“It’s been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 Minutes in October,” host Scott Pelley said to the camera last night before 60 Minutes aired an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. This year, both Harris and Republican nominee former president Donald Trump accepted an invitation for an interview.
“Then a week ago,” Pelley said, “Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story,” Pelley said. “Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Leslie Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that.
“Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris, so tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates between now and election day. Our questions addressed the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, and the wars in the Middle East and Europe. Both campaigns understood this special would go ahead if either candidate backed out.”
And with that, 60 Minutes aired its interview with Vice President Harris.
Trump broke a fifty-year tradition so his false world would not be challenged by reality. He apparently wants to make sure voters cannot base their decisions about the country’s future on facts. Hiding reality is in keeping with his continued refusal to release his tax returns or a medical report—even after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania—or the video from the incident at Arlington National Cemetery, instead insisting that people take him at his word about what happened.
If voters trust his disinformation campaign, rather than thinking things through for themselves, who will his policies help?
A bombshell story from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward today revealed that in 2020, when he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it.
A Trump aide told Woodward that Trump and Putin have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House, prompting Edward Luce of the Financial Times to comment: “What possible business could an out-of-office U.S. president have to call Vladimir Putin seven times?” Woodward recounts a moment when Trump told a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin.”
The Woodward book also says that when South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was visiting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, in March 2024, Graham said “Hey, let’s call Trump.” According to Woodward, an aide brought MBS a bag full of burner phones, one of which was labeled “TRUMP 45.”
This news highlights the fact that Trump retained classified documents when he left the White House, carrying them with him to Mar-a-Lago, where he tried to hide them from federal officials. A grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts for those actions, but Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case in July after concluding that Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed.
Trump’s campaign came out swinging after the story broke, with Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung calling Woodward “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”
In contrast to Trump’s disinformation campaign, Vice President Harris is running a normal campaign, offering policy proposals. Today she proposed a plan to permit Medicare to help cover the costs of long-term home health care aides for seniors. Harris announced the plan on ABC’s The View, where she spoke of the so-called sandwich generation, people—mostly women—who are taking care of their elderly parents at the same time they are also taking care of children. “[I]t’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work,” Harris said, adding that many end up having to leave their jobs. She also called for Medicare to cover vision and hearing care to enable seniors to live independently for longer.
Harris said the money to pay for the new services will come from savings realized through Medicare’s new ability to negotiate drug prices—an ability Republicans are eager to end—and through cracking down on Medicare fraud. A fact sheet about the plan emphasizes that it will enable the government to work with the private sector to expand the home care workforce and provide more access to telehealth.
Her plan also calls for stopping states from seizing family homes of recently deceased Medicaid beneficiaries to restore funding, a program called “Medicaid estate recovery.” Those seizures particularly hurt rural and minority populations, she noted, preventing them from building wealth.
Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times note that both expanded home care benefits and drug negotiations are popular. KFF, which conducts health policy research, reports that Medicaid estate recovery has been criticized because it “falls primarily on individuals with limited incomes, raises little revenue, and is applied very unevenly across the states.”
Deepa Shivaram of NPR noted that a relatively large percentage of middle-aged and older women remain undecided in this race and Harris’s plan speaks to their needs. The plan would also bring more money and care workers into rural towns with aging populations, giving those areas an economic boost.
In a fact sheet, the Harris-Walz campaign noted that Trump is focused on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, has repeatedly called for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and gave clemency to those abusing the system. As Amy B. Wang and Azi Paybarah explained in the Washington Post: “In his last year in office, Trump commuted the sentences of at least five people who collectively filed nearly $1.6 billion in fraudulent claims through Medicare or Medicaid.”
On The View, Harris said, “In this election, people are ready for a new generation of leadership that’s about fixing problems.”
The 2020 60 Minutes interview for which Trump demanded an apology last week was the one in which he promised his health care plan was “fully developed,” then angrily walked out. His exit was apparently planned, for shortly after his departure, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany walked up to Stahl with a giant book, saying: “Lesley, the President wanted me to deliver his health care plan. It’s a little heavy.”
Trump and McEnany likely expected that the audience would remember their theatrical move rather than the reality, which was that the book contained no Trump healthcare plan because one didn’t exist.
Four years later, it still doesn’t. Trump said at the September 10 presidential debate that he has the “concepts of a plan.”
CNN today set a deadline of Thursday for Trump to accept its invitation for an October 23 presidential debate. Harris has already accepted.
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Yesterday we learned from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward that in 2020, while he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it. To be clear, this equipment was not the swabs we now use at home, but appears to be what at the time was a new point-of-care machine from Abbott Laboratories that claimed to be the fastest way to test for Covid-19.
Journalist Karly Kingsley points out that at the time, central lab testing to diagnose Covid-19 infections took a long time, causing infections to spread. Machines like Abbott’s were hard to get. Trump chose to send them to Putin—not to charge him for them, or to negotiate for the release of Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans being held by Russia at the time and later released under the Biden administration, but to give them to him—rather than keeping them for Americans.
It’s hard to overstate just what an astonishing story this is. In 2016, Republicans stood firm against Putin and backed the arming of Ukraine to stand against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. But that summer, at Trump’s urging, the party changed its platform to weaken its support of Ukraine. In 2020, it appears, Trump chose to give lifesaving equipment to Putin rather than use it for Americans. And in 2024, Trump’s willingness to undermine the United States to cozy up to an adversary his own party stood against less than a decade ago does not appear to be a deal breaker for Republicans.
As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it: “What has this country come to if the revelation that Trump secretly sent COVID testing machines to Putin while thousands of Americans were dying, in part because of a shortage of testing machines here, doesn't disqualify him to be President?” He continued: “Donald Trump helped keep Putin alive during the pandemic and let Americans die. This revelation is damning. It's disqualifying. He cannot be President of the United States.”
Increasingly, Trump’s behavior seems to parrot the dictators he appears to admire.
After 60 Minutes called him out for breaking a fifty-year tradition of both candidates talking to 60 Minutes and backing out of an interview to which he had agreed, Trump today accused the producers of 60 Minutes of cutting Vice President Kamala Harris’s answers to make her look good. He suggested that such cuts were “illegal” and possibly “a major Campaign Finance violation” that “must be investigated, starting today!” “The public is owed a MAJOR AND IMMEDIATE APOLOGY!” he wrote. Trump is trying to cover for his own failure by attacking CBS in an echo of dictators determined to control the media.
In a post on his social media site tonight, Trump appears to have declined to appear at another presidential debate with Vice President Harris. After declaring he had won the previous debate with Harris and rehashing many of his grievances, he wrote: “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH!”
As Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post recounted yesterday, a report from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that the Trump White House prevented a real investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. More than 4,500 calls and electronic messages about Kavanaugh sent to the FBI tip line went directly to the White House, where they were never investigated, and the FBI was told not to pursue corroborating evidence of the accusations by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez although lawyers for the women presented the names of dozens of people who could testify to the truth of their allegations.
A number of senators said the lack of corroborating evidence convinced them to vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. As Steve Benen of MSNBC recalled, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said at the time that it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation,” while the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the 2018 FBI report “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”
After he left office, Trump told author Michael Wolff that he had gone to bat for Kavanaugh, saying: “I…fought like hell for Kavanaugh—and I saved his life, and I saved his career.” Kavanaugh was the crucial vote for Trump’s right-wing agenda, including ending the federal recognition of abortion rights by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Ken Bensinger reported in the New York Times today that Trump’s team has refused to participate in preparations for a transition to a potential Trump presidency. Normally, the nonpartisan transition process, dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has candidates setting up teams as much as six months before the election to begin vetting and hiring political appointees and working with the administration in office to make sure the agencies continue to run smoothly.
With the election less than a month away, Trump has neither signed the required agreements nor signed the transition’s ethics plan that would require him to disclose private donors to the transition and limit them to contributions of no more than $5,000. Without that agreement, there are no limits to the money the Trump transition can take. Trump has also refused to sign an agreement with the White House requiring that anyone receiving classified information have a security clearance. Currently, his aides cannot review federal records.
Trump ignored the traditional transition period in 2016, cutting off communications with President Barack Obama’s team. He refused to allow incoming president Joe Biden access to federal agencies in 2020, hampering Biden’s ability to get his administration in place in a timely fashion. Now it’s possible that Trump sees no need for a normal transition because Project 2025, on which he appears to be relying, has been working on one for many months.
It calls for him to fire most federal employees, reinstating the policy he started at the end of his term. To fill their positions, the Heritage Foundation has been vetting loyalists now for months, preparing a list of job candidates to put in place a new, right-wing agenda.
Yesterday, on California’s KFI radio station, Trump told host John Kobylt that Tom Homan of Project 2025, who as director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversaw the family separation policy at the southern border, will be “coming on board” a new Trump administration.
This afternoon, Trump told an audience in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he expects to put former rival Vivek Ramaswamy into an important position in his administration. On October 7, 2024, Ramaswamy suggested on social media that he wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. He wrote: “Shut down the entitlement state & you solve most of the immigration problem right there. We need to man up & fix the root cause that draws migrants here in the first place: the welfare state. But no one seems to want to say that part out loud, because too many native-born Americans are addicted to it themselves.”
Trump has expressed frustration with the independence of the Federal Reserve, expressing a desire to make it answer to the president. In an interview with Barron’s, one of his advisors, Scott Bessent, has floated the idea of creating a shadow Fed chair until the term of the current chair, Jerome Powell, ends, thus undercutting him without facing a fight over firing the Fed chair.
This agenda is not a popular one in the U.S., but Trump is getting a boost as Russian operatives work to swing downballot races toward the Republicans. In a briefing on Monday, October 7, experts from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told reporters that China and Iran are trying to influence the upcoming election and that “Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians. Russian influence actors have planned, and likely created and disseminated, content, particularly over social media, intended to encourage the election of congressional candidates that Moscow assesses will oppose aid to Ukraine.”
Russia, an ODNI spokesperson said, uses “influence-for-hire firms, or commercial firms with expertise in these type[s] of activities.” It also coopts “witting and unwitting Americans to work on Russia’s behalf,” to “launder their influence narratives through what are perceived as more authentic U.S. voices.”
Not all of Trump’s supporters appear eager to stick around to see if Trump will win another term. Today news broke that Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive officer of OverStock, who became a fervent advocate of the idea that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election, has left the country, apparently permanently, to live in Dubai. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Byrne, as is President Biden’s son Hunter. The younger Biden sued Byrne for defamation last November after Byrne claimed Hunter Biden sought a bribe from Iran.
In September, Biden’s lawyers were trying to schedule a date for Byrne’s deposition when his lawyer abruptly “claimed for the first time that Defendant has moved his residence to Dubai and if Plaintiff wanted to take his in-person deposition counsel would have to fly to Dubai to do so, to which Plaintiff responded with various related inquiries to try to resolve this matter and defense counsel stated Defendant would not be returning to the United States for the foreseeable future.”
Byrne claimed to have fled the U.S. because the Venezuelan government has put a bounty on him, but as Biden’s lawyers note, “the Defendant’s truthfulness is directly at issue.”
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Hurricane Milton made landfall yesterday evening as a Category 3 storm just south of Sarasota, Florida. Before the hurricane hit, thirty-eight tornadoes swept across thirteen counties in the state, putting about 1.26 million people under a tornado advisory. With the hurricane came high winds and water, including ten to twenty inches of rain in the Tampa area. And, although it was not the worst-case scenario people feared, eleven people are dead and about three million are without power because of the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been on the ground since before the storm hit.
In election news, today, The Atlantic endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. This is only the fifth time since its founding in 1857 that The Atlantic has endorsed a presidential candidate. It is the third time it has endorsed Trump’s opponent. It also endorsed Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 when he ran against extremist Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. And in 1860 it endorsed Abraham Lincoln.
The Atlantic’s endorsement of Harris echoes its earlier endorsement of Lincoln, not only in its thorough dislike of Trump as “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history”—an echo of its 1860 warning that this election “is a turning-point in our history”—but because both endorsements show a new press challenging an older system.
In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is…still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns and has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, and did a presidential debate with ABC News. Earlier this week, she appeared on 60 Minutes.
With Trump refusing to participate in another presidential debate, Vice President Harris today accepted CNN’s invitation to a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania. In the announcement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon noted that Trump has confined his recent appearances to conservative media.
Indeed, Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes interview and has appeared only on the shows of loyalists. And yet, Berlatsky points out, he is not receiving similar criticism. Indeed, observers note that Trump has tended to get far more favorable coverage than his mental slips, open embrace of Nazi racism, fantastical lies, and criminal indictments deserve.
In a piece today, Matt Gertz of the media watchdog Media Matters reports that five major newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post—produced nearly four times as many articles about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 in the week after then–FBI director James Comey announced new developments in the story than they did about the unsealing of a new filing in Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection earlier this month.
“None of the papers ran even half as many Trump indictment stories as they did on Clinton’s server,” Gertz wrote. “Indeed, every paper ran more front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server [than] they did total stories that referenced Trump’s indictment.” “The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve,” Gertz wrote, “resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior.”
On Tuesday, October 8, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter of the Columbia Journalism Review outlined Trump’s longstanding attack on the U.S. media as “fake news,” an attack that is ongoing and obvious. (Just today, he threatened CBS and “all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!”)
Bassin and Potter note that in his attacks on the media, Trump is following the pattern of authoritarians like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who attacked media critics with audits, investigations, and harassment until he “drove independent media from the field.” They also note the observation of Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, that power is often freely given to an authoritarian in anticipation of punishment, what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”
And yet, in the past in the U.S., when the media has appeared to become captive to established interests, new media have begun to give a voice to the opposition. In the 1850s, when elite enslavers stopped the circulation of newspapers and books calling for abolition, they prompted an explosion of new media that expressed the sentiments of those opposed to the expansion of human enslavement. Editor Horace Greeley led the way with the New-York Tribune in the 1840s. He was keenly aware of the importance of the new press and, as an early convert to the Republican Party, led his paper to become the anchor of a string of new Republican newspapers across the North—including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times—that spread the party’s ideology.
The Atlantic Monthly’s endorsement of Lincoln in 1860 was part of that movement, and poet James Russell Lowell, who wrote the endorsement, mocked the idea that the press should avoid causing trouble. “We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents’ messages, and congress, for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union…. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think.”
Harris has nodded to established media, but as Berlatsky points out, there is very little payoff for her in focusing on those venues, since those audiences are generally already quite attuned to politics and are looking for new developments and scandals. In contrast, winning in 2024 means turning out new voters by finding new venues that offer them a political voice. Harris has recognized that media shift by focusing her media appearances on podcasts like Call Her Daddy, radio shows like Howard Stern’s, and television shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View.
Campaign staffer Victor Shi noted that, based on averages, Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy reached 5 million people, The View, 2.45 million; Howard Stern, 10 million; and Stephen Colbert, 3.2 million—in all, 25 million or more people that traditional media do not reach. (Shi also called attention to the fact that on October 9, the campaign live streamed an Arizona rally by Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on the World of Warcraft Twitch stream.)
The Atlantic nodded to the free thought on which the magazine was founded in 1857 when it came out strongly for Harris today. It is endorsing Harris, it said, because she “respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.”
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A report from the Labor Department yesterday showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P 500 closed above 5,800 for the first time.
Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “[b]y just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. Long adds that “many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy.
Democratic presidential nominee and sitting vice president Kamala Harris has promised to continue the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration and focus on cutting costs for families. She has called for a federal law against price gouging on groceries during times of crisis, cutting taxes for families, and enabling Medicare to pay for home health aides. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which focuses on the direct effect of policies on the federal debt, estimated that Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion to the debt.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and to impose a 10% to 20% tariff across the board on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, and economists predict such tariffs would cost an average family more than $2,600 a year. Overall, the effect of these policies would be to shift the weight of taxation even further toward middle-class and lower-class Americans and away from the wealthy.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these plans would add $7.5 trillion to the debt.
But there is more: Trump has also made deporting undocumented immigrants central to his promises, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, has claimed the right to determine which government policies he considers legal, threatening to expand deportation to include legal migrants, as well.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted on October 8 that in March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out that the immigrants Trump is targeting are vital to a number of U.S. businesses. Their loss will cause dramatic cutbacks in those sectors. Taken together, the study concluded, Trump’s deportations, tariffs, and vow to take control of the Federal Reserve could make the country’s gross domestic product as much as 9.7% lower than it would be without those policies, employment could fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4%.
And yet, in a New York Times/Siena Poll of likely voters released on October 8, 75% of respondents said the economy was fair or poor. Further, although a study by The Guardian showed that Harris’s specific economic policies were more popular than Trump’s in a blind test, 54% of respondents to a Gallup poll released on October 9, thought that Trump would manage the economy better than Harris would.
Part of Americans’ sour mood about the economy stems from the poor coverage all the good economic news has received. Part of it is that rising prices are more immediately obvious than the wage gains that have outpaced them. But a large part of it is the historic habit of thinking that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats do.
That myth began immediately after the Civil War when Democrats demanded the government renege on the generous terms under which it had floated bonds during the war. When the Treasury put those bonds on the market, they were a risky proposition, but with the United States secure after the war, calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.
Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred. They added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” When that amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868, the Democrats’ fiscal rebellion seemed to be quelled.
But as Republicans increasingly insisted that protecting big business with a high tariff wall was crucial to the American economy, Democrats called for lowering tariffs to give the consumers who paid them a break. In response, Republicans said that those suffering in industrial America were lazy or spendthrifts and warned that Democrats were socialists. When Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and put Grover Cleveland in the White House in 1892 with a promise to lower tariffs, Republicans insisted that the economy would collapse. But, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The working classes of the country need such a lesson…. The Republicans will be passive spectators… It will not be their funeral.”
Their warnings of an impending collapse prompted investors to take their money home. On February 17, 1893, fifteen days before Cleveland would be sworn into office, the Reading Railroad Company went under, after which, as one reporter wrote, “the bottom seemed to be falling out of everything.” By the time Cleveland took office, a financial panic was in full swing.
Republican lawmakers and newspapers blamed Democrats for the collapse because everyone knew they would destroy the economy. Republicans urged voters to put them back in charge of Congress, and in 1894, in a landslide, they did. “American manufacturers and merchants and business-men generally will draw a long breath of relief,” the Chicago Tribune commented just days after the Republican victory. Republicans had successfully associated their opponents with economic disaster.
That association continued in the twentieth century. In 1913, for the first time since Cleveland’s second term, the Democrats captured both Congress and the White House. Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson called for lowered tariff rates and, to make up for lost revenue, an income tax. Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the tariff measure “very radical” and warned that it would destroy all the industries in Massachusetts. As for the income tax, big-business Republicans claimed it was socialism and that it discriminated against the wealthy.
For the rest of the century, Republicans would center taxes, especially income taxes, as proof Democrats were bad for the economy. As soon as World War I ended, Republicans set out to get rid of the high progressive taxes that had paid for the war. Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, took office in 1921 and set out to increase productivity by increasing investment in industry. To free up capital, he said, the government must slash its budget and cut taxes. From 1921 to 1929, Mellon returned $3.5 billion to wealthy Americans through refunds, credits, and tax abatements.
The booming economy of the 1920s made it seem that the Republicans had finally figured out how to create a perpetually prosperous economy. When he accepted the 1928 Republican nomination for president, Herbert Hoover said: “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us…. [G]iven a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
The Great Depression, sparked by the stock market crash of October 1929, revealed the central weakness of an economic vision based in concentrating wealth. While worker productivity had increased by about 43% in the 1920s, wages did not rise. By 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income. When the stock market crash wiped out the purchasing power of this group, the rest of the population did not have enough capital to fuel the economy.
Mellon predicted that the crisis would “purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The Hoover administration preached thrift, morality, and individualism and blamed the depression on a wasteful government that had overstaffed public offices. To restore business confidence, Republicans declared, the nation must slash government spending and lay off public workers.
But most Americans had had enough of Republican economics, especially as the crash revealed deep corruption in the nation’s financial system. In 1932, voters overcame their deep suspicion of Democratic economic policies to embrace what Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a “New Deal” for the American people, combating the depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and investing in infrastructure. Hoover denounced Roosevelt’s plans as dangerous radicalism that would “enslave” taxpayers and destroy the United States.
Voters elected FDR with about 58% of the vote. Over the next forty years, Americans of both parties embraced the government’s active approach to promoting economic growth and individual prosperity by protecting all Americans.
But when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he promised that returning to a system like that of the 1920s would make the country boom. He called his system “supply-side” economics, for it invested in the supply side—investors—rather than the consumers who made up the demand side. “The whole thing is premised on faith,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman told a reporter. “On a belief about how the world works.”
Under Reagan, deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion— more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country— along with lower interest rates and deregulated savings and loan banks, made the economy boom. Americans watching the economic growth such deficit spending produced believed supply-side economics worked. Tax cuts and spending cuts became the Holy Grail of American politics, and the Democrats who opposed them seemed to be unable to run an economy.
But that belief was not based in reality. In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations (3.79% versus 2.60%), total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans, business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans, average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats, and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth 188% faster under Democrats than under Republicans.
A recent analysis by former Goldman Sachs managing director H. John Gilbertson expands on those numbers, showing that Democratic administrations reduce the U.S. budget deficit and that stock market returns are 60% higher under Democrats than under Republicans.
Democratic President Joe Biden returned the country to the proven system that worked before 1981, and the economy has boomed. While Trump has vowed to return to the tax cuts and deregulation of supply-side economics, Vice President Harris has promised to retain and fine-tune Biden’s policies.
But Harris has to overcome more than a century of American mythmaking.
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Celebrated another trip around the sun this week with a day on the water. I've seen the same harbor and the same islands and the same boats and the same buoys my whole life, and you know, it never gets old.
Let's take the night off, and get back to it tomorrow.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military.
Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn't really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.
According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.
At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME,” he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called “Operation Aurora” to remove those immigrants he insists are members of “savage gangs.” When Trump said, “We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long,” a person in the crowd shouted: “Kill them!”
Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump’s claim that the city is a “war zone.” Republican mayor Mike Coffman said that Aurora is “not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs” and that such statements are “grossly exaggerated.” While there have been incidents, they “were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.” The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is “not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs.”
In Aurora, Trump also promised to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.” As legal analyst Asha Rangappa explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn’t come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in charge of policy in a second Trump administration.
Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of “denaturalization,” that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He, too, spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals.
Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants: “These people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children—especially underaged children." Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are “very very very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would “liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life.”
On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.
And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem.
He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants "is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."
Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.
Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”
Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.
Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?... Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”
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As the two presidential campaigns position themselves for the final sprint to the election on November 5, the difference between them is dramatic.
Trump is hunkering down behind what has always appeared to be a plan not to attract voters but instead to create chaos on Election Day. Creating confusion around the election could enable his loyalists to put in place the plan the Trump team concocted in 2020 to throw the election into the House of Representatives or get it before the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with Trump loyalists.
A central piece of that plan appears to be to rile up his supporters to violence, and a few of them have been delivering. News broke yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had advised federal emergency workers to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, because of concerns about their safety after Trump and MAGA Republicans spread the false rumor that federal agents are forcing people off their land to start lithium mining projects. The alert came after the U.S. Forest Service sent an email to federal responders saying that National Guard troops had encountered armed militia saying they were “hunting FEMA.” FEMA officials will no longer go door-to-door with disaster assistance, but instead will stay in fixed locations.
