We need your help for the final stretch of our Annual TPM Membership Drive. We’ve now signed up 858 new members out of our goal of 1,000. One of the benefits of these round numbers is that even I can easily compute the percentage in my head. We’re about 85% of the way there and we are going to pull out all the stops to hit our goal by the end of this week. If you have been thinking of joining during our drive, now is quite literally the time. Remember that in addition to all the direct benefits and supporting our work, we are running a 40% discount for the duration of the drive. So it’s also a good time for that. If you’ve never joined or perhaps let your membership lapse, please take a moment right now to click this link and join us. We all appreciate it.

Late Update: Now 893! We can definitely get past 900 this evening.

One of the abiding themes of election coverage this year is that if there’s a second Trump presidency it will be more extreme, more organized and ideologically coherent and more prepared. There’s some level of psyching out the opposition going on here. But it’s still mostly correct. The major guideposts in the storyline are first that the various forces that went into Trumpism came into 2016 and 2017 not really realizing Trump was the guy. And that’s not surprising. He was Donald Trump after all, something our whole political system has difficulty remembering. Trump also staffed most of his administration with what for him were the equivalent of Hollywood leading men: ex-generals, legitimate multinational corporation CEOs, Wall Street sharks. They weren’t people Democrats like but they weren’t ideologues or even very in line with the goals Trump was pursuing by the end of his term.

The part of the story that is still too little articulated is how Trump’s personal and legal challenges galvanized and really created the whole thing. Trump’s desire for dictatorial power, to control the government in depth, to have the entire state mirror and obey his will grew from his frustration and fear of the various legal probes that stalked him. He thought when he became President that he had managed a hostile takeover of a rival company. The state and the country was his. So he could do whatever he wanted. But it didn’t turn out to be that way. And that’s how the drive to vanquish the “Deep State” was born. In other words, the kernel of Trump’s dictatorial, strongman ambitions were there from the start. But it was only the shock and ego injury of being faced with the difference between owning and governing that set him on the track, for entirely personal and self-protective reasons, of transforming the state to make it serve him in the way he wanted.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Kate and Josh discuss abortion ballot initiatives in Florida and elsewhere, and how they may affect the 2024 election.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Thanks to so many of you for writing in in response to yesterday’s post about SCTV. It hadn’t occurred to me that lots of the sketches and maybe whole shows are on YouTube. But of course that makes perfect sense. One of the interesting things about those notes is that many of you mentioned something that I didn’t say explicitly in my post but was likely implicit, which is that being a fan of SCTV was a bit like joining a secret club. About half way through it’s run it got picked up by NBC and then it ran I think after Saturday Night Live. That’s a helluva time slot. But still, that’s network TV. Before that, though, you had to be a bit of a freak to even have found it. It would only be available as a syndicated show on one of the non-affiliate channels picked up from whatever rando station produced it in Toronto. (And yes, for you youngs, this was back when there were like 5 to 7 channels total, the three affiliate channels, PBS and then two or three low budget local channels that probably ran mostly repeats of like I Love Lucy and Brady Bunch.) So it really was a bit like being in a secret club. The few, the elect, the viewers of a show that was legit funnier than SNL.

Here’s a recollection from TPM Reader PK … (and God is he right about John Candy)

We have a cluster of new national polls out today. And they continue to show a bumpy and uneven but still clear movement in Joe Biden’s direction. Polls are complicated these days because there are so many different ones and more importantly the quality and reliability of those polls vary greatly. So we have five polls out since the 25th. And those are Marist (Biden+2); Data for Progress (Biden +1), Big Village (Biden +2); Morning Consult (Biden +2) and Trafalgar (Trump +3).