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.
BREAKING: Harris reacts to John Kelly's warnings in the NYT that Trump spoke positively about Hitler and would rule as a dictator.
"All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is … from the people who know him best," she said. pic.twitter.com/vHC3E93vUU
It’s true and it’s necessary to take that seriously. It’s also a strategy. Here’s Greg Sargent in a fascinating interview with Ron Brownstein, one of the best:
Sargent: Ron, you sometimes hear pundits argue that Harris should stop putting so much effort into attacking Trump as a threat to democracy and highlighting his authoritarianism, that the economy and health care will matter more to swing voters and so forth. But in your reporting, you’re finding that this large reservoir of voters, right-leaning moderates, independents, pretty affluent suburban, are absolutely gettable with messages about Trump’s authoritarianism. They’re deeply troubled and motivated by the anti-democratic threat Trump poses, right? Those voters are there. They’re a big growth opportunity for Harris still, and they are the swing constituency now, or at least one of them. Would it be malpractice not to go after them in this way?
Brownstein: Big is a strong word, in terms of how many voters we’re talking about on any front. But yes, I thought her appearances with Liz Cheney this week were a precision-guided missile aimed at exactly the voters she needs in exactly the places where they are most concentrated with exactly the message that will move them. I thought it could not have been more precisely targeted at what she can actually achieve.
She has made progress on the economy, particularly on questions of “Who fights for you?” But in the end, the share of voters who think that they were better off under Trump’s policies than Biden’s policies before Covid is an insurmountable obstacle if the frame of the election is solely “Who is going to deliver more for your bottom line?” She’s gotten more competitive on that, but if that’s the question people are asking the last week and going into the ballot box, I don’t think she can get there. But there’s no reason for that to be the question, right? Trump, every day, shows you why that shouldn’t be the question.
Sargent: Right, but there is a bit of a split-screen effect here. Harris is making these major appeals to affluent suburbanites, Republican-leaning, educated women, and so forth on the anti-democratic threat on how disgusting Trump is and what a menace he is, but an immense amount of resources is going into Democratic ads about the economy, touting her plans to reduce childcare costs, health care costs, home-buying costs, etc. Much of the ad spending is going to that according to some analysis I’ve seen. That’s aimed at these more working-class voters, both nonwhite and white. How do we make sense of these two tracks happening at the same time? Are all those ads just an effort to just contain Trump’s advantage while they win the election or try to win it on the anti-democratic stuff? How do we think about this?
Brownstein: Just think of it as different tracks aimed at different voters. In 2012, [I was] writing a story about how Obama was focusing on Romney as a plutocrat who closed the factory in town in the Rust Belt battlegrounds, which by then included Ohio, and running more on values in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. You have to be able to communicate to multiple audiences at the same time. As we said, all votes are fungible. For Harris in the former blue wall states, so I always put that former in there to distinguish, she has to get into the mid 40s among the noncollege white women. She can grow then among the college white women, try to hold her own among the college white men. And then she could withstand some erosion among the blue-collar white men and Black men.
Don’t forget, the paradox is that these states look best for her because generally speaking, Harris, like Biden before her, is holding the 2020 levels of support more among whites than nonwhites. College-educated white women, Greg, are three to four times as big a share of the electorate across these three states as Black men. So if she can increase, I hope my math isn’t wrong here, five or six points among college white women in these states—which don’t forget Biden won—she could withstand losses of 15 points, I think, among the Black men, which is not going to happen.
New ad from the Harris campaign on reproductive freedom, ahead of the VP's speech in Texas on Friday. This is a very tough one to watch, but it's incredibly important to. Thank you so much to Ondrea and Ceasar for trusting us to share their story. pic.twitter.com/ytJQg2ONiv
I urge you to watch this. This sort of thing is happening all over the country where there are Trump abortion bans. People’s futures are being destroyed. Women’s health is being ruined and some are dying. Families are going through desperate heartache at an already traumatic time in their lives.
We are an uncivilized country for doing this to our own citizens. If they are rewarded for this by re-electing that monster who made it all happen he will genuinely believe that he is impervious to all accountability. At that point it will be hard to argue that he’s not.
Media critic Margaret Sullivan is exhorting the media to discuss the stakes in the election in these last two weeks, noting that there have been some good signs in the last couple of weeks .She also taks issue with the people who say that we should all just calm down and look at the polling averages instead of stressing out. (I say don’t even look at those, for all the reasons Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky lay out in this article in TNR.)
Sullivan explains why even those of us who know that the polls will drive us crazy and are trying to keep the horse race in prspective are still freaking out over the election: the stakes:
Believe me, it’s not the shifting polls that are stressing me out; it’s the knowledge that if Trump is elected, American democracy may well be over. Her take reminded me of the infamous column from Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post on Nov. 4, 2016: “Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins.”
Readers, we weren’t.
