Or very very stupid
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Not mutually exclusive by any means. One of the best cures for all the various -ist prejudices is education and exposure. Not perfectly effective, but pretty damned good. After all,
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November 1, 2024 (Friday)
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 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.
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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I was watching Morning Joe yesterday, and he was talking about this story, and it was interesting to see Joe Scarborough, of all people, getting frustrated with his own control room who seemed bound and determined to frame the story the former way while Scarborough was framing it the latter. First, he asked them to put up a screenshot of the Daily Beast’s story on it, which made it clear Trump was suggesting an execution, but the control room instead put up a screenshot of the NBC article which framed it as suggesting she would be less of a Hawk if she had to go to war herself. Scarborough told them no, not that one, and made them put up the DB one. Then, very quickly, they took it off screen and showed Scarborough. And he then said, “No, put that back up!” Whoever was in the control room was desperately trying to sanewash what Trump has said, and it was nice to see Scarborough not having it. I think Mika Brzezinski has been a good influence on him.
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“No, no, I meant we’re going to hang her on Yggdrasil with nine… um. Shit."
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The AP story was repeated today in the print edition of the Toronto Star under the headline “Trump Calls Liz Cheney a War Hawk”. 
How about: “Trump Threatens Liz Cheney with a Firing Squad”
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That’s another example of sanewashing by mainstream media, and it’s a big part of the reason why so many people still think of Trump as just a normal Republican.
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I used the word “sane-washing” in my note back to the editor.
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I know i shouldn’t be surprised by anything when it comes to these retrogrades but i am kinda shocked that this is still a thing.
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November 2, 2024 (Saturday)
Yesterday, in Time magazine, Eric Cortellessa explained that the electoral strategy of the Trump campaign was to get men who don’t usually vote, particularly young ones, to turn out for Trump. If they could do that, and at the same time hold steady the support of white women, Trump could win the election. So Trump has focused on podcasts followed by young men and on imitating the patterns of professional wrestling performances.
At the same time, he has promised to “protect women…whether the women like it or not,” and lied consistently about crime statistics to keep white suburban women on his side by suggesting that he alone can protect them. Today in Gastonia, North Carolina, for example, Trump told the audience: “They say the suburban women. Well, the suburbs are under attack right now. When you’re home in your house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison and he’s got, you know, six charges of murdering six different people, I think you’d rather have Trump.”
The crime rate has dropped dramatically in the past year.
Rather than keeping women in his camp, Trump’s strategy of reaching out to his base to turn out low-propensity voters, especially young men, has alienated them. That alienation has come on top of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that recognized the constitutional right to abortion.
Early voting in Pennsylvania showed that women sent in 56% of the early ballots, compared to 43% for men. Seniors—people who remember a time before Roe v. Wade—also showed a significant split. Although the parties had similar numbers of registrants, nearly 59% of those over 65 voting early were Democrats. That pattern holds across all the battleground states: women’s early voting outpaces men’s by about 10 points. While those numbers are certainly not definitive—no one knows how these people voted, and much could change over the next few days—the enthusiasm of those two groups was notable.
This evening, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll conducted by the highly respected Selzer & Co. polling firm from October 28 to 31 showed Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump in Iowa 47% to 44% among likely voters. That outlying polling result is undoubtedly at least in part a reflection of the fact that Harris’s running mate is the governor of a neighboring state, but that’s not the whole story. While Trump wins the votes of men in Iowa by 52% to 38%, and of evangelicals by 73% to 20%, women, particularly older women, are driving the shift to favor Harris in a previously Republican-dominated state.
Independent women back Harris by a 28-point margin, while senior women support her by a margin of more than 2 to 1, 63% to 28%. Overall, women back Harris by a margin of about 20 points: 56% to 36%. Seniors as a group including men as well as women are also strongly in Harris’s camp, by 55% to 36%.
A 79-year-old poll respondent said: “I like her policies on reproductive health and having women choosing their own health care, and the fact that I think that she will save our democracy and follow the rule of law…. [I]f the Republicans can decide what you do with your body, what else are they going to do to limit your choice, for women?”
