Democrats can’t resist Trump until he starts doing things.
In a Perry Bacon article I linked to two weeks ago, he cautioned against “turning into an amateur political strategist”. It’s a tough temptation to resist, and I’ve been in several conversations recently that veered into who the Democrats’ 2028 nominee should be, what groups of voters we should be trying to win over, how our message needs to change, and so on.
If you find your mind heading in that direction, all I can say is “Slow down.” The election of 2028 or even 2026 will be fought on a battlefield that doesn’t exist yet.
I think the place for political thinking to start is with one obvious fact: The Trumpists won in 2024. They got the White House and both houses of Congress. They control the Supreme Court to an extent that no partisan faction has in my lifetime. And I draw one major conclusion from those facts: The ball is in their court. We can’t know precisely what they’ll do with it until they start doing things. The things they do and the consequences of those actions will shape the landscape of 2026 and 2028.
Trump has raised many hopes and expectations among the people who voted for him. Specifically:
The economy is going to be fabulous. Not only will inflation stop, but prices will go back down to what they were the last time Trump was president. The trade deficit will vanish: Americans will get good jobs making the products we no longer import, but other Americans won’t lose their jobs making products for export. Increased oil and gas production will make energy much cheaper, lowering the price of everything. But we won’t have to worry about increased disasters from climate change.
Trump will wield unchecked power without abusing it. Neither Congress nor the courts nor the states will be able to stand in his way. But he won’t be petty and go after political opponents who broke no laws. He won’t make Americans afraid to criticize him. He won’t govern for his own profit. He won’t alter the rules to make future Democratic victories impossible. And he won’t ignore the Constitution to seek a third term.
The government is going to get drastically smaller. Spending will go way down without cutting Social Security or Medicare or defense. Regulations will be slashed without unleashing bad behavior from predatory corporations. Taxes will go down, but the budget deficit will vanish. Corruption will disappear. Private companies and the free market will serve Americans’ interests better and more efficiently than big government programs like ObamaCare or Medicare for All.
American strength will make the world safer. Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East will end on terms favorable to US interests. Terrorism will stop. Tariffs will be an unanswerable weapon that makes other countries do what we want.
The immigration problem will be solved. The Army will round up 10-20 million undocumented nonwhite people living here, without terrorizing the rest of us. They will be held in camps until they can be deported to other countries, who will accept them for fear of American tariffs. That roundup and detention power will be wielded without abuse, and only the bad, criminal immigrants will be affected. The good Latinos will stay and the bad ones will get kicked out. American industries (like agriculture) won’t be affected by the sudden departure of their work force.
Normal (i.e., White, Christian, straight) Americans will matter again. Small towns and rural areas will make a comeback. Working people will get a fair shake and won’t be exploited by giant unregulated corporations, so unions and consumer-protection agencies won’t be needed.
And more. Now, I think the picture I just painted is a fairy tale, because many of those goals are contradictory and most of the rest are unlikely. But just for a moment, let’s imagine Trump fulfills all of it. The people who voted for him look at the results and say, “That’s what I voted for.” The people who didn’t vote for him have to admit (if we are honest) that our fears were groundless. How do the Democrats surge in 2026 and 2028 to regain power?
It’s simple: They don’t. And more than that, they shouldn’t. If the MAGA movement can do all that, it will deserve to stay in power. Gavin Newsom (or whoever you’re picturing) won’t be able to run against it. No “message” you can come up with will win over Hispanics or suburban women or demoralized nonvoters or whichever other group you attribute our 2024 loss to.
What that means in practice is that, while we continue to espouse our own values, and oppose nominees and proposals that look wrong to us, it’s way too soon to start shaping any sort of campaign. A large chunk of the 2026 and 2028 campaigns will necessarily be reactive. Trump will disappoint many of the people who voted for him, either by not doing what he said he would do (“build the wall” from his first administration) or by doing it and having it turn out differently than he said it would. Future Democratic campaigns will center on exploiting that disappointment.
But we can’t design those campaigns until we see who he disappoints and how.
So what does that mean Democrats should be doing now? Laying the groundwork for the Trump-disappointed-you campaign, whatever it turns out to be. We need to constantly call attention to the ways Trump tries to move the goalposts. (Bringing prices down, we now learn from him, is very hard.) We need to highlight those people who are being harmed by his policies, once those policies start to take shape.
The upcoming leadership battle in the House will be the first substantive thing to look at. For the first time in decades, all committee chairs will be White men.
The budget will be a target-rich environment, because Republican math just doesn’t work. Either their cuts won’t total up the way they anticipated, or they will cut things they said they wouldn’t. Probably both. And if there’s a deficit, they own it.
I know that vision is not nearly as inspiring as a ten-point-plan to elect AOC. But this is the reality we have arrived in: The voters have given MAGA a chance to prove itself. We won’t know how to run against them until we see how they fail that test.
Honest journalists can debunk false news stories. But the responses those false stories raise linger as if they were true.
Something I’ve been struggling with since the election is: Why didn’t Kamala Harris’ message get through?
The majority of Harris-campaign criticism I’ve read is of the form “She should have talked about X instead of Y.” Kitchen-table issues instead of trans rights, centrist issues instead of far-left issues, and so forth. And typically, if you look at the actual content of her speeches and ads, the answer is: “She did, but nobody paid attention.”
Which raises the question: Why not?
One answer (which commenters have repeatedly criticized me for not highlighting) is that she’s a Black woman, so it’s easy for our sexist and racist culture to discount whatever she says. And that’s true up to a point, but I doubt it hits the heart of the matter, because I was already noticing the same problem with the Biden campaign: He never got credit for the jobs created by his infrastructure bill, for example, or for lowering the cost of prescription drugs. You can say, “He should have talked about that.” But when he did, no one listened.
I also think the racism/sexism interpretation suggests a too-easy solution: We can just nominate a White guy like Gavin Newsom next time, and we’ll be fine. But I doubt that’s true.
A related problem is why Trump could tell obvious lies, get debunked, and keep telling those lies with positive effects. Even people who knew the truth continued believe the point the lie was making. I think we need to understand how that works.
The critical relative. I want to propose a theory based on scaling up something you may have observed in your personal life.
Imagine you have a relative who for many years has criticized you in some unfair way: You’re stupid, you’re ugly, you’re selfish, or something like that. Picture a parent, a sibling, or an annoying older cousin who’s been putting you down since you were both kids.
So you go to a family gathering, and as you walk in you hear that relative saying things that sound just like the unfair criticism. Somebody is being stupid, ugly, selfish — and you’re sure it’s you.
But as you walk up ready to give that relative a piece of your mind, something in the conversation makes you realize they’re not talking about you at all. So if you enter the conversation and cut loose, you’ll just make a fool of yourself.
Now think about how you feel: You have no cause for offense. Nobody has insulted you. But do your emotions stand down?
Probably not. Even though the goad that raised those emotions was a complete misperception, nonetheless they have been raised. Most likely, you’ll be spoiling for a fight the rest of the day.
I think that’s what happened in the campaign.
Preexisting narratives. The most powerful propaganda message is “This thing you already know about is happening again.”
What’s insidious about this message is that it’s almost impossible to debunk. Ostensibly it’s a news story: Something supposedly has just happened. So an objective news source might try to debunk it by demonstrating that the “something” in question didn’t happen.
But that doesn’t work because it doesn’t address what’s really being communicated. The “things you already know about” that the news story brought to mind are not explicitly in the story, so they’re not touched by the debunking.
I think this requires an example: the Haitian immigrants who were supposedly “eating the dogs … eating the cats” in Springfield, Ohio. It just flat out wasn’t true, and every piece of “evidence” supporting the story was either made up or repurposed from some other event. (The photo that supposedly showed a Haitian carrying off a dead goose wasn’t of a Haitian, it wasn’t from Springfield, and the guy was clearing roadkill, not returning from a successful goose-hunt.)
But why didn’t the debunking stick? In this case, the “thing you already know” — at least in TrumpWorld — is that illegal immigrants are threatening your way of life. Haitians eating people’s pets isn’t the beginning of this issue, it’s just more of it. If you’ve been paying attention to Fox News or Truth Social or right-wing podcasts, you’ve heard hundreds of examples of how illegal immigrants are threatening your way of life. This one isn’t strictly true? So what?
To truly debunk the story in the minds of its target audience, you would have to identify what they think they already know and the incidents they think establish their knowledge — and debunk all of them. Obviously, that can’t be done, both because the assignment itself is impossible, and because even if you succeeded, nobody would have the attention span to process everything you’d need to tell them.
Second example: The “trans” Olympic boxer who was beating up women in the Olympics. Again, completely false. The boxer was from Algeria, a Muslim-majority country where trans isn’t recognized as a thing. Imane Khelif’s birth certificate identifies her as a woman, and she’s never been anything else. An Algerian with a male birth certificate who was claiming to be female would most likely be in prison, not on the Olympic team.
All those facts were easily available to anybody who wanted to check.
But so what? You are already supposed to know that men claim to be women so they can cheat in sporting events, and men posing as women put real women in physical danger. Again, the people who believe these things also believe that they’ve seen dozens and dozens of examples — the great majority of which are probably also either objectively false or wildly exaggerated. But what can you, the objective mainstream journalist, do about that? You weren’t there when this base of misleading examples was laid down, and you’re not going to reverse it with one news story.
So even after the claim was known to be false, Trump went on making it, presumably because he believed it was working for him.
