It shocks me that this is not already the case!
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It might be one of those on-paper things where they should be but in reality are not. Or are making it so hard that people give up. 
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Yeah, insurance companies are famous for that shit. “If we make you jump through enough hoops, a significant proportion of you will just go away.” I hate that.
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I only caught a few minutes of this town hall, but one thing I heard Harris say that isn’t mentioned here made me want to jump for joy. An “undecided” voter (put in quotes because said voter is a registered Democrat and woman who is a poly-sci professor…come on now) asked Harris what one thing she needed Congress’s help on she would want done if she could only get one thing done through Congress. Kind of a ridiculous question, and Harris even said “well there’s not just one thing”, but then Harris specifically mentioned codifying Roe v. Wade, among other things. That’s not what made me want to jump, though. Cooper then followed that up, asking Harris how she was going to accomplish that since it would require 60 votes in the Senate. And the next words out of her mouth were “Well we might have to look at the filibuster.” And then she went on with standard political speech stuff. Maybe she’s mentioned ending the filibuster before and I just missed it, but I was really happy to hear her mention that. Of course, she won’t have the power to make that happen, but I love that she wants to.
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October 24, 2024 (Thursday)
Trump’s threat to use the military on “the enemy within,” along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump’s administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump’s reelection could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party.
On the Hugh Hewitt Show this morning, Trump boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.”
Trump’s analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.
Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.
In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.
But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.
In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump’s promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republicans’ reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s economic plans would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Rattner noted that Trump’s plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or a depression.
MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it is not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. "My wife…was miscarrying and bleeding out,” John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharpe. “Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, ‘Oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you’re sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion’—that’s what they’re saying in…all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not you and your family. The government. No! Stay out of it!.. We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That’s crazy!”
“He is killing us!” Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. “He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk and some women have died already because of this…. What’s happening with women right now is real, and it is playing out across America.”
MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long-overdue farm bill.
Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democrat incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. “These people are not fit to govern,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) posted today.
MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it: Ohio representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how “Trump’s Already Stuffing House GOP ‘Normies’ in a Locker” as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist.
But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records, “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psycho PAC warned both that Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up,” and that his malignant narcissism makes him “grossly unfit for leadership.”
But if Trump’s grip is slipping, who will take over the party?
In a new biography of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” He also went after Florida senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly called McConnell’s comments “indefensible.” Scott said he was “shocked that [McConnell] would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election.”
Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump’s campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs.
And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA Republicans who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris.
In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center.
In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the federal government out of the southern states. (They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)
“If this is not revolution,” Civil War veteran House minority leader James A. Garfield (R-OH) said, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.”
Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform, but voters backed Garfield’s defense of the country and of Black rights and elected him to the White House.
The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884 they backed former New York governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened Black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed “Mugwumps,” thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party.
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Fuck McConnell. He’s a big part of the reason things ended up here. And he had two chances to rid his party of Trump for good, and wouldn’t do it because he wanted those MAGA voters. And, if my memory is correct, he still endorsed Trump in this election. Spineless coward.
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October 25, 2024 (Friday)
A bombshell story last night from the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, who is backing the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaway and gifts of tens of millions to the campaign, has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Reporters Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold, and Sam Schechner said that the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, won a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies in 2021. It is the major rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon, and Musk has a security clearance; he says it is a top-secret clearance.
Today, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into the story. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia,” Nelson told Burgess Everett of Semafor, “then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk appears to be making a bid for control of the Republican Party for a number of possible reasons, including so he can continue to score federal contracts and because the high tariffs Trump has promised to place on Chinese imports would guarantee that Musk would have leverage in the electrical vehicle market.
But Musk has competition for control of the party. Today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who lead the establishment Republican faction and the MAGAs, respectively, and thus are usually at loggerheads, issued a joint statement condemning Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for “labeling [Trump] as a ‘fascist.’” They suggest she is "inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.”
Observers immediately pointed out that, in fact, it is Trump who has repeatedly called Harris a fascist—as well as a Marxist and a communist—and that those calling Trump a fascist are former members of his own administration like former White House chief of staff General John Kelly, or leaders like former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump himself appointed to his position and who called Trump “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Harris’s contribution to this discussion was that when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris directly if she thinks Trump is a fascist at a town hall this week, she answered: “Yes, I do. And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”
Aside from the gaslighting of attacking Harris for something that Trump is the one doing, the statement seemed a calculated attempt to demonstrate Republican solidarity. But it was glaringly obvious that McConnell and Johnson found that solidarity only in attacking Harris. Their statement contained no praise of Trump.