I’m barely sleeping and drinking too much and generally stressing out not because of the polls which are out of my hands but because I know it’s going to be even worse this time. Way worse.
the morning after on the record revelations about a candidate’s admiration for Hitler and the generals who crushed Tiananmen pic.twitter.com/YZDwSZnGjJ
Fox host Brian Kilmeade justifies Trump wanting German generals
Kilmeade: I can absolutely see him go it'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever pic.twitter.com/6lpjH6foEk
The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters:
Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.
This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.
What did move the needle was this message:
Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.”
As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.
I’m going to guess that his own chief of staff calling him a Hitler loving fascist might have an effect.
Back in 2015, before the Republican primaries when Donald Trump was considered nothing more than a circus sideshow, some of us were noting that his rhetoric and agenda bore the hallmarks of the “f” word: fascism. Historian Rick Perlstein wrestled with it as early as September of that year. I wrote about it just a couple of months later.
At the time, Trump was extolling the virtues of torture, talking about a massive surveillance program to be used again American Muslims and promising to send Syrian refugees, including children, back to their war torn country. He hadn’t yet declared his intention to ban all Muslims from coming to the US but it was easy to see the writing on the wall. It was also very easy to see that fascism was on the menu in the the United States of America if Donald Trump won the election
That was nine years ago and there have been zillions of pixels spilled about Trump’s dishonesty, corruption, unfitness as well as his authoritarian philosophy. We’ve learned over the years, through many reports, memoirs and tell-all books that Trump tried to govern in dictatorial fashion at every turn but was either too mentally undisciplined to follow through or was held back by people around him who kept him from acting on his worst impulses.
This campaign has shown him ratcheting up the fascist rhetoric to previously unseen heights, saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” and calling his political opponents “vermin” and “enemies within” that must be purged.
Trump follows in the footsteps of Hitler and Mussolini by calling his opposition "vermin" during an alarming Veterans Day speech. pic.twitter.com/HC6ShJ8XAN
Lately he’s even suggested that he would call out the military against “the enemy from within.:
Trump to Bartiromo on what worries him about election day: "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within … sick people, radical left lunatics. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military." pic.twitter.com/twRsilNJnz
Yet Trump has very little respect for the military either. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg chronicled his odd antipathy toward it during his first term, the details of which were further confirmed bya Susan Glasser of the New Yorker and Peter Baker of the NY Times in their book The Divider: Trump in the White House and the NY Times’ Michael Schmidt in his book Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, among others. They all relied on former General and Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly as a primary source for such anecdotes as Trump’s contemptuous references to service members as “suckers and losers” and his frequent demands to use the military unconstitutionally.
Goldberg has published a piece in the Atlantic this week with some new revelations about Trump’s disdain for the military, quoting from witnesses and contemporaneous notes an episode in which Trump exploded over the cost of a funeral for a service member which he’d promised to help pay for:
“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “Fucking people, trying to rip me off.”
The lawyer for the family said he never paid it but members of the family say he did. His loyal henchman Meadows naturally denies that he ever said those things. Nobody can say that it doesn’t sound like something he would say.
Goldberg also recapitulates the stories about Trump’s fascination with Adolph Hitler as told to him and the other authors by John Kelly. Trump had said to Kelly at one point, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” and Kelly explained that those German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler three times and almost succeeded. Trump didn’t believe him, insisting that they were totally loyal. Kelly went on the record with about that conversation this week:
This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
Trump also asked at one point who the “good guys” were in WWI. Apparently, he missed that semester in military school.
Michael Schmidt also got Kelly on the record for the NY Times yesterday and published voice recordings of his comments. Schmidt asked him if he thinks Trump is a fascist:
“Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy,” he said.
Mr. Kelly said that definition accurately described Mr. Trump.
“So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America,” Mr. Kelly said. He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”
“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Mr. Kelly said. Mr. Trump “never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world — and by power, I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted,” Mr. Kelly said.
Watch w/ Sound up! "I'm looking at the definition of fascism. It’s a far-right movement with a dictatorial leader and forcible suppression of opposition — So certainly in my experience, he falls into the definition of a fascist." – General John Kelly Trump's Chief of Staff in… pic.twitter.com/7nEjAX32Tx
Kelly isn’t the only former general saying this. Just a week or so ago, Bob Woodward reported in his new book “War” that the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley describes Donald Trump as “fascist to the core” calling “the most dangerous person to this country.” Woodward told The Bulwark podcast that former Defense Secretary and Retired Gen. James Mattis agreed with this assessment.
It’s good that these former high ranking military leaders are saying all this. But they really need to go on 60 Minutes or at least cut an ad so that people who aren’t reading the Atlantic and the NY Times (or Salon, for that matter) will know about it. There’s no reason for them not to do it at this point. If they fear retribution from Trump, I’m afraid that ship sailed. You can bet they are already on his list. If they just don’t want to be in the line of fire it’s a sad comment on the military ethos for which they claim to be speaking.
Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s an ignorant fascist, but there’s really no requirement for education to be one. It’s driven by an authoritarian, nationalist, racist instinct and that he has in spades. He may not have been fully able to accomplish his true desires in his first term since he was so unfamiliar with even the rudimentary levers of power but he’s no longer afraid to go for it. Here’s Trump on the campaign trail just yesterday:
“As president, you have tremendous — it’s called extreme power. You have extreme power. You can, just by the fact, you say, ‘Close the border,’ and the border’s closed. That’s it. Very, very simple. You don’t need all of this nonsense that they talk about.”
If he wins there will be no John Kellys or Mark Milleys to stand in the way. He’ll only be served by accomplices who agree with him.
Don’t expect his minions to balk:
Scott Jennings on CNN just dismissed this by saying “if you’re worried about Hitler there are thousands of Hitlers running around college campuses” https://t.co/NKfNtKXKCS
Crowd of Trump supporters marching on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, ultimately leading the building being breached and several deaths. Photo by TapTheForwardAssist (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Despite minimal evidence, a full-bore effort is underway to make Democrats think Kamala Harris is losing the election. This effort is abetted by preternaturally anxious Democrats expressing their concerns on social media.
I have written a lot recently about the vibe shift in Democrats after Kamala Harris’s nomination. I don’t think the data validates such an extreme shift in emotions. However, I won’t shame anyone for being on edge these last two weeks. The stakes are enormous. Reproductive freedom, health care, democracy, and the planet are on the line in an election that could be decided by the weather in a random suburban Wisconsin county.
Simon Rosenberg has been on about Republicans flooding the zone with conservative “red wave” polls meant to skew polling averages in Donald Trump’s favor. This is a GOP psyop meant to a) depress Democrat enthusiasm and, b) lay the groundwork for another “stop the steal” movement post-Nov. 5. And if you’ve been paying attention, it’s clear that that that is when the Trump campaign expects to win the presidency. Not at the polls on Election Day. Look at how he’s campaigning.
Pfeiffer admits he tends to hang out “on the dark side,” but offers a counter to the GOP effort to psych out their opponents. Hope, he writes, “is a powerful force.” There are several reasons why Harris may have the advantage.
Kamala Harris is Better Liked
Harris Has a (Slightly) Easier Path to 270
Trump is Not Closing Strong
Harris Runs the Better Field Operation
Pfeiffer offers reasons behind all those. But there are wild cards beyond those four. Trump’s campaign has nowehere to grow. A large percentage of the Republican base voted for Nikki Haley in the primaries, even after she dropped out on March 6. She garnered 23 percent of the vote on March 5 in the swing state of North Carolina. Will those Haley voters return to the Trump cult fold or what?
The large expansion in independent voter identification over the last four years (where voters register that way) means that simply counting Ds and Rs as early voting continues is all but meaningless. How they will vote this year is anyone’s guess. They still tell pollsters that the economy is a top issue. Nate Silver’s “gut” this morning acknowledges reasons why polling may underestimate Trump support, or else be biased against Harris. (See Rosenberg above.)
The best Silver can offer is, “Don’t be surprised if a relatively decisive win for one of the candidates is in the cards — or if there are bigger shifts from 2020 than most people’s guts might tell them.”
Then of course, there is the Dobbs decision. Elections where women’s reproductive rights measures were on the ballot consistently tipped in Democrats’ favor even in conservative states. The horror stories of pregnant women bleeding out in parking lots have been powerful. The backlash against Trump and Dobbs has not gone away.
We just don’t know how it will all play out. Just don’t get psyched out. We are, as Dem strategists insist, within the margin of effort.
One of my favorite TV scenes was in a show called “6 Feet Under” in which Kathy Bates brings her friend to a department store and tells her to go ahead and shoplift because once a woman goes through menopause she’s invisible. It’s kind of true …
New polling shows Kamala Harris leads Donald Trump with women over the age of 50 by more than any presidential candidate since 2016. The survey shows that 54% of women in that demographic plan to vote for the vice president, over just 42% for Trump.
It’s a huge improvement from Joe Biden, who only led Trump by three points with women over 50 in January. The numbers are also better than Hillary Clinton‘s numbers in 2016, who polled 48%-40% over Trump.
[…]
‘Our polling over the years has shown them to be a key swing voting bloc,’ said AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond.
In the same survey, Democrats led Republicans 51%-42% on votes for who should control Congress. Overwhelmingly, women over 50 say that the economy and affordability are their biggest issue.
‘Without abortion, the women love me,’ Trump insisted.
They may be invisible but they vote. They really vote. And they affirmatively like Kamala Harris. On the other hand, I would guess hat quite a few of them really hate Donald Trump and JD Vance who said just the other day that post menopausal women’s only purpose in life is to watch the grandkids or Bernie Moreno in Ohio who said that women over 50 have no reason to care about abortion rights.
