Yeah. And my fingers are crossed that her centrism reflects a more left-at-heart candidate’s temporary efforts to get more votes. We’ll see. If she wins.
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October 12, 2024 (Saturday)
Celebrated another trip around the sun this week with a day on the water. I’ve seen the same harbor and the same islands and the same boats and the same buoys my whole life, and you know, it never gets old.
Let’s take the night off, and get back to it tomorrow.
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October 13, 2024 (Sunday)
“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country…a fascist to the core.”
This is how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the primary military advisor to the president, the secretary of defense, and the National Security Council, described former president Donald Trump to veteran journalist Bob Woodward. Trump appointed Milley to that position.
Since he announced his presidential candidacy in June 2015 by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, Trump has trafficked in racist anti-immigrant stories. But since the September 10 presidential debate when he drew ridicule for his outburst regurgitating the lie that legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their white neighbors’ pets, Trump has used increasingly fascist rhetoric. By this weekend, he had fully embraced the idea that the United States is being overrun by Black and Brown criminals and that they, along with their Democratic accomplices, must be rounded up, deported, or executed, with the help of the military.
Myah Ward of Politico noted on October 12 that Trump’s speeches have escalated to the point that he now promises that he alone can save the country from those people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.” He falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world…from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again.
But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn’t really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him.
According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader’s behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly.
According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.
At a MAGA rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, Trump added to this formula his determination to use the federal government to attack those he calls enemies. Standing on a stage with a backdrop that read, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW” and “END MIGRANT CRIME,” he insisted that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs and proposed a federal program he called “Operation Aurora” to remove those immigrants he insists are members of “savage gangs.” When Trump said, “We have to live with these animals, but we won’t live with them for long,” a person in the crowd shouted: “Kill them!”
Officials in Aurora emphatically deny Trump’s claim that the city is a “war zone.” Republican mayor Mike Coffman said that Aurora is “not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs” and that such statements are “grossly exaggerated.” While there have been incidents, they “were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.” The chief of the Aurora police agreed that the city is “not by any means overtaken by Venezuelan gangs.”
In Aurora, Trump also promised to “invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.” As legal analyst Asha Rangappa explains, the Alien Enemies Act authorizes the government to round up, detain, and deport foreign nationals of a country with which the U.S. is at war. But it is virtually certain Trump didn’t come up with the idea to use that law on his own, raising the question of who really will be in charge of policy in a second Trump administration.
Trump aide Stephen Miller seems the likely candidate to run immigration policy. He has promised to begin a project of “denaturalization,” that is, stripping naturalized citizens of their citizenship. He, too, spoke at Aurora, leading the audience in booing photos that were allegedly of migrant criminals.
Before Miller spoke, a host from Right Side Broadcasting used the dehumanizing language associated with genocide, saying of migrants: “These people, they are so evil. They are not your run-of-the-mill criminal. They are people that are Satanic. They are involved in human sacrifice. They are raping men, women, and children—especially underaged children." Trump added the old trope of a population carrying disease, saying that immigrants are “very very very sick with highly contagious disease, and they’re let into our country to infect our country.”
Trump promised the audience in Aurora that he would “liberate Colorado. I will give you back your freedom and your life.”
On Saturday, October 12, Trump held a rally in Coachella, California, where temperatures near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) sparked heat-related illnesses in his audience as he spoke for about 80 minutes in the apocalyptic vein he has adopted lately. After the rally, shuttle buses failed to arrive to take attendees back to their cars, leaving them stranded.
And on Sunday, October 13, Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the “enemy within,” Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem.
He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants “is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi “race science” and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states—Colorado, California, New York—that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.
Longtime Republican operative Matthew Bartlett told Matt Dixon and Allan Smith of NBC News: “This does not seem like a campaign putting their candidate in critical vote-rich or swing vote locations—it seems more like a candidate who wants his campaign to put on rallies for optics and vibes.”
Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.
Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent…. He refuses to release his medical records. I’ve done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate…. It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?.. Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
“For these reasons and so many more,” she said, “it is time to turn the page.”