The obvious driver for women and seniors to oppose Trump is the Dobbs decision. The loss of abortion care has put women’s lives at risk. Within days after the Supreme Court handed the decision down, we started hearing stories of raped children forced to give birth or cross state lines for abortions, as well as of women who have suffered or died from a lack of health care after doctors feared intervening in miscarriages would put them in legal jeopardy.
As X user E. Rosalie noted, Iowa’s abortion ban also has long-term implications for the state. It has forced OBGYNs to leave and has made recruiting more impossible. As people are unable to get medical care to have babies, they will choose to live elsewhere, draining talent out of the state. That, in turn, will weaken Iowa’s economy.
That same process is playing out in all the states that have banned abortion.
It seems possible that the Dobbs decision ushered in the end of the toxic American individualism on which the Reagan revolution was built. When he ran for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan set out to dismantle the active government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. Such a government was akin to socialism, he claimed, and he insisted it stifled American individualism.
In contrast to such a government, Reagan celebrated the mythological American cowboy. In his telling, that cowboy wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to provide for and to protect his family. Good women in the cowboy myth were wives and mothers, in contrast to the women who wanted equal rights and jobs outside the home in modern America. That traditional image of American women had gotten legs in 1974, when the television show Little House on the Prairie debuted; it would run until 1983. Prairie dresses became the rage.
Reagan’s embrace of women’s role as wives and mothers brought traditionalist white Southern Baptists to his support. Those traditionalists objected to the government’s recognition of women’s equal rights because they believed equality undermined a godly patriarchal family structure. They made ending access to abortion their main issue.
At the same time that the right wing insisted that women belonged in their homes, it socialized young men to believe in a mythological world based on guns and the domination of women. In 1980 the previously nonpartisan National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan, their first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate, and the rise of evangelical culture reinforced that dominant men must protect submissive women.
When federal marshals tried to arrest Randy Weaver at his home in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in August 1992 for failure to show up in court for trial on a firearms charge, right-wing activists and neo-Nazis from a nearby Aryan Nations compound rushed to Ruby Ridge to protest what right-wing media insisted was simply a man protecting his family.
The next February, when officers stormed the compound of a religious cult in Waco, Texas, whose former members reported that their leader was sexually assaulting children and stockpiling weapons, right-wing talk show hosts—notably Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones—blamed new president Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, for the ensuing gun battle and fire that killed 76 people. Reno was the first female attorney general, and right-wing media made much of the idea that a group of Christians had been killed by a female government official who was unmarried and—as opponents made much of—unfeminine.
When he ran for office in 2015, Trump appealed to those men socialized into violence and dominance. He embraced the performance of dominance as it is done in professional wrestling, and urged his supporters to beat up protesters at his rallies. The Access Hollywood tape in which he boasted of sexual assault did not hurt his popularity with his base. He promised to end abortion rights and suggested he would impose criminal punishments on women seeking abortions.
And then, in June 2022, thanks to the votes of the three religious extremists Trump put on it, the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision, stripping women of a constitutional right that the U.S. government had recognized for almost 50 years.
Justice Samuel Alito suggested that women could change state laws if they saw fit, writing in the decision that “women are not without electoral or political power.” Indeed, since the Dobbs decision, every time abortion rights have been on the ballot, voters have approved them, although right-wing state legislators have worked to prevent the voters’ wishes from taking effect.
In this moment, though, it is clear that women have electoral and political power over more than abortion rights.
The 1980 election was the first one in which the proportion of eligible female voters who turned out to vote was higher than the proportion of eligible men. It was also the first one in which there was a partisan gender gap, with a higher proportion of women than men favoring the Democrats. That partisan gap now is the highest it has ever been.
The fear that women can, if they choose, overthrow the patriarchal mythology of cowboy individualism that shaped the modern MAGA Republican Party is likely behind the calls of certain right-wing influencers and evangelical leaders to stop women from voting. For sure, it is behind the right-wing freak-out over the video voiced by actor Julia Roberts that reassures women that they do not have to tell their husbands how they voted.
The right-wing version of the American cowboy was always a myth. Nothing mattered more for success in the American West than the kinship networks and community support that provided money, labor, and access to trade outlets. When the economic patterns of the American West replicated those of the industrializing East after the Civil War, success during the heyday of the cowboy depended on access to lots of capital, giving rise to western barons and then to popular political movements to regulate businesses and give more power to the people. Far from being the homebound wives of myth, women were central to western life, just as they have always been to American society.
