The Weekly Sift

Are any of Trump’s distractions worth chasing? How do we decide which ones?

Midway through his debate with Kamala Harris, Donald Trump had to have known he was losing. Trump’s debate technique relies on rattling his opponent, and Harris was clearly not rattled. She was systematically hitting the points she had set out to make, while he was allowing her to bait him into wasting his time on things voters don’t care about, like his crowd sizes or how he really didn’t lose the 2020 election. And the moderators, in contrast to his debate with Biden, were not letting him lie with impunity.

He had been insisting on — and getting — the last word on virtually every topic, which normally ought to mean that he was winning. But all he had to do was look at his opponent to realize that he wasn’t. She wanted him to keep talking, and he couldn’t stop. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the next day’s headlines would be: “Trump Loses Debate: ‘stable genius’ gets humiliated by woman ‘dumb as a rock’.” That could set the narrative of the campaign for weeks.

He couldn’t let that happen. So he used a tried and true Trump technique: He said something outrageous. That won’t be the narrative, I imagine him thinking, this will be.

Look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.

And it worked, mostly. I mean, the media did notice that Harris humiliated Trump in their mano-a-womano confrontation. But that narrative didn’t stay in the headlines long. The audacity of Trump’s lie; the fact that even Republican local officials, like the mayor of Springfield and the governor of Ohio, wouldn’t back him up; the immediate destructive consequences for the town he claimed to be defending — it demanded attention. (BTW: His reference to Aurora, which he had also talked prior to the debate, was based on a false story about immigrants as well.)

The conundrum. I can’t point fingers here, because last week I also devoted a post to the Trump/Vance Springfield libel. (That post got more page views than last week’s other featured post, which analyzed what recent polls predict about Electoral College totals.) So I understand the difficult choice editors face: If you just let the libel pass, the public may imagine that there’s some kernel of truth behind it, and real people could suffer from that misperception. But if you give it a thorough debunking, you have helped Trump shift the narrative from his debate humiliation to immigration, an issue that he thinks plays in his favor.

So as a distraction, the Haitian Fright was less like the golden apples Melanion dropped in Atalanta’s path, and more like the escape tactics supervillains have used since the early days of comics: Hide a few gas bombs in a crowded area, and Batman will have more to worry about than where the Joker is vanishing to. If we all refused to take Trump’s bait, innocent people would pay the price.

Post-shame politics. Under the standards of a mere decade-or so ago, Trump’s tactic wouldn’t have worked: Being caught in an obvious and hateful lie used to shame a candidate, and his supporters as well. Headlines like “Candidate X Lies Again About Y” would sink a campaign, because voters wouldn’t want to associate themselves with the liar, or find themselves in a position where they had to defend the lie in front of their friends. Whatever advantage a candidate might gain by changing the subject would be swamped by the moral outrage his lie would call down.

But the innovation of Trump and his MAGA movement has been to transcend shame. “Grab them by the pussy” didn’t sink his 2016 campaign. “Good people on both sides” didn’t derail his administration. Probably hundreds of thousands of Americans died unnecessarily because Trump happy-talked his way through the opening months of the Covid pandemic. (“The Covid Crisis Group concluded that ‘Trump was a co-morbidity’ with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously.”) Yet Trump could say during the debate

We did a phenomenal job with the pandemic. … Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. We made ventilators for the entire world. We got gowns. We got masks. We did things that nobody thought possible.

The standards of truth-telling have so eroded around Trump that this blatant rewriting of recent history mostly went unnoticed.

But many of us (myself included) are having a hard time adjusting to this new world. We had always been taught that truth endures, while lies are ephemeral. But Trump has flipped that axiom of philosophy on its head: He can keep repeating a lie until fact-checkers get bored and truth-tellers collapse from exhaustion. All the while, his supporters will stand by him, reveling in the reflected glory of his victory over reality.

And yet we hope — and this is what the future of American democracy will ultimately hang on — that truth still matters somewhere around the edges of the MAGA movement. Perhaps a few percent of independents or swing voters continue to care about it. Perhaps even a handful of Republicans chafe at constantly repeating lies. (I’m looking at you, Governor DeWine. You resist the lie, but support the liar. How long can you hold that contorted position?) Maybe, in a close election, truth could still make a difference.

