What’s he thinking about, I wonder? This maybe? The share price of Trump Media plunged more than 13% on Wednesday, a day after majority shareholder Donald Trump gave a widely panned presidential debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris. The company’s stock price was at its lowest intraday level since the Truth Social app owner began publicly trading as DJT on the Nasdaq in late March. Investing in Trump Media stock is often seen as a way to bet on the political fortunes of Trump, the former president and current Republican nominee. Trump Media has said its business hinges at least partly on Trump’s popularity, and analysts say the company’s value will rise or fall based on his electoral prospects. He’s going to cash out in a few days with at least a billion dollars. It will destroy his investors but he doesn’t care about that. At this point he’s got to cramble to grift as much as he possibly can before the whole thing comes crashing down.
Uncategorized
JV Last at the Bulwark asks the right question: What will it say about America if Trump’s numbers don’t drop over the next week? We have had every chance to reject Donald Trump. We saw him mishandle a crisis, resulting in an economic collapse and hundreds of thousands of excess deaths. We saw him attempt a violent coup. When voters said, “I don’t love Trump, but that other candidate is super old . . .” Democrats went and swapped out Joe Biden for Kamala Harris. Harris has been a good candidate. She has run as a rock-solid moderate. She just curb-stomped Trump in front of tens of millions of voters. What else do people want? I’m serious about this: What else could Harris possibly do? Because it looks to me like she’s an above-average candidate, running in a good economic environment, playing near-perfect baseball against a guy who says he wants to be a dictator. And the response of the American people is: Harris +1.1. What happens if, a week after last night’s demonstration, this race is still a toss-up? What does that tell us about the long-term viability of American democracy?
Republicans would rather rule The mailing of over 100,000 North Carolina absentee ballots in-state and to armed service members and others residing overseas will be delayed for weeks. (Dare we again use unprecedented?) North Carolina’s state Supreme Court on Monday ruled for RFK Jr. on his demand that his name/party that he fought to include on state ballots now be removed. One hundred county Boards of Elections have already printed roughly 3 million in-person and absentee ballots with Kennedy’s name on them. His delay in withdrawing from the presidential contest to endorse Donald Trump means strapped county boards must pay reprinting costs. As we noted on Saturday, “2,348 ballot styles will have to be reformatted, reproofed, reprinted, mailings re-prepared by staff, and voting machines recoded in 100 counties.” The cost of Kennedy’s vanity project to North Carolina taxpayers and delay to voters will be considerable. State law requires absentee ballots to be mailed 60 days ahead of the general election. That was Friday, September 6.
I wish the Atlantic offered gift links because this is one I’d really love to share with you. Here’s a gift link to this article in the Atlantic. It’s from Mark Liebovitch and it’s about the invertebrate cowards in the Republican Party. Donald Trump had them pegged: In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed. But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.
Rebecca Traister has written an inspiring feature about the Harris candidacy that you don’t want to miss. She talks about the fact that the burst of enthusiasm around her candidacy was fuelled almost entirely by the grassroots, much of it led by women, especially Black women’s groups that have been around awhile, quietly going about the business of electing Democrats. She writes: As we settle into the second phase of this candidacy and old hands regain control in preparation for the presidential debate on September 10, the question is whether the cautious, moderating forces that have long guided Democratic electoral politics will tamp down the people’s power that was unleashed this summer and jeopardize Harris’s chances of victory.
All of us who write about politics are writing these “what if he wins” pieces. It’s terrifying. I truly believe that his administration will implement as much of Project 2025 as he can get away with because he doesn’t ever have to face the voters again. (Either he will leave under the normal constitutional order or he’ll suspend elections and stay past his term under some BS emergency order.) He would also be unshackled by the rule of law now that the Supremes have given him immunity. Combined with his obviously degraded mental state and bitterness over his loss in 2020 and the legal consequences of his criminal behavior, he’s going to be on a mission. Rolling Stone’s entry into this genre has some chilling quotes that I haven’t head before: It was the second year of his presidency, and Trump was seething about gang members and drug lords. He wanted to see their bodies piled up in the streets.
The Philly Inquirer proposed a set of questions for Donald Trump tomorrow night that would be fantastic: I wish I had confidence that this is the caliber of questions we can expect but I don’t. Get ready for more questions like “how do you answer Vice President Harris’ accusation that you are anti-democratic?”
Good. There’s no need to rattle him during the debate because he’ll do that to himself. Rattle him before the debate.
“People need to know what they’re up against” Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick spoke with Ari Berman of Mother Jones, author of “Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It.” He warns that anti-democracy forces inside this country are doing what the far right always does: doubling down. Republicans love few things more than a twofer. They have one in spreading a new conspiracy theory that noncitizens are voting in numbers and tipping elections away from decent, All-American white people. Berman says, “[I]t’s the newest version of the Big Lie, and it’s really a twofer for them because they are fusing voter fraud paranoia with anti-immigrant hysteria. And in doing so, they’re building support both for new restrictions on voting, but also for new restrictions on immigration. So it’s basically taking two of the most important planks of the MAGA agenda and putting them together.” But that’s just filigree.
Mark Cuban tweeted this and I thought it was useful: I think one major point the discussion of tariffs is missing is the time and cost to businesses, even the smallest single person company. It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of bureaucracy. It almost always required hiring a broker to deal with all of it. And of course there is the ongoing record keeping that each business is responsible for. Here is what @grok had to say (really growing attached to @grok @elonmusk) When importing products that are subject to tariffs, here’s what you generally need to do: 1. **Determine the Tariff Rate**: Use the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (HTSUS) to classify your product and find out the applicable tariff rate. This classification involves determining the correct HTS code for your product, which can be complex and might require consulting with a customs broker or trade specialist. 2. **Calculate the Duty**: Once you know the tariff rate, calculate the duty you’ll owe. This duty is based on the customs value of the goods, which includes the cost, insurance, and freight (CIF) value.