In Flagstaff, Arizona, today, Democratic presidential candidate and Minnesota governor Tim Walz told a crowd: “I kind of have a feeling that women all across this country, from every walk of life, from either party, are going to send a loud and clear message to Donald Trump next Tuesday, November 5, whether he likes it or not.”
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November 3, 2024 (Sunday)
I’m home tonight to stay for a bit, after being on the road for thirteen months and traveling through 32 states. I am beyond tired but profoundly grateful for the chance to meet so many wonderful people and for the welcome you have given me to your towns and your homes.
I know people are on edge, and there is maybe one last thing I can offer before this election. Every place I stopped, worried people asked me how I have maintained a sense of hope through the past fraught years. The answer—inevitably for me, I suppose—is in our history.
If you had been alive in 1853, you would have thought the elite enslavers had become America’s rulers. They were only a small minority of the U.S. population, but by controlling the Democratic Party, they had managed to take control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court. They used that power to stop the northerners who wanted the government to clear the rivers and harbors of snags, for example, or to fund public colleges for ordinary people, from getting any such legislation through Congress. But at least they could not use the government to spread their system of human enslavement across the country, because the much larger population in the North held control of the House of Representatives.
Then in 1854, with the help of Democratic president Franklin Pierce, elite enslavers pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through the House. That law overturned the Missouri Compromise that had kept Black enslavement out of the American West since 1820. Because the Constitution guarantees the protection of property—and enslaved Americans were considered property—the expansion of slavery into those territories would mean the new states there would become slave states. Their representatives would work together with those of the southern slave states to outvote the northern free labor advocates in Congress. Together, they would make enslavement national.
America would become a slaveholding nation.
Enslavers were quite clear that this was their goal.
South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explicitly rejected “as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’” He explained to his Senate colleagues that the world was made up of two classes of people. The “Mudsills” were dull drudges whose work produced the food and products that made society function. On them rested the superior class of people, who took the capital the mudsills produced and used it to move the economy, and even civilization itself, forward. The world could not survive without the inferior mudsills, but the superior class had the right—and even the duty—to rule over them.
But that’s not how it played out.
As soon as it became clear that Congress would pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Representative Israel Washburn of Maine called a meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington, D.C., to figure out how they could fight back against the Slave Power that had commandeered the government to spread the South’s system of human enslavement. The men met in the rooms of Representative Edward Dickinson of Massachusetts—whose talented daughter Emily was already writing poems—and while they came to the meeting from all different political parties, often bitterly divided over specific policies, they left with one sole purpose: to stop the overthrow of American democracy.
The men scattered back to their homes across the North for the summer, sharing their conviction that a new party must rise to stand against the Slave Power. They found “anti-Nebraska” sentiment sweeping their towns; a young lawyer from Illinois later recalled how ordinary people came together: “[W]e rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” In the next set of midterm elections, those calling themselves “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept into both national and state office across the North, and by 1856, opponents of the Slave Power had become a new political party: the Republicans.
But the game wasn’t over. In 1857, the Supreme Court tried to take away Republicans’ power to stop the spread of slavery to the West by declaring in the infamous Dred Scott decision that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. This made the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the land above Missouri unconstitutional. The next day, Republican editor of the New York Tribune Horace Greeley wrote that the decision was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.”
By 1858 the party had a new rising star, the young lawyer from Illinois who had talked about everyone reaching for tools to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act: Abraham Lincoln. Pro-slavery Democrats called the Republicans radicals for their determination to stop the expansion of slavery, but Lincoln countered that the Republicans were the country’s true conservatives, for they were the ones standing firm on the Declaration of Independence. The enslavers rejecting the Founders’ principles were the radicals.
The next year, Lincoln articulated an ideology for the party, defining it as the party of ordinary Americans defending the democratic idea that all men are created equal against those determined to overthrow democracy with their own oligarchy.
In 1860, at a time when voting was almost entirely limited to white men, voters put Abraham Lincoln into the White House. Furious, southern leaders took their states out of the Union and launched the Civil War.
By January 1863, Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation ending the American system of human enslavement in lands still controlled by the Confederacy. By November 1863 he had delivered the Gettysburg Address, firmly rooting the United States of America in the Declaration of Independence.
