Late into election night 2020, Donald Trump emerged with a message.
He was ahead in Pennsylvania, he said, declaring that it was “not close,” and that “with 64 percent of the vote in, it’s going to be almost impossible to catch.” There was one solution, Trump assured the country, and everyone, he said, agreed on it: “We all want voting to stop.”
“We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list,” he proclaimed.
Contra the then-President’s wishes, Pennsylvania duly completed the rest of its vote count. Biden emerged as the winner by more than 80,000 votes.
But that multi-day period of delay in confirming the final result gave Trump a critical opportunity to lob his farcical claims of voter fraud at the public, seizing on a “red mirage” in which early results trended more Republican when compared to later-arriving Democratic results.
Next month, the country’s largest and most important swing state will likely repeat that delay. Pennsylvania Republicans have for the past four years blocked an easy fix that could allow the state to complete the count in as fast as a day, holding it hostage with a demand for strict voter ID requirements.
The fix comes down to pre-canvassing, the obscure but necessary process that allows election workers to verify the outside envelope of mail-in and absentee ballots before an election. In Pennsylvania, unlike many other states, officials are not allowed to begin that process until 7 a.m. on Election Day. In a state which, since 2019, has had expansive mail-in voting it’s a recipe for long delays and a prolonged lack of clarity around the result. And while that manifests in anxiety for most of the country, for Trump, it’s an opportunity: he can use the time, as he did in 2020, to claim any loss is illegitimate.
Delays, Conspiracy Theories and a Legislative Stalemate
Experts, politicians and local voting officials agree on the solution to this: Other states give poll workers more time — weeks, in some cases — to pre-canvass the surge of mail-in ballots. A simple legislative fix could see Pennsylvania provide a result hours, not days, after polls close. Florida and other GOP-leaning states have adopted similar solutions.
But instead, state Republicans have held legislation to make the fix hostage with a demand of their own: requiring voter ID for elections. It’s a significant stalemate amid a year-long volley of lawsuits asking courts to shape the playing field of the 2024 election, with the Republican National Committee joining in a lawsuit that seeks to deprive voters of the ability to fix errors in the information placed on the outside envelope of a mail-in ballot.
That GOP stonewalling has left Pennsylvania’s canvassing procedures unchanged, with the same 2020 delay likely to repeat itself in November.
Donald Trump speaks on election night in the East Room of the White House. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Yet the state legislature has succeeded in making another post-2020 fix: banning “Zuckerbucks,” a component of a 2020 Stop the Steal conspiracy theory which laid Trump’s defeat at the feet of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Per the conspiracy theory, which is byzantine — but relatively more grounded than fellow-traveling 2020 fantasies like ItalyGate — Zuckerberg rigged the election by contributing to a nonprofit, which then provided grants to help county election offices cope with administering the 2020 election. Per the new law, passed in 2022, it’s a crime for any non-governmental entity to fund Pennsylvania election operations.
“There are a lot of people who just focus on the conspiratorial allegations about how elections are run without knowing anything about how things actually happen,” Bob Harvie, a Democratic commissioner for Bucks County, Pennsylvania, told TPM. “I would not put it past some people who are elected officials in Harrisburg to just want this system to fail, or to at least look like it’s failing, or at least allow them to point at it and say it’s failing.”
After the 2020 election, Pennsylvania legislators did what many law-making bodies do to address a problem: They created a bipartisan commission to review questions around the election, and make recommendations. In a 2022 report, the commission recommended that the state speed up its vote-counting by passing a law that would give county offices two weeks to conduct a pre-canvass.
In 2020, the delay caused by the lack of a pre-canvass helped set the stage for Trump to muddy the waters around the election result. After unofficial results took days to come in in several counties in Pennsylvania, Trump used the delay to say that Democrats were taking the time to tamper with the results. It was an obvious lie, but it provided early fodder for Trump’s attempt to stay in power and to overturn his 2020 defeat.
“We could be getting ballots ready today to be scanned and input and counted on Election Day, but because the law doesn’t allow us to do anything, everything waits until Election Day,” Lisa Deeley, a city commissioner for Philadelphia who helps oversee voting, told TPM. “It’s unfortunate that the voters are caught in the middle because what it’s doing is it’s having a really negative impact on people’s perception and feelings about the integrity of elections — because the longer they have to wait, it just brings worry and wonder into people’s minds.”
Still, the 2024 count will likely take less time than 2020. The COVID pandemic contributed to around half of Pennsylvania’s voters avoiding in-person voting that year; election officials estimate only a third will avail themselves of voting by mail in 2024. Poll workers can, this election, use an electronic poll book to check voters, and the length of determining any winner will depend on how close the result is.
Both parties have proposed bills that would allow pre-canvassing to begin earlier. Republicans have met Democratic bills with no votes, calling for voter ID; former Gov. Tom Wolf (D) in 2021 vetoed a GOP voter ID bill that included a five-day pre-canvassing period.
“You can get votes to do that from the right, but only if you mandate voter IDs,” Harvie, the Bucks County commissioner, told TPM.
And so, with weeks to go before Election Day, the most significant legislative change to elections in Pennsylvania is one rooted in years of conspiracy-mongering from the GOP: Pennsylvania election offices can no longer accept outside money.
Election workers count ballots on November 04, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
It’s an odd shift, and one that came almost entirely in response to the Zuckerbucks theory. Since 2020, Trump and other Republicans have said that a $400 million contribution that Zuckerberg made to keep election offices running during the COVID pandemic was, in fact, a stalking horse for its true purpose: a Democratic get-out-the vote operation, run by Zuckerberg-funded election officials themselves.
GOP legislators pushed a law to criminalize outside funding of election operations in the state; Democrats signed on to the bill with a proviso that state government provide counties with optional election grants.
