As you might expect, the mystery of the GOP ground game and Elon Musk’s late, bulldozer entry into the 2024 campaign has become a fascination of mine even apart from its relevance to the outcome of the campaign. It really seems now that most of Musk’s supposed $150 million contribution to the Trump effort was simply lit on fire. I should note that even by their own accounts not all of that money was slated for ground operations and get out of the vote efforts. Some went to mailers, yard signs and other kinds of advertising. But it’s become one of the hallmarks of this campaign that Trump-aligned canvassers and door knockers are just nowhere to be found really anywhere in the swing states. To be clear, I’m not saying none — like no one has seen a single one anywhere. But what’s wild is that what I’m describing is actually not that far off than that. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina. Even in Arizona and Nevada I haven’t heard much that contradicts it. I’ve just had less visibility altogether.
Continue reading “Musk’s Vaporware Ground Operation”Trump Says He’ll Fight for Working-Class Americans. His First Term Suggests He Won’t.
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
When Donald Trump was president, he repeatedly tried to raise the rent on at least 4 million of the poorest people in this country, many of them elderly or disabled. He proposed to cut the federal disability benefits of a quarter-million low-income children, on the grounds that someone else in their family was already receiving benefits. He attempted to put in place a requirement that poor parents cooperate with child support enforcement, including by having single mothers disclose their sexual histories, before they and their children could receive food assistance.
He tried to enact a rule allowing employers to pocket workers’ tips. And he did enact a rule denying overtime pay to millions of low-wage workers if they made more than $35,568 a year.
Trump and his vice presidential pick JD Vance have been running a campaign that they say puts the working class first, vowing to protect everyday Americans from an influx of immigrant labor, to return manufacturing jobs to the U.S., to support rural areas and families with children and, generally, to stick it to the elites.
Critics reply by citing Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump presidency that proposes deep cuts to the social safety net for lower-income families alongside more large tax breaks for the wealthy. But Trump, despite his clear ties to its authors, has said that Project 2025 doesn’t represent him.
Still, his views on working-class and poor people can be found in specific actions that he tried to take when, as president, he had the power to make public policy.
ProPublica reviewed Trump’s proposed budgets from 2018 to 2021, as well as regulations that he attempted to enact or revise via his cabinet agencies, including the departments of Labor, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services, and also quasi-independent agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Social Security Administration.
We found that while Trump was in the White House, he advanced an agenda across his administration that was designed to cut health care, food and housing programs and labor protections for poor and working-class Americans.
“Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low- and modest-income people than any other president ever has, including Reagan, by far,” said Robert Greenstein, a longtime federal poverty policy expert who recently published a paper for the Brookings Institution on Trump’s first-term budgets.
Trump was stymied in reaching many of these goals largely because he was inefficient about pursuing them until the second half of his term. According to reporters covering him at the time, he’d been unprepared to win the presidency in 2016, let alone to fill key positions and develop a legislative and regulatory strategy on poverty issues.
He did have control of both the House and Senate during his first two years in office, but he used his only shots at budget reconciliation (annual budget bills that can’t be filibustered by the opposing party) to cut taxes for the rich and to try to repeal Obamacare. By 2019, there wasn’t much time left for his cabinet agencies to develop new regulations, get them through the long federal rulemaking process and deal with any legal challenges.
Trump and his allies appear focused on not repeating such mistakes should he win the White House again. Republican leaders in Congress have said that this time, if they retake majorities in both chambers, they’ll use their reconciliation bills to combine renewed tax cuts with aggressive cuts to social spending. Meanwhile, Trump would likely put forward new regulations earlier in his term, in part so that legal challenges to them get a chance to be heard before a Supreme Court with a solid conservative majority he created.
If he relies on his first-term proposals, that would mean:
- Cutting the Children’s Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, by billions of dollars.
- Rescinding nearly a million kids’ eligibility for free school lunches.
- Freezing Pell grants for lower-income college students so that they’re not adjusted for inflation.