In that speech, Lincoln charged Americans to rededicate themselves to the unfinished work for which so many had given their lives. He urged them to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom. But Lincoln did not do any of this alone: always, he depended on the votes of ordinary people determined to have a say in the government under which they lived.
In the 1860s the work of those people established freedom and democracy as the bedrock of the United States of America, but the structure itself remained unfinished. In the 1890s and then again in the 1930s, Americans had to fight to preserve democracy against those who would destroy it for their own greed and power. Each time, thanks to ordinary Americans, democracy won.
Now it is our turn.
In our era the same struggle has resurfaced. A small group of leaders has rejected the idea that all people are created equal and seeks to destroy our democracy in order to install themselves into permanent power.
And just as our forebears did, Americans have reached for whatever tools we have at hand to build new coalitions across the nation to push back. After decades in which ordinary people had come to believe they had little political power, they have mobilized to defend American democracy and—with an electorate that now includes women and Black Americans and Brown Americans—have discovered they are strong.
On November 5 we will find out just how strong we are. We will each choose on which side of the historical ledger to record our names. On the one hand, we can stand with those throughout our history who maintained that some people were better than others and had the right to rule; on the other, we can list our names on the side of those from our past who defended democracy and, by doing so, guarantee that American democracy reaches into the future.
I have had hope in these dark days because I look around at the extraordinary movement that has built in this country over the past several years, and it looks to me like the revolution of the 1850s that gave America a new birth of freedom.
As always, the outcome is in our hands.
“Fellow-citizens,” Lincoln reminded his colleagues, “we cannot escape history. We…will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
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November 4, 2024 (Monday)
Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that foreign adversaries, especially Russia, are working “to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.” The intelligence community urged Americans to “seek out information from trusted, official sources, in particular, state and local election officials.”
That warning is an important backdrop for the next several days.
We are in the final hours of an unusual campaign season. Appearing to recognize that women were alienated from the Republican Party after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Trump did not try to appeal to anyone but his base. His campaign courted white, male, low-propensity voters while hoping they could hold the white suburban women who in the past have voted Republican. If they could turn out that base to cause enough trouble at polling places, they could open a way to challenge election results.
To that end, as soon as Trump took control of the Republican National Committee early this year by putting his daughter-in-law Lara Trump and loyalist Michael Whatley in charge, they killed the get-out-the-vote efforts begun by previous chair Ronna McDaniel and put money instead into legal bills, both to pay Trump’s lawyers and to fund a legal team that could fight to keep people from voting and that could challenge election results.
Trump has doubled down on his appeal to his base voters, his speeches getting darker (along with his makeup, oddly) and more violent in the past weeks as his rallies are getting smaller. On Sunday, November 3, he told supporters that he should not have left the White House in 2021, appearing to think that holding the building would have enabled him to hold the title of president, as if it were a king’s castle rather than a symbol of a democratic office from which he had been ousted. He said he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, and called Democrats “demonic.”
But early voting numbers suggest that strategy has, so far, not worked. Without an official ground game, Trump turned to outside vendors, including Elon Musk, to get out the vote. Paid canvassers are not as reliable as volunteers, and Musk didn’t do it well anyway: his operation is being sued in California for violating labor codes, while his effort to collect voter information by running a “lottery” is also currently in court.
So far, men do not appear to be turning out in the high numbers Trump hoped for. On Rumble tonight, Donald Trump Jr. complained that “women are still showing up more than men.” He berated men for not “get[ting] off their butts” and voting. “If I can do what I’ve been doing for the last few months just getting crapped on by everyone all over the country…you can wait in line.” His eyes mostly closed, Don Jr. also suggested that celebrities are endorsing Harris because they are “on an Epstein list or a Diddy party list or both”—referring to men who were indicted for sexual abuse or assault—and that Harris is blackmailing them.
In fact, newly released tape recordings reveal financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein saying that he was Trump’s “closest friend.”
At the same time, the tactics the Trump campaign used to build his base have alienated the women who had stayed with him after Dobbs, and it’s clear that Trump knows it: at a rally today, he had a backdrop of women holding pink “Women for Trump” signs.
But Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance apparently didn’t get the memo: today he called Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris “trash,” prompting MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace to say: “In my humble view, light’s out. Women. You can disagree with us. We’ve actually learned to take it for our whole careers all the time in every form. But you call us trash? Oh, oh, oh, J.D. Vance. You just effed up in a way that I’ve never seen in my political life, and I worked with Sarah Palin.”
Today, news broke that Trump’s regional field director for western Pennsylvania, Luke Meyer, is a white nationalist who, under the name Alberto Barbarossa, co-hosts a podcast with Richard Spencer, who organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. When Amanda Moore of Politico outed Meyer, he responded: “Like the hydra, you can cut off my head and hold it up for the world to see, but two more will quietly appear and be working in the shadows.” Meyer has called Trump a “con artist” but told Moore he supports Trump because Trump creates chaos that will cause a crisis that will make Americans turn against non-whites, enabling white nationalists to rebuild the country as they wish.
With his dark and unpopular message, Trump’s campaign has been unable to find people to act as surrogates, meaning that Trump and Vance are carrying their message to the voters largely alone. Trump financial backer Elon Musk and supporter Robert Kennedy Jr. are also speaking for the campaign, but they are not doing it any favors.
Musk expects to lead a government efficiency commission that he has said will cut $2 trillion out of the federal budget, throwing the country into an economic crisis of about two years. He says it will emerge in a stronger position than it is now, but that seems of little comfort to those who will be hurt.
Kennedy, a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist who claims to have suffered from a worm in his brain, says Trump has promised to put him in control of the public health agencies: Health and Human Services and its sub-agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH,) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
As he campaigned today in Raleigh, North Carolina, in Reading and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump continued his usual lies about voter fraud and immigration, and promised that voting for him would “fix every single problem our country faces and lead America, and indeed the whole world, to new heights of glory.” Above all, he attacked his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. He boasted that the election was his to lose, but significantly, he felt obliged to campaign today in North Carolina, a state he won in 2016 and 2020.
Also contradicting his pronouncement was an account of his campaign by Tim Alberta published Saturday in The Atlantic. It showed a chaotic campaign run by advisors frustrated with Trump’s instability and bitterly divided. The information campaign co-chairs Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles shared with Alberta reads like a preemptive attempt to blame others for an election loss. Alberta recorded that campaign officials told him they were done. “The past three months had been the most unpleasant of their careers. Win or lose, they said, they were done with the chaos of Donald Trump—even if the nation was not.”
In contrast, the closing argument of Vice President Kamala Harris, her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and their many, many surrogates has been upbeat. After appearing on Saturday Night Live, Harris spent Sunday in Detroit, Pontiac, and East Lansing, Michigan, before heading today to Scranton, Pittsburgh, and Reading, Pennsylvania. Unlike Trump’s, her rallies appear to be getting even bigger, and she has not mentioned her opponent in the closing days of the campaign, instead urging Americans to look to the future.
Harris held her final rally tonight in Philadelphia on Benjamin Franklin Parkway, near the Philadelphia Art Museum, where the statue of the famous fictional boxer Rocky Balboa, an underdog who became a champion, stands. Artists Lady Gaga, Oprah, The Roots, Jazmine Sullivan, Freeway and Just Blaze, DJ Cassidy, Fat Joe, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Ricky Martin, and Adam Blackstone all performed for the crowd, many of whom stood in line for hours to get in.
“We are all in this together…. Are we ready to vote? Are we ready to win?” Harris asked the crowd. “One more day in the most consequential election of our lifetime, and the momentum is on our side. Our campaign has tapped into the ambitions and the aspirations and the dreams of the American people. We are optimistic and we are excited about what we can do together. And we know it is time for a new generation of leadership in America. And I am ready to offer that leadership as the next president of the United States of America.”
She reminded the audience that this could be one of the closest races in American history and that her supporters needed to “finish strong.” The Harris-Walz campaign has focused on voter turnout, with an exceptional ground game of volunteers knocking on doors, phone banking, and texting. “Every single vote matters,” she said, encouraging people in the crowd to vote and to spread the word to neighbors, friends, and family. “Your vote is your voice, and your voice is your power,” she said.
“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that. We are exhausted with it. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.