And yet, recent history shows that truth by itself is not enough. The American people already know Trump is a liar, just as they know many other negative things about him: He is a felon, an abuser of women, the perpetrator of numerous frauds (a fraudulent university, fraudulent foundation, fraudulent business), a racist, and much else. He has so far avoided going to trial for three of the four indictments against him, but the evidence in those indictments remains unrefuted.

Given all that, it is remarkable that only 53% of Americans report having an unfavorable opinion of the man. But will they all vote for his opponent? Unlikely.

Once, the fact that Trump is provably a bad man would have been enough to defeat him. But today, it no longer is.

This week’s squirrels. As the election approaches, the number of outrageous stories is mushrooming. As David Roberts put it:

It is getting very difficult to determine which MAGA fiasco is supposed to be a distraction from the other MAGA fiascos.

Just in the past eight days:

• Trump tweeted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” on Truth Social. I can’t find anything to compare this to. Has any presidential candidate ever announced his HATE for a pop-culture megastar who has done nothing more objectionable than endorse his opponent?
• Blame the Jews. Thursday, at an event that was supposed to be against antisemitism, Trump demonstrated how antisemitism works. If he loses, Trump said, “the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss”. No doubt the Proud Boys and other violent January 6 extremists are listening and will remember. Pogroms have been started for less.
• Mark Robinson is a “black NAZI!”. Also Thursday, CNN outed Trump’s handpicked candidate for governor of North Carolina for posting wildly over-the-top stuff on a porn website’s message board back in the early 2010s. Trump has remained silent about the reports, after previously giving Robinson a speaking slot at the Convention and calling him “Martin Luther King on steroids“.
• Legal is illegal. J. D. Vance has been calling the Haitians in Springfield “illegal aliens” even though he knows they’ve got temporary protected status under the law. Wednesday, he acknowledged that, but said he’s going to keep calling them “illegal” anyway. This is all part of keeping the cat-eating lie going. (Oh, and this is trivia, but it sticks in my craw: Vance said “Haitia” (HAY-sha) instead of “Haiti”. Imagine if Biden had done that.)

And I still feel like I’m missing something. It would be easy to spend the week talking about nothing else.

What we’re being distracted from. I hear lots of frustration from Harris supporters (but not from Harris or Walz) about how anyone can still be on the fence in this election. How can anyone with sense and a conscience even consider voting for this guy, or even staying home on election day?

But let’s put that frustration aside and face the fact: Something like 5-10% of people either still haven’t made up their minds or aren’t willing to tell pollsters what they’ve decided. The key to winning this election, for either side, lies with convincing those people or making their support firm enough to get them out to vote.

Getting frustrated at them isn’t likely to move them in our direction. Also, the fact that Donald Trump is a vile person has been well covered. As I’ve already noted, he’s a felon, a fraudster, a scam artist, a race baiter, an abuser of women, and all sorts of other things. MAGA types deny all that, but I don’t think they’re fooling a lot of people outside their bubble. People know, they just don’t care. Hitting that point harder also isn’t going to move them.

Here’s how I picture the maybe-Trump voter: They’re mainly motivated by pre-pandemic nostalgia. They knew in 2019 that Trump was a vile person, but it didn’t seem to matter. They were doing fine and felt like the country was doing fine. If electing him again would bring that back, that sounds good.

Meanwhile, a lot of bad stuff has happened since 2019. Yeah, a bunch of that stuff happened in 2020 under Trump, but it’s easy to overlook that. Life has been disrupted, and the most visible disruption is that there was a lot of inflation in from 2021 to 2023. It’s largely over now, but the cumulative effect is still with us.

The economy. The argument against that view is a little complicated, and is hard to get people to pay attention to: The pandemic had two main effects around the world: a surge in unemployment before vaccines were available (under Trump), and a surge of inflation afterward (under Biden) as the money governments created to keep people fed, housed, and out of bankruptcy hit the reopening post-vaccine economy.

Trump doesn’t usually get blamed for the job losses, but Biden does get blamed for the inflation. Neither should be: Those two tidal waves hit the whole world, not just the US, and the US has surfed those waves better than any other economy. No other country has gotten its jobs back and tamed the post-vaccine inflation as quickly as we have.