- Overhauling and substantially cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, colloquially known as food stamps, in part by defining people with assets exceeding $2,250 as not being poor enough to receive aid and reducing the minimum monthly food stamp amount from $23 to zero.
- Eliminating multiple programs designed to increase the supply of and investment in affordable housing in lower-income communities.
- Eliminating a program that helps poor families heat their homes and be prepared for power outages and other energy crises.
- Shrinking Job Corps and cutting funding for work-training programs — which help people get off of government assistance — nearly in half.
- Restricting the collective bargaining rights of unions, through which workers fight for better wages and working conditions.
Trump also never gave up on his goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act, which disproportionately serves lower-income Americans. He cut in half the open-enrollment windows during which people can sign up for health insurance under the ACA, and he cut over 80% of the funding for efforts to help lower-income people and others navigate the system. This especially affected those with special needs or who have limited access to or comfort with the internet.
As a result of these and other changes, the number of uninsured people in the U.S. increased in 2017 for the first time since the law was enacted, then increased again in 2018 and in 2019. By that year, 2.3 million fewer Americans had health insurance than when Trump came into power, including 700,000 fewer children.
President Joe Biden has reversed many of these changes. But Trump could reverse them back, especially if he has majorities in Congress.
Perhaps the main thing that Trump did with his administrative power during his first term — that he openly wants to do more of — is reduce the civil service, meaning the nonpolitical federal employees whom he collectively calls “the Deep State.”
This, too, would have a disproportionately negative impact on programs serving poor and working Americans. Agencies like the Social Security Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which provide disability and survivor benefits and housing assistance to lower-income families in times of need, rely heavily on midlevel staff in Washington, D.C., and local offices to process claims and get help to people.
Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica about whether Trump wants to distance himself from his first-term record on issues affecting working-class people or whether his second-term agenda would be different.
Instead, she focused on Social Security and Medicare, saying that Trump protected those programs in his first term and would do so again. “By unleashing American energy, slashing job-killing regulations, and adopting pro-growth America First tax and trade policies, President Trump will quickly rebuild the greatest economy in history,” Leavitt said.
One new ostensibly pro-worker policy that Trump, as well as his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have proposed: ending taxes on tips.
Trump officials and Republican politicians have long said that more federal spending on safety net programs is not the solution to poverty and that poor people need to be less dependent on government aid and exercise more personal responsibility.
And working-class voters — especially white men without a college degree who feel that their economic standing has diminished relative to other demographic groups — have joined the Trump movement in increasing numbers. What’s more, some counties that have seen large upticks in food stamp usage in recent years continue to vote for him, despite his attempts to shrink that program and others that people in these places rely on. (All that said, Trump’s supporters are better off on average than the media often portrays them to be.)
Meanwhile, pandemic relief, including stimulus checks, did start during the Trump administration and helped reduce poverty rates. But those efforts were temporary responses to a crisis and were mostly proposed by Democrats in Congress; they were hardly part of Trump’s governing agenda.
Amid a presidential race that has at times focused on forgotten, high-poverty communities — with Vance repeatedly touting his Appalachian-adjacent roots — it is surprising that journalists haven’t applied more scrutiny to Trump’s first-term budgets and proposals on these issues, said Greenstein, the poverty policy expert.
Would Trump, given a second term, continue the Biden administration’s efforts to make sure that the IRS isn’t disproportionately auditing the taxes of poor people? Would he defend Biden’s reforms to welfare, aimed at making sure that states actually use welfare money to help lower-income families?
Trump hasn’t faced many of these questions on the campaign trail or in debates or interviews, as the candidates and reporters covering them tend to focus more on the middle class.
Okay, What About the Selzer Poll?
If you don’t know what I’m talking about it’s kind of hard to know where to start.
