Here’s a story in the NY Times about a phenomenon that should have been investigated long before now. We know there are a bunch of true believers out there who dress up in stars and stripes regalia and deck out their trucks and boats for Trump. But that’s just the hardcore of the Trump base. What about the rest of them? The Times interviewed some of them at Trump’s Detroit economic club interview. They know he’s a liar so they think he’s lying about all the terrible stuff he plans to do in his second term. So they’re fine with him: There were a few hundred people there. They were not the sorts of people one encounters at a Trump rally. They weren’t construction workers or truck drivers or forklift operators; they carried business cards and had very active LinkedIn pages. They did not wear red hats or T-shirts with images of Mr. Trump’s bloodied face; they wore windowpane suit jackets and loafers and rather conspicuous cuff links. They did not want to hear about “one really violent day” or about the deep state or the Marxists or the fascists or any of the other radical or antidemocratic visions that Mr.
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You won’t be surprised that the latest head of the NRA is a charter member: Douglas Hamlin, who was appointed to lead the NRA this summer in the wake of a long-running corruption scandal at the gun rights group, was involved decades ago in the sadistic killing of a fraternity house cat named BK, according to several local media reports at the time. Hamlin pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of animal cruelty brought against him and four of his fraternity brothers in 1980, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The charge was brought against Hamlin under a local Ann Arbor ordinance. All five members of Alpha Delta Phi were later expelled from the fraternity. The details of the case, described in local media reports at the time, are gruesome. The house cat was captured, its paws were cut off, and was then strung up and set on fire. The killing, which occurred in December 1979, was allegedly prompted by anger that the cat was not using its litterbox. The case caused such a furore locally that some students and animal rights activists wore buttons and armbands in memory of BK.
Believe them. They carry out their agenda when they get the power to do it: Trump talks a lot about the 1890s as America’s golden era. That’s when he thinks America was great. Child labor was a big part of that: Court documents unsealed in the Western District of Arkansas reveal accusations of child labor at Tyson processing plants, which have since prompted searches by the U.S. Department of Labor. Applications for inspection warrants were filed in September 2024 for Tyson Foods Rogers and Tyson Foods Green Forest. The applications, which included narratives from an investigator at the Houston District Office for the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor, claim that there is reason to believe minors are employed in violation of labor laws at the Tyson locations in Rogers and Green Forest. The warrants were seeking records relating to the employment of minors, and the searches were meant to gather records relating to employees for Tyson Foods or affiliates and contractors of Tyson Foods, according to the applications.
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?”
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.