A man has been arrested and charged with threatening FEMA workers with an assault rifle. He was released on a $10,000 bond.
To the extent Trump or his running mate Ohio senator J.D. Vance talks about them, their policies are promises to repair what they insist is the damage caused by President Joe Biden (although the stock market hit record highs again today), or threats that reinforce an authoritarian Christian nationalist worldview. Today, Bill Barrow of the Associated Press explored the extensive overlap of Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups and the plans that Trump and Vance have set out.
Both promise to cut taxes for the wealthy, but Project 2025 has more detail about how. Both plan to cut off immigration and to fire federal workers, replacing them with loyalists. Both say the president can decide not to use the money Congress has appropriated (in 2019, Trump refused to disburse the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to smear Trump’s chief Democratic rival for the presidency, Joe Biden). Both call for slashing government regulations and getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as well as protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and programs addressing climate change.
But perhaps most revealing of both Trump’s ideology and his plan for the election was his statement to Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that he would like to use the military against what he called “the enemy from within…radical left lunatics" to guard the election. While this is a threat to use the power of the government against his political opponents if he is elected—he mentioned California representative and Senate candidate Adam Schiff by name—it also seems likely his loyalists will hear this as a call for violence at election sites.
Trump’s statement has not gone unnoticed.
Tonight, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper posted a dictionary definition of the word “fascism”: “A populist political philosophy, movement…that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
On the show, Tapper pressed Republican Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to comment on Trump’s statement that as commander-in-chief, he would use the military against political opposition. When Youngkin denied that Trump had said any such thing, Tapper replied: “I’m literally reading his quotes to you.” Youngkin’s willingness to deny what was right in front of him did not exactly quell talk of fascism, since in his dystopian novel 1984 about authoritarianism, George Orwell famously wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
If Trump is hunkering down, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz are still pushing ahead, pressing Trump on both his personal weakness and his now open embrace of fascism. Harris’s advisor Ian Sams went on the Fox News Channel today to note that it’s been a month since Trump “did a mainstream media interview, and we got to wonder why. We called this weekend for him to release his medical records…. Donald Trump’s team, I heard him on your air last hour insisting that everything is okay and that…there’s nothing to see here. And your anchor rightly asked, ‘Well, if that’s true, why not just put them out?’”
At 1:12 this morning, Trump posted on his social media site: “I believe it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility. Her actions have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her.” Sams hit that as well, noting that in the middle of the night, Trump felt obliged to write about Harris and a cognitive test “[a]s he refuses to release his medical records, sit with 60 Minutes, or debate her again—instead retreating solely to rambling rallies where he’s increasingly making no sense[.] Is he okay?”
In Erie, Pennsylvania, today, Harris outlined how her proposals for an “opportunity economy” will help Black men, calling for business loans for entrepreneurs, more apprenticeships, rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, and study of diseases that disproportionately affect Black men.
She also continues her outreach to Republicans. Today, former Trump friend and talk show host Geraldo Rivera endorsed her. So did former Wisconsin Republican state senate majority leader Dale Schultz. “I tell people, ‘Look, I didn’t leave the party. The party left me,’” he said. “This is a critically important race, and…Donald Trump should never be allowed in the Oval Office again.”
Today Harris’s campaign announced she will be sitting down with Fox News Channel reporter Bret Baier for an interview on Wednesday from the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The Fox News Channel is scheduled to tape a town hall with Trump in front of an audience of women on Tuesday. It is supposed to air on Wednesday morning, while the Harris interview will air Wednesday night.
At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, tonight, Harris reiterated Trump’s refusal to talk to any but the right-wing media and recalled his promise to terminate the Constitution. And then she used Trump’s own words against him, playing a video montage of Trump’s calls for violence, his threats against “the enemy within,” and his call for using the military against his political opponents.
“You heard his words, coming from him,” she told the audience. “[H]e considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country…. He’s saying that he would use the military to go after them…. And we know who he would target because he has attacked them before. Journalists whose stories he doesn’t like. Election officials who refuse to cheat by…finding extra votes for him. Judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will. This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous…. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power, that’s what he’s looking for.”
In Oaks, Pennsylvania, tonight, Trump was supposed to take questions from preselected attendees at a town hall with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. He did, at first, although his answers were all over the place and he urged people to vote on January 5. But then, in the hot and crowded space, two people needed medical attention. Slurring, Trump then said: "Let's not do any more questions. Let's just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?" And then he stood on stage and swayed for 39 minutes of songs from his personal playlist before seeming to recall that he was supposed to be talking about the election, which he suddenly told the confused crowd was “the most important election in the history of our country” before turning back to the music.
Rob Crilly of the U.K.’s The Daily Mail wrote: “I was at Trump's golden escalator launch, flew out of Washington with him in 2020 and have probably been to 100 rallies, give or take. Have never seen anything like tonight.” The headline over Marianne LeVine’s Washington Post story about the event read: “Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode.
"The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.”
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After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck.
Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.
When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.
The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."
As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.
Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.”
And therein lies the rub.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”
Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day.
Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.
Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.
Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.
Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference.
It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.
Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.
Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.
In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.
Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“
That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1, and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”
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In a new rule released yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to make it as easy to cancel a subscription to a gym or a service as it is to sign up for one. In a statement, FTC chair Lina Khan explained the reasoning behind the “click-to-cancel” rule: “Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” she said. “Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.” Although most of the new requirements won’t take effect for about six months, David Dayen of The American Prospect noted that the stock price of Planet Fitness fell 8% after the announcement.
When he took office in January 2021, with democracy under siege from autocratic governments abroad and an authoritarian movement at home, President Joe Biden set out to prove that democracy could deliver for the ordinary people who had lost faith in it. The click-to-cancel rule is an illustration of an obvious and long-overdue protection, but it is only one of many ways—$35 insulin, new bridges, loan forgiveness, higher wages, good jobs—in which policies designed to benefit ordinary people have demonstrated that a democratic government can improve lives.
When Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, she noted that the administration “has driven a historic economic recovery” with strong growth, very low unemployment rates, and inflation returning to normal. Now it is focused on lowering costs for families and expanding the economy while reducing inequality. That strong economy at home is helping to power the global economy, Yellen noted, and the U.S. has been working to strengthen that economy by reinforcing global policies, investments, and institutions that reinforce economic stability.
“Over the past four years, the world has been through a lot,” Yellen said, “from a once-in-a-century pandemic, to the largest land war in Europe since World War II, to increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. This has only underlined that we are all in it together. America’s economic well-being depends on the world’s, and America’s economic leadership is key to global prosperity and security.” She warned against isolationism that would undermine such prosperity both at home and abroad.
The numbers behind the proven experience that government protection of ordinary people is good for economic growth got the blessing of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday, when it awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and to James Robinson of the University of Chicago. Their research explains why “[s]ocieties with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better,” while democracies do.
Although democracy has been delivering for Americans, Donald Trump and MAGAs rose to power by convincing those left behind by 40 years of supply-side economics that their problem was not the people in charge of the government, but rather the government itself.
Trump wants to get rid of the current government so that he can enrich himself, do whatever he wants to his enemies, and avoid answering to the law. The Christian nationalists who wrote Project 2025 want to destroy the federal government so they can put in place an authoritarian who will force Americans to live under religious rule. Tech elites like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel want to get rid of the federal government so they can control the future without having to worry about regulations.
In place of what they insist is a democratic system that has failed, they are offering a strongman who, they claim, will take care of people more efficiently than a democratic government can. The focus on masculinity and portrayals of Trump as a muscled hero‚ much as Russian president Vladimir Putin portrays himself, fit the mold of an authoritarian leader.
But the argument that Americans need a strongman depends on the argument that democracy does not work. In the last three-and-a-half years, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democrats have proved that it can, so long as it operates with the best interests of ordinary people in mind. Trump and Vance’s outlandish lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene are designed to override the reality of a competent administration addressing a crisis with all the tools it has. In its place, the lies provide a false narrative of federal officials ignoring people and trying to steal their property.
Their attack on democracy has another problem, as well. In addition to the reality that democracy has been delivering for Americans for more than three years now—and pretty dramatically—Trump is no longer a strongman. Vice President Kamala Harris is outperforming him in the theater of political dominance. And as she does so, his image is crumbling.
In an article in US News and World Report yesterday, NBC’s former chief marketer John D. Miller apologized to America for helping to “create a monster.” Miller led the team that marketed The Apprentice, the reality TV show that made Trump a household name. “To sell the show,” Miller wrote, “we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty.” But the truth was that he declared bankruptcy six times, and “[t]he imposing board room where he famously fired contestants was a set, because his real boardroom was too old and shabby for TV,” Miller wrote. While Trump loved the attention the show provided, “more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV.”
Miller says they “promoted the show relentlessly,” blanketing the country with a “highly exaggerated” image of Trump as a successful businessman “like a heavy snowstorm.” “[W]e…did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader,” Miller wrote. “I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”
Speaking as a “born-and-bred Republican,” Miller warned: “If you believe that Trump will be better for you or better for the country, that is an illusion, much like The Apprentice was.” He strongly urged people to vote for Kamala Harris. “The country will be better off and so will you.”
A new video shown last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live even more powerfully illustrated the collapse of Trump’s tough guy image. Written by Jesse Joyce of Comedy Central, the two-minute video featured actor and retired professional wrestler Dave Bautista dominating his sparring partner in a boxing ring and then telling those who think Trump is “some sort of tough guy” that “he’s not.”
Working out in a gym, Bautista insults Trump’s heavy makeup, out-of-shape body, draft dodging, and physical weakness, and notes that “he sells imaginary baseball cards pretending to be a cowboy fireman” when “he’s barely strong enough to hold an umbrella.” Bautista says Trump’s two-handed method of drinking water looks “like a little pink chickadee,” and goes on to make a raunchy observation about Trump’s stage dancing. “He’s moody, he pouts, he throws tantrums,” Bautista goes on. “He’s cattier on social media than a middle-school mean girl.”
Bautista ends by listing Trump’s fears of rain, dogs, windmills…and being laughed at.” “And mostly,” Bautista concludes, “he’s terrified that real, red-blooded American men will find out that he’s a weak, tubby toddler.” Calling Trump a “whiny b*tch,” Bautista walks away from the camera.
The sketch was billed as comedy, but it was deadly serious in its takedown of the key element of Trump’s political power.
And he seems vulnerable. Forbes and Newsweek have recently questioned his mental health; yesterday the Boston Globe ran an op-ed saying, “Trump’s decline is too dangerous to ignore. We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy.”
Trump’s Fox News Channel town hall yesterday got 2.9 million viewers; Harris’s interview got 7.1 million. Today, Trump canceled yet another appearance, this one with the National Rifle Association in Savannah, Georgia, scheduled for October 22, where he was supposed to be the keynote speaker.
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris today held rallies in Milwaukee, Green Bay, and La Crosse, Wisconsin. In La Crosse, MAGA hecklers tried to interrupt her while she was speaking about the centrality of the three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices to the overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
“Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” Harris called to them with a smile and a wave. As the crowd roared with approval, she added: “No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.”
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The events of January 6, 2021, overshadowed those of January 5, 2021, but that day was crucially important in a different way: Georgia voters elected two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to the U.S. Senate. Warnock and Ossoff brought the total of Democrats in the Senate to 48, and since two Independents—Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont—caucus with the Democrats and because in an evenly split Senate the majority goes to the party in the White House, their election gave Democrats control of the Senate.
Without that majority, the Biden-Harris agenda that built the U.S. economy into what The Economist this week called “the envy of the world” would never have passed. There would have been no American Rescue Plan, no Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, no CHIPS and Science Act, no Safer Communities Act, no PACT Act, no Inflation Reduction Act.
In an era when Republicans refuse to vote for any Democratic measures no matter how popular they are, control of the Senate is vital. The Senate majority leader decides what measures can come to the floor for consideration, so a leader can shut out anything his party doesn’t like. The Senate also controls the confirmation of federal judges, including members of the Supreme Court.
During the Trump years, then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stacked the courts with MAGA judges, some of whom are now so reliably handing down right-wing decisions that plaintiffs routinely “shop” for them to get the decisions they want. And with Trump’s three hand-picked extremists at the Supreme Court, challenging those decisions simply writes that extremism more fully into law.
As Trump continues to crumble—he canceled another appearance today, and in a statement almost certainly designed to leak, an advisor said he was “exhausted”—and as Democrats are favored to take the House, Republicans are waging a fierce battle to take control of the Senate.
They are starting with an advantage. There are 34 Senate seats on the ballot this year, and Democrats are defending 23 of them while Republicans are defending just 11. Republicans need to pick up one seat to control the Senate if Trump wins the White House, and two if Harris wins.
The McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund PAC has, so far, spent more than $140 million in this year’s Senate races, with more than $136 million going to attack ads. In the four races that are most vulnerable for Democrats—Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the Senate Leadership Fund has spent $17.85 million (MT), $55.5 million (OH), $38.1 million (PA), and $23.6 million (WI).
In each of those four races, that money is bolstering extremely wealthy Republican challengers. In Montana, Republican Tim Sheehy, running against Senator Jon Tester, would be among the ten wealthiest senators if elected: his financial disclosures put his net worth at between $74 million and $260 million. Republican Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, has a net worth between $38 million and $172.7 million. In the Pennsylvania race, David McCormick (who actually appears to live in Connecticut) reported assets of $116 million to $290 million in 2022. In Wisconsin’s race, Republican Eric Hovde (who lived in an ocean-view mansion in Laguna Beach, California, until he decided to run for the Senate from Wisconsin) would also be one of the Senate’s richest members. His financial disclosures say his net worth is between $195.5 million and $564.4 million.
This is not a coincidence. Knowing that fundraising would be difficult this year with Trump steering funds from the Republican National Committee primarily to himself, Republican Party leaders actively recruited candidates who could pour their own money into their campaigns. By the end of June, Sheehy had put $10.7 million into his own race; Moreno had put in $4.5 million by mid-October. McCormick had loaned his campaign more than $4 million by the end of June; Hovde put in $8 million by the end of March.
This moment echoes the late nineteenth century, when wealthy businessmen sought a Senate seat as a capstone to their success, a perch from which they could protect the interests of other men like themselves. In that era it was relatively easy for a man like Nevada’s William Sharon to buy himself a Senate seat because the Constitution had established that state legislatures would elect their state’s senators. Determined to win a Senate seat to protect his railroad interests “regardless of expense,” Sharon bought a newspaper to flood the state capital with his own praise. The legislature gave him the seat in 1874.
By the 1880s, even the staunchly pro-business Chicago Tribune complained: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation.” In 1892 the newly formed Populist Party met in Omaha, Nebraska, “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with which class it originated.” They called for the people to bypass the corrupt legislatures and elect senators directly.
In 1900, William A. Clark of Montana provided the kick their proposal needed.
Clark had arrived at the newly opened gold fields in Montana Territory in 1863 and transferred the money he made as a mule trader into banking. He made a fortune repossessing mining properties when owners defaulted on their loans. He invested that fortune in smelters, railroads, a newspaper, and copper mining, becoming one of the state’s famous Copper Kings. In 1889 he was the president of the Montana constitutional convention, where he made sure that mine owners could run the state as they wished.
By 1890, Clark had his eyes on a Senate seat. He failed to get the support of the legislature in that year, and for the next decade he and his rival copper magnate Marcus Daly of the Anaconda Company poured vast sums of money into influencing the economy of the state, the location of the capital, and the state’s politics.
Clark finally won his election in 1899, but on the same day he presented his credentials to the Senate, his opponents filed a petition charging him with bribery. An extensive investigation revealed that Clark had bought his seat with bribes ranging from $240 to $100,000, equivalent to almost $4 million today. His representatives had paid debts, bought ranches, and even handed envelopes of cash to legislators. The investigation also showed that Daly had spent a fortune trying to block Clark’s election.
Montana politics, it seemed, had become a rich man’s game.
Aware that the Senate would vote to remove him from his seat, Clark resigned in May 1900. In January 1901 a new Montana legislature containing many of the same men Clark had paid off in 1899 elected him again to the same term from which he had been forced to resign. After an undistinguished term, he retired from the Senate in 1907.
Clark’s blatant purchase of a Senate seat added momentum to the demand for the direct election of senators, and in 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution established that the power to elect senators must rest in the hands of voters. That measure was supposed to make sure that wealth could not buy a Senate seat.
That the ability to self-fund a campaign is once again a key factor in winning a Senate seat from Montana—and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—seems to be history repeating.
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A number of people telling me we all need a night off had almost convinced me not to write tonight.
But then Trump spoke at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he told a long, meandering story about golfing legend Arnold Palmer that ended with praise for Palmer’s…anatomy.
He went on to call Vice President Kamala Harris—whose name he deliberately mispronounced—“a sh*t vice president. The worst. You’re the worst vice president. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here, you’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.”
As Trump’s remarks got weirder and weirder, the Fox News Channel cut away and instead showed Harris being cheered at a packed, exuberant, super-charged rally in Georgia.
Trump’s speech comes on top of his repeated backing out of interviews and his bizarre appearances. Last night, his advice to an audience in Detroit to vote took its own wild turn: “Jill, get your fat husband off the couch,” he said. “Get that fat pig off the couch. Tell him to go and vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country. Get that guy the hell off our— get him up, Jill, slap him around. Get him up. Get him up, Jill. We want him off the couch to get out and vote.”
Trump’s performances over the past few days seem to confirm that the 2024 October surprise is the increasingly obvious mental incapacity of the Republican candidate for president.
It seems clear that a vote for Trump is really a vote for his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who if he becomes president will be the youngest American president in our history. At 40 years old, he is two years younger than Theodore Roosevelt was when he took office in 1901 at 42. Vance would also be one of the least experienced presidents ever. His 18 months in the Senate has given him only slightly more experience in office than Chester Alan Arthur, who succeeded James Garfield in 1881. Arthur was a political operative who had never held elected office at all before becoming vice president.
I’m going to leave you tonight with my friend Peter Ralston’s image of Maine’s Atlantic puffins, in whose expressions I am reading the consternation that speaks for me right now.
I’ll be back at the wheel tomorrow.
[Image by Peter Ralston, “Four Razorbills with Puffins.”]
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I had hoped to write tonight about the farm bill, which Eric Hovde, running for the Senate from Wisconsin although it's not clear he lives there, could not talk about in the debate between him and incumbent senator Tammy Baldwin on Friday. “I’m not an expert on the farm bill because I'm not in the U.S. Senate at this point in time,” Hovde said. "So I can't opine specifically on all aspects of the farm bill."
The farm bill is one of our most important pieces of legislation. It establishes the main agricultural and food policies of the government, covering price supports for farm products, especially corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, dairy, and sugar; crop insurance; conservation programs; and nutritional programs for 41 million low-income Americans, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps. It must pass every five years but has been held up by Republican extremists in the House and is now in limbo. One would think that anyone running for Senate should know it pretty well, especially in Wisconsin, where in 2022 farms produced $16.7 billion in agricultural products.
Perhaps this is why the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation has endorsed Baldwin, the first Democrat in nearly twenty years to receive their support.
But I cannot take tonight to explain the really quite interesting history of the farm bill (and why it contains our nutrition programs) because the real story of today is that the Republican candidate for president is not mentally able to handle the job of the presidency, and Republican leaders are trying to cover up that reality.
These two stories are related.
That same quest for power that appears to be driving Hovde to seek a Senate seat without knowing anything about a bill that is hugely important to the people he would be representing appears to be preventing Republican leaders from admitting that their 78-year-old candidate has lost the mental capacity necessary for managing the most powerful nation in the world, including its vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
The United States has guardrails to prevent an incapacitated president from exercising power.
The question of what to do when a president was unable to do his job was not really a major question until the post–World War II years. While presidents before then had been weakened—notably, Woodrow Wilson had had a stroke—medical care was poor enough that those presidents who sustained life-threatening injuries tended to die from them fairly quickly. At the same time, the difficulties of the travel necessary for a national political career made politics a young man’s game, so there really weren’t rumblings of mental incapacity from age.
But Republican president Dwight Eisenhower had seen the grave damage military leaders could do when they were incapacitated and unaware of their inability to evaluate situations accurately, and knew that the commander-in-chief must have a system in place to be replaced if he were unable to fulfill the mental requirements of his position.
Eisenhower took office in 1953, and two years later, he suffered a heart attack. Vice President Richard Nixon and members of the Cabinet agreed to a working plan to conduct business while the president recovered, but presidential assistant Sherman Adams noted that the crisis left everyone “uncomfortably aware of the Constitution's failure to provide for the direction of the government by an acting President when the President is temporarily disabled and unable to perform his functions.”
When Eisenhower went on to need an abdominal operation and then to have a minor stroke, concerns mounted. As Congress discussed a solution, Eisenhower took matters into his own hands. He drafted an informal agreement that he presented to Nixon. If the president became temporarily unable to do the duties of the office, the document gave to the vice president the power of “Acting President.”
The need to figure out what would happen if modern medicine could keep alive an incapacitated president became apparent after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Not only did the question of a president’s incapacity have to be addressed; so did the problem of succession. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was falsely rumored to have had a heart attack, and both the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate were old and doubted that they could adequately fulfill the duties of the presidency themselves.
Congress’s solution was the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, providing a system by which either the president or, if they were unable to realize their incapacity, members of the executive branch would transfer the powers of the president to the vice president. Eisenhower enthusiastically backed the idea that the nation should have coverage for a disabled president.
To anyone paying attention, it is clear that Trump is not in any shape to manage the government of the United States of America. He is canceling interviews and botching the ones he does sit for, while falling asleep at events where he is not actually speaking. He lies incessantly even when hosts point out that his claims have been debunked, and cannot answer a question or follow a train of thought. And his comments of the weekend—calling the vice president a “sh*t vice president,” telling a woman to get “your fat husband off the couch” to vote for him, and musing about a famous golfer’s penis—indicate that he has no mental guardrails left.
Today, in what apparently was designed to show Trump as relatable and to compete with the story that Vice President Harris worked at a McDonalds when she was in college, Trump did a photo op at a McDonalds in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he took prepared fries out of the fryolator. It was an odd moment, for Trump has never portrayed himself as a man of the people so much as a man to lead the people, and the picture of him in a McDonald’s apron undercuts his image as a dominant leader.
But in any case, it was all staged: the restaurant was closed, the five “customers” were loyalists who had practiced their roles, and when Trump handed food through the drive-through window, he did not take money or make change.
"Now I have worked at McDonald's," he said afterward. "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala."
The fact that someone on Trump’s campaign leaked to Politico that he is “exhausted” is almost certainly a sign that people down the ranks are deeply concerned about his ability to finish the campaign, let alone run the country. But party leaders continue to stand behind him, raising echoes of their staunch support during Trump’s two impeachment trials.
In 2019 the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his attempt to coerce Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and pervert the security of the United States to steal an election. The evidence was so overwhelming that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) noted: “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” But Republican senators—except Mitt Romney (R-UT), who voted to convict on one count—nonetheless acquitted Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
Trump’s second impeachment by the House in January 2021 for incitement of insurrection ended similarly. In the Senate, McConnell refused to change the schedule to enable the Senate to vote before a new president was inaugurated, thus giving himself, as well as other Republican senators, an out to vote against conviction on the grounds that Trump was no longer the president. Seven Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, but forty-three continued to back Trump. In a speech after the vote, McConnell said he believed Trump was responsible for the January 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election but that he would have to answer for that behavior in court.
