Why? You have probably heard about Tucker Carlson’s interview with a pro-Hitler, Holocaust revisionist whom he called “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” a few days back. Yeah. This article in Vox wonders if the GOP is going to go along with him on this. Guess what? The Trump camp — which sets the tone for the entire party — has so far done nothing to distance itself from the increasingly toxic Carlson. [JD] Vance, who has pre-taped a Carlson interview and is scheduled to speak with him at a live event in two weeks, refused to denounce Carlson after the Cooper fiasco — with a spokesperson saying in a statement that “Senator Vance doesn’t believe in guilt-by-association cancel culture.” A Trump campaign source told the Bulwark that while it’s “not ideal timing” for Vance to appear twice with Carlson before Election Day, “it is what it is.” (Donald Trump Jr. is also scheduled to attend.) It is what it is.
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Asked of a panel of likely voters in swing states what they thought Harris and Trump most wanted to achieve from a term in office: Harris: Trump: Sounds about right. I would just ask you to contemplate what it means that nearly half the country says they plan to vote for the second one.
Five years ago today He had been very pleased that they called him “your excellency” which he insists they never called any other president because they respected him so much you’ve never seen anything like it. I still remember the shock at learning that Trump had secretly invited the leaders of the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11. It boggled the mind that he could even contemplate such a thing, although he’d been inviting Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte to the White House for years so why not? But to imagine the Taliban at Camp David on 9/11 was beyond imagination even for him. It turned out that there had been ongoing peace talks that were designed to lead to the American withdrawal but Trump wanted the credit for “making the deal” so he came up with the Camp David proposition. In the end all it did was help destabilize the already fragile Afghan government (a major factor in the chaotic withdrawal in 2021) and Trump ended up releasing 5,000 Taliban fighters and agreeing to a timetable for US withdrawal with only a promise that the Taliban would be good boys in the future.
Reports from the field “The Trump campaign is tasking the far-right Turning Point network with spearheading its ground game despite having no track record of success,” Bill Scher noticed back in June: CNN reported that “Donald Trump’s campaign is taking a vastly different approach to 2024 compared with 2020, with plans for fewer staff and expenses [and instead] relying on wealthy conservative groups for data, infrastructure, and significant bank accounts.” It further noted that one of the most important of these groups is Turning Point Action, part of the Turning Point network that began with Turning Point USA. Turning Point USA is a right-wing student group founded in 2012 by Charlie Kirk, an 18-year-old soon-to-be college dropout, and Bill Montgomery, an elderly Tea Party activist. None of Turning Point’s 2022 efforts in Arizona “had any discernible impact” on Republicans’ fortunes there, Scher wrote.
From polling expert Larry Sabatp: The oracle of Delphi NY Times poll dropped today and that is what it showed. Ok. That’s that. The race, as I’ve been saying all year, is about two coalitions: the fascists vs the anti-fascists. And it’s a shockingly, disturbingly tight race.
Not that it matters. The “vibe” remains horrifically negative and the economy is what people point to to explain it. The reality is that for half of America, the world is going to shit because Donald Trump is telling them to believe his lies instead of their lyin’ eyes, and they love him so much that they’re happy to do it. For the rest of us, the world is going to shit because the other half worships that orange imbecile and it simply defies all sense and logic leading to a sense of dread about the future that is beyond disorienting. How can it be that half the country has succumbed to this addled demagogue? I don’t know, but it does help explain how some very bad things happened in the 20th century. It’s got something to do with mass communications, propaganda and groupthink and it’s terrifying.
I’m sure you’ve heard Trump bellowing his fatuous nonsense about how everyone always wanted Roe overturned so it could go back to the states where people can vote on it and “it’s a beautiful thing.” I’ll admit that I was derelict in seeing where this was going. Leave it to Ron DeSantis to show the way: Florida voters who signed a petition to place a pro-choice abortion referendum on the ballot this November say they have been visited by police who are investigating claims of fraud at the behest of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, the Tampa Bay Times reported Saturday. Last year, DeSantis, a Republican, signed into a law a ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. In response, pro-choice campaigners gathered and submitted nearly one million signatures to place on the ballot Amendment 4, a referendum that would overturn the ban and restore reproductive rights in the state. Now Florida’s Department of State is claiming it suspects fraud in the signature-gathering process.
Trump goes all but “Off with their heads!” Heather Cox Richardson is hardly the only one to notice that as the prospect of losing the election (and facing criminal judgment) haunts Donald Trump’s every waking moment, he’s going full apocalyptic. Trump on Saturday warned that not even his rallies are safe spaces in a country “overrun by criminals.” He promised that expelling migrants en masse “will be a bloody story.” But that’s only the beginning. Trump is going full Queen of Hearts: Then, tonight, Trump posted on his social media site a rant asserting that he will win the 2024 election but that he expects Democrats to cheat, and “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials.
Trump excited the crowd yesterday with promises of bloodshed with his mass deportation policy. They wouldn’t have it any other way. Just as a reminder: Two former officials who handled immigration issues for then-President Donald Trump say that a “whole of government” approach costing billions would be needed to mount the “largest deportation effort in American history” promised in the Republican convention platform if Trump is re-elected. The exact number of people who would be deported in a second Trump administration is hard to pin down. During the June 29 presidential debate, Trump claimed there were 18 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. One of the two former Trump officials said it could be as high as 30 million. The last official estimate in 2022 was under 11 million, but when you count the American children and other Americans caught up in the raids by mistake, they can probably get to 20 million or so.
The idea of the unaccountable criminal president began that day. Look where it brought us.