“Nobody should want a private, partisan arms race to underwrite government-led get-out-the-vote drives in heavily Democratic or Republican towns. Mr. Zuckerberg says he doesn’t intend to reprise his Covid largesse, but lawmakers are reasonably acting to ban it because other billionaires are likely to try,” thundered the Wall Street Journal after the law’s passage. “The bad news begins with the fact that Pennsylvania still won’t let officials preprocess mail votes before Election Day.”
Just Throw Out The (Mostly) Democratic Votes
Meanwhile, another set of related fights has played out in the courts. Republicans have had mixed results in their other attempts to make voting — particularly voting by mail, which skews Democratic in Pennsylvania — more difficult.
For years, voting groups — often joined or opposed by the national Democratic and Republican committees, respectively — have wrestled with Pennsylvania’s election administrators over the exterior envelope of absentee ballots. Voters must date the envelope, despite the fact that the date is useless; administrators don’t use it for anything, including determining whether the ballot was sent on time.
This spring, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ballots missing the date, or having an incorrect one, must not be counted. The panel reversed a district court, which had found that the requirement violated the Materiality Provision, a section of the Civil Rights Act meant to protect voters from having their ballots being tossed out for small, technical reasons. The full Third Circuit declined to hear the case en banc.
(Photo by GEORGE FREY, KENA BETANCUR, JASON REDMOND, JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images)
The plaintiffs sought help at both the U.S. and state Supreme Court. The PA Supreme Court, dominated by Democrats, declined to change voting laws so close to the election (absentee ballots had already been sent out to Pennsylvania voters). The U.S. Supreme Court, with its inconsistent notions about when is too soon to intervene in election administration, has yet to act on the plaintiffs’ petition for certiorari.
Under the status quo, thousands of timely sent ballots will near-certainly be thrown out.
“In the 2022 general election, county boards of elections in Pennsylvania refused to count at least 10,500 timely-received mail ballots based solely on missing or purportedly ‘incorrect’ handwritten dates on the outer return envelope,” the plaintiffs wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court.
There’s a reason the Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee and Republican Party of Pennsylvania joined this case on the side of the election administrators: In Pennsylvania about three-fourths of mail-in ballots are typically cast by Democrats.
Republicans will be less thrilled with another decision the state Supreme Court made the same day earlier this month: It will not take up the Republicans’ challenge to the “notice-and-cure” process, where voters are informed of disqualifying mistakes on their ballots and given the chance to fix them. There is a patchwork of those policies across the commonwealth; some counties let voters cure their ballots, others don’t even notify them about disqualifying mistakes.
A similar challenge to the curing process is wending its way up through state courts, though the court expressed disinclination to change the rules so close to the election in its recent orders.
The overall picture is a level of delay likely to mimic that which the country experienced in 2020, for largely the same reasons. It’s the result of conscious policy choices, both aimed at making voting more difficult and at keeping the window in which one of the largest swing states does not report its results open for as long as possible.
Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the county commissioners association of Pennsylvania, told TPM that it all manifests in tremendous pressure on individual officials.
“We’re going to be running not only the in-person election, but also processing those mail-in ballots on Election Day,” she said. “And that takes time and that takes resources.”
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
When the Paris agreement on climate change was gavelled into being in December 2015, it briefly looked like that rarest of things: a political victory for climate activists and delegates from the poorest regions of the world that, due to colonization by today’s wealthy nations, have contributed little to the climate crisis — but stand to suffer its worst ravages.
The world had finally agreed an upper limit for global warming. And in a move that stunned most experts, it had embraced the stretch target of 1.5°C, the boundary that small island states, acutely threatened by sea-level rise, had tirelessly pushed for years.
Or so, at least, it seemed. For soon, the ambitious Paris agreement limit turned out to be not much of a limit at all. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC, the world’s foremost body of climate experts) lent its authority to the 1.5°C temperature target with its 2018 special report, something odd transpired.
Nearly all modeled pathways for limiting global heating to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels involved temporarily transgressing this target. Each still arrived back at 1.5°C eventually (the deadline being the random end point of 2100), but not before first shooting past it.
Scientists responsible for modeling the response of Earth’s climate to greenhouse gas emissions — primarily caused by burning fossil fuels — called these “overshoot” scenarios. They became the dominant path along which mitigating climate change was imagined to proceed, almost as soon as talk of temperature limits emerged.
De facto, what they said was this: staying below a temperature limit is the same as first crossing it and then, a few decades hence, using methods of removing carbon from the atmosphere to dial temperatures back down again.
From some corners of the scientific literature came the assertion that this was nothing more than fantasy. A new study published in Nature has now confirmed this critique. It found that humanity’s ability to restore Earth’s temperature below 1.5°C of warming, after overshooting it, cannot be guaranteed. Many impacts of climate change are essentially irreversible. Those that are might take decades to undo, well beyond the relevant horizon for climate politics. For policy makers of the future, it matters little that temperatures might eventually fall back again; the impacts they will need to plan for are those of the overshoot period itself.
The rise of overshoot ideology
Even if global average surface temperatures are ultimately reversed, climate conditions at regional levels might not necessarily follow the global trend and might end up different from before. Delayed changes in ocean currents, for instance, could mean that the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean continue warming while the rest of the planet does not.
Any losses and damages that accumulate during the overshoot period itself would of course be permanent. For a farmer in Sudan whose livestock perishes in a heatwave that would have been avoided at 1.5°C, it will be scant consolation to know that temperatures are scheduled to return to that level when her children have grown up.
Then there is the dubious feasibility of planetary-scale carbon removal. Planting enough trees or energy crops to make a dent in global temperatures would require whole continents of land. Direct air capture of gigatons of carbon would consume prodigious amounts of renewable energy and so compete with decarbonization. Whose land are we going to use for this? Who will shoulder the burdens for all this excess energy use?