But nearly four years later, Trump has not had to answer in court because the Supreme Court, stacked with his appointees thanks to Republican senators, has said that he cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. While the courts sort out what counts as official duties, he is, once again, the Republican nominee for president. Leaders are standing behind him despite the fact he is demonstrating deeply concerning behavior.
When President Joe Biden decided not to accept the Democratic presidential nomination after his poor performance in his June debate with Trump, Republicans demanded that Vice President Harris and the Cabinet invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment, despite the fact that Biden’s job performance continued to be exemplary. We learned later that during the time of the debate, he was negotiating a historic prisoner swap involving multiple countries to free twenty-four prisoners, including Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan.
Nonetheless, that one poor debate performance was enough for Republicans to condemn Biden’s ability to govern the nation. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) told the Fox News Channel that “Joe Biden has decided he isn’t capable of being a candidate; in so doing his admission also means he cannot serve as President.”
But Trump has been lying that immigrants are eating pets; calling voters fat pigs; basing his economic policy on a backward idea of how tariffs work; calling for prosecuting his enemies and making the civil service, military, and judiciary loyal to him; and praising a famous golfer’s “manhood”—hardly indications of a man able to take on the presidency of the United States.
And yet with regard to his mental acuity, Republican leaders offer only crickets.
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On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.”
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
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Former president Trump’s closing economic argument for the American people is that putting a high tariff wall around the country will bring in so much foreign money that it will fund domestic programs and bring down the deficit, enabling massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing economic argument is that the government should invest in the middle class by permitting Medicare to pay for in-home health aides for the elderly, cutting taxes for small businesses and families, and passing a federal law against price gouging for groceries during emergencies.
The two candidates are presenting quite stark differences in the futures they propose for the American people.
Trump has indicated his determination to take the nation’s economy back to that of the 1890s, back to a time when capital was concentrated among a few industrialists and financiers. This world fits the idea of modern Republicans that the government should work to protect the economic power of those on the “supply side” of the economy with the expectation that they will be able to invest more efficiently in the market than if they were regulated by business or their money taken by taxation.
Trump has said he thinks the word tariff is as beautiful as “love” or “faith” and has frequently praised President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, for leading the U.S. to become, he says, the wealthiest it ever was. Trump attributes that wealth to tariffs, but unlike leaders in the 1890s, Trump refuses to acknowledge that tariffs do not bring in money from other countries. The cost of tariffs is borne by American consumers.
The industrialists and Republican lawmakers who pushed high tariffs in the 1890s were quite open that tariffs are a tax on ordinary Americans. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World complained about the McKinley Tariff that raised average tariffs to 49.5%. “Under the McKinley Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnetic, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners,” it wrote, even as the powerful companies slashed wages.
Today, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman noted that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has called out Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers of as much as $3.9 trillion.
Together with Trump’s promise to make deep cuts or even to end income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic plan will dramatically shift the burden of supporting the country from the very wealthy to average Americans, precisely the way the U.S. economy worked until 1913, when the revenue act of that year lowered tariffs and replaced the lost income with an income tax.
That shifting of the economic burden of the country downward showed in another way yesterday, as well, when the Committee for a Responsible Budget noted that Trump’s economic plans would hasten the insolvency of Social Security trust funds by three years, from 2034 to 2031, and would lead to dramatic cuts.
Harris’s plan explicitly rejects the supply-side economics of the past and moves forward the policies of the Biden administration that work to make sure the “demand side” of the economy, or consumers, has access to money and opportunity. Those policies, dismissed by the ideologues of the Reagan revolution, had proven their success between 1933 and 1981 and have again delivered, achieving the nation’s extraordinary post-pandemic economic growth.
The International Monetary Fund underlined that growth again today when it outlined that the nation’s surge of investment under the Biden administration has attracted private investment, all of which is paying off in higher productivity, higher wages, and higher stock prices, enabling the U.S. to pull ahead of the world’s other advanced economies.
And it is continuing to deliver. Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials that mislead consumers and hurt real businesses went into effect. Today the Department of Health and Human Services reported that in the first half of 2024, nearly 1.5 million people with Medicare Part D saved almost $1 billion in out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs thanks to the drug negotiations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Harris has expanded that plan to focus on small businesses and families. In addition to her plan to permit start-ups to deduct $50,000 in costs rather than the current $5,000 and to cut taxes for families by extending the Child Tax Credit, she has called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, lower than it was before the Trump tax cuts and lower than the rate President Joe Biden proposed in his 2024 budget. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.
Her recent proposal to enable Medicare to pay for home health aides has flown largely under the radar, although it would be a major benefit to many Americans. She proposes to pay for that benefit with additional savings from drug price negotiations. By keeping seniors in their homes longer, it would save families from having to meet the high cost of residential care.
Yesterday the White House proposed an expansion of the Affordable Care Act to make over-the-counter contraceptives free under health plans. Currently, only prescription contraceptives are covered. If the rule is finalized, it would expand contraceptive coverage to the 52 million women of reproductive age covered by private health plans.
As the campaigns enter the last two weeks before the election, the difference between their economic vision is stark.
So, it seems, is the difference between the candidates.
Today, Trump canceled another event, this one a roundtable with Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, both members of Trump’s transition team, that was supposed to highlight Kennedy’s vision for America’s health and their contributions to the campaign. He later held a rally in North Carolina.
Harris, meanwhile, sat down with Hallie Jackson of NBC News and participated in an interview with Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Tonight, rapper Eminem introduced former president Barack Obama at a rally for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Harris’s campaign announced today that on Friday she will campaign in Houston, Texas, where she will emphasize the dangers of abortion bans in the heart of Trump country.
The biggest news about the candidates today, though, appears to be an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic exploring Trump’s disparagement of the U.S. military. Noting that it is an odd thing for a president to remain popular when he is openly dismissive of soldiers and their decorated officers, Goldberg explores Trump’s inability to understand any relationship that is not transactional. He noted Trump’s dismissal of soldiers as “losers,“ his astonishment at how little pay they make, and his dislike of wounded personnel who, he thinks, made him look bad.
Unable to understand the principles of honor or patriotism, Trump could not comprehend that Army generals were loyal to the U.S. Constitution rather than him. He yearned for generals, he said, like those of autocratic rulers. He said he wanted generals like Hitler’s, a leader he sometimes praised. “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Trump asked then–chief of staff General John Kelly. Kelly was clear: “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.”
That was not an answer Trump liked. When the generals refused to shoot protesters or deploy U.S. troops against American citizens, Trump screamed: “You are all f*cking losers!”
Finally, General Kelly spoke up himself. In an interview with Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times published tonight, Kelly noted that he had decided not to speak out about Trump unless Trump said something deeply troubling or something that involved Kelly and was wildly inaccurate. For Kelly, Trump’s recent talk about the “enemy within” was dangerous enough that he felt obliged to make a public comment.
The retired U.S. Marine Corps general confirmed that Trump is “certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government—he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”
Kelly added that “in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
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The struggle over whether the U.S. government should work for everyone or for the very wealthy and corporations was on display today. Cable and internet providers and home security companies sued to stop the newly finalized Federal Trade Commission “click-to-cancel” rule that says it must be as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.
Also today, the Department of Transportation reached a record settlement of $50 million with American Airlines, whose damage to wheelchairs and dangerous physical assistance to disabled passengers has broken laws. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost both legs in combat in the Iraq War, praised the fine and commented: “When an airline damages or breaks someone’s wheelchair, it’s like breaking their legs.”
"The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. "With this penalty, we are setting a new standard of accountability for airlines that violate the civil rights of passengers with disabilities. By setting penalties at levels beyond the mere cost of doing business for airlines, we're aiming to change how the industry behaves and prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the first place.”
A reader called to my attention that the recent Federal Election Commission filings showed one significant difference in the expenditures of the two presidential campaigns. The Harris campaign spent $34,550.02 on sign language interpreting services. The Trump campaign spent $0.00.
These details of governance are fragments of a larger picture of how we see our country. Are we all created equal and entitled to be treated equally before the law? Or are some people better than others?
CNN was supposed to host another presidential debate tonight, but while Vice President Kamala Harris accepted, Trump declined to attend. In place of a debate, CNN invited each candidate to hold a town hall. Harris accepted; Trump declined.
In her discussion with host Anderson Cooper, Harris focused on the reiteration yesterday by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, that Trump had spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler and expressed a desire to have generals like Hitler’s. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
The ideology of fascism is associated with Italian journalist and politician Benito Mussolini, who articulated a new political ideology in the 1920s. Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter what socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince their neighbors that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production. The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini to give up on socialism and develop a new political theory.
Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that some men were better than others. Those few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They must organize the people as they had during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
This hierarchical system of government was called “fascism” after the bundle of rods tied around an axe that was the ancient Roman symbol of authority and power. Italy adopted it, and Mussolini’s ideas inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hitler. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim a glorious past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
But while today we associate fascism with this European movement, its foundational principle—that some men are better than others and have the right and even the duty to rule over the majority—runs parallel to that same strand in United States history. Indeed, Nazi lawyers and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws for inspiration, and Hitler looked to America’s Indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of “unwanted” people.
For retired Marine general John Kelly to have spoken out against Trump before the 2024 election was a huge deal. As Secretary Buttigieg put it: “It’s one thing for some leftist group to call you a fascist. Quite another when it’s a fellow Republican. And absolutely astonishing when it’s your own chief of staff.” But Kelly was not alone. Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told veteran journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
In tonight’s CNN town hall, Vice President Harris told Cooper that she agreed that Trump is a fascist. She noted that when a four-star Marine general comes out two weeks before an election to warn Americans that one of the candidates is a fascist, we should see this as “a 911 call to the American people.”
Trump is “increasingly unstable,” Harris said, “and unfit to serve…. [T]he people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans by the way, who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, his national security advisor, former secretaries of defense, and his vice president have all called him unfit and dangerous. They have said explicitly he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as President of the United States,” she said.
When Trump talks about “the enemy within,” Harris said, “ [h]e's talking about the American people. He's talking about journalists, judges, nonpartisan election officials…. And he's going to sit there unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution. Creating an enemies list.” In contrast, she said, she would have a “to-do list” to work on the things that matter to the American people.
When Trump responded to Kelly’s claims, he appeared to confuse Kelly, who was retired when Trump chose him to serve as White House chief of staff, and Mark Milley, the active-duty chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump referred to four-star general Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan, as “tough and dumb,” a “LOWLIFE, and a bad General,” but then went on to talk of him as active duty and to say he stopped seeking his advice in the White House.
Forced to comment on Kelly’s comment about Trump’s embracing fascism, Republican leaders are either ducking the question or acting as if it is not a big deal. On CNN this morning, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said the news that Trump has praised Hitler will not affect Sununu’s support. “If we can get a Republican mindset out of Washington,” he said, “we need that culture change.”
At a rally tonight in Macon, Georgia, Trump agreed with the audience as it chanted: “Lock him up.” “You should lock them up,” Trump said. “Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary. Lock ‘em up.”
Tonight, Shawn Reilly, the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin—a key Republican stronghold—announced he’s voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Trump’s threat to use the military on “the enemy within,” along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump’s administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump’s reelection could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party.
On the Hugh Hewitt Show this morning, Trump boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.”
Trump’s analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.
Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.
In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.
But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.
In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump’s promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republicans’ reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s economic plans would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Rattner noted that Trump’s plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or a depression.
MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it is not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. "My wife…was miscarrying and bleeding out,” John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharpe. “Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, 'Oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you're sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion'—that’s what they’re saying in...all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not you and your family. The government. No! Stay out of it!... We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That's crazy!”
“He is killing us!” Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. “He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk and some women have died already because of this…. What’s happening with women right now is real, and it is playing out across America.”
MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long-overdue farm bill.
Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democrat incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. “These people are not fit to govern,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) posted today.
MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it: Ohio representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how “Trump’s Already Stuffing House GOP ‘Normies’ in a Locker” as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist.
But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records, “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psycho PAC warned both that Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up,” and that his malignant narcissism makes him “grossly unfit for leadership.”
But if Trump’s grip is slipping, who will take over the party?
In a new biography of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” He also went after Florida senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly called McConnell’s comments “indefensible.” Scott said he was “shocked that [McConnell] would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election.”
Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump’s campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs.
And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA Republicans who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris.
In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center.
In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the federal government out of the southern states. (They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)
“If this is not revolution,” Civil War veteran House minority leader James A. Garfield (R-OH) said, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.”
Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform, but voters backed Garfield’s defense of the country and of Black rights and elected him to the White House.
The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884 they backed former New York governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened Black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed “Mugwumps,” thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
A bombshell story last night from the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, who is backing the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaway and gifts of tens of millions to the campaign, has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Reporters Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold, and Sam Schechner said that the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, won a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies in 2021. It is the major rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon, and Musk has a security clearance; he says it is a top-secret clearance.
Today, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into the story. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia,” Nelson told Burgess Everett of Semafor, “then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk appears to be making a bid for control of the Republican Party for a number of possible reasons, including so he can continue to score federal contracts and because the high tariffs Trump has promised to place on Chinese imports would guarantee that Musk would have leverage in the electrical vehicle market.
But Musk has competition for control of the party. Today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who lead the establishment Republican faction and the MAGAs, respectively, and thus are usually at loggerheads, issued a joint statement condemning Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for “labeling [Trump] as a ‘fascist.’” They suggest she is "inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.”
Observers immediately pointed out that, in fact, it is Trump who has repeatedly called Harris a fascist—as well as a Marxist and a communist—and that those calling Trump a fascist are former members of his own administration like former White House chief of staff General John Kelly, or leaders like former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump himself appointed to his position and who called Trump “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Harris’s contribution to this discussion was that when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris directly if she thinks Trump is a fascist at a town hall this week, she answered: “Yes, I do. And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”
Aside from the gaslighting of attacking Harris for something that Trump is the one doing, the statement seemed a calculated attempt to demonstrate Republican solidarity. But it was glaringly obvious that McConnell and Johnson found that solidarity only in attacking Harris. Their statement contained no praise of Trump.
The struggle over the Republican Party also seemed evident in yesterday’s decision by the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong, to kill that paper’s planned endorsement of Harris. Choosing not to make an endorsement in the race, Soon-Shiong said that he thought an endorsement would “add to the division” in the country. Elon Musk praised his decision.
Today the Washington Post also decided not to make an endorsement in the presidential race, despite the fact a piece endorsing Harris was already drafted. Publisher William Lewis said the paper was returning to its roots of not endorsing presidential candidates, although it has endorsed candidates for decades and did so in its early years as well. His statement seemed a weak cover for the evident wish of the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to avoid antagonizing Trump.
Bezos gives Musk a run for his money at being the richest man in the world. But while Musk wants high tariffs against China to protect his access to electric vehicle markets, Bezos’s fortune comes from Amazon, and high tariffs would shatter his business. When he was in office, Trump went out of his way to find ways to hurt Amazon to get back at Bezos for unfavorable coverage in the Post.
Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Mariel Garza, along with journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein, resigned from the paper after its decision not to endorse Harris, and nearly 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. The Washington Post, too, has seen about 2,000 subscribers bow out, and fourteen of the newspaper’s columnists called the decision not to condemn Trump’s threats to the “freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution” “a terrible mistake.” Cartoonist Ann Telnaes published a blacked-out square, playing on the Post’s motto that democracy dies in darkness.
Readers are speaking out against the Washington Post for demonstrating what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” the demands of an authoritarian leader (although Washington Post legal journalist Ruth Marcus, who signed the letter calling the decision a terrible mistake, pointed out that the Post itself was publishing the many letters of condemnation). “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder’s “On Tyranny” reads. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
The aftermath of the Post’s decision demonstrated what scholars say will happen after such obeying. Rather than winning favors, such a demonstration of weakness invites further abuse, as anyone who has watched Trump in action ought to know by now.
Trump’s people pounced, with advisor Stephen Miller posting: “You know the Kamala campaign is sinking when even the Washington Post refuses to endorse.”
Trump then promptly went a step further, claiming that Democrats had taken part in “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery…in the 2020 presidential election” and warning that in 2024, “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…. Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Trump’s threats are designed to convince people he is a strongman who will inevitably win the 2024 presidential election. But to do that, he will have to go through the voters, who are demonstrating their enthusiasm for Democratic candidate Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
After the announcement by the Washington Post, others stepped up to endorse Harris. The largest Teamsters union in Texas endorsed Harris before her rally tonight in Houston. In a blistering editorial, the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Harris, saying: “America deserves much more than an aspiring autocrat who ignores the law, is running to stay out of prison, and doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Tonight, Trump taped a podcast episode with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas, hoping to reach Rogan’s large audience. He was still on the ground in Austin when he was supposed to be appearing at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, and blamed the long taping for the fact he was three hours late to the rally. Tired of waiting, rally attendees streamed out. When he finally arrived, about 47,000 viewers watched the PBS live stream of the rally.
Harris was in Houston, where she took the fight for abortion rights to the heart of a state where an abortion ban has endangered women and driven up the infant mortality rate. People began standing in line before sunrise to get into the rally at the Houston Shell Energy Stadium and filled the 22,000-seat stadium to capacity. About 2.5 million people watched the PBS live stream.
Harris shared the stage with actor Jessica Alba and music legends Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, who asked the crowd: “Are we ready to say Madam President?”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed "to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers."
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed "to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers."
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
Who here wants to deny this is happening? And we were told that it couldn’t happen here.
I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.
It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.
There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.
Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.
On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.
Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.
Meanwhile, the decision of the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post not to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have sparked a backlash. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.”
Early on October 26, the Washington Post itself went after Trump backer billionaire Elon Musk with a major story highlighting the information that Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, had worked illegally when he started his career in the U.S. Musk “did not have the legal right to work” in the U.S. when he started his first successful company. As part of the Trump campaign, Musk has emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigrants.
The New York Times has tended to downplay Trump’s outrageous statements, but on Saturday it ran a round-up of Trump’s threats in the center of the front page, above the fold. It noted that Trump has vowed to expand presidential power, prosecute his political opponents, and crack down on immigration with mass deportations and detention camps. It went on to list his determination to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), use the U.S. military against Mexican drug cartels “in potential violation of international law,” and use federal troops against U.S. citizens. It added that he plans to “upend trade” with sweeping new tariffs that will raise consumer prices, and to rein in regulatory agencies.
“To help achieve these and other goals,” the paper concluded, “his advisers are vetting lawyers seen as more likely to embrace aggressive legal theories about the scope of his power.”
On Sunday the front page of the New York Times opinion section read, in giant capital letters: “DONALD TRUMP/ SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES/ ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS/ USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS/ ABANDON ALLIES/ PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS/ BELIEVE HIM.” And then, inside the section, the paper provided the receipts: Trump’s own words outlining his fascist plans. “BELIEVE HIM,” the paper said.
On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, host Jake Tapper refused to permit Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, to gaslight viewers. Vance angrily denied that Trump has repeatedly called for using the U.S. military against Americans, but Tapper came with receipts that proved the very things Vance denied.
Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden began in the early afternoon. The hateful performances of the early participants set the tone for the rally. Early on, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, delivered a steamingly racist set. He said, for example: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” He went on: “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” Hinchcliffe also talked about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins.
The speakers who followed Hinchcliffe called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” They called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch,” and they railed against “f*cking illegals.” They insulted Latinos generally, Black Americans, Palestinians and Jews. Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s claim that “America is for Americans and Americans only” directly echoed the statement of Adolf Hitler that "Germany is for Germans and Germans only.”
Trump took the stage about two hours late, prompting people to stream toward the exits before he finished speaking. He hit his usual highlights, notably undermining Vance’s argument from earlier in the day by saying that, indeed, he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”
But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,” Trump said.
It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote.
Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024, this seems his likely plan.
But to do that, he needs at least a plausibly close election, or at least to convince his supporters that the election has been stolen from him. Tonight’s rally badly hurt that plan.
As Hinchcliffe was talking about Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris was at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia talking about her plan to spread her opportunity economy to Puerto Rico. She has called for strengthening Puerto Rico’s energy grid and making it easier to get permits to build there.
After the “floating island of garbage” comment, Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny, who has more than 45 million followers on Instagram, posted Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico, and his spokesperson said he is endorsing Harris.
Puerto Rican singer and actor Ricky Martin shared a clip from Hinchcliffe’s set with his 16 million followers. His caption read: “This is what they think of us.” Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, posted Harris’s plan. Later, singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande posted that she had voted for Harris. Grande has 376 million followers on Instagram. Singer Luis Fonsi, who has 16 million followers, also called out the “constant hate.”
The headlines were brutal. “MAGA speakers unleash ugly rhetoric at Trump's MSG rally,” read Axios. Politico wrote: “Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks.” “Racist Remarks and Insults Mark Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally,” the New York Times announced. “Speakers at Trump rally make racist comments, hurl insults,” read CNN.
But the biggest sign of the damage the rally did was the frantic backpedaling from Republicans in tight elections, who distanced themselves as fast as they could from the insults against Puerto Ricans, especially. The Trump campaign itself tried to distance itself from the “floating island of garbage” quotation, only to be met with comments pointing out that Hinchcliffe’s set had been vetted and uploaded to the teleprompters.
As the clips spread like wildfire, political writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out that almost 6 million Puerto Ricans live in the states—about a million in Florida, half a million in Pennsylvania, 100,000 in Georgia, 100,000 in Michigan, 100,000 in North Carolina, 45,000 in Arizona, and 40,000 in Nevada—and that over half of them voted in 2020.
In 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue.
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Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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On Monday, October 28, 1929, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company opened its forty-fifth season.
Four thousand attendees in their finest clothes strolled to the elegant building on foot or traveled in one of a thousand limousines to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the melodramatic story of an innocent French girl seduced by wealth, whose reluctance to leave her riches for true love leads to her arrest and tragic death. Photographers captured images of the era’s social celebrities as they arrived at opening night, their flash bulbs blinding the crowd that had gathered to see the famous faces and expensive gowns.
No one toasting the beginning of the opera season that night knew they were marking the end of an era.
At ten o’clock the next morning, when the opening gong sounded in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange, men began to unload their stocks. So fast did trading go that by the end of the day, the ticker recording transactions ran two and a half hours late. When the final tally could be read, it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. The market had been uneasy for weeks before the twenty-ninth, but Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. By mid-November the industrial average was half of what it had been in September. The economic boom that had fueled the Roaring Twenties was over.
Once the bottom fell out of the stock market, the economy ground down. Manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade dropped by $7 billion, down to just $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 to 33 cents; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.
By 1932, over one million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
No one knew how to combat the Great Depression, but certain wealthy Americans were sure they knew what had caused it. The problem, they said, was that poor Americans refused to work hard enough and were draining the economy. They must be forced to take less. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Slash government spending, agreed the Chicago Tribune: lay off teachers and government workers, and demand that those who remain accept lower wages. Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, told the Senate that the only way to restart the economy was to cut government salaries and veterans’ benefits (although he told them that his own salary—which at sixty thousand dollars was six times higher than theirs—was “very little” and couldn’t be reduced).
President Hoover knew little about finances, let alone how to fix an economic crisis of global proportions. He tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.”