The simplest explanation is that there’s a pollster named Ann Selzer. Her home base and speciality is Iowa but she also does national polling. She has a very good track record. For various reasons among data nerds she’s taken on a kind of legendary status in recent cycles, not only for accuracy but also in 2016 and 2020 for releasing final polls that picked up in advance the surprises that came on election day. In other words, she has a record of outlier last polls that are later vindicated by election results. The almost totemic treatment of this poll can’t not be seen as a bit overblown. But Selzer has a very good record. There’s no getting around that.
Her final poll of Iowa, which is of course now a securely red state, was slated to come out at 7 pm this evening. People were eagerly the results to see whether Trump or Harris might be doing better than you’d expect for Iowa. It’s a given that Trump will win Iowa. The question everyone had is whether Selzer’s poll would say Trump’s margin was bigger or narrower than one might expect.
The poll came out and Harris was beating Trump by 3 percentage points. 47-44. No one considered anything like that a possibility. It’s sent a shockwave through election land.
What does it mean?
Continue reading “Okay, What About the Selzer Poll?”Where Are We?
I’ve tried to write this post a few times. But the information I’m trying to convey is so impressionistic, tentative and tid-bitty that it’s better suited to a stream of nuggets than a structured piece of writing. So I’m going to take the bullet point approach.
- All the standard caveats about no secret information, either candidate could win and it wouldn’t be a big surprise.
- Democrats in high-level campaign positions seem increasingly optimistic about their chances pretty much in spite of themselves. That’s been my sense from the beginning of early voting and that mood has built over the course of this last week. I’d say it’s best described as optimism they’re trying not to express and almost wish they didn’t feel.
Outlaws On The Verge Of Power
Hello, it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
One way of thinking about the time since Donald Trump descended on a golden escalator into American political life is to conceptualize it as a spree. Trump has been gambling since 2015; he entered the GOP primary that year as a demagogic wildcard. People laughed at first, and thought his immediate surge in the polls was a fluke, but they were wrong: his support stayed high, as he both reflected and shaped the party’s base by humiliating GOP leaders to establish dominance over them.
Throughout, the draw of the spectacle that Trump created was the dominance that he exerted over his opponents. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) became “little Marco;” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had his personal cell phone number read out; Jeb Bush walked away almost completely emasculated. For many on the left, there was a deeply pleasing quality to this: politicians that had long been seen as hypocrites and shills for various nexes of moneyed interests were finally getting their comeuppance, upstaged by an obvious con artist who had no chance of victory.
That feeling obscured the truth. Trump was taking big risks, yes, but his appeal to segments of the American public was real and durable. The first significant instance in which he bullied his way to power was his first GOP primary, where he abused, intimidated, and scapegoated his opponents to beat them.
From there, Trump kept gambling. He took a risk in asking the Russians for help in unlocking Hillary Clinton’s emails; he took a risk in paying off Stormy Daniels; he took a risk in refusing to commit to accepting the results. They all mostly paid off: Trump won the 2016 election. Accountability, to the extent it came at all, has appeared in meager and late helpings.
His term was a shambles of day-to-day incompetence and impulsivity. But on longer-term issues that concern himself, Trump has shown a real capacity for learning and focus. As early as 2019, with his attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into smearing Joe Biden to win re-election, Trump began to twist the policies and resources of the federal government towards staying power. Ukraine led to an impeachment, but he pushed through: as COVID swept across the country, he began to implement the blueprint for a potential second term. He chipped away at protections for federal workers that keep them nonpartisan, and stacked top positions at DOJ and defense agencies with political cronies.
After he lost the 2020 election, Trump stayed the same — denying that he lost, he gambled on a series of outlandish plots that came dangerously close to success. He tried to bully state election officials. Courage at the top of the DOJ prevented him from enlisting it in his fight to stay in power; Mike Pence stopped the certification of Trump’s defeat from foundering in Congress.
That gamble failed, but only partly. Through a strategy of delay, some fecklessness by those empowered to hold him accountable, and a major assist from the conservative-stacked Supreme Court, Trump has managed to survive the legal peril in which January 6 placed him long enough to election day.
