Trump’s Obsession With Violence Becomes More Explicit

INSIDE: Mike DeWine ... Kamala Harris ... Kris Kristofferson
ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA - SEPTEMBER 29: Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Bayfront Convention Center on September 29, 2024 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Trump contin... ERIE, PENNSYLVANIA - SEPTEMBER 29: Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Bayfront Convention Center on September 29, 2024 in Erie, Pennsylvania. Trump continues to campaign in battleground swing states ahead of the November 5 election. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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‘One Really Violent Day’

With five weeks until the election, and early voting underway, Donald Trump has returned to the themes that most animate him: ones grounded in race and racial violence.

In a campaign appearance Friday in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, where the outcome of the 2024 election may very well be decided, Trump launched into a disjointed attack on crime, long a Republican code word for Black. But the dream sequence he narrated about unlawfully using violence preemptively as a deterrent to more crime was clear as a bell:

Crime and immigration as racist code words are not new in general or specifically to Trump. He has fallen back on them over and over, as other rhetorical devices come and go. As has been observed repeatedly over the past decade, Trump seems to have a visceral personal reaction to the prospect of violence, especially as a means of cleansing or rejuvenating, a baptismal violence fantasy that he indulges when the going gets tough.

The violence of Trump’s fantasies take many forms – police brutality, vigilantism, pro-wrestling theatrics – but in every form they serve as a projection of strength for a fundamentally weak, craven, and damaged man.

Trump Cranks Up Attacks On Immigrants

In related news, Trump’s racist anti-immigrant rhetoric has deepened and darkened as the race has tightened and Election Day approaches. While xenophobia has always been part and parcel of Trumpism, the combination of finding little traction elsewhere and Kamala Harris’ own biracial status has left blatant racist appeals as Trump’s last campaign grasp:

  • WSJ: Trump Amps Up Rhetoric to Keep Immigration at Center of Election
  • NYT: Trump’s Answer to Harris’s Border Trip Is To Call Her ‘Mentally Disabled’
  • CNN: To attack Harris, Trump falsely describes new stats on immigrants and homicide
  • WaPo: Trump lambastes immigrants using false homicide claims

Springfield Still Reeling From Attack On Haitian Immigrants

  • Politico: Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine confronts Trump’s lies.
  • NYT: An Ohio Businessman Faces Death Threats for Praising His Haitian Workers

Rule Of Law Watch

  • WSJ: Trump Plans Massive Shake-Up of Justice Department
  • Politico Magazine: Exactly How Trump Could Prosecute His Political Enemies

The Battle To Control The Senate

  • WSJ: Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund plans to spend $67.5 million on TV, radio and digital ads to flip Democratic Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin
  • Politico: Ted Cruz rebrands for a tight race in Texas

2024 Ephemera

Feds Bring Charges In Iran Hack Of Trump Campaign

Three Iranian nationals were indicted in federal court in Washington, D.C., for their alleged roles in the hack-and-leak attack against the Trump campaign.

Still Fighting Impeachment I At Ukraine’s Expense

An astonishing moment, really:

Can’t Ignore

Outside of Morning Memo’s usual jurisdiction, but the weekend developments in Lebanon are too momentous not to mention:

Southern Appalachia Faces A Long Recovery From Helene

ASHEVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA – SEPTEMBER 28: Men inspect the damage from flooding in the Biltmore Village in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene on September 28, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina. Hurricane Helene made landfall Thursday night in Florida’s Big Bend with winds up to 140 mph. (Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)

The death toll from Hurricane Helene rose past 100, more than a third of those deaths in and around Asheville in crippled western North Carolina, where historic rainfall caused catastrophic damage to human infrastructure.

Kris Kristofferson, 1936-2024

Kris Kristofferson being interviewed. He performed in the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, 08/02/1993. (Part of the Independent Newspapers Ireland/NLI Collection). (Photo by Independent News and Media/Getty Images)

Kris Kristofferson’s many remarkable incarnations – from youthful accomplishments like Rhodes Scholar and Army helicopter pilot to his creative output as a songwriter and musician to his substantial career as an actor – made him the embodiment of certain eras of American pop culture, especially the 1970s.

I have an offbeat amalgam of mental snapshots of him: flying helicopters offshore for the oil and gas industry from my hometown while he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee,” which Janis Joplin would make famous posthumously; the trucker in the Sam Peckinpah movie based on the novelty song “Convoy” that defined the big rig craze of the 1970s; a member of the supergroup The Highwaymen in the 1980s along with Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings; his fabled confrontation with Toby Keith backstage at Nelson’s 70th birthday party in 2009, that Ethan Hawke famously described and that Kristofferson himself said he had no memory of.

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Notable Replies

  1. frist?

    This is Rayne Beau (rainbow), who recently walked from Yellowstone to California.

    image

  2. Yes you are! I’m second.

    After churning across the southern US and causing massive destruction and dozens of deaths in North Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere, Hurricane Helene appears set to collide with the presidential campaign. **Donald Trump**will speak this afternoon in Valdosta, Georgia about the storm, undoubtedly with an eye on turning the swing state’s voters away from Kamala Harris. The former president has already made the hurricane’s destruction into an attack line on the Democrats, reportedlyaccusing Joe Biden of “sleeping” as the storm raged. Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania yesterday he also accused Harris of turning a blind eye to the destruction.

    Biden plans to speak from the White House at 10.30am ET about his administration’s response to the storm, while Harris has announced the cancellation of campaign events in Las Vegas today so she can return to Washington DC and be briefed on the storm’s impact at Fema headquarters. She’ll arrive just after 5pm.

  3. CBS decided not to fact check the guy that admitted on camera that he literally just makes shit up?!?!?

    Somewhere Walter Cronkite’s grave is making a turbine sort of sound.

  4. It really is as if Voldemort was running, and half the people voting scratched their chins and said, “Maybe if we got on his good side, we could benefit from his destructive magic…”

  5. Avatar for dont dont says:

    “The violence of Trump’s fantasies take many forms – police brutality, vigilantism, pro-wrestling theatrics – but in every form they serve as a projection of strength for a fundamentally weak, craven, and damaged man.“

    Ya think?

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