A view of a lionfish near the Karaburun Coast, which is know for its artificial and natural reefs and seagrass meadows. Coral reefs face permanent destruction. (Photo by Lokman Ilhan/Anadolu via Getty Images)
If reversal cannot be guaranteed, then clearly it is irresponsible to sanction a supposedly temporary overshoot of the Paris targets. And yet this is exactly what scientists have done. What compelled them to go down this dangerous route?
Our own book on this topic (Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, published last week by Verso) offers a history and critique of the idea.
When overshoot scenarios were summoned into being in the early 2000s, the single most important reason was economics. Rapid, near-term emissions cuts were deemed prohibitively costly and so unpalatable. Cost optimisation mandated that they be pushed into the future to the extent possible.
The models for projecting possible mitigation trajectories had these principles written into their code and so for the most part could not compute “low” temperature targets like 1.5 or 2°C. And because modelers could not imagine transgressing the deeply conservative constraints that they worked within, something else had to be transgressed.
One team stumbled upon the idea that large-scale removal of carbon might be possible in the future, and so help reverse climate change. The EU and then the IPCC picked up on it, and before long, overshoot scenarios had colonized the expert literature. Deference to mainstream economics yielded a defense of the political status quo. This in turn translated into reckless experimentation with the climate system. Conservatism or fatalism about society’s capacity for change flipped into extreme adventurism about nature.
Time to bury the time machine
Just as the climate movement scored an important political victory, compelling the world to rally behind an ambitious temperature limit, an influential group of scientists, amplified by the world’s most authoritative scientific body on the subject, effectively helped water it down. When all is said and written about the post-Paris era, this surely should stand as one of its greatest tragedies.
By conjuring up the fantasy of overshoot-and-return, scientists invented a mechanism for delaying climate action and unwittingly lent credibility to those (and they are many) who have no real interest in reigning in emissions here and now; who will seize on any excuse to keep the oil and gas and coal flowing just a little longer.
The findings of this new paper make it perfectly clear: There is no time machine waiting in the wings. Once 1.5°C lies behind us, we must consider that threshold permanently broken.
There then remains only one road to ambitious mitigation of climate change, and no amount of carbon dioxide removal can absolve us of its inconvenient political implications.
Avoiding climate breakdown demands that we bury the fantasy of overshoot-and-return and with it another illusion as well: that the Paris targets can be met without uprooting the status-quo. One limit after the other will be broken unless we manage to strand fossil fuel assets and curtail opportunities for continuing to profit from oil and gas and coal.
We will not mitigate climate change without confronting and defeating fossil fuel interests. We should expect climate scientists to be candid about this.
When Democracy Itself Is On the Ballot, We’ve Already Lost
The last few weeks have been a particularly strange stretch in a campaign year that is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced.
The country is poised at a great fork in the road, with a historically significant decision to be made between democracy or authoritarianism, pluralism or cultism, the rule of law or Trumpian retribution. Yet the national political conversation, the news coverage of it, the pace of daily events doesn’t seem to be rising to the momentousness of the occasion.
It was different in the tumultuous summer of two attempted assassinations against Trump, Biden’s surprise withdrawal from the race, the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and the political conventions. That period felt as historic as the decision voters would make in November. But since then, things have settled into a odd limbo, like we’re all waiting out the clock until Election Day, resigned that a sufficient number of our fellow citizens may in fact decide to ditch the American experiment as we know it, imperfect though it’s been, in favor of some kind of gaudy neofascist kleptocracy.
In some respects, once Harris replaced Biden and took the doubts about his age and fitness off the table, the election became a referendum on Trump. And what, really, is there left to say about Trump? Everyone who pays any attention to politics long ago made up their minds. All that’s left to do is the expensive work of trying to make sure those people actually cast their votes while also trying to capture a slice of the hapless folk who after all these years still haven’t made up their minds about Trump. In the meantime, everything else is frozen in place until a decision is made on whether democracy is the way to go.
Compiling Morning Memo each day has been harder in recent weeks than ever before, not because there is no news but because there’s little that seems to capture the present moment in full, which has forced me to think hard about why, instead of building to a crescendo in November, we seem to be slouching toward a potential second coming of Trump.
I don’t have an especially satisfying global answer, but there are some dynamics that contribute to this unpleasant sensation that we’re walking eyes wide open into the abyss.
It is a mark of the poor health of our democracy that democracy itself is on the ballot at all. A choice between democracy or not democracy isn’t a choice but an existential threat that doesn’t sustain or nourish civic life. The social compact has already been broken when we can’t agree that free and fair elections are a universal goal or that we abide by the results of those elections or that the rule of law should apply equally to everyone. We can’t even agree on whether an auto-coup by a sitting president is a good or a bad thing – or a thing at all.
To put a finer point on it: While we should hail the self-sacrifice of Republican Never Trumpers for forgoing their own political ambitions in service of defeating Trump and upholding the rule of law, something is fundamentally broken when it requires a coalition that ranges from AOC to Liz Cheney to elect a pro-democracy candidate. Democracy is designed to mediate the differences among those who believe in democracy, not resolve the conflict over whether to have democracy at all.
These kinds of dynamics – and the presence of Trump and MAGA Republicans – skew public discourse in ways that I’m not sure we fully recognize let alone understand. I could debate with Liz Cheney til the cows come home on the proper role of government, on how to fine tune the balance between liberty and equality, on where the rights of the individual should yield to the common good, and on more mundane topics like health care policy, the energy transition, and foreign affairs. But those are not the debates anyone is having.
For much the past eight years, and especially in the last several months, the long-running debates that form a through line for American democracy have been sidelined by the existential threat posed by Trump and Trumpism. So while there is honor in linking arms with former foes to unite in defense of the very democracy that allows us to argue these finer points with each other, there is much to mourn in what we have already lost: years of some the most pressing issues we face relegated to secondary or tertiary significance; vibrant and essential public debates left to molder while we confront the more immediate threat; time, energy, and resources diverted from supporting the best of who we are to fend off the worst of who we can be.
