In the past five weeks, Trump’s operation has spent more than $29 million on TV ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris for supporting transgender surgeries for inmates and illegal immigrants in detention, according to data from the media tracking firm AdImpact. That makes the topic, by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending—one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is. By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.
The campaign’s elevation of transgender issues above the economy constitutes one of the biggest bets in presidential politics. The former rates as among the least important to voters according to public opinion polls; the latter their top concern. The trans-heavy focus also seems to conflict with months of insistence—from the Trump campaign to the pundit class—that the ex-president will win because of inflation and jobs.
Executing such a gambit at this late stage of the campaign represents a major roll of the dice: one that could either reset culture war politics for years to come in presidential races or, if Trump loses, go down as a major, even historic, tactical blunder.
I’m going to guess the latter. I really doubt that most people are going to be persuaded to vote for Trump because of this. The ads are so cruel and stupid it makes me want to throw my coffee cup at the screen:
Trump strategist and pollster John McLaughlin says that this is “asymmetrical political warfare” in that modern campaigns aren’t about policies, they’re about character.
He’s not wrong. But this kind of crude bullying and scapegoating of a very small and vulnerable minority says everything about the character of the people who are doing it. I suspect that even many of those people who are uncomfortable with transgender girls competing in sports aren’t moved by this cruel message. Sure, the racists and the xenophobes and homophobes like it, but they’re already voting for Trump. I can’t imagine this is persuading anyone who isn’t already a hateful MAGA voter.
By the way, out of tens of thousands of prisoners, there is a record of only 2 inmates ever having this surgery (as required under the law.)
The New York Times reports on Trump’s latest “policy” proposal:
During a Fox News segment on Monday, Mr. Trump took questions at a barbershop in the Bronx. When asked if the United States could potentially end all federal taxation, Mr. Trump said the country could return to the economic policies in the late 19th century, when there was no federal income tax.
“It had all tariffs — it didn’t have an income tax,” Mr. Trump said. “Now we have income taxes, and we have people that are dying. They’re paying tax, and they don’t have the money to pay the tax.”
In June, Mr. Trump floated the idea of replacing federal revenue from income taxes with money received from tariffs. Mr. Trump has not provided specific details of how that would work, and it is unclear if he wants to eliminate all federal taxes, including corporate income taxes and payroll taxes, or only end the individual income tax.
Either way, both liberal and conservative experts have dismissed his idea as mathematically impossible and economically destructive. Even if Republicans control Congress, lawmakers are unlikely to dismantle the income tax system. Yet Mr. Trump’s combination of tax cuts and tariff increases has been central to his political pitch.
“There is a way, if what I’m planning comes out,” Mr. Trump said of ending income taxes.
“Our country,” he says of that decade, “was probably . . . the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” His love of the era has become so pronounced that it’s now a fixture of his stump speech, meant to defend the massive tariffs now central to the economic platform he’s promising in a second term. There’s just one problem: Trump’s comments are historically oblivious, evincing no awareness of the depression of the 1890s, whose severity was owed, in part, to the protectionist tariffs he praises.
He goes on to lay out the full history of the disastrous tariff policy of the era. Here are just a couple of highlights:
For as long as there had been Republicans and longer—even during the days of their predecessors, the Whigs—a high tariff had proudly occupied a place in their platforms. In the era before the Sixteenth Amendment, a tariff—a tax on imports—was a major source of federal income. But Republicans wanted tariffs not for revenue, but for protection, as they liked to say: a tariff so high it would render foreign imports undesirable to the consumer. U.S.-based manufacturers could then raise their prices to levels just shy of these tax-induced heights and still appear competitive in the marketplace. Consumers would not buy imports; tariff revenue to the U.S. Treasury would actually fall; the higher prices Americans paid would go into the pockets of American companies.
In theory, these domestic industries would plow their tariff-produced profits into research and development, improving their products and paying higher wages to workers. In practice, this trickle-down theory worked no better in the nineteenth century than it did a century later, and tariffs helped make the owners of U.S. factories into the richest of men.
