A previous lawsuit to ban the drug used in about half of all US abortions failed at the Supreme Court for technical reasons. But a new suit fixes those problems. It also introduces some truly weird and creepy arguments. Is it really a problem if a state’s teen pregnancy rate gets too low?
Back in June, a lawsuit asking federal courts to ban the abortion drug mifepristone was thrown out unanimously by the Supreme Court on technical grounds: The plaintiffs (mainly physicians who don’t prescribe the drug) were not sufficiently affected by mifepristone’s availability to have standing to sue. So the Court never got to the heart of the case: whether the FDA was right to declare the drug safe to use.
Naturally, that couldn’t be the end of the story, so the anti-abortion forces are back with a new suit. This time three states — Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho — are suing the FDA, attempting to reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone for pregnancies of 7-10 weeks. And of course the suit has been filed in Amarillo, Texas (which has no connection to either the FDA or the plaintiff states) because that’s where the plaintiffs can be guaranteed to get the most anti-abortion federal judge: Matthew Kacsmaryk, who somehow failed to see the problems with the first suit. (Anti-abortion radicals Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas could see the standing issue, but not Kacsmaryk.)
The current suit has a much better standing argument: Missouri and Idaho have “almost completely banned” abortion, but their residents sometimes get mifepristone from another state. (Abortion is legal up to 22 weeks in Kansas, so I’m not sure why it joined the suit.) They then return home to use the drug, and if there are complications they may wind up in some home-state emergency room, where Medicaid may wind up paying the bill. This costs the states money, so they have suffered an injury the courts can redress.
But in addition to that reasoning, the lawsuit also includes some weird and creepy stuff, if you read deep enough into it.
Defendants’ [i.e., the FDA’s] actions are causing a loss in potential population or potential population increase. Each abortion represents at least one lost potential or actual birth. … Defendants’ efforts enabling the remote dispensing of abortion drugs has caused abortions for women in Plaintiff States and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the State in itself [due to] “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds”.
OK, we get it: Missouri and Idaho have reasons to want to increase their populations, and the FDA is interfering with their power to force unwilling women be their brood mares. How dare the Feds violate states rights like that?
And then it gets even a little creepier: A study has shown that birth rates increase the further that a woman has to drive to get an abortion, and that teen-age women (15-19) should be especially affected by this. (I suspect that’s because the younger ones can’t drive and the older ones probably don’t have their own cars.) But the recent bans are not raising the teen birth rate the way they ought to.
When data is examined in a way that reflects sensitivity to expected birth rates, these estimates strikingly “do not show evidence of an increase in births to teenagers aged 15-19,” even in states with long driving distances despite the fact that “women aged 15-19 … are more responsive to driving distances to abortion facilities than older women.” The study thus concludes that “one explanation may be that younger women are more likely to navigate online abortion finders or websites ordering mail-order medication to self-manage abortions. This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected.
So in particular, the FDA is interfering with the states’ right to make teenage girls be their brood mares. I can’t emphasize this enough: One “injury” Missouri and Idaho complain about is that their teen birth rates are too low.
And there’s one set of girls the suit calls special attention to: those in the foster care system, who might be able to sneak out and get mifepristone somehow or have it mailed to them.
As a result of Defendants’ actions, Plaintiffs have suffered injury to their sovereign interests in enacting and enforcing their laws. Defendants … seek to displace and nullify the States’ state-law parental rights of notice and consent for abortions for teen girls in foster care.
Just picture this for a second: A girl for one reason or another has lost her birth parents. Maybe they died, or maybe they misparented in some way that caused the state to take the girl away. Either way, there’s bound to be some trauma involved.
Traumatized girls sometimes take foolish risks, and it’s also possible they might be sexually abused by a foster parent or by some other adult their foster parents didn’t watch closely enough. So unwanted pregnancies happen, and Missouri’s abortion ban has no rape or statutory rape exception. But the girl is so desperate and so determined to end the pregnancy that she might figure out how to do something about it. Being such a loving parent, however, the state wants to thwart that desire, make her carry a pregnancy for nine months, and then give birth to a child she doesn’t want.
I think if I had gone through something like that, I might be a serial killer.
What lovely, God-fearing states you’ve got there, Missouri and Idaho. (And I still can’t figure out what Kansas is doing.)
Hamas’ October 7 attacks on Israel were a horrifying beginning to a horrifying year of violence and death.
One year ago today, Hamas fighters from Gaza crossed into Israel, killing 1,139 people, including 695 Israeli civilians. Often, war produces civilian casualties because unfortunate people are in the wrong place at the wrong time, but here the civilians seem to have been specifically targeted. More than half the civilians were killed while attending a music festival. Another 250 Israelis, including 38 children, were taken back to Gaza as hostages.
The attack was both tactically brilliant and a moral atrocity. It succeeded largely because Israel had not imagined Hamas could pull off such a thing. Afterwards, the world wondered how anyone could do such a thing.
Immediate reactions. For a time, Israel was the object of more worldwide sympathy than perhaps at any moment since its founding, and certainly since its victory in the 1967 war. Many Americans remembered the aftermath of 9-11, when Le Monde’s top headline was “Nous sommes tous américains“. (“We are all Americans”.) We recalled both the rush of feeling that the world was behind us, and the regret of recognizing how badly we had screwed that up by launching wars we had no idea how to end. To the extent that we supported Israel — and how could we not on October 8? — Americans hoped Israelis would learn from our bad example.
On October 10, Thomas Friedman raised the exact question somebody should have asked George W. Bush on 9/12: “What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?”
The October 7 attack had little military value. Rather, the monstrous attack was designed to provoke a response in kind, one that would show the world — especially the Arab world — what monsters the Israelis can be. Friedman’s advice: Don’t give them that response.
What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.
The wider war. But a year later, that’s where we are. Neighborhood-by-neighborhood fighting in densely populated Gaza, plus bombing that the Israelis claim is intended to minimize civilian casualties, has resulted in over 41,000 Gazan deaths, and 1.9 million displaced people. More than 300 aid workers have been killed. No one knows how many of the dead Gazans were Hamas fighters, but the estimated 14,000 dead children clearly were not. Israeli attacks have tapered off recently, but still continue. Yesterday:
For the first time in months, Israel sent a column of tanks into northern Gaza and launched major operations there, surrounding Jabalia, the largest of strip’s eight historic refugee camps, as strikes hit a mosque and a school in attacks that killed 24 and wounded nearly 100, according to the local Hamas-controlled government. … Sunday, Israel issued a new blanket evacuation order for all of the northern Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of civilians remain, as a military spokesperson declared a “new phase of the war” against Hamas.
The Biden administration repeatedly has tried to broker a ceasefire-for-hostages deal. 105 hostages were released during a brief ceasefire and prisoner exchange in November, and each side blames the other for why further negotiations broke down. A few additional hostages have been rescued by Israel, some have died, and the fate of the rest is still unknown.
