"Nothing Matters"

 I've come to notice that commentators - left or right - have settled on a narrative of "nothing matters" when to comes to Donald Trump. There are so many iterations of this, but a few would be 

- Joe Biden's age is the central feature of the presidential race, but Donald Trump's is not.
- Trump has launched a coup against electoral democracy, but everyone knows that so it's not a story.
- Trump's judges have overturned Roe, but everyone knows that so it's not a story.
- Trump is a convicted felon, but everyone knows that so it's not a story.
- Trump has ducked debating Harris again, but that doesn't matter.
- Trump has ducked hard interviews like 60 Minutes, but no one cares about that, unless it's Harris not going on Joe Rogan's podcast.
- Trump, yesterday, struggled to get into a truck and has not released medical records, but his supporters don't care.
- Trump held a veritable Nazi rally on Sunday, but Joe Biden called those Nazis garbage, so bothsides.
- The people around him are nuts and want to bring back polio and the measles.

In short, media commentators - with a few exceptions - have all decided that whatever Trump does or doesn't do simply isn't relevant, because he's done atrocious disqualifying shit before and won in 2016. so it doesn't matter now.

I have to wonder if that's true.

Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, he was soundly beaten in 2020, he has since launched a coup, seen Roe overturned, been convicted and then run an objectively terrible campaign all fall.

And the race is tied?

Look, maybe it is. Trump has defied the laws of political gravity before. He should not be the nominee of a major party, but he is. 

Perhaps I'm hopelessly naïve and Pollyannaish, but I can't help but have some faith in the American people. I know that for many people the very fact that Trump wasn't thrashed in 2016 has shaken their faith, but I think that people are tired of him. 

I think this shit actually does matter.

To Recap

- On Sunday, Trump hosted a hate-filled rally in NYC, where a "comedian" called Puerto Rico a "floating pile of garbage."

- Republicans scrambled to try and distance themselves from the comment or explain it away.

- Trump holds a presser yesterday where he does not apologize for the comment or say that it is wrong.

- Harris holds a "Closing Argument" rally on the Ellipse in DC that brings 75,000 people and she delivers a compelling speech, even if it does not mention sharks, Hannibal Lecter or how unfairly she's been treated.

- Biden deplores the Trump rally and mangles a line about the speakers at the rally being garbage. Biden mangles lines like this a lot, but he immediately clarifies that he was talking about Tony Hinchcliffe.

- Right wing media immediately pounces on this to try and deflect away from the Puerto Rico is garbage story and Harris' speech.

- Credulous Beltway media types actually amplify it.

The conclusions are that it really is a good idea that Biden stepped aside. He is - especially at this point in his career - a very poor communicator, and that's part of the job. However, he did step aside, and you have a reporter saying the "Biden campaign" clarifying the comment.

People at the Washington Post are pleading with people not to cancel their subscriptions, but Bezos' killing of the endorsement is not just a broligarch protecting his government contracts, but a clear example of the Beltway Press's mendacity and desire to put their thumbs on the scale by sanewashing every vile utterance that leaks forth from Trump's puckered piehole, while holding others to a standard or perfection.

This Seems Significant

 We have a new verse in the Closing Argument:

The Broligarchs in Trump's orbit are going to crash the economy. On purpose.

This is the Musky Libertarian Nonsense in which society's edgelords create ruin to weed out the weak and emerge in their techno-utopia to rule us all.

I hope we can appreciate how bad an idea this is, unless you are some ketamine addled accelerationist waiting for the collapse of civilization to prove that you are an Ubermensch.

They Can't Help Themselves

 Trump is supposed to speak this morning, and of course, the presumed topic is damage control from Sunday's hate rally at Madison Square Garden. Recent revelations include the fact that Trump's people struck Hinchcliffe's use of the c-word, which means they approved the rest. We've now seen North Korean State Television Fox News make rhetorical gestures towards explaining away the slur against Puerto Rico as being about waste management issues. Last night, a Republican commentator on CNN said to Mehdi Hassan "I hope your pager doesn't go off." I bet he thinks he was funny.

But of course, they are not funny. Hinchcliffe is cruel, which is occasionally funny, if you're roasting Tom Brady, but not when you're on a political stage. Someone said, before Biden stepped down, that he hoped he would and Harris would get the nomination, just so the Trump campaign would self-destruct in an orgy of racism and sexism.

I guess we will see. Anyway, the Puerto Rican stuff is playing on a loop on Spanish language media.

The Closing Argument

 For some inscrutable reason, Donald Trump (or his campaign) decided to kick off the final week at Madison Square Garden. The Garden was the site of an infamous Nazi rally in 1939, and critics pointed this out as soon as it was announced. One would think that a not-racist, competent campaign would seek to distance itself from that history.

Trump's campaign leaned into it. 

If "even the New York Times" has abandoned its weasel worded depictions of Trump's racism and misogyny, if even the craven weasels at the Post call it racism, I think maybe this could be a big deal. 

First off, there are about 500,000 Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania and about 1,700,000 in Florida. Apparently WhatsApp exploded with people sharing the clip of Tony Hinchcliffe calling Puerto Rico and an "island of garbage". Now, Hinchcliffe is an insult comic, but there is a huge difference between a transgressive set at a comedy club and standing up at a political rally. Florida Senator and Voldemort impersonator Rick Scott tried immediately to distance himself from the comment, because a groundswell of Puerto Ricans could tip the balance in a close Senate race.

It went beyond Hinchcliffe, too, though his remarks will grab the headlines. Here are a smattering of quotes from the Post write-up:

Grant Cardone, a businessman, said Vice President Kamala Harris and “her pimp handlers will destroy our country,” a metaphor that casts the Democratic presidential nominee as a prostitute.

David Rem, a childhood friend of Trump, called Harris “the devil” and “the Antichrist.”

And former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked the attention paid to Harris’s racial identity: “She’s just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president,” Carlson said.

As the Times noted:

The rally served as a capstone to an escalating series of remarks from Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly said in recent days that one of the gravest threats that America faces is “the enemy within.” Democrats have cranked up warnings of Mr. Trump’s descent into authoritarianism as John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, warned that Mr. Trump met the definition of a fascist.