“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom, including the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said. And she pledged always to put “country over party and self and to be a president for all Americans.”
“Tonight…we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to face our future and that we can confront any challenges we face when we do it together.”
“We still have work to do,” she said. “We like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake: We will win.”
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I went and found the clip
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November 6, 2024 (Wednesday)
Yesterday, November 5, 2024, Americans reelected former president Donald Trump, a Republican, to the presidency over Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris. As of Wednesday night, Trump is projected to get at least 295 electoral votes to Harris’s 226, with two Republican-leaning states still not called. The popular vote count is still underway.
Republicans also retook control of the Senate, where Democrats were defending far more seats than Republicans. Control of the House is not yet clear.
These results were a surprise to everyone. Trump is a 78-year-old convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual assault and is currently under indictment in a number of jurisdictions. He refused to leave office peacefully when voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020, instead launching an unprecedented attack on the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, and said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office.
Pollsters thought the race would be very close but showed increasing momentum for Harris, and Harris’s team expressed confidence during the day. By posting on social media—with no evidence—that the voting in Pennsylvania was rigged, Trump himself suggested he expected he would lose the popular vote, at least, as he did in 2016 and 2020.
But in 2024, it appears a majority of American voters chose to put Trump back into office.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, offered a message of unity, the expansion of the economic policies that have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and the creation of an “opportunity economy” that echoed many of the policies Republicans used to embrace. Trump vowed to take revenge on his enemies and to return the country to the neoliberal policies President Joe Biden had rejected in favor of investing in the middle class.
When he took office, Biden acknowledged that democracy was in danger around the globe, as authoritarians like Russian president Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi Jinping maintained that democracy was obsolete and must be replaced by autocracies. Russia set out to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that enforced the rules-based international order that stood against Russian expansion.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who overturned democracy in his own country, explained that the historical liberal democracy of the United States weakens a nation because the equality it champions means treating immigrants, LGBTQ+ individuals, and women as equal to men, thus ending traditionally patriarchal society.
In place of democracy, Orbán champions “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.
In order to strengthen democracy at home and abroad, Biden worked to show that it delivered for ordinary Americans. He and the Democrats passed groundbreaking legislation to invest in rebuilding roads and bridges and build new factories to usher in green energy. They defended unions and used the Federal Trade Commission to break up monopolies and return more economic power to consumers.
Their system worked. It created record low unemployment rates, lifted wages for the bottom 80% of Americans, and built the strongest economy in the world in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, setting multiple stock market records. But that success turned out not to be enough to protect democracy.
In contrast, Trump promised he would return to the ideology of the era before 2021, when leaders believed in relying on markets to order the economy with the idea that wealthy individuals would invest more efficiently than if the government regulated business or skewed markets with targeted investment (in green energy, for example). Trump vowed to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations and to make up lost revenue through tariffs, which he incorrectly insists are paid by foreign countries; tariffs are paid by U.S. consumers.
For policies, Trump’s campaign embraced the Project 2025 agenda led by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which has close ties to Orbán. That plan calls for getting rid of the nonpartisan civil service the U.S. has had since 1883 and for making both the Department of Justice and the military partisan instruments of a strong president, much as Orbán did in Hungary. It also calls for instituting religious rule, including an end to abortion rights, across the U.S. Part of the idea of “purifying” the country is the deportation of undocumented immigrants: Trump promised to deport 20 million people at an estimated cost of $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
That is what voters chose.
Pundits today have spent time dissecting the election results, many trying to find the one tweak that would have changed the outcome, and suggesting sweeping solutions to the Democrats’ obvious inability to attract voters. There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
Many voters who were using their vote to make an economic statement are likely going to be surprised to discover what they have actually voted for. In his victory speech, Trump said the American people had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes posted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” and gloated that men will now legally control women’s bodies. His post got at least 22,000 “likes.” Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, previously funded by Russia, posted: “It is my honor to inform you that Project 2025 was real the whole time.”
Today, Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump would launch the “largest mass deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants, and the stock in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic jumped 41% and 29%, respectively. Those jumps were part of a bigger overall jump: the Dow Jones Industrial Average moved up 1,508 points in what Washington Post economic columnist Heather Long said was the largest post-election jump in more than 100 years.