Meanwhile, the war continues to widen. Israel has been bombing Lebanon to target Hezbollah, and now has ground troops in southern Lebanon in what is described as “the largest military operation there since 2006”, killing an estimated 2,000 people so far. Iran has responded by firing ballistic missiles at Israel, the vast majority of which were shot down with help from the US.
Israeli fire has killed at least 722 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, Palestinian health officials say.
Victory? The Israeli military operations have had successes, killing top leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah. Much of the Hezbollah leadership was lost in an imaginative pager attack. Vox’s Robert Greiner puts a triumphal spin on the current situation:
What this means is that we can stop fearing a wider regional war because it is already being fought, and Israel has largely won it. And with it, the relative deterrence Israel sought has been restored. … As for Palestine, its future is a question no more. Diplomats from the US, Europe, and the Arab world can save themselves the effort: There will be no negotiations worthy of the name and no solutions in Gaza or the West Bank, other than those unilaterally imposed by Israel and tacitly permitted by the US.
… Israel’s 40-year program of inexorable dispossession of Palestinians through land seizures and settlement, a process long slow and implicit, has become increasingly rapid and explicit since October 7. Even if occupied Palestinian lands aren’t formally annexed, a unitary Israeli state from the river to the sea is all but inevitable.
The Guardian’s Andrew Roth views Israel’s situation less favorably, arguing that the inexorable economics of missile/anti-missile struggles works against it: Offensive missiles are cheaper and easier to replace. If Iran keep firing, it can wear down the Iron Dome. At that point, protecting Israel’s cities would require not just an occasional raid, but a persistent and widespread bombing campaign against Iran.
Pushing my earlier 9-11 analogy a little further, I wonder if Israel is at its “Mission Accomplished” moment, paralleling where the US was in 2003, when resistance in both Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to have been crushed.
As The Economist puts it: “Israel has succeeded at hammering its enemies, but has not yet worked out how to end its wars.” Hamas and Hezbollah losses are significant, but in the long run should be easy to replace, now that a whole new generation has been given deeply personal reasons to hate Israel.
Contrary to Israeli claims that force will beat Palestinians into submission, survey after survey shows the reverse since Israel invaded Gaza. In a poll conducted in the West Bank by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, support for “military resistance” grew from 40% in May this year to 51% in September, whereas support for “peaceful political action” fell from 44% to 36% in the same period.
Polling Gaza is probably impossible at the moment, but I would imagine that the swing in sentiment is even larger there.
The long view. I approach this conflict through the lens of an essay I wrote in 2004: Terrorist Strategy 101: a quiz. The quiz assumes you are a violent extremist, and its first two question presage where it’s going: “What is the first and biggest obstacle between you and victory?” and “Who is your best ally?”
The first and biggest obstacle to your victory is that the vast majority of the people who sympathize with your issue are not violent extremists. … Most people on both sides of your issue just wish the issue would go away. If you’re not careful, those apathetic majorities will get together and craft a compromise. And where’s your revolution then? So your first goal as a violent extremist is not to kill your enemies, but to radicalize the apathetic majority on your side of the issue. …
In radicalizing your apathetic sympathizers, you have no better ally than the violent extremists on the other side . Only they can convince your people that compromise is impossible. Only they can raise your countrymen’s level of fear and despair to the point that large numbers are willing to take up arms and follow your lead.
The picture the essay presents is of opposing pairs of extremists with a common interest in radicalizing the center. (“Inverting the Bell Curve” is how the quiz frames it.) The two extreme factions are trying to kill each other, but they also depend on each other. At the time, I was pointing out the symbiotic relationship between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden. But I used Hamas/Israel as an example in a paragraph that looks eerie today:
Naive observers frequently decry the apparent counter-productivity of extremist attacks. Don’t the leaders of Hamas understand that every suicide bombing makes the Israelis that much more determined not to give the Palestinians a state? Don’t they realize that the Israeli government will strike back even harder, and inflict even more suffering on the Palestinian people? Of course they do; they’re not idiots. The Israeli response is exactly what they’re counting on. More airstrikes, more repression, more poverty — fewer opportunities for normal life to get in the way of the Great Struggle.
The cycle of violence may be vicious, but it is not pointless. Each round of strike-and-counterstrike makes the political center less tenable. The surviving radical leaders on each side energize their respective bases and cement their respective holds on power.
In this respect, both Hamas’ October 7 attacks and Netanyahu’s response have been enormously successful. Pre-10/7, the Palestinian situation was drifting towards irrelevance. In the October 10 article quoted earlier, Thomas Friedman flashed back to a picture that appeared in the Israeli press on October 3, of an Israeli government official visiting Saudi Arabia for a conference “wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.”
For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true — the ultimate expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.
But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For them, that picture is the full expression of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supreme goal: to prove to all naysayers, indeed to rub their noses in the fact, that he can make peace with all the Arab states — even Saudi Arabia — and not have to give the Palestinians a single inch.
As far as diplomacy goes, that has been Netanyahu’s life’s mission: to prove to everyone that Israel can have its cake — acceptance by all the surrounding Arab states — and eat the Palestinians’ territory, too.
But Netanyahu was also facing political disaster: October 7 was not just a daring Hamas plan, it also pointed to security lapses on the Israeli side. The prime minister’s popularity plummeted. Simultaneously, his trial on corruption charges was crawling forward. An end to the war would also end the war cabinet Netanyahu headed, leading to elections that he would most likely lose.
But he has not brought the war to a conclusion, and so has not had to face either elections or jail. He continues to have no plan for what happens after the war. Now Israel’s tactical successes have redounded to his benefit, and it appears possible that he could even win another round of elections.
A world renewed by violence. Like Bush before him, Netanyahu is now offering visions of a military victory that reshapes the entire Middle East. A week ago, in a speech he gave in English so that it would be understood in Iran, Netanyahu said:
Our two ancient peoples, the Jewish people and the Persian people, will finally be at peace. Our two countries, Israel and Iran, will be at peace.
How will this happy day come to pass? Through regime change in Iran. Israel will change nothing, but Iran will change into a form Israel will find more congenial. And so there will be peace.
When Iran is finally free, and that moment will come a lot sooner than people think — everything will be different.
I can imagine no message better designed to prop up the Iranian regime. Going forward, every Iranian protester, every Iranian dissenter, can be cast as an agent of the Jews. Every critic of the regime shares responsibility for whatever bombs Israel decides to drop.
Does Netanyahu understand this? Of course he does. He’s not stupid. He understands that he needs the mullahs in Tehran as much as they need him. Otherwise, people across the region might get on with their lives and peace might break out. Then where would either flavor of extremist be?
In the US. Sadly, the processes at work in Israel and Palestine have also been playing out here. For the most part, Americans are exchanging words and possibly threats rather than bombs, but here also the Bell Curve has been inverting. If you criticize Netanyahu, you must be antisemitic and support Hamas. If you criticize Hamas, you must support genocide against Palestinians.