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It crossed my mind that he is favoring rallies in blue states where he has perhaps a lower possibility of being shot at.
Can’t blame him for that.
For everything else, though…
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October 14, 2024 (Monday)
As the two presidential campaigns position themselves for the final sprint to the election on November 5, the difference between them is dramatic.
Trump is hunkering down behind what has always appeared to be a plan not to attract voters but instead to create chaos on Election Day. Creating confusion around the election could enable his loyalists to put in place the plan the Trump team concocted in 2020 to throw the election into the House of Representatives or get it before the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with Trump loyalists.
A central piece of that plan appears to be to rile up his supporters to violence, and a few of them have been delivering. News broke yesterday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had advised federal emergency workers to evacuate Rutherford County, North Carolina, which was hit hard by Hurricane Helene, because of concerns about their safety after Trump and MAGA Republicans spread the false rumor that federal agents are forcing people off their land to start lithium mining projects. The alert came after the U.S. Forest Service sent an email to federal responders saying that National Guard troops had encountered armed militia saying they were “hunting FEMA.” FEMA officials will no longer go door-to-door with disaster assistance, but instead will stay in fixed locations.
A man has been arrested and charged with threatening FEMA workers with an assault rifle. He was released on a $10,000 bond.
To the extent Trump or his running mate Ohio senator J.D. Vance talks about them, their policies are promises to repair what they insist is the damage caused by President Joe Biden (although the stock market hit record highs again today), or threats that reinforce an authoritarian Christian nationalist worldview. Today, Bill Barrow of the Associated Press explored the extensive overlap of Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups and the plans that Trump and Vance have set out.
Both promise to cut taxes for the wealthy, but Project 2025 has more detail about how. Both plan to cut off immigration and to fire federal workers, replacing them with loyalists. Both say the president can decide not to use the money Congress has appropriated (in 2019, Trump refused to disburse the money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine until Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to smear Trump’s chief Democratic rival for the presidency, Joe Biden). Both call for slashing government regulations and getting rid of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as well as protections for LGBTQ+ individuals and programs addressing climate change.
But perhaps most revealing of both Trump’s ideology and his plan for the election was his statement to Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that he would like to use the military against what he called “the enemy from within…radical left lunatics" to guard the election. While this is a threat to use the power of the government against his political opponents if he is elected—he mentioned California representative and Senate candidate Adam Schiff by name—it also seems likely his loyalists will hear this as a call for violence at election sites.
Trump’s statement has not gone unnoticed.
Tonight, CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper posted a dictionary definition of the word “fascism”: “A populist political philosophy, movement…that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
On the show, Tapper pressed Republican Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin to comment on Trump’s statement that as commander-in-chief, he would use the military against political opposition. When Youngkin denied that Trump had said any such thing, Tapper replied: “I’m literally reading his quotes to you.” Youngkin’s willingness to deny what was right in front of him did not exactly quell talk of fascism, since in his dystopian novel 1984 about authoritarianism, George Orwell famously wrote: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
If Trump is hunkering down, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz are still pushing ahead, pressing Trump on both his personal weakness and his now open embrace of fascism. Harris’s advisor Ian Sams went on the Fox News Channel today to note that it’s been a month since Trump “did a mainstream media interview, and we got to wonder why. We called this weekend for him to release his medical records…. Donald Trump’s team, I heard him on your air last hour insisting that everything is okay and that…there’s nothing to see here. And your anchor rightly asked, ‘Well, if that’s true, why not just put them out?’”
At 1:12 this morning, Trump posted on his social media site: “I believe it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility. Her actions have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her.” Sams hit that as well, noting that in the middle of the night, Trump felt obliged to write about Harris and a cognitive test “[a]s he refuses to release his medical records, sit with 60 Minutes, or debate her again—instead retreating solely to rambling rallies where he’s increasingly making no sense[.] Is he okay?”
In Erie, Pennsylvania, today, Harris outlined how her proposals for an “opportunity economy” will help Black men, calling for business loans for entrepreneurs, more apprenticeships, rules for cryptocurrency exchanges, and study of diseases that disproportionately affect Black men.
