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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.

Same boat parade: Eric and Lara forgot to put life jackets on their small kids which is bad enough. And they had their children on a boat with a huge Trump head with blood all over it which was, at one time, considered to be so outrageous that they destroyed Kathy Griffin’s career over it. But that’s just the Trump family. You would think, however, that someone would have said something about the Nazis in the boat parade and maybe told them to leave or at least said something about it today. But no, like his father, Eric obviously believes there were very find people on both sides.

Weirdo billionaire Trumper Bill Ackman responded to Stevens by daring him to respond to his full post, point by point —- and Stevens did it. I think it’s worth sharing with all of you here: Bill, saying you support the candidate who has promised to cut taxes for billionaires vs. the candidate who will raise taxes on billionaires, but you don’t really support the tax cuts is a bit like the old “I read Playboy for the articles.” But fine, let’s assume you are convinced that all the benefits of a Trump presidency compensate for the burden of having your taxes cut. Let’s look at your 33 reasons. But first, let’s dispense with the misty-eyed absurdity that you can vote for an openly racist Trump, but you’d like it known that you don’t support racism. The ballot box isn’t a cafeteria where you can go down the line and pick and choose what you like. If you vote for Trump, you are voting for a criminal out on bail who describes non-white immigrants with the same language as National Socialism described Jews. Don’t pretend that by voting for Trump you get some pass because you insist that’s not who you are.

You should… That’s right. The RCP average at the end of October in 2012 was a virtual tie between Obama and Romney. I’ve been saying for a while that I think this election is more like 2012 than 2020 or 2016. We’ll see. But I thought it might be worth looking at where we were in October in a recent election the Democrats won handily.

Rumors and their origins Northeast of here, near the the little town of Spruce Pine, NC, there is a mine that provides key minerals used in the manufacture of microelectronics (NPR): Semiconductors are the brains of every computer-chip-enabled device, and solar panels are a key part of the global push to combat climate change. To make both semiconductors and solar panels, companies need crucibles and other equipment that both can withstand extraordinarily high heat and be kept absolutely clean. One material fits the bill: quartz. Pure quartz. Quartz that comes, overwhelmingly, from Spruce Pine. “As far as we know, there’s only a few places in the world that have ultra-high-quality quartz,” according to Ed Conway, author of Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization. Russia and Brazil also supply high-quality quartz, he says, but “Spruce Pine has far and away the [largest amount] and highest quality.” Conway says without super-pure quartz for the crucibles, which can often be used only a single time, it would be impossible to produce most semiconductors.

He wants people to think he’s a superman: That’s no doubt true. “I may be a criminal, a fascist and an all-around disgraceful human being but I’m leading in the polls, so vote for me!” does sound like Trump. I also think he just believes that he can make reality conform to his desires. And for millions of his cult members, he can. But there’s an actual, longstanding campaign strategy involved as well. I wrote about it back in 2022 just before that election: One more day until the voting is done. Hallelujah! When the polls are so tight and the campaigning so intense you reach a point where you almost don’t care who wins anymore and just want it to be over. But of course you do care, as we all must in this age of authoritarian right-wing, lunacy. I wrote on Friday that nobody really knows anything about this election. It could go either way. It might be a close result or one side could sweep both houses of Congress with big wins. But if you just read the headlines and listen to the pundits and strategists on TV, you’d think the evidence showed clearly that Republicans were running away with it.

Steelmanning (as opposed to strawmannin) is a rather obscure concept defined as: A steel man argument (or steelmanning) is the opposite of a straw man argument. Steelmanning is the practice of applying the rhetorical principle of charity through addressing the strongest form of the other person’s argument, even if it is not the one they explicitly presented. Creating the strongest form of the opponent’s argument may involve removing flawed assumptions that could be easily refuted or developing the strongest points which counter one’s own position. Developing counters to steel man arguments may produce a stronger argument for one’s own position Apparently, the Washington Post called up economics journalist Noah Smith and asked him to make the best case for Trump’s economic policies, ostensibly in order to give people a good faith argument that they could easily understand so they’d realize that Trump’s policies aren’t actually very good. Steelmanning. Smith declined because while there may be some reasonable uses for this type of argumentation.