It’s time for this message: I listened to the Pod Save America interview with David Plouffe who’s working on the Harris campaign and he says they have found in their qualitative research that this message resonates. I don’t know if that’s meaningful, but I hope it is because it would mean that the batshit crazy cult worship is confined to a minority and the Democrats may win. Think about it. Here’s you have Trump acting like a lunatic on the stump and Republicans like Cheney and Pence along with most of his cabinet saying he’s unfit. If most people don’t find that disturbing we’re in bigger trouble than I realized. I’m reminded of Obama’s righteous indignation at his speech last week. “When did this become ok?”
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There are already Trump AR-15s Politico reporters watched 20 Trump rallies and, to their credit, reported what they heard. Donald Trump is still preaching the dark “weird shit” of American carnage eight years after his inaugural speech. Rapists and murderers are everywhere, and “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” The monsters are due on Maple Street. Trump is one Grade A paranoiac, and he’s likely getting a lot of this from Discount Goebbels. Haitians, Venezuelans, Mexicans, and Chinese immigrants are targets. And you too, Dear Reader (Heather Cox Richardson): And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents.
Watering N.C. with the blood of rescuers. Or something. FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell warned that disinformation spread about Hurricane Helene relief in North Carolina would spawn threats against government workers and impede rescue and relief efforts. She was right (Washington Post): LAKE LURE, N.C. — Federal emergency response personnel on Saturday had employees operating in hard-hit Rutherford County, N.C., stop working and move to a different area because of concerns over “armed militia” threatening government workers in the region, according to an email sent to federal agencies helping with response in the state. Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately.
Following up on Tom’s post below. Note Trump’s contribution: And half of the voters want more of this. Apparently, they love it.
Better late than never, Axios has decided to look at what will happen if Trump wins the White House. In this case their patented style is actually quite useful: There’s much more on topics such as health care, social spending, trade and economic policy etc., all of which are nightmares. I just highlighted the worst of it. Axios will likely publish the same analysis for Harris but I think we all know that it will not be this kind of fascist agenda, even if she were to win the trifecta. I would imagine they will present it as a similar threat to what you just read above, however. And that’s a big part of our problem. For all of Trump’s “distancing” this is little different than Project 2025. The wingnuts always have some ridiculous plan and nobody pays attention to it because it’s so outlandish and extreme. This time, we must. They’re serious.
Chris Wallace was on TV promoting his new book about the 1960 election and they featured this quote from Nixon after he presided over the counting of the electoral votes as VP after his razor thin loss to Kennedy: “I don’t think we can have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our Constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing and respecting and honoring institutions of self-government” I hadn’t heard that before. Nixon was famously bitter about that loss and there were plenty of reasons to be suspicious about it. But he didn’t whine like a little baby and throw a tantrum. Even he had more dignity than that. Here’s Al Gore, in the same position, presiding over the same process in 2000, when he and the Democrats had a much better case for objecting to the results than Nixon in 1960 or Trump did in 2020. (He won the popular vote and the election was decided in a 5-4 partisan decision of the Supreme Court …) That’s how it used to be done.
I think everyone reading this already knows that Trump is planning to purge the nation of millions of non-citizens. Most people think he’s just going to round up undocumented immigrants (of color, he certainly won’t target any Swedes or Brits who’ve overstayed their visas and are working illegally.) This past weekend he amended that to say that he’s going to deport Haitians who are in the country legally so I think we can assume that he’s not going to stick to any of those pesky legal niceties. He plans to deport millions and millions of foreigners from the “shithole countries” he loathes so much. But as Philip Bump points out in this piece, and I’ve been writing here non-stop for months, on the stump he’s more and more often targeting “the enemy within” by which he means his political enemies: “You know, I always say: We have the outside enemy, so you can say China, you can say Russia, you can say Kim Jong Un, you can say — but that’s — it’s going to be fine.
Same boat parade: Eric and Lara forgot to put life jackets on their small kids which is bad enough. And they had their children on a boat with a huge Trump head with blood all over it which was, at one time, considered to be so outrageous that they destroyed Kathy Griffin’s career over it. But that’s just the Trump family. You would think, however, that someone would have said something about the Nazis in the boat parade and maybe told them to leave or at least said something about it today. But no, like his father, Eric obviously believes there were very find people on both sides.
Weirdo billionaire Trumper Bill Ackman responded to Stevens by daring him to respond to his full post, point by point —- and Stevens did it. I think it’s worth sharing with all of you here: Bill, saying you support the candidate who has promised to cut taxes for billionaires vs. the candidate who will raise taxes on billionaires, but you don’t really support the tax cuts is a bit like the old “I read Playboy for the articles.” But fine, let’s assume you are convinced that all the benefits of a Trump presidency compensate for the burden of having your taxes cut. Let’s look at your 33 reasons. But first, let’s dispense with the misty-eyed absurdity that you can vote for an openly racist Trump, but you’d like it known that you don’t support racism. The ballot box isn’t a cafeteria where you can go down the line and pick and choose what you like. If you vote for Trump, you are voting for a criminal out on bail who describes non-white immigrants with the same language as National Socialism described Jews. Don’t pretend that by voting for Trump you get some pass because you insist that’s not who you are.
You should… That’s right. The RCP average at the end of October in 2012 was a virtual tie between Obama and Romney. I’ve been saying for a while that I think this election is more like 2012 than 2020 or 2016. We’ll see. But I thought it might be worth looking at where we were in October in a recent election the Democrats won handily.