She also continues her outreach to Republicans. Today, former Trump friend and talk show host Geraldo Rivera endorsed her. So did former Wisconsin Republican state senate majority leader Dale Schultz. “I tell people, ‘Look, I didn’t leave the party. The party left me,’” he said. “This is a critically important race, and…Donald Trump should never be allowed in the Oval Office again.”
Today Harris’s campaign announced she will be sitting down with Fox News Channel reporter Bret Baier for an interview on Wednesday from the battleground state of Pennsylvania. The Fox News Channel is scheduled to tape a town hall with Trump in front of an audience of women on Tuesday. It is supposed to air on Wednesday morning, while the Harris interview will air Wednesday night.
At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, tonight, Harris reiterated Trump’s refusal to talk to any but the right-wing media and recalled his promise to terminate the Constitution. And then she used Trump’s own words against him, playing a video montage of Trump’s calls for violence, his threats against “the enemy within,” and his call for using the military against his political opponents.
“You heard his words, coming from him,” she told the audience. “[H]e considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will an enemy of our country…. He’s saying that he would use the military to go after them…. And we know who he would target because he has attacked them before. Journalists whose stories he doesn’t like. Election officials who refuse to cheat by…finding extra votes for him. Judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will. This is among the reasons I believe so strongly that a second Trump term would be a huge risk for America, and dangerous…. Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power, that’s what he’s looking for.”
In Oaks, Pennsylvania, tonight, Trump was supposed to take questions from preselected attendees at a town hall with South Dakota governor Kristi Noem. He did, at first, although his answers were all over the place and he urged people to vote on January 5. But then, in the hot and crowded space, two people needed medical attention. Slurring, Trump then said: “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” And then he stood on stage and swayed for 39 minutes of songs from his personal playlist before seeming to recall that he was supposed to be talking about the election, which he suddenly told the confused crowd was “the most important election in the history of our country” before turning back to the music.
Rob Crilly of the U.K.’s The Daily Mail wrote: “I was at Trump’s golden escalator launch, flew out of Washington with him in 2020 and have probably been to 100 rallies, give or take. Have never seen anything like tonight.” The headline over Marianne LeVine’s Washington Post story about the event read: “Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town-hall episode.
"The scene comes as Vice President Kamala Harris has called Trump, 78, unstable and called into question his mental acuity.”
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I bet that rally they have scheduled at MSG gets canceled. There is no way his handlers are going to want him on a stage with that high a profile.
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October 15, 2024 (Tuesday)
After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck.
Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.
When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way…… You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.
The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to “straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press.”
As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.
Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.”
And therein lies the rub.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign…and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He’s one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”
Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day.
Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.
Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.
Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.
Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference.
It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.
Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.
Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.
In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.
Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“
That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1, and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”
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I think she’s right to imply that given how possible it is that Vance will become president, his even more frightening vision for the US needs more attention. Instead, as usual for so long now, everywhere I turn the topic is still “Tromp! Tromp! TROMP!!”
Great news!
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ah yes. that ruling class called… the voters. so troublesome democracy 
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October 16, 2024 (Wednesday)
Two Fox News Channel interviews bracketed today: one this morning with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in front of an audience of hand-picked Republican women in Georgia, the other by Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris with host Bret Baier. Together, the two were a performance of dominance.
FNC billed Trump’s so-called town hall as a chance for female voters, a demographic that is swinging heavily to Harris, to ask Trump about issues they care about. But Hadas Gold and Liam Reilly of CNN reported that FNC had packed the audience with Trump supporters. The first question came from the president of the Fulton County Republican Women, though she was not identified as such. FNC then edited the broadcast to cut out remarks in which the attendees expressed support for Trump.
It seems unlikely that Trump attracted any new voters by speaking to an audience of loyalists audibly cheering him on.