It’s a tricky message to communicate: The economy still isn’t wonderful, but the Biden/Harris administration has done a great job managing it through a difficult stretch.

That message needs to be coupled with a simpler message: Everything Trump is proposing will make the economy worse. His high tariffs will raise prices not just on everything we import, but on American products that compete with imported products. Deporting millions of people will make it hard for businesses to find workers, which will also raise prices, as well as constrict the economy in other ways.

In short, putting Trump back in the White House won’t make it 2019 again. The pandemic really happened, and the effects will still be here.

Non-economic messages. Trump is relying on the complexity of the economic situation to keep voters bamboozled, but the squirrels are supposed to keep them from noticing more obvious things

• Women are dying because of the abortion bans he made possible. ProPublica recently put names on two of the corpses Trump is responsible for: Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller. Harris supports legislation to restore the pre-Dobbs status quo. If your 2019 nostalgia extends to how abortion was handled, Harris will bring that back
• A second Trump administration will be far more autocratic than the first. Project 2025 (which Trump denied responsibility for after it became unpopular) outlines the plans in detail. But even if you don’t believe Trump will follow that plan, the general outlines are clear: His first administration started out staffed by generic Republicans who were constantly telling him that he couldn’t do illegal things. By the end of his term, he had gotten rid of most of those people, which is how the January 6 insurrection happened. His second administration will be staffed by people like Kash Patel, who will do whatever he tells them. And he will enter a second term with a Supreme Court guarantee of immunity from subsequent prosecution, so if a staffer does have the temerity to tell him his orders are illegal, he can tell them to jump in a lake.
• Harris believes in democracy and the rule of law, but Trump does not. Trump believes in the rule of Trump. Harris will obey laws and court orders. She will accept the results of elections, even if she doesn’t like them.
• Harris believes in science. Trump believes in whatever is convenient. The worst of Covid is behind us, but we’re in an era where pandemics are becoming more frequent. If another one hits in the next four years, we’ll be better off with Harris in the White House, because she will face reality rather than try to happy-talk through it.
• Harris will continue fighting climate change. Trump will undo everything Biden has done to fight climate change. “Drill, baby, drill” is a recipe for stronger hurricanes, bigger wildfires, and unlivable temperatures in much of the United States. Climate change around the world will bring more refugees to our borders. Trying to hang on to the dying fossil fuel economy will put us behind the rest of the world, especially China.
• Dictators are not our friends. Trump admires and wants to be like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He would give Ukraine to Putin and endanger NATO allies like Poland.

Handling the squirrels. Before you react, ask yourself if there are real victims, like the Haitains of Springfield. If there aren’t, make sure you don’t get too distracted from the points above.

In general, we should notice the squirrels, bookmark them, and be ready to show them to people who need to see them, like undecided Swifties and Jews who think Trump’s support of Israel cancels out his overall antisemitism. But let’s not pound on them. As a lead argument, Trump-is-vile won’t persuade the people we need to be persuading.

Once the election board picks a side, does it matter what the voters want?

The usual methods of stealing elections go back to Athens and Rome: Bring in unqualified voters of your own, or use force or trickery to prevent your opposition’s voters from showing up in the right place. If voters vote by dropping tokens in a box, miscount the tokens, or maybe lose boxes from precincts where you don’t expect to do well. There’s a long history of such tried-and-true methods being used in the United States, and voting systems are designed to avoid such shenanigans.

For the most part they’ve been designed pretty well, and by now actual election-day cheating is fairly rare (despite Donald Trump’s baseless claims about every election he’s ever lost, going back to the Iowa caucuses in 2016 and even the Emmys “The Apprentice” lost). That’s why most current cheating goes on before election day, by “purging” the voting roles of legitimate voters, or requiring IDs that your voters are more likely to have than your opposition’s voters.

2020. But in 2020, Trump came up with a novel scheme to cheat after all the votes had been cast and counted: At every level from county election boards to the counting of electoral votes in Congress on January 6, Trump did his best to delay certification of Biden’s victory. The goal of this delay was not just to declare himself the winner (as he hoped Mike Pence would do by counting the votes of his fake electors), but to delegitimize his loss by pushing certification past certain legal deadlines.

