfortunately. Still…
I don’t think issues matter much. To the extent they are relevant it’s only because they are heuristics for something people do care about — mostly culture, security, fear, hate.Hopefully, a majority of voters are just sick of listening to that relentless negativity of Donald Trump and are eager to embrace a future that isn’t stuck in the past. I don’t know if, in general, we’ve managed to work through the trauma of the past few years enough to get there but I certainly hope so.
Those of you who read this blog know very well what Trump’s obsession is all about and it’s eugenics, not “genes and genetics” and it’s Nazi stuff.
What in the world is going on there? They are producing some of the best work ever, like the Trump and Putin story I wrote about yesterday. And then there’s this. It’s mystifying.
It’s not as if they don’t know the stakes:
How to explain this????
And worker problem (The New Republic):
It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all.
The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry.
It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry.
Trump’s entire M.O. has been fake it till you fail at it and Daddy bails you out. But Daddy Fred is long gone. Trump plans to steal this election when he fails to win again.
Trump’s incredible shrinking campaign has other problems, reports The Washington Post:
Soon after Donald Trump’s campaign team took over the Republican National Committee earlier this year, a senior Trump aide was asked how to combat news stories that the campaign had an insufficient get-out-the-vote operation.
“We are going to beat the reporters into retardation!” shouted James Blair, one of the two men now leading the operation, on a call with other advisers, according to two people with direct knowledge of the conversation. Blair did not respond to a request for comment.
He seems nice.
Trump co-campaign manager Susie Wiles observes that one of her campaign’s challenges is “too much testosterone.”
Thr Bulwark’s poll mentioned yesterday suggests over a third of Republican primary voters who voted for Nikki Haley will vote for Kamala Harris (despite Haley’s gutless endorsement of Trump). The share of GOP voters surveyed in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll shows Harris has increased her support among them from 5 percent last month to 9 percent in the new survey. An American University poll shows Trump losing ground to Harris among women on the economy as well.
The gap is more pronounced among independents and White voters than partisans and voters of color. Independent women favored Harris 51 percent to 36 percent, according to a recent CNN poll, while independent men split 47 percent for Trump and 40 percent for Harris. The poll showed Trump ahead among White women 50 percent to 47 percent for Harris, much smaller than his 23-point lead with White men.
Furthermore:
“There’s a pretty big universe of women who think he’s a misogynist, that he doesn’t like women, that he demeans women, that he’s a sexual predator, et cetera, et cetera,” Harris campaign pollster John Anzalone said. “And without a doubt, there’s a group of men who thinks he’s an alpha male who is going to solve all our problems by flexing his muscles.”
They mean the fantasy muscles supporters Photoshop below Trump’s head.
Some staffers said the dynamic has worsened since August when Trump brought Corey Lewandowski, his former 2016 campaign manager, back onto the team. Lewandowski left the 2016 campaign after grabbing a female reporter’s arm (he wasn’t prosecuted), and in 2021 he lost a position in a pro-Trump super PAC after allegations of sexually harassing a donor.
This kind of thing can kill a Democratic operative’s career. Not so among Republicans.
Why is that?
President Joe Biden hit back at MAGA misinformation on Wednesday (TPM):
“But now I want to be clear about something. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies that are disturbing people,” Biden said. “It’s undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken. It’s harmful to those who need help the most. There is simply no place for this to happen.”
But he saved his most biting remarks for Greene, who has been spreading the lie that the federal government (??) geo-engineered (??) Hurricane Helene in order to seize control of lithium deposits (??) in a certain area of North Carolina, called Chimney Rock.
“Now the claims are getting even more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, is now saying the federal government is literally controlling the weather. We’re controlling the weather,” Biden said. “It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop. Moments like this, there are no red or blue states.”
Greene’s suggestsions that “they” can control the weather (with Jewish space lasers?) and direct storms at red states is patently nuts.
Even nuttier — which I guess proves the RW belief that “they” can’t do anything right — the gang that couldn’t shoot straight apparently bullseyed one of their own with their Jewish weather machine. Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, as Pete Buttigieg notes, is attracting antisemitic slurs in the wake of the Helene disaster that destroyed a large chunk of her town.
I’m told by a fellow blogger that “Morning Joe” featured a Dan Abrams clip (?) about a man’s out-of-food father-in-law rejecting help because he’d heard it meant the government would seize his home. It’s not just the threats against relief workers spawned by the lies. The lies are hurting people on the ground.
This is a terrific ad from Brownaddrssing that grotesque ageism and misogyny from his opponent Bernie Moreno:
I know that nobody likes to see older women — except older women. Many of them probably aren’t crazy about the right’s recent decision to deman them as completely useless except as nannies for their grandchildren. Bit mistake. They vote. A lot.