This is kind of depressing but it’s important. Dan Pfeiffer took a look at the gender gap and it’s a large as ever. But the younger men of Gen Z are far more likely to vote for Trump this year than they were in 2020. And it’s a problem. If the current numbers hold, Trump will win the election: In the NBC News Stay Tuned poll of Gen Z: The sample of men under 30 is too small to get a real picture of why. In focus groups of young men who previously supported Democrats but are open to voting for Trump in 2024 many cite dissatisfaction with the economy, tremendous cynicism with politics, distrust of institutions, and a sense of being left behind or undervalued by our current culture. Young men are Trump’s top target in this race. That’s why his convention featured a wife beating MMA fighter introducing him and he entered the stage to the tune of “it’s a man’s world.” Trump’s campaign advisers explicitly target young men — of all races.
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Maaaybe…. The indictment of Russian agents bankrolling a bunch of very heavy hitting right wing “influencers” says those influencer had no idea what was going on and they all insist they were “victims” (who were being paid as much as 400k a month to make some videos.) The Daily Beast story summarizes it as well as anyone: Several right-wing American influencers described themselves as “victims” after the Justice Department accused a company they worked with of being a front for a covert Russian influence campaign. Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin all released statements Wednesday after prosecutors claimed a Tennessee-based firm—identified in multiple media reports as Tenet Media—was secretly funded and directed by Russian state media employees. The company, which lists Pool, Johnson, Rubin, and others as its “talent,” published English-language videos online with content that is “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s aim of “amplifying U.S. domestic divisions” to undermine American opposition to Russian interests like its war in Ukraine, prosecutors say.
The stock price of Trump’s media company Truth Social continues its plunge. It’s downright spectacular: Shares of former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company have fallen so much that his onetime $6 billion stake is now worth about $2 billion. The stock price of Trump Media & Technology Group, closed Wednesday at $16.98, and is down more than 74 percent from the high-water mark it hit after Trump Media’s merger in March with a publicly traded shell company. Mr. Trump is the single largest shareholder of Trump Media, the parent company of Truth Social, owning 115 million shares — a roughly 60 percent stake. The slide in the share price has accelerated over the past few weeks as the presidential campaign has heated up and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has narrowly overtaken Mr. Trump in most national polls. Shares of Trump Media often have risen and fallen in tandem with investor perception of how Mr. Trump is doing in the presidential race. The stock is also falling in advance of a pivotal date — the expiration of a contractual lockup that has precluded Mr.
He paid his taxes late. They threw the book at him. I fully expect that they are going to throw him in jail for doing something that millions of Americans do every year and simply pay fines and interest. But this is Hunter Biden not an ordinary American and they were planning to expose every sordid detail of his descent into addiction hell in order to embarrass him and his family, especially his father. Meanwhile, Donald Trump walks free and will likely never see the inside of a jail cell. If you think that makes sense you must be a member of the Trump cult.
NPR just reported that one of two staffers involved in the altercation at Arlington National Cemetery is a deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s reelection bid. The two staffers, according to a source with knowledge of the incident, are deputy campaign manager Justin Caporale and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team. I thought it was Chris LaCivita or Cory Lewandowski. One of the misogynistic a-holes on Donald Trump’s campaign staff pushed a female employee at Arlington National Cemetery. It’s probably Chris “I’m the a-hole who created Swift Boating” LaCivita, but it might be Cory “I don’t have to be honest with the media” Lewandowski. As of Sept 5th 2024, the DoD and the DOJ aren’t going after them for what happened at Arlington. Why? The FEC isn’t going after the Trump campaign for their use of campaign footage from Arlington in an ad. Why? The outlet that broke the story, NPR, KNOWS exactly who did what, but they aren’t revealing that information. Why?
Tim Walz on Labor Day The Labor Day clip of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz speaking in Milwaukee (“very good at this” below) went viral on Monday. After I transcribed and posted the gist of it on several platforms, it went nuts on Mastodon. (Don’t ask me why, but I seem to get more traffic on Mastodon than on X, Blue Sky or Threads.) As a teacher and coach for years, Walz said, “I was a dues-paying member of my union.” When Republican critics accused him of being “in the pocket of organized labor,” he said, “That’s a damn lie. I am the pocket!” Want to attack him for standing up for collective bargaining, for fair wages, safe working conditions, for health care and retirement, have at it. Democrats have to run for something, Walz continued, not just against the other guys. Fair wages and safe working conditions, expanded health care and addressing climate change, etc. are on Democrats’ agenda. Just one vote made the difference in moving Minnesota forward. “That’s our vision for the country,” Walz said in asking the crowd to give Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and President Kamala Harris working majorities.
Pithy turns of phrase for dysfunctional personalities Tim Miller of The Bulwark appearing the other day on MSNBC used the phrase “emotional support cougar” to describe the over-made-up groupies who decorate Donald Trump’s Mar-al-Lago resort. The term seems not to have originated with Miller, but perhaps with comedian Carla Collins. Miller deployed the phrase to reference Trump’s regular need to run home to them in his Florida safe space. But the desperation behind the need is broader than Trump, his sons, and his hangers-on. Over at The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klaas explores the epidemic of toxic masculinity embodied by Trump and guys like Elon Musk. The day after Gov. Tim Walz modeled a healthier masculinity in addressing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a professional purveyor of the destructive kind, Andrew Tate, was placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge for human trafficking in minors.
Aside from the obvious, his actual performance was just terrible. Here a just a couple of data points I ran across this morning: I guess when people say they liked his policies, they meant his policies to deny people health insurance. How about this one? Or how about Trump’s claim that his tax cuts were the largest in history. (“nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”) How about Trump’s new crusade against Joe Biden in which he claims that nobody died on his watch? He lied, of course: 65 military personnel died in war zones during Trump’s administration. It’s common for some gold star families to blame the administration in charge for the deaths of their loved ones. Weirdly, since Benghazi it only seems to be right wing gold star families blaming Democrats. I didn’t see much of this during Trump’s tenure. Maybe all the families of the fallen were Trump fans? Or, more likely, the non-Trump fan families weren’t interested in becoming part of a political campaign.
Trump has primed his cult to believe that Kamala Harris is an illegitimate president. Of course he has. “Obama wasn’t born in the US!” “Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to run!”because of her emails. “Joe Biden didn’t win, they cheated!” Now he’s laying the groundwork to whine that Harris should not have been allowed to run. And his people believe it: Jason Streem, also 46, a dentist from the Cleveland suburbs who supports Trump, objected to the way Harris became the nominee. “She was never part of the running process,” he said in a follow-up interview. “She never received the primary votes.” He called it “the most undemocratic way of picking a nominee.” “It just threw me off,” complained Roger Sierra, 28, of Miami, an independent who supports Trump.