If January 6 had come and gone with no recognized winner, he might have been able to push the decision into the House, where each state has only one vote and Republican delegations outnumbered Democratic delegations. Or possibly the succession might have been decided in the Supreme Court, where the 6-3 Republican majority has shown its willingness to decide cases on a partisan basis. If January 20 had arrived and no new president could be inaugurated, then he might simply have stayed in power temporarily until … well, until never. If voters had taken to the streets to protest their disenfranchisement, right-wing militias could make sure that demonstrations turned into riots that required federal troops and temporary martial law.

At each stage, Trump would hold out the promise of a peaceful transfer of power … but not yet. Here’s what Ted Cruz was proposing on January 6:

And what I would urge of this body is that we do the same [as in the contested Hayes/Tilden election of 1876]. That we [appoint an] electoral commission to conduct a 10-day emergency audit, consider the evidence, and resolve the claims [of fraud]. For those on the Democratic aisle who says, say there is no evidence, they’ve been rejected, then you should rest [in] comfort if that’s the case.

From today’s perspective, when Trump is still making claims of fraud despite uncovering no evidence in nearly four years, it seems naive to imagine that any ten-day audit could have resolved the doubts Trump had falsely instilled in his followers. If the electoral commission didn’t decide in Trump’s favor, then it too would have been “rigged” and “fake”. So then it’s January 16, with four days to inauguration, and there’s still no president-elect. What then?

2024. Four years later, Trump has had time to refine this plan. In many ways, he’s in worse shape to pull it off: He isn’t president. So if Harris wins, but her victory can’t be certified by January 20, it’s Biden who might stay in power. (Biden might then resign and let Harris become president until her victory could be certified.) And as President of the Senate, it’s Kamala Harris who will preside over the joint session of Congress on January 6.

Also, one state where the election is likely to be close (Arizona) now has a Democratic governor, but another (Nevada) has flipped in the other direction.

But he has one advantage now that he didn’t have in 2020: Despite the lack of evidence, the myth of the 2020 stolen election has become dogma among Republicans, who have worked to make local election posts more partisan. Republican officials like Aaron van Langevelde, who voted to certify Biden’s victory in Michigan because that was his legal duty, have been replaced by people more loyal to Trump than to the law.

Across the country, county-level boards of canvassers have what is legally known as ministerial duties. They aren’t supposed to be investigators and they aren’t supposed to make judgment calls. The law assigns them the mundane job of receiving vote totals from the precincts, adding them up, and passing the information up to state officials by some set deadline. Recounts and challenges to the votes-as-first-counted are somebody else’s job.

But Republicans see county election boards as places to stand while they throw monkey wrenches into the system. If counties don’t certify totals and pass them up the line, then states also can’t certify elections. This has been tried out in various state and local elections since 2020, usually unsuccessfully. (Often the refusal to certify comes from rural Republican counties who are protesting election fraud that they imagine happens in urban Democratic counties.)

A few weeks ago, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) published a report Election Certification Under Threat. The report identifies 35 officials in eight states who have already refused to certify an election. Nearly all of them are either still in office or likely to be reappointed at any moment. The report lists, state by state, the actions that can be taken to overcome the threat.

Those steps usually begin with a mandamus lawsuit. Mandamus is Latin for “we command”, and is related to the English word mandate. In a mandamus case, a court has the power to force an official to do his or her job. If the official refuses, the court has options that vary by state. The court may appoint a new official, or fine or even jail the resisting official.

What gives a court this kind of power is the ministerial nature of the job. Typical state law says that election supervisors shall (not should or even may) certify an election within a certain time period. If they don’t, they’re violating the law. Even if the officials are correct in thinking that vote totals are tainted, dealing with that is somebody else’s job. They’re just supposed to collect numbers from the precincts, total them up, and pass the results on.

Mandamus suits should work just about everywhere. Local officials can call attention to their cause by initially refusing the certify an election, but ultimately they’ll have to.

Georgia. But “just about anywhere” may not include Georgia, which Biden carried by less than 12,000 votes in 2020, and where Harris/Trump polls are very close.