Through a series of cascading events (including a disastrous pander to western constituencies that undermined confidence in the dollar) these tariffs precipitated a massive depression that lasted for years.
Before the Republicans decided on this course of action, the economy was booming. As has been the continuing pattern ever since, they took that as an opportunity to adopt a trickle down policy so they could line the pockets of the already wealthy while average citizens paid the price. I understand why Trump and his Billionaire Boyz Club like it. I can’t imagine why anyone else would by such an obvious con:
The right thing to do on the heels of the boom on the 1880s and the government surplus might well have been to lower tariffs. But the McKinley Republicans wanted to give something to their Eastern supporters while they were wooing their Western supporters. And, in the way of nineteenth-century Republicans, they thought tariffs were a beautiful thing. They reduced government income, they increased government expenditure, and they undercut foreign investors’ confidence in U.S. reliability, leading to catastrophic effects for ordinary Americans.
Trump is preparting to do the same thing if he gets the chance. Don’t count on his essential stupidity to prevent it. He’s got a whole bunch of billionaires whispering in his ear. He’ll do what they tell him.
Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, experts on democratic systems and authors of “Tyranny of the Minority” have a great essay in today’s NY Times today about the various ways a society can protect itself from anti-democratic forces. I am including a gift link so that you can read the whole thing.
Here’s the intro:
Democratic self-rule contains a paradox. It is a system premised on openness and competition. Any ambitious party or politician should have a shot at running for office and winning. But what if a major candidate seeks to dismantle that very system?
America confronts this problem today. Donald Trump poses a clear threat to American democracy. He was the first president in U.S. history to refuse to accept defeat, and he illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Now, on the brink of returning to the White House, Mr. Trump is forthrightly telling Americans that if he wins, he plans to bend, if not break, our democracy.
Mr. Trump tells us he plans to prosecute his political rivals, including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney and other members of the Jan. 6 Select Committee; deploy the army to repress protest; and order the deportation of 15 to 20 million people, including some legal immigrants.
We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian.
They outline five different approaches to combatting assaults on democracy with examples of how it’s worked in other countries. It’s happened here too but in the past we quelled it with what they call “partisan gatekeeping”
In the absence of legal tools to block extremist threats, the responsibility for fending off such threats falls to political parties. In a healthy democracy, party leaders police their own ranks, expelling antidemocratic elements or refusing to nominate extremists or demagogues for public office.
American parties were effective gatekeepers throughout the 20th century. In the early 1920s, Henry Ford, the plain-spoken founder of Ford Motor Company, who was admired by many Americans but whose extremism and anti-Semitism was embraced by Hitler and the Nazis, considered running for president as a Democrat. Early polls showed him leading the pack of potential candidates. But Democratic leaders never seriously considered him. Finding the party’s gates closed, Ford abandoned his presidential aspirations.
Half a century ago, Republican leaders engaged in self-policing when they joined in congressional investigations into wrongdoing by President Richard Nixon. When Mr. Nixon’s abuse of power was brought to light, key Republican leaders supported impeachment. Their actions shifted public opinion in important ways. It was not until a group of Republican lawmakers came out in favor of impeachment beginning in late July 1974 that a clear majority of Americans supported Mr. Nixon’s removal from office.
We all know how that’s worked out with this current threat. Trump tried to stage a coup and incited a violent insurrection and his party refused to use the one tool that could have prevented him from ever doing it again: conviction in the second impeachment trial. They are accomplices now.
Right now we’re trying what they call a “containment strategy” which is to try to create a popular front consisting of ideological opponents coming together to stop this illiberal movement. That’s the strategy of people like Liz Cheney and others to work with a very unified Democratic coalition to defeat Trump. It’s difficult because most Republicans are cowards and traitors:
But containment is hard in a polarized two-party system. Most of the prominent Republicans who have not endorsed Mr. Trump, including Senator Mitt Romney, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former President George W. Bush, declined to back Ms. Harris, opting instead to remain on the sidelines. Other leading Republicans who declared Mr. Trump unfit for office after 2020, such as Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, and Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador, who ran against Mr. Trump this year, now support him. As long as Republican leaders who privately view Mr. Trump as a grave danger refuse to go public, most Republicans voters will remain unmoved.