Louisiana Senator John Kennedy’s grilling of Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute, was far too typical. Ostensibly, the hearing was about hate crimes in the US, which victimize Jews and Muslims alike. But Kennedy would not listen to testimony about Muslim victims. “You support Hamas, do you not?” he asked Berry, and refused to hear her clear denials.
“Hamas is a foreign terrorist organization that I do not support, but you asking the executive director of the Arab American Institute that question very much puts the focus on the issue of hate in our country,” Berry responded.
“I got your answer and I appreciate it. You support Hezbollah, too, don’t you?” Kennedy continued. … “You just can’t bring yourself to say no, can you? You just can’t do it.”
The exchange ended with Kennedy telling Berry “You should hide your head in a bag.”
Attacking Israel is a losing political issue in the US (at least for now; Netanyahu risks changing that), so I can’t think of any parallel example where elected officials mistreat Jewish spokespeople. But what happens on college campuses, where Israel is much less popular, can be another story.
I find this trend very sad. There is no reason to bring the war to America. American Jews are not responsible for Netanyahu. American Palestinians are not responsible for Hamas. The suffering of either side does not justify victimizing the other.
America’s hands are not clean, and that needs to be discussed. But such a discussion does not benefit from demonization. There needs to be room for both sides to say, “I know this is wrong, but I don’t know how to fix it.” That common confession seems to me to be a necessary first step towards moving forward.
And if we can’t talk across our differences here, how can we expect them to do it over there, where people are dying?
The press often complains that Kamala Harris doesn’t answer enough questions. Here are some unanswered questions for Donald Trump.
Kamala Harris faces frequent criticism from from news media sites like The New York Times and CNN for not doing more interviews or providing more details about the plans she would pursue if she becomes president. This week, she released a 82-page economic plan and gave a 24-minute interview to MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, but her critics were not satisfied.
The NYT’s Reid Epstein, for example, dismissed Ruhle (the host of MSNBC’s nightly The 11th Hour) as a “friendly interviewer” and compared the interview to Trump talking to Fox News’ Sean Hannity. [1] He wrote that Ruhle
avoided posing tricky questions about positions Ms. Harris supported during her 2020 presidential campaign or what, if anything, she knew about Mr. Biden’s physical condition or mental acuity as his own campaign deteriorated. [2]
and said that “A hard-hitting interview is yet to come.” [3]
Most of the specific questions Epstein accused Harris of “evading” are questions no politician ever answers, like why her opponent out-polls her on certain issues, or how she will pursue her plans if Democrats lose the Senate. (When was the last time you heard a candidate give a forthright answer to “What if your party loses?”) And as for the more general criticism, how are voters served by “tricky” questions that aim to “hit hard” rather than elicit information?
Yesterday the NYT pounded again on its Harris-needs-to-answer-questions theme by publishing Ashley Etienne’s essay. Etienne asserted that Harris needs to explain why she wants to be president (as if every previous campaign had communicated some unique and memorable reason). In general, people run for president because they think they can do a good job for the country. Why does Harris need a better reason?
I have written before about how the corporate media’s approach to this campaign fails to serve voters. CNN’s Jake Tapper often equates doing press interviews with “answer[ing] some of the questions that voters have about her policies”, but such questions are plainly not what interviewers ask. Dana Bash’s interview with Harris and Walz mostly confronted them with Trump-campaign talking points. In June, while he was still a candidate, Joe Biden sat with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos for 22 minutes, most of which Stephanopoulos spent trying to get Biden to describe the circumstances under which he would withdraw from the race (another question no politician has ever answered). I sincerely doubt that an undecided voter would have wasted the President’s time like that.
It seems clear to me that the demand for “hard-hitting interviews” is not about getting voters the information they need. Instead, critics seek the theater of an interviewer fencing with Harris and trying to trap her with “tricky questions”.
With that distinction in mind, I pose a challenge for the talking heads complaining that Harris isn’t sitting down with them: Tell us what questions you think Harris still needs to answer. If the point is to get voters the information they need, why does it matter that you (or someone from your organization) be in the room when it happens?
The double standard. I have also often complained that the press wants to hold Harris (like Biden before her) to a standard that they don’t apply to Trump. For example, whenever Biden would say the wrong word or call someone by the wrong name, the press would largely ignore whatever he had been trying to say (even if it was perfectly clear) and instead write a story highlighting the mistake and using it to question the President’s mental capacity. But Trump often makes similar mistakes, and regularly goes off on incoherent rambles that are arguably insane. Subsequent press reports do not highlight these moments, and Trump’s mental acuity is rarely questioned. Instead, reporters do their best to read sense into Trump’s words and report what they divine he meant rather than what he said.
Trump also gets credit for being more accessible to the press than Harris, even if he does not actually answer their questions, or answers with a transparent lie. Often, Trump responds to a “hard-hitting” or “tricky” question — or even just a question he has no good answer for — by calling the questioner “nasty” or accusing him or her of representing “fake news“. This vitriol has trained many reporters not to ask Trump difficult questions.
How well do you think that tactic would work for Harris?
Taking my own advice. So what I’m going to do below is follow the advice I’ve just given: I’m going to list the questions that I believe Trump still needs to answer. In my opinion, these are all questions voters might wonder about, and nothing in them is the least bit “tricky”. I have not tried to frame them in a hostile manner. Whenever possible, I have quoted Trump directly rather than put my own interpretation on his words. I have provided references for any facts that I claim, and in several of them I ask him to point to sources he considers more trustworthy. I have tried to focus my questions on positions he holds now, without comparison to differing positions he may have taken many years ago.
I believe that Trump has not given adequate answers to any of these questions. (If you know that he has, please leave a comment with a link referencing his answer.) Further, I don’t care how Trump provides this information, as long as it results in actual answers. To satisfy me, he doesn’t have to sit down with an interviewer I like or trust. If he wants to work his answers into speeches without being interviewed at all, or even without acknowledging that anyone has asked, that would be fine too.
Unlike The New York Times, I am looking for information, not theater.
Questions about the economy. Trump’s economic proposals can be summed up as tariffs, tax cuts, and increased fossil fuel production. Since energy is an input into almost every other product, Trump is counting on increased oil production from his “drill baby drill” policy to drive down prices across the board. Meanwhile tariffs are supposed to simultaneously protect American industries from foreign competition while generating “trillions” in revenue that will bring down the deficit and pay for income tax cuts as well as some undetermined number of additional programs (like childcare, apparently). But he has provided very few specifics that can be tested and analyzed.
So here are my questions:
You have described tariffs as “a tax on another country“, even though the money is actually collected from the American importer, not the foreign exporter. What convinces you that the tax will ultimately be paid by foreign exporters (who would have to compensate by cutting their prices) rather than American consumers (who would have to pay higher prices)? Can you point to an economic analysis that supports your view?