The impact of “it’s happening again” is to bring back to mind people’s general impression that this kind of thing happens all the time. And that impression continues to feel fresh even after the particular story turns out to be false.
Or remember when President Biden said Trump voters are “garbage”? He was clearly trying to say that the Trump campaign’s racist rhetoric was garbage, but — surprise! — things Biden tries to say often come out wrong. But never mind that — instantly this became a scandal for Harris, who hadn’t said anything remotely similar.
Think about why: Trump voters already think they know that elite Democrats look down on them. And here it was, happening again. It brought back Hillary’s deplorables remark (which also wasn’t as bad as you probably remember) and countless other moments when Fox News has told them that Democrats were insulting them.
Ambient informaton. The it’s-happening-again phenomenon is related to the problem of ambient information that I talked about three weeks ago.
The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.
The upshot is that when many people hear some meme like “eating the dogs”, they don’t make a serious attempt to figure out whether or not it refers to something that actually happened. Instead, they’re thinking about whether it “sounds right”. How well does it fit into a pattern with all the other news they’ve rubbed up against?
You can say that people just shouldn’t think this way, but in the meantime we have to deal with a world where many do.
And that seems to require a completely different form of campaigning and a different form of journalism.
In traditional political and journalistic thinking, ethical campaigning and objective journalism go hand-in-hand: Your candidate is right on the issues, you collect the facts and examples that show your candidate is right, the media gives that information preference over conflicting information based on lies, and the public eventually gets the message.
But if things ever really worked that way, they don’t any more, at least not for a number of voters large enough to decide close elections.
And if Democrats can’t figure out how to address this problem, I don’t think nominating a White man or targeting Latinos with more effective ads is going to do the trick.
Recovering from the disillusionment of the election is taking longer than I expected.
Many articles are being written about how best to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected assault on democracy and human rights. I had planned to write a post curating those articles for you, picking out the best ones and summarizing their advice. Unfortunately, I’ve bookmarked more of them than I’ve read, and I haven’t given the ones I’ve read enough serious thought.
That lack of motivation has forced me to admit something about myself: I’m not ready to resist yet. I hope I will be soon.
Everybody’s absorbing the reality of the election at their own pace and in their own way, I suppose. Prior to the election, I advised my readers over and over again not to speculate about what would happen. Like many advice-givers, I almost listened to myself. I refused to anticipate and dwell on either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. (I’m dating myself: When I was growing up, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” was the well-known catch-phrase of ABC’s Wide World of Sports.) And yet, deep down, I stubbornly refused to believe the American people would do this. Even at the lowest points, like after Biden’s disastrous debate, I would think about a second Trump administration and think, “No. That can’t happen.”
In retrospect, my faith in the good judgment of the American electorate looks like the faith of a wife who is certain that her husband won’t ever cheat on her, or a child who is sure Dad will never go back to drinking, because it led to so much pain the first time.
But here we are.
I had imagined I was living in an early British detective novel, where Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple would eventually figure everything out and justice would triumph. Instead, I woke up in an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammit or Raymond Chandler, where the Powers That Be have known all along who the murderer is, but see no reason to do anything about it.
Here we are.
Many of my friends have reported periods of anger, which I haven’t experienced yet. Maybe that’s still coming or maybe I’m just not built that way. Instead, I’ve been living with a deep sense of disappointment. I don’t anticipate any satisfaction coming when Trump voters lose their health insurance or see his tariffs reignite inflation in their grocery stores. When Trump-supporting Hispanics have their naturalization revoked or see their birthright citizenship denied, I don’t expect “I told you so” to taste delicious in my mouth. It will be a sad day, even if they did it to themselves. They are my countrymen, even if my country tells me otherwise.
But I’m still not ready to construct my resistance strategy. I hope I will be soon. Andrea Pitzer is right about this much: Most countries that experienced a fascist takeover didn’t enjoy the luxury of three months to plan. But one of those months is gone already. The clock is ticking.
I can tell I’ll eventually come around. One weird aspect of my psychology is that I’m aware of a subconscious personality who communicates with me — and occasionally critiques my behavior — through my brain’s musical soundtrack. (I noticed it my senior year in college, when I was trying to keep a relationship from getting too serious because I anticipated it ending with graduation. All spring I unaccountably found myself humming “Frosty the Snowman”.)
Lately it’s been playing a song I haven’t heard in years, maybe decades: Graham Nash’s “Chicago“, which he wrote in response to the Chicago 7 trial. It’s aimed at someone Nash wants to “come to Chicago” to protest, and hopes that the listener isn’t like Jack, who won’t help “cause he’ll turn the other ear”. And he envisions this:
We can change the world. Rearrange the world. It’s dying to get better.
I wonder.
In my uninspired wanderings through resistance articles, I have noticed a few things, which I’ll pass on in lieu of a better post in some future week.
The simplest advice has been repeated by many people, so you’ve probably heard it already: Timothy Snyder says “Don’t obey in advance.” In their formation phase, authoritarian regimes wonder what they can get away with. When people anticipate the regime’s demands and comply before they’re asked, they teach the government what it can do. We’ve seen simple examples already: When the Washington Post and LA Times owners torpedoed their editorial departments’ Harris endorsements, they signaled to Trump that he can control the press through the government’s influence on the owners’ other businesses. Seth Moulton — my congressman, sadly — has already offered that many Democrats are willing to surrender trans rights without a fight.
Other examples are more local, like libraries that remove LGBTQ memoirs or non-White fiction before anyone demands it, or sociology departments that voluntarily pare back their programs to avoid discussing White supremacy.
The other thing I’ve been struck by is the importance of perception. The power of an authoritarian regime rests more on belief than on institutional power or even guns. No one resists because everyone believes that (in the words of Star Trek’s Borg Collective) “resistance is futile”. But if enough people believe resistance isn’t futile, then it’s not.
That’s why Trump and his people are working so hard to assert that his sub-50% showing in the election is a “mandate” or even a “landslide“. But if you voted for someone other than Trump, you belong to the majority. And there’s certainly no mandate for implementing Project 2025 policies, which he explicitly denied during the campaign.
Similarly, we can expect a Day One shock-and-awe campaign, where it will seem as everything is happening at once: mass deportation, attacks on abortion rights and trans rights, tariffs, oil drilling on public lands, rolling back environmental regulations, firing civil-service workers, and so on. Trump and his people will make it sound as if these are all done deals — it’s happened already, get over it.
But in fact it won’t have happened. Most of his Day One moves will be challenged in court or require agreement from Congress, either of which will (at a minimum) take time, and may result in significant revisions or even reversal. Every delay means that less gets done, and the secret to saving American democracy is making sure that Trump doesn’t finish it off before the next elections.
So one of the worst things we can do is be defeatist, and claim that democracy is already lost. That does Trump’s work for him.
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.
Trump’s overthrow of democracy has barely started. We can’t let him pretend that it has already succeeded.
Perry Bacon‘s list of things to do or avoid doing is well chosen. The gist: Get involved in something beyond electoral politics, like union, a local issue-oriented group, or a politically committed liberal church. (After initial skepticism, Perry is a UU now. Welcome!) Don’t obsess over political news or Democratic strategy.
During the stretch run of the presidential campaign, $37 million worth of Trump ads connected Kamala Harris to trans people, especially transwomen and transwoman athletes. It’s hard to know whether those ads decided the election, but it’s not crazy to imagine that they did. This has started a debate among Democrats about how to handle trans-rights issues going forward.
Republicans sense an advantage, so they will make sure those issues don’t go away any time soon. Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) responded to Delaware electing transwoman Sarah McBride to Congress by proposing a bill to keep her out of women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in the Capitol. [1] WaPo’s Matt Bai laid out how this political trick works:
First, you single out someone transgender for unprompted cruelty. … Then you sit back and wait for Democrats to do the decent thing, which is to stand up for the right of any American to be left alone. At which point, Republican leaders step in to say, as House Speaker Mike Johnson did, that they’re “not going to engage in silly debates about this,” as if it were Democrats and not Republicans who are so obsessed with trans rights that they can’t stop thinking about who’s in the next stall.
Talk about obsessed: Of the current posts on Mace’s X-timeline, 76 of the first 79 are about her bathroom bill. All since November 20.
Bai’s model certainly captures how the issue played out in the recent campaign, as M. Gessen (who identifies as trans) observed:
In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people — as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is obvious: Democrats could get on board the anti-trans train and start their own fear-mongering about trans people. My Congressman, Seth Moulton [2], is showing the way:
I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.
This is a tactic I remember well from junior high: If kids are picking on you for looking gay, find some kid who looks gayer and beat him up. Don’t stand up to cruelty, just make sure you’re on the inflicting side rather than the suffering side.
But while you’re doing that, make sure you don’t look cruel. So Moulton, who (like me) enjoys almost every kind of privilege American culture offers, is the victim here: People like him are “afraid” of the Big Bad Trans Community. But Seth himself is one of the few Democrats courageous enough to join in the smear against transathletes. He knows that the number of transathletes in women’s sports is vanishingly small [3], that identified-male-at-birth kids who have taken puberty blockers don’t have significant physical advantages over identified-female-at-birth kids, and that the only way Trump managed to find an example in the news that he could use to smear transathletes was to lie about a female Algerian boxer in the Olympics. But never mind that. His little girls are in danger and require his protection.
