During Trump’s very weird event with Moms for Liberty last week he lied many times as he always does. And this particular lie is one he keeps telling and it keeps not being true. After telling them that he had wanted to make Ivanka “UN Secretary” (which would not have been possible) he said this: “Daddy, I just want to help people get jobs….” Yeah right. Reality (from 2019) Trump signed an executive order creating the National Council for the American Worker, co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. One of the council’s priorities is asking companies across the US to sign the Pledge to America’s Workers. The pledge involves “committing to expand programs that educate, train, and reskill American workers from high-school age to near-retirement,” according to the White House. Two hundred companies have agreed to the pledge, with each providing different numbers of training opportunities. This brings the total number of opportunities pledged to just over 6.5 million.
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Trump cannot change, nor will he “Are we in La La Land?” asks Colbert I. King in the Washington Post. “He’s on our side,” Donald Trump told a rally crowd on Friday as police hauled off a supporter for attempting to assault reporters. Associated Press: JOHNSTOWN, Pa. (AP) — A man at Donald Trump’s rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, stormed into the press area as the former president spoke Friday but was surrounded by police and sheriff’s deputies and was eventually subdued with a Taser. The altercation came moments after Trump criticized major media outlets for what he said was unfavorable coverage and dismissed CNN as fawning for its interview Thursday with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz. The man made it over a bicycle rack ringing the media area, and began climbing the back side of a riser where television reporters and cameras were stationed, according to a video of the incident posted to social media by a reporter for CBS News. People near him tried to pull him off the riser and were quickly joined by police officers.
I can see why he said this was a horrible interview. He was asked about the Florida abortion ban and royally screwed himself with that answer. And now this. It’s amazing what a couple of straightforward questions can elicit. More people should try it.
Simon Rosenberg on the “Trump underperforming the polls” thing: [Y]ou often hear commentators talk about Trump overperforming public polling in 2016 and 2020 which means we need to be up by 3-4-5 points or more in the polls to win. That may have been true in 2016 and 2020, but it is core to our understanding here that everything in American politics changed with Dobbs, it was a before and after moment, and that: Republicans have underperforming public polls in races of all kinds all across the country since Dobbs. We’ve been overperforming public polls not them. Trump underperformed – not overperformed – public polls in his primary elections, sometimes by a big number The fascists underperformed public polls in the recent European and French elections, and the right got blown out in the UK. Every election is unique, not like any other. I think comparisons to 2016 and 2020 are unhelpful, for Trump 2024 is now an insurrectionist, a rapist, fraudster, traitor, felon, and the man who stripped the rights and freedoms away from the women of America. He is far more degraded, diminished and extreme.
Trump at Moms For Liberty on Friday, the group that just can’t stop losing elections: “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child and you know many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’ They say, ‘Who did this to me?’ It’s incredible.” What the ever loving fuck is he talking about? We really need to start talking about the serious problem with our society. It’s one thing to have fringe freaks out there who say stuff like this. That’s always been true. Nothing you can do about that, it’s a free country. But never has one of them mesmerized almost half the country into voting for him for president. Something’s gone very wrong. And here’s one reason why. Check out the headline from the LA Times: No, that is not an adequate way of describing what Trump said. That headline should say “Trump says public schools are performing transgender surgeries on students.” That’s what he said.
Looks like the bloom is off the DeSantis rose: DeSantis pulled back a contentious plan this week to add golf courses and hotels at some Florida state parks. The governor acted after his administration’s “Great Outdoors Initiative” faced a withering blast of criticism from across the political spectrum, including from one-time GOP allies who may run for governor when he’s out of office. Local school board candidates he backed underperformed in the Aug. 20 primary. He is feuding with the lone Jewish Republican in the Legislature after that lawmaker called out DeSantis for recently traveling to Ireland — which has recognized Palestine as a country. And two initiatives on the November ballot on abortion access and recreational marijuana appear poised to pass despite the governor’s opposition. […] “I don’t think the backlash about parks was about him being a lame duck,” said Jamie Miller, a veteran political consultant who once worked for the Republican Party of Florida. “But I also do think that when the governor was tone-deaf in the past, people would go along with it.
This is beyond your standard natalism. He seems to not only believe that the only use for women is bearing and caring for children, he believes that those who do not bear children, or are past the age when they can, are directly responsible for the ills of society. He’s obsessed and it’s beyond weird now. It’s sick. The Guardian has the whole story. I suggest you read the whole thing if you have time. It’s disturbing to say the least. This guy tried to say he was joking about the childless cat ladies. He wasn’t. Here’s an excerpt. Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity. The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning … [but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.
Vance and AI “He’s really thought this through and he is an incredibly twisted man,” Sam Seder tweeted in response to the JD Vance clip below. As if the prospect of this man being one heartbeat away from the presidency isn’t warped enough, our technology-fetishizing overlords want to put the electronic brains behind driverless cars in charge of defining reality for us. You’ve noticed it too: “Google has rolled out generative AI to users of its search engine on at least four continents, placing AI-written responses above the usual list of links; as many as 1 billion people may encounter this feature by the end of the year.” I already don’t trust them: Yet AI chatbots and assistants, no matter how wonderfully they appear to answer even complex queries, are prone to confidently spouting falsehoods—and the problem is likely more pernicious than many people realize.
Moms for Liberty gets “a bit carried away” When Donald Trump is not campaigning in a string of sundown towns, he’s rubbing elbows with Moms for Liberty. * The New York Times has the full story: The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women. How in the world does this get past editors? [image or embed] — Sarah Posner (@sarahposner.bsky.social) Sep 1, 2024 at 9:56 AM Don’t get mad and don’t get complacent. It ain’t over until all the votes are counted. Do something! * Okay, there are so many sundown towns in swing states (and blue states) that it’s almost hard not to end up campaigning in one, but still.
Look at that mess. That’s not some blog post written by me after a few drinks at 2 in the morning. It’s the NY Times! For reasons that are obscure they, and much of the mainstream media, is engaged in insane gymnastics trying to keep from accurately describing Donald Trump’s disintegration. It’s profound and it’s alarming. Media critic Margaret Sullivan has a newsletter aptly called American Crisis in which she addresses the problem. She names former Timesman James Risen as one of the journalists she most respects (I agree!) and relays a communication she received from him this week: “At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president. “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by.