A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

‘The American People Are Exhausted With His Gaslighting’

With JD Vance’s claim that Trump won in 2020 and Trump himself calling Jan. 6 a “day of love,” the GOP ticket is doubling down on the Big Lie with three weeks to go before Election Day – and Kamala Harris is having none of it.

In a noticeable shift, Harris has expanded her usual campaign speech to include more direct critiques of Trump’s anti-democratic extremism. Earlier in the week, she pulled in his remarks on “enemies within,” going so far as to begin playing video of his remarks at her own campaign rallies. As the week comes to an end, she’s incorporating into her own speech Trump’s latest remarks minimizing Jan. 6.

“So now, we here, know Jan. 6 was a tragic day. It was a day of terrible violence. There were attacks on law enforcement — 140 law enforcement officers were injured, some were killed. And what did Donald Trump say last night about Jan. 6? He called it a ‘day of love,’” Harris told a rally in Wisconsin Thursday.

In Trump’s remarks earlier this week, he once again referred to the Jan. 6 rioters as “we,” an admission that is sure to pique the interest of Special Counsel Jack Smith: “We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walked down — this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows.” Trump’s claim that none of the rioters had guns is a falsity that he often repeats.

For her part, Harris folded Trump’s Jan. 6 lies into her larger “We Are Not Going Back” theme: “The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting — exhausted. … Enough,” Harris said. “We are ready to turn the page.”

Zombie Fake Electors

CNN: At least 30 election deniers and 2020 fake electors are serving as Trump electors this year.

Chutkan Rejects Trump Plea For More Delay In Jan. 6 Case

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request by Donald Trump to postpone until after Election Day the public unsealing of a filing in the Jan. 6 case related to presidential immunity. In denying the request, Chutkan said she would order the appendices to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s mammoth filing on immunity unsealed today. Trump may seek appeal court intervention, but no sign this morning that he has done so yet.

The Aftermath Of Kamala Harris’ Fox News Interview

• Bret Baier says he aired the wrong Trump clip during the Harris interview: “I did make a mistake.”
• Greg Sargent: Harris’s Harsh Takedown of Fox’s Bret Baier Exposes MAGA’s Biggest Lie
• The ratings for the Harris interview swamped those for Trump’s town hall the same day on Fox News and were the highest for an episode of “Special Report With Bret Baier” since 2020, reports The Wrap.

Quote Of The Day

Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, on Donald Trump’s increasingly dire rhetoric: “From a mainstream candidate, I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of tapping into the most vicious, nativist, racial backlash. He doesn’t even really use code words or anything. He’s just all in.”

Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, And Mussolini

Anne Applebaum: “The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the ‘bloodbath’ that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics. But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics.”

The Never-Ending Shame Of Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell, in private: Donald Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist.” 

Mitch McConnell, in public: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”

Does Elon Musk Want To Get Sued By Dominion, Too?

NBC News: Musk pushes debunked Dominion voting conspiracy theory at first Pennsylvania appearance

In Other Elon Musk News …

• NYT: How Tech Billionaires Became the G.O.P.’s New Donor Class
• Susan Glasser: How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again
• NPR: X/Twitter has changed its terms of service to force litigation with its users into the friendly confines of the Northern District of Texas for federal cases and Tarrant County (Fort Worth) for state cases, even though the company is not headquartered in either place.

Disinformation Watch

• NBC News: The Pipeline: How Russian propaganda reaches and influences the U.S. 
• AP: Right-wing influencers hyped anti-Ukraine videos made by a TV producer also funded by Russian media
• WSJ: A Mystery $30 Million Wave of Pro-Trump Bets Has Moved a Popular Prediction Market

‘We Created A Monster’

Former chief marketing executive at NBC apologizes for helping to create Trump’s reality TV image: “While we were successful in marketing ‘The Apprentice,’ we also did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”

‘It’s The First Amendment, Stupid’

A federal judge in Tallahassee blocked the DeSantis administration’s pressure campaign against TV stations for airing pro-abortion-rights ads in support of Amendment 4, with this withering summation: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

UPDATE: Trump Assassination Attempts

• NYT: “An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.”
• WaPo: “In its 52-page report, the panel wrote that ‘the Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission. Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.'”
• WSJ: “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved,” the panel said in the report. “It is simply unacceptable for the Service to have anything less than a paramount focus on its protective mission, particularly while that protective mission function is presently suboptimal.”
• Politico: “Lawyers for the man charged with attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump on a golf course in Florida last month have asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to recuse herself from the case.”

Texas Supreme Court Halts Controversial Execution

After intervention from a bipartisan group of Texas legislators, the state Supreme Court halted the execution of Robert Roberson that was scheduled for last evening. The late reprieve in the controversial shaken-baby case came after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene earlier in the day.

“Roberson remains alive following a 48 hours unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of covering the final days preceding virtually every execution to have been scheduled in the United States in that time,” Chris Geidner reports.

Harris v. Hecklers

Kamala Harris: Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally. I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street pic.twitter.com/tjhbDB9m3R

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 17, 2024

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

The Alt Universe Of The Right-Wing Media Ecosystem

You go where the votes are. Period.

It’s not validating Fox News to agree to an interview in hopes of reaching voters, particularly in this case disaffected Republican women.

The idea that Kamala Harris’ interview with Bret Baier was some kind of Daniel in the lion’s den moment conflates the relatively straightforward task of dealing with a hostile interviewer with the exceedingly difficult task of penetrating a closed-off, self-reinforcing news bubble based on endlessly repeated falsehoods, relentless appeals to tribal identity, and the grinding delegitimization of people of color and political foes.