But taxes were already so low that most folks would see only a few extra dollars a year from the cuts, and the fundamental business of the country was not, in fact, sound. When suffering Americans begged for public works programs to provide jobs, Hoover insisted that such programs were a “soak the rich” program that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.
By the time Hoover’s term ended, Americans were ready to try a new approach to economic recovery. They refused to reelect Hoover and turned instead to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.
As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.
They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939—and abroad.
The New Deal worked so well that common men and women across the country hailed FDR as their leader, electing him an unprecedented four times. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on the New Deal when voters elected him in 1952. He bolstered the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; added the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and called for a national healthcare system.
Eisenhower nominated former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights, which he would begin to do with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision months after joining the court. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.
Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.”
The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion. The vast majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II.
Politicians and commentators agreed that most Democrats and Republicans shared a “liberal consensus” that the government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. It seemed the country had finally created a government that best reflected democratic values.
Indeed, that liberal consensus seemed so universal that the only place to find opposition was in entertainment. Popular radio comedian Fred Allen’s show included a caricature, Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a southern blowhard who pontificated, harrumphed, and took his reflexive hatred of the North to ridiculous extremes. A buffoon who represented the past, the Claghorn character was such a success that he starred in his own Hollywood film and later became the basis for the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn.
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Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump offered Americans his closing argument in the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, October 27, at Madison Square Garden. At a rally that evoked a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, Trump’s warm-up acts set the terms of Trump’s final pitch to voters by calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and railing against “f*cking illegals.” They called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil,” and called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch.” When Trump took the stage about two hours late, he echoed the warm-up acts, and then reiterated that he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”
The racism and fascism Trump’s MAGA Republicans displayed at Madison Square Garden is usually expressed within their media bubble, where it passes for normal conversation. The backlash against it among people in the real world appears to have shocked the Trump campaign so much that the candidate is running away from his own closing argument.
On Monday, Trump felt obliged to tell an audience in Georgia, “I’m not a Nazi.” The Trump campaign has made it a point never to apologize and never to explain, but on Monday it broke that rule, trying to distance itself from performer Tony Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico.
This morning, Trump announced he would hold a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He showed up more than an hour late for the assembled press, then began the event by undermining faith in the election, claiming the campaign is going “very well; there are some bad spots in Pennsylvania where some serious things have been caught or are in the process of being caught,” although it was unclear what he meant.
He went on to deliver such a litany of lies that CNN cited them as a reason to cut away from the speech. Trump chose not to acknowledge the offensiveness of the Madison Square Garden event, saying ““The love in that room, it was breathtaking—and you could have filled it many many times with the people that were unable to get in.”
Tonight, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris offered her own closing argument to the American voters. Once again taking her campaign directly to Trump, she held a rally at the Ellipse near the White House, where Trump spoke to his supporters on January 6, 2021, before sending them off to the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president.
More than 75,000 attendees in the Ellipse and standing on the Mall near the Washington Monument waved flags and held up signs with “USA” printed on them as Harris spoke in front of a backdrop of the White House, on a stage with a line of American flags.
“One week from today, you will have the chance to make a decision that directly impacts your life, the life of your family, and the future of this country we love,” she said. “[I]t will probably be the most important vote you ever cast. And this election is more just than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”
Harris outlined Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and noted that he is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.” She continued: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That is who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say: that is not who we are.” She called for Americans “to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division.”
The vice president described herself as “someone who has spent most of my career outside of Washington, D.C.,” a former prosecutor who cares that all people are treated fairly and that those who “use their wealth or power to take advantage of other people” are held to account.
She promised to “work every day to build consensus and reach compromise to get things done…. [to] work with everyone—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—to help Americans who are working hard and still struggling to get ahead.” She vowed to lower costs by delivering tax cuts to working people and the middle class, ban price gouging on groceries, lower the cost of prescription drugs, provide down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and build millions of new homes.
She promised to fight for a child tax credit and to lower the cost of child care, as well as allowing Medicare to cover the cost of home aides for seniors.
She promised to “fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court Justices took away from the women of America.” “[W]hen Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide,” she said, “as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.”
She promised to “work with Democrats and Republicans to sign into law the border security bill that Donald Trump killed.” She promised to “remove those who arrive here unlawfully, prosecute the cartels, and give border patrol the support they so desperately need. At the same time,” she said, “we must acknowledge we are a nation of immigrants.” She vowed to “work with Congress to pass immigration reform, including an earned path to citizenship for hardworking immigrants like farmworkers and our Dreamers.”
“As Commander in Chief,” she said, “I will make sure America has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.… I will strengthen—not surrender—America’s global leadership,” and stand with America’s allies because “our alliances keep American people safe and make America stronger and more secure.”
While Trump offers “more chaos, more division, and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else,” Harris said, “I offer a different path. And I ask for your vote. And here is my pledge to you: I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to make your life better…. I pledge to listen: To experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me…. I pledge…to approach my work with the joy and optimism that comes from making a difference in people’s lives. And I pledge to be a president for all Americans. And to always put country above party and self.”
“I love our country with all my heart,” she said, “And I believe in its promise. Because I’ve lived it…. And I see the promise of America in all of you…. I see it in the young people who are voting for the first time who are determined to live free from gun violence and to protect our planet, and to shape the world they inherit.
“I see it in the women who refuse to accept a future without reproductive freedom, and the men who support them. I see it in Republicans who have never voted for a Democrat before but have put the Constitution of the United States over party. I’ve seen it in Americans, different in many respects, but united in our pursuit of freedom, our belief in fairness and decency, and our faith in a better future.”
“Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing, proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us—the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmlands and factory floors—they did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms…only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.
“These United States of America: we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.
“So, America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love. And in seven days, we have the power—each of you has the power—to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.
“I thank you all,” she said. “God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”
In Las Vegas, Nevada, today, the Harris campaign placed a giant political advertisement on the Sphere, the music and entertainment venue owned by the same family that owns Madison Square Garden. The globe showed stars and stripes, pictures of Vice President Harris, the words “Harris-Walz,” “November 5,” “Vote for Freedom,” “Vote for Opportunity, “Vote for our Future,” “Vote for Kamala,” “Vote for a New Way Forward.” “Vote for Reproductive Freedom,” “When We Fight, We Win,” and “When We Vote, We Win.”
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On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.
He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.
Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.
Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.
An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”
Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”
This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one.
Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.
It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.”
Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.
A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”
Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.
In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).
Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare.
Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler.
At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”
The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone.
In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally.
This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.
Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.”
The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”
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House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has responded to news stories about his plan to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) by claiming his comments at the closed-door campaign event on Monday were taken out of context. But they weren’t. The tape is clear. Johnson said that Republicans want “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” Johnson laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
MAGA Utah senator Mike Lee reposted the video of Johnson and commented: “Kill Obamacare now[.]”
Trump today posted on social media that he never mentioned repealing the Affordable Care Act, “never even thought of such a thing.” But this was either a memory lapse or a lie, because in 2016 he ran on repealing the ACA and his 2016 platform called for “a full repeal of Obamacare.” Within hours of taking office in 2017, Trump issued an executive order weakening the law, and when the Republican-dominated House voted to repeal the law, Trump held a celebration in the Rose Garden and declared the ACA “essentially dead.”
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) bucked Trump to protect the ACA then, and Trump began this year’s campaign with a promise to get rid of it before backing off. Even still, the vague promise in the 2024 platform to “increase Transparency, promote Choice and Competition, and expand access to new Affordable Healthcare” sounds a lot like Johnson’s promise to restore “the free market” to health care.
While Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has been campaigning in the swing states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump today held a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state President Joe Biden won by almost 11 points in 2020 and that Democrats are likely to win in 2024. Trump had to hold the rally at a private airplane hangar after city officials refused to rent the Albuquerque Convention Center to the campaign because it still owes Albuquerque almost $445,000 from a similar rally in 2019.
Once there, he made it clear he was trying to repair some of the damage caused by the extraordinary racism and sexism on display at his Sunday rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where a comedian called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
Courting offended voters, he said: “Don’t make me waste a whole damn half a day here, OK? Look, I came here. We can be nice to each other, or we can talk turkey. I’m here for one simple reason: I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.” That outreach might not be enough to bring back the voters lost after the Madison Square Garden event.
The campaign is seeing other weaknesses, as well. Meredith McGraw and Jessica Piper of Politico reported today that nearly half of the ballots already cast in Pennsylvania have come from voters over the age of 65, and although the numbers of registered older voters are divided evenly between the parties, registered Democrats have made up about 58% of Pennsylvania’s early votes, compared to 35% for Republicans. Those numbers might well simply reflect different approaches to mail-in ballots, but they also might explain why Trump is already claiming fraud in Pennsylvania.
He is also seemingly nervous about Pennsylvania because women are voting there at a much higher rate than men in the early vote: 56% to 43%. And Democratic women are the biggest group of new voters in the state. New voters who were too young eight years ago to hear the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, have been hearing it on TikTok lately, as younger users record their reactions to it and call out their older male relatives for voting for anyone who would talk as Trump did.
“I moved on her, and I failed,” Trump says in the tape. “I’ll admit it. I did try and f*ck her…. I moved on her like a b*tch, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married,” Trump said. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p*ssy. You can do anything,” he said.
The Harris campaign and pro-Harris organizations leaned into the history of women’s suffrage today with videos highlighting those who fought so that women could vote and reiterating: “We are not going back.” To assist those women who might not feel safe letting their husbands know how they voted, women have been posting notes in women’s public bathrooms assuring other women that their vote is secret. A Democratic advertisement voiced by actress Julia Roberts powerfully makes the point that women do not have to tell their husbands how they vote.
Right-wing figures like Charlie Kirk have expressed alarm at the gender gap in voting. As well, there has been a right-wing backlash to the idea that women will vote for Harris while letting their husbands assume they’re voting for Trump.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who famously cheated on both of his first two wives, expressed dismay at the idea that a woman might need to keep her vote secret from her husband. “For them to tell people to lie is just one further example of the depth of their corruption,” he said. “How do you run a country…saying wives should lie to their husbands, husbands should lie to their wives? I mean, what kind of a totally amoral, corrupt, sick system have the Democrats developed?”
On the Fox News Channel’s The Five this morning, host Jesse Watters said that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair…. That violates the sanctity of our marriage.” Christian pastor Dale Partridge posted: “In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction. He is the head and they are one. Unity extends to politics. This is not controversial.” But, he added, “submission does have limits. A wife doesn’t need to submit to her husband in sin (in this case voting democrat).”
Tonight, at an event with right-wing host Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, Trump seemed to move beyond misogyny to murderous intent. He turned his increasingly violent rhetoric against former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has urged Republican women to vote against Trump. “She’s a radical war hawk,” he said, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Carlson is friendly with authoritarian Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in his own country and is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Today Orbán posted that he had “Just got off the phone with President [Trump]. I wished him the best of luck for next Tuesday. Only five days to go. Fingers crossed[.]“
Meanwhile, a lot more major endorsements for Harris have been coming in.
Today basketball legend LeBron James released a powerful one-minute ad with clips of Trump’s many racist statements and drawing a straight line from him back to the most violent days of the civil rights movement. “HATE TAKES US BACK,” it says. In a post sharing the video, James wrote: “When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!” James has 53 million followers on X.
The Economist today endorsed Harris, warning that “a second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks.” Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg also posted on social media that he had voted for Harris “without hesitation,” and added that he hoped undecided voters would join him. “Trump is not fit for high office,” he wrote in a Bloomberg op-ed. He praised Harris’s positive vision and bipartisan outreach.
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published an op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday, titled: “My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say ‘Enough’ With Trump.” The former president is unfit for office, Luttig wrote. “When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy to him before, he betrayed us.” Luttig assured readers that “[t]here could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate” Trump.
He reminded his fellow Republicans that they had always “proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come…. All Americans, but especially Republicans, will live with their decision the rest of their lives.” “The choice for America next Tuesday,” Luttig wrote, “could not be clearer.”
Ever since Vice President Harris tapped Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Democratic governors have been demonstrating their support for one of their own. Today, for Halloween, Democratic governors Wes Moore of Maryland, Janet Mills of Maine, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Phil Murphy of New Jersey each dressed to match a photograph of Walz.
“No tricks this Halloween!” Whitmer posted. “Just dressing up as our friend [Tim Walz]—excited to elect him and [Kamala Harris]. If you haven’t yet, make a plan to vote: http://iwillvote.com[.]”
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Trump’s comments to right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson last night at an event in Glendale, Arizona, about former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), coming as they have after the extraordinary racism and sexism of Trump’s Sunday event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, have highlighted the centrality of the campaign's attack on women.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump told Carlson, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Today, Trump surrogates have tried to say that he was referring to Cheney’s positions on American warfare, but it seems pretty clear he is fantasizing about seeing her in front of a firing squad. Journalist Magdi Jacobs noted the parallels between this statement and his 2020 command to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” the precursor to the Proud Boys’ attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In both statements, Trump avoided explicitly calling for violence, but absolutely set the stage for it.
This morning, Cheney responded to Trump’s threat “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
While Trump began to attack Cheney openly when she accepted the role of vice-chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, where her presence clearly made Republicans—like Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—willing to share what they knew, Trump’s recent bloody fantasies appear to have broader meaning.
Cheney has emerged as the key figure to urge Republican women to vote against Trump, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s reelection is in trouble in part because white women are abandoning him. The early hints that this is happening, like the huge gender gap showing up in early voting, have sparked a right-wing frenzy of attempts to restore the power of white men over the women in their lives. Right-wing men are insisting that wives should vote as their husbands do, or that women should lose the ability to vote altogether.
Trump’s suggestion that Cheney should face a firing squad seems to be a general expression of the anger of white men accustomed to dictating the terms of public life when faced with the reality that they can no longer count on being able to cow the people around them.
Trump’s attack on Cheney has galvanized his unpopularity with women, while the larger meaning of the MAGAs’ attacks on women got additional illustration with the news broken today by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica that a pregnant 18-year-old in Texas suffering from sepsis was turned away from emergency rooms twice before a before doctors at a third visit required two ultrasounds to make sure her fetus no longer had a heartbeat before they would move her into intensive care. She died within hours.
Today’s news continued to be bad for Trump. Last week, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump talked about the CHIPS and Science Act that authorized about $280 billion to encourage domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. While the law has brought significant private investment into the construction of new manufacturing plants and has created manufacturing jobs, Trump complained to Rogan, “That chip deal is so bad.”
After listening to that conversation, journalist Luke Radel asked House speaker Mike Johnson in a report aired today whether, with Trump opposed to the bill and with Republicans having voted against it, the Republicans will try to repeal the law if they get majorities in Congress. Johnson responded “I expect we probably will, but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet.”
Republicans are determined to cut government spending to make way for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But the CHIPS and Science Act has brought important supply chains home and has created more than 115,000 new high-paying jobs in the U.S.
And it has brought significant investment to battleground states: $19.5 billion to Arizona, $75 million to Georgia, $325 million to Michigan, $750 million to North Carolina, and $93 million to Pennsylvania. Johnson quickly realized that acknowledging the Republicans’ hopes of repealing it was a bad mistake days before an election and, claiming he had not heard the question accurately, said he had no intent to undermine the CHIPS and Science Act.
At a closed-door meeting earlier this week, Johnson said repealing the Affordable Care Act is a Republican priority. He tried to walk this comment back, as well, but Pennsylvania Republican senatorial candidate Dave McCormick kept the issue in front of voters when he was caught on a hot mic saying he wants to reform the ACA and that he opposes the provision in the ACA that allows children to stay on their parent’s health insurance until they’re 26.
Trump’s mental state continues to deteriorate, taking with it the former president’s inhibitions. After going on a rant about the people he blamed for troubles with his microphone at a sparsely attended rally in Warren, Michigan, tonight, the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America simulated oral sex on stage.
An official with the Harris campaign told reporters today that they "fully expect" Trump will replay the game plan of 2020 and claim victory on election night, before all the votes are fully counted. In an interview on Wednesday, Harris noted that they were ready if Trump prematurely declared victory: "We are sadly ready if he does and, if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people ... we are prepared to respond," she said.
The Trump campaign’s Washington State governor Jay Inslee has activated the state’s National Guard so it will be “fully prepared to respond to any…civil unrest” before or after the election.
The Department of Justice today announced it would monitor the polls in 86 jurisdictions in 27 states to make sure they comply with federal voting rights laws. Although the federal government has monitored certain polls since 1965, officials in the states of Florida, Missouri, and Texas promptly announced they would not permit Department of Justice officials inside polling stations.
Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris made two stops in Wisconsin today before packing the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center in West Allis near Milwaukee.
In Madison, Harris told a reporter: "What I am enjoying about this moment most is that in spite of how my opponent spends full time trying to divide the American people, what I am seeing is people coming together under one roof who seemingly have nothing in common and know they have everything in common, and I think that is in the best interest of the strength of our nation.”
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“It’s been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 Minutes in October,” host Scott Pelley said to the camera last night before 60 Minutes aired an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. This year, both Harris and Republican nominee former president Donald Trump accepted an invitation for an interview.
“Then a week ago,” Pelley said, “Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story,” Pelley said. “Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Leslie Stahl said in that interview that Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that.
“Trump has said his opponent doesn’t do interviews because she can’t handle them. He had previously declined another debate with Harris, so tonight may have been the largest audience for the candidates between now and election day. Our questions addressed the economy, immigration, reproductive rights, and the wars in the Middle East and Europe. Both campaigns understood this special would go ahead if either candidate backed out.”
And with that, 60 Minutes aired its interview with Vice President Harris.
Trump broke a fifty-year tradition so his false world would not be challenged by reality. He apparently wants to make sure voters cannot base their decisions about the country’s future on facts. Hiding reality is in keeping with his continued refusal to release his tax returns or a medical report—even after the shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania—or the video from the incident at Arlington National Cemetery, instead insisting that people take him at his word about what happened.
If voters trust his disinformation campaign, rather than thinking things through for themselves, who will his policies help?
A bombshell story from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward today revealed that in 2020, when he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it.
A Trump aide told Woodward that Trump and Putin have spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House, prompting Edward Luce of the Financial Times to comment: “What possible business could an out-of-office U.S. president have to call Vladimir Putin seven times?” Woodward recounts a moment when Trump told a senior aide to leave the room so “he could have what he said was a private phone call with Russian president Vladimir Putin.”
The Woodward book also says that when South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham was visiting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, in March 2024, Graham said “Hey, let’s call Trump.” According to Woodward, an aide brought MBS a bag full of burner phones, one of which was labeled “TRUMP 45.”
This news highlights the fact that Trump retained classified documents when he left the White House, carrying them with him to Mar-a-Lago, where he tried to hide them from federal officials. A grand jury indicted him on 37 felony counts for those actions, but Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, dismissed the case in July after concluding that Special Counsel Jack Smith was improperly appointed.
Trump’s campaign came out swinging after the story broke, with Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung calling Woodward “a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”
In contrast to Trump’s disinformation campaign, Vice President Harris is running a normal campaign, offering policy proposals. Today she proposed a plan to permit Medicare to help cover the costs of long-term home health care aides for seniors. Harris announced the plan on ABC’s The View, where she spoke of the so-called sandwich generation, people—mostly women—who are taking care of their elderly parents at the same time they are also taking care of children. “[I]t’s just almost impossible to do it all, especially if they work,” Harris said, adding that many end up having to leave their jobs. She also called for Medicare to cover vision and hearing care to enable seniors to live independently for longer.
Harris said the money to pay for the new services will come from savings realized through Medicare’s new ability to negotiate drug prices—an ability Republicans are eager to end—and through cracking down on Medicare fraud. A fact sheet about the plan emphasizes that it will enable the government to work with the private sector to expand the home care workforce and provide more access to telehealth.
Her plan also calls for stopping states from seizing family homes of recently deceased Medicaid beneficiaries to restore funding, a program called “Medicaid estate recovery.” Those seizures particularly hurt rural and minority populations, she noted, preventing them from building wealth.
Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times note that both expanded home care benefits and drug negotiations are popular. KFF, which conducts health policy research, reports that Medicaid estate recovery has been criticized because it “falls primarily on individuals with limited incomes, raises little revenue, and is applied very unevenly across the states.”
Deepa Shivaram of NPR noted that a relatively large percentage of middle-aged and older women remain undecided in this race and Harris’s plan speaks to their needs. The plan would also bring more money and care workers into rural towns with aging populations, giving those areas an economic boost.
In a fact sheet, the Harris-Walz campaign noted that Trump is focused on tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, has repeatedly called for cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, and gave clemency to those abusing the system. As Amy B. Wang and Azi Paybarah explained in the Washington Post: “In his last year in office, Trump commuted the sentences of at least five people who collectively filed nearly $1.6 billion in fraudulent claims through Medicare or Medicaid.”
On The View, Harris said, “In this election, people are ready for a new generation of leadership that’s about fixing problems.”
The 2020 60 Minutes interview for which Trump demanded an apology last week was the one in which he promised his health care plan was “fully developed,” then angrily walked out. His exit was apparently planned, for shortly after his departure, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany walked up to Stahl with a giant book, saying: “Lesley, the President wanted me to deliver his health care plan. It’s a little heavy.”
Trump and McEnany likely expected that the audience would remember their theatrical move rather than the reality, which was that the book contained no Trump healthcare plan because one didn’t exist.
Four years later, it still doesn’t. Trump said at the September 10 presidential debate that he has the “concepts of a plan.”
CNN today set a deadline of Thursday for Trump to accept its invitation for an October 23 presidential debate. Harris has already accepted.
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Yesterday we learned from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward that in 2020, while he was president, Trump secretly shipped Covid-19 testing equipment to Russian president Vladimir Putin for his own personal use at a time when Americans could not get it. To be clear, this equipment was not the swabs we now use at home, but appears to be what at the time was a new point-of-care machine from Abbott Laboratories that claimed to be the fastest way to test for Covid-19.
Journalist Karly Kingsley points out that at the time, central lab testing to diagnose Covid-19 infections took a long time, causing infections to spread. Machines like Abbott’s were hard to get. Trump chose to send them to Putin—not to charge him for them, or to negotiate for the release of Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed, two Americans being held by Russia at the time and later released under the Biden administration, but to give them to him—rather than keeping them for Americans.
It’s hard to overstate just what an astonishing story this is. In 2016, Republicans stood firm against Putin and backed the arming of Ukraine to stand against Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. But that summer, at Trump’s urging, the party changed its platform to weaken its support of Ukraine. In 2020, it appears, Trump chose to give lifesaving equipment to Putin rather than use it for Americans. And in 2024, Trump’s willingness to undermine the United States to cozy up to an adversary his own party stood against less than a decade ago does not appear to be a deal breaker for Republicans.
As Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it: “What has this country come to if the revelation that Trump secretly sent COVID testing machines to Putin while thousands of Americans were dying, in part because of a shortage of testing machines here, doesn't disqualify him to be President?” He continued: “Donald Trump helped keep Putin alive during the pandemic and let Americans die. This revelation is damning. It's disqualifying. He cannot be President of the United States.”
Increasingly, Trump’s behavior seems to parrot the dictators he appears to admire.
After 60 Minutes called him out for breaking a fifty-year tradition of both candidates talking to 60 Minutes and backing out of an interview to which he had agreed, Trump today accused the producers of 60 Minutes of cutting Vice President Kamala Harris’s answers to make her look good. He suggested that such cuts were “illegal” and possibly “a major Campaign Finance violation” that “must be investigated, starting today!” “The public is owed a MAJOR AND IMMEDIATE APOLOGY!” he wrote. Trump is trying to cover for his own failure by attacking CBS in an echo of dictators determined to control the media.