As for the lower prices Trump voters wanted, Kate Gibson of CBS today noted that on Monday, the National Retail Federation said that Trump’s proposed tariffs will cost American consumers between $46 billion and $78 billion a year as clothing, toys, furniture, appliances, and footwear all become more expensive. A $50 pair of running shoes, Gibson said, would retail for $59 to $64 under the new tariffs.
U.S. retailers are already preparing to raise prices of items from foreign suppliers, passing to consumers the cost of any future tariffs.
Trump’s election will also mean he will no longer have to answer to the law for his federal indictments: special counsel Jack Smith is winding them down ahead of Trump’s inauguration. So he will not be tried for retaining classified documents or attempting to overthrow the U.S. government when he lost in 2020.
This evening, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán posted on social media that he had just spoken with Trump, and said: “We have big plans for the future!”
This afternoon, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at her alma mater, Howard University, to concede the election to Trump.
She thanked her supporters, her family, the Bidens, the Walz family, and her campaign staff and volunteers. She reiterated that she believes Americans have far more in common than separating us.
In what appeared to be a message to Trump, she noted: “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle as much as any other distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny, and anyone who seeks the public trust must honor it. At the same time in our nation, we owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the Constitution of the United States, and loyalty to our conscience and to our God.
“My allegiance to all three is why I am here to say, while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fuels this campaign, the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness and the dignity of all people, a fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up.”
Harris urged people “to organize, to mobilize and to stay engaged for the sake of freedom and justice and the future that we all know we can build together.” She told those feeling as if the world is dark indeed these days, to “fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service,” and to let “that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks, toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America.”
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This is why I don’t believe that there was some massive fraud or rigging of the vote in Trump’s favor. In the last days before the election, his campaign and supporters were all but panicking about the number of women voting in advance, etc. They did not behave like they thought they had this all in the bag, and I don’t believe the Trump campaign would have been able to fake it the whole time.
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November 7, 2024 (Thursday)
Today the Trump family posed for a post-election photo. Missing from the group was former first lady Melania Trump. Joining the family was billionaire Elon Musk, who supported Trump’s campaign both through his ownership of X, formerly Twitter, and then with $132 million in cash and with apparent giveaways to get voters to give the campaign personal information.
As an immigrant from South Africa, Musk is barred from the presidency himself by the U.S. Constitution, which requires that a president be born in the U.S. (out of the Framers’ concern that a foreign country could put a puppet in the presidency). But he is now very close to Trump and stands to gain significantly from a Trump presidency, both through deregulation and government contracts, and through Trump’s planned tariffs on Chinese imports that will enable Musk to monopolize the electric vehicle market in the U.S. Musk also would like a victory in the culture wars; he is strongly opposed to transgender rights.
After the election results came out, Musk posted on X, “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” Latin for “New World Order.”
At Trump’s election party, Trump said: “We have a new star: Elon. He is an amazing guy. We were sitting together tonight—you know he spent two weeks in Philadelphia and different parts of Pennsylvania campaigning? He’s a character, he’s a special guy. He’s a super-genius, and we have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them. We have to protect our super-geniuses.”
Trump’s new closeness with Musk presents an issue for the Republican Party. The president-elect is 78 and has shown signs of mental and physical deterioration, making it possible that someone will need to take his place at some point in the next four years.
The vice president–elect, current Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is backed by billionaire Peter Thiel, is constitutionally the next in line for the presidency, but neither Musk nor Vance has Trump’s popular support, making it unclear who will take over the leadership of the party if such a takeover is necessary. Whether either can command Trump’s supporters is also unclear.
What is clear is that neither of them has much experience in elected office. Vance was elected senator just two years ago, and Musk comes from the business world.
There is another, major problem for the party, as well: Trump won the election in part by promising everything to everyone, but the actual policies of the MAGA party are unpopular, even with many Republican voters.
Notably, Trump has said he will appoint Musk to head a new government efficiency commission, and Musk has vowed to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. Such cuts would decimate government services, including food programs and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Supplemental nutrition programs disproportionately benefit rural areas, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are used much more heavily in counties that support Trump than those that don’t.
That will be a hard circle to square.
So will Trump’s promise to lower consumer costs while also putting tariffs of 10% to 20% on all foreign imports and of 60% on imports from China. Tariffs are borne by consumers, so by definition they will drive prices up. These two promises cannot be reconciled.