The current moment is so strange and attenuated in part because the robust public debate we’re accustomed to is shorn of any real meaning when one party to that debate doesn’t give a fuck about debating. You can’t debate democracy with people who don’t believe in democracy, or debating, or empirical evidence, or anything approximating truth or reality.
Most of political journalism fails to meet the moment because it has chosen to maintain – or is unable to break free of – the illusion that the 2024 campaign is another in the long line of great quadrennial public debates engaged in mostly good faith by two sides seeking to coalesce the will of the people around their preferred vision for the country. It’s nowhere more painfully apparent than watching the TV networks continue to try to competitively exercise their convening authority to stage the presidential campaign in front of their cameras. We’ve catalogued at length the ways that using the same old journalistic constructs normalizes Trump, creates false equivalencies, and generally allows the anti-democratic forces to pantomime as democratic while denigrating, undermining and delegitimizing democratic institutions, including news outlets themselves.
What that has left us with is a curdled public discourse in which the pro-democracy side is mostly yelling at each other about what more can be done to stop Trump; holding up scorecards like figure skating judges on the effectiveness of this or that anti-Trump strategy; assessing the purity of each other’s anti-Trumpism; and railing against democratic institutions like the media for wilting in our hour of greatest need. Not all of those are bad impulses, and to be clear they are not the cause but rather a symptom of our current predicament. It’s what happens when the “other side” rejects democracy as a means of resolving these differences. It’s like having a public debate against an abandoned lectern.
2024 Ephemera
NYT on Elon Musk: “In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the richest man in the world has involved himself in the U.S. election in a manner unparalleled in modern history.”
NYT: A Stern Obama Tells Black Men to Drop ‘Excuses’ and Support Harris
Good Read
WSJ: When the Hurricane-Relief Worker Turns Out To Be a Neo-Nazi
Ethel Kennedy, 1928-2024
WASHINGTON – MARCH 27: (AFP OUT) Ethel Kennedy attends the ceremonial installation for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at George Washington University March 27, 2009 in Washington, DC. Holder has been serving as the 82nd attorney general since he was confirmed by the Senate in February of this year. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Ethel Kennedy, the activist, advocate, and widow of Robert F. Kennedy, has died at 96.
While VP candidate JD Vance’s racist efforts to dehumanize legal immigrants from Haiti who are living in his state might still be playing out favorably among groypers, white supremacist bros and QAnon-adjacent online conspiracy mongers, the people who actually live in the state he represents in the Senate are, en masse, not buying the anti-immigrant propaganda.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh talk about the campaign vibes, Trump’s misinformation campaign around recent hurricanes and the beginning of the Supreme Court term.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
A group of Virginia voting rights groups filed a federal lawsuit this week against GOP Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s recent efforts to purge supposed non-citizens from the voter rolls just before the election, using what plaintiffs argue is unreliable information from the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Before social media foreign subversion became a staple of partisan politics in the U.S., the first journalist to write about the topic for a big mainstream audience was Adrian Chen. He published a piece in The New York Times Magazine in June 2015. It was called “The Agency” and it told the story of the Internet Research Agency, the government-linked Russian troll farm which would become a centerpiece of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the long investigations that came after it. The IRA was owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner Group whose star would continue to rise over the next decade until he mounted an ill-fated rebellion against Moscow and later died “mysteriously” in a plane crash.
I mentioned on Monday that the DeSantis administration in Florida is literally threatening criminal prosecution of TV stations that run pro-abortion rights ads for the state ballot initiative to turn back Florida’s six week abortion ban. This piece in the Post largely repeats those earlier reports. But it does confirm that an additional station in Gainesville got the same threat letters. Presumably others have as well.
Hurricane Milton made landfall at 8:30 p.m. ET Wednesday near Siesta Key, Florida, just south of the Tampa area, sparing the bay from a worst-case storm surge scenario while hitting communities like Sarasota particularly hard.
The damage and impacts from Milton are extensive and widespread and will take many more hours or days to assess fully:
While avoiding the worst of the storm surge, Tampa was deluged with more rain in one day that it had ever received in an entire October.
Milton spawned a tornado outbreak that led to the most tornado warnings ever issued in Florida in a single day, and the second most ever issued anywhere in the United States.
More than 3.3 million Florida customers are without power this morning.
The public water supply was turned off in St. Petersburg after a water main broke.
A tower crane in St. Petersburg collapsed during the storm and fell into the building that houses the Tampa Bay Times. No injuries were reported. With not enough time to dismantle tower cranes before the storm arrived, warnings had been issued in advance to those near cranes, including the one that collapsed.
ST. PETERSBURG, FLORIDA – OCTOBER 10: A crane sits on the street after crashing down into the building housing the Tampa Bay Times offices after the arrival of Hurricane Milton on October 10, 2024 in St. Petersburg, Florida. Milton, which comes just after the recent catastrophic Hurricane Helene, landed into Florida’s Gulf Coast late Wednesday evening as a Category 3 storm causing extensive flooding and damage. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
The defining image of Milton may be the destruction of the roof of St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field, home of major league baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays and a planned staging area for electric utility lineman and first responders:
Hurricane forecasting has made enormous progress in the past 50 years, greatly reducing the direct death toll from storms, even as sea levels have risen and the populations of coastal areas have exploded. But as a new study published last week found, excess deaths from hurricane strikes are much higher and longer lasting than we knew them to be empirically.
It makes sense intuitively that the many stressors of a storm – mass evacuations, power outages, infrastructure damage, economic setbacks, and new pressures on government budgets – would have health consequences, but the study’s findings exceeded all expectations. “The numbers proved so high that the researchers kept looking for mistakes or complicating factors they had missed,” according to one report.
This is a long way of saying that while national media attention will quickly wane after Helene and Milton have spun themselves out, the ongoing recovery will take years – in ways that are slow, tedious, and heartbreaking – and the public health cost will remain high for decades afterwards.