That’s how the game is played: Don’t attack. Just invent a “threat”, pin it on the target group, and then “defend” against that threat. You know: “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats.“
So let’s not kid ourselves about what the choice is. Democrats can’t just “stop spending so much time talking about trans issues”, because we never did that. Whatever we say or do, Republicans are going to try to connect us to the trans community. The only way out of that box is to actively join the lynch mob.
Is that really what you want to do?
Josh Marshall offers a historical parallel: the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won reelection over John Kerry. Like 2024, 2004 was a very discouraging election for liberals. Bush had won in 2000 despite losing the popular vote, so it was easy to look on his administration — torture, war based on lies, etc. — as an aberration. America wasn’t really like that. But then he got over 50% of the vote in 2004 (the only Republican to do so in the 21st century), so Democrats had a lot of soul-searching to do.
There’s at least a decent argument that Democrats lost the 2004 election over gay marriage. It certainly wasn’t the biggest issue. But Republicans, cynically and shrewdly, got state ballot initiatives banning gay marriage on the ballot in a number of key states. Ohio seemed like the keyest. … Who knows whether it actually turned the election. But it’s not a far-fetched argument given how close the result was. There’s no question that substantial majorities of voters opposed same-sex marriage rights at the time, though of course support varied from more liberal to more conservative states. …
I don’t think you get to the Obergefell decision in 2015 without 2004 or the whole range of marriage equality activism in the first years of this century. In fact, I’m also certain you don’t. And I guarantee it was an albatross and super annoying to tons of Democratic elected officials. It’s possible it cost Democrats the 2004 election. It generated all sorts of agita and in many cases anger that LGBT activists were pushing the envelope so hard.
Marshall allows that the parallel isn’t perfect, but it’s also not totally off-base. Neither is the comparison to civil rights in the 1960s — Marshall didn’t go there — when there were literal race riots in cities all over the country. Nixon won in 1968 largely because he could pose as the law-and-order candidate who would stand up to Black activism.
Once in a while, there’s going to be a political price to pay for refusing to beat down on whatever group is unpopular at the moment. We can’t ignore that price, but going the other way has a price as well.
One thing the gay-marriage comparison suggests is that we have no idea how trans issues will play in 2028 and beyond. Most voters in 2004 based their same-sex marriage opinion on ignorance: They did not know any gay couples with a public long-term commitment, so they had no basis on which to judge claims that same-sex marriage would lead to “the fall of Western Civilization itself“. Same thing now: Most Americans don’t know any openly trans people, so they’re easy to demonize.
A few years down the road, most Americans probably will know at least one or two such people, plus a handful of trans celebrities. [4] The conversation may be very different by then.
[1] In the WaPo, Style (not Politics) columnist Monica Hesse wonders if Mace knows how women’s bathrooms work.
Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s how public bathrooms work for women: Each restroom is cordoned off into multiple private stalls. Each stall has its own door, which fully shuts and locks. Each door either goes all the way to the ground or — more commonly — stops approximately 12 inches from the floor. This is not an open-plan urinal situation, is what I’m saying. This is a situation in which the most flesh anyone typically sees is a scandalous, tawdry swath of … ankle.
If, somehow, a sex pest were to infiltrate a women’s room and do something creepy — like attempting to spy under a stall — then the women using the restroom would and should call security to have the sex pest removed. That would be true whether the culprit was a cis woman, a trans woman, a man or six koalas in a trench coat. Creepy behavior should be policed; mere existence should not.
If Mace’s bill passes, though, it becomes someone’s job to check up on the genitalia of restroom users. The government itself becomes the “sex pest”.
[2] If you’re a Democrat who believes in human rights, including trans rights, and you’re thinking of running against Moulton in MA-6, please put me on your mailing list. I’ve been a very reluctant Moulton voter ever since he challenged Nancy Pelosi for Speaker in 2018. Politico wrote that Moulton looked like “a mansplaining young punk taking down a vastly more experienced woman”, which is generally how I see him. (I understood why Pelosi faced criticism from the left, even though I disagreed with that criticism. But that’s not where Moulton was coming from. He just wanted to be important.)
Moulton’s anti-trans turn has to be about his larger ambitions, because it isn’t forced by any local political necessity. Republicans didn’t even bother to field a candidate in MA-06 this year, so Moulton won with 97% of the vote.
[3] Apparently, one of those rare transathletes is on the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State. The WaPo outlines the current controversy there, as some schools are refusing to play against the Spartans. The article notes that the player meets the NCAA requirements for transwomen athletes (one year of testosterone suppression treatment), and quotes a rival athletic director:
I do think it is important to note, we have played against this athlete for the past two seasons and our student-athletes felt safe in the previous matches. She is not the best or most dominant hitter on the Spartans team.
[4] Slowing this process down is the core reason Republicans want to ban books like Gender Queer, a memoir that I learned a lot from. If you read such books, or attend plays like Becoming a Man, you may begin to think of people with nontraditional gender identities primarily as people. That will make it harder for Republicans to use fear to manipulate you.
Some of Trump’s cabinet picks are merely unorthodox, but others are expressions of dominance.
The Roman historian Cassius Dio told this story about the Emperor Caligula and his horse Incitatus:
[Caligula] used to invite [Incitatus] to dinner, where he would offer him golden barley and drink his health in wine from golden goblets; he swore by the animal’s life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.
Modern historians generally believe that if he made this promise at all, Caligula was joking.
Caligula once said that he would appoint his horse Incitatus consul, which was probably a joke intended to belittle the Senate’s authority.
In the old Roman Republic, the consulship had been the top executive office and was anything but a joke. When Caligula’s great-grandfather Augustus established the imperial system, he preserved the forms and rituals of the Republic and ruled from behind the scenes, not as consul or dictator (as his own uncle Julius Caesar had done) but as “First Citizen”. (In Latin, princeps, the origin of the word “prince”.) Caligula, on the other hand, had no patience with such niceties and wanted to rub senators’ noses in the emptiness of their formal titles. “You want to be consul? So does my horse.”
Matt Gaetz. The Incitatus story came to mind Wednesday after President-elect Trump announced that he would nominate Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general, a possibility only slightly less absurd than Incitatus’ consulship.
Gasps were heard during a meeting of Republican lawmakers when the nomination for America’s top US prosecutor was announced, Axios reported, citing sources in the room.
Republican Congressman Mike Simpson of Idaho reportedly responded with an expletive.
“I don’t think it’s a serious nomination for the attorney general,” Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said.
Gaetz has a law degree, but no experience in law enforcement or the judiciary. He has been dogged by persistent accusations of sex trafficking and relationships with underage girls, though the Justice Department declined to file charges. [1] The House Ethics Committee had been about to publish a report of their investigation into his sexual misconduct, but Gaetz has avoided this by resigning his House seat to accept Trump’s offer. (Typically, members of Congress who take cabinet seats wait to resign until after the Senate confirms them.) Republican Senators have said they’d like to see the report, but Speaker Johnson is against releasing it to them — something he would obviously do if it cleared Gaetz.
I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.
Like Incitatus, though, Gaetz knows who his master is. He has been abjectly loyal to Donald Trump, and has said his is “proud of the work we did” on January 6. [2]
This is the last chance we’re gonna have of saving this country. And if you wanna get in the way, fine. But we’re gonna try to get you out of the Senate, too if you try to do that.
As for the mainstream media, sanewashing is still the order of the day. The NYT describes the Gaetz nomination as a “loyalist” and WaPo characterizes Gaetz as “outspoken“.
Confirming Gaetz will verify that two significant American institutions have lost their independence: not just the Justice Department, but the Senate also. It will be a major step in the direction of autocracy. Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse refers to this as “the crawl test“, and Ezra Klein writes:
Demanding Senate Republicans back Gaetz as attorney general and Hegseth as Defense Secretary is the 2024 version of forcing Sean Spicer to say it was the largest inauguration crowd ever. These aren’t just appointments. They’re loyalty tests. The absurdity is the point.
Pete Hegseth. And that brings us to our next horse, Pete Hegseth.
Let’s start with the good: He has a strong academic record, receiving a bachelors degree in politics from Princeton (where he wrote for the conservative Princeton Tory and played on the school’s varsity basketball team), and then a masters in public policy from the Kennedy School at Harvard. [3] He was an infantry officer in the Minnesota National Guard, volunteered to be posted to Baghdad, and received a bronze star. He also served in Afghanistan and was promoted to major.
From there things go downhill. He was at first chosen to be one of the 25,000 National Guard troops protecting Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration (which needed protection given the post-January-6 threats of right-wing violence), but was removed as a possible “insider threat” in view of two tattoos: a Jerusalem cross and “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” an 11th-century Crusader battle cry). Either might be a simple expression of Christian devotion, but they are also associated with Christian nationalism and even neo-Nazism. [4]
Hegseth’s political positions have been described as Christian nationalist. In his book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he said he believes there are “irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process”. He furthermore called for an “American crusade”, which he described as “a holy war for the righteous cause of human freedom”.
In short, the Crusades — a Christian war against infidels, particularly Muslims — figure prominently in his thinking.
His business career was undistinguished, and his time managing conservative political action groups raises more red flags without any proven wrong-doing. He ran a Minnesota PAC that spent 1/3 of its funds on Christmas parties, and as director of Concerned Veterans for America he hired his brother and paid him over $100K.