In a series of meetings in July and August, the Georgia State Election Board voted 3-2 to change the rules governing local election boards. (The three members voting to change the rules all deny that Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020, despite the complete lack of evidence for that view. Trump has given them a shout-out at a political rally. When was the last time a national candidate paid any attention to a state election board?) Lawrence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut summarize the new rules and their apparent purpose:

The first rule requires local election officials to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into election results before certifying them. The term “reasonable inquiry” is dangerously elastic, creating an opening for authoritarians to do whatever they want. No sensible court would ever approve such a system, by which unelected appointees could issue open-ended election rules making certification discretionary, especially without any such directive from the legislature of Georgia to end democracy.

The second rule permits individual county board members “to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections prior to certification of results”. The opportunities are unlimited to delay certification by demanding that documents great and small be produced before certification.

One apparent goal is to bypass federal and state law requiring states’ votes certified in time for Congress, on 6 January 2025, to bless the election results. If enough states’ certifications are stalled so that too few electors are actually appointed as of 6 January, under the 12th amendment, the presidential election goes to the House. There, per the constitution, the election is determined by one vote per state delegation. Given gerrymandering and how the House is structured, Republicans have held a majority of the state delegations for years. In November, by their votes, Trump would become president, regardless of whether he has won the electoral college vote or a popular vote majority.

Who are those guys? One unintended benefit of Trump’s relentless assault on democratic processes is that we all get a rolling civics lesson. Here’s some stuff I never knew before about the Georgia State Elections Board:

The board has five members: one appointed by the state House, one chosen by the state Senate, one each from the Republican and Democratic parties, and a nonpartisan chair selected by the General Assembly or by the governor if the General Assembly is not in session when there is a vacancy.

The three Trumpists trying to monkey-wrench Georgia elections are the House, Senate, and Republican Party appointees. The Democratic appointee and the chair appointed by Republican Governor Kemp voted against the new rules.

You may notice from that description that none are elected by the People of Georgia, and so they really shouldn’t (and almost certainly don’t) have the power to circumvent laws passed by the legislature. If state law says that the local election officials have until 5 p.m. the next Monday to certify Tuesday’s election (as it does say), the GSEB can’t authorize further delay.

Remedies. With that in mind, some Georgia voters and the Georgia Democratic Party are suing the GSEB in state court

To remedy these harms and prevent chaos in November, this Court should follow decades of binding precedent and declare both that the statutes mean exactly what they say and that SEB’s rules must be construed consistent with those statutes in order to be a valid exercise of SEB’s authority. …

Such relief is needed now, before the November 5 election and the start of the six-day clock the election code sets for certification. Election officials are already setting procedures and staffing for canvassing. Similarly, candidates and political organizations are already allocating resources and making efforts to ensure that every vote is counted. Withholding relief until a county board or other superintendent relies on the rules to delay certification or not certify at all risks disorder, including extremely rushed emergency judicial proceedings across multiple courts; imposes additional burdens on Georgia’s courts, election officials, and political organizations; and could lead to the discarding of valid votes cast by qualified electors

Democrats may have some allies in this effort: Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp. Both have denounced the new rules, and Kemp reportedly has asked the state attorney general to determine whether he can remove the GSEB’s three Trumpist members.

At a rally in Atlanta on August 5, Trump denounced Governor Kemp, who has consistently denied Trump’s claim that the 2020 Georgia election was rigged against him. But they have since patched up their differences and Kemp is supporting Trump. If Kemp removes board members Trump picked out for praise, though, the feud may start up again.

Harris’ best strategy: Win big, win everywhere. Of course, this disruption will only occur if Trump loses Georgia, and is only one of the tricks he can be expected to play in any state where the election is close. The best way to avoid another tense November, December, and early January is if Harris wins by margins large enough to dwarf Trump’s complaints, and to win in enough states that no single one is necessary for an Electoral College majority.

The most direct path for Harris to get 270 electoral votes (exactly) is to win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, along with the 2nd congressional district in Nebraska. (Nebraska and Maine give separate electoral votes to each of their districts. Nebraska’s lone Democratic electoral vote should cancel the lone Republican vote from Maine.) Also in play are Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. Winning two or three of those would protect the election from a lot of shenanigans.