Senate Chances Looking Rougher For Dems
The Senate map this year was always exceedingly difficult for Democrats, but the boost that Kamala Harris brought when she replaced Joe Biden as the party’s nominee offered a glimmer of hope that the Senate could still be salvaged.
Some new data points this week paint a less-than-optimistic picture of Dems’ chances to hold their narrow majority:
MT-Sen: GOP nominee Tim Sheehy is leading Sen. Jon Tester (D) 52%-44% in the latest NYT/Siena College poll.
MI-Sen: Former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers has pulled into a 48%-48% tie with Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D) among likely voters in the latest Quinnipiac University Poll. Slotkin led 51%-46% in last month’s version of the poll.
WI-Sen: The Cook Political Report shifted Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s race against GOP challenger Eric Hovde from “Lean Democrat” to “Toss Up.”
In Florida and Texas, where Democrats would need to unseat GOP incumbents to make up for losses elsewhere, the latest NYT/Siena College poll shows the Dem challengers still trailing:
FL-Sen: Sen. Rick Scott (R) leads Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D) 49% to 40%.
TX-Sen: Sen. Ted Cruz (R) leads Rep. Colin Allred 48%-44%.
A reminder that with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) retiring and Democrats having no real chance of retaining that seat, Republicans need to flip just one more seat – Montana looking like the most promising for them – to regain Senate control.
On a Brighter Note …
Rep. Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania Republican whose cell phone is an integral part of the criminal investigation into the Jan. 6 coup attempt, is in real trouble in his re-election bid. “There are increasingly dire signs that six-term conservative Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) is on the verge of losing his seat, potentially a big pickup for House Democrats,” Punchbowl reports. Paul Kane has a profile of Perry challenger Janelle Stelson.
Racism Still Front And Center In Trump Campaign
WaPo: How Trump warped and weaponized a small Pennsylvania town’s immigration story
NYT: Trump Spreads His Politics of Grievance to Nonwhite Voters
Good Read
WSJ: The Evangelicals Calling for ‘Spiritual Warfare’ to Elect Trump
Robert Pape: I Study Political Violence. I’m Worried About the Election.
WaPo: Republicans challenge legitimacy of overseas votes, including military
Politico: “Lawmakers from both parties are vowing to fight back if former President Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to put a Confederate general’s name back on an Army base if he’s reelected.”
The Big Picture
WESTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA – SEPTEMBER 7: African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) are seen at the coast of Simon’s Town as the number of endangered African penguins has declined due to numerous human factors such as industrial fishing and fuel oil spills in Western Cape, South Africa on September 7, 2024. African penguins, which are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) red list of animals threatened with extinction, have distinctive features such as black feet, the pink markings between the beak and the eye, and the black markings around the eyes that looks like a mask. (Photo by Ihsaan Haffejee/Anadolu via Getty Images)
WaPo: “Earth’s wildlife populations have fallen on average by a ‘catastrophic’ rate of 73 percent in the past half-century, according to a new analysis the World Wildlife Fund released Wednesday.”
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Late last month, Donald Trump declared that if he loses the November election, it will be the Jews’ fault. He wasn’t speaking to the Proud Boys or a neo-Nazi group. He was at meetings with Jewish Republicans. Despite this, he made Jews the scapegoat — in advance! — for his possible defeat.
“In my opinion,” Trump said, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss if I’m at 40 percent” — referring to the number of Jews that he expects to vote for him if nothing changes.
If Kamala Harris wins, Trump warned, Israel will be “eradicated,” “wiped off the face of the earth” and “cease to exist.”
Trump made these remarks at two events on the same day. One, which ironically focused on combatting anti-Semitism, was organized by GOP mega-donor Miriam Adelson. The other was the Israeli-American Council National Summit.
In reality, it would be a historical anomaly if even 40 percent of Jews supported Trump. Since 1960, Jewish Americans’ vote for Republican candidates for president has typically been around 25 percent, from a low of 10 percent for Barry Goldwater in 1964 to a high of 39 percent for Ronald Reagan in 1980. That year Jimmy Carter, running for re-election, got only 45 percent of the Jewish vote, while Independent John Anderson (an Illinois Congressman) received 15 percent. What limited polling there is suggests the pattern will hold true in 2024.
Trump’s recent tirade blaming Jews, specifically, for a future election loss should not be surprising to anyone who knows about his background and has followed his business and political career. Trump has trafficked in anti-Semitic tropes throughout his life, just as he has trafficked in racism, xenophobia, and a kind of genetic determinism that harkens back to the worst moments of twentieth century history. He has described Jews in ways that sound both suspicious of them and begrudgingly impressed by them. He praises Jews as good with money and good at deal-making. In return, he treats them transactionally, as the other party in a negotiation.
He expects Jews to support him because he’s a strong supporter of Israel’s right-wing government, seemingly not recognizing that most American Jews don’t support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and vote based on a mixture of priorities, including abortion, gun laws, the rise of Christian nationalism (and Trump’s support for it), and the imperiled state of our democracy.
Smarting at this rejection, Trump issues his ominous warnings — “I did more for the Jewish people than anybody, and it’s not reciprocal,” he complained on the anniversary of October 7. He has grumbled that Jews “are only in it for themselves” and “stick together,” aides told the Washington Post. He takes umbrage at being called an anti-Semite. “I’m the least anti-Semitic person you’ve ever seen,” he’s said on several occasions. But he has consistently alluded to dark stereotypes of Jews as all powerful, nefarious figures. He has emboldened hate groups with his words and actions.
Even if he loses the election, those groups won’t simply retreat to the shadows. And if he wins, many Jews fear, he will likely unleash an upsurge of hate, including anti-Semitism, of the sort America hasn’t seen in almost a century.
As the 2024 election approaches, with Trump leaning heavily into his appeals, and warnings, to Jewish voters, it is worth reexamining the toxic mix of anti-Semitism, racism, and conspiracy theorizing that his long career in public life has churned up, and that may once again sweep into the White House next year.