For Trump personally, the stakes in 2024 have never been higher. The risks he’s taken to get here have crossed so many legal boundaries (forget about ethical lines, come on) as to make this quite existential for him. One thing that struck me, watching him in the courtroom for his Manhattan hush money trial earlier this year, was how much time he’ll have spent in court in the year leading up to a potential victory. The sexual assault defamation cases, his New York Attorney General case, the hush money criminal case — it’s a lot of time spent stewing quietly in dingy rooms, as people recount horrible things you’ve done.
And yet, it’s not nearly enough to say that Trump’s gambles over the past decade of American life have failed. Next week’s election is the big one, where all of it may come due; for him, or for the country.
— Josh Kovensky
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend
- Hunter Walker does a wellness check on Mike Lindell ahead of the election, as he and Steve Bannon preemptively declare a Trump victory the only acceptable outcome.
- Khaya Himmelman reports on a group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania who are suing to invalidate hundreds of thousands of mailed-in ballots, based on false evidence.
- Emine Yücel has the latest on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) disastrous (for the Trump campaign) admission that Republicans will, in fact, gut Obamacare if Trump wins and Republicans get both chambers of Congress.
— Nicole Lafond
Mike Lindell Is Preemptively Denying Next Week’s Election
As you may know, Steve Bannon, the on-again-off-again adviser to former President Trump was released from prison on Tuesday after serving a nearly four month sentence for defying a subpoena in conjunction with the congressional investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Bannon quickly returned to his “War Room” podcast where he had a very special guest for Wednesday’s episode, MyPillow entrepreneur and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell.
Lindell, who is a major financial backer of various groups, digital platforms, and far right broadcasts that have spread false narratives about Trump’s last loss, took the time to preemptively insist next week’s election is already a clear victory for his dear leader. Referring to “early voting” without citing any actual numbers, Lindell said it was now clear that any Trump defeat would be illegitimate.
“Everyone sees now. Republicans have overtaken Democrats in this early voting in a lot of places. That’s like a poll coming out. It’s going to be very hard for them to hide that from the people,” Lindell said, adding, “In order to steal an election, you’ve got to make it somewhat believable. No one’s going to believe this now.”
Of course, Lindell tends to not believe elections. It’s kind of his whole thing. And everything he cited to justify this latest version of his conspira schtick is nonsense. Early voting is not, in fact, “like a poll coming out.” While it can be an interesting indicator, neither early voting or polls are exact definitive depictions of a final vote. And despite Lindell’s claim, the early voting data is overwhelmingly favoring Republicans, the actual figures we have so far are mixed.
Obviously reality has never exactly stopped Lindell. He went on to suggest the past two election cycles were rigged by unspecified “deviations” before sort of saying the quiet part out loud.
Lindell is one of many Trump allies who have recently made confident declarations that the former president cannot possibly lose next week’s election. The boasts seem like a clear attempt to issue a prebuttal and get Trump supporters ready to fight as they have been in the past. Lindell essentially admitted this. After insisting any Trump loss would be unbelievable, Lindell went on to tell Bannon that his goal is spreading these false narratives on far right platforms in order to amp up the Trump base.
“Our voice has gotten so much bigger like your great show. … They’re not going to have more votes than voters again and get away with that,” Lindell said. “We’re getting our news from all the different podcasts all the different platforms that have opened up.”
For Lindell, advancing these false narratives is going to be the way to win in a race that he somewhat contradictorily characterized as already won by Trump and deviously rigged against him.
“This is going to be what we need to open things up when they try and do — they’re already trying it,” Lindell said. “We’ve just got to make people aware so everybody is on fire for this election.”
Getting Trump supporters prepped to fight any potential defeat isn’t Lindell’s only goal. He also has pillows to sell and Bannon was happy to help.
“Mike, I want to talk to you … I’ll call you after the show about doing a prison line of pillows. Pillows in federal prison are a rare commodity,” Bannon said as they wrapped up their chat. “Mike … before you turned your life over to God … you were both a degenerate gambler and a drug addict. And so, you know about getting on the wrong side of the law.”