This should land for two reasons.

The first is that, duh, Trump is racist. He tries (barely) to code it and hide it, but he is, we know he is and even his milquetoast supporters know it, even as they waive it away. I really do believe that there is a significant number of GOP and GOP-leaning independents who don't want this guy back in power, precisely because he is such a racist piece of shit. This is the closing argument for them.

The second is that this is the drama and chaos of Trumpistan all over again. Again, there are so many people who just want to forget about politics for months at a time. This rally reminds all of us of how chaotic and mean-spirited those four years were. We tend to memory-hole that stuff, but this was a reminder.

Attacks work when they gibe with pre-existing impressions of the two parties. For inexplicable reasons, the GOP is considered the "business party" despite their poor economic record. But anything that might land against Democrats or for Republicans on economic growth will lean into those preconceptions. 

The GOP - well before Trump - has been embracing racists and racism for my entire life. People kind of "get it".  With the race in the final week, this sort of warning - flashing in neon lights in New York City, the media capital of the world - is Trump's closing argument: I am a racist; racists support me; I will hurt you if you're not one of us.

Good luck winning the center with that message.

About That Ground Game

 Yeah, the GOP GOTV is not going well.

I've gotten nervous about the election as its gotten closer, not because of the polls, because I do believe they are just hopelessly broken at this point, but because the stakes are so damned high.

I simply don't see a demographic group that has moved to Trump since he lost in 2020. I do think there are a host of January 6th and Dobbs voters out there who may have leaned GOP who are going to break over Trump's entire tired, rancid bullshit. 

If, as it appears to be the case, the Harris campaign is getting their voters to the polls and Trump is not, that could be the difference if it's close.

Fascism

 One of the preeminent scholars of fascism has weighed in on Trump. Like me, he did not originally think Trump rose to the level of fascist, but now does. Worth a read.

Hot Take

 I agree with Josh Marshall that newspaper endorsements are largely irrelevant. I do wonder though about the impact of the obvious calculus of the LA Times and Post to not endorse. The billionaire owners of those papers don't want their other business interests hampered by a Trump administration, and we know he will go after them. I would think that has an effect of the need for truly independent media outlets. Also, if you're a reporter, maybe the decision of your broligarch overlords to cave before the fact will wake you up to the threat you face. 

Maybe now it's time to look at something like Trump's rambling incoherence on Joe Rogan and reiterate the reporting on his cognitive decline.

Mushy Ground Game

 Josh Marshall has been assiduously tracking stories about GOP GOTV efforts. He wrote about it yesterday and noted how shambolic and inefficient it seems to be. No sooner had he posted this, he finds a Times article credulously relaying Musk's GOTV operation. Basically, there does seem to be a metric ton of money being spent by Musk to elect Trump and other Republicans. What there does not seem to be is any real door-knocking or phone-banking. Or if it is, it's very much sub-rosa. 

I remember a few years back having a discussion with a student about Musk. I was incredulous that a guy who owns a company that makes such shit cars and has sunk so much money into odd projects like SpaceX that can't possibly be remunerative could be the richest man in the world. So much of Musk's fortune is venture capitalists seeing that he is the "future" and want to get on board with him early for when he becomes the next Ford or Edison.

A lot of his money does come from government contracts and now we have evidence that he's been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin. I'm so old, I can remember his quixotic quest to free those kids stranded in the cave in Thailand. We also have his absurd purchase of Twitter. In other words, we have a guy with a reputation for genius, who really isn't one. How can jeopardize your government contracts by being in contact with America's preeminent geopolitical foe? How many dipshit ideas like the Boring Company has he sunk his money into? He's absolutely trashed Twitter. 

Twitter might actually be the lens through which to see the GOTV operation. Musk came in and fired all the people who knew how to make Twitter work. He fired those who disagreed with him, surrounding himself with sycophants. Sycophancy is not a recipe for a robust operation in the long run. 

Could people be ripping him off with his GOTV operation? Could they be squandering money on weird "disruptive" ideas that won't work? (Early Teslas famously had no cup holders.)

Regardless, among the many reasons to hope for a Harris victory would be to sideline this fraud masquerading as the future

Who Are The BIden>Trump Voters?

 I've seen the wonky polling. I've doomscrolled. In the end, my theory of the election stands as follows:

- The 2020 election is the baseline and Biden won it.

- Since 2020 we have January 6th and Dobbs. The felony convictions, too, but that's kind of baked in.

- There are Republicans and right-leaning Independents who have voted for Trump in the past who are going to vote for Harris. Mostly because of January 6th.

- There are Republicans and right-leaning Independents who have voted for Trump in the past who are not going to vote at all.

- Anyone who dragged themselves out to vote for Biden in 2020 in the midst of a pandemic is voting for Harris.

- There are more new Harris voters than new Trump voters. Mostly because of Dobbs.

- Pollsters are terrified of missing Trump voters again, so they are modelling a very GOP-leaning electorate. Some of those GOP voters are going to break for Harris.

I might be wrong on any of these individual points, but not on all of them. Especially the fact that if you voted for Biden in 2020, you are not voting for Trump in 2024.

You Can't Have An October Surprise...

 ...if nothing is surprising anymore.

The headline revelations - if that's even the right word - in The Atlantic article is Trump praising Hitler and yelling, "It can't cost $60,000 to bury a damned Mexican." The Trump campaign has denied, on the record, that he said those things, but the Trump camp lies about everything, so the usual journalistic deference to categorical denials is gone. 

What's more, his denigration of military service and sacrifice are not one-offs. He does it all the time and has done it on the record and before live mics. It is striking, however, that the article quotes John Kelly and Mark Milley, but these two men have yet to go in front of cameras and say, unequivocally, that Trump is a fascist threat to American constitutional order.

What the author makes clear in the piece is what we all know to be true about Trump - denials from his campaign notwithstanding. He does not understand on any level the concept of serving others. 

Why is this election close?

Do Campaigns Matter?

 As we approach the white knuckled finish to this election, we are faced with a stark difference in how the candidates are ending their push for office. Trump is literally falling asleep during interviews, he's rambling, he's also canceling events left and right, he won't sit for non-partisan interviews. He very much looks and sounds like an old man with no new ideas and low energy. Harris is going on TV, headed to Texas and pitching her message to various voting blocs. She has more money and more GOTV efforts.