The Jews of Trump-World
Trump’s ideas about Jews seem to stem from long before his time in politics, during his rise in New York real-estate. “A lot of you are in the real-estate business, because I know you very well,” he told the Israeli-American council in 2019. “You’re brutal killers. Not nice people at all.”
In his 1991 book, “Trumped!” John O’Donnell, former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, recounted Trump’s anger when he learned that O’Donnell had hired Black employees in the casino’s finance department. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump told him. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” (Trump has at times disputed O’Donnell’s account.)
In 1971, Trump became president of his father’s real-estate empire, which was dogged by allegations of profiteering and racism toward Black families, and renamed it The Trump Organization. The younger Trump wanted to move out of New York’s outer boroughs and become a big-time developer in Manhattan. To do so, he had to compete with the Jewish-run firms that dominated New York’s real estate industry.
Fred Trump and Donald Trump in New York City in the early 1980s. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
It was during this time that Jews came to play an important role in Trump-world: the consigliere. Since most of Trump’s personal, political, and business relationships were and are transactional, it should not be surprising that in Trump-world, Jews are not friends or even business partners: they are advisors.
First among them was Roy Cohn, the former lawyer for Joe McCarthy who met Trump in the early 1970s. He initially helped Trump settle a discrimination lawsuit from the Department of Justice, which found that he had banned Black tenants from his apartment buildings. Cohn quickly became his advisor and fixer, teaching him how to navigate among politicians, the Mafia, construction unions, the media, and the courts to expand his real estate empire into Manhattan and embolden the Trump brand. Trump learned a core Cohn lesson: never admit you’re wrong, and never apologize.
Next came Allen Weisselberg, who worked as an accountant for Trump’s father and eventually became the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, hired to keep Trump’s secrets about his business deals and his tax returns.
Michael Cohen served as Trump’s personal lawyer beginning in 2006, eventually becoming vice president of the Trump Organization, but he was essentially Trump’s final fixer before entering the realm of politics. It was Cohen who arranged the payments to porn star Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about her relationship with Trump. Trump installed Cohen as deputy finance chairman of the Republican National Committee during the first two years of his presidency.
In the end, Trump’s relationship with all three men broke apart. Cohen would later testify that he tried to remain loyal to Trump, even as the FBI raided his home and office in connection with the hush money deal he had orchestrated on Trump’s behalf, but felt his loyalty was unreciprocated. He flipped on Trump after a family intervention. Until it was no longer possible Weisselberg continued to protect Trump, but in 2022 took a plea deal, pleaded guilty to 15 criminal charges including grand larceny, criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records on Trump’s behalf, and served a five month prison sentence. In 2024, he pleaded guilty to perjury and was sentenced to another five months behind bars, as well as being permanently banned from serving in a financial position in any New York corporation or business. Even after Cohn was disbarred, he continued to work for Trump until it became public that the closeted Cohn had AIDS, at which point Trump refused to speak with him again. Cohn died in 1986, but Trump waxed nostalgic for his one-time fixer. When Trump’s first Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Trump complained, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
Donald Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, and Roy Cohn attend the Trump Tower opening in October 1983 at Trump Tower in New York City. (Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images)
During a campaign speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition in December 2015, Trump told his audience, “I’m a negotiator like you folks, we are negotiators … Is there anybody that doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room?”
When it came time for the president-elect to select his Cabinet, Trump appointed two Jews, both bankers, to oversee economic affairs: Gary Cohn as head of the National Economic Council, and Steve Mnuchin as his chief fundraiser and then his Treasury Secretary. The other two high-level Jews in the Trump administration were son-in-law Jared Kushner and right-wing ideologue Stephen Miller, the main architect of Trump’s attacks on immigrants.
Trump and Genetic Determinism
There’s a more expansive rhetoric of racial and ethnic difference that looms behind Trump’s testament that Jews are good with money: it’s an articulation of a kind of scientific racism that has popped up periodically in Trump’s long career — most recently on Monday, when the former president baselessly told radio host Hugh Hewitt that many thousands of “murderers” had been let into the country during the Biden administration.
“Now a murderer — I believe this — it’s in their genes,” he said of recent immigrants to America. “And we got a lot of bad genes in our country.”
Long before he ran for president, Trump made statements like this that smack of race science, the discredited, fake discipline that was popular in the early 1900s and that viewed some groups as genetically superior and others inferior. It lives on in Trump’s periodic assertion that he believes in a kind of genetic determinism.
In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey that a person had “to have the right genes” in order to achieve great fortune. In 2010, he told CNN that he was a “gene believer,” explaining that “when you connect two racehorses, you usually end up with a fast horse.” He compared his own “gene pool” to that of successful thoroughbreds.
During his career in politics, Trump’s genetic theorizing has taken a darker turn. In a 2020 campaign speech to a crowd of white supporters in Minnesota, Trump said, “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
Donald Trump departs after speaking during a campaign rally at Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, on July 27, 2024. (Photo by ALEX WROBLEWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump said at a rally last December in Iowa that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.” Similarly, in 2018 he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” and said he preferred immigrants from places like Norway, whose population is almost entirely white. During a speech in Michigan this April, Trump called undocumented immigrants “animals” and “not human.”
The same ideas — genetic determinism, specifically with regard to immigration — were en vogue in the first half of the 20th century. They formed the basis of eugenics, which was popular in the U.S. and used to justify restrictions on immigration and involuntary sterilization of the “unfit.” Nazi doctors were influenced by American eugenics thinking in their quest to develop a superior Aryan race.