Hegseth was investigated for a sexual assault in 2017, but (like Gaetz) was not charged. [5]
But the reason he’s been nominated is that Trump liked him as a weekend contributor to Fox & Friends. He joined Fox News in 2014, and is best known for advocating pardons for war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher. (Gallagher was pardoned by Trump and had his rank restored, despite testimony against him from seven of his 21 platoon members, one of whom said “The guy is freaking evil.”)
Nothing in Hegseth’s background qualifies him to run a department with nearly three million employees and an $842 billion annual budget. But he does bring to the job an anti-LGBTQ and patriarchal zeal that fits well with Trump’s criticisms of the “woke” military.
Given his past pronouncements, and those of President-elect Trump, Hegseth is expected to end any diversity programs in the U.S. military, and perhaps retire or replace senior officers he sees as “woke” or who did not get the position through what he sees as merit alone.
His view of war crimes also aligns with Trump, who said after pardoning a different war criminal that “We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”
How Trumpists see their team.
Tulsi Gabbard. This former Democratic congresswoman has been nominated to be Director of National Intelligence. The DNI is the primary liaison between the 17 US intelligence agencies and the President. The DNI’s office (ODNI) produces the Presidential Daily Brief, which integrates and distills reports from all the agencies.
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz probably went too far by characterizing Gabbard as “likely a Russian asset“, but some hosts on Russian state TV appear to agree, referring to her as “our girlfriend Tulsi“. Gabbard has often echoed Russian propaganda about the Ukraine War. During her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign, she received favorable coverage from Russian state media.
Less than one month into her presidential campaign, there were at least 20 Gabbard stories on three major Moscow-based English-language websites affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government — all of which celebrated her candidacy.
She has also been a defender of the Assad regime in Syria, a Russian ally.
Our allies are reported to be alarmed by her nomination, and there is talk that the other Five Eyes countries — Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand — may stop sharing information with us, for fear of where that information might go next.
Gabbard has no previous experience in intelligence. She has not worked for a US intelligence agency and was not a member of the Intelligence Committee when she was in Congress.
RFK Jr. It’s possible to describe RFK Jr. in glowing terms: He wants to Make America Healthy Again. He wants to take on the Big Pharma and Big Food oligopolies, and fight the forces that make Americans prone to chronic diseases.
Throughout the year, we observed an increasing trend in the prevalence of low-credibility news about vaccines. We also observed a considerable amount of suspicious YouTube videos shared on Twitter. Tweets by a small group of approximately 800 “superspreaders” verified by Twitter accounted for approximately 35% of all reshares of misinformation on an average day, with the top superspreader (@RobertKennedyJr) responsible for over 13% of retweets.
Then there’s the danger of fluoridated water, which is a John Birch Society conspiracy theory I remember from childhood. RFK would like to eliminate water fluoridation, due to various health problems that overexposure to fluoride can cause. But like so many of his causes, his anti-fluoride case is overstated and full of misinformation. Fluoridated water has proven cavity-prevention benefits, and local monitoring should be sufficient to prevent over-exposure.
Kennedy denies responsibility for a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people, but he did play a role.
Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit anti-vax outfit he led until becoming a presidential candidate, had helped spread misinformation that contributed to the decline in measles vaccination that preceded the lethal eruption. And during his trip to Samoa, Kennedy had publicly supported leading vaccination opponents there, lending credibility to anti-vaxxers who were succeeding in increasing vaccine hesitation among Samoans.
That, in a nutshell, is the main thing to fear about Kennedy heading HHS: He’ll encourage public doubts about vaccines that have all but eliminated various once-common diseases. If vaccination levels fall below what is necessary to maintain herd immunity, those disease can make a comeback.
The U.S. is already seeing an uptick in some vaccine-preventable childhood diseases, says Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease specialist in New York City and author of a forthcoming book about the resurgence of measles and the growing anti-vaccine movement.
Measles outbreaks and cases of chickenpox and pneumococcal disease are on the rise in the U.S., he notes.
“When we see children in the hospital with complications of these things that we can prevent or at least decrease the risk of by using vaccines, it’s very frustrating,” he says.
As vaccine hesitancy continues to spread, Alissa and other pediatricians worry that other devastating childhood diseases like polio could re-emerge.
As for sticking it to Big Pharma and Big Food, I have a theory about that: I deeply disbelieve in Trump’s populism, and think that fundamentally he is on the side of Big Whatever. But RFK Jr. could still be useful to him by creating a threat Trump could use to shake the big companies down.
What’s next? These particular picks were so outrageous that many other nominees are passing without comment, like Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, Steven Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security. And I’ve seen many people use the Simpsons’ worst [blank] SO FAR meme. (We’re still waiting for a Treasury secretary.)
It’s been hard to parody Trump’s team, because anything you suggest could become tomorrow’s reality. (Last week, Gaetz becoming attorney general might have gotten a good laugh.) The only real way to stay ahead of the game is to propose fictional characters:
Donald Trump picks Baltimore based developer Russell “Stringer” Bell as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
But to repeat a previous point: The question is what the Senate will do. It’s encouraging that Republican senators stuck by their own choice (John Thune) for majority leader, and didn’t give in to Trump’s choice (Rick Scott). Maybe that means the Senate will play the role the Founders intended, checking and balancing the President. At least sometimes.
[1] Not filing an indictment isn’t actually a ringing endorsement. It means only prosecutors didn’t think they could convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But according to Gaetz’ defenders, if there’s not enough evidence to send you to jail, you might as well be attorney general.
[2] Trump’s tweet announcing Gaetz calls him “a Champion for the Constitution and the Rule of Law”, which is the kind of up-is-down statement we’re going to see a lot of.
The rest of the new DoJ management team will also be compromised: Trump has nominated his personal attorneys, Todd Blanche and John Sauer, as Deputy Attorney General and Solicitor General. At least they have some relevant experience: Blanche was once a federal prosecutor and Sauer was solicitor general for Missouri.
[4] At a minimum these are anti-Islam symbols. The Jerusalem Cross goes back to the Crusades, and is also known as the Crusaders’ Cross. If I were a senator vetting Hegseth, I’d point to Deus Vult and ask him precisely what he thinks God wills in the 21st century.
[5] The Washington Post published more details about the assault Saturday, including that Hegseth paid the accuser to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
[A] detailed memo was sent to the Trump transition team this week by a woman who said she is a friend of the accuser. The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, alleged he raped the then-30-year-old conservative group staffer in his room after drinking at a hotel bar. … The accuser, whose identity has not been made public, filed a complaint with the police alleging she was sexually assaulted days after the Oct. 7, 2017, encounter in Monterey, California, but the local district attorney did not bring charges. Police confirmed that they investigated the incident. After she threatened litigation in 2020, Hegseth made the payment and she signed the nondisclosure agreement, his attorney said.
Once again, not being formally indicted for a crime seems to be the gold standard for Trump nominees.
Heller begins with an observation I keep banging my head against: All those accounts where Harris lost because she didn’t do something — almost invariably she did do the thing they’re claiming she didn’t do. She talked about kitchen-table issues, she had detailed policy proposals, she gave interviews, she reached out to every kind of voter, and so on. She raised money, she advertised, she had a great ground game. But for some reason the things she said and did didn’t register with some large chunk of the electorate.
This seems to me like the central problem for Democrats to wrestle with. Sure, work on the Party’s message, work on the outreach to Latino men, come up with more popular policies. But none of that is going to matter if your great message describing your great policies goes in one ear and out the other.
But why would it do that?
On the other hand, Trump seemed to do everything wrong. His campaign speeches were boring and largely unwatchable. He didn’t have a ground game to speak of. Any policy ideas — there weren’t many of them — were vague. (Does he want a 10% tariff or 20%? It seems like that should matter.)
Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. … Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age.
… The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece. This is the opposite of micro-targeting. The goal is for voters to meet ideas coming and going so often that those notions seem like common sense.
So when Harris described policies (or even Biden administration accomplishments) that benefit the working class, it didn’t register, because people “know” (from having run into the notion over and over again) that Democrats are elitists who look down on the working class. They didn’t listen, because they “knew” that Harris wasn’t talking to people like them.
Conversely, when Trump said immigrants were “eating the dogs … eating the cats”, maybe people eventually heard that this story was false. (Or maybe they didn’t.) But the idea that immigrants are causing problems all over the country was seeded. When you heard it again, you’d heard it before.
That’s how you wind up with a result like this: Harris won handily among people who were paying attention, but got clobbered among voters who just “knew things” without checking them out.
Heller points out that if you’re trying to seed the world with ambient information, it helps to have your own dedicated media organizations like Fox News, Truth Social, and ultimately X/Twitter, where your factoids can be repeated endlessly without contradiction. Democrats have the so-called “liberal” media, but the message discipline just isn’t there. As often as not, “liberal” outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post would pass along Trump-oriented ambience: Biden’s too old, the economy feels bad, Harris’ campaign doesn’t have enough substance, and so on.
In the old days, campaigns imagined that even fairly uninformed voters had an issue checklist: abortion, inflation, immigration, climate change, education, and so on. Just before the election, they’d find out which candidate agreed with them on those issues, and then vote for that candidate.
Tuesday was traumatic. How do we recover, as individuals and as a country?
There’s a lot for all of us to process here. About the outside world, the emotions roiling around inside, what we need to be preparing for, and so on. This post is a very quick and incomplete response.