All of this - and more - forces the question of: Why is the election close? We've been hearing for decades how important a candidate's campaign is, but Trump refuses to debate, refuses to sit down with 60 Minutes, refuses to hold real town halls. He apparently has no ground game. 

Yet he could - amazingly, despairingly - win this thing. If he does - aside from the frightening challenge to American democracy - it will call into question the idea that how a candidate campaigns actually matters. 

If, on the other hand, the late breakers all move towards Harris, that doesn't really answer the question definitively either. In a weird way, she's the challenger and late breakers often break that way.

Going into the summer, I would have told you that presidential debates don't matter; they are theater. The June debate turned out to perhaps be the most important debates in presidential history. Then we have Trump's bizarre turn in the single fall debate, which might have cemented the small but steady lead that Harris has had since then, roughly 3-4 points in decent polling. 

Still, if this does turn out to be close, the argument that what a candidate says or does would seem to be challenged.

Young Voters

 Paul Campos looks at youth voting and finds that it's not as dire as is traditionally portrayed. I do think, however, that a campaign that relies on youth voters is likely in trouble. They can be part of your coalition and they might require a bit more GOTV effort, but they should only be a piece of the puzzle (unless you have a huge state university in your district and you're running for a local or House seat). Of course, the GOP has almost no GOTV operations anyway.

As for what young voters will do, there's a fair amount of baseless speculation about young men voting for Trump. Will some of them vote for the felon? Of course. There is a Black lesbian with a PhD who is going to vote for him somewhere out there. The fundamental question is how many will vote for him. While there is a certain type of Dude Bro who might vote for Trump out of a reflexive need for performative opposition, most won't, I don't think.

Having watched a fair amount of football over the past few days, I've seen some of the closing pitches from both parties, and the GOP is pretty much 100% running on hating trans people. I'm visiting my college aged frat boy son and he said something that I would guess is a pretty widely held position on trans issues. For the most part, he really wishes he wasn't being asked to weigh in on trans rights. He thinks it's a little odd, but he really doesn't see how it affects him and he generally wants people to be happy and free to be themselves. It's a sort of negative assertion of supporting trans rights rather than affirmative support. If you're a trans activist, this is likely outrageous or at least mildly offensive. But it strikes me as the right position for most people. My son doesn't want to march in a parade in support of trans rights (or really any social or political movement) but he wants people to live and let live.

I think the GOP is coming across as kind of desperate and flop sweaty. Using hatred to motivate people seems like they've run out of arrows in their quiver. I doubt it motivates a ton of new voters and for the mildly engaged - like my son - it all just seems hateful.

One can hope. 

Finally! The Issues America Cares About!

 Arnold Palmer's Nine Iron.

Is The Worm Turning?

 There seems to finally be some recognition among the media that Trump's age should be an issue they look at. Of course, a quick scan of the Times and Post does not find the sort of breathless wall-to-wall coverage of Trump's manifest confusion and gibberish that we saw because of Biden's terrible debate performance. However, the Biden Debate Debacle came AFTER a few months of concern about his age. The increasing number of stories about his age and his constant cancelling of events should begin to create a "story about the story" dynamic. If "people are talking about it" then the press will have to talk about what people are talking about.

He looks cooked. He sounds cooked. Let's stick a fork in him. 

(Also, be wary of reading too much into early voting.)

Should Harris Be Scaring Us More?

 Marshall writes about Ron Brownstein's article channeling unease among Democratic operatives that Harris hasn't closed the deal. It's the age old question of Trumpistan: Why is this even close? Of course, we are making assumptions about whether it actually IS close, but whatever.

Paul Campos talks about how far too many people have a rosy view of Trump, because they have somehow memory-holed that Trump was president during the annus horriblus of 2020. Biden wasn't president until 2021, but since he was elected in 2020, people who don't really follow politics kind of think he was the president then.

I'm not really convinced by Campos' point, because Trump's "inject with bleach" nonsense is more resonant than actual calendars. However, he links to one of his "Ariana Grande voters" (people with very low political engagement) who is "undecided". I think those of us who follow politics a lot are baffled by these people but they basically don't pay attention to politics.

What I think is interesting about the person they interview is that she voted for Trump in 2020. This goes to my theory that there simply aren't going to be a lot of people who voted for Biden in 2020 and then will vote for Trump in 2024. Not after January 6th. However, there are likely to be a non-trivial number of either Trump>Harris voters or more likely Trump>Non-Voter.

Does Harris need to drive a fear-based message about Trump in order to make that happen? I think the campaign has settled instead on a "Trump is old, confused and weak" and that seems to be a stronger attack on Trump's strengths than attacking him for his botched Covid response or even January 6th.

Into The Lyin's Den

 Harris went on Fox and had a testy interview with Bret Baier, who is as close to an actual journalist as Faux can muster. Baier talked over her, but she pushed back. Those who were upset at Baier's aggressive and rude interviewing style are missing the point. Harris cannot go on Faux and change people's minds with policy answers. There is no magic sequence of words that will unlock Faux viewers' support for her candidacy. 

The point of this interview was to engage with a hostile interviewer who would talk over her and repeat bullshit. As McLuhan would say, the medium is the message. Skeptical centrists were being fed a bunch of bullshit about Harris not sitting for tough interviews, when she had been, in fact, sitting for 60 Minutes and a town hall. Going on Faux wax not about winning those benighted viewers, it was about countering the narrative that Harris is an intellectual or rhetorical lightweight. I think they likely achieved that.

Meanwhile, simultaneously, we have Trump at the same Univision town hall format giving absolute batshit answers. When asked by a Cuban American about January 6th, he called it a "day of love." I don't think that answer is going to fly with people who fled dictatorships in the first place. Certainly the expressions on the face of the audience was damning. I don't think Trump's less extreme positions on immigration hurt him with Latin voters, but some of the more extreme rhetoric will and his usual rambling non-answers are starting to add up.

There is talk of Harris going on Joe Rogan, and I think yesterday's Faux sparring match showed that this is 100% the right thing to do. Rogan is not a combative interviewer and reducing Trump's margins among Dude Bros is another part of what she seems to be doing in taking the fight to his turf.