Bannon then asked Lindell to “tell me about the pillows.” Lindell noted he was offering a specially designed “Free Steve Pillow” to the “War Room Posse.” He also touted the rest of his wares including his standard pillow, which happens to be on sale for a price that is a commonly used Neo Nazi code, a fact Lindell has insisted is just a coincidence.
“There’s all the classic pillows that I got attacked for for me being a Nazi because they’re on special for $14.88,” Lindell said, later adding, “I don’t know if you know this Steve, but while you were in just a week ago it’s been a celebration of our great leader, you getting out. MyPillow has made it through the storm.”
— Hunter Walker
Citizen Activists Sue To Invalidate Pennsylvania Mail-In Ballots Before They’ve Even Been Counted
A group of activists are challenging mail-in ballots based in parts of southeast Pennsylvania, alleging that these ballots are coming from voters who have moved out of state permanently and are therefore ineligible, according to reporting from Votebeat.
These challenges rely on the cross-checking of data from the state’s mail-ballot request database with information from the U.S. Postal Service, with the activists claiming that the voters in question are not residents of Pennsylvania anymore and should be ineligible to vote in the state. It’s worth noting, as Votebeat does, that according to Pennsylvania law, a voter does not need to receive their mail-in ballot at a Pennsylvania address.
This is an unreliable way to determine whether someone is actually eligible to vote or not, however — it’s impossible to know from that data alone if a voter has moved permanently or not.
On Tuesday, a group known as Citizen AG filed a federal lawsuit against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt over what they claim are more than 270,000 possible ineligible voters, according to the Lebanon Daily News. According to the lawsuit these 270,000 voters have been marked as inactive, having not responded to notices since before the 2020 election, and should therefore be purged from the voter rolls.
Andrew Garber, a counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice’s Voting Rights and Elections Program, in an interview with Lebanon Daily News said: “These lawsuits alleging states need to kick people off the voter rolls, these are laying the groundwork for people to challenge election results they might not like this fall.”
For months now, Republicans have been alleging issues with the voter rolls and mounting baseless lawsuits against voter list maintenance practices to set themselves up to cry voter fraud if Trump loses next week. Experts have previously explained to TPM that these voter roll maintenance challenges are simply a way to sow seeds of distrust in the election system.
“The ultimate goal of these lawsuits is to lay the foundation for later claims that the election results can’t be trusted because the voter registration rolls can’t be trusted,” director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center Jonathan Diaz previously told TPM.
— Khaya Himmelman
Johnson Tries To Claim ‘No Obamacare’ Just Means An Improved Obamacare
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) went on Fox News on Thursday to try to do some clean up following his remarks indicating that Republicans will tackle “massive reform” of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — AKA gutting Obamacare — should Donald Trump win his third bid for the Oval Office and the GOP keep the House.
Johnson claimed his words were twisted, saying he just meant that the ACA needs “improvements.”
“We need to expand quality of care, access to care, and, obviously, lower the cost of healthcare,” Johnson said.
“They took a clip out of context,” he added.
The House Speaker’s backtracking comes shortly after Trump and his campaign attempted to do damage control after Johnson indicated that Republicans are planning to either get rid of the popular ACA or substantially gut it during a campaign event in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania the Republican speaker attended for House candidate Ryan Mackenzie (R).
“Health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda. When I say we’re going to have a very aggressive first 100 days agenda, we got a lot of things still on the table,” Johnson said on Monday, according to a video obtained by NBC News.
“No Obamacare?” an event attendee asked Johnson.
“No Obamacare,” Johnson responded, reportedly rolling his eyes. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
In reaction to Johnson’s remarks the Trump campaign said, “This is not President Trump’s policy position.”
“As President Trump has said, he will make our healthcare system better by increasing transparency, promoting choice and competition, and expanding access to new affordable healthcare and insurance options,” campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday night.
Trump has a long history of wanting to do away with the ACA — including when Congress unsuccessfully tried to repeal it during his presidency — but has avoided saying anything specific about his health care position this cycle, knowing it’s a political liability.