When it came to confronting a hostile interviewer, Harris more than held her own against Baier. Here she is rejecting the misleading clip Baer showed her of Trump speaking earlier on Fox News, which was not one of the many recent examples of him warning of an “enemy within” but was instead a tepid defense of his own rhetoric:

WOW — Kamala Harris forcefully calls out Bret Baier for playing a deceptive clip whitewashing Trump's comments about "the enemy within" pic.twitter.com/JmIwSQXVjv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 16, 2024

As for puncturing the Fox News bubble, Harris’ presence essentially did that, albeit for less than 30 minutes on a Wednesday evening in October. There’s only so much you can do. I’m reminded of this smart thread on debunking v. pre-bunking from two years ago by Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric at Texas A&M: “Every day our political discourse is dominated by an agenda-setting war (what issues we should talk about) and a frame war (how we should frame/understand those issues). Again, so much of our political discourse is about controlling our political discourse.”

Harris didn’t have much control over the Fox News agenda-setting: “immigration” – by which we really mean the vilification of people of color as “other” – dominated the first 10 mins of a 26-minute interview, and abortion never came up. But she was relentless in maintaining her own framing of the issues that did come up. The tradeoff – losing an agenda-setting battle in order to fight and try to win a framing battle – is the calculation the Harris campaign made in deciding it was worth it to reach some subset of voters.

And it never hurts to force a little bit of reality into the faces of Fox News viewers.

Watch The Full Interview

Quote Of The Day

Kamala Harris, defending the Constitution at a campaign appearance in Pennsylvania:

Kamala Harris: "We know the Constitution is not a relic from our past, but determines whether we are a country where the people can speak freely and even criticize POTUS without fear of being thrown in jail or targeted by the military."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 16, 2024 at 4:36 PM

Georgia State Election Board Slapped Down Again

For the second day in a row, a state judge has rejected last-minute rules changes by the MAGA-dominated Georgia State Elections Board.

‘Unconstitutional Government Interference’

An advocacy group filed a federal lawsuit to stop the pressure campaign by the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) against TV stations to prevent them from running ads in favor of the passage of Amendment 4, which would protect abortion rights.

2024 Ephemera

• Fox News poll: Trump leads Harris 50%-48% among likely voters nationwide, a flip from last month when Harris lead Trump 50%-48%.
• WaPo: Inside Elon Musk’s plan to trigger a ‘red wave’ for Trump
• WSJ: Republicans Rush to Bolster Trump’s Ground Game

Tough Day For Project 2025

Two related developments:

• In an internal tiff, the former director of Project 2025 condemned the “violent rhetoric” of Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which served as the incubator for the blueprint for a Trump II presidency. In an interview with the WaPo, Paul Dans also called on JD Vance to retract the foreword he wrote for Roberts’ book. Dans blames Roberts’ inflammatory public comments for the negative publicity Project 2025 has received
• Donald Trump Jr. is leading an effort by Trump’s transition operation to compile a list of people banned from working in a Trump II administration that includes … wait for it … people linked to Project 2025. “Clearly people working on Project 2025 are blacklisted,” a former Trump official told Politico. Stay skeptical though. The ban on Project 2025 may be a pre-election tactic easily reversed after a victory in November.

Loud And Proud

After fielding the question dozens of times since July and mostly bobbing and weaving around it, JD Vance was pushed by a reporter Wednesday into saying that he didn’t think Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

UPDATE: Donald Trump Prosecutions

• Mar-a-Lago case: With a trial in the currently-dismissed classified documents case months or years off at best, two prosecutors on Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team have returned to their regular jobs in the Justice Department.
• Jan. 6 case: U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected the vast majority of Donald Trump’s claims that he is due more discovery in the case, but tossed him a bone on a few of his discovery requests.
• Jan. 6 case: Trump is asking Chutkan to push a deadline related to the arguments over presidential immunity until after the election.
• Jan. 6 case: Special Counsel Jack Smith argues in a new filing that Trump bears responsibility in law and in fact for Jan. 6:

Contrary to the defendant’s claim … that he bears no factual or legal responsibility for the ‘events on January 6,’ the superseding indictment plainly alleges that the defendant willfully caused his supporters to obstruct and attempt to obstruct the proceeding by summoning them to Washington, D.C., and then directing them to march to the Capitol to pressure the Vice President and legislators to reject the legitimate certificates and instead rely on the fraudulent electoral certificates.”

Donald Trump Is Still Trying To Silence Stormy Daniels!

As recently as this summer, while settling his judgment against Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump’s attorneys pitched a new hush money agreement to the porn actress, Rachel Maddow reports:

Sigh …

The armed North Carolina man arrested Saturday for allegedly threatening FEMA workers says he was motivated to intervene in person by that blitz of bogus social media posts about Hurricane Helene aid being withheld – and semi-admits to being bamboozled: “I went up and saw that there was absolutely nothing there, so I stayed, and I volunteered all day.”

The full report, including a phone interview with the man, from WGHP in Greensboro:

$50B Double Whammy

Hurricanes Helene and Milton are each projected to exceed $50 billion in damages. Only eight prior hurricanes have produced that much damage, but five of those have been in the past seven years.

Jimmy Carter Lives Long Enough To Vote For Kamala Harris

Former President Jimmy Carter, who just turned 100 years old and has been in hospice since February 2023, when he was a mere 98 years old, fulfilled his wish of living long enough to cast his vote for Kamala Harris.

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