Last week I wrote about the ways in which Donald Trump’s Republican allies were struggling to defend the former president after he suggested that the military should be deployed to go after his political rivals. As a party built largely on its support for the troops, the mischaracterization of the military’s role would typically be considered blasphemous on its face.
Continue reading “Former Trump Critics Offer Befuddling, Dodgy Defense Of Use Of Military Against Rivals”Ex-Health Dept Lawyer Says DeSantis’ Office Directed Him To Send Letters Threatening TV Stations
A former Florida Department of Health attorney said in a sworn affidavit that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) office’s top deputies drafted the letters threatening TV stations with criminal prosecution for airing ads that advocated for the passage of an abortion rights ballot measure, and directed him to send them to the stations.
Continue reading “Ex-Health Dept Lawyer Says DeSantis’ Office Directed Him To Send Letters Threatening TV Stations”Josh’s Ongoing Dissertation on Ground Game Studies
We’ve spoken a number of times about the Republican ground game, or Get Out The Vote efforts. Just to review again, the Trump campaign made the decision to take GOTV operations away from the RNC and outsource it to a series of pro-Trump super PACs. The question now is: did the gamble pay off? Have the super PACs been able to field a solid ground operation or perhaps create one even better than the one the RNC would have created?
Continue reading “Josh’s Ongoing Dissertation on Ground Game Studies”State And National Republicans Appeal Ruling Striking Down Several Georgia Election Rules
Georgia Republicans along with the Republican National Committee are appealing a recent decision by a Fulton County judge, which struck down several election rules approved by the MAGA-controlled state election board that have the potential to delay election certification in the state.
Continue reading “State And National Republicans Appeal Ruling Striking Down Several Georgia Election Rules “Are Right-Wing Pollsters Flooding the Zone?
I get this question a lot: are right-wing pollsters flooding the zone? So I thought I would answer it generally in a single post.
Are they? Yes, they definitely are. But there are some important caveats and qualifiers to know to make sense of the whole story.
Just to review the basics: There are a series of Republican or right-wing pollsters who are overtly partisan, use questionable or floating methodologies and pretty clearly release polls not as a predictive enterprise but to produce friendly numbers for Republican candidates. The worst offenders are places like Rasmussen, Trafalgar, InsiderAdvantage. We know this from a mix of a lack of transparency about methodology, general behavior that betrays a goal of shaping election perceptions and outcomes rather than measuring public opinion, and extreme “house effects” — the tendency to favor a particular party’s candidates over the other’s relative to what most pollsters are finding — that support their agenda. After those, there’s a larger penumbra of often less-known pollsters who don’t appear to be as flagrant, but generally seem to be in the same category.
Continue reading “Are Right-Wing Pollsters Flooding the Zone?”The Trump Value Meal: Extra Buffoonery With A Side Of Fascism
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
How To Explain Trump To Future Generations
Because we don’t have enough to worry about at the moment, I sometimes fret that future generations may only see the madcap buffoonery of Donald Trump and his MAGA sidekicks and wonder what all the fuss was about.
That guy was an existential threat to American democracy? That guy actually won once and narrowly lost a second time? That guy was nominated for president three times by the Republican Party and was neck-and-neck to win his third bid for the White House?
With the election in its final stretch run, the past 72 hours have been a grand tour of Trump buffoonery. Remarkably, the examples that jump out most to me don’t include any that might be directly ascribed to his aging, diminished cognitive function, or his reported “exhaustion.” These are the kinds of things in style and tone you could have heard from Trump 2016 or Trump 2020 (though it’s true that his disinhibition seems generally worse now):
- Trump comparing the Jan. 6 rioters to the Japanese-Americans interred during World War II;
- Trump calling Kamala Harris a “shit vice president”;
- Trump lamenting that serial sex abuser Harvey Weinstein got “schlonged”;
- Trump extolling the size of the late golfing great Arnold Palmer’s manhood.
Here’s your visual rundown of Trump’s latest rampage of buffoonery:
holy shit snl 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/4IPYG47vGx
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) October 20, 2024
What has only become obvious over the past decade (to those of us who haven’t professionally studied fascism in Europe in the 1930s) is that the buffoonery and the fascism go hand in hand. They are inseparable. The buffoonery doesn’t make the fascism less dangerous, and the fascism doesn’t make the buffoonery less ridiculous. Both are spectacles in their own way, delighting willing audiences with their bombast, transgressiveness, and appeal to base emotions.
It’s only when we try to analyze the buffoonery and the fascism separately that we make the mistake of treating them as different impulses in apparent conflict, rather than similar dynamics acting in unison. Trump’s adoring audiences – so often derided as unsophisticated marks – have no trouble seeing the buffoonery and the fascism as part of the same set piece. They don’t see a tension there.
The Tenor Of Our Times
- WaPo: Trump repeats ‘enemy from within’ comment, targeting Pelosi and Schiff
- HuffPost: Christina Bobb, a top election lawyer for the RNC, said last week that she’s hoping for a “cleansing in our nation” and that “we can clean out the filth.”
- NYT: Trump Ratchets Up Threats on the Media
We Are Not Taking Mass Deportations Seriously Enough
Timothy Snyder: “The deep purpose of a mass deportation is to establish a new sort of politics, a politics of us-and-them, which means (at first) everyone else against the Latinos. In this new regime, the government just stokes the fears and encourages the denunciations, and we expect little more of it.”