After Trump refused to debate her again, Harris voluntarily moved into his right-wing territory, agreeing to an interview with FNC host Bret Baier. In that interview, Baier reframed right-wing talking points as questions, essentially giving Trump a second shot at a debate. Baier kept talking over the vice president’s attempts to answer—even putting out a hand to interrupt her—in a stark contrast to FNC’s deference to Trump. Harris asked him to let her reply, and then answered his questions, sometimes testily, usually turning them into opportunities to contrast her own candidacy and record with Trump’s.
Control of the interview changed abruptly when Harris called out Trump for referring to the “enemy within” and talking about using the American military against those he considers enemies. Baier used that opportunity to show a clip of Trump saying he wasn’t threatening anyone, but the clip was edited to remove his threats against “sick,” “evil,” “dangerous” “Marxists and communists and fascists” including Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) and “the Pelosis”—presumably former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her husband, who was attacked by a man with a hammer in 2022 by a man who wanted to force Nancy Pelosi to renounce the investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
Harris had had enough propaganda.
“Bret, I’m sorry, and with all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about the enemy within that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people. That’s not what you just showed…. You and I both know that he’s talked about turning the American military on the American people. He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States in the United States of America should be… able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake, which is why you have someone like the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying what Mark Milley has said about Donald Trump being a threat to the United States of America.”
Simply by going on the right-wing network, Harris was demonstrating dominance. Then, by answering as thoroughly as she did, she undercut the right-wing narrative that she is stupid and inarticulate. By calling out the FNC for deliberately misleading its viewers, she took command. Baier, rather than Harris, was the one doing the post-interview spinning.
Writer Peter Wehner, who worked for presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, wrote: “Bret Baier has rarely looked as bad (or tendentious) as he did in his interview with Kamala Harris. On the flip side, this was one of her best interviews. She dominated Bret. All in all it was quite a bad day for MAGA world’s most important media outlet.”
In between the two FNC events were two others that also told a story, this one about how the Republican Party’s descent into MAGA is creating a new political coalition to defend American principles.
Trump held a town hall with undecided Latino voters moderated by Mexican journalist Enrique Acevedo for Univision. Members of the audience asked excellent questions: how would he bring down household costs, who would take the jobs left behind by undocumented workers if Trump deported them and how much would that drive up food costs, why Trump took so long to stop the January 6 rioters, if he had caused deaths during the pandemic by misleading Americans, and if he agrees with his wife, Melania, about protecting abortion rights.
But Trump did not answer the questions, instead regurgitating his usual talking points. He promised to produce more oil and gas, called undocumented immigrants criminals, repeated the lie about Haitian migrants eating pets, and, after notably referring to the January 6 rioters as “we” and law enforcement officers as “the others,” called January 6 “a day of love.” The audience did not appear convinced.
Meanwhile, Vice President Harris joined more than 100 Republicans in Pennsylvania, near the spot where George Washington and more than 2,000 Continental soldiers crossed the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to surprise a garrison of British soldiers at Trenton, New Jersey, where they won a strategic victory.
Harris noted that those gathered were also near Philadelphia, where in 1787 delegates from across the country gathered to write and sign the U.S. Constitution.
“That work was not easy. The founders often disagreed. Often quite passionately. But in the end, the Constitution of the United States laid out the foundations of our democracy, including the rule of law, that there would be checks and balances, that we would have free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power. And these principles and traditions have sustained our nation for over two centuries, sustained because generations of Americans, from all backgrounds, from all beliefs, have cherished them, upheld them, and defended them.
“And now, the baton is in our hands," she said. "[A]t stake in this race are the democratic ideals that our founders and generations of Americans before us have fought for. At stake in this election is the Constitution of the United States…its very self.”
Harris welcomed the Republicans in the crowd, saying that everyone there shared a core belief: “That we must put country before party.” The crowd chanted, “USA, USA, USA.”
Harris noted that many of the Republicans on stage had taken the same oath to the Constitution that she had. “We here 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 the president, without fear of being thrown in jail, or targeted by the military. Where the people can worship as they choose without the government interfering. Where you can vote without fear that your vote will be thrown away. All this and more depends on whether or not our leaders honor their oath to the Constitution.”