Trump has promised mass deportations, and much of his base is fervently behind them. The Republican National Committee even had signs saying “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” made up for attendees to wave at the party’s convention.
Priscilla Alvarez and Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump’s allies have been preparing for mass detentions and deportations of undocumented immigrants, and the stock prices of private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic have soared since Trump’s election. Steven T. Dennis of Bloomberg reported that on an earnings call today, GEO chief executive officer Brian Evans told investors that filling currently empty beds could bring in $400 million a year and that the company can scale up its current surveillance, monitoring, and transportation programs to handle millions of immigrants. “This is to us an unprecedented opportunity,” he said.
But deporting up to 20 million people will be a logistical nightmare and is projected to cost from $88 billion to $315 billion a year. At the same time, much of the U.S. economy depends on undocumented immigrants, and Republican businessmen will certainly object to losing their workers.
Tom Homan, who served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump in his first term, backed away from some of the extremes of Trump’s immigration policy when he told CBS last month: “It’s not gonna be—a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous…. They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ‘em based on numerous, you know, investigative processes.”
Meanwhile, Democratic state lawmakers have been preparing for a potential Trump administration for more than a year, and some are putting down public markers that they will not cooperate with the extreme policies of the Trump administration.
Trump vowed to begin his mass deportation plan in Aurora, Colorado, where he maintained—contrary to the statements of local Republican officials—that Venezuelan gangs had taken over the city. Aurora is a suburb of Denver, and yesterday the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, told a reporter he would not cooperate with requests that are “immoral or unethical or unfair.”
California governor Gavin Newsom called an emergency session of the California state legislature to convene on December 2, “to help bolster our legal resources and protect our state against any unlawful actions by the incoming Trump Administration.” It will focus on funding lawsuits against any actions that impact civil liberties, reproductive rights, protection for immigrants, and climate initiatives. Newsom said the California lawmakers “will seek to work with the incoming president—but let there be no mistake, we intend to stand with states across our nation to defend our Constitution and uphold the rule of law.”
California has the fifth largest economy in the world, and its population of 39 million people is more than four times the 9.59 million people in Hungary, the country from which MAGA Republicans are taking much of their ideological vision.
Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, who has been called a “happy warrior,” held a press conference today, telling reporters that he will continue working to keep Illinois “a place of stability and competent governance” and vowing to protect the people of his state no matter what the new administration does. “To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom and opportunity and dignity of Illinoisans: I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior,” he said. “You come for my people, you come through me.”
Trump has made it clear he intends to have a say in the decisions of the Federal Reserve, which manages interest rates, and during his first term he frequently attacked Fed chair Jerome Powell, whom he appointed, for not lowering rates to boost the economy. Trump’s advisors have suggested the president can gain power over the nation’s finances by removing members of the Fed in his next term.
Today, when reporters asked Powell if he would resign before Trump takes office, he said no. When asked if Trump could fire or demote him or the other Fed governors, Powell was firm: “Not permitted under the law.”
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Well that’s certainly specific and completely reassuring. /s
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88 billion, eh?
I’m sure IBM will be happy to help out with the logistics
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Deporting involves having somewhere else for people to go, too. As was pointed out above, I’m sure they have plenty of other ideas:
Lack of healthcare tends to be the cause most reported in the news in my state, but the public will never know the real numbers because TPTB running prisons avoid any reports that make them look bad.
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- I’m absolutely sure that
- they’re preparing their mates to soak as much of that infinite budget as possible into their profits, and
- they’re going to spend as little as possible on the process. I suspect that they can halve the cost or more by not bothering to check whether someone they’ve rounded up actually has the right to be in the country, much less citizenship. The Homeland Security goons will not ask if you y tus padres voted for Trump or not when they’re putting you in the van at 3am.
- If they don’t care whether you’re allowed to be there, then why should they care one micron more where you’re “supposed” to be? Expect Mexico to have to set up massive camps on the border to soak up millions of displaced persons and refugees. Then expect Trump to use the existence of the camps that his actions caused as a reason to militarise the border. Once there’s a fully militarised and trigger-happy border with Mexico, further escalation is practically guaranteed.
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