A new biography of Mitch McConnell drawing on his diaries and oral histories has some interesting tidbits: The comments about Trump quoted in the book came in the weeks before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Trump was then actively trying to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden. McConnell feared this would hurt Republicans in two Georgia runoffs and cost them the Senate majority. Democrats won both races. Publicly, McConnell had congratulated Biden after the Electoral College certified the presidential vote and the senator warned his fellow Republicans not to challenge the results. But he did not say much else. Privately, he said in his oral history that “it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days” until Trump left office, and that Trump’s behavior “only underscores the good judgment of the American people.
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Let’s just say persuasion isn’t on the menu Ed Kilgore outlines the Trump campaign strategy to “win” the election on election day. It won’t surprise you to learn that they aren’t trying to persuade people to vote for him: The Trump campaign, the Republican Party, and its super-PAC allies are devoting a lot of resources to suppressing the Democratic vote in key states. These strategies include: -Insisting on voter-roll purges to eliminate people who don’t respond quickly to official verification inquiries, whether or not they are appropriate. (In the past, overzealous purges have disqualified hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, most notably in Florida in 2000.) -Promoting ridiculously strict rules for mail ballots that don’t have anything to do with their integrity (e.g., tossing them out due to extremely minor address or date errors without the possibility of curing them). -Flooding the polling places with poll watchers trained to challenge individual ballots that might go to Kamala Harris on a variety of sketchy grounds.
Eric Levitz at Vox takes a look at the continuing loss of working class white voters and the analysis shows that unions haven’t turned out to be the great fix everyone thought they would be: The rightward drift of America’s working class disconcerted progressives, who generated a variety of ideas for reversing it. But one of their primary prescriptions could be summarized in a single word: unions. After all, the erosion of Democrats’ working-class support had coincided with the collapse of organized labor in the United States. There were many reasons to think the latter had caused the former. Thus, to prevent Democrats’ working-class support from diminishing further, the thinking went, the party needed to deliver for existing trade unions, whose demands Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had sometimes defied. Meanwhile, to lay the seeds for a broader realignment of working-class voters, Democrats needed to make it easier for workers to organize by reforming federal labor laws. The Biden administration appears to have embraced this analysis.
It can’t be any clearer. As it turns out, the same gentleman who asked Trump about January 6th last night also asked Kamala Harris a question at her Univision town hall last week. He asked her about the rumors that the administration wasn’t doing anything for the hurrican victims and what they planned to do in the future. Watch them back-to-back. Something tells me Mr. González is undecided no more. pic.twitter.com/I35zz3zPY4 — Ms. M 🪷 Read Project 2025 (@MsMalarkey24) October 17, 2024 Guess what? Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump? Undecided voter: No Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision? Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump Q: Did you receive the answer you were looking for from Trump? Undecided voter: No Q: You came here undecided to this town hall. Have you made a decision? Undecided voter: I am not going to vote for Trump https://t.co/LHAsYkjdkb pic.twitter.com/EeEzzrDUOx — Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 17, 2024
Harris handles a protester: And then there was that debate: Is she strong enough? You bet she is. And that seems to be the main complaint among those who say they’re not happy with Trump but just don’t think she has the “strength and the stamina” (remember that one?) to be president. It’s sexism, of course. But I think her toughness is obvious now. She’s making power moves. And it’s impressive.
Just what is Kamala’s position on seabed mining? Rachel Maddow last night put the lie to oligarch nonsense about their support for Trump being a business decision. Um, no. Think Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter was a sound business decsision? “In the history of modern economics America’s three-decade outperformance is remarkable,” declares The Economist. Why would “business” types hand it over to a felon whose entire economic plan is 19th-century tariffs? Remember those “Nine out of ten doctors prefer” ads for personal care products back when color TV was young? Well, The Wall Street Journal finds that “65% of economists see Trump’s proposed policies putting more upward pressure on the federal deficit” and “68% said prices would rise faster under Trump than under Harris.” No. Oligarchs want to be oligarchs. Their support of Trump is not based on economics, per se. The ruling class wants to rule. As a fringe benefit, writes Brian Klass about billionaires in politics, “Politics is the most straightforward way to get rich in autocracies.
Dear Misleader is running out of time JIMMY KIMMEL: “Just a former presidency suggesting he’ll use the military against his fellow citizens for exercising their freedom of speech. Nothing to worry about, folks. Seriously, when is he going to grow that little mustache already? Because there’s only three weeks left, you gotta get started.
Here’s a hunched over, tired Trump looking like he slept in his make-up and just decided to trowel on more doing a “beautiful” job on Bartiromo: That’s the one that got him in trouble saying that he was going to all out the military on “radical leftists.” Then yesterday he held a “town hall” Pennsylvania in an overheated venue, with puppy killer Kristi Noem asking the questions. He took a few and then some people fainted from the heat and they never went back to the questions. The Washington Post wrote this up: The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers for how he’d address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention. And so Trump, after jokingly asking the crowd if “anybody else would like to faint,” took a different approach. “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music.
For weeks the press was obsessed with Biden’s “age problem,” examining everything from the shoes he wears to his sleeping habits. They demanded that his doctors appear before the media and take questions even after they testified to his good health. They pored over white house logs to determine if a specialist was secretly visiting him. Ok, fair enough. His performance at the debate in June validated the idea that he was no longer the man he once was and that another four years was probably too much. Then the younger Kamala Harris replaced him and they have dogged her mercilessly for failing to give enough interviews feeding the Trump campaign’s theme that she’s avoiding the press because she’s incapable of doing them. Now she’s talking to anyone who will listen, even Fox news tomorrow and possibly Joe Rogan’s podcast. They still don’t seem satisfied.
Bob Woodward’s book “War”: Steady and purposeful. That’s what we all signed on for in 2020 and for the most part we got it. (Israel-Gaza remains a conundrum…) Biden’s legacy is secure, especially considering his Washingtonian exit. He did well under very difficult circumstances.