In a post on his social media site tonight, Trump appears to have declined to appear at another presidential debate with Vice President Harris. After declaring he had won the previous debate with Harris and rehashing many of his grievances, he wrote: “THERE WILL BE NO REMATCH!”
As Beth Reinhard of the Washington Post recounted yesterday, a report from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed that the Trump White House prevented a real investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. More than 4,500 calls and electronic messages about Kavanaugh sent to the FBI tip line went directly to the White House, where they were never investigated, and the FBI was told not to pursue corroborating evidence of the accusations by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez although lawyers for the women presented the names of dozens of people who could testify to the truth of their allegations.
A number of senators said the lack of corroborating evidence convinced them to vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. As Steve Benen of MSNBC recalled, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) said at the time that it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation,” while the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) said that the 2018 FBI report “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”
After he left office, Trump told author Michael Wolff that he had gone to bat for Kavanaugh, saying: “I…fought like hell for Kavanaugh—and I saved his life, and I saved his career.” Kavanaugh was the crucial vote for Trump’s right-wing agenda, including ending the federal recognition of abortion rights by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Ken Bensinger reported in the New York Times today that Trump’s team has refused to participate in preparations for a transition to a potential Trump presidency. Normally, the nonpartisan transition process, dictated by the Presidential Transition Act, has candidates setting up teams as much as six months before the election to begin vetting and hiring political appointees and working with the administration in office to make sure the agencies continue to run smoothly.
With the election less than a month away, Trump has neither signed the required agreements nor signed the transition’s ethics plan that would require him to disclose private donors to the transition and limit them to contributions of no more than $5,000. Without that agreement, there are no limits to the money the Trump transition can take. Trump has also refused to sign an agreement with the White House requiring that anyone receiving classified information have a security clearance. Currently, his aides cannot review federal records.
Trump ignored the traditional transition period in 2016, cutting off communications with President Barack Obama’s team. He refused to allow incoming president Joe Biden access to federal agencies in 2020, hampering Biden’s ability to get his administration in place in a timely fashion. Now it’s possible that Trump sees no need for a normal transition because Project 2025, on which he appears to be relying, has been working on one for many months.
It calls for him to fire most federal employees, reinstating the policy he started at the end of his term. To fill their positions, the Heritage Foundation has been vetting loyalists now for months, preparing a list of job candidates to put in place a new, right-wing agenda.
Yesterday, on California’s KFI radio station, Trump told host John Kobylt that Tom Homan of Project 2025, who as director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement oversaw the family separation policy at the southern border, will be “coming on board” a new Trump administration.
This afternoon, Trump told an audience in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that he expects to put former rival Vivek Ramaswamy into an important position in his administration. On October 7, 2024, Ramaswamy suggested on social media that he wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. He wrote: “Shut down the entitlement state & you solve most of the immigration problem right there. We need to man up & fix the root cause that draws migrants here in the first place: the welfare state. But no one seems to want to say that part out loud, because too many native-born Americans are addicted to it themselves.”
Trump has expressed frustration with the independence of the Federal Reserve, expressing a desire to make it answer to the president. In an interview with Barron’s, one of his advisors, Scott Bessent, has floated the idea of creating a shadow Fed chair until the term of the current chair, Jerome Powell, ends, thus undercutting him without facing a fight over firing the Fed chair.
This agenda is not a popular one in the U.S., but Trump is getting a boost as Russian operatives work to swing downballot races toward the Republicans. In a briefing on Monday, October 7, experts from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) told reporters that China and Iran are trying to influence the upcoming election and that “Moscow is leveraging a wide range of influence actors in an effort to influence congressional races, particularly to encourage the U.S. public to oppose pro-Ukraine policies and politicians. Russian influence actors have planned, and likely created and disseminated, content, particularly over social media, intended to encourage the election of congressional candidates that Moscow assesses will oppose aid to Ukraine.”
Russia, an ODNI spokesperson said, uses “influence-for-hire firms, or commercial firms with expertise in these type[s] of activities.” It also coopts “witting and unwitting Americans to work on Russia’s behalf,” to “launder their influence narratives through what are perceived as more authentic U.S. voices.”
Not all of Trump’s supporters appear eager to stick around to see if Trump will win another term. Today news broke that Patrick M. Byrne, the former chief executive officer of OverStock, who became a fervent advocate of the idea that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election, has left the country, apparently permanently, to live in Dubai. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Byrne, as is President Biden’s son Hunter. The younger Biden sued Byrne for defamation last November after Byrne claimed Hunter Biden sought a bribe from Iran.
In September, Biden’s lawyers were trying to schedule a date for Byrne’s deposition when his lawyer abruptly “claimed for the first time that Defendant has moved his residence to Dubai and if Plaintiff wanted to take his in-person deposition counsel would have to fly to Dubai to do so, to which Plaintiff responded with various related inquiries to try to resolve this matter and defense counsel stated Defendant would not be returning to the United States for the foreseeable future.”
Byrne claimed to have fled the U.S. because the Venezuelan government has put a bounty on him, but as Biden’s lawyers note, “the Defendant’s truthfulness is directly at issue.”
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Hurricane Milton made landfall yesterday evening as a Category 3 storm just south of Sarasota, Florida. Before the hurricane hit, thirty-eight tornadoes swept across thirteen counties in the state, putting about 1.26 million people under a tornado advisory. With the hurricane came high winds and water, including ten to twenty inches of rain in the Tampa area. And, although it was not the worst-case scenario people feared, eleven people are dead and about three million are without power because of the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been on the ground since before the storm hit.
In election news, today, The Atlantic endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president. This is only the fifth time since its founding in 1857 that The Atlantic has endorsed a presidential candidate. It is the third time it has endorsed Trump’s opponent. It also endorsed Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 when he ran against extremist Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. And in 1860 it endorsed Abraham Lincoln.
The Atlantic’s endorsement of Harris echoes its earlier endorsement of Lincoln, not only in its thorough dislike of Trump as “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history”—an echo of its 1860 warning that this election “is a turning-point in our history”—but because both endorsements show a new press challenging an older system.
In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is…still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns and has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, and did a presidential debate with ABC News. Earlier this week, she appeared on 60 Minutes.
With Trump refusing to participate in another presidential debate, Vice President Harris today accepted CNN’s invitation to a live, televised town hall on October 23 in Pennsylvania. In the announcement, Harris-Walz campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon noted that Trump has confined his recent appearances to conservative media.
Indeed, Trump backed out of a 60 Minutes interview and has appeared only on the shows of loyalists. And yet, Berlatsky points out, he is not receiving similar criticism. Indeed, observers note that Trump has tended to get far more favorable coverage than his mental slips, open embrace of Nazi racism, fantastical lies, and criminal indictments deserve.
In a piece today, Matt Gertz of the media watchdog Media Matters reports that five major newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post—produced nearly four times as many articles about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s email server in 2016 in the week after then–FBI director James Comey announced new developments in the story than they did about the unsealing of a new filing in Trump’s federal criminal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection earlier this month.
“None of the papers ran even half as many Trump indictment stories as they did on Clinton’s server,” Gertz wrote. “Indeed, every paper ran more front-page stories that mentioned Clinton’s server [than] they did total stories that referenced Trump’s indictment.” “The former president continues to benefit from news outlets grading him on a massive curve,” Gertz wrote, “resulting in relatively muted coverage for his nakedly authoritarian, unfathomably racist, and allegedly criminal behavior.”
On Tuesday, October 8, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter of the Columbia Journalism Review outlined Trump’s longstanding attack on the U.S. media as “fake news,” an attack that is ongoing and obvious. (Just today, he threatened CBS and “all other Broadcast Licenses, because they are just as corrupt as CBS—and maybe even WORSE!”)
Bassin and Potter note that in his attacks on the media, Trump is following the pattern of authoritarians like Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who attacked media critics with audits, investigations, and harassment until he “drove independent media from the field.” They also note the observation of Timothy Snyder, a scholar of authoritarianism, that power is often freely given to an authoritarian in anticipation of punishment, what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”
And yet, in the past in the U.S., when the media has appeared to become captive to established interests, new media have begun to give a voice to the opposition. In the 1850s, when elite enslavers stopped the circulation of newspapers and books calling for abolition, they prompted an explosion of new media that expressed the sentiments of those opposed to the expansion of human enslavement. Editor Horace Greeley led the way with the New-York Tribune in the 1840s. He was keenly aware of the importance of the new press and, as an early convert to the Republican Party, led his paper to become the anchor of a string of new Republican newspapers across the North—including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times—that spread the party’s ideology.
The Atlantic Monthly’s endorsement of Lincoln in 1860 was part of that movement, and poet James Russell Lowell, who wrote the endorsement, mocked the idea that the press should avoid causing trouble. “We are gravely requested to have no opinion, or, having one, to suppress it, on the one topic that has occupied caucuses, newspapers, Presidents’ messages, and congress, for the last dozen years, lest we endanger the safety of the Union…. In a democracy it is the duty of every citizen to think.”
Harris has nodded to established media, but as Berlatsky points out, there is very little payoff for her in focusing on those venues, since those audiences are generally already quite attuned to politics and are looking for new developments and scandals. In contrast, winning in 2024 means turning out new voters by finding new venues that offer them a political voice. Harris has recognized that media shift by focusing her media appearances on podcasts like Call Her Daddy, radio shows like Howard Stern’s, and television shows like The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The View.
Campaign staffer Victor Shi noted that, based on averages, Harris’s appearance on Call Her Daddy reached 5 million people, The View, 2.45 million; Howard Stern, 10 million; and Stephen Colbert, 3.2 million—in all, 25 million or more people that traditional media do not reach. (Shi also called attention to the fact that on October 9, the campaign live streamed an Arizona rally by Minnesota governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz on the World of Warcraft Twitch stream.)
The Atlantic nodded to the free thought on which the magazine was founded in 1857 when it came out strongly for Harris today. It is endorsing Harris, it said, because she “respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy. These, and not any specific policy positions, are the reasons The Atlantic is endorsing her.”
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A report from the Labor Department yesterday showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P 500 closed above 5,800 for the first time.
Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “[b]y just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. Long adds that “many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy.
Democratic presidential nominee and sitting vice president Kamala Harris has promised to continue the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration and focus on cutting costs for families. She has called for a federal law against price gouging on groceries during times of crisis, cutting taxes for families, and enabling Medicare to pay for home health aides. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which focuses on the direct effect of policies on the federal debt, estimated that Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion to the debt.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and to impose a 10% to 20% tariff across the board on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, and economists predict such tariffs would cost an average family more than $2,600 a year. Overall, the effect of these policies would be to shift the weight of taxation even further toward middle-class and lower-class Americans and away from the wealthy.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these plans would add $7.5 trillion to the debt.
But there is more: Trump has also made deporting undocumented immigrants central to his promises, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, has claimed the right to determine which government policies he considers legal, threatening to expand deportation to include legal migrants, as well.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted on October 8 that in March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out that the immigrants Trump is targeting are vital to a number of U.S. businesses. Their loss will cause dramatic cutbacks in those sectors. Taken together, the study concluded, Trump’s deportations, tariffs, and vow to take control of the Federal Reserve could make the country’s gross domestic product as much as 9.7% lower than it would be without those policies, employment could fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4%.
And yet, in a New York Times/Siena Poll of likely voters released on October 8, 75% of respondents said the economy was fair or poor. Further, although a study by The Guardian showed that Harris’s specific economic policies were more popular than Trump’s in a blind test, 54% of respondents to a Gallup poll released on October 9, thought that Trump would manage the economy better than Harris would.
Part of Americans’ sour mood about the economy stems from the poor coverage all the good economic news has received. Part of it is that rising prices are more immediately obvious than the wage gains that have outpaced them. But a large part of it is the historic habit of thinking that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats do.
That myth began immediately after the Civil War when Democrats demanded the government renege on the generous terms under which it had floated bonds during the war. When the Treasury put those bonds on the market, they were a risky proposition, but with the United States secure after the war, calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.
Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred. They added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” When that amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868, the Democrats’ fiscal rebellion seemed to be quelled.
But as Republicans increasingly insisted that protecting big business with a high tariff wall was crucial to the American economy, Democrats called for lowering tariffs to give the consumers who paid them a break. In response, Republicans said that those suffering in industrial America were lazy or spendthrifts and warned that Democrats were socialists. When Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and put Grover Cleveland in the White House in 1892 with a promise to lower tariffs, Republicans insisted that the economy would collapse. But, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The working classes of the country need such a lesson…. The Republicans will be passive spectators… It will not be their funeral.”
Their warnings of an impending collapse prompted investors to take their money home. On February 17, 1893, fifteen days before Cleveland would be sworn into office, the Reading Railroad Company went under, after which, as one reporter wrote, “the bottom seemed to be falling out of everything.” By the time Cleveland took office, a financial panic was in full swing.
Republican lawmakers and newspapers blamed Democrats for the collapse because everyone knew they would destroy the economy. Republicans urged voters to put them back in charge of Congress, and in 1894, in a landslide, they did. “American manufacturers and merchants and business-men generally will draw a long breath of relief,” the Chicago Tribune commented just days after the Republican victory. Republicans had successfully associated their opponents with economic disaster.
That association continued in the twentieth century. In 1913, for the first time since Cleveland’s second term, the Democrats captured both Congress and the White House. Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson called for lowered tariff rates and, to make up for lost revenue, an income tax. Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the tariff measure “very radical” and warned that it would destroy all the industries in Massachusetts. As for the income tax, big-business Republicans claimed it was socialism and that it discriminated against the wealthy.
For the rest of the century, Republicans would center taxes, especially income taxes, as proof Democrats were bad for the economy. As soon as World War I ended, Republicans set out to get rid of the high progressive taxes that had paid for the war. Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, took office in 1921 and set out to increase productivity by increasing investment in industry. To free up capital, he said, the government must slash its budget and cut taxes. From 1921 to 1929, Mellon returned $3.5 billion to wealthy Americans through refunds, credits, and tax abatements.
The booming economy of the 1920s made it seem that the Republicans had finally figured out how to create a perpetually prosperous economy. When he accepted the 1928 Republican nomination for president, Herbert Hoover said: “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us…. [G]iven a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”
The Great Depression, sparked by the stock market crash of October 1929, revealed the central weakness of an economic vision based in concentrating wealth. While worker productivity had increased by about 43% in the 1920s, wages did not rise. By 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income. When the stock market crash wiped out the purchasing power of this group, the rest of the population did not have enough capital to fuel the economy.
Mellon predicted that the crisis would “purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The Hoover administration preached thrift, morality, and individualism and blamed the depression on a wasteful government that had overstaffed public offices. To restore business confidence, Republicans declared, the nation must slash government spending and lay off public workers.
But most Americans had had enough of Republican economics, especially as the crash revealed deep corruption in the nation’s financial system. In 1932, voters overcame their deep suspicion of Democratic economic policies to embrace what Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a “New Deal” for the American people, combating the depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and investing in infrastructure. Hoover denounced Roosevelt’s plans as dangerous radicalism that would “enslave” taxpayers and destroy the United States.
Voters elected FDR with about 58% of the vote. Over the next forty years, Americans of both parties embraced the government’s active approach to promoting economic growth and individual prosperity by protecting all Americans.
But when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he promised that returning to a system like that of the 1920s would make the country boom. He called his system “supply-side” economics, for it invested in the supply side—investors—rather than the consumers who made up the demand side. “The whole thing is premised on faith,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman told a reporter. “On a belief about how the world works.”
Under Reagan, deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion— more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country— along with lower interest rates and deregulated savings and loan banks, made the economy boom. Americans watching the economic growth such deficit spending produced believed supply-side economics worked. Tax cuts and spending cuts became the Holy Grail of American politics, and the Democrats who opposed them seemed to be unable to run an economy.
But that belief was not based in reality. In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations (3.79% versus 2.60%), total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans, business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans, average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats, and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth 188% faster under Democrats than under Republicans.
A recent analysis by former Goldman Sachs managing director H. John Gilbertson expands on those numbers, showing that Democratic administrations reduce the U.S. budget deficit and that stock market returns are 60% higher under Democrats than under Republicans.
Democratic President Joe Biden returned the country to the proven system that worked before 1981, and the economy has boomed. While Trump has vowed to return to the tax cuts and deregulation of supply-side economics, Vice President Harris has promised to retain and fine-tune Biden’s policies.
But Harris has to overcome more than a century of American mythmaking.
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Celebrated another trip around the sun this week with a day on the water. I've seen the same harbor and the same islands and the same boats and the same buoys my whole life, and you know, it never gets old.
Let's take the night off, and get back to it tomorrow.
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“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military.
Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn't really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.
According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.
At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME,” he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called “Operation Aurora” to remove those immigrants he insists are members of “savage gangs.” When Trump said, “We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long,” a person in the crowd shouted: “Kill them!”
Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump’s claim that the city is a “war zone.” Republican mayor Mike Coffman said that Aurora is “not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs” and that such statements are “grossly exaggerated.” While there have been incidents, they “were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.” The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is “not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs.”
In Aurora, Trump also promised to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.” As legal analyst Asha Rangappa explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn’t come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in charge of policy in a second Trump administration.
Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of “denaturalization,” that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He, too, spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals.
Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants: “These people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children—especially underaged children." Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are “very very very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would “liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life.”
On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.
And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem.
He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants "is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military."
Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.
Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”
Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.
Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?... Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”
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As the two presidential campaigns position themselves for the final sprint to the election on November 5, the difference between them is dramatic.
Trump is hunkering down behind what has always appeared to be a plan not to attract voters but instead to create chaos on Election Day. Creating confusion around the election could enable his loyalists to put in place the plan the Trump team concocted in 2020 to throw the election into the House of Representatives or get it before the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with Trump loyalists.
A central piece of that plan appears to be to rile up his supporters to violence, and a few of them have been delivering. News broke yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had advised federal emergency workers to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, because of concerns about their safety after Trump and MAGA Republicans spread the false rumor that federal agents are forcing people off their land to start lithium mining projects. The alert came after the U.S. Forest Service sent an email to federal responders saying that National Guard troops had encountered armed militia saying they were “hunting FEMA.” FEMA officials will no longer go door-to-door with disaster assistance, but instead will stay in fixed locations.
A man has been arrested and charged with threatening FEMA workers with an assault rifle. He was released on a $10,000 bond.
To the extent Trump or his running mate Ohio senator J.D. Vance talks about them, their policies are promises to repair what they insist is the damage caused by President Joe Biden (although the stock market hit record highs again today), or threats that reinforce an authoritarian Christian nationalist worldview. Today, Bill Barrow of the Associated Press explored the extensive overlap of Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups and the plans that Trump and Vance have set out.
Both promise to cut taxes for the wealthy, but Project 2025 has more detail about how. Both plan to cut off immigration and to fire federal workers, replacing them with loyalists. Both say the president can decide not to use the money Congress has appropriated (in 2019, Trump refused to disburse the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to smear Trump’s chief Democratic rival for the presidency, Joe Biden). Both call for slashing government regulations and getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as well as protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and programs addressing climate change.
But perhaps most revealing of both Trump’s ideology and his plan for the election was his statement to Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that he would like to use the military against what he called “the enemy from within…radical left lunatics" to guard the election. While this is a threat to use the power of the government against his political opponents if he is elected—he mentioned California representative and Senate candidate Adam Schiff by name—it also seems likely his loyalists will hear this as a call for violence at election sites.
Trump’s statement has not gone unnoticed.
Tonight, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper posted a dictionary definition of the word “fascism”: “A populist political philosophy, movement…that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
On the show, Tapper pressed Republican Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to comment on Trump’s statement that as commander-in-chief, he would use the military against political opposition. When Youngkin denied that Trump had said any such thing, Tapper replied: “I’m literally reading his quotes to you.” Youngkin’s willingness to deny what was right in front of him did not exactly quell talk of fascism, since in his dystopian novel 1984 about authoritarianism, George Orwell famously wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
If Trump is hunkering down, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz are still pushing ahead, pressing Trump on both his personal weakness and his now open embrace of fascism. Harris’s advisor Ian Sams went on the Fox News Channel today to note that it’s been a month since Trump “did a mainstream media interview, and we got to wonder why. We called this weekend for him to release his medical records…. Donald Trump’s team, I heard him on your air last hour insisting that everything is okay and that…there’s nothing to see here. And your anchor rightly asked, ‘Well, if that’s true, why not just put them out?’”
At 1:12 this morning, Trump posted on his social media site: “I believe it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility. Her actions have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her.” Sams hit that as well, noting that in the middle of the night, Trump felt obliged to write about Harris and a cognitive test “[a]s he refuses to release his medical records, sit with 60 Minutes, or debate her again—instead retreating solely to rambling rallies where he’s increasingly making no sense[.] Is he okay?”
In Erie, Pennsylvania, today, Harris outlined how her proposals for an “opportunity economy” will help Black men, calling for business loans for entrepreneurs, more apprenticeships, rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, and study of diseases that disproportionately affect Black men.
She also continues her outreach to Republicans. Today, former Trump friend and talk show host Geraldo Rivera endorsed her. So did former Wisconsin Republican state senate majority leader Dale Schultz. “I tell people, ‘Look, I didn’t leave the party. The party left me,’” he said. “This is a critically important race, and…Donald Trump should never be allowed in the Oval Office again.”
Today Harris’s campaign announced she will be sitting down with Fox News Channel reporter Bret Baier for an interview on Wednesday from the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The Fox News Channel is scheduled to tape a town hall with Trump in front of an audience of women on Tuesday. It is supposed to air on Wednesday morning, while the Harris interview will air Wednesday night.
At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, tonight, Harris reiterated Trump’s refusal to talk to any but the right-wing media and recalled his promise to terminate the Constitution. And then she used Trump’s own words against him, playing a video montage of Trump’s calls for violence, his threats against “the enemy within,” and his call for using the military against his political opponents.
“You heard his words, coming from him,” she told the audience. “[H]e considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country…. He’s saying that he would use the military to go after them…. And we know who he would target because he has attacked them before. Journalists whose stories he doesn’t like. Election officials who refuse to cheat by…finding extra votes for him. Judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will. This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous…. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power, that’s what he’s looking for.”
In Oaks, Pennsylvania, tonight, Trump was supposed to take questions from preselected attendees at a town hall with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. He did, at first, although his answers were all over the place and he urged people to vote on January 5. But then, in the hot and crowded space, two people needed medical attention. Slurring, Trump then said: "Let's not do any more questions. Let's just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?" And then he stood on stage and swayed for 39 minutes of songs from his personal playlist before seeming to recall that he was supposed to be talking about the election, which he suddenly told the confused crowd was “the most important election in the history of our country” before turning back to the music.
Rob Crilly of the U.K.’s The Daily Mail wrote: “I was at Trump's golden escalator launch, flew out of Washington with him in 2020 and have probably been to 100 rallies, give or take. Have never seen anything like tonight.” The headline over Marianne LeVine’s Washington Post story about the event read: “Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode.
"The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.”
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After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck.
Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.
When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.
The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."
As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.
Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.”
And therein lies the rub.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”
Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day.
Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.
Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.
Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.
Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference.