— Emine Yücel
How Trump’s Racist Talk Of Immigrant ‘Bad Genes’ Echoes Some Of The Last Century’s Darkest Ideas About Eugenics
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly denounced immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally and the danger he says that poor immigrants of color pose for the U.S. – often using hateful language to make his point.
In early October 2024, Trump took his comments a step further when he questioned immigrants’ faulty genes, saying without support that “Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they are now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
It was far from the first time Trump has invoked eugenics – a false, racist theory that some people, and even some races, are genetically superior to others.
In 1988, for example, Trump told Oprah Winfrey during an interview: “You have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”
In 2016, Trump said that his German roots are the reason behind his greatness:
“I always said that winning is somewhat, maybe, innate. Maybe it’s just something you have; you have the winning gene. Frankly it would be wonderful if you could develop it, but I’m not so sure you can. You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, there’s no question about it. Great stuff.”
And in 2020, Trump again alluded to his belief that bloodlines convey excellence:
“I had an uncle who went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood. I’m smart.”
Trump’s repeated and countless comments about white people’s racial superiority to people of color have prompted some comparisons to the Nazis and their ideology of racial superiority.
The Nazis are indeed the most infamous believers of the false idea that white, blue-eyed, blonde-haired people were superior to others – and that the human population should be selectively managed to breed white people.
But the Nazis didn’t originate these ideas. In fact, the Nazis were so impressed with many American eugenic ideas that they incorporated them into their racist, antisemitic laws.
Root of eugenics
The British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of the evolutionist Charles Darwin, first developed the theory of eugenics in the 1860s, and it gained a foothold in the U.S. and Britain around this time.
Eugenics sets racial identity, and especially white identity, as the most desirable and worthy.
By the dawn of the early 1900s, much of the American eugenics scholarship looked down on American immigrants from any place other than Scandinavia, thus coining the term “Nordicism.”
In the late 19th and early 20th century, immigration to the U.S. was at its peak. In 1890, 14.8% of people living in the U.S. were immigrants. Many people felt concerned about immigration in the U.S., and there were many prominent eugenicists in America. Two of the most famous were Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.
Both were avowed white supremacists who advocated for scientific racism. They wrote popular and widely read books that helped shape American and German law in the 1920s and 1930s.
Grant, Stoddard and other theorists in the U.S. embraced eugenics as a way to justify racial segregation, restrict immigration, enforce sterilization and uphold other systemic inequalities.
Stoddard attacked the United States’ immigration policies in his 1920 book, “The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy.” He wrote: “If the present drift is not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. … We now know that men are not, and never will be equal. We now know that environment and education can only develop what heredity brings.”
Another prominent eugenicist was Harry H. Laughlin, an educator and superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, a now-defunct research group that gathered biological and social information about the American population.
Laughlin wrote an influential 1922 book, “Eugenical Sterilization in the United States,” which included a chapter on model sterilization laws. The Third Reich used his book and laws as a template when implementing them in Germany during the height of the Nazi period.
Laughlin also regularly testified before U.S. Congress, with this 1922 testimony representative of his message to lawmakers: “Immigration is essentially and fundamentally a racial and biological problem. There are many factors to consider, but, from the standpoint of the future, immigration is primarily a long time national investment in human family stocks.”
Eugenicists, including Laughlin, have long been specifically preoccupied with Norwegian genetics – believing that America is under attack when immigration occurs from non-Nordic countries.
In November 1922, Laughlin said, “Some of our finest and most desirable immigrants are from Norway.”
In 1924, Congress approved the Immigration Act, which severely limited immigration to the U.S., established quotas for immigrants based on nationality and barred immigrants from Asia.
It was only following the end of World War II and the Holocaust that eugenics fell out of favor and lost its prominence in American thinking.
Trump’s recycling of history
Fears over foreign immigrants weakening the U.S. were popular a century ago, and Trump and many of his followers still embrace them today.