Trump Has Another Disqualifying Event

 Trump spoke before the Economic Club of Chicago - a similar event to the one in Detroit. Presumably the campaign thinks that he needs to go before what they assume are friendly crowds of business executives.

It did not go well.

The moderator - Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait - did a great job of actually pressing Trump to answer his questions and reconcile his rambling nonsense with reality. At various points, it seems like the audience was laughing at his answers. When asked about anti-trust actions with Google, Trump talked about voting in Virginia until pressed to answer the actual question. He rambles off topic in ways that suggest very, very clearly that either A) he has zero idea what he's talking about or B) he's in the very real grip of dementia or likely both. 

In the clip, he once again falls back on "the weave" which someone told him is what smart people do and can explain away his rambling incoherence. I watched my father in law slowly sink into Alzheimer's, and he would repeat the same stories, because that's what he knew. The older the story, the better, because that was more familiar. Trying to carry on a free flowing conversation became harder and harder, because that new information became harder to assimilate. It was crushingly sad, to the point where I could almost feel sorry for Trump, if he wasn't such a smoldering dumpster fire of a human being.

There's an exchange where Micklethwait presses him on the absolute innumeracy of his tariff plans, and Trump asserts that he is, in fact, great at math. 

Trump has always spoken like a seventh grader who has a book report but didn't read the book. He was never a smart man and always a profoundly ignorant man about American civic life. The fact that his already marginal mental abilities are being eroded by senescence would seem to be a story that the press - who hounded Joe Biden from the race because his stutter has gotten worse - would be all over. They do seem to be giving it some coverage, but they also continue to sane-wash his insane utterings.

This man's brain is pudding and it's time the media reported it as such.

Again, Pay Attention To What The Campaigns Do...

...Not what they say. Here's what's transpired:

- Trump has backed out of a CNBC interview. This is a Tilt Republican news outlet, but they are passably objective and the campaign seems intent on keeping his cognitive decline and increasingly pudding-brained response on the QT. A diminished Trump going in front of a business audience and rambling on about Hannibal Lecter or the McKinley Tariff could be fatal.

- Trump has announced fundraising in the last weeks of the campaign. He should have his war chest by now. Harris has hundreds of millions on hand and doing the work in GOTV. Yes, Melon Musk is spending millions for Trump, but this feels more like CyberTruck than SpaceX.

- Harris is going on Faux News for an interview. Some of this is likely countering the narrative that she doesn't do hard interviews. This is mostly false, but no matter how many interviews she gives, none will come closer to piercing that attack than sitting for a Fox interview. She also could be seeing evidence of either of the following: more Republicans might be leaning her way and/or independents want to see her in a hostile interview setting.

- Harris is considering going on Joe Rogan. Rogan isn't Fox. He's not really a hostile interviewer, but his audience is Harris' Achilles Heel: Young Dude Bros. If she does go on Rogan, that feels to me that her Fox interview is less about shoring up the criticisms about tough interviews (she did 60 Minutes) than it is about her expanding her share of the electorate. The Harris campaign has made tangible efforts to reduce the margins of defeat in "red counties" and this feels like part of that effort.

- Harris has been talking about bipartisan advisors. Perhaps she's trying to blunt criticisms of her being a California Liberal, but this also feels like she's confident that she has her base locked up and committed and is trying to win over the independent Republican-leaning voters who are skeptical of another Trump presidency.

In sum, Harris looks to be trying to expand her demographic reach and Trump is hiding from interviews and sticking to fundraisers and friendly rallies/dance parties.

The Mental Gymnastics Of Voting For Trump

 Paul Campos relays this story from a friend:

My nephew is in his early 30s and lives in Hamtramck [Detroit suburb with large Arab-American population]. A white male with a college education. He is a one-issue voter. Gaza. He accuses Kamala of genocide in Gaza. I asked him how trump’s presidency would benefit the Palestinians more than Kamala’s. He said Gaza would fare no worse under trump. He supports Talib Rashid. He blames Kamala for America’s support of Israel. He accepts the mayor of Hamtramck’s support of trump. He claims the support is reasonable because trump’s first term proves trump is not a warmonger.

My nephew insists that January 6th wasn’t a big deal it was just theatre. He is cavalier in his assessment of the event lumping both parties together. In short, he is willfully ignorant of the dangers trump presents to our democracy.

I was able to pin him on the ACA. My niece has a preexisting condition, and he expressed concern the ACA might be eliminated. He thinks Trump talks one thing but will do another, so he isn’t worried about ACA repeal.

He lives in an ideological fantasy world where those in power are the same and equally bad. I’m concerned. I think he is somewhat representative of his demographic. They are young, white, educated males, wannabe rebels without a clue. They are willing to risk burning down the system on the chance that it will be remade better.

He is firmly against Kamala. He claims he won’t vote for trump. I have my doubts.

Sorry for the rambling diatribe. I couldn’t sleep.

This, to me, is the crux of our problem. "Because Trump was not successful in his attempt to overthrow American democracy, we don't have to worry about him trying again. He won't actually do the horrible things he says he wants to do, even if with something like Dobbs, he did precisely what he said he would. All politicians are the same and corrupt, so I'll support the guy who is openly corrupt, because we need a 'revolution'."

I don't know how many of these White Dudes exist, but they are the demographic I worry about most, because their closed information eco-system is just a broken as their grandparents' Fox News dependency. The 2016 "Harambe Voter" who can't conceive of how awful things can get, because they've been sheltered their whole lives from the actual deprivations in the world, but think they are oppressed because they saw a TikTok that told them so.

You can even see it in what passes for Normie Republicans. Watch Glenn Youngkin flail when confronted with Trump's words.

How Is This Close?

 Last night, Trump had one of his Klan Bakes in a 90 degree factory. Two people fainted, because they're old and Trump doesn't pay his bills so there was no venue with A/C.

He then stopped taking questions and played his favorite songs while swaying back and forth on stage. As one might say, it was deeply, deeply weird. While it is not the lead story in either the Post or Times, it is at least a headline. Trump won't release his medical records. He's the oldest candidate for president in history. 