One important thing I’ll say up front: This is a secure-your-own-mask-first situation. We’ve all been knocked off balance, and we need to get our balance back before we go charging out into the world. So do what you need to do and don’t feel guilty about it: gather friends around you, sit in a dark room alone, make art, play solitaire, binge on some silly TV show, whatever. Things are happening deep down, and we need to let those processes do their work. Whatever you decide to do next will benefit if you take care of yourself now.
Me. The hardest thing for me right now is re-envisioning my country. It’s been many years since I have seen America as a “city upon a hill” or the “last best hope of Earth“. But still, I’ve gone on believing that the great majority of Americans aspire to be better and do better. A lot of my commitment to writing has come from my belief that if I work to understand things and explain them clearly, then other people will understand those things too, and most of them will do the right thing, or at least do better than they otherwise would have.
This election demonstrates how naive that belief is. Some Americans were fooled by Trump’s lies about the economy or crime or history or whatever, but many weren’t. They saw exactly what Trump is, and they chose him. Many of the people who believed him weren’t fooled into doing it. They chose to believe, because his lies justified something they wanted to do.
Oddly, though, I am continuing to write, as you can see.
I am reminded of a Zen story: A man meditated in a cave for twenty years, believing that if he could achieve enlightenment, he would rise to a higher state of being and attain mystical powers. One day a great teacher passed through a nearby village, so the man left his cave to seek the sage’s advice. “I wish you had asked me sooner,” the great teacher said sadly, “because there is no higher state of being. There are no mystical powers.”
Crestfallen, the man sat down in the dust and remained there for some while after the sage had continued on his way. As the sun went down, he got up and went back to his cave. Not knowing what else to do with himself, he began his evening meditations. And then he became enlightened.
So far, no enlightenment. But I’ll let you know.
Something similar happens in Elie Wiesel’s recounting of a trial of God he witnessed as a boy in a Nazi concentration camp. (I haven’t recently read either his account or the play it inspired, so I might not have the story exactly right.) After a lengthy and spirited argument, this makeshift Jewish court finds God guilty of violating his covenant and forsaking the Jewish people. And then they move on to their evening prayers.
Election night. Despite everything I’ve said in this blog about avoiding speculation and being prepared for whatever happens, by Election Day I had become fairly optimistic. That all went south very quickly.
I had made myself a list of early indicators, beginning with how Trump Media stock performed that day. (It was way up, a bad sign.) Next came how easily Trump carried Florida. (It was called almost immediately, another bad sign.) Things just got worse from there. I briefly held out some hope for the Blue Wall states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) until early reports showed Harris underperforming Biden’s 2020 results (when Biden just barely won those states). So I was in bed by 11 and never got up in the night to see if some amazing comeback had started.
I had expected to be deeply depressed if Harris lost, but in fact I haven’t been. I’m disappointed, but I’ve been oddly serene.
No doubt part of my serenity is ignoble. Due to a variety of privileges — I’m White, male, heterosexual, cis, English-speaking, native-born, Christian enough to fake it, and financially secure — I am not in MAGA’s direct line of fire. So whatever trouble I get into will probably come from risks I choose to take rather than brownshirts pounding on my door. Many people are not in my situation, and I am not going to tell them they should be serene.
But there’s also another factor — I hope a larger factor — in how I feel, and I had to search my quote file until I found something that expressed it. In Cry, the Beloved CountryAlan Paton wrote:
Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.
It’s not a perfect metaphor, because we could in fact vote or contribute or volunteer to influence the election. But the scale of the election dwarfed individual action. The closer it got, the more it seemed like a storm. In spite of my propensity to latch onto hopeful signs, in the days and months leading up to the election, I was filled with a very painful dread.
That dread is gone. The hammer has fallen. My faith in the American people was misplaced, so I can now get on with reconstructing that important piece of my worldview.
What happened. As always, we should start with the undeniable facts before making a case for this or that interpretation.
Trump won. He carried the Electoral College 312-226, and also won the popular vote by around 3 1/2 million votes, which is not quite the margin that Obama had over Romney (5 million), and well below the margin Biden had over Trump (7 million) or Obama had over McCain (9 1/2 million).
So it was not a historic landslide, but it was a clear win. Trump had appeared to be ready to try to steal the election if he didn’t win it, but that turned out not to be necessary. Coincidentally, all online talk of “voter fraud” evaporated as it became clear Trump was winning legitimately. The whole point of the GOP’s “election integrity” issue was to provide an excuse not to certify a Harris victory. But with Trump winning, fraud was no longer a concern.
Republicans also won the Senate. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott retained their seats, and no seats flipped from Republicans to Democrats. Democrats lost Joe Manchin’s West Virginia seat, something everyone expected as soon as Manchin announced he wouldn’t run. In addition, Democratic incumbents Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, and Jon Tester in Montana were defeated. The new Senate looks to have a 53-47 Republican majority. (Casey is still holding out hope that uncounted provisional ballots will overcome McCormick’s lead. But few think that’s likely.)
How did it happen? At the simplest level, it happened because too many people voted for Trump and not enough for Harris. Because the US has secret ballots, there’s no way to know for sure who those people were. But we do have exit polls.
It’s important to phrase things correctly here, because it’s way too easy to scapegoat groups of people unfairly. For example, you’ll hear that Trump won because of the Latino vote (which is true in a sense that we’ll get in a minute). But if you look at the news-consortium exit poll, Harris won the Hispanic/Latino vote 52%-46%, while Trump won the White Evangelical/Born-Again vote 82%-17%. So if you’re looking for someone to blame, look at Evangelicals, not Latinos.
However, most analysts are using the 2020 election as a baseline: Harris lost because she didn’t do as well as Biden did in 2020. And that brings a second exit poll into the conversation. Biden won the Hispanic/Latino vote 65%-32% in 2020, and lost the White Evangelical/Born-Again vote 24%-76%. So if you’re looking for Democratic slippage from 2020 to 2024, you’ll find it in both groups, but the Hispanic/Latino vote stands out; the Democratic margin among Latinos dropped from 33% to 6%.
The Latino vote also stands out because it’s puzzling, at least to non-Latinos like me. Trump ran largely on hostility to non-White immigrants and a promise to deport millions of people, many of whom are Latino. Again, it’s important to nuance this correctly: Latino voters are citizens — non-citizen voting was one of Trump’s lies — and Trump’s prospective deportees are not. Many Latino voters are solidly middle class, speak English with an accent that is more regional than foreign-born, and are well along the immigrant path traveled in the 20th century by Italians and Greeks. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that as Latinos assimilate into America, they begin to vote more and more like other Americans. After all, Polish Americans may still value their Polish heritage, but they typically don’t base their votes on an agenda of Polish issues.
Still, I have a hard time believing that MAGA racism will respect legal, social, or economic boundaries. Puerto Ricans have been citizens since 1917, and they are still fair game for racist insults. Native Americans are sometimes told to “Go back where you came from”, which is probably Siberia many thousands of years ago. When the racial profiling starts, your skin color and family name may matter more than your legal status. Also, I would suspect that Latino citizens are much more likely than Anglos to know somebody at risk of deportation. I don’t understand why that wasn’t a bigger consideration.
There was also slippage — not much, but some — among Blacks. Biden won the Black vote 87%-12%, while Harris won it 85%-13%. Harris actually improved slightly on Biden’s performance among Black women (91% to 90%), but did worse among Black men (77% to 79%). (I assume that round-off errors account for the math anomaly in those numbers.)
Meanwhile, the White vote barely changed: Harris and Biden each got 41%.
Finally, there’s turnout. Total voter turnout was 65% in 2024 compared to 67% in 2020. However, by American historical standards 65% is high, not low. You have to go back to 1908 (66%) to find another election with turnout this high. The 2020 adjustments to the Covid pandemic made it easier to vote then than at any other time in US history. So it’s unfair to fault the Harris campaign for not matching that turnout.
Why did it happen? I want to urge caution here. After any political disaster, you’ll hear a bunch of voices saying basically the same thing: “This proves I was right all along” or “This wouldn’t have happened if only people had listened to me.”
So Bernie Sanders thinks this election proved Democrats need a more progressive agenda to win back the working class. Joe Manchin says Democrats ignored “the power of the middle”, which implies the party should move right, not left. Others blame the liberal cultural agenda — trans rights, Latinx-like language, defund the police — for turning off working-class voters. Or maybe Harris’ outreach to Nikki Haley conservatives wasn’t convincing enough, and the problem was all the progressive positions she espoused in her 2020 campaign. Josh Barro suggests the problem is that blue states and cities are not being governed well.
The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat.
Basically, whatever you believe, you can find somebody telling you that you are right, and Harris would have won if she had done what you wanted.
I want to encourage you to resist that message — and I’m going to try to resist it myself — because none of us will learn anything if we just insist we’ve been right from Day 1. We should all bear in mind that the US is a very big, very diverse country, and (whoever you are) most voters are not like you. It’s easy for me to imagine positions or messages or candidates that would have made me more enthusiastic about voting Democratic. But we need to be looking for an approach that inspires a broader coalition than showed up for Harris last week. That coalition is going to have to include people you don’t understand, the way I don’t understand the Latinos who voted for mass deportation, the women who voted to give away their own rights, or the young people who voted to make climate change worse.
This is exactly the wrong time for I-was-right-all-along thinking. Back in 1973, Eric Hoffer wrote:
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
So much of what passes for “obvious” or “common sense” right now only sounds that way because it is well grounded in a worldview that no longer applies. This is a truth that is easy to see in other people, but hard to see in ourselves.