There are more options, none of which are currently on the menu mostly because many people who should know better still don’t seem to see the threat.
These assaults on democracy have been happening with some frequency around the world so it says something that these authors say they’ve rarely seen major national candidates as openly authoritarian as Trump. It sent a chill down my spine to read that. After I read how lamely we are resisting it, I felt another one. This may very well be our last chance.
There’s a lot of chatter about the early vote with Donald Trump changing his tune and suggesting that the GOP is breaking all early vote records. (“Nobody’s ever seen anything like it!) It does appear that the early vote is going well but it’s worth taking a look at some analysis as to what it means.
Well, for one, we’re not in the peak of a deadly pandemic. The 2020 election saw the biggest liberalization of access to early voting as states adapted to the realities of the pandemic. And it was a great success, with over 100 million Americans safely casting their vote before Election Day. Of course, there was an asymmetry here. Democrats were more covid-conscious, and therefore more likely to cast an early vote (take Pennsylvania, where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans in the early vote by an almost 3 to 1 margin). And at the same time, Republicans largely abandoned voting by mail, due to Donald Trump claiming that mail voting was fraudulent.
Republicans acknowledge that their failure to drive their voters out early in 2020 put them at a strategic disadvantage, and have since committed significant resources to turning that around in this election. Just yesterday the New York Times reported “Republicans have spent months and millions of dollars on an effort to push former President Donald J. Trump’s most loyal supporters to change their minds about voting early.”
It is also important to keep in mind that many states have changed access to early voting. Michigan added early in person voting, while North Carolina put stricter voter ID laws in place. Georgia put additional regulations into place on mail voting.
All of these changes will make any comparisons in the current early vote to 2020 numbers extremely difficult, at best.
With Democrats shifting from early voting to Election Day, and Republicans doing the opposite, it is safe to say the expectation is that the early voting will skew much more Republican than it did in 2020. So at what point can we draw conclusions as to which side has an intensity advantage? We may not be able to, though when the results in a state defy expectations (as they currently appear to in Michigan and Wisconsin, where partisan models suggest the early vote is actually more Democratic than it was at this point in 2020), that is noteworthy.
He goes on to discuss the specifics in North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania which is very interesting. He concludes with this:
While banking votes early is obviously important, it’s also important who is voting. The early evidence is that Republicans are cannibalizing likely Election Day voters, not turning out lower propensity voters early, which is always the priority. As a matter of fact, across the battleground states, 92% of voters who have cast their ballot so far also voted in the 2020 election.
In short, it means that something that was already difficult before the massive vote-mode shifts we’re seeing happening this year will be exponentially more difficult. And in turn, we are seeing exponentially more flawed analyses, so buyer beware. As I noted earlier, my general approach this cycle is to stay in this context of expected vote-mode shifting, so when the early vote looks close to 2020 (or better) for Democrats, that is a very good sign, and when it looks worse for Democrats, like in North Carolina, we are left with the question of how much worse is problematic.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have been taken in before by early vote euphoria and I’m very resistant to making too much of it one way or another. As Bonier points out, comparisons are very dicey since the rules are changing and more and more people have availability (and, I would guess, the Republicans are making it harder in some places.) This is still a new thing and we just don’t have much to go on.
Update:
Bonier: They’re not creating new votes at this point… what we’re really looking for are signs of intensity and enthusiasm from each base. Where that comes from is looking at new voters or infrequent, lower-propensity voters and who’s turning out more of them.
Former President Donald Trump said Thursday that, if elected to a second term in November, he would immediately fire special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against Trump.
Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump if he plans to pardon himself or fire Smith on the day he would take the oath of office.