If tariffs result in American companies facing less price competition from imports, won’t they just raise their prices? Does anything in your plan prevent this?
In some speeches you have suggested across-the-board tariffs of 10%, but in others it’s 20%, with rates up to 200% on specific products like electric cars. Can you be more specific about your tariff rates and how much revenue you expect to collect?
Many American industries depend on exports. What will you do if other countries retaliate with tariffs against American products?
Questions about the environment. During his four years in office, Trump rolled back regulations designed to protect the environment, pulled out of the Paris Accords , and repeatedly minimized the effects of climate change.
Do you believe that warmer ocean temperatures contribute to destructive storms like Hurricane Helene?
Should the federal government be doing anything to decrease the use of fossil fuels in the US?
Questions about foreign policy. Trump’s first answer to questions about almost any foreign policy problem is that the problem wouldn’t exist if he were still president: Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine, Hamas wouldn’t have attack Israel on October 7, and so on. Whatever you think of those claims, such answers are not adequate. The 47th president will have to deal with the situations that currently exist, independent of what might have happened in some alternate timeline.
In 2020, you proposed a modified two-state peace plan for Israel and Palestine, in which the Palestinian state would be fragmented and considerably smaller than territory Israel acquired in the 1967 war. But this year, you said that achieving two-state solution of any sort would be “very, very tough“. Do you currently have a vision of a future peace in that region? What long-term goals should US policy be working toward?
You have said you could end the Ukraine War in one day by talking to Presidents Putin and Zelenskyy, but you haven’t said what you would try to get them to agree to. J. D. Vance has described the process like this:
Trump sits down, says to the Russians, Ukrainians, and Europeans: ‘You guys need to figure out what does a peaceful settlement look like.’ And what it probably looks like is something like the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine. That becomes like a demilitarized zone. It is heavily fortified so that Russians don’t invade again. Ukraine retains its independent sovereignty. Russia gets a guarantee of neutrality from Ukraine. It doesn’t join NATO. It doesn’t join some of these allied institutions.
Is that accurate?
Should the United States try to promote democracy in other countries?
You have said that Russia can do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that don’t spend enough on their own defense. Which NATO nations does that currently leave vulnerable?
Questions about immigration. The issue Trump talks about most often and most passionately is immigration. But there is still much he hasn’t told us.
Earlier this year, Republican Senator James Lankford negotiated a bill to increase border security. Mitch McConnell said it didn’t pass because “our nominee for president didn’t seem to want us to do anything at all”. Is that an accurate description of what happened? Why did you oppose the bill?
You have proposed “mass deportation” of all undocumented immigrants, and have estimated that 20 million or more such people are currently in the United States. Could you describe in detail how that deportation operation would be carried out? How long do you expect this operation to take, and how much do you expect it to cost?
Given that many American citizens and legal residents have brown skin, common Hispanic names, and speak Spanish as their first language how will you protect them from being swept up in the mass deportation operation by mistake?
The US Chamber of Commerce claims we already have a labor shortage, with 8.2 million job openings but only 7.2 million job seekers. If we deport millions of workers, how will the US economy replace them? In particular, won’t deporting low-wage workers increase inflation?
Should the United States continue to honor its treaty obligations to offer asylum to refugees who face persecution in their home countries?
Is Christianity just one religion among many in America, or should the government treat Christians differently? For example, should Christian immigrants be favored over immigrants who practice Islam or some other religion?
Questions about social issues.
You have said that crime is “rampant and out of control“, and that the FBI statistics that show crime falling are “fake numbers“. Why do you base these claims on? Why is your source (whatever it is) more credible than the FBI?
You have said you would not sign a national abortion ban, and that you want the issue left to the states. But some abortion issues necessarily are made at the federal level. The drug mifepristone, used in about half of all abortions, is subject to FDA approval, which it currently has. You said in June that your FDA would not revoke access to the drug, but a subsequent comment in August was less clear. [4] Can you state a definite position on mifepristone?
In February, you told the NRA that “nothing happened” on gun control during your administration, and emphasized “We did nothing.” Can you offer any hope to Americans who worry about mass shootings?
Questions about his indictments. In the summer of 2022, Trump complained that the January 6 Committee hearings were “one-sided“. But with regard to the claims made in the indictments against him, we don’t know Trump’s side of the story because he has never told it. Instead, he has refused to let himself be pinned down to any one account, and has thrown up multiple contradictory defenses, or simply claimed “I did nothing wrong” with no further details.
Sometimes, for example, he blames Antifa for the January 6 violence, sometimes he denies or minimizes the violence, and at other times he valorizes the violence by claiming that the convicted rioters are “warriors“, “hostages“, or “patriots“. Similarly, he has never explained exactly why he took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago or what he intended to do with them.
The press has simply accepted that he’s not going to provide these answers and has stopped asking the questions. That’s wrong. Voters deserve to know this information. Trump’s legal maneuvers have prevented the answers from coming out in court, but not even the Supreme Court can grant him immunity from the press or the voters. He should be asked the following questions, and criticized if he evades them.
When you asked the crowd to go to the Capitol on January 6, what did you expect them to do there? If you had gone to the Capitol yourself, as you told the crowd you would do, what did you intend to do?
The people who fought with police (and injured more than a hundred of them) on January 6 — were they your supporters?
At what point (if any) do you think the January 6th march to the Capitol started to go wrong? When did you become aware that the marchers had turned violent? Why didn’t you ask the crowd to go home at that point?
When people from your own campaign (like Bill Stepian) or your own administration (like Attorney General Bill Barr and CISA Director Chris Krebs) told you that you had lost the 2020 election and there was no significant fraud, why didn’t you believe them?
If you still believe the 2020 election was decided by fraud, how do you think the fraud was carried out? Please be specific.
Were any of the documents you brought to Mar-a-Lago after your presidency still classified? If not, when and how were they declassified?
On many occasions you have said that the Presidential Records Act gave you the right to possess the classified documents. I have looked for a legal expert who shares your interpretation of the PRA and I have not found one. Who is advising you on this? Is there a particular section in the law that you think gives you this right?
Did you understand that Mar-a-Lago had not been approved as a secure site for storing classified documents, and that you no longer had a security clearance?
Why were you interested in keeping those particular documents? What did you intend to do with them?
Why didn’t you return the documents when the National Archives asked for them?
When your lawyers told the government that all classified documents had been returned, were they carrying out your instructions? Did you believe that claim to be true?
When the FBI’s search discovered classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, were you surprised, or did you already know the documents were there? Some of your supporters believe the FBI planted the documents. Do you?
Were you aware that your employees at Mar-a-Lago were moving boxes of documents from room to room? Did you instruct them to do so? Was the purpose to hide the documents from someone?
Conclusion. The New York Times and corporate media in general are fond of “both sides” framing, a tendency the Pitchbot often parodies:
Whether it’s Kamala Harris celebrating Diwali or Donald Trump celebrating one really rough and nasty day of police violence, both candidates have embraced controversial holidays.