We’re going to be in a weird position for the foreseeable future: Trump is going to try to run over a lot of legal, cultural, and political boundaries, and we need to be prepared to resist. It would be great to be able to resist from a place of rock-solid certainty. But if we’re going to turn this around in the long term, we also need to be humble and flexible in our thinking. Fairly often, we’re going to have to think thoughts like: “I don’t really don’t understand a lot of what’s happening, but I’m pretty sure I need to put my body here.”
Explanations we can eliminate. You don’t have to have the right explanation to recognize wrong ones.
Harris ran a bad campaign.Josh Marshall puts his finger on the statistic that debunks this.
In the seven swing states, the swing to Trump from 2020 to 2024 was 3.1 percentage points. In the other 43 states and Washington, DC the swing was 6.7 points.
Both candidates focused their ads, their messaging, and their personal appearances on the swing states. If the Trump campaign had been running rings around the Harris campaign, this arrow would have pointed in the other direction. In short: If you were a 2020 Biden voter, the more you saw of Harris and Trump, the more likely you were to vote for Harris.
I live in a typically liberal Boston suburb. Massachusetts is about as far from a swing state as you can get, so no national figures ever showed up here. Occasionally we’d see some ads aimed at New Hampshire, but we didn’t get nearly the blitz that Pennsylvanians got. And guess what? Harris slipped behind Biden’s performance here too.
Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her VP. This would be a good argument if Harris had won the national popular vote, but failed in the Electoral College because she lost Pennsylvania. But she also lost Wisconsin, where Walz probably helped her.
Also, Harris won the Jewish vote by a wide margin: 78%-22%. So Shapiro’s Judaism probably wouldn’t have helped the ticket.
Harris should have moved further left. We can never say what would have happened if a candidate had delivered a completely different message from the beginning. But I think it’s pretty clear that simply shifting left down the stretch, i.e., emphasizing the more liberal parts of Harris’ message and record, wouldn’t have helped.
The best evidence here comes from comparing Harris to Democratic Senate candidates. Candidates who are perceived as more liberal, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, generally did slightly worse than Harris in their states, while candidates perceived as more conservative (Tim Kaine and Bob Casey, say) did somewhat better.
I’m ignoring a bunch of the Senate races because I don’t see much to be gleaned from them. Jon Tester ran to Harris’ right in Montana and did 7% better, but Harris was never going to be conservative enough to win Montana — and as it turned out, Tester wasn’t either. Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks ran almost 8% behind Harris (and won anyway), but that’s more a reflection on her opponent, former governor Larry Hogan, one of the few non-MAGA Republican candidates. (It suggests that a moderate Republican could have won a landslide on the scale of Nixon in 1972 or LBJ in 1964.)
If you saw much election advertising, you know that Republicans worked hard to paint Harris as part of the “radical left”. I don’t think they’d have done that if they thought moving left would help her.
Things I think I know. I don’t have a sweeping theory, but I’ll offer a few tentative pieces of a theory.
We lost the information war. The aspect of this campaign I found most personally frustrating was how much of the pro-Trump argument centered on things that simply aren’t true. Our cities are not hellholes. There is no migrant crime wave. Crime in general is not rising. Most of the countries that compete with us would love to have our economy. Inflation is just about beaten. America was far from “great” when Trump left office in 2021. Trump has no magic plan for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. The justice system has favored Trump, not persecuted him.
I hate to say this, but it’s true: Ignorance won. And it will keep winning until we realize that we can’t win by playing politics as usual. This isn’t the same world. Knocking 100 doors is a personal connection that might win a small race — I don’t know that it can change the larger races. Trump’s folks weren’t knocking doors. They were lying to the masses through an extreme right-wing reality that most of us can’t conceive.
This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter. And that is why Donald Trump won.
It’s hard to know how important the pervasive misperception of facts really was. Did people believe Trump’s nonsense because it was actually convincing? Or did they want to support Trump for some other reason and latched onto whatever pro-Trump “facts” they could find? (Birtherism was like that. People who didn’t want to admit that a Black president scared or angered them instead claimed to be convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, despite clear evidence to the contrary.)
Past presidential campaigns have included some misinformation, but they revolved much more around philosophical disagreements not easily reduced to facts, like the significance of the national debt, or how to balance the public and private sectors.
One of the big questions going forward is whether Democrats want to continue being the reality-based party. I hope we do, just for the sake of my conscience. But if so, how do we make that work in the current information environment?
Harris had a steep hill to climb. Around the world, countries went through a period of inflation as their economies reopened after the pandemic. And around the world, the governments in power got thrown out. Here’s how Matt Yglesias put it just before the election:
The presumption is that Kamala Harris is — or at least might be — blowing it, either by being too liberal or too centrist, too welcoming of the Liz Cheneys of the world or not welcoming enough or that there is something fundamentally off-kilter about the American electorate or American society.
Consider, though, that on Oct. 27, Japan’s long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party suffered one of its worst electoral results. In late September, Austria’s center-right People’s Party saw an 11-percentage-point decline in vote share and lost 20 of its 71 seats in Parliament. Over the summer, after being in power for 14 years, Britain’s Conservative Party collapsed in a landslide defeat, and France’s ruling centrist alliance lost over a third of its parliamentary seats.
… It is not a left-right thing. Examples show that each country has unique circumstances. Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium. This year the center-left governing coalition in Portugal got tossed out. Last year the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the incumbent center-right governing party in the Netherlands, finished third in an election dominated by far-right parties.
I’m reluctant to give this explanation too much credit, because it says this election was a one-off and there’s nothing really to learn, other than to avoid being in power at the end of a pandemic. So in that sense it’s too easy. But it’s also a real thing that is an important part of the picture.
Harris’ outreach to Republican women came up empty. I’m not going to say it was a bad idea, but it didn’t work. I haven’t seen an exit poll that specifically breaks out Republican women, but the overall slippage among women in general makes it unlikely that many Liz Cheney Republicans crossed over.
After Trump’s 2016 win, big-city journalists trying to figure out Trump voters made countless trips to small-town diners. This time, I’d like to see them hang out in upscale suburban coffee shops and talk to women in business suits. Why did so many of them stay loyal to their party’s anti-woman candidate?
Democrats need a utopian vision. If Democrats had complete control and could remake America however we wanted, what would that look like? I honestly don’t know.
It’s not like Democrats don’t stand for anything. I can list a bunch of things an unconstrained Democratic administration would do, like make sure everyone gets the health care they need, raise taxes on billionaires, ban assault weapons, cut fossil fuel emissions, and make states out of D. C. and Puerto Rico. Maybe it would also reform the food system and break up the tech monopolies, though the details on those two are fuzzy.
But a list of policies doesn’t add up to a vision.
Whatever you think of it, libertarianism provided pre-MAGA conservatives with a utopian vision for decades. Republicans didn’t usually run on an explicitly libertarian platform, but libertarian rhetoric and libertarian philosophy was always in the background. (Reagan in his first inaugural address: “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”) Trump mostly turned away from that, and slogans like “America First” and “Make America Great Again” may be vague, but they also evoke something sweeping.
I can’t think of anything comparable on the left. The communist vision collapsed with the Soviet Union, and I don’t know anybody who wants to revive it. But in the absence of a political vision, we’re left with a technocracy: Do what the experts think will work best.
This is a problem a new face won’t solve. Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or even AOC is not a vision.
What happens next? It’s Trump’s move. We don’t know yet who he’s going to appoint to high office or what the agenda of the new Congress will be. Establishing authoritarian government is work, and he may not have the energy for it. Maybe he’ll get so distracted by seeking his revenge against individuals that he won’t get around to systematically destroying democracy. We’ll see.
I’m reminded of a story Ursula le Guin told decades ago, repeating something from another woman’s novel: A female character discovers her baby eating a manuscript.
The damage was not, in fact, as great as it appeared at first sight to be, for babies, though persistent, are not thorough.
Trump has many babyish traits. We can hope that he won’t be thorough enough to do as much damage as we now fear.
This Adam Gurri article is full of good advice, but I especially appreciate this:
The biggest weakness of The Women’s March was its lack of strategic objective or timing. It simply demonstrated mass dissatisfaction with the Trump administration the day after it began. The best use of mass protest is in response to something specific. It does not even need to be an action, it can be as simple as some specific thing that Trump or a member of his administration says. But it has to have some substance, some specific area of concern. Perhaps it is about prosecuting his enemies. Perhaps it is about mass deportations. No one doubts there will be a steady supply of choices to latch onto. Those seeking to mobilize protests need to make sure they do pick something specific to latch onto, and be disciplined in making opposition to it the loudest rhetoric of the protest.
This time around, I don’t expect protesting against Trump himself to get very far. His followers expect it; they will just roll their eyes and talk about “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. But protesting something Trump does will at least draw attention to that thing. We have to wait for him to do something objectionable. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be a long wait.
In the meantime, prepare. Take care of yourself. Regain your balance.
What the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times aren’t saying speaks volumes.
Newspaper endorsements seldom garner much attention. (The New York Times endorsed Harris almost a month ago. Did you notice?) It’s debatable whether such endorsements move many votes, though I think they used to. As a 12-year-old in 1968, one of my first political actions was to stand near my hometown’s central square, where Lincoln once debated Douglas, and hand out copies of the Times’ editorial endorsing Hubert Humphrey. Clearly the Humphrey campaign thought the newspaper’s voice might have some influence, even a thousand miles from Manhattan.