Hopefully, the story of the next three weeks is his physical and cognitive decline.

Disinformation

 I had a (surprising) lunch conversation with a colleague who is at least Trump curious. He's from Texas with all the shit that comes with that. He's on the anti-woke bullshit, which...sure...I guess. Yes, some college kids are intolerant of free speech, and that's a problem.

We concluded with his assertion that the government censored anti-vax stuff on social media and that was "worse than anything that happened on January 6th." I think this guy might have a PhD. 

I asserted that censorship didn't happen, but, you know, I should check. The allegations and rough set of facts are that the Biden Administration pressured social media companies to take down especially misleading posts. Not all misleading posts, but some that were off the deep end. They did not require this to happen, but still, the White House has big time clout.

The question, fundamentally, is whether that pressure is a restriction on free speech. What's more, this is perhaps the question of the next decade.

First of all, as to the specifics of this case, it was dismissed for not having standing 6-3, so even the Republicans on the bench wanted no part of it. What's more, there is a clear restriction on speech for corporations, when it comes to making false claims. If Moderna says they have a pill that cures cancer - and it doesn't cure cancer - then they are criminally liable for fraud.

The tricky issue is the degree to which a social media company is liable for falsehoods at their sites, and the current answer is: not very. So, we've had the ridiculous claims online that Democrats are sending hurricanes to Red States. In a case like this, speech counters speech. However, in a public health emergency, does that calculus change? 

My interlocutor admitted that such restrictions are no longer in place, because the health emergency is over, but I don't think he was convinced that the occasional restriction on speech in emergencies was legitimate. This felt very much like the Elon Musk Villain Arch. "I'm super smart, so no one needs to be warned off misinformation." It's the same "logic" people apply to dystopian civilizational collapse. "I'll be fine, I'm super special." In fact, he had "learned" that the government was restricting what was on social media, when they had applied pressure but issued no injunctions or penalties. 

Ultimately, the danger of misinformation is that it feeds what we already want to hear. This fellow wanted to believe that the government and the "left" wanted to restrict free speech, like with the Campus Left. So he was primed to believe that "censorship" had occurred. It was actually something far more nuanced and complicated. 

Plus, far too much of the Right Wing "cancel culture panic" is really that people don't want to hear what they have to say. In most cases, speech counters speech, and I think many schools and universities fall short of that. However, getting dragged on Twitter is not censorship. Losing your job for having a post where you are saluting a swastika isn't persecution, your employer doesn't want to employ Nazi. 

Generally speaking, I'm in favor of speech countering speech, but we have to contend with the ability of AI to generate falsehoods at astonishing speed and volume. Our ability to be a self-governing polity is endangered by the tidal wave of bullshit that inundates us. 

Actions Not Polls

 There are a few "high quality" polls that show the race as roughly a Harris 2-3 points lead. Given the ability to Trump to exceed his polling and the Electoral College tilt towards the GOP, this has caused a "vibes shift" inducing panic among Democrats.

However, you can tell a lot about a campaign by what they do, rather than what they say. Their polls are more rigorous and more detailed and are used to define what they do. They poll messaging, they polls which demographics they need to reach. News media polls are narrative setters. They are trying to drive coverage.

Trump's campaigns have always been a bit weird. He doesn't campaign like previous candidates. He doesn't raise money, he doesn't sit for neutral interviews unless he wants to pick a fight. He does his rallies and lets the media's bias towards narrative do his work for him.

However, for 2024, he hired some "normal" campaign people to run his campaign. He then brought back accused wife beater Corey Lewandowski a few weeks back. Now, he's shaking up his communications team.

You don't shake up your comms team three weeks before the election because your communication strategy is working. Trump might have, but Susie Wiles wouldn't have. She did, because she must be getting feedback that their message is failing to get through.

There is also Trump's bizarre decision to have his rallies in Colorado, California and New York. He's not winning those states. Why is he there? Is it that he hopes there will be counter protestors and violence? There's some media involved, but the clips from his rallies are more and more insane and inane. He rambles more, he leans into outright Nazi language more and more. 

And the increasingly desperate tone of his attacks on American democracy and democratic norms suggests to me that he's also getting the word that he's losing. 

If there's truly some underlying data that this race is leaning significantly towards Harris, there's a weird confluence of interests for both the Trump and Harris campaigns to see the race as close. 

Let's say the "real" numbers suggest a pretty static 5-6 point Harris lead with solid leads in the Biden states plus North Carolina. Harris wants you to think it's close, because there seems to be a lingering fear that some Democratic demographics won't vote. I'm not 100% sure that's still the case - in fact, I think there might some evidence that lower propensity voters now tilt towards Trump. Still, they want to make sure all their voters go to the polls, so that there is no 2016 surprise. Meanwhile, Trump's people need the race to look close so that they can plausibly argue that A) they have a shot at winning, so vote and B) they can advance their false claims about a stolen election.

The message from Harris is "We are winning, but it's close so don't take anything for granted." That's the message of a campaign that feels pretty confident in their ground game and their status in the race. 

The message from Trump is his usual nonsensical blathering, but also a LOT of fear mongering over demonstrably false things like FEMA spending their money of gender reassignment surgery for MS-13 members. The fact that the campaign professionals are sidelining Steven Cheung - a former UFC figure - because the combative stuff clearly isn't working. Fear mongering on trans issues or pet-eating immigrants isn't getting them where they need to go.

There are two things to focus on in the crazy media environment before an election. Where are the candidates going and where are they spending money? Harris is going back to Atlanta and Arizona this week. Trump is too, plus Arizona. Trump does not seem to be putting much into Wisconsin, which is interesting.

There's also this: Trump went to Detroit for an economic summit and immediately denigrated Detroit. The Harris people had an ad up and running in Detroit before the day was out. His incessant negativity and disparaging of America IS HIS MESSAGE. If you want to extend your reach beyond your cultists, that's really tough.

Trump's message is a message for the 35% of voters who adore Donald Trump. The "hold your nose and vote for him" cadre are likely not going to like it but they will vote for him anyway. That gets you to 45% or thereabouts.

He's not persuading new voters. The fact that he's reshuffling his communications team is stronger evidence for that than any poll.