But on the unanswered-questions theme, coverage has been bizarrely one-sided: Only Harris needs to answer more questions or provide more information, and only Harris is criticized for “evasion” if her answers are unsatisfactory.
I hope the list above has made obvious that Trump also has a lot of questions to answer. The fact that the press has stopped asking does not mean that he has answered.
[1] The Ruhle/Hannity comparison is a false equivalence.
After the 2020 election, Hannity (like several other Fox News hosts) said one thing to his viewers about Trump’s allegations of voting-machine fraud, but said something quite different to colleagues in text messages. He was not the whole problem, but he certainly played a role in Fox needing to pay $787 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit. Ruhle has not been associated with any comparable journalistic wrongdoing. Hannity has repeatedly participated in Republican fund-raising, including for Trump’s 2020 campaign. Such partisan activity is a firing offense at MSNBC — and virtually any news organization other than Fox.
We know how [Stephanie Ruhle is] going to vote—she has told us, and explained why. But she is not like Sean Hannity—nor Fox’s Jesse Watters or the now-exiled Tucker Carlson. She differs in that she respects the boundaries of established fact and won’t lie or pander to help “her side.” (If you disagree: Please send me an example of her doing so.)
[2] Harris has made it clear that she believes President Biden retains the physical and mental capacity to do his job, so there is no further question for her to answer. Prior to Biden withdrawing his candidacy, worries within the Democratic Party centered on whether Biden could turn the presidential race around and govern effectively until January, 2029 — not whether he could govern effectively until January, 2025.
[3] It’s striking how perfectly the satirical New York Times Pitchbot anticipated Epstein’s commentary:
Kamala Harris gave an interview, but not the right kind of interview.
[4] “Less clear” is kind. TNR described Trump’s answer as “gibberish“.
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.
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.
The conventions and probably the only Harris/Trump debate are behind us now. Can we say who’s winning?
The story so far. Last September, President Joe Biden started falling behind former President Donald Trump in the polls , and then their debate in June made the situation worse. As of July 19, The Hill’s polling average had Trump ahead by 3.3% — not a certain loss for Biden, but hardly an encouraging situation. Then on July 21, Biden withdrew from the race in favor of his vice president, Kamala Harris.
Many observers, including me, had predicted that replacing Biden would produce chaos, possibly turning a difficult race into an impossible one. That prediction looks silly now. (My own failures are one reason why I discourage taking speculation seriously.) In fact, no other major Democrat showed an interest in contesting for the nomination, and the Democratic Party quickly united behind Harris.
Everything has gone well for Harris since then. Her ascension to the top of the ticket produced a huge wave of excitement and a corresponding outpouring of both volunteer commitments and financial contributions. Her choice of Tim Walz as VP has been popular. To Trump’s consternation, the Democratic Convention was watched by more people than his Republican Convention, and Harris’ well-constructed and well-delivered acceptance speech contrasted favorably with his record-long 92-minute ramble. Tuesday, Harris dominated Trump in a one-on-one debate. (More on the debate in the following post.)
After all that, you might imagine she would be far ahead, but not so. In The Hill’s polling average, she has almost exactly the same lead Trump had over Biden: 3.4%. 538 has the race even closer: 2.7%.
The Electoral College. If all Harris had to do was win the popular vote, things would be looking pretty good for her. But due to the Constitutional Convention, whose motives are still hotly debated, the United States elects its president through an electoral college in which every state gets at least three votes, with more depending on population. That has always produced a bias towards the small states, and in the current era it gives Republicans a consistent advantage. In 2000 and 2016 that advantage was decisive, as Republicans won the presidency with fewer votes than their Democratic opponents. These Republican victories have had consequences: the Iraq War, a long delay in our government recognizing climate change, and the 6-3 partisan majority on the Supreme Court, just to name the most obvious ones.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1% and lost; in 2020 Joe Biden got 4.5% more votes and won. But an across-the-board shift of .63% in Trump’s favor would have flipped Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, producing a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. (.63% was the margin in Wisconsin, the other two were closer.) The election would have gone to the House, where each state gets one vote and Republicans held a 26-23-1 advantage. In short, if Biden had only won the popular vote by 3.8%, Trump would be president.
In 2016, a .77% shift towards Hillary would have flipped Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, giving her the election. So a Clinton 2.9% victory would have been enough.
So it’s a reasonable guess that a 2.5% Harris victory wouldn’t be enough, but a 4% victory would.
State polls. Almost everyone believes that a Trump victory is secure in 23 states with 187 electoral votes, while a Harris win is reliable in 17 states (actually 16 plus DC) with 203 electoral votes. That leaves 11 with uncertain results, plus singleton electoral votes in Maine and Nebraska, which allocate a vote to each of their congressional districts.
Some of those “uncertain” states have a definite lean, and would only go the other way in a national rout. So an average of recent polls has Harris up 6.7% in New Hampshire and 8.0% in Virginia, while every recent poll of New Mexico has Harris up at least 5%. Trump is up 4.3% in Florida, which is hardly insurmountable, but still significant. If you allocate those votes, Harris is ahead 225-217.
That leaves the generally accepted list of “battleground” states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, plus the two singletons. Polling is unreliable for the singletons, but Harris is leading in both, so let’s go to 227-217, while making a note to be suspicious of a conclusion that has Harris winning by 2 EVs or less. Here are the 538 polling averages in the remaining states:
Winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania gives Harris 271, so she would need at least one of the singletons. A shift of 0.8% in her direction and she sweeps the battleground states. A shift of 0.7% against her and Trump becomes president again.
Now you have some idea how close things really are.
Campaign strategies. The two campaigns are not approaching the battleground states equally. The Trump campaign is focusing its spending on a narrow path to 270 (or perhaps only 269), believing it mainly needs to win Georgia and Pennsylvania. (So far, they do not seem to take seriously the possibility of losing North Carolina.)
Meanwhile the Harris campaign understands that its most direct path to victory consists of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. But they are also putting significant resources into Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina.
Intangibles. Now we’re into speculation, which I’ve already discouraged you from doing. Going forward, I believe Democrats have an intangible advantage in this campaign based on a simple fact: We have better candidates. I mean this in terms of basic political skills. Day-in, day-out from here to Election Day, I think that Harris and Walz will give better speeches, do better interviews, connect better face-to-face, and make better commercials than Trump and Vance. We saw that in the debate, and I think it will continue.
Also, Harris is reality-based and Trump is not. Trump’s people are afraid to tell him unpleasant facts, and this will cause him to make bad decisions down the stretch. The Harris campaign will consistently get more out of its resources, because the Trump campaign has always been at least partially a grift, holding events at Trump properties and booking ads through Trump-favored firms.