“It’s so easy — I would fire him within two seconds,” said Trump, who added that he got “immunity at the Supreme Court” and called Smith a “crooked person.”
Last year, Trump warned that Smith and other Justice Department officials would wind up in a mental institution if he’s re-elected.
He’s going to be a dictator on day one. He’s made that clear.
Three Republican state senators in North Carolina have demanded an investigation of state Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs. The state senators, Buck Newton (R), Amy Galey (R), and Danny Britt (R), claim that Riggs has “blatantly violated” the North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct. They called for an investigation into Riggs’ conduct by the North Carolina Judicial Standards Commission.
What was Riggs’ transgression? She mentioned reproductive rights in a campaign ad.
Riggs was appointed to fill a vacancy in the North Carolina Supreme Court in September 2023. It is an elected position, and now Riggs is running for a full eight-year term. She is in a closely contested race against Republican Jefferson Griffin, a current member of the North Carolina Court of Appeals.
In a television ad, Riggs says that “women should be in charge of our own reproductive health care.” She notes that the Republican nominee for Governor, Mark Robinson, has supported a total abortion ban and that Griffin, if elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court, “could decide if [Robinson’s] ban becomes law.”
How dare she!
In a letter to colleagues announcing their request for an investigation, the Republican Senators claim that the North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct “prohibits any judicial candidate, regardless of the office they seek, from taking a position on any issue that may appear before the court.” The letter was posted online this week by Billy Corriher, State Courts Manager at People’s Parity Project Action.
But the Republican Senators have mischaracterized the North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct. It does not say that judicial candidates cannot comment on any issue that may appear before the court. The North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct states that judges “should abstain from public comment about the merits of a pending proceeding in any state or federal court dealing with a case or controversy arising in North Carolina.” Riggs’ ad does not comment on any pending court proceeding.
To the contrary, the North Carolina Code of Judicial Conduct says that a judge seeking election may engage in “constitutionally protected political activity.” Stating that you believe that women should be in control of their reproductive health care is unquestionably constitutionally protected political speech.
The letter from the Republican Senators mirrors criticism of the ad from Griffin during an October 11 debate against Riggs. “We don’t need to be out there telling people how we’re going to vote on cases,” Griffin said. “We don’t need to be out there telling folks how another judge is going to vote on cases.”
But Griffin himself has made his views on abortion very clear. Last year, the North Carolina Court of Appeals heard a case that “dealt with the termination of a mother’s parental rights because she had committed a crime while she was pregnant.” Griffin signed onto an opinion that found the woman’s “parental rights could be terminated — even though the child hadn’t yet been born at the time of the mother’s crimes — because ‘life begins at conception.'”
The ruling Griffin signed enshrined the notion of “fetal personhood” into North Carolina law. There was widespread outrage about the ruling and its broader impact on the state. In response to the criticism, Griffin and the other judges who signed on took the usual step of formally withdrawing the decision. That means “the potential precedent it had established regarding personhood no longer exists.”
Now that he is seeking a promotion to the North Carolina Supreme Court, Griffin and his allies are attempting to make any discussion of reproductive rights off-limits.
But of course they are. Especially in the wake of Dobbs.
It would not be the first time Republicans in the N.C. state legislature have launched an investigations of a Democratic supreme court judge (also a woman).
In August 2023, North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Anita Earls received a letter from the commission informing her that she was under investigation for suspicion of violating the state’s Code of Judicial Conduct. The investigation centered around comments that Earls, the only Black woman on the court, made about the court’s approach to racial and gender discrimination in an interview with legal publication Law360.
In the interview, Earls was asked about a study that found that attorneys who argued before the North Carolina Supreme Court were primarily white and male. Earls responded that she sees “gender and race discrepancies” in the court caused by “implicit bias.” Earls noted that she thought the court treated white male attorneys with “more respect,” and that there were certain cases where she believed “[her] colleagues [were] unfairly cutting off a female advocate.” Earls also criticized the court’s decision to shut down diversity and equity efforts.