The Blog Motto

 In building on yesterday's post, I happened to look at the Mencken quote at the top of the blog. It's been up there for years, well before Trump. The most obvious example was the lying to get us into the Iraq war, but "Al Qaeda will kill you in your sleep" eventually morphed into Trump's deranged Aurora klan-bake the other day.

What makes Trump "special" goes back a little to Lee Atwater's famous dictum about how to leverage racism to win elections. Atwater described how you could no longer throw our the n-word with abandon, you had to talk about things like "busing" or "welfare queens". He's describing what became known as "dog whistle" rhetoric, that didn't quite tip over into repellent language, but was couched in less offensive terms.

Trump basically says out loud the sort of naked racism and hate that Republican politicians have been trying to soft pedal for decades. What makes Trumpistan so freaking awful is how devoted millions of Americans have become to obvious falsehoods.

Part of my vibe-based optimism is that this sort of reckless lying is not going to be very persuasive outside of Cult 45, and 45% might just be where he winds up, if I'm right. 

A Nesting Doll of Trolls

 One of the ways that Russia helped and helps Donald Trump is through troll-bots. That was true back in 2016, but it's always been true of Russian propaganda and information warfare. 

Recently, we've seen a wave of mis- and disinformation surrounding hurricane relief from Helene and Milton. Some of this is from Trumpists, but some is coming from overseas. The potential for AI to supercharge this is underrated as a threat to democracy. 

While there are plenty of reasons to criticize the American media, this one seems most profound. Because the Republican Party's motto is now "The rules were that there would be no fact checking" no mainstream media outlet can fact check Republicans and expect to still have them book guest slots on their shows. First off: good! Second: fact checking the most basic crap is literally your job. 

The First Amendment is a bedrock of American civil liberties, but I have to think that it's a stretch to argue that freedom of speech applies to computers. True, a human likely repeats it or posts it in the first place, but the ability to "flood the zone" with lies is Trump's ultimate degradation of democracy. The press is abetting him.

As Charlie Warzel argues, the purpose of the more obviously false "AI slop" is not to persuade but to confirm. The viral bullshit is not about "doing your own research" or "exposing the hidden truth" but to comfort people's already held views. If you think that the national government is tyrannical, then a shitty AI picture of a girl holding a puppy is an example of the failed FEMA response intended to kill Republicans rather than...a shitty AI picture of a girl holding a puppy. The fact that it's obviously false is irrelevant. If it confirms your pre-held beliefs, then the factual accuracy of it is besides the point.

Of all the questions that scholars will study about our time in Trumpistan, the biggest will be whether Trump is a symptom or a cause of our political dysfunction. Of course, they go hand in hand. As Warzel notes, Stephen Colbert came up with "truthiness" almost 20 years ago. 

It does feel, though, like the descent into unreality is linked both to the epistemic closure on the right and the educational polarization of the two parties that increasingly groups those without the sort of skepticism that a liberal arts education might hopefully build into one party.

Critics talk about the dumbing down of America, but I don't think America is any dumber than it's always been (or any country has always been). What has happened is that one party has become the home and engine of a sort of ignorance that has profound implications for whether we can persist as a self-governing democracy.

Vibe Shift

 For whatever reason - and I've felt it too - there's a sense that things have shifted against Harris. Some of that is just the flood of polling and the tendency to focus on the ones that scare you. Some of it, I think, is the nonstop flood of fundraising emails that scare you into giving money.

I think the final thing is that we haven't had anything like the debate, where you can clearly point to Trump's manifest decline. There hasn't been that story that shows Harris surging ahead.

This is weird, because Trump continues to say awful, awful things, he continues to stay both deeply stupid and plainly false things. We have the revelations from Bob Woodward's new book that Trump sent scarce Covid testing machines to Putin during the 2020 chaos and lockdowns. 

The basic dynamic is that Trump does and say so many things that you can't actually focus on one of them, but the Covid machines should be a line of attack that hits along multiple axes. There's the self-dealing, the closeness with Putin, the botched Covid response. 

A quick check of the Times 2024 page shows zero stories on this (the front page dominated by Milton, of course). The WaPo - which has a relationship with Woodward - does not have the story on their campaign page. 

This is journalistic malpractice.

We have so many breathless horserace stories and campaign strategy stories, but the fact that Trump gave scarce medical resources that hospitals were clamoring for in the middle of the 2020 lockdowns should be the lead in every newspaper. It's not even a story!

If we slip into fascism, it will be because of a fundamentally broken new media unable to give the American people the most important information about their political future.

Not A Hoax

 The Russian hoax was not a hoax. The witch hunt keeps finding witches.

If any other politician blah blah blah lather rinse repeat.

Conmen

 Donald Trump's "campaign" for president involves some really odd stuff. He spends almost as much time hawking merch to his cultists as he does making an affirmative case to be president. To the degree he makes an affirmative case it roughly goes like this: "Biden is terrible of Issue X, I will make it better. The best. The end."

Instead, he's doing things like selling his bibles and golden sneakers. Some of this is his irresistible need to monetize everything. Some of it, I think, comes from the grifters that surround him and that sure seems to be the case with his new embrace of crypto. These guys are so sketchy, even other crypto bros are skeptical of them. Imagine being too sketchy for guys who make fake money for drug dealers.

It is so incredibly tiresome to live in a world with the constant drip-drip-drip of "If any other candidate had said or done this, their career would be over." My wife had me listen to an interview of a Black guy who hated all politicians but thought Trump was "gangsta" and if he voted, he would vote for Trump. He acknowledges that he's a crook, but thinks all politicians are. Someone coined this the Politics of Anti-Politics. Trump is the central figure in this Anti-Politics.

The problem with Anti-Politics is that it leads to terrible and terribly corrupt government. Everyone saying "all politicians are corrupt" is refusing to deal with reality, true, but they really have no idea how corrupt things can be. Among the many fears of a Trump restoration would be the absolute destruction of government into a rent seeking cesspool of every day graft.

Grim Anniversary

 A year ago today some of the worst people in the world perpetrated horrors that empower some of the other worst people in the world visit brutality on civilians caught in the middle. This led other terrible people to join in and now they have dragged Lebanon into the maelstrom. 