In all recent cycles we’ve seen election-day surprises, as the vote totals failed to match the polls. In 2016 and 2020, those polling errors favored Republicans, but in 2022 they favored Democrats. This year, it may all come down to voters who make up their minds in the voting booth. And here, I think the diminishing enthusiasm for Trump will take its toll. In 2016 he was the exciting candidate. (Wouldn’t it be a hoot to see him as president?) But in 2024 he’s the boring candidate, the one who talks endlessly about his own grievances and grudges. His constant appeals to anger and hate are exhausting.
My hunch — based on nothing but my own intuition, which has failed before — is that large numbers of Americans will go into the voting booth and think “This could all be over.”
Many Americans are ready to believe and pass on any horrifying rumor they hear about non-White immigrants, without checking their sources or looking too hard at the evidence. Trump, Vance, and other Republican politicians have been eager to exploit this gullibility.
The Simpsons is set in Springfield because there are 35 Springfields in various states, including five in Wisconsin alone. So wherever you live, the Simpson house might be just down the road. Given this near-universality, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Trump/Vance lies about the Springfield in Ohio have grabbed public attention on both sides of our political divide. If immigrants really are stealing and eating pets in Springfield, your pets may be in danger too. Conversely, if Trump can tell such a baseless and vicious lie about Springfield, he could just as easily lie about your town, your neighbors, or even you.
It’s important to be clear from the beginning: He is lying. Everybody from the local police to the city manager to the Republican governor of Ohio has denied this pernicious internet rumor, which is a lesson in how easy it is to create “evidence” for anything. (Here’s a photo that purports to show a Haitian in Springfield carrying off two geese, presumably to eat. Actually it’s a non-Haitian in Columbus, removing two road-kill geese from the pavement.)
Lots of articles trace the rumor through right-wing sources that invented it, so I’ll cover that history only briefly: The influx of legal Haitian immigrants in recent years had created discomfort among some White Springfield citizens. During Covid, city services got stretched — as services did nearly everywhere — and some locals blamed the Haitians. In any large group, somebody will eventually do something wrong; last year, an unlicensed Haitian driver killed an 11-year-old boy (whose parents have begged the public not to use their son’s death to fan hatred). That created an exploitable opportunity for neo-Nazi groups like Blood Pride, which began targeting Springfield with negative disinformation about the immigrants. From there, stories multiplied until the eating-dogs-and-cats rumor got started. It spread mainly online, and not so much by word-of-mouth in Springfield itself. Then J. D. Vance picked it up, from which it got to Trump.
If you want more detail, I can recommend a post on Justin Ling’s blog Bug-Eyed and Shameless, which relates the story to the Irish Fright of 1688, when tens of thousands of panicked Englishmen barricaded bridges and crossroads to stop the advance of marauding Irish troops, who in fact did not exist.
The Irish Fright didn’t make it into my high-school history texts, but maybe it should have. There’s a lot to learn from what what 19th-century historian Charles Mackay famously dubbed “extraordinary popular delusions“.
How racism manifests. To begin with, the Haitian Fright of 2024 provides a teaching opportunity about racism. I am constantly seeing accounts from White people online and on television, who believe they are not racist because they don’t internally experience what they imagine racism to be: a blind and senseless hatred of other races. “I don’t hate anyone,” they claim, and believe that they are telling the truth.
But the Haitian Fright points out a more subtle and widespread kind of racism: a propensity to believe (and even pass on) negative stories about other races without requiring evidence. A sudden influx of Scots or Danes could have put just as big a strain Springfield’s schools and hospitals, but I doubt we’d be hearing stories about them eating cats.
A similar lesson can be drawn from the Birther controversy of the Obama years (where Trump also was a major player). Many Whites were eager to believe that Barack Obama wasn’t a legitimate president, so they credited any justification for that belief, no matter how flimsy. The birther story served to mediate their racism: They could deny that they disapproved of Obama’s presidency because he was Black, and instead disapprove because he wasn’t really an American. But they believed that evidence-free claim because he was Black.
Myths about immigration. Similarly, many Americans claim that they don’t object to immigrants per se, but only to illegal immigrants. If people would only come to America “the right way, like my ancestors did”, they would be welcomed.
Personally, my ancestors arrived in the United States from Germany in the mid-1800s. And yes, they did come “the right way”, but at the time there was no wrong way. Other than occasional quarantines for health reasons, the US had few restrictions on immigration prior to the openly racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
You know who else is here the right way? The Haitians in Springfield. They qualify for a program known as “temporary protected status“, which provides legal status to people from countries which (because of either natural disaster or political unrest) are not safe to return to. Others came “as part of a parole program that allows citizens and lawful residents to apply to have their family members from Haiti come to the United States”.
Here’s what we do know, though. What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in. The Haitians came in to work for these companies. What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They’re happy to have them there. And frankly, that has helped the economy.
This matches an observation Deborah and James Fallows made in their book Our Towns, about their travels across America, particularly in the section about Dodge City, Kansas: One key difference between small towns that are dying and those that are thriving is that the thriving towns are welcoming immigrants rather than discouraging them.
Governor DeWine had previously mentioned his own trips to Haiti and observed:
[I]n Haiti education is prized. So when you look at all of these things, people who want to work, people who value their kids, who value education, you know, these are positive influences on our community in Springfield, and any comment about that otherwise, I think, is hurtful and is not helpful to the city of Springfield and the people of Springfield.
In short, whatever you may think you want out of immigrants — legal status, work ethic, family values … anything other than white skin and speaking English since birth — the Haitians of Springfield have it.
Another complaint I’ve run into is that the Biden administration “sent” the Haitians to Springfield. Here’s J. D. Vance:
Kamala Harris dropped 20,000 Haitian migrants into a small Ohio town and chaos has ensued.
But like any person with legal status in the US, the Haitians can go where they like. They weren’t “sent” or “dropped”, they came to Springfield looking for work and a low cost of living.
Thousands of new jobs had been created [in Springfield], thanks to a successful effort by the city’s leadership and Chamber of Commerce to attract new business to Springfield, which sits between Columbus and Dayton. Once a manufacturing hub, Springfield saw its economy shrink after factories closed and jobs migrated overseas. By about 2015, its population had dwindled to under 60,000, from about 80,000 in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Companies that set up shop, however, confronted a dire labor shortage.
Haitians in Florida, Haiti and South America heard from friends and family about Springfield and its need for workers. They began arriving to take jobs in warehouses, manufacturing and the service sector, and employers urged the new workers to encourage other Haitians to join them.
We often hear how jarring it must be for a town of 60,000 to accommodate 15,000-or-so new residents. But few note that the immigrants are simply restoring Springfield to its historic size. They are making Springfield great again.
Consequences. History teaches that lies can lead to violence, particularly when they make a group of people seem monstrous or subhuman. The pet-eating lie has been likened to the blood libel against Jews, which often circulated prior to pogroms. According to the libel, Jews needed the blood of Christian children to ritually prepare matzah for Passover. So any child who went missing prior to Passover could spark a bloody attack on a town’s Jews.