It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.
Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.
Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.
In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.
Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“
That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1, and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”
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In a new rule released yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to make it as easy to cancel a subscription to a gym or a service as it is to sign up for one. In a statement, FTC chair Lina Khan explained the reasoning behind the “click-to-cancel” rule: “Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” she said. “Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.” Although most of the new requirements won’t take effect for about six months, David Dayen of The American Prospect noted that the stock price of Planet Fitness fell 8% after the announcement.
When he took office in January 2021, with democracy under siege from autocratic governments abroad and an authoritarian movement at home, President Joe Biden set out to prove that democracy could deliver for the ordinary people who had lost faith in it. The click-to-cancel rule is an illustration of an obvious and long-overdue protection, but it is only one of many ways—$35 insulin, new bridges, loan forgiveness, higher wages, good jobs—in which policies designed to benefit ordinary people have demonstrated that a democratic government can improve lives.
When Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen spoke to the Council on Foreign Relations yesterday, she noted that the administration “has driven a historic economic recovery” with strong growth, very low unemployment rates, and inflation returning to normal. Now it is focused on lowering costs for families and expanding the economy while reducing inequality. That strong economy at home is helping to power the global economy, Yellen noted, and the U.S. has been working to strengthen that economy by reinforcing global policies, investments, and institutions that reinforce economic stability.
“Over the past four years, the world has been through a lot,” Yellen said, “from a once-in-a-century pandemic, to the largest land war in Europe since World War II, to increasingly frequent and severe climate disasters. This has only underlined that we are all in it together. America’s economic well-being depends on the world’s, and America’s economic leadership is key to global prosperity and security.” She warned against isolationism that would undermine such prosperity both at home and abroad.
The numbers behind the proven experience that government protection of ordinary people is good for economic growth got the blessing of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on Monday, when it awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, both of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and to James Robinson of the University of Chicago. Their research explains why “[s]ocieties with a poor rule of law and institutions that exploit the population do not generate growth or change for the better,” while democracies do.
Although democracy has been delivering for Americans, Donald Trump and MAGAs rose to power by convincing those left behind by 40 years of supply-side economics that their problem was not the people in charge of the government, but rather the government itself.
Trump wants to get rid of the current government so that he can enrich himself, do whatever he wants to his enemies, and avoid answering to the law. The Christian nationalists who wrote Project 2025 want to destroy the federal government so they can put in place an authoritarian who will force Americans to live under religious rule. Tech elites like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel want to get rid of the federal government so they can control the future without having to worry about regulations.
In place of what they insist is a democratic system that has failed, they are offering a strongman who, they claim, will take care of people more efficiently than a democratic government can. The focus on masculinity and portrayals of Trump as a muscled hero‚ much as Russian president Vladimir Putin portrays himself, fit the mold of an authoritarian leader.
But the argument that Americans need a strongman depends on the argument that democracy does not work. In the last three-and-a-half years, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Democrats have proved that it can, so long as it operates with the best interests of ordinary people in mind. Trump and Vance’s outlandish lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene are designed to override the reality of a competent administration addressing a crisis with all the tools it has. In its place, the lies provide a false narrative of federal officials ignoring people and trying to steal their property.
Their attack on democracy has another problem, as well. In addition to the reality that democracy has been delivering for Americans for more than three years now—and pretty dramatically—Trump is no longer a strongman. Vice President Kamala Harris is outperforming him in the theater of political dominance. And as she does so, his image is crumbling.
In an article in US News and World Report yesterday, NBC’s former chief marketer John D. Miller apologized to America for helping to “create a monster.” Miller led the team that marketed The Apprentice, the reality TV show that made Trump a household name. “To sell the show,” Miller wrote, “we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty.” But the truth was that he declared bankruptcy six times, and “[t]he imposing board room where he famously fired contestants was a set, because his real boardroom was too old and shabby for TV,” Miller wrote. While Trump loved the attention the show provided, “more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV.”
Miller says they “promoted the show relentlessly,” blanketing the country with a “highly exaggerated” image of Trump as a successful businessman “like a heavy snowstorm.” “[W]e…did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader,” Miller wrote. “I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”
Speaking as a “born-and-bred Republican,” Miller warned: “If you believe that Trump will be better for you or better for the country, that is an illusion, much like The Apprentice was.” He strongly urged people to vote for Kamala Harris. “The country will be better off and so will you.”
A new video shown last night on Jimmy Kimmel Live even more powerfully illustrated the collapse of Trump’s tough guy image. Written by Jesse Joyce of Comedy Central, the two-minute video featured actor and retired professional wrestler Dave Bautista dominating his sparring partner in a boxing ring and then telling those who think Trump is “some sort of tough guy” that “he’s not.”
Working out in a gym, Bautista insults Trump’s heavy makeup, out-of-shape body, draft dodging, and physical weakness, and notes that “he sells imaginary baseball cards pretending to be a cowboy fireman” when “he’s barely strong enough to hold an umbrella.” Bautista says Trump’s two-handed method of drinking water looks “like a little pink chickadee,” and goes on to make a raunchy observation about Trump’s stage dancing. “He’s moody, he pouts, he throws tantrums,” Bautista goes on. “He’s cattier on social media than a middle-school mean girl.”
Bautista ends by listing Trump’s fears of rain, dogs, windmills…and being laughed at.” “And mostly,” Bautista concludes, “he’s terrified that real, red-blooded American men will find out that he’s a weak, tubby toddler.” Calling Trump a “whiny b*tch,” Bautista walks away from the camera.
The sketch was billed as comedy, but it was deadly serious in its takedown of the key element of Trump’s political power.
And he seems vulnerable. Forbes and Newsweek have recently questioned his mental health; yesterday the Boston Globe ran an op-ed saying, “Trump’s decline is too dangerous to ignore. We can see the decline in the former president’s ability to hold a train of thought, speak coherently, or demonstrate a command of the English language, to say nothing of policy.”
Trump’s Fox News Channel town hall yesterday got 2.9 million viewers; Harris’s interview got 7.1 million. Today, Trump canceled yet another appearance, this one with the National Rifle Association in Savannah, Georgia, scheduled for October 22, where he was supposed to be the keynote speaker.
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris today held rallies in Milwaukee, Green Bay, and La Crosse, Wisconsin. In La Crosse, MAGA hecklers tried to interrupt her while she was speaking about the centrality of the three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices to the overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
“Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally,” Harris called to them with a smile and a wave. As the crowd roared with approval, she added: “No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.”
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The events of January 6, 2021, overshadowed those of January 5, 2021, but that day was crucially important in a different way: Georgia voters elected two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to the U.S. Senate. Warnock and Ossoff brought the total of Democrats in the Senate to 48, and since two Independents—Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont—caucus with the Democrats and because in an evenly split Senate the majority goes to the party in the White House, their election gave Democrats control of the Senate.
Without that majority, the Biden-Harris agenda that built the U.S. economy into what The Economist this week called “the envy of the world” would never have passed. There would have been no American Rescue Plan, no Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, no CHIPS and Science Act, no Safer Communities Act, no PACT Act, no Inflation Reduction Act.
In an era when Republicans refuse to vote for any Democratic measures no matter how popular they are, control of the Senate is vital. The Senate majority leader decides what measures can come to the floor for consideration, so a leader can shut out anything his party doesn’t like. The Senate also controls the confirmation of federal judges, including members of the Supreme Court.
During the Trump years, then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) stacked the courts with MAGA judges, some of whom are now so reliably handing down right-wing decisions that plaintiffs routinely “shop” for them to get the decisions they want. And with Trump’s three hand-picked extremists at the Supreme Court, challenging those decisions simply writes that extremism more fully into law.
As Trump continues to crumble—he canceled another appearance today, and in a statement almost certainly designed to leak, an advisor said he was “exhausted”—and as Democrats are favored to take the House, Republicans are waging a fierce battle to take control of the Senate.
They are starting with an advantage. There are 34 Senate seats on the ballot this year, and Democrats are defending 23 of them while Republicans are defending just 11. Republicans need to pick up one seat to control the Senate if Trump wins the White House, and two if Harris wins.
The McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund PAC has, so far, spent more than $140 million in this year’s Senate races, with more than $136 million going to attack ads. In the four races that are most vulnerable for Democrats—Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the Senate Leadership Fund has spent $17.85 million (MT), $55.5 million (OH), $38.1 million (PA), and $23.6 million (WI).
In each of those four races, that money is bolstering extremely wealthy Republican challengers. In Montana, Republican Tim Sheehy, running against Senator Jon Tester, would be among the ten wealthiest senators if elected: his financial disclosures put his net worth at between $74 million and $260 million. Republican Bernie Moreno, who is challenging Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, has a net worth between $38 million and $172.7 million. In the Pennsylvania race, David McCormick (who actually appears to live in Connecticut) reported assets of $116 million to $290 million in 2022. In Wisconsin’s race, Republican Eric Hovde (who lived in an ocean-view mansion in Laguna Beach, California, until he decided to run for the Senate from Wisconsin) would also be one of the Senate’s richest members. His financial disclosures say his net worth is between $195.5 million and $564.4 million.
This is not a coincidence. Knowing that fundraising would be difficult this year with Trump steering funds from the Republican National Committee primarily to himself, Republican Party leaders actively recruited candidates who could pour their own money into their campaigns. By the end of June, Sheehy had put $10.7 million into his own race; Moreno had put in $4.5 million by mid-October. McCormick had loaned his campaign more than $4 million by the end of June; Hovde put in $8 million by the end of March.
This moment echoes the late nineteenth century, when wealthy businessmen sought a Senate seat as a capstone to their success, a perch from which they could protect the interests of other men like themselves. In that era it was relatively easy for a man like Nevada’s William Sharon to buy himself a Senate seat because the Constitution had established that state legislatures would elect their state’s senators. Determined to win a Senate seat to protect his railroad interests “regardless of expense,” Sharon bought a newspaper to flood the state capital with his own praise. The legislature gave him the seat in 1874.
By the 1880s, even the staunchly pro-business Chicago Tribune complained: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation.” In 1892 the newly formed Populist Party met in Omaha, Nebraska, “to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people,’ with which class it originated.” They called for the people to bypass the corrupt legislatures and elect senators directly.
In 1900, William A. Clark of Montana provided the kick their proposal needed.
Clark had arrived at the newly opened gold fields in Montana Territory in 1863 and transferred the money he made as a mule trader into banking. He made a fortune repossessing mining properties when owners defaulted on their loans. He invested that fortune in smelters, railroads, a newspaper, and copper mining, becoming one of the state’s famous Copper Kings. In 1889 he was the president of the Montana constitutional convention, where he made sure that mine owners could run the state as they wished.
By 1890, Clark had his eyes on a Senate seat. He failed to get the support of the legislature in that year, and for the next decade he and his rival copper magnate Marcus Daly of the Anaconda Company poured vast sums of money into influencing the economy of the state, the location of the capital, and the state’s politics.
Clark finally won his election in 1899, but on the same day he presented his credentials to the Senate, his opponents filed a petition charging him with bribery. An extensive investigation revealed that Clark had bought his seat with bribes ranging from $240 to $100,000, equivalent to almost $4 million today. His representatives had paid debts, bought ranches, and even handed envelopes of cash to legislators. The investigation also showed that Daly had spent a fortune trying to block Clark’s election.
Montana politics, it seemed, had become a rich man’s game.
Aware that the Senate would vote to remove him from his seat, Clark resigned in May 1900. In January 1901 a new Montana legislature containing many of the same men Clark had paid off in 1899 elected him again to the same term from which he had been forced to resign. After an undistinguished term, he retired from the Senate in 1907.
Clark’s blatant purchase of a Senate seat added momentum to the demand for the direct election of senators, and in 1913 the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution established that the power to elect senators must rest in the hands of voters. That measure was supposed to make sure that wealth could not buy a Senate seat.
That the ability to self-fund a campaign is once again a key factor in winning a Senate seat from Montana—and Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—seems to be history repeating.
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A number of people telling me we all need a night off had almost convinced me not to write tonight.
But then Trump spoke at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he told a long, meandering story about golfing legend Arnold Palmer that ended with praise for Palmer’s…anatomy.
He went on to call Vice President Kamala Harris—whose name he deliberately mispronounced—“a sh*t vice president. The worst. You’re the worst vice president. Kamala, you’re fired. Get the hell out of here, you’re fired. Get out of here. Get the hell out of here, Kamala.”
As Trump’s remarks got weirder and weirder, the Fox News Channel cut away and instead showed Harris being cheered at a packed, exuberant, super-charged rally in Georgia.
Trump’s speech comes on top of his repeated backing out of interviews and his bizarre appearances. Last night, his advice to an audience in Detroit to vote took its own wild turn: “Jill, get your fat husband off the couch,” he said. “Get that fat pig off the couch. Tell him to go and vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country. Get that guy the hell off our— get him up, Jill, slap him around. Get him up. Get him up, Jill. We want him off the couch to get out and vote.”
Trump’s performances over the past few days seem to confirm that the 2024 October surprise is the increasingly obvious mental incapacity of the Republican candidate for president.
It seems clear that a vote for Trump is really a vote for his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who if he becomes president will be the youngest American president in our history. At 40 years old, he is two years younger than Theodore Roosevelt was when he took office in 1901 at 42. Vance would also be one of the least experienced presidents ever. His 18 months in the Senate has given him only slightly more experience in office than Chester Alan Arthur, who succeeded James Garfield in 1881. Arthur was a political operative who had never held elected office at all before becoming vice president.
I’m going to leave you tonight with my friend Peter Ralston’s image of Maine’s Atlantic puffins, in whose expressions I am reading the consternation that speaks for me right now.
I’ll be back at the wheel tomorrow.
[Image by Peter Ralston, “Four Razorbills with Puffins.”]
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I had hoped to write tonight about the farm bill, which Eric Hovde, running for the Senate from Wisconsin although it's not clear he lives there, could not talk about in the debate between him and incumbent senator Tammy Baldwin on Friday. “I’m not an expert on the farm bill because I'm not in the U.S. Senate at this point in time,” Hovde said. "So I can't opine specifically on all aspects of the farm bill."
The farm bill is one of our most important pieces of legislation. It establishes the main agricultural and food policies of the government, covering price supports for farm products, especially corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, dairy, and sugar; crop insurance; conservation programs; and nutritional programs for 41 million low-income Americans, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps. It must pass every five years but has been held up by Republican extremists in the House and is now in limbo. One would think that anyone running for Senate should know it pretty well, especially in Wisconsin, where in 2022 farms produced $16.7 billion in agricultural products.
Perhaps this is why the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation has endorsed Baldwin, the first Democrat in nearly twenty years to receive their support.
But I cannot take tonight to explain the really quite interesting history of the farm bill (and why it contains our nutrition programs) because the real story of today is that the Republican candidate for president is not mentally able to handle the job of the presidency, and Republican leaders are trying to cover up that reality.
These two stories are related.
That same quest for power that appears to be driving Hovde to seek a Senate seat without knowing anything about a bill that is hugely important to the people he would be representing appears to be preventing Republican leaders from admitting that their 78-year-old candidate has lost the mental capacity necessary for managing the most powerful nation in the world, including its vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
The United States has guardrails to prevent an incapacitated president from exercising power.
The question of what to do when a president was unable to do his job was not really a major question until the post–World War II years. While presidents before then had been weakened—notably, Woodrow Wilson had had a stroke—medical care was poor enough that those presidents who sustained life-threatening injuries tended to die from them fairly quickly. At the same time, the difficulties of the travel necessary for a national political career made politics a young man’s game, so there really weren’t rumblings of mental incapacity from age.
But Republican president Dwight Eisenhower had seen the grave damage military leaders could do when they were incapacitated and unaware of their inability to evaluate situations accurately, and knew that the commander-in-chief must have a system in place to be replaced if he were unable to fulfill the mental requirements of his position.
Eisenhower took office in 1953, and two years later, he suffered a heart attack. Vice President Richard Nixon and members of the Cabinet agreed to a working plan to conduct business while the president recovered, but presidential assistant Sherman Adams noted that the crisis left everyone “uncomfortably aware of the Constitution's failure to provide for the direction of the government by an acting President when the President is temporarily disabled and unable to perform his functions.”
When Eisenhower went on to need an abdominal operation and then to have a minor stroke, concerns mounted. As Congress discussed a solution, Eisenhower took matters into his own hands. He drafted an informal agreement that he presented to Nixon. If the president became temporarily unable to do the duties of the office, the document gave to the vice president the power of “Acting President.”
The need to figure out what would happen if modern medicine could keep alive an incapacitated president became apparent after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Not only did the question of a president’s incapacity have to be addressed; so did the problem of succession. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was falsely rumored to have had a heart attack, and both the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate were old and doubted that they could adequately fulfill the duties of the presidency themselves.
Congress’s solution was the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, providing a system by which either the president or, if they were unable to realize their incapacity, members of the executive branch would transfer the powers of the president to the vice president. Eisenhower enthusiastically backed the idea that the nation should have coverage for a disabled president.
To anyone paying attention, it is clear that Trump is not in any shape to manage the government of the United States of America. He is canceling interviews and botching the ones he does sit for, while falling asleep at events where he is not actually speaking. He lies incessantly even when hosts point out that his claims have been debunked, and cannot answer a question or follow a train of thought. And his comments of the weekend—calling the vice president a “sh*t vice president,” telling a woman to get “your fat husband off the couch” to vote for him, and musing about a famous golfer’s penis—indicate that he has no mental guardrails left.
Today, in what apparently was designed to show Trump as relatable and to compete with the story that Vice President Harris worked at a McDonalds when she was in college, Trump did a photo op at a McDonalds in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where he took prepared fries out of the fryolator. It was an odd moment, for Trump has never portrayed himself as a man of the people so much as a man to lead the people, and the picture of him in a McDonald’s apron undercuts his image as a dominant leader.
But in any case, it was all staged: the restaurant was closed, the five “customers” were loyalists who had practiced their roles, and when Trump handed food through the drive-through window, he did not take money or make change.
"Now I have worked at McDonald's," he said afterward. "I've now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala."
The fact that someone on Trump’s campaign leaked to Politico that he is “exhausted” is almost certainly a sign that people down the ranks are deeply concerned about his ability to finish the campaign, let alone run the country. But party leaders continue to stand behind him, raising echoes of their staunch support during Trump’s two impeachment trials.
In 2019 the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his attempt to coerce Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and pervert the security of the United States to steal an election. The evidence was so overwhelming that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) noted: “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” But Republican senators—except Mitt Romney (R-UT), who voted to convict on one count—nonetheless acquitted Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
Trump’s second impeachment by the House in January 2021 for incitement of insurrection ended similarly. In the Senate, McConnell refused to change the schedule to enable the Senate to vote before a new president was inaugurated, thus giving himself, as well as other Republican senators, an out to vote against conviction on the grounds that Trump was no longer the president. Seven Republican senators joined the Democrats to convict, but forty-three continued to back Trump. In a speech after the vote, McConnell said he believed Trump was responsible for the January 6, 2021, attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election but that he would have to answer for that behavior in court.
But nearly four years later, Trump has not had to answer in court because the Supreme Court, stacked with his appointees thanks to Republican senators, has said that he cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties. While the courts sort out what counts as official duties, he is, once again, the Republican nominee for president. Leaders are standing behind him despite the fact he is demonstrating deeply concerning behavior.
When President Joe Biden decided not to accept the Democratic presidential nomination after his poor performance in his June debate with Trump, Republicans demanded that Vice President Harris and the Cabinet invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment, despite the fact that Biden’s job performance continued to be exemplary. We learned later that during the time of the debate, he was negotiating a historic prisoner swap involving multiple countries to free twenty-four prisoners, including Americans Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan.
Nonetheless, that one poor debate performance was enough for Republicans to condemn Biden’s ability to govern the nation. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) told the Fox News Channel that “Joe Biden has decided he isn’t capable of being a candidate; in so doing his admission also means he cannot serve as President.”
But Trump has been lying that immigrants are eating pets; calling voters fat pigs; basing his economic policy on a backward idea of how tariffs work; calling for prosecuting his enemies and making the civil service, military, and judiciary loyal to him; and praising a famous golfer’s “manhood”—hardly indications of a man able to take on the presidency of the United States.
And yet with regard to his mental acuity, Republican leaders offer only crickets.
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On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living in the United States would be “bloody.” He also promised to prosecute his political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “a fascist to the core…the most dangerous person to this country.”
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those “radical left lunatics” on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about “the enemy from within,” specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as “bad people.” Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that broke the 2019 story of Trump’s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Trump’s references to the “enemy from within” have become so frequent that former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that his construction of those who oppose him as “enemies” might sweep in virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled “What (Really) Happens If Trump Wins?” Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler’s January 30, 1933, oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations “that he cannot deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.” To enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, “politely handed me a letter and requested a signed receipt.” She thought nothing of it, she said, “But what a surprise was in store for me!” The letter informed her that, “in light of your numerous anti-German publications,” she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924 she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi’s opponents to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than “the future dictator of Germany” she had expected to meet, he was a man of “startling insignificance.” She asked him if he would “abolish the constitution of the German Republic.” He answered: “I will get into power legally” and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution and “found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below.” She did not believe he could succeed: “Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights,” she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off at the railway station with “great sheaves of American Beauty roses.”
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when she had left to marry Lewis, they offered “many expressions of friendship and gratitude.” But times had changed. “I thought of them sadly as my train pulled out,” she said, “carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them are émigrés and some of them are dead.”
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis’s bestselling 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, she wrote in a 1937 column: “No people ever recognize their dictator in advance…. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned…. But when our dictator turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: “She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political commentator] Walter Lippmann.” The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two “most influential women in the U.S.”
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in honor of President George Washington’s birthday on February 20, 1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed loudly during the speeches and yelled “Bunk!” at the stage, illustrating that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a reporter: “I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler.”
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper’s Magazine titled “Who Goes Nazi?” she wrote: “It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi,” she wrote. “By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.”
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or nationality. “Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,” she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too easygoing to join a struggle. “But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis,” she wrote. “Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.”
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same reason that Hitler’s power was growing. “Chancellor Hitler is no longer a man, he is a religion,” she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people…. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen….”
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Former president Trump’s closing economic argument for the American people is that putting a high tariff wall around the country will bring in so much foreign money that it will fund domestic programs and bring down the deficit, enabling massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s closing economic argument is that the government should invest in the middle class by permitting Medicare to pay for in-home health aides for the elderly, cutting taxes for small businesses and families, and passing a federal law against price gouging for groceries during emergencies.
The two candidates are presenting quite stark differences in the futures they propose for the American people.
Trump has indicated his determination to take the nation’s economy back to that of the 1890s, back to a time when capital was concentrated among a few industrialists and financiers. This world fits the idea of modern Republicans that the government should work to protect the economic power of those on the “supply side” of the economy with the expectation that they will be able to invest more efficiently in the market than if they were regulated by business or their money taken by taxation.
Trump has said he thinks the word tariff is as beautiful as “love” or “faith” and has frequently praised President William McKinley, who held office from 1897 to 1901, for leading the U.S. to become, he says, the wealthiest it ever was. Trump attributes that wealth to tariffs, but unlike leaders in the 1890s, Trump refuses to acknowledge that tariffs do not bring in money from other countries. The cost of tariffs is borne by American consumers.