Among the many tragedies of this new round of violence is that there would seem to be a clear path to peace: Israeli and Palestinian states living independently from one another. Sadly, as clear as that solution is, the worst set of decisions makers - from Hamas to Netanyahu/Likud to Hezbollah to Iran - want to make sure it doesn't happen.

It's similar in some ways to the Republicans who have killed the immigration bill or won't return to appropriate FEMA money in the middle of a disaster, because the politics might work to their benefit.

UPDATE: This post by Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is poignant and accurate.

Do Lies Matter?

 There's a reflex among Americans to dismiss all politicians as liars. I think that was wrong, although Trump has upped the ante.

There are basically three "lies" that politicians tell.

The first is overpromising. If you think Harris is going to restore Roe, but she doesn't have the votes in the Congress and can't do that...is that a lie? I don't think it is, though we would prefer to think a politician lied to us that acknowledge that we don't really understand how Congress works.

The second is spin. This is the more traditional form of "lying". When craft an argument or a campaign pitch, candidates will pick only the most flattering aspects of their biography or platform. It's lying by omission or by accented certain things more than they should be. It's the sort of half-lying that Bill Clinton in particular was famous for.

The third is the current default of the Republican Party: just brazen, provable falsehoods. The current mendacity over the Helene disaster response is just appalling and could get people killed. National Republicans are spreading lies whereas the Republican governors of those states are saying that FEMA and the national government are incredibly engaged.

This is, of course, a direct manifestation of Donald Trump's hold on the GOP. As I've argued here before, Trump is less a liar than a bullshitter. He doesn't violate the truth, he simply doesn't care what it is. As he gets more addle-minded and panicky, he simply pushes more ridiculous lies and the institutional GOP has collapsed in their ability to check those lies. 

JD Vance is the poster boy for this collapse, as he arose as a Trump critic and now helps spread his most blatant lies. The rot, however, goes all the way down. If Trump loses next month, who can bring that party back to a nodding acquaintance with reality?

The Past Is A Different Country

 I had a brief interaction in Twitter (I did not engage) about the relative luxury of being - I'm not joking - a medieval peasant. There's this weird subset of mostly bros who think that being a peasant was awesome, because there were so many feast days and you didn't "have to work" during the winter.

This is, of course, bullshit of the highest order. A peasant could not own his own land, could not pass down wealth to his children, could not control his own destiny. A peasant had no civil or legal rights, was at the mercy of the local warlord, had strikingly high child mortality rates. In return for being able to farm a patch of land, a peasant gave up much of his crop and could be conscripted into the militia. Food was bland and scarce, entertainment was non existent and life spans could be quite short.

Still, there are those who don't see the past accurately. You could watch a show like The Witcher but you can't smell the open sewers. You can't feel the utter hopelessness as your child dies of a common infection.

This occurs to me as a parallel to Trump's current monomaniacal obsession with William McKinley. Like the walking Dunning-Kruger effect that he is, Trump has heard about the McKinley Tariff and extrapolated from that this bullshit idea that America was never richer than in the 1890s. Now, Americans were relatively richer than other people in the world in the 1890s, but that's pretty much true today, too. Leaving aside the treatment of women, Blacks and Natives, even for White people this was an era of child labor, agrarian unrest and monopoly.

What's more then McKinley Tariff helped touch off one of the worst depressions in American history. These were depressions without unemployment insurance, food assistance or any welfare beyond private charity and family help. Urban poverty and crime were endemic. 

What that Bro on Twitter and Trump are doing is proceeding from a perspective - the modern world sucks because I personally am unhappy right now - and then cherry pick a few misleading events or ideas. It is the exact opposite of the actual study of history (when done right). Sure, there is a reliance on the sort of "Great Man" school of history that ignores the actual lives of the overwhelming majority of people, but it's also just raging confirmation bias. 

With Trump, of course, it extends beyond the 1890s. He makes ragingly false statements about anything and everything. When was president everything was perfect and now everything is American Carnage. My worry is that the historical illiteracy of the average American can actual extend to the recent past. Trump gets high approval ratings on the economy, when really he did jack shit besides inheriting the Obama Recovery and cutting taxes. The Biden economic record is actually much stronger, but people rarely remember the past well. 

Jack Smith

 The recent court filing by Jack Smith regarding Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election have laid out in detail what we know about that effort and how it might inform the 2024 election. The key takeaway - aside from Trump being, you know, guilty AF - is that Trump's plan was always to deny the election result and declare victory anyway.

The evidence - supplied by Republicans close to Trump - shows that Trump knew he had lost but was going to find a way to fight it out anyway. This is exactly who he is. Trump does not give the slightest damn about democratic norms. He actively hates them.

The combination of Vance refusing to say who won the 2020 election, Liz Cheney joining Harris for campaign events and now the Smith filing lays out pretty clearly what Trump did in 2020. He knew he lost, he incited the mob, he didn't care if Mike Pence got killed...it's really bad!

The question as to whether that's the entirety of his plan for 2024 is unknown. I'm bullish on Harris, but if Trumpist election officials manage to gum up the works as they tried to do in 2020, they could aim for more civil unrest. 

Part of me, however, is hoping/confidant that with Democrats in charge of the governorships in PA, MI, WI, AZ and NC (and Kemp in GA being a "Cheney Republican") that violence and criminality will be kept to a real minimum. Plus, Biden has control of the Federal government. I'm going to assume that every third person in a Proud Boys chat room is an FBI agent.

Hopium

 I follow Simon Rosenberg, which is why I'm maybe more optimistic about the election than most. He recently made some good points that I want to fold into some other points.

Among the oddities of this election is the fact that it is October 3rd and we are done with debates. The reason we are done with them is that Trump is increasingly unhinged and incoherent. Further evidence of this is Trump backing out of the 60 Minutes interview that is traditionally done every October. He simply can't be trusted to weather skeptical questioning. Hell, he sits down with NewsMax and says something crazy. The lasting soundbites of these debates are Trump's bizarre "eating the cat eating the dogs" bit and Vance refusing to say who won the 2020 election. That's now locked in.

Losing campaigns typically want more debates, unless they are genuinely worried because their candidate has pudding for brains.