UPDATE: Election Threats
- Politico: ‘The center of the storm’: Arizona’s election chief prepares for a disinformation battle
- WSJ: ‘It Feels Very Dystopian.’ Republican County Officials Brace for Election Deniers—Again
- Politico: The Very Real Scenario Where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway
Just Go Ahead And Give Dominion Your Money Now
Mediaite: “Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) claimed Friday during an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that Dominion Voting Systems software was ‘switching’ votes in her district from Republican candidates to Democratic Party candidates.”
MUST READ
TPM’s Hunter Walker: The Biggest Mystery Of January 6 Remains Unsolved
All Musk, All The Time
With America on the brink of some newfangled high-tech oligarchic fascism, the deep involvement of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in the campaign to elect Donald Trump stands out as a warning sign of the country’s deep structural corruption independent of MAGAism:
- NYT: U.S. Agencies Fund, and Fight With, Elon Musk. A Trump Presidency Could Give Him Power Over Them.
WSJ: Elon Musk Offers $1 Million Daily Prize for Signing His Petition - Brian Beutler: The Rotten World Elon Musk Is Trying To Force On Us
- Chris Geidner: Even the Fifth Circuit is questioning Judge Reed O’Connor — and Elon Musk
- Open Secrets: Pro-Trump dark money network tied to Elon Musk behind fake pro-Harris campaign scheme
- TPM’s Josh Marshall: Elon Musk’s Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign
- Chris Hayes: “It is the grossest, most cynical ploy in an election cycle that’s rotten with cynical ploys”:
Still Remarkable
Democrats will never be bipartisan enough to satisfy the demands of DC political journalists, but I’m not sure what more they can do after this this election cycle. Kamala Harris’ embrace of former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) isn’t a one-off thing. Check out Harris’ plans for today (emphasis mine):
Democrat Kamala Harris … touches down in three Midwestern battleground states on Monday to hold moderated conversations with Republican Liz Cheney. … Their conversations will be moderated by a conservative radio host and a GOP strategist.
By The Numbers
- A new WaPo-Schar School poll of likely voters in the battleground states shows:
- PA: Harris 49%, Trump 47%
- GA: Harris 51%, Trump 47%
- MI: Harris 49%, Trump 47%
- WI: Harris 50%, Trump 47%
- NV: Harris 48%, Trump 48%
- AZ: Trump 49%, Harris 46%
- NC: Trump 50%, Harris 47%
- Harris sets record for biggest fund-raising quarter ever, enabling her to outspend Trump 3.5-1 in September.
2024 Ephemera
- MT-Sen: Montana ranger questions Senate hopeful Sheehy’s bullet wound
- NE-Sen: A Tattooed Union Leader Is Threatening to Topple a Republican Senator in a Deep-Red State
- NYT: Jill Stein Won’t Stop. No Matter Who Asks.
Bipartisan Report Details Secret Service Failures
The July assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, was “preventable and should not have happened,” according to a preliminary report by a House bipartisan task force.
Good Read
WaPo: The CIA analyst who triggered Trump’s first impeachment asks: Was it worth it?
Trump Prosecution Watch
- Jan. 6 case: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the appendices to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s mammoth brief on presidential immunity, but they were heavily redacted and offered only a smidge of new information.
- NYT: For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment
- Mitch McConnell, speaking of Trump and Jan. 6 (but saying this only in private and then endorsing Trump’s re-election bid): “If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is.”
What’s Causing The Recent Spike in Global Temperatures?
Elizabeth Kolbert talks with NASA’s top climate scientist about the insanely steep rise in global temperatures in 2023 and science’s struggle to explain it.
Truth
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The Biggest Mystery Of January 6 Remains Unsolved
It is the biggest remaining mystery of the January 6 attack.
On the night before that dark day in early 2021, when over a thousand supporters of former President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol after he urged them to march on the building, a hooded and masked figure went on their own lone patrol outside the halls of Congress.
Continue reading “The Biggest Mystery Of January 6 Remains Unsolved”Opponents Of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging And Misinformation
This article was originally published at ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
The billboards have popped up along both Interstates 55 and 170 around St. Louis. They’re along I-70 between Columbia and St. Charles, in central Missouri. And there’s one across from a shopping center in Cape Girardeau, along the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.
In fact, as the Nov. 5 election approaches, motorists can see the billboards all over Missouri.
Continue reading “Opponents Of Missouri Abortion Rights Amendment Turn to Anti-Trans Messaging And Misinformation”Elon Musk’s Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign
There’s deeply cynical and then there’s things which might be illegal. In the first category we have an Elon Musk-funded PAC microtargeting Jewish and Arab communities with diametrically opposed ads about Kamala Harris’s support for Israel or Palestine. Amazingly cynical. But then you have what I’m going to describe next, which comes from another Musk-funded dark money operation. They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site. (A lot of potential legal and regulatory questions turns on word like “fake” and “impersonating,” which we’ll return to in a moment.)
Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Fake Sites and Fake Texts Impersonating the Harris Campaign”Burdened By What Has Been, Dems Enter Election Home Stretch With Typical Anxiety
Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
Despite the dependability of election years’ October neurosis for Democrats, this year’s bout has prompted a flurry of stories on the phenomenon (heck, we did a whole podcast episode about it).
Continue reading “Burdened By What Has Been, Dems Enter Election Home Stretch With Typical Anxiety”