The struggle over the Republican Party also seemed evident in yesterday’s decision by the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong, to kill that paper’s planned endorsement of Harris. Choosing not to make an endorsement in the race, Soon-Shiong said that he thought an endorsement would “add to the division” in the country. Elon Musk praised his decision.
Today the Washington Post also decided not to make an endorsement in the presidential race, despite the fact a piece endorsing Harris was already drafted. Publisher William Lewis said the paper was returning to its roots of not endorsing presidential candidates, although it has endorsed candidates for decades and did so in its early years as well. His statement seemed a weak cover for the evident wish of the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to avoid antagonizing Trump.
Bezos gives Musk a run for his money at being the richest man in the world. But while Musk wants high tariffs against China to protect his access to electric vehicle markets, Bezos’s fortune comes from Amazon, and high tariffs would shatter his business. When he was in office, Trump went out of his way to find ways to hurt Amazon to get back at Bezos for unfavorable coverage in the Post.
Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Mariel Garza, along with journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein, resigned from the paper after its decision not to endorse Harris, and nearly 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. The Washington Post, too, has seen about 2,000 subscribers bow out, and fourteen of the newspaper’s columnists called the decision not to condemn Trump’s threats to the “freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution” “a terrible mistake.” Cartoonist Ann Telnaes published a blacked-out square, playing on the Post’s motto that democracy dies in darkness.
Readers are speaking out against the Washington Post for demonstrating what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” the demands of an authoritarian leader (although Washington Post legal journalist Ruth Marcus, who signed the letter calling the decision a terrible mistake, pointed out that the Post itself was publishing the many letters of condemnation). “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder’s “On Tyranny” reads. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
The aftermath of the Post’s decision demonstrated what scholars say will happen after such obeying. Rather than winning favors, such a demonstration of weakness invites further abuse, as anyone who has watched Trump in action ought to know by now.
Trump’s people pounced, with advisor Stephen Miller posting: “You know the Kamala campaign is sinking when even the Washington Post refuses to endorse.”
Trump then promptly went a step further, claiming that Democrats had taken part in “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery…in the 2020 presidential election” and warning that in 2024, “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again…. Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Trump’s threats are designed to convince people he is a strongman who will inevitably win the 2024 presidential election. But to do that, he will have to go through the voters, who are demonstrating their enthusiasm for Democratic candidate Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
After the announcement by the Washington Post, others stepped up to endorse Harris. The largest Teamsters union in Texas endorsed Harris before her rally tonight in Houston. In a blistering editorial, the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Harris, saying: “America deserves much more than an aspiring autocrat who ignores the law, is running to stay out of prison, and doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Tonight, Trump taped a podcast episode with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas, hoping to reach Rogan’s large audience. He was still on the ground in Austin when he was supposed to be appearing at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, and blamed the long taping for the fact he was three hours late to the rally. Tired of waiting, rally attendees streamed out. When he finally arrived, about 47,000 viewers watched the PBS live stream of the rally.
Harris was in Houston, where she took the fight for abortion rights to the heart of a state where an abortion ban has endangered women and driven up the infant mortality rate. People began standing in line before sunrise to get into the rally at the Houston Shell Energy Stadium and filled the 22,000-seat stadium to capacity. About 2.5 million people watched the PBS live stream.
Harris shared the stage with actor Jessica Alba and music legends Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, who asked the crowd: “Are we ready to say Madam President?”
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October 26, 2024 (Saturday)
Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed “to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers.”
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.”
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Heather Cox Richardson posts nightly at both Facebook, where she has two million followers:
and at Substack, where she has 1.7 million subscribers:
It’s been great to share and discuss with yall her “Letters from an American.” I’m sure her work has made an enormous positive difference in the world, and let’s hope that’s true of the upcoming election too.
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Thank you so much for posting these so consistently over the years!
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Thank you for introducing me to Heather Cox Richardson and so consistently reposting here!
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Many thanks for diligently posting these daily. 
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Thank you, milliefink! 
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