In every losing campaign’s postmortem the analysts insist that the candidate should have gone where he or she did not. There were many complaints about Vice President Al Gore spending time in California late in the race when he should have been stumping in Florida and I’m sure everyone recalls that Hillary Clinton was excoriated for taking Wisconsin and Michigan for granted in 2016 by failing to hold events there in the closing days of the campaign. Certainly, it’s a general rule of thumb that in close elections, the candidates are supposed to live in the battleground states, especially in the final weeks to eke out every last vote in the electoral college. So why in the world is Donald Trump holding rallies in the blue enclaves of California, New York and Colorado in the month of October? As far as we can tell, the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada are all close and various combinations of those states will be required to get to 270 electoral votes. And yet Trump will be wasting time in these other states for reasons that are obscure.
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This is a terrific ad from Brownaddrssing that grotesque ageism and misogyny from his opponent Bernie Moreno: I know that nobody likes to see older women — except older women. Many of them probably aren’t crazy about the right’s recent decision to deman them as completely useless except as nannies for their grandchildren. Bit mistake. They vote. A lot.
Those of you who read this blog know very well what Trump’s obsession is all about and it’s eugenics, not “genes and genetics” and it’s Nazi stuff. What in the world is going on there? They are producing some of the best work ever, like the Trump and Putin story I wrote about yesterday. And then there’s this. It’s mystifying. It’s not as if they don’t know the stakes: How to explain this????
He did it again: Can a reporter please, please please ask Trump to explain what he means when he says that NATO countries are “delinquent?” He clearly believes they are supposed to pay money to the “club” or maybe to him and doesn’t understand that the financial commitment is actually to commit a certain percentage of GDP to defense. The truth is that he is hostile to Europe and has been for decades. They’re “laughing at us” and they gave him trouble with his golf courses. Europeans make him feel inferior. But clearly “NATO has to pay its dues” is the only policy idea he’s ever had so that’s what he’s gone with and nothing has changed in 8 long years. And, it’s also clear, that his phone pal Vladimir Putin, has been telling him for years now to withdraw from NATO. As we know, Trump believes him over his own experts and staff. BTW, only 8 out of the 31 countries are not currently meeting or exceeding their commitment and all of those are very close. When they fell short in the last decade it was largely due to the Great Recession caused by the financial crisis.
The weirdo once again says something that’s easily fact checked: Ok: There were many personal heroes in my life: aunts and uncles, a protective sister, a father who re-entered my life at the right time. But I benefited, too, from the example of a man whose public life showed that we need not be defeated by the domestic hardships of youth. It is one of the great failures of recent political history that the Republican Party was too often unable to disconnect legitimate political disagreements from the fact that the president himself is an admirable man. Speaking of lying: I think he may be a worse liar than Trump. He is the future of MAGA.
Trump has “a woman problem” And worker problem (The New Republic): It turns out that some of the people wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts at J.D. Vance’s rally in Detroit Tuesday weren’t autoworkers at all. The Detroit News’s Craig Mauger covered the rally and spoke to some of the more than dozen people wearing the shirts. Six of the people wearing the shirts told the newspaper that they didn’t work in the automobile industry. It’s not a surprise, as the Trump campaign has a long history of faking support from certain groups in desperate attempts to attract more voters. This isn’t even the first instance of Trump faking support from auto industry workers, either. One year ago, the former president made a big show of reaching out to union autoworkers at a campaign event in Michigan, but it was held at a nonunion factory, and it wasn’t clear how many of the people attending were even employed in the industry. Trump’s entire M.O. has been fake it till you fail at it and Daddy bails you out. But Daddy Fred is long gone. Trump plans to steal this election when he fails to win again.
Today we have yet another GREAT piece by Rick Perlstein about our weird political culture. He takes a look at America’s current obsession with “cult-culture” as a way people are trying to explain our politics to themselves. Boy, do I relate to that. I’ve been reading books and studies and psychology papers as well as watching the movies and series Perlstein outlines in his piece. (He notes a few that I haven’t seen which I excitedly made note of for weekend binging.) I have been obsessed with this subject for the past few years for obvious reasons. Here’s an excerpt but do read the whole thing if you’re as concerned about this phenomenon as I am: THE ASSOCIATION OF TODAY’S REPUBLICAN PARTY and its luminous god-king Donald J. Trump with cults began almost as soon as his first presidential campaign did. But what would a docuseries about MAGA-as-cult—the one Netflix, Hulu, Max, or CNN would never produce, because that would make them unduly “partisan”—look like?
Interesting that Trump was just in Detroit today talking about how terrible Detroit is. I guess he’s just seeding the ground.
MTG’s space lasers misfire President Joe Biden hit back at MAGA misinformation on Wednesday (TPM): “But now I want to be clear about something. Over the last few weeks, there’s been a reckless, irresponsible and relentless promotion of disinformation and outright lies that are disturbing people,” Biden said. “It’s undermining confidence in the incredible rescue and recovery work that has already been taken and will continue to be taken. It’s harmful to those who need help the most. There is simply no place for this to happen.” But he saved his most biting remarks for Greene, who has been spreading the lie that the federal government (??) geo-engineered (??) Hurricane Helene in order to seize control of lithium deposits (??) in a certain area of North Carolina, called Chimney Rock. “Now the claims are getting even more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, is now saying the federal government is literally controlling the weather. We’re controlling the weather,” Biden said. “It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop.
Gallup measured some attitudes: Perceptions of Trump are similar to what Gallup found at the same time in 2020, except voters are now slightly more likely to believe he would display good judgment in a crisis, up six percentage points to 52%. (How soon they forget…) Here’s why she doesn’t get points for being a strong and decisive leader: It’s the sexism, stupid, (although why anyone thinks that the guy who wears more make-up and hairspray that last year’s winner of RuPaul’s Drag race and whines like a little bitch 24/7 is some kind of alpha male, I’ll never understand.) As for Trump being able to get things done … lol. They clearly haven’t looked at his record from 2017-2021. How gullible Americans are, how pathetically eager they are to be conned. Trump’s rating for being honest and trustworthy is higher now than his 38% rating in 2016 when he won the election. However, even at that lower level, Trump’s honesty rating exceeded Hillary Clinton’s, at 31%. This changed in 2020 when, despite seeing his “honest” score improve to 41%, Trump trailed Joe Biden by 11 points on this character dimension.