Many eugenicists believed that Jews were not really white. Rather, Jews were categorized as a separate race who, along with other immigrant groups and African Americans, could not assimilate into white American culture and society. Those ideas gained traction as Jews became convenient scapegoats. During this period, Jews often faced physical violence in the U.S., including the lynching of Leo Frank outside Atlanta in 1915, and the attacks on Jews by American Nazis and other street thugs during the 1930s and 1940s. They faced discrimination in jobs and housing. Colleges imposed quotas on Jewish students. Many hotels, resorts, and clubs barred Jews. The Ku Klux Klan surged, organizing itself as a nativist, fraternal organization that targeted Jewish and Catholic immigrants as well as African Americans. Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, was arrested at an anti-Catholic KKK march in Queens in 1927.
A 1938 poll found that about 60 percent of Americans held a low opinion of Jews, labeling them “greedy,” “dishonest,” and “pushy.” In 1939, a Roper poll found that 53 percent believed that “Jews are different” from other Americans. Ten percent favored their deportation. A 1945 survey found that 23 percent of Americans would vote for a congressional candidate who declared himself as “being against the Jews.”
The most overt forms of anti-Semitism began to wane after the Second World War, but they didn’t disappear. The KKK and other segregationists bombed Southern synagogues and the homes of outspoken Jews in response to Jews’ support for the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The “No Dogs, No Coloreds, No Jews” sign at the Baltimore Country Club in Maryland didn’t come down until 1970.
Now it is making a comeback, thanks, in part, to Trump.
Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theories and the Current Political Moment
When Trump descended his escalator, he met his moment, running for president in an America increasingly rife with conspiracy theories. It’s here that America’s latent anti-Semitism, Trump’s anti-Semitic rhetoric, and his appeals to xenophobia and race science overlap. When neo-Nazis at Charlottesville chant “Jews will not replace us,” they are referencing a kaleidoscopic set of conspiracy theories that hold — baselessly, ridiculously — that Jews are behind the greatest betrayal in American right-wing mythology: an imagined plot to ensure that supposedly pliable, non-white immigrants replace white, Christian, American men.
Trump, in his unending fight to hold onto political power, stokes America’s conspiratorial flame. Like many of his followers, Trump often describes a world that is dark and foreboding, manipulated by conspiracies of invisible networks in which the elite pull the strings. He hasn’t been shy about inserting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories into campaign ads and talking points.
In July 2016, during his campaign, Trump tweeted a graphic borrowed from 8-chan, a message board frequented by white supremacists, showing Hillary Clinton against a backdrop of $100 bills. Inside a six-pointed red star (clearly the Star of David) were the words, “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”
In a speech in October 2016, Trump claimed that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors.” He didn’t need to use the word “Jew” in order to evoke the sort of global banking cabal familiar to anyone who is passingly familiar with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery that has fueled anti-Jewish violence for over a century.
In Trump’s final campaign video, a clear appeal to anti-Semitism, he warned of “those who control the levers of power in Washington” and of “global special interests” who “partner with these people who don’t have your good in mind,” while pictures flashed of Hillary Clinton and three Jews: billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.
Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson joins the stage with former U.S. President Donald Trump during a rally at The Farm at 95 on April 9, 2022 in Selma, North Carolina. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)
Over time, the subtext has become text. In 2019, Trump had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Nick Fuentes, perhaps the most influential white nationalist and Holocaust denier in the U.S., and with Kanye West, the rapper who now goes by Ye, who has spewed anti-Semitic rhetoric. Trump has been a strong supporter of other anti-Semites, including Mark Robinson, the North Carolina gubernatorial candidate, who had a history of making anti-Semitic remarks dating back long before Trump endorsed him. He raised money for Robinson and gave him a speaking role at this summer’s Republican convention. It was only after CNN reported that Robinson had described himself as a “Black Nazi” that Trump stopped campaigning with him, but he has yet to criticize Robinson’s repugnant remarks.
Reflecting the lessons taught by Roy Cohn, Trump hasn’t apologized or explained his association with any of these bigots.
The Real Reason Trump Fails To Attract Jewish Support
At the core of Trump’s attempt to appeal to Jews is a kind of quid-pro-quo based on the misguided belief that Jews are single-issue voters. Trump portrays himself to Jews as “your defender, your protector,” and “the best friend Jewish Americans have ever had in the White House.” “I’m the one that’s protecting you,” Trump said in one recent speech to Jewish Republicans, adding that Democrats “are the people that are going to destroy you.” But when Trump tells Jews that he’s their best friend, he means he is a friend to Israel’s political right — not that he aligns with American Jews on the issues they care about.
Trump frequently complains that American Jews have been insufficiently grateful for the instances when he has taken steps applauded by Israel’s government, such as moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. “No President has done more for Israel than I have,” he recently tweeted.
There are a multitude of problems with Trump’s attempt to attract Jewish voters.
Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as they pose for a photo during their meeting at Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Florida on July 26, 2024. (Photo by Amos Ben-Gershom (GPO) / Handout/Anadolu via Getty Images)
First, Trump conflates Jewish and Israeli identity. When he talks to groups of Republican Jews, he refers to Israel as “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister.” Implicit in this language is the suggestion that Jews can’t be loyal Americans, because they are so closely tied to Israel.
Second, he doesn’t understand that for most Jewish voters, Israel is not the only priority at the ballot box. They don’t support Trump because they disagree with him on a wide range of policy issues, from gun control (Jews have the lowest rate of gun ownership of all religious groups) to reproductive rights (Jews are widely in favor of expanding access to abortion). According to a 2020 Pew poll, Jews overwhelmingly disapproved of Trump’s handling of a host of flash-point issues, including family separations at the Mexican border (78 percent), treatment of DACA recipients (74 percent), guns (74 percent), Supreme Court nominations (69 percent), and banning immigration from certain Muslim-majority countries (66 percent).
And, so, despite his efforts to cultivate them, American Jews have never embraced Donald Trump.
In his 2016 contest against Hillary Clinton, Trump got 29 percent of the Jewish vote. In 2020, a poll sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition found that 30 percent of Jews voted for Trump, while another survey that year by the liberal J Street found that only 21 percent of Jews supported Trump.