As Rosenberg notes, if we look at quality polling - excluding Republican pollsters like Trafalgar and Rasmussen for very good reasons - we see the following dynamic. Harris is up nationally by about 3-5 points. The Cook Report has her up 3 in Michigan, up 2 in Wisconsin and Arizona, up 1 in Pennsylvania and Nevada, tied in North Carolina and down 2 in Georgia. That's 287 electoral votes.

What Rosenberg doesn't mention but Josh Marshall and others have been tracking is that the GOP apparently has no ground game. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has no money. There's a strong argument that if this contest really is as close as the polls have it, then Get Out The Vote campaigns are critical, because those are your margins of victory. The Republican Party has lost its historic advantage with high propensity voters, as educational polarization turns college graduates Blue. 

Trump has historically turned out these low propensity voters - which is why the GOP can't move on from him. However, ANY erosion in support among his voting blocs will be fatal to his campaign, and they simply aren't allocating resources to mobilize those voters. Democrats have ALL the usual advantages of organization, money and high propensity voters. The GOP has the hope that Trump can mobilize those hidden voters he did in 2016.

One other thing that Harris is doing is reaching out to disaffected Republicans. She's campaigning with Liz Cheney, right after Jack Smith dropped a court filing that (should) reinvigorate the question over Trump's conduct in 2020 and even Vance's refusal to state who won that election. If the next week is about Trump's efforts to overthrow the election, how does he change the subject?

Furthermore, the dynamic of the VP debate was sort of turned on its head. VP debates are usually bomb throwing affairs, as the VP is supposed to be the attack dog of the two candidates. Trump is his own rabid mutt, so Walz and Vance gave a glimpse of what politics might look like once Trump goes away. The fact that BOTH men were more popular after the debate suggests a real hunger to move on from Trump's nastiness and 24 hour drama.

As always, I'm not convinced there are a meaningful number of people who voted for Biden in 2020 who are going to vote for Trump in 2024. I do believe that there is a groundswell of support for Harris among new registrants. I think he's losing voters and she's gaining them. We are living in the aftershock of January 6th and Dobbs, and whatever the polls say, it seems unlikely that there are a ton of Biden-Trump voters. Maybe misogyny really is that strong though. 

The big, unreported story is Trump's psychological and cognitive collapse as evidenced by his recent appearances. He's low energy and barely coherent. People really ARE leaving his rallies early. People really fired up for Harris. Maybe it's 2020 where we have to wait for PA to count their absentee ballots. Or maybe we go to bed Tuesday night with Harris pulling Florida out of her hat. But we are winning. I feel it in my bones.

Vance Helped Himself Not Trump

 JD Vance had some of the worst favorable ratings of any modern politician, and his debate performance has helped erase some of that negativity - at least in the short run. Interestingly, one poll found that BOTH Vance and Walz improved their favorability - but Walz was already popular to start with, and Vance is still unpopular.

Debates are kinda dumb, although we have seen arguably two of the most consequential debates in American history with Biden's poor performance causing him to drop out and Harris's effective psychological destruction of Trump. VP debates are typically even less consequential, but Vance and Walz aren't exactly well known.

However, one of the political impacts of a debate is how the post-debate narrative gets shaped. In June, the response from undecided voters was actually more mixed than the press led you to believe. They found Biden old and Trump angry, and they didn't like either of them. However, the relentless coverage of Biden's age shaped the following few weeks and caused him to drop out.

Vance is a very polished media presenter and trained as a lawyer. This is a good format for him. However, he is also a man who was willing to abandon his earlier principles to reshape himself in the image of Donald Trump. He is also - like Trump - a willing and eager liar. In this light, I think two moments stand out.

The first was when Vance complained about being fact checked. This is consistent with Trump's whining about the first debate and it amplifies the idea that they can only operate in this environment when they are allowed to lie. That's an angle of attack that could work well for Democrats.

The second - and this is already being cut into an ad - was when Vance couldn't admit that Trump lost in 2020, and then Walz pinned him down on that issue. The disrespect for American democracy really ought to be the most important disqualifying aspects of Trumpism among all the many parts of Trumpism that are awful. For whatever reason this is not something that came up really in the first two presidential debates.

My guess is that this debate - like most "normal" debates - will fade away in a few days. If anything, Trump's recent statements and actions should become the focus of the media. He's pulled out of the 60 Minutes interview, probably because his brain is pudding and he wilts when challenged. Was this his choice or the people around him? Also yesterday, he denigrated the injuries that American service members suffered during a rocket attack by Iran during his presidency, saying they just had "headaches" when referring to the brain injuries caused by shelling. 

As always with Trump, he says things that should end any other candidacy. I worry at the moment about the press's inability to cover his steep and obvious mental decline - the man can't speak in sentences much less paragraphs. He's now taken to using slurs and insults about his opponents, calling Harris an idiot and so on. That sounds like a guy who's losing and lashing out. That crack about wounded veterans, though, that should be the lead story (it won't be). A quick check of the Times and the Post don't show the story anywhere.

Still, people know who Donald Trump is, I guess. It might not hurt to hammer his negatives though. Walz wasn't great at that. The campaign needs to step up.

Hezbollah and Lebanon

 As Josh Marshall lays out here, the Israeli attack into Lebanon is simply qualitatively different than the invasion of Gaza. One thing he doesn't mention as a complication is that Hezbollah isn't really popular among many Lebanese and Syrians, as they have been part of the brutal Syrian civil war. Nasrallah's death was cheered amongst Syrian refugees.

The broader point is this:

Again, this is a hopelessly complicated issue which I’ve tried to lay out here in overview terms. The relevant point is that this is categorically different from the situation in Gaza. In Gaza, Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation. Lebanese citizens and Hezbollah do not. Hezbollah opened a new front against Israel starting on October 8th, 2023, in support of the October 7th massacres. Everybody who is expressing worry about this escalating into a broader regional war and the inevitable rising death toll of these actions is right to be worried. But it’s Hezbollah’s decision to open that northern front that gets us here.

Of course, the longer the generalized war goes on, the longer Netanyahu can cling to power. A potential crushing victory against Hezbollah would not only weaken Iran's Axis of Resistance but improve his odds of surviving the next election.