Trump has promised that he will carry out mass deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, forcibly detaining immigrants in camps and removing 1 million people a year.
In April 2024, Trump used dehumanizing language to express his apparent belief that immigrants are unworthy of empathy. “The Democrats say, ‘Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans.’ I said, ‘No, they’re not humans, they’re not humans, they’re animals.’”
Trump has also promoted eugenicists’ obsession with Scandinavia and the superiority of white people.
In 2018, Trump spoke about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, saying “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
In the same meeting, Trump also reportedly suggested that the U.S. should instead draw in more people from countries like Norway.
In April 2024, Trump again embraced this idea of Scandinavian superiority, saying that he wants immigrants from “Nice countries. You know, like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
A dangerous flash to the past
A person running for president in 1924 would seem more likely than a candidate in 2024 to espouse this now-discredited point of view.
President Calvin Coolidge ran for election on an “America First” platform in 1924, with the slogan only falling out of favor after groups like the Ku Klux Klan embraced it around the same time.
The idea of America First, at the time, denoted American nationalism and exceptionalism – but also was linked to anti-immigration and fascist movements.
When Coolidge signed the heavily restrictive 1924 Immigration Act into law he stated, “America must remain American.”
One hundred years later, Trump calls to mind an America First mentality, including when he regularly reads the lyrics to a song called “The Snake” during his rallies as a way to explain the dangers of welcoming immigrants into the U.S. The civil rights activist Oscar Brown wrote this poem in 1963, and his family has said that Trump misinterprets the song’s words.
‘I saved you,’ cried that woman.
‘And you’ve bit me even, why’
‘You know your bite is poisonous and now I’m going to die.’
‘Oh shut up, silly woman,’ said the reptile with a grin,
‘You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.’
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
How We Got To The Precipice Of A Trump II Presidency
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
What Might Have Been
As we head into the final weekend before the most momentous election in U.S. history, we got a faint echo Thursday of what might have been.
Special Counsel Jack Smith submitted a new filing in the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump. The particulars of it hardly matter at this point, but for the record it was a response to Trump’s belated challenge of the legality of Smith’s appointment.
In reminding the court how the case arrived at this point, Smith wrote:
In November 2022, it was known publicly that the defendant was the subject of two ongoing federal criminal investigations. The first investigation involved potential criminal violations in connection with the 2020 presidential election, and the second investigation involved the defendant’s alleged retention of classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago and related obstruction of justice. On November 15, 2022, while both investigations were pending, the defendant declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.
It’s a sobering reminder of how Trump’s aggressive strategy of delay succeeded in avoiding accountability for his alleged criminal conduct. The Mar-a-Lago case has been dismissed by the egregious U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and the Jan. 6 case has been knee-capped by the similarly egregious six-justice right-wing supermajority of the Supreme Court. Even his conviction in New York state has been called into question by the Supreme Court and his sentencing delayed until after the election.
And so it is that we head into the election of our lives unable to rely on the rule of law to dispatch a flagrant criminal like Donald Trump. He has seized on the opportunity to position himself to retake the White House and then make the criminal cases against him go away for good. But he’s done more than that. So much more.
In barnstorming the country threatening to uproot the Constitution, exact retribution against his perceived foes, and use the military against the “enemy within,” among other threats and fomentations, Trump has promised to reorder civic life in an authoritarian image, undermining the rule of law not just for him but for all Americans. If he wins, those promises become a mandate.
If he loses, the criminal cases against him are revived. The rule of law has a chance to be resurrected and hardened against future attack. The worst case scenario will have been averted, but the work to keep this from ever happening again will have just begun.
The Disinformation Environment
- CNN: Election officials are outmatched by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine
- WaPo: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger warned that a video purporting to show Haitians claiming that they illegally voted for Kamala Harris is fake and likely the product of a Russian troll farm.