Polls suggest a similar split this year: Harris leads Trump among Jewish voters a 72 percent to 25 percent, according to a poll conducted in September on behalf of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
Trump’s obsession with the Jews is not explained by electoral necessity. Though Jewish voters have historically supported Democratic candidates for president by wide margins, Trump is likely wrong that Jewish voters will play a pivotal role in the outcome of this election. Jews represent a little more than 2 percent of the U.S. population and about 3 percent of all voters. Jews are largely concentrated in a few regions of the country, particularly New York, Florida, and California. Among the swing states, only in Pennsylvania do Jews comprise more than 3 percent of likely voters. If Trump loses the Keystone State by 500, 5,000 or 50,000 votes, there are many groups he can, and may well, blame — women, young people, African Americans, and union members — all of which comprise much larger portions of the Pennsylvania electorate than Jews. The same is true in the other swing states, where Jews comprise between 0.6 percent (Wisconsin) and 2.6 percent (Nevada) of all voters.
Trump’s outrage at the low level of support he gets from Jews spilled over when he blamed Jews for a possible loss while continuing to support positions they oppose.
The 2020 Pew poll discovered that only 27 percent of Jews approved of Trump’s job performance as president. Among subgroups within the Jewish community, 21 percent of non-affiliated Jews, 18 percent of Reform Jews, 29 percent of Conservative Jews, and 81 percent of Orthodox Jews gave Trump a thumbs-up.
Trump’s illegal efforts to undermine American democracy — including trying to overturn the 2020 election and inciting the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capital — was, according to polling, particularly galling to American Jews, perhaps because the Trump followers who participated in the January 6 insurrection include members and leaders of hate groups who espouse anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, including neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
Asked in the June 2023 poll to identify two issues that are most important to them when deciding how to vote in 2024, 37 percent of Jews listed “the future of democracy” — more than any other issue.
Compounding this is the ascendancy of self-described “Christian nationalists” in Trump’s orbit. Jews are understandably wary of Trump’s support for this section of the American right.
Trump is neither religious nor knowledgeable about theology, but he knows how to tap into white evangelicals’ fears of being persecuted, feeling embattled, losing their cultural identity to unwelcome immigrants, and blaming Jews for their predicament.
“Our country’s gone to hell. As soon as I get back in the Oval Office, I’ll also immediately end the war on Christians. I don’t know if you feel it. You have a war. There’s a war,” said Trump in a speech in Iowa in December. “Under crooked Joe Biden, Christians and Americans of faith are being persecuted and government has been weaponized against religion like never before.”
Who could possibly be behind an alleged “war on Christians”?
An attendee holds a “MAKE AMERICA PRAY AGAIN” hat ahead of the appearance of Donald Trump during the 2024 NRB International Christian Media Convention Presidential Forum at The Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center on February 22, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, about 80 percent of white Christian evangelicals voted for Trump, accounting for 45 percent of his total vote both times.
A 2021 PRRI survey found that 81 percent of white evangelicals believe that the country’s founders intended for America to be a “Christian nation” and that it should be one today. Three-quarters (76 percent) say that being Christian is important to being “truly American.”
The same goes for ethnic diversity. Sixty-one percent of white evangelicals believe that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Three-quarters (74 percent) of white evangelicals support installing deterrents, such as walls, floating barriers in rivers, and razor wire to prevent immigrants from entering the country illegally, even if such measures endanger or kill some people.
The Consequences of Trump’s Anti-Semitism
“As anti-Semitism has surged from the internet into the streets, President Trump has done too little to rouse the national conscience against it,” the New York Times observed in an April 2019 editorial.
That’s putting it mildly. Since he started running for president in 2015, Trump has emboldened Jew-haters with his appeals to racism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. He verbalizes, encourages, enables, tolerates, winks at, and makes excuses for anti-Semitism, most notably when he said that some of the torch-wielding Nazis marching in Charlottesville in 2017 were “good people.”
It is no accident that anti-Semitic social media posts and incidents have spiked since Donald Trump took the political stage.
The shooters who in recent years have gone on rampages against Jews echoed the anti-Semitic canard about Jews plotting to promote non-white immigration.
Before he entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 and killed 11 Jews at worship, Robert Gregory Bowers posted a message online attacking HIAS (originally called the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), a Jewish nonprofit group that was helping bring refugees from Syria and Afghanistan to the United States. “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people,” he wrote. “I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”
In 2019, John Earnest fired shots into a synagogue in Poway, near San Diego, killing one woman and injuring three others, including the synagogue’s rabbi. He had earlier written “I would die a thousand times over to prevent the doomed fate that the Jews have planned for my race” on an anti-Semitic message board. “Every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race. They act as a unit, and every Jew plays his part to enslave the other races around him — whether consciously or subconsciously. Their crimes are endless.”
Robert Crimo — who killed seven people and injured more than 30 people with a semi-automatic rifle during a July 4, 2022 parade in Highland Park, a heavily Jewish suburb of Chicago — had posted anti-Jewish and racist material online, as well as a photo on Twitter showing him draped in a Trump flag.
American Jews make up 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, but in 2023 they were the targets of the majority of all religion-based hate crimes in the country.
Throughout history, Jews have generally opposed dictators and autocrats, in large part because they have tended to persecute Jews. Trump, in contrast, admires strong men who rule outside the constraints of democracy and the rule of law, including Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán. He has even, per a former White House chief of staff, expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler.
Most American Jews understandably fear that if Trump is elected this year, his disdain for democracy and the rule of law, and his alliance with hate groups, including anti-Semites, will unleash new horrors.
Even if Trump loses the election, the rise of organized hate will persist, and Trump could continue to be its highest-profile cheerleader. Trump has inspired and emboldened a racist and anti-Semitic infrastructure that won’t likely retreat into the relative obscurity it inhabited before Trump became president.