The industrialists and Republican lawmakers who pushed high tariffs in the 1890s were quite open that tariffs are a tax on ordinary Americans. In 1890, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World complained about the McKinley Tariff that raised average tariffs to 49.5%. “Under the McKinley Act the people are paying taxes of nearly $20,000,000 and a much larger sum in bounties to Carnetic, Phipps & Co., and their fellows, for the alleged purpose of benefiting the wage-earners,” it wrote, even as the powerful companies slashed wages.
Today, on CNBC’s Squawk Box, senior economics reporter Steve Liesman noted that the conservative American Enterprise Institute has called out Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax hike on American consumers of as much as $3.9 trillion.
Together with Trump’s promise to make deep cuts or even to end income taxes on the wealthy and corporations, his economic plan will dramatically shift the burden of supporting the country from the very wealthy to average Americans, precisely the way the U.S. economy worked until 1913, when the revenue act of that year lowered tariffs and replaced the lost income with an income tax.
That shifting of the economic burden of the country downward showed in another way yesterday, as well, when the Committee for a Responsible Budget noted that Trump’s economic plans would hasten the insolvency of Social Security trust funds by three years, from 2034 to 2031, and would lead to dramatic cuts.
Harris’s plan explicitly rejects the supply-side economics of the past and moves forward the policies of the Biden administration that work to make sure the “demand side” of the economy, or consumers, has access to money and opportunity. Those policies, dismissed by the ideologues of the Reagan revolution, had proven their success between 1933 and 1981 and have again delivered, achieving the nation’s extraordinary post-pandemic economic growth.
The International Monetary Fund underlined that growth again today when it outlined that the nation’s surge of investment under the Biden administration has attracted private investment, all of which is paying off in higher productivity, higher wages, and higher stock prices, enabling the U.S. to pull ahead of the world’s other advanced economies.
And it is continuing to deliver. Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission’s final rule banning fake online reviews and testimonials that mislead consumers and hurt real businesses went into effect. Today the Department of Health and Human Services reported that in the first half of 2024, nearly 1.5 million people with Medicare Part D saved almost $1 billion in out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs thanks to the drug negotiations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act.
Harris has expanded that plan to focus on small businesses and families. In addition to her plan to permit start-ups to deduct $50,000 in costs rather than the current $5,000 and to cut taxes for families by extending the Child Tax Credit, she has called for raising the corporate tax rate to 28%, lower than it was before the Trump tax cuts and lower than the rate President Joe Biden proposed in his 2024 budget. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.
Her recent proposal to enable Medicare to pay for home health aides has flown largely under the radar, although it would be a major benefit to many Americans. She proposes to pay for that benefit with additional savings from drug price negotiations. By keeping seniors in their homes longer, it would save families from having to meet the high cost of residential care.
Yesterday the White House proposed an expansion of the Affordable Care Act to make over-the-counter contraceptives free under health plans. Currently, only prescription contraceptives are covered. If the rule is finalized, it would expand contraceptive coverage to the 52 million women of reproductive age covered by private health plans.
As the campaigns enter the last two weeks before the election, the difference between their economic vision is stark.
So, it seems, is the difference between the candidates.
Today, Trump canceled another event, this one a roundtable with Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Democratic representative Tulsi Gabbard, both members of Trump’s transition team, that was supposed to highlight Kennedy’s vision for America’s health and their contributions to the campaign. He later held a rally in North Carolina.
Harris, meanwhile, sat down with Hallie Jackson of NBC News and participated in an interview with Telemundo’s Julio Vaqueiro. Tonight, rapper Eminem introduced former president Barack Obama at a rally for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Harris’s campaign announced today that on Friday she will campaign in Houston, Texas, where she will emphasize the dangers of abortion bans in the heart of Trump country.
The biggest news about the candidates today, though, appears to be an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic exploring Trump’s disparagement of the U.S. military. Noting that it is an odd thing for a president to remain popular when he is openly dismissive of soldiers and their decorated officers, Goldberg explores Trump’s inability to understand any relationship that is not transactional. He noted Trump’s dismissal of soldiers as “losers,“ his astonishment at how little pay they make, and his dislike of wounded personnel who, he thinks, made him look bad.
Unable to understand the principles of honor or patriotism, Trump could not comprehend that Army generals were loyal to the U.S. Constitution rather than him. He yearned for generals, he said, like those of autocratic rulers. He said he wanted generals like Hitler’s, a leader he sometimes praised. “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Trump asked then–chief of staff General John Kelly. Kelly was clear: “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.”
That was not an answer Trump liked. When the generals refused to shoot protesters or deploy U.S. troops against American citizens, Trump screamed: “You are all f*cking losers!”
Finally, General Kelly spoke up himself. In an interview with Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times published tonight, Kelly noted that he had decided not to speak out about Trump unless Trump said something deeply troubling or something that involved Kelly and was wildly inaccurate. For Kelly, Trump’s recent talk about the “enemy within” was dangerous enough that he felt obliged to make a public comment.
The retired U.S. Marine Corps general confirmed that Trump is “certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government—he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.”
Kelly added that “in his opinion, Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
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The struggle over whether the U.S. government should work for everyone or for the very wealthy and corporations was on display today. Cable and internet providers and home security companies sued to stop the newly finalized Federal Trade Commission “click-to-cancel” rule that says it must be as easy to cancel a service as it is to sign up for it.
Also today, the Department of Transportation reached a record settlement of $50 million with American Airlines, whose damage to wheelchairs and dangerous physical assistance to disabled passengers has broken laws. Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), who lost both legs in combat in the Iraq War, praised the fine and commented: “When an airline damages or breaks someone’s wheelchair, it’s like breaking their legs.”
"The era of tolerating poor treatment of airline passengers with disabilities is over," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. "With this penalty, we are setting a new standard of accountability for airlines that violate the civil rights of passengers with disabilities. By setting penalties at levels beyond the mere cost of doing business for airlines, we're aiming to change how the industry behaves and prevent these kinds of abuses from happening in the first place.”
A reader called to my attention that the recent Federal Election Commission filings showed one significant difference in the expenditures of the two presidential campaigns. The Harris campaign spent $34,550.02 on sign language interpreting services. The Trump campaign spent $0.00.
These details of governance are fragments of a larger picture of how we see our country. Are we all created equal and entitled to be treated equally before the law? Or are some people better than others?
CNN was supposed to host another presidential debate tonight, but while Vice President Kamala Harris accepted, Trump declined to attend. In place of a debate, CNN invited each candidate to hold a town hall. Harris accepted; Trump declined.
In her discussion with host Anderson Cooper, Harris focused on the reiteration yesterday by Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, retired U.S. Marine Corps general John Kelly, that Trump had spoken admiringly of Adolf Hitler and expressed a desire to have generals like Hitler’s. In an interview with the New York Times, Kelly said Trump “met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of rule of law.”
The ideology of fascism is associated with Italian journalist and politician Benito Mussolini, who articulated a new political ideology in the 1920s. Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter what socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince their neighbors that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production. The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini to give up on socialism and develop a new political theory.
Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that some men were better than others. Those few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They must organize the people as they had during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
This hierarchical system of government was called “fascism” after the bundle of rods tied around an axe that was the ancient Roman symbol of authority and power. Italy adopted it, and Mussolini’s ideas inspired others, notably Germany’s Adolf Hitler. These leaders believed that their new system would reclaim a glorious past with the ideology of the future, welding pure men into a military and social machine that moved all as one, while pure women supported society as mothers. They set out to eliminate those who didn’t fit their model and to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
But while today we associate fascism with this European movement, its foundational principle—that some men are better than others and have the right and even the duty to rule over the majority—runs parallel to that same strand in United States history. Indeed, Nazi lawyers and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws for inspiration, and Hitler looked to America’s Indigenous reservations as a way to rid a country of “unwanted” people.
For retired Marine general John Kelly to have spoken out against Trump before the 2024 election was a huge deal. As Secretary Buttigieg put it: “It’s one thing for some leftist group to call you a fascist. Quite another when it’s a fellow Republican. And absolutely astonishing when it’s your own chief of staff.” But Kelly was not alone. Former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told veteran journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is “fascist to the core.”
In tonight’s CNN town hall, Vice President Harris told Cooper that she agreed that Trump is a fascist. She noted that when a four-star Marine general comes out two weeks before an election to warn Americans that one of the candidates is a fascist, we should see this as “a 911 call to the American people.”
Trump is “increasingly unstable,” Harris said, “and unfit to serve…. [T]he people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans by the way, who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, his national security advisor, former secretaries of defense, and his vice president have all called him unfit and dangerous. They have said explicitly he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said he should never again serve as President of the United States,” she said.
When Trump talks about “the enemy within,” Harris said, “ [h]e's talking about the American people. He's talking about journalists, judges, nonpartisan election officials…. And he's going to sit there unstable, unhinged, plotting his revenge, plotting his retribution. Creating an enemies list.” In contrast, she said, she would have a “to-do list” to work on the things that matter to the American people.
When Trump responded to Kelly’s claims, he appeared to confuse Kelly, who was retired when Trump chose him to serve as White House chief of staff, and Mark Milley, the active-duty chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump referred to four-star general Kelly, whose son died in Afghanistan, as “tough and dumb,” a “LOWLIFE, and a bad General,” but then went on to talk of him as active duty and to say he stopped seeking his advice in the White House.
Forced to comment on Kelly’s comment about Trump’s embracing fascism, Republican leaders are either ducking the question or acting as if it is not a big deal. On CNN this morning, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu said the news that Trump has praised Hitler will not affect Sununu’s support. “If we can get a Republican mindset out of Washington,” he said, “we need that culture change.”
At a rally tonight in Macon, Georgia, Trump agreed with the audience as it chanted: “Lock him up.” “You should lock them up,” Trump said. “Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary. Lock ‘em up.”
Tonight, Shawn Reilly, the mayor of Waukesha, Wisconsin—a key Republican stronghold—announced he’s voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
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Trump’s threat to use the military on “the enemy within,” along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump’s administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump’s reelection could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party.
On the Hugh Hewitt Show this morning, Trump boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.”
Trump’s analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.
Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.
In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.
But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.
In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump’s promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republicans’ reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s economic plans would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Rattner noted that Trump’s plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or a depression.
MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it is not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. "My wife…was miscarrying and bleeding out,” John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharpe. “Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, 'Oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you're sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion'—that’s what they’re saying in...all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not you and your family. The government. No! Stay out of it!... We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That's crazy!”
“He is killing us!” Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. “He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk and some women have died already because of this…. What’s happening with women right now is real, and it is playing out across America.”
MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long-overdue farm bill.
Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democrat incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. “These people are not fit to govern,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) posted today.
MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it: Ohio representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how “Trump’s Already Stuffing House GOP ‘Normies’ in a Locker” as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist.
But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records, “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psycho PAC warned both that Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up,” and that his malignant narcissism makes him “grossly unfit for leadership.”
But if Trump’s grip is slipping, who will take over the party?
In a new biography of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” He also went after Florida senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly called McConnell’s comments “indefensible.” Scott said he was “shocked that [McConnell] would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election.”
Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump’s campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs.
And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA Republicans who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris.
In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center.
In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the federal government out of the southern states. (They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)
“If this is not revolution,” Civil War veteran House minority leader James A. Garfield (R-OH) said, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.”
Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform, but voters backed Garfield’s defense of the country and of Black rights and elected him to the White House.
The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884 they backed former New York governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened Black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed “Mugwumps,” thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party.
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A bombshell story last night from the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, who is backing the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaway and gifts of tens of millions to the campaign, has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Reporters Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold, and Sam Schechner said that the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, won a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies in 2021. It is the major rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon, and Musk has a security clearance; he says it is a top-secret clearance.
Today, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into the story. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia,” Nelson told Burgess Everett of Semafor, “then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk appears to be making a bid for control of the Republican Party for a number of possible reasons, including so he can continue to score federal contracts and because the high tariffs Trump has promised to place on Chinese imports would guarantee that Musk would have leverage in the electrical vehicle market.
But Musk has competition for control of the party. Today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who lead the establishment Republican faction and the MAGAs, respectively, and thus are usually at loggerheads, issued a joint statement condemning Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for “labeling [Trump] as a ‘fascist.’” They suggest she is "inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.”
Observers immediately pointed out that, in fact, it is Trump who has repeatedly called Harris a fascist—as well as a Marxist and a communist—and that those calling Trump a fascist are former members of his own administration like former White House chief of staff General John Kelly, or leaders like former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump himself appointed to his position and who called Trump “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Harris’s contribution to this discussion was that when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris directly if she thinks Trump is a fascist at a town hall this week, she answered: “Yes, I do. And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”
Aside from the gaslighting of attacking Harris for something that Trump is the one doing, the statement seemed a calculated attempt to demonstrate Republican solidarity. But it was glaringly obvious that McConnell and Johnson found that solidarity only in attacking Harris. Their statement contained no praise of Trump.
The struggle over the Republican Party also seemed evident in yesterday’s decision by the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong, to kill that paper’s planned endorsement of Harris. Choosing not to make an endorsement in the race, Soon-Shiong said that he thought an endorsement would “add to the division” in the country. Elon Musk praised his decision.
Today the Washington Post also decided not to make an endorsement in the presidential race, despite the fact a piece endorsing Harris was already drafted. Publisher William Lewis said the paper was returning to its roots of not endorsing presidential candidates, although it has endorsed candidates for decades and did so in its early years as well. His statement seemed a weak cover for the evident wish of the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to avoid antagonizing Trump.
Bezos gives Musk a run for his money at being the richest man in the world. But while Musk wants high tariffs against China to protect his access to electric vehicle markets, Bezos’s fortune comes from Amazon, and high tariffs would shatter his business. When he was in office, Trump went out of his way to find ways to hurt Amazon to get back at Bezos for unfavorable coverage in the Post.
Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Mariel Garza, along with journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein, resigned from the paper after its decision not to endorse Harris, and nearly 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. The Washington Post, too, has seen about 2,000 subscribers bow out, and fourteen of the newspaper’s columnists called the decision not to condemn Trump’s threats to the “freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution” “a terrible mistake.” Cartoonist Ann Telnaes published a blacked-out square, playing on the Post’s motto that democracy dies in darkness.
Readers are speaking out against the Washington Post for demonstrating what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” the demands of an authoritarian leader (although Washington Post legal journalist Ruth Marcus, who signed the letter calling the decision a terrible mistake, pointed out that the Post itself was publishing the many letters of condemnation). “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder’s “On Tyranny” reads. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
The aftermath of the Post’s decision demonstrated what scholars say will happen after such obeying. Rather than winning favors, such a demonstration of weakness invites further abuse, as anyone who has watched Trump in action ought to know by now.
Trump’s people pounced, with advisor Stephen Miller posting: “You know the Kamala campaign is sinking when even the Washington Post refuses to endorse.”
Trump then promptly went a step further, claiming that Democrats had taken part in “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery…in the 2020 presidential election” and warning that in 2024, “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…. Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Trump’s threats are designed to convince people he is a strongman who will inevitably win the 2024 presidential election. But to do that, he will have to go through the voters, who are demonstrating their enthusiasm for Democratic candidate Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
After the announcement by the Washington Post, others stepped up to endorse Harris. The largest Teamsters union in Texas endorsed Harris before her rally tonight in Houston. In a blistering editorial, the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Harris, saying: “America deserves much more than an aspiring autocrat who ignores the law, is running to stay out of prison, and doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Tonight, Trump taped a podcast episode with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas, hoping to reach Rogan’s large audience. He was still on the ground in Austin when he was supposed to be appearing at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, and blamed the long taping for the fact he was three hours late to the rally. Tired of waiting, rally attendees streamed out. When he finally arrived, about 47,000 viewers watched the PBS live stream of the rally.
Harris was in Houston, where she took the fight for abortion rights to the heart of a state where an abortion ban has endangered women and driven up the infant mortality rate. People began standing in line before sunrise to get into the rally at the Houston Shell Energy Stadium and filled the 22,000-seat stadium to capacity. About 2.5 million people watched the PBS live stream.
Harris shared the stage with actor Jessica Alba and music legends Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, who asked the crowd: “Are we ready to say Madam President?”
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Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed "to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers."
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
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I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.
It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.
There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.
Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.
On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.
Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.
Meanwhile, the decision of the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post not to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have sparked a backlash. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.”
Early on October 26, the Washington Post itself went after Trump backer billionaire Elon Musk with a major story highlighting the information that Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, had worked illegally when he started his career in the U.S. Musk “did not have the legal right to work” in the U.S. when he started his first successful company. As part of the Trump campaign, Musk has emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigrants.
The New York Times has tended to downplay Trump’s outrageous statements, but on Saturday it ran a round-up of Trump’s threats in the center of the front page, above the fold. It noted that Trump has vowed to expand presidential power, prosecute his political opponents, and crack down on immigration with mass deportations and detention camps. It went on to list his determination to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), use the U.S. military against Mexican drug cartels “in potential violation of international law,” and use federal troops against U.S. citizens. It added that he plans to “upend trade” with sweeping new tariffs that will raise consumer prices, and to rein in regulatory agencies.
“To help achieve these and other goals,” the paper concluded, “his advisers are vetting lawyers seen as more likely to embrace aggressive legal theories about the scope of his power.”
On Sunday the front page of the New York Times opinion section read, in giant capital letters: “DONALD TRUMP/ SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES/ ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS/ USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS/ ABANDON ALLIES/ PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS/ BELIEVE HIM.” And then, inside the section, the paper provided the receipts: Trump’s own words outlining his fascist plans. “BELIEVE HIM,” the paper said.
On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, host Jake Tapper refused to permit Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, to gaslight viewers. Vance angrily denied that Trump has repeatedly called for using the U.S. military against Americans, but Tapper came with receipts that proved the very things Vance denied.
Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden began in the early afternoon. The hateful performances of the early participants set the tone for the rally. Early on, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, delivered a steamingly racist set. He said, for example: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” He went on: “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” Hinchcliffe also talked about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins.
The speakers who followed Hinchcliffe called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” They called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch,” and they railed against “f*cking illegals.” They insulted Latinos generally, Black Americans, Palestinians and Jews. Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s claim that “America is for Americans and Americans only” directly echoed the statement of Adolf Hitler that "Germany is for Germans and Germans only.”
Trump took the stage about two hours late, prompting people to stream toward the exits before he finished speaking. He hit his usual highlights, notably undermining Vance’s argument from earlier in the day by saying that, indeed, he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”
But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,” Trump said.
It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote.
Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024, this seems his likely plan.
But to do that, he needs at least a plausibly close election, or at least to convince his supporters that the election has been stolen from him. Tonight’s rally badly hurt that plan.
As Hinchcliffe was talking about Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris was at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia talking about her plan to spread her opportunity economy to Puerto Rico. She has called for strengthening Puerto Rico’s energy grid and making it easier to get permits to build there.
After the “floating island of garbage” comment, Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny, who has more than 45 million followers on Instagram, posted Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico, and his spokesperson said he is endorsing Harris.
Puerto Rican singer and actor Ricky Martin shared a clip from Hinchcliffe’s set with his 16 million followers. His caption read: “This is what they think of us.” Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, posted Harris’s plan. Later, singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande posted that she had voted for Harris. Grande has 376 million followers on Instagram. Singer Luis Fonsi, who has 16 million followers, also called out the “constant hate.”
The headlines were brutal. “MAGA speakers unleash ugly rhetoric at Trump's MSG rally,” read Axios. Politico wrote: “Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks.” “Racist Remarks and Insults Mark Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally,” the New York Times announced. “Speakers at Trump rally make racist comments, hurl insults,” read CNN.
But the biggest sign of the damage the rally did was the frantic backpedaling from Republicans in tight elections, who distanced themselves as fast as they could from the insults against Puerto Ricans, especially. The Trump campaign itself tried to distance itself from the “floating island of garbage” quotation, only to be met with comments pointing out that Hinchcliffe’s set had been vetted and uploaded to the teleprompters.
As the clips spread like wildfire, political writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out that almost 6 million Puerto Ricans live in the states—about a million in Florida, half a million in Pennsylvania, 100,000 in Georgia, 100,000 in Michigan, 100,000 in North Carolina, 45,000 in Arizona, and 40,000 in Nevada—and that over half of them voted in 2020.
In 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
this was all campaign . this was trump.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
On Monday, October 28, 1929, New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company opened its forty-fifth season.
Four thousand attendees in their finest clothes strolled to the elegant building on foot or traveled in one of a thousand limousines to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the melodramatic story of an innocent French girl seduced by wealth, whose reluctance to leave her riches for true love leads to her arrest and tragic death. Photographers captured images of the era’s social celebrities as they arrived at opening night, their flash bulbs blinding the crowd that had gathered to see the famous faces and expensive gowns.
No one toasting the beginning of the opera season that night knew they were marking the end of an era.
At ten o’clock the next morning, when the opening gong sounded in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange, men began to unload their stocks. So fast did trading go that by the end of the day, the ticker recording transactions ran two and a half hours late. When the final tally could be read, it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. The market had been uneasy for weeks before the twenty-ninth, but Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. By mid-November the industrial average was half of what it had been in September. The economic boom that had fueled the Roaring Twenties was over.
Once the bottom fell out of the stock market, the economy ground down. Manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade dropped by $7 billion, down to just $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 to 33 cents; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields.
By 1932, over one million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
No one knew how to combat the Great Depression, but certain wealthy Americans were sure they knew what had caused it. The problem, they said, was that poor Americans refused to work hard enough and were draining the economy. They must be forced to take less. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Slash government spending, agreed the Chicago Tribune: lay off teachers and government workers, and demand that those who remain accept lower wages. Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, told the Senate that the only way to restart the economy was to cut government salaries and veterans’ benefits (although he told them that his own salary—which at sixty thousand dollars was six times higher than theirs—was “very little” and couldn’t be reduced).
President Hoover knew little about finances, let alone how to fix an economic crisis of global proportions. He tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.”
But taxes were already so low that most folks would see only a few extra dollars a year from the cuts, and the fundamental business of the country was not, in fact, sound. When suffering Americans begged for public works programs to provide jobs, Hoover insisted that such programs were a “soak the rich” program that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.
By the time Hoover’s term ended, Americans were ready to try a new approach to economic recovery. They refused to reelect Hoover and turned instead to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised the American people a “New Deal”: a government that would work for everyone, not just for the wealthy and well connected.
As soon as Roosevelt was in office, Democrats began to pass laws protecting workers’ rights, providing government jobs, regulating business and banking, and beginning to chip away at the racial segregation of the American South. New Deal policies employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 buildings.
They regulated banking and the stock market and gave workers the right to bargain collectively. They established minimum wages and maximum hours for work. They provided a basic social safety net and regulated food and drug safety. And when World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists both at home—where they had grown strong enough to turn out almost 20,000 people to a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939—and abroad.
The New Deal worked so well that common men and women across the country hailed FDR as their leader, electing him an unprecedented four times. Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower built on the New Deal when voters elected him in 1952. He bolstered the nation’s infrastructure with the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which provided $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of highway across the country; added the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to the government and called for a national healthcare system.
Eisenhower nominated former Republican governor of California Earl Warren as chief justice of the Supreme Court to protect civil rights, which he would begin to do with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision months after joining the court. Eisenhower also insisted on the vital importance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to stop the Soviet Union from spreading communism throughout Europe.