The pet-eating lie has not yet led to any murders in Springfield. But a series of bomb threats followed Trump’s outburst at Tuesday’s debate. City hall had to be shut down on Thursday. Friday, a middle school closed and two elementary schools had to be evacuated. Saturday, two hospitals went into lockdown. Two local colleges have temporarily shut down in-person classes. I can only imagine the bullying that Haitian children are experiencing in schools all over the country.
Thank you, Mr. Trump.
Trump has expressed no remorse and repeated the lie Friday in California, long after it had been widely debunked. On talk shows Sunday, J. D. Vance simultaneously acknowledged that the stories are false while justifying his own role in continuing to spread them.
On Sunday, Ohio’s junior senator was pressed by journalists as to why the Trump campaign was spreading a claim it could provide no evidence for beyond the anecdotal “I heard it on television” excuse Trump himself gave during the debate.
On CNN, he seemingly admitted that his claims were lies, then continued by saying that he would keep spreading such tales, even knowing them to be untrue, if they resulted in the media talking about issues he claimed were still just as real despite the deception.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” said the senator.
It is worth pointing out that even though non-citizens can’t vote, anyone legally in the State of Ohio is Vance’s constituent. (That’s why congressional districts are distributed according to total population rather than the number of citizens, a provision Republicans are trying to overturn.) He has a responsibility to them whether he recognizes it or not.
Vance’s interviews point out something else: He and Trump are often accused of “falling for” the pet-eating lie, as if the problem were simply their gullibility in the face of an internet conspiracy theory. But they haven’t fallen for anything. They looked for a hateful lie they could tell about immigrants, and they found one.
What is a joke? The internet is now full of cat-and-dog-eating memes, most of which are intended to be humorous. Both sides are spreading them with very different motives. For Democrats, the lie is so unbelievable that people who are taken in by it deserve to be laughed at. That’s why many of my liberal friends have shared The Kiffness’ musical version of Trump’s debate lines. The song doesn’t explicitly criticize Trump, but does make him seem ridiculous.
Meanwhile, Republicans are indulging in bully-humor, as they so often do. By posting a cat-eating meme with three laugh-till-I-cry emojis, Ted Cruz can promote cruelty towards immigrants while hiding behind a veneer of comedy. When challenged, he is undoubtedly saying, “It’s a joke! Doesn’t anybody have a sense of humor any more?”
The problem, of course, is that not everyone agrees that it’s a joke. Many on the internet still take the Haitian Fright seriously, and virtually no Republicans are condemning Trump for promoting it. (Even Governor DeWine has stopped short of faulting Trump or specifically asking him to stop.) And even if they did agree, jokes can still be cruel.
While Phillips said she doesn’t begrudge people “having fun online,” she warned that liberals who think they’re cutting Trump down to size risk giving oxygen to a trope that ultimately plays into his hands — and endangers the Haitians who were its original targets.
“When you’re making a joke using the frame” of immigrants as cultural invaders, she said, even if you’re pushing back on it, “the frame is still amplified.”
The transgender thing is incredible. Think about it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child, and many of these children, 15 years later, say “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”
Incredible? Absolutely, and rightfully so: What Trump is telling us is literally beyond credibility, because it bears no resemblance to reality. Schools aren’t performing unauthorized gender-changing operations, or operations of any kind (beyond possibly the school nurse pulling a splinter out of a child’s finger). Not even the wildest radical is proposing that they should. And nobody is looking back on some surgery-at-school that happened 15 years ago.
This goes way beyond any political lying we’ve seen in the past. Trump isn’t exaggerating a statistic, cherry-picking a quote, or spinning some actual incident to his advantage. He’s not implying something nasty about an opponent that can’t be proved either way, or making some bizarre prediction that may not come to pass. Instead, he’s inviting us to come live in a completely delusional world of his construction.
Harris’ housing ideas are relatively straightforward policies amenable to ordinary political and economic analysis: tax cuts to stimulate construction of affordable housing and a $25K benefit targeted at first-time home buyers. Trump’s “housing” idea is a side-effect of his insane proposal for “mass deportation”: If millions of undocumented people are forced to leave the country or herded into detention camps, the couches they’ve been sleeping on will become available to American citizens.
Nothing monstrous here. Just a normal presidential candidate’s policy idea, whose effectiveness economists might “doubt”. Former NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan quotes former NYT reporter (and Pulitzer-prize winner) James Risen: “At first, I thought this was a parody.”
Speaking of economists, Thursday Trump appeared before the Economic Club of New York. A woman asked him what specific legislation he would propose to make childcare more affordable. Here was his answer:
Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody — we had, Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country. Because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care. But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just — that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars. And as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers will be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people. And then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it because right now, we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.
Got that? The NYT looked at that answer and divined a policy proposal: tariffs. It disapproved of Trump’s proposal, saying that it was a 19th century proposal for a 21st century country. “Trump Praises Tariffs, and William McKinley, to Power Brokers“. [1] But the fact that he was asked a serious question and responded with an incoherent ramble about something else — that wasn’t news.
The Washington Post thought the most significant thing Trump did Thursday was deepen his alliance with Elon Musk. Deep, deep in that article it summarized the childcare back-and-forth like this:
Trump made several other promises during his speech at the Economic Club of New York. … When asked about how he’d make child care more affordable, Trump suggested that he would help pay for it by placing taxes on foreign governments. “We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kinds of numbers we’re going to be taking in,” he said. He did not provide details or specifics about how this would work; experts have warned imposing tariffs on such a scale would risk triggering an international trade war.
Just a normal candidate explaining a normal policy amenable to normal critique. The word “suggested” does a lot of work here: It means that Trump’s words inspired WaPo’s three byline reporters to imagine a coherent proposal in which tariff revenue pays for childcare.
Oh, and Trump has an explanation for his rambles: It’s an art. He calls it “the weave”.
You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, “It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.”
It might be fair to see that explanation itself as evidence of insanity. But the NYT wrote an article taking it seriously. “Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.” It compared Trump’s verbal stylings to Shakespeare, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. Seriously. [2]
Just two months ago, the press took a very different attitude towards the mental processes of an aging candidate. On July 11, President Biden held a news conference to talk about the recently concluded NATO summit. He was asked questions on a variety of foreign-policy topics and answered them all in considerable detail, demonstrating an impressive mastery of a number of complex situations. Reuters’ headline captured none of that, because Biden had also occasionally misnamed people, like saying “Putin” when he meant “Zelensky”. “Biden makes a series of verbal gaffes at NATO summit“. The Hill also found Biden’s flub newsworthy: “Zelensky dismissed Biden accidentally calling him Putin as a ‘mistake’“.
If Biden made a verbal error, that became the headline. It eclipsed whatever else he had been trying to say.
