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.