Earls clarified that she did not believe this was “conscious, intentional, racial animus,” but rather “that our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.” Earls did not discuss any cases that had come before the Supreme Court.
The NCGOP majority is not a clan to allow such details to get between them and a partisan inquisition. Earls countersued the Judicial Standards Commission in federal court, arguing that investigation interfered with her First Amendment rights.
Popular Information continues:
In November 2023, a federal judge rejected Earls’ request for a preliminary injunction to block the investigation. In January, the commission’s investigation was dropped without any discipline against Earls. In response, Earls dropped the lawsuit.
Addtional color commentary
There’s even more GOP monkey-wrenching afoot on the N.C. state Supreme Court (from August):
North Carolina Democrats blasted Republicans on the North Carolina Supreme Court Thursday for ruling that Justice Phil Berger Jr. should not have to remove himself from a case concerning his father, Republican Senate leader Phil Berger Sr.
The case involves the power to appoint state and local elections boards. That power is currently held by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper. Republican legislators passed a law to give that power to themselves instead, and Cooper is challenging that law in court.
You’d think that would be a clear-cut case for recusal and you would be wrong in a state where Republicans dominate both branches of the legislature and the Supreme Court.
Sort of like Wisconsin not so long ago. There in January 2023, Republicans filed a similar complaint against Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate, Judge Janet Protasiewicz:
Randall Cook, a Barron County resident and GOP supporter, filed the complaint against Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Janet Protasiewicz. The complaint seeks to have the Wisconsin Judicial Commission investigate whether Protasiewicz has declared how she’d rule in cases the high court could eventually see regarding Wisconsin’s abortion ban and the legality of its legislative maps.
Those complaints against Protasiewicz were dismissed without action in September last year.
In North Carolina, Riggs faces a Judicial Standards Commission that Republicans reconfigured in October last year after the Earls and Protasiewicz dismissals.
“Republicans took away the state bar’s appointments to the commission and took those appointments for themselves,” Slate reported. The new commission will be comprised of “only judges and laypeople—no attorneys,” all chosen by the gerrymandered Republican legislature. Slate concludes, “This gives the GOP near-total control over enforcement of judicial ethics rules.”
“The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary,” wrote Robert Paxton, 92, in Jan. 11, 2021 Newsweek article. Previously reluctant to use a loaded term like fascism to describe the Trump presidency, Trump’s “open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election,” was the breaking point for the retired Columbia University historian of fascism.
Calling someone or something “fascist” is the supreme expression of moral revulsion, an emotional impulse that is difficult to resist. “The temptation to draw parallels between Trump and the fascist leaders of the 20th century is understandable,” the British historian Richard J. Evans wrote in 2021. “How better to express the fear, loathing, and contempt that Trump arouses in liberals than by comparing him to the ultimate political evil?” The word gets lobbed at the left too, including by Trump at Democrats. But fascism does have a specific meaning, and in the last few years the debate has turned on two questions: Is it an accurate description of Trump? And is it useful?
Most commentators fall into one of two categories: a yes to the first and second, or a no to both. Paxton is somewhat unique in staking out a position as yes and no. “I still think it’s a word that generates more heat than light,” Paxton said as we sat looking out over the Hudson River. “It’s kind of like setting off a paint bomb.”
Cokie’s Law resurfaces
But that paint is already splattered. Multiple Trump administration officials, including former John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general and Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, employed the term. Mark Esper, former Trump secretary of defense, won’t use the word fascism but tells CNN “it’s hard to say that” that Trump doesn’t fit the definition: “He certainly has those inclinations.”
The proverbial cat (Trump believes immigrants are eating) is out of the bag. Everyone knows it. Kamala Harris knows it too. Per Cokie’s Law, “it’s out there.”
ANDERSON COOPER: Do you believe Donald Trump is a fascist?
KAMALA HARRIS: Yes I do. And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted pic.twitter.com/CgIvKmCkXU
In “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recount Trump asking Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?” Kelly asked, knowing full well Trump had no idea who Bismark was. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?”
“Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals,” Trump said in Kelly’s retelling. Those generals tried and failed to assassinate the fascist dictator, not that with his ignorance of history Trump knew.
Paxton tells the Times that, in a way, Trump did not set out to launch a fascist movement, but the consummate marketer nurtured it:
Whatever Trumpism is, it’s coming “from below as a mass phenomenon, and the leaders are running to keep ahead of it,” Paxton said. That was how, he noted, Italian Fascism and Nazism began, when Mussolini and Hitler capitalized on mass discontentment after World War I to gain power. Focusing on leaders, Paxton has long held, is a distraction when trying to understand fascism. “What you ought to be studying is the milieu out of which they grew,” Paxton said. For fascism to take root, there needs to be “an opening in the political system, which is the loss of traction by the traditional parties” he said. “There needs to be a real breakdown.”
And here we are. It’s the patriarchy that is breaking down. Trump and Trump’s Men don’t like it. Not one bit.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) wrote about the discontent young men feel at his substack in 2023. The mores that secured men, especially white men, atop the social ladder for millennia are crumbling. First came the civil rights, then came women’s liberation, then came Obama, triggering the alt right movement and the Trump backlash. Now the country faces choosing not only the second Black (and first Asian) president, but the first women president (for the second time). Murphy spoke about it last night with MSNBC’s Alex Wagner [timestamp 2:38]. In a post-patriarchal world, Trump promises to dial America back to a time when men were men and knew where they stood. It’s an explict part of Trump’s pitch.
Team Trump is already flooding social media with “I know you are but what am I” memes depicting Democrats as the real fascists (or communists; they can’t decide). They’re already drawing up their enemies list.
Guess what? We’re not going back. Not without a fight.
Tucker Carlson’s vision of a Trump presidency is that “dad comes home” and says to America, “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. … It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”pic.twitter.com/fh25KmyYmG
Trump had a “town hall” with a bunch of rightwing Christians today. He’s been doing a lot of those lately. They must be concerned about the evangelical turnout:
Trump: "They say — and I would agree with this 100 percent — nobody has done what I've done for Israel." pic.twitter.com/rvdLLU8RiF
I don’t know about you but I find it very concerning that he’s talking to Netanyahu every day, no doubt telling him to keep that war going to hurt the Democrats and promising that as soon as he wins he’ll give the green light for Bibi to go wild.
How can this be legal? I know it violates the Logan Act but that’s a toothless law that’s been violated many times. But we’ve never seen anything like this before. Trump is running a shadow government from Mar-a-lago.
By the way, there’s a rumor all over twitter that there’s a video of Trump groping the young daughter of a wealthy donor that’s about to break. The Trumpers are all saying it’s a deep fake. I have no idea if it’s true. But I also doubt that it would make any difference because the right will convince themselves that it’s a Democratic deep fake election interference ploy and who knows, it might even help him. Whatever.
It also may be something like the last big rumpor to take the internet by storm — that Beyonce was going to appear at the final night of the convention. It didn’t happen. This probably won’t either.
Update — Oh my God:
BREAKING: In a senile moment, Donald Trump just claimed that while he was President, he stopped a war with France. This obviously never happened. Trump’s brain has gone to rot. pic.twitter.com/oMzg7JQvW7
Which party will win more congressional delegations, in case that matters for the presidential election? Jump to our answer.
What happens if you walk into the wrong polling place by mistake? Jump to our answer.
I spent hours trying to research our local candidates’ platforms and it was fruitless. Shouldn’t every candidate have a website with their platform?! Jump to our answer.
I can’t seem to get people to care about boards of canvassers. Can you explain the significance of the offices that play a role in elections? Jump to our answer.
It’s almost here folks and if we’ve learned anything in these looney MAGA years, it’s that we need to pay attention to the state and local elections where the Republicans have focused much of their energy. At some point that power starts to accumulate and there’s no end to what they can get away with.