- WSJ: Foreign Adversaries Target Specific Demographics in Attempt to Sway U.S. Election
Election Threats Watch
- LawFare: David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal
- NBC News: ‘There’s no white knight coming’: Federal authorities will face limits responding to 2024 election lies
- TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Swing State Election Officials Are Preemptively Shutting Down Rogue Clerks
By The Numbers
A series of new Marist College polls of the Blue Wall states is out. These are all likely voter numbers:
President:
Senate:
- PA-Sen: Bob Casey 50%, David McCormick 48%
- MI-Sen: Elissa Slotkin 52%, Mike Rogers 46%
- WI-Sen: Tammy Baldwin 51%, Eric Hovde 48%
Tea-Leaf Reading
Data points, not predictions:
- Doug Sosnik: Why Trump Has a More Plausible Path to the Presidency, in 19 Maps
- Politico: Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania
- Aaron Blake: Polls show Harris with big lead, ranging from 19 to 29 points, among those who have already voted.
2024 Ephemera
- Politico: Kamala Harris has more than twice as many donors as Trump’s campaign apparatus.
- WaPo: MAP: Where millions of Americans have cast ballots during early voting
- Politico: European Green parties implore Jill Stein to withdraw her candidacy.
A Deeper Dive On What SCOTUS IS Up To In Election Cases
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck was so appalled by the Supreme Court’s intervention this week in the Virginia purge of supposed non-citizen voters that he’s out with a special edition of his weekly newsletter:
[W]hether you like the bottom line the justices reached or not, these kinds of cases are the precise disputes in which all of us—state election officials; voters; and everyone in between, including the Court itself—would be better off with more clarity as to why the Supreme Court did what it did. For reasons sketched out below, I’m skeptical that such an opinion would’ve been persuasive; but it sure would’ve been better than what we got.
Stay tuned for the Supreme Court’s pending decision in a election case in Pennsylvania.
Trump Sues CBS News In One-Judge Texas District
Donald Trump filed a specious lawsuit against CBS News, claiming it interfered in the presidential election by editing a 60 Minutes interview Kamala Harris. Trump filed the lawsuit in the Texas district where it is assured of being assigned to the sole federal judge there: the notoriously reactionary Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Quote Of The Day
Jamelle Bouie, on the historical consequences of a Trump II presidency:
Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
LOL
Charlie Kirk is upset that Republican women may “undermine their husbands” and secretly vote for Harris while telling their husbands they voted for Trump, even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.” pic.twitter.com/3ttLOqROBy
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 31, 2024
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Election Miscellany #5
A curious thing. There’s a new rush of press stories reporting that Mar-a-Lago is suddenly a bundle of nerves as they see evidence they’re falling short in Pennsylvania. This is certainly why Trump is suddenly going berserk on social media, making freakshow claims that the race is being stolen in PA. We knew that. Meanwhile Trump is suddenly losing ground in betting markets, which for a couple of weeks have shown him to be a prohibitive favorite to return to the White House. This is all very nice to see. But I wouldn’t necessarily see it as some sign of momentum in Harris’s favor.
Continue reading “Election Miscellany #5”Trump Again Reiterates That When He Says ‘Enemy From Within’ He Means Specific People
I’ve written a few times in recent weeks about the pretzels into which Donald Trump’s Republican allies are twisting his words as they try to defend and explain away his sinister remarks about deploying the military domestically to go after his “enemy.” The rhetoric has been a throughline of Trump’s campaign, as he and alumni of his first administration threaten to use the military as a goon squad to crack down on Americans if elected.
Continue reading “Trump Again Reiterates That When He Says ‘Enemy From Within’ He Means Specific People”Battleground State Election Officials Are Preemptively Shutting Down Rogue Clerks
Election officials in battleground states across the country — both Republican and Democrat alike — are getting ahead of election misinformation, debunking baseless claims of fraud and issuing strong warnings against any attempts to delay election certification from rogue, election denying county and precinct-level officials. In some cases, they’re removing them before they have a chance to interfere.
Continue reading “Battleground State Election Officials Are Preemptively Shutting Down Rogue Clerks”