Trump, she pointed out, tried to overturn the will of the people expressed in a free and fair election, has vowed to use the military to go after any American who doesn’t support him, and has called for the “termination” of the Constitution. “It is clear,” she said, “Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged, and he is seeking unchecked power.” Trump, she said, “must never again stand behind the seal of the President of the United States.”
“And to those who are watching,” she said, “if you share that view, no matter your party, no matter who you voted for last time: There is a place for you in this campaign. The coalition we have built has room for everyone who is ready to turn the page on the chaos and instability of Donald Trump.”
“I pledge to you to be a President for all Americans. And I take that pledge seriously.”
She reiterated her promise to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and to establish a Council on Bipartisan Solutions to strengthen the middle class, secure the border, defend our freedoms, and maintain the nation’s leadership in the world. She noted that the country needs a healthy two-party system, and described how the Senate Intelligence Committee left partisanship at the door. It “was “country over party in action,” when she sat on the committee, she said, “[s]o I know it can be done.”
“[O]ur campaign is not a fight against something,” she said. “It is a fight for something. It is a fight for the fundamental principles upon which we were founded, It is a fight for a new generation of leadership that is optimistic about what we can achieve together—Republicans, Democrats, and independents who want to move past the politics of division and blame and get things done on behalf of the American people.
“[W]e are all here together this beautiful afternoon because we love our country…and we know the deep privilege and pride that comes with being an American and the duty that comes along with it…. Imperfect though we may be, America is still that ‘shining city upon a hill’ that inspires people around the world. And I do believe it is one of the highest forms of patriotism to fight for the ideals of our country.”
“So, to people from across Pennsylvania, and across our nation, let us together stand up for the rule of law, for our democratic ideals, and for the Constitution of the United States. And in twenty days, we have the power to chart a New Way Forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.”
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These people keep forgetting that she was a prosecutor. For years. She has tons of real world experience at this. Not just being on the debate team in college. But if they want to keep underestimating her, that’s a good thing.
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I read something somewhere that I really want to find now. The thrust was: the “word salad” responses were an intentional choice she was making to sound serious and reflective and has now simply stopped making because it wasn’t that great a choice. Years of Trump, Biden and various overtrained stiffs have made us expect inarticulate politicians.
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I’m not sure I agree with that characterization of Biden, but I agree with your basic point.
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Biden, in the last few years, has had a lot more trouble speaking. Compare him to Obama? Obama sounds like a trained Shakespearean actor compared to Biden. Biden’s fundamentals were and are sound, but his ability to think on his feet has gone markedly downhill the last few years.
And speaking as someone in his 50s, the fact that it took him this long to slow down a little is amazing!
Biden has always had trouble speaking. He has a stutter. He’s always had a very measured way of speaking, which is how he minimizes the stutter. This has become more difficult for him in the last couple of years. I’ve seen several interviews with him since he dropped out of the race. I completely disagree that his ability to think on his feet has gone down markedly. What has become more difficult for him is to speak quickly. But his wit is still there, 100%, as is his understanding of political issues. I don’t think he’s lost a step. He just struggles more communicating that.
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I think it’s just misogyny though. People hear a female voice saying words and turn attention elsewhere then project their lack of paying attention onto the speaker.
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That along with racism.
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Oh yeah that too.
But that explains why the same people can listen to blowhards blah blah blah pseudoscience and religion with purple prose but not find it to be “word salad” too. Even when some of it is literally nonsense and lies.
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Yep. To MAGAts, Tromp sounds bold, decisive and wise, while all they hear from Harris is “lies” and content-free “yapping.”
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My father is 93. He has more trouble speaking than he has ever experienced in his life. But his mind is sharp as a tack - he has simply needed to learn new ways to communicate and must work harder to make himself understood quickly and properly. Yes, the presidency is a job that requires one to communicate concisely, and in all practicality, replacing Biden on the ticket was a proper move. But Biden is still far better at communicating than the GOP’s word-salad “weave” bobblehead.
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