Eisenhower called his vision “a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands of the welfare of the whole Nation.”
The system worked: between 1945 and 1960 the nation’s gross national product (GNP) jumped by 250%, from $200 billion to $500 billion. The vast majority of Americans of both parties liked the new system that had helped the nation to recover from the Depression and to equip the Allies to win World War II.
Politicians and commentators agreed that most Democrats and Republicans shared a “liberal consensus” that the government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. It seemed the country had finally created a government that best reflected democratic values.
Indeed, that liberal consensus seemed so universal that the only place to find opposition was in entertainment. Popular radio comedian Fred Allen’s show included a caricature, Senator Beauregard Claghorn, a southern blowhard who pontificated, harrumphed, and took his reflexive hatred of the North to ridiculous extremes. A buffoon who represented the past, the Claghorn character was such a success that he starred in his own Hollywood film and later became the basis for the Looney Tunes cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn.
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Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump offered Americans his closing argument in the 2024 presidential race on Sunday, October 27, at Madison Square Garden. At a rally that evoked a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939, Trump’s warm-up acts set the terms of Trump’s final pitch to voters by calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” and railing against “f*cking illegals.” They called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil,” and called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a b*tch.” When Trump took the stage about two hours late, he echoed the warm-up acts, and then reiterated that he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”
The racism and fascism Trump’s MAGA Republicans displayed at Madison Square Garden is usually expressed within their media bubble, where it passes for normal conversation. The backlash against it among people in the real world appears to have shocked the Trump campaign so much that the candidate is running away from his own closing argument.
On Monday, Trump felt obliged to tell an audience in Georgia, “I’m not a Nazi.” The Trump campaign has made it a point never to apologize and never to explain, but on Monday it broke that rule, trying to distance itself from performer Tony Hinchcliffe’s comments about Puerto Rico.
This morning, Trump announced he would hold a press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He showed up more than an hour late for the assembled press, then began the event by undermining faith in the election, claiming the campaign is going “very well; there are some bad spots in Pennsylvania where some serious things have been caught or are in the process of being caught,” although it was unclear what he meant.
He went on to deliver such a litany of lies that CNN cited them as a reason to cut away from the speech. Trump chose not to acknowledge the offensiveness of the Madison Square Garden event, saying ““The love in that room, it was breathtaking—and you could have filled it many many times with the people that were unable to get in.”
Tonight, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris offered her own closing argument to the American voters. Once again taking her campaign directly to Trump, she held a rally at the Ellipse near the White House, where Trump spoke to his supporters on January 6, 2021, before sending them off to the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president.
More than 75,000 attendees in the Ellipse and standing on the Mall near the Washington Monument waved flags and held up signs with “USA” printed on them as Harris spoke in front of a backdrop of the White House, on a stage with a line of American flags.
“One week from today, you will have the chance to make a decision that directly impacts your life, the life of your family, and the future of this country we love,” she said. “[I]t will probably be the most important vote you ever cast. And this election is more just than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”
Harris outlined Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and noted that he is “unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance, and out for unchecked power.” She continued: “Donald Trump has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other. That is who he is. But America, I am here tonight to say: that is not who we are.” She called for Americans “to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the fear and division.”
The vice president described herself as “someone who has spent most of my career outside of Washington, D.C.,” a former prosecutor who cares that all people are treated fairly and that those who “use their wealth or power to take advantage of other people” are held to account.
She promised to “work every day to build consensus and reach compromise to get things done…. [to] work with everyone—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—to help Americans who are working hard and still struggling to get ahead.” She vowed to lower costs by delivering tax cuts to working people and the middle class, ban price gouging on groceries, lower the cost of prescription drugs, provide down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers, and build millions of new homes.
She promised to fight for a child tax credit and to lower the cost of child care, as well as allowing Medicare to cover the cost of home aides for seniors.
She promised to “fight to restore what Donald Trump and his hand-selected Supreme Court Justices took away from the women of America.” “[W]hen Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide,” she said, “as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.”
She promised to “work with Democrats and Republicans to sign into law the border security bill that Donald Trump killed.” She promised to “remove those who arrive here unlawfully, prosecute the cartels, and give border patrol the support they so desperately need. At the same time,” she said, “we must acknowledge we are a nation of immigrants.” She vowed to “work with Congress to pass immigration reform, including an earned path to citizenship for hardworking immigrants like farmworkers and our Dreamers.”
“As Commander in Chief,” she said, “I will make sure America has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.… I will strengthen—not surrender—America’s global leadership,” and stand with America’s allies because “our alliances keep American people safe and make America stronger and more secure.”
While Trump offers “more chaos, more division, and policies that help those at the very top and hurt everyone else,” Harris said, “I offer a different path. And I ask for your vote. And here is my pledge to you: I pledge to seek common ground and commonsense solutions to make your life better…. I pledge to listen: To experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me…. I pledge…to approach my work with the joy and optimism that comes from making a difference in people’s lives. And I pledge to be a president for all Americans. And to always put country above party and self.”
“I love our country with all my heart,” she said, “And I believe in its promise. Because I’ve lived it…. And I see the promise of America in all of you…. I see it in the young people who are voting for the first time who are determined to live free from gun violence and to protect our planet, and to shape the world they inherit.
“I see it in the women who refuse to accept a future without reproductive freedom, and the men who support them. I see it in Republicans who have never voted for a Democrat before but have put the Constitution of the United States over party. I’ve seen it in Americans, different in many respects, but united in our pursuit of freedom, our belief in fairness and decency, and our faith in a better future.”
“Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing, proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us—the patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmlands and factory floors—they did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms…only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.
“These United States of America: we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.
“So, America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love. And in seven days, we have the power—each of you has the power—to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.
“I thank you all,” she said. “God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America.”
In Las Vegas, Nevada, today, the Harris campaign placed a giant political advertisement on the Sphere, the music and entertainment venue owned by the same family that owns Madison Square Garden. The globe showed stars and stripes, pictures of Vice President Harris, the words “Harris-Walz,” “November 5,” “Vote for Freedom,” “Vote for Opportunity, “Vote for our Future,” “Vote for Kamala,” “Vote for a New Way Forward.” “Vote for Reproductive Freedom,” “When We Fight, We Win,” and “When We Vote, We Win.”
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On Friday, October 25, at a town hall held on his social media platform X, Elon Musk told the audience that if Trump wins, he expects to work in a Cabinet-level position to cut the federal government.
He told people to expect “temporary hardship” but that cuts would “ensure long-term prosperity.” At the Trump rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Musk said he plans to cut $2 trillion from the government. Economists point out that current discretionary spending in the budget is $1.7 trillion, meaning his promise would eliminate virtually all discretionary spending, which includes transportation, education, housing, and environmental programs.
Economists agree that Trump’s plans to place a high tariff wall around the U.S., replacing income taxes on high earners with tariffs paid for by middle-class Americans, and to deport as many as 20 million immigrants would crash the booming economy. Now Trump’s financial backer Musk is factoring in the loss of entire sectors of the government to the economy under Trump.
Trump has promised to appoint Musk to be the government’s “chief efficiency officer.” “Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut.… We can’t be a wastrel.… We need to live honestly,” Musk said on Friday. Rob Wile and Lora Kolodny of CNBC point out that Musk’s SpaceX aerospace venture has received $19 billion from the U.S. government since 2008.
An X user wrote: “I]f Trump succeeds in forcing through mass deportations, combined with Elon hacking away at the government, firing people and reducing the deficit—there will be an initial severe overreaction in the economy…. Markets will tumble. But when the storm passes and everyone realizes we are on sounder footing, there will be a rapid recovery to a healthier, sustainable economy. History could be made in the coming two years.”
Musk commented: “Sounds about right[.]”
This exchange echoes the prescription of Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, whose theories had done much to create the Great Crash of 1929, for restoring a healthy economy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living
will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Mellon, at least, was reacting to an economic crisis thrust upon an administration. Musk is seeking to create one.
Today the Commerce Department reported that from July through September, the nation’s economy grew at a solid 2.8%. Consumer spending is up, as is investment in business. The country added 254,000 jobs in September, and inflation has fallen back almost to the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.
It is extraordinarily rare for a country to be able to reduce inflation without creating a recession, but the Biden administration has managed to do so, producing what economists call a “soft landing,” rather like catching an egg on a plate. As Bryan Mena of CNN wrote today: “The US economy seems to have pulled off a remarkable and historic achievement.”
Both President Joe Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris have called for reducing the deficit not by slashing the government, as Musk proposes, but by restoring taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
As part of the Republicans’ plan to take the country back to the era before the 1930s ushered in a government that regulated business and provided a basic social safety net, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) expects to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
At a closed-door campaign event on Monday in Pennsylvania for a Republican House candidate, Johnson told supporters that Republicans will propose “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare,” if they take control of both the House and the Senate in November. “Health-care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda,” Johnson said. Their plan is to take a “blowtorch to the regulatory state,” which he says is “crushing the free market.” Trump’s going to go big,” he said.” When an attendee asked “No Obamacare?” he laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare…. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Ending a campaign with a promise to crash a booming economy and end the Affordable Care Act, which ended insurance companies’ ability to reject people with preexisting conditions, is an unusual strategy.
A post from Trump last night and another this morning suggest his internal polls are worrying him. Last night he claimed there was cheating in Pennsylvania’s York and Lancaster counties. Today he posted: “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before. REPORT CHEATING TO AUTHORITIES. Law Enforcement must act, NOW!”
Trump appears to be setting up the argument he used in 2020, that he can lose only if he has been cheated. But it is increasingly apparent that the get-out-the-vote, or GOTV, efforts of the Trump campaign have been weak. When Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley became the co-chairs of the Republican National Committee in March 2024, they stopped the GOTV efforts underway and used the money instead for litigation. They outsourced GOTV efforts to super PACs, including Musk’s America PAC.
In Wired today, Jake Lahut reported that door-knockers for Musk’s PAC were driven around in the back of a U-Haul without seats and threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet high canvassing quotas. One of the canvassers told Lahut that they thought they were being hired to ask people who they would be voting for when they flew into Michigan, and was surprised to learn their actual role. The workers spoke to Lahut anonymously because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement (a practice the Biden administration has tried to stop).
Trump’s boast that he is responsible for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion is one of the reasons his support is soft. In addition to popular dislike of the idea that the state, rather than a woman and her doctor, should make decisions about her healthcare, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision is now over two years old, and state examinations of maternal deaths are showing that women are dying from lack of reproductive healthcare.
Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica reported today that at least two pregnant women have died in Texas when doctors delayed emergency care after a miscarriage until the fetal heartbeat stopped. The woman they highlighted today, Josseli Barnica, left behind a husband and a toddler.
At a rally this evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump said his team had advised him to stop talking about how he was going to protect women by ending crime and making sure they don’t have to be “thinking about abortion.” But Trump, who has boasted of sexual assault and been found liable for it, did not stop there. He went on to say that he had told his advisors, “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.”
The Trump campaign remains concerned about the damage caused by the extraordinarily racist, sexist, and violent Sunday night rally at Madison Square Garden. Today the campaign seized on a misstatement President Biden made when condemning the statement from the Madison Square Garden event that referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” They tried to turn the tables to suggest that Biden was calling Trump supporters garbage, although the president has always been very careful to focus his condemnation on Trump alone.
In Wisconsin today, when he disembarked from his plane, Trump put on an orange reflective vest and had someone drive him around the tarmac in a garbage truck with TRUMP painted on the side. He complained about Biden to reporters from the cab of the truck but still refused to apologize for Sunday’s slur of Puerto Rico, saying he knew nothing about the comedian who appeared at his rally.
This, too, was an unusual strategy. Like his visit to McDonalds, where he wore an apron, the image of Trump in a sanitation truck was likely intended to show him as a man of the people. But his power has always rested not in his promise to be one of the people, but rather to lead them. The pictures of him in a bright orange vest and unusually dark makeup are quite different from his usual portrayal of himself.
Indeed, media captured a video of Trump’s stunt, and it did not convey strength. MSNBC’s Katie Phang watched him try to get into the truck and noted: “Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door…. Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.”
The Las Vegas Sun today ran an editorial that detailed Trump’s increasingly obvious mental lapses and concluded that Trump is “crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.” It noted that Trump now depends “on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals.” It noted that if Trump cannot fulfill the duties of the presidency, they would fall to his running mate, J.D. Vance, who has suggested “he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.”
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House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has responded to news stories about his plan to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (or Obamacare) by claiming his comments at the closed-door campaign event on Monday were taken out of context. But they weren’t. The tape is clear. Johnson said that Republicans want “massive reform” to the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” When an attendee asked, “No Obamacare?” Johnson laughed and agreed: “No Obamacare. The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
MAGA Utah senator Mike Lee reposted the video of Johnson and commented: “Kill Obamacare now[.]”
Trump today posted on social media that he never mentioned repealing the Affordable Care Act, “never even thought of such a thing.” But this was either a memory lapse or a lie, because in 2016 he ran on repealing the ACA and his 2016 platform called for “a full repeal of Obamacare.” Within hours of taking office in 2017, Trump issued an executive order weakening the law, and when the Republican-dominated House voted to repeal the law, Trump held a celebration in the Rose Garden and declared the ACA “essentially dead.”
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) bucked Trump to protect the ACA then, and Trump began this year’s campaign with a promise to get rid of it before backing off. Even still, the vague promise in the 2024 platform to “increase Transparency, promote Choice and Competition, and expand access to new Affordable Healthcare” sounds a lot like Johnson’s promise to restore “the free market” to health care.
While Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris has been campaigning in the swing states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, Trump today held a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state President Joe Biden won by almost 11 points in 2020 and that Democrats are likely to win in 2024. Trump had to hold the rally at a private airplane hangar after city officials refused to rent the Albuquerque Convention Center to the campaign because it still owes Albuquerque almost $445,000 from a similar rally in 2019.
Once there, he made it clear he was trying to repair some of the damage caused by the extraordinary racism and sexism on display at his Sunday rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where a comedian called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage.”
Courting offended voters, he said: “Don’t make me waste a whole damn half a day here, OK? Look, I came here. We can be nice to each other, or we can talk turkey. I’m here for one simple reason: I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.” That outreach might not be enough to bring back the voters lost after the Madison Square Garden event.
The campaign is seeing other weaknesses, as well. Meredith McGraw and Jessica Piper of Politico reported today that nearly half of the ballots already cast in Pennsylvania have come from voters over the age of 65, and although the numbers of registered older voters are divided evenly between the parties, registered Democrats have made up about 58% of Pennsylvania’s early votes, compared to 35% for Republicans. Those numbers might well simply reflect different approaches to mail-in ballots, but they also might explain why Trump is already claiming fraud in Pennsylvania.
He is also seemingly nervous about Pennsylvania because women are voting there at a much higher rate than men in the early vote: 56% to 43%. And Democratic women are the biggest group of new voters in the state. New voters who were too young eight years ago to hear the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, have been hearing it on TikTok lately, as younger users record their reactions to it and call out their older male relatives for voting for anyone who would talk as Trump did.
“I moved on her, and I failed,” Trump says in the tape. “I’ll admit it. I did try and f*ck her…. I moved on her like a b*tch, but I couldn’t get there, and she was married,” Trump said. “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p*ssy. You can do anything,” he said.
The Harris campaign and pro-Harris organizations leaned into the history of women’s suffrage today with videos highlighting those who fought so that women could vote and reiterating: “We are not going back.” To assist those women who might not feel safe letting their husbands know how they voted, women have been posting notes in women’s public bathrooms assuring other women that their vote is secret. A Democratic advertisement voiced by actress Julia Roberts powerfully makes the point that women do not have to tell their husbands how they vote.
Right-wing figures like Charlie Kirk have expressed alarm at the gender gap in voting. As well, there has been a right-wing backlash to the idea that women will vote for Harris while letting their husbands assume they’re voting for Trump.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who famously cheated on both of his first two wives, expressed dismay at the idea that a woman might need to keep her vote secret from her husband. “For them to tell people to lie is just one further example of the depth of their corruption,” he said. “How do you run a country…saying wives should lie to their husbands, husbands should lie to their wives? I mean, what kind of a totally amoral, corrupt, sick system have the Democrats developed?”
On the Fox News Channel’s The Five this morning, host Jesse Watters said that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair…. That violates the sanctity of our marriage.” Christian pastor Dale Partridge posted: “In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction. He is the head and they are one. Unity extends to politics. This is not controversial.” But, he added, “submission does have limits. A wife doesn’t need to submit to her husband in sin (in this case voting democrat).”
Tonight, at an event with right-wing host Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, Trump seemed to move beyond misogyny to murderous intent. He turned his increasingly violent rhetoric against former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who has urged Republican women to vote against Trump. “She’s a radical war hawk,” he said, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Carlson is friendly with authoritarian Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in his own country and is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin. Today Orbán posted that he had “Just got off the phone with President [Trump]. I wished him the best of luck for next Tuesday. Only five days to go. Fingers crossed[.]“
Meanwhile, a lot more major endorsements for Harris have been coming in.
Today basketball legend LeBron James released a powerful one-minute ad with clips of Trump’s many racist statements and drawing a straight line from him back to the most violent days of the civil rights movement. “HATE TAKES US BACK,” it says. In a post sharing the video, James wrote: “When I think about my kids and my family and how they will grow up, the choice is clear to me. VOTE KAMALA HARRIS!!!” James has 53 million followers on X.
The Economist today endorsed Harris, warning that “a second Trump term comes with unacceptable risks.” Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg also posted on social media that he had voted for Harris “without hesitation,” and added that he hoped undecided voters would join him. “Trump is not fit for high office,” he wrote in a Bloomberg op-ed. He praised Harris’s positive vision and bipartisan outreach.
Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published an op-ed in the New York Times on Tuesday, titled: “My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say ‘Enough’ With Trump.” The former president is unfit for office, Luttig wrote. “When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy to him before, he betrayed us.” Luttig assured readers that “[t]here could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate” Trump.
He reminded his fellow Republicans that they had always “proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come…. All Americans, but especially Republicans, will live with their decision the rest of their lives.” “The choice for America next Tuesday,” Luttig wrote, “could not be clearer.”
Ever since Vice President Harris tapped Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, Democratic governors have been demonstrating their support for one of their own. Today, for Halloween, Democratic governors Wes Moore of Maryland, Janet Mills of Maine, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and Phil Murphy of New Jersey each dressed to match a photograph of Walz.
“No tricks this Halloween!” Whitmer posted. “Just dressing up as our friend [Tim Walz]—excited to elect him and [Kamala Harris]. If you haven’t yet, make a plan to vote: http://iwillvote.com[.]”
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Trump’s comments to right-wing media figure Tucker Carlson last night at an event in Glendale, Arizona, about former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), coming as they have after the extraordinary racism and sexism of Trump’s Sunday event at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, have highlighted the centrality of the campaign's attack on women.
“She’s a radical war hawk,” Trump told Carlson, “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
Today, Trump surrogates have tried to say that he was referring to Cheney’s positions on American warfare, but it seems pretty clear he is fantasizing about seeing her in front of a firing squad. Journalist Magdi Jacobs noted the parallels between this statement and his 2020 command to the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” the precursor to the Proud Boys’ attacking the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. In both statements, Trump avoided explicitly calling for violence, but absolutely set the stage for it.
This morning, Cheney responded to Trump’s threat “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
While Trump began to attack Cheney openly when she accepted the role of vice-chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, where her presence clearly made Republicans—like Cassidy Hutchinson, aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows—willing to share what they knew, Trump’s recent bloody fantasies appear to have broader meaning.
Cheney has emerged as the key figure to urge Republican women to vote against Trump, and it is becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s reelection is in trouble in part because white women are abandoning him. The early hints that this is happening, like the huge gender gap showing up in early voting, have sparked a right-wing frenzy of attempts to restore the power of white men over the women in their lives. Right-wing men are insisting that wives should vote as their husbands do, or that women should lose the ability to vote altogether.
Trump’s suggestion that Cheney should face a firing squad seems to be a general expression of the anger of white men accustomed to dictating the terms of public life when faced with the reality that they can no longer count on being able to cow the people around them.
Trump’s attack on Cheney has galvanized his unpopularity with women, while the larger meaning of the MAGAs’ attacks on women got additional illustration with the news broken today by Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana of ProPublica that a pregnant 18-year-old in Texas suffering from sepsis was turned away from emergency rooms twice before a before doctors at a third visit required two ultrasounds to make sure her fetus no longer had a heartbeat before they would move her into intensive care. She died within hours.
Today’s news continued to be bad for Trump. Last week, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump talked about the CHIPS and Science Act that authorized about $280 billion to encourage domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the U.S. While the law has brought significant private investment into the construction of new manufacturing plants and has created manufacturing jobs, Trump complained to Rogan, “That chip deal is so bad.”
After listening to that conversation, journalist Luke Radel asked House speaker Mike Johnson in a report aired today whether, with Trump opposed to the bill and with Republicans having voted against it, the Republicans will try to repeal the law if they get majorities in Congress. Johnson responded “I expect we probably will, but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet.”
Republicans are determined to cut government spending to make way for more tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. But the CHIPS and Science Act has brought important supply chains home and has created more than 115,000 new high-paying jobs in the U.S.
And it has brought significant investment to battleground states: $19.5 billion to Arizona, $75 million to Georgia, $325 million to Michigan, $750 million to North Carolina, and $93 million to Pennsylvania. Johnson quickly realized that acknowledging the Republicans’ hopes of repealing it was a bad mistake days before an election and, claiming he had not heard the question accurately, said he had no intent to undermine the CHIPS and Science Act.
At a closed-door meeting earlier this week, Johnson said repealing the Affordable Care Act is a Republican priority. He tried to walk this comment back, as well, but Pennsylvania Republican senatorial candidate Dave McCormick kept the issue in front of voters when he was caught on a hot mic saying he wants to reform the ACA and that he opposes the provision in the ACA that allows children to stay on their parent’s health insurance until they’re 26.
Trump’s mental state continues to deteriorate, taking with it the former president’s inhibitions. After going on a rant about the people he blamed for troubles with his microphone at a sparsely attended rally in Warren, Michigan, tonight, the Republican nominee for president of the United States of America simulated oral sex on stage.
An official with the Harris campaign told reporters today that they "fully expect" Trump will replay the game plan of 2020 and claim victory on election night, before all the votes are fully counted. In an interview on Wednesday, Harris noted that they were ready if Trump prematurely declared victory: "We are sadly ready if he does and, if we know that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people ... we are prepared to respond," she said.
The Trump campaign’s Washington State governor Jay Inslee has activated the state’s National Guard so it will be “fully prepared to respond to any…civil unrest” before or after the election.
The Department of Justice today announced it would monitor the polls in 86 jurisdictions in 27 states to make sure they comply with federal voting rights laws. Although the federal government has monitored certain polls since 1965, officials in the states of Florida, Missouri, and Texas promptly announced they would not permit Department of Justice officials inside polling stations.
Meanwhile, Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris made two stops in Wisconsin today before packing the Wisconsin State Fair Exposition Center in West Allis near Milwaukee.
In Madison, Harris told a reporter: "What I am enjoying about this moment most is that in spite of how my opponent spends full time trying to divide the American people, what I am seeing is people coming together under one roof who seemingly have nothing in common and know they have everything in common, and I think that is in the best interest of the strength of our nation.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14