The problem here isn’t that newspapers are obligated to make endorsements. Whether news organizations should endorse candidates or show a public face of neutrality is a question journalists can debate in good faith. Earlier in their history, both the WaPo and the LAT had periods where they didn’t endorse presidential candidates. Rival news organizations CNN and NPR still don’t. I’m on the editorial committee of the hyperlocal Bedford Citizen, which serves the 14 thousand people of Bedford, Massachusetts. We don’t endorse candidates, or even take positions on controversial local issues (despite the fact that members of the editorial committee are often fairly unified in our opinions).
Changing policies is also not the problem. Individual news organizations should be free to change their endorsement policies (whatever they are) whenever they want, or to decide in some election cycle that neither candidate deserves their support. But both the process and the timing of these particular decisions augur badly for the future of American democracy.
WaPo’s Publisher Lewis put a principled spin on the paper’s non-endorsement, framing it
as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.
However, both the LAT and the WaPo have endorsed senate candidates this year, so the principle here escapes me. And if readers can make up their own minds, why have an editorial page at all? If you have an editorial department and a decision process for making endorsements, why not trust it? And after your editorial department comes to a decision, what valuable new insight does an owner bring to the table?
That last question is what makes these non-endorsements so disturbing: The owner brings a business point of view. An owner can see how a new administration, particularly a corrupt and vengeful new administration, might use the power of government to attack either the paper itself or the owner’s unrelated businesses. Conversely, such an administration might also rain benefits on a supportive media-company-owner’s businesses, like Bezos’ Blue Origin or Elon Musk’s Starlink. (LAT owner Patrick Soon-Shiong has a variety of business interests in pharmaceuticals, energy, and biotech. I could not easily guess which carrots or sticks a second Trump administration might use to influence him. Compared to Bezos or Musk he is a mere pauper, with a net worth just over $7 billion.)
During the first Trump administration, Bezos (whose much larger business is Amazon) saw what can happen when his newspaper becomes too annoying.
In 2019, Trump found his lever. Amazon was due to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon. The Pentagon suddenly shifted course and denied Amazon the contract. A former speechwriter for Defense Secretary James Mattis reported that Trump had directed Mattis to “screw Amazon.”
This is the context in which the Post’s decision to spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris should be considered.
In other words, the owners of one (or maybe two) major American newspapers appear to be giving in to intimidation/bribery. Their actions (or non-actions) are teaching Donald Trump that intimidation/bribery works. So if he is elected next week, they will see more.
The WaPo’s and LAT’s silence illustrates what fascism expert Jason Stanley calls “anticipatory obedience“, a primary pattern in democracies that surrender to autocrats: Don’t wait for the lash to fall. Anticipate what the autocrat will require of you and obey in advance. (Stanley himself makes the connection with the newspaper non-endorsements here.)
Roots are important, of course. As recently as the 1970s, The Post did not endorse a candidate for president. As recently as centuries ago, there was no Post and the country had a king! Go even further back, and the entire continent of North America was totally uninhabitable, and we were all spineless creatures who lived in the ocean, and certainly there were no Post subscribers.
But if I were the paper, I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement. I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.
A friend who works for #WaPo marketing dept says there’s a #WaPoMeltDown in their business unit following the news as digital subscriptions cancellations have hit 60k barely 8 hrs after decision not to endorse. Cancellation rate is unprecedented and we’re barely 24 hours into it.
But as damaging as this might be to the WaPo business model, it’s hard to imagine it having a noticeable impact on Bezos-scale wealth.
The impact Bezos’ decision is having on American democracy is easier to see. Norman Rockwell famously illustrated Freedom of Speech by painting a man wearing working-class clothes standing up at a public meeting. All eyes are on him, and he seems to be about to speak his mind. His own eyes tilt upward, as if he were being inspired by a high ideal. Maybe he what he says will change minds and convince his fellow citizens to take some worthy action.
But picture, for a moment, a different way that scene might play out: Some rich employer or local political boss might shoot him a dirty look, causing the man to think better of speaking and sit back down. His refusal to speak also would have an influence on fellow citizens, but a less positive one.
That’s what has happened here.
The Post’s slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. But democracy also dies in silence, particularly if those moments of silence happen when everyone is looking at you and waiting for you to speak.
If you can’t see any sense in the pro-Trump case, you’re looking at the wrong level.
“How can this election be close?”
It’s a cry of frustration I hear almost every day in one way or another, not just from Substack bloggers and TV talking heads, but also on social media and from personal friends.
Sure, there are about as many Republicans as Democrats in the country, and as many conservatives as liberals. But one of the two candidates is Donald Trump. I could easily imagine someone like Nikki Haley winning. But the case against Trump should be both obvious and compelling.
How is this election close? How is it still possible that he could win? Is half the country as far gone as Ruben Bolling’s version of Snoopy?
If you feel this frustration, imagine what it’s like for bloggers like me. Day after day, I motivate myself with this myth: If I could only explain things clearly enough, people would understand; and once they understood, the great majority of them would do the right thing. So the prospect of another Trump presidency doesn’t just make me fear for my country, it undermines my identity.
More and more it becomes apparent that the problem isn’t that half the country doesn’t understand. Many of them actively want a fascist government that will implement the cruelty they feel in their hearts. Many who aren’t openly rooting for that cruelty refuse to understand what Trump is, and no one can make them understand against their will. They will accept any excuse for his behavior, even excuses that shift from month to month and contradict the previous excuses.
Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Now I can try to go back to being calm and reasonable.
A few weeks ago I took a long, leisurely driving trip from my home in Massachusetts out to west-central Illinois, where I grew up. I led a church service there, and then took a long, leisurely drive back. Along the way, I saw the lawn signs in neighborhoods very different from mine, and I heard campaign ads not just for the national race, but for a variety of close Senate races.
I think I understand something now.
Fantasies of crime. In the northwest neck of Pennsylvania, road closures threw me off of I-90 and sent me through a small town that sits between Cleveland and Buffalo, but is outside the orbit of either city. In a peaceful middle-class neighborhood I saw numerous yard signs that said
Trump safety Kamala crime
I doubt the people who live in those houses are recent victims of crime or live in any realistic state of fear. I also doubt that they have looked very deeply into the crime problem nationally. If they had, they would know that crime has been dropping for decades, and was no better under Trump than under Biden and Harris. Crime briefly blipped upward during both the Trump and Biden years of the Covid pandemic, but in recent years the long-term decline has resumed.
Unlike many of the fantasy problems Trump presents in his speeches, he at least has proposed fantasy solutions to this one: deport all those brown people with criminality in their DNA, and stop making the police follow rules.
The trans “threat”. Trans people figure prominently in several of the ads I saw. One purported to compare the Trump military to the “woke” Harris military. The scenes representing Trump were of a drill sergeant screaming abuse at recruits. The ones representing Harris showed dancers of indeterminate gender. We are supposed to draw the “obvious” conclusions that these images are typical of Trump and Harris military policies, and that the abused recruits will perform better on the battlefield than the gender-fluid recruits.
An attack ad directed at Sherrod Brown said that he voted to allow men to compete in women’s sports. An anti-Harris ad said she supported paying for the sex-change operations of criminals in prison. It concluded “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” During the Olympics, Trump falsely said that a gold-medal-winning female boxer was a man who had “transitioned”, and implied that women competing against her were in danger. Republicans often attack the inclusion of transwomen in women’s sports by invoking the image of men beating up on women.
Again, these ads seem directed at people whose lives are not affected by the issues being raised. The Algerian boxer Trump attacked was not trans. The actual number of transwomen athletes in school sports is tiny — about 40 out of 500,000 NCAA athletes, according to one report — and no women’s league in any sport in the country is dominated by trans stars. The real stars of women’s sports — Caitlin Clark, for example, or Serena Williams — were identified as female at birth. Transwomen who have taken puberty-blocking drugs have only minor advantages over other high-school or college-age women. The problem of transwomen beating down “real” women is itself not real.
Similarly, the number of trans soldiers in our military or trans inmates in our prisons is tiny. Kicking out the one or making the other pay for their own surgery is not going to perceptibly improve the daily lives of MAGA voters.
Immigrants “destroying our country”. The third major argument, which I hear more from Trump himself than in TV ads, is that immigrants are “destroying our country“. The examples Trump offers are horrifying: In Springfield, Ohio “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Aurora, Colorado is a “war zone”, occupied by “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world”.
But none of that is true, and even local Republican officials push back against Trump’s false claims. Such lies can’t be aimed at winning votes in the communities he’s talking about, because local people can simply open their eyes and see that the world he’s describing isn’t real.
So the target audience must be elsewhere.
Something similar is going on in Trump’s rhetoric about American cities, especially major cities in key swing states: Milwaukee is “horrible”. Philadelphia is “ravaged by bloodshed and crime”. If Harris is elected, he claims, “the whole country will end up being like Detroit.” (Harris and Detroit struck back with this ad, about how the city has rebuilt itself: America will be like Detroit? “He should be so god damn lucky.”)
“These cities,” Trump said in a 2020 town hall. “It’s like living in hell.”
Those comments aren’t intended to earn votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Detroit — Democratic strongholds where people can simply open their eyes and see that on the whole life is not particularly hellish. Rather, they’re aimed at suburban and rural voters who never go to the cities because they believe terrible things about them.
What’s going on? I set out to explain how this election can be close, and so far I haven’t. If you think of politics as being about problems and solutions, none of the arguments Trump and other MAGA Republicans are making add up. They are offering to solve problems their voters don’t have, and to protect them from people who do them no harm. (Trans people, for example, have issues with their own genders, not yours. Crime in Atlanta hurts Atlantans, not people in Marjorie Taylor Green’s district, where the largest city, Rome, has 37,000 people. If undocumented immigrants affect your life, it’s probably by picking the vegetables you eat or washing the dishes in your favorite restaurant.)
So how do all these arguments work? Why doesn’t it matter that so many of them are easily debunked? And how do they coalesce into a coherent whole? Fortunately, we don’t have to figure this out for ourselves, because we can call in a MAGA expert: Tucker Carlson. Speaking at a Trump rally in Georgia Wednesday, Tucker pulled it all together:
If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it, and those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them.
No. There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. [loud cheering] Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know: “Get to your room right now and think about what you did.”
And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way. It has to be this way, because it’s true. And you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.”
That’s not said in the spirit of hate. It’s not said in the spirit of vengeance or bigotry. Far from it. It’s said in the spirit of justice, which is the purest and best thing there is. And without it, things fall apart. …
Not only do I think Donald Trump’s going to win, I think that the vibe shift has been so profound. … What you smell around you is the return of freedom, it’s the return of the country you grew up in. …
[The Democrats] need to lose. And at the end of all that, when they tell you they’ve won: No! You can look them straight in the face and say, “I’m sorry. Dad’s home. And he’s pissed.” [1]
How does that pull it all together? Most of us don’t parent teen-age girls we wish we could spank, so how does this little vignette capture why we should vote for Trump?
Let me explain: If you’re looking for the problems of ordinary American life, you’re looking in the wrong place. Trump is not talking about how you’re going to pay for college or find a job or afford a house or get healthcare or retire without starving. The problem his campaign is all about is on a different level altogether: You feel dislocated in today’s world.
What we found is that, whether they’re 30 or 70 years old, the typical RNC attendee thinks America was “great” when they were kids. They believe America lost its way coincidentally right at the time they were maturing into adulthood.
For whatever reason, they now find themselves living in a world very different from “the country you grew up in”. Maybe it’s all the people chattering in languages they don’t understand. Maybe it’s being told that it’s racist or sexist to talk the way they’ve always talked. Maybe it’s having to deal with people who don’t look like either men or women to them, and being told that they’re the problem when they can’t keep track of which name or pronoun to use. Maybe it’s not being able to assume that everybody’s Christian or heterosexual, or not knowing what’s funny now, or hearing music that doesn’t sound like music. Maybe it’s not being able to get a real person on the phone, or receiving 100 pieces of junk mail for every letter they actually want, or dealing with women who earn more than men. Maybe it’s not recognizing half the countries on the globe or being reminded about George Washington’s slaves or hearing “land acknowledgements” about the Native Americans who once occupied the property where they live.
The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave.
All the apparent problems Trump talks about are just symbols, just ways to get his hands around this larger, more ineffable problem. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, transsexuals, women who get abortions — they’re all just people who don’t know how to behave. And that’s why it doesn’t matter if he’s making up his facts or that some particular thing never really happened. People don’t know how to behave, and they make the whole world feel weird and scary That’s real.
Similarly, all the solutions he talks about are really just symbols of one solution: We need to put somebody in charge who will be strong enough to make people behave.
That’s what Tucker spelled out: Dad needs to come home, the old-fashioned kind of Dad who yells and judges and punishes. He’ll tell the bad kids they’re bad, and he’ll keep spanking them hard until they learn to be good.
And then America will be great again, like it was when all of us were children.
[1] This clip got a lot of play on social media and elsewhere, but most of the response focused on the spanking-little-girls aspect and ignored the fascist threat at the end: Even if Kamala Harris wins, MAGA will try to install its strongman.
In the final weeks before an election, a candidate is supposed to focus like a laser on some closing message that sums up why he or she should be elected rather than the opponent. Whether by mysterious design or simple inability, Donald Trump is doing something else.
But OK, you might think, that was two months out from the election. When you get down the final weeks, though, candidates start to focus on their closing arguments and the particular voters they think are persuadable. Kamala Harris, for example, is zeroing in on wavering Republicans, and gathering endorsements from former Trump administration officials. She’s centering that pitch on a Trump-is-unfit attack, and she’s also seeking working-class voters by promising to raise rather than cut billionaire taxes.
But we’re in the home stretch now, and Trump is still all over the place, doing weird and crazy stuff almost every day. Maybe this is some four-dimensional strategy only a stable genius can understand, or maybe the stress of the campaign is aggravating his dementia, so that he simply can’t focus or control himself.
In the last eight days, Trump has
threatened to use the military against political opponents like Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi, who he described as “the enemy within” [1]
praised legendary golfer Arnold Palmer by telling a lengthy anecdote about his penis size [2]
ended the Q&A portion of an appearance early and spent the final 40 minutes playing his Spotify playlist and doing some kind of old-man dance [3]
“answered” a question about breaking up Google by ranting about a Justice Department suit to stop Virginia from purging its voter rolls, then attacked the interviewer for asking questions he can’t answer about how his proposals would run up the national debt [4]
warned his audience about hydrogen cars (which most of us wouldn’t even know how to buy) blowing up and leaving your unidentifiable corpse hanging in a tree [5]
told Univision’s Latino viewers that January 6 was “a day of love” [6]
expressed his amazement that “Harvey Weinstein got schlonged”, as if Harvey were the victim in his story [7]
staged a fake media event at a closed McDonalds, where he served preselected supporters through the drive-up window [8]
I’ve relegated the details of these incidents to the footnotes, because I want you to appreciate the larger view: This guy has come unhinged.
This is a point that I think is worth making to the maybe-Trump voters you know, the people who may have voted for him before and don’t see why they shouldn’t do it again: He’s getting worse.
You can look at any of the incidents above and say, “Trump’s always said and done things other politicians wouldn’t. That’s part of his charm.” But not like this, not every day. You may have liked him in 2016 or even 2020, but he’s not that man any more. [9]
Father Time is undefeated, and he gets us all eventually. What we’re seeing here is exactly how dementia works: It takes our little quirks and exaggerates them until they become serious dysfunctions.
Look at Trump’s deterioration from 2015 to today and project it forward four more years. Now think about 2028 Trump wielding all the power of the President of the United States.
[1] A week ago Sunday, in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump started talking about “the enemy within”, who he defined vaguely as “radical left lunatics”. He suggested they be “handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
Later in the interview, Trump said the “enemy from within” is “more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries,” declaring, “The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff.” Schiff, of course, is a prominent California Democrat running for Senate, who served as the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial and has therefore been attacked by Trump for years.
[2] Saturday, Trump spoke at the Arnold Palmer Airport in Latrobe, PA, where the late great golfer was born. Like any politician would, Trump decided to say something nice about the local hero. So he rambled about Palmer for 12 minutes, leading up to praising Palmer’s penis.
Arnold Palmer was all man. I mean no disrespect to women, I love women, but he was all man. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros they came out of there saying ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say it. I had to say it. I had to tell you the shower part because it’s true. … He was really something special.
In response, there’s something I have to say: One dementia symptom is called “disinhibition“. It’s when you start saying and doing things your mind would have stopped you from saying and doing, if it were still working properly.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem wound up in that embarrassing position where sycophants in authoritarian systems (like North Korea or the Republican Party) often find themselves: She had to pretend that what Trump was doing made sense. So she spent 40 minutes up there in front of the crowd, imitating his dance moves and spelling out YMCA.
[4] Tuesday at the Economic Club of Chicago Trump was asked whether the Justice Department should break up Google. Apparently, the phrase “Justice Department” set off something in his brain, and he went into a totally irrelevant rant against DoJ filing suit to stop Virginia from purging its voter rolls so close to an election. (DoJ is right in this suit, BTW. Late purges are a prime voter-suppression tactic that violates the National Voter Registration Act.) After the questioner, Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait, reminded him that the question was about Google, Trump aired his personal grievances with Google and said he would “do something” to the company without ever pointing to a genuine antitrust issue.
Later, when Micklethwait asked whether his policy proposals would drive up the national debt (they would), Trump went on a personal tirade: “You’re wrong. You’ve been wrong. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
[5] The hydrogen car rant also happened Tuesday. Here’s how Vox’ Zack Beauchamp covered it:
[6] This was Wednesday. He not only gaslit Latino voters at a Univision event, claiming that January 6 was a “day of love”, but also dodged a question about what will happen to food prices after he deports the majority of our farm workers.
[8] Sunday he staged a weird media event: He went to a closed McDonalds, put on an apron, and served food through the drive-up window to pre-selected supporters who pretended to be customers. (If you somehow got the impression that he actually worked a shift at a McDonalds, even for a few minutes, you’ve been fooled.)
[9] Don’t believe me? Look at this clip from 2015. He’s answering questions from the crowd, and one comes from Maria Butina (who later turned out to be a Russian agent). Butina asks about how he’ll deal with Russia after he becomes president. Trump listens to her question, puts it in a broader context, and then answers it. That never happens any more.
Maybe you loved 2015 Trump or maybe you hated him, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s not that man any more.
The Weekly Sift 