Why isn’t Trump being covered the same way? When Trump says something insane or incoherent that should be the news. It’s not just smoke that a reporter needs to blow away to reveal some underlying policy point that may or may not actually exist. The nominee of a major party regularly says things that are insane or incoherent. That’s what’s significant. That — and not whatever policy a reporter can interpret from his ravings — is the news in these Trump events.
Blogs like this one have been making this point for months. But that understanding is beginning to creep closer to the mainstream. It is being aided by the existence of a term that perfectly describes what the NYT and its ilk have been doing: sanewashing.
Apparently the term goes back at least to 2020 and has been popularized more recently by Aaron Rupar, whose X/Twitter feed I often quote. But I hadn’t noticed sanewashing until this week, when suddenly it exploded into public consciousness and usage. TNR’s Parker Malloy defines it like this: “reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse”. Her article gives many examples I have not mentioned here.
With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He says toxic, antidemocratic things over and over again. And he still gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in, scoop, and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough actual gray matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption.
His link is to a Jason Linkin tweet, which calls this phenomenon “coherency bias”. But sanewash is the term that seems to be winning out. Thursday, James Fallows asked his followers on X/Twitter whether they can
think of an example of main media “sane-washing” Biden the way they are even today doing w Trump?
A phenomenon with a widely-used name is harder to ignore, and harder to make excuses for, than some vague intuition that a lot of us share. Perhaps now we can hope that Trump’s delusions and incoherent rambles will themselves become news, just as Biden’s word-substitutions did.
Greg Sargent, who wrote The Plum Line blog for the WaPo until 2023 and now writes for TNR, described what that would mean:
Trump’s mental fitness for the presidency deserves sustained journalistic scrutiny as a stand-alone topic with its own intrinsic importance and newsworthiness. Real journalistic resources should be put into meaningfully covering it from multiple angles, as often happens with other big national stories of great consequence.
He illustrated the point by rewriting actual headlines about Biden as they might apply Trump.
Are these headlines really stretches, based on all we’ve seen? I submit that they are not. Note that all of these treat signs of the subject’s questionable mental fitness for the presidency—and the politics surrounding them—as themselves being the real news. How often do you see headlines like this? Why don’t we see more of them?
Why indeed?
[1] It’s worth pointing out that even if you give Trump the benefit of the doubt and interpret his nonsense as having something to do with tariffs, he still isn’t making sense. A tariff does not “tax foreign nations”. A tariff is a tax paid by an American importer, not a foreign exporter. If that importer isn’t going to go broke, it needs to raise the prices its American customers pay. So a tariff is ultimately a tax on American consumers, not on foreigners.
This has been well understood for a long time. Back in 1828, a tariff very nearly started the Civil War decades early, because it taxed British goods Southerners needed in order to benefit Northern industries that otherwise couldn’t compete with British imports. Southerners like John Calhoun labeled the proposal “the Tariff of Abominations“, because they grasped that the British weren’t paying the tax, they were.
So calling a tariff a “tax on foreign nations”, like talking about schools performing surgeries on unsuspecting students, is delusional.
[2] I am reminded of a possibly apocryphal story (recounted without reference in the Illuminatus! trilogy) of a conversation between James Joyce and Carl Jung. Joyce excuses his schizophrenic daughter’s ravings by comparing them to similar to passages in his own writing. “You are diving,” Jung supposedly replies, “but she is sinking.”
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.
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.
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.
Trump has always done offensive things, and said ignorant, incoherent, or insane things. But I don’t think he used to say or do them every day.
One thing I’ve heard about aging, which I can verify from my own life, is that it doesn’t change your character so much as magnify it. Whatever you’ve always been, you’ll be moreso as you get old.
This week revealed that pattern in 78-year-old Donald Trump, who did something stereotypically Trumpy every day from Monday to Saturday.
Monday. He started the week with a bang, by desecrating the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery to film a campaign TikTok video. You can dive into the long explanation of what ANC’s rules are, why those rules exist, and how Trump violated them. Or you can take another long dive into the flim-flam he, Vance, and his campaign spread to excuse his inexcusable behavior. But all you really need to do is look at this photo:
You know this is wrong.
Trump giving an inappropriate thumbs-up is becoming a meme, like this image of Thumbs-Up Trump at Jesus’ crucifixion. I’m hoping Thumbs-Up Trump becomes as ubiquitous as Bernie in his mittens.
Tuesday. Trump announced a new line of NFT trading cards showing him in fantastically heroic settings — in superhero armor, wielding a lightning bolt — and looking slimmer and more muscular than he has in many years, if ever. For a mere $99 you get one digital file of a card-image. If you buy 250 of them ($24,750), you get one physical card, two tickets to a Trump-attended dinner at his golf club (I assume the one in New Jersey), and a piece of the true cross suit he wore when he debated Biden.
But MAGA isn’t a cult and Trump isn’t a grifter. It’s totally unfair to say that the man who made these cards or the people who spend money on them are weird.
Wednesday. Trump unleashed a series of Truth Social posts that were extreme even by his standards. He reposted memes that
called for “public military tribunals” to try Barack Obama,
suggested indicting the House January 6 Committee for sedition,
commented on a photo of Harris and Hillary Clinton together that “blowjobs impacted both their careers differently”,
pictured Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, Nancy Pelosi, and Bill Gates in orange prison jumpsuits with the caption “How to Actually Fix the System”.
When he’s called on stuff like this, the usual excuse is that he didn’t create the memes, he just reposted them. But reposting without criticism is endorsement. It says, “I think more people should see this.”
Look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon any more. And we are going to get the energy prices down. You know, this was caused by their horrible energy. Wind. They want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem.
Also Thursday, he began a two-day flip-flop on abortion, an issue that he insists voters don’t really care about. Currently, Florida bans almost all abortions of fetuses more than six weeks old. (Embryos, actually. They’re not considered fetuses until eight weeks.) NBC News asked Trump how he (a Florida resident) planned to vote on an upcoming Florida referendum to guarantee abortion rights “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider”.
He replied: “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks.” That sounded like a Yes vote on the referendum, which would repeal the six-week ban. A No vote would leave it in place.
In that same interview, he said that in his next administration, the government would pay for all IVF treatments (which are very expensive) but didn’t say what program would cover them or where the money would come from.
Friday. A busy day. After a freakout from Evangelical “Christians”, he walked back the previous day’s statement on the Florida referendum, announcing that he would vote No. The anti-abortion faction hates his IVF proposal too, but so far he hasn’t walked it back.
(Naturally, though, it’s Harris who gets bad press for changing the position she held on fracking five years ago, and for not providing details of her proposals. It would be completely unacceptable for Harris to change her position on some major issue from one day to the next, or to announce an expensive new program with no supporting details.)
Also Friday, he shared this insane dark fantasy with a Moms For “Liberty” gathering:
The transgender thing is incredible. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And then many of these childs [sic] 15 years later look back and say “What the hell. Who did this to me?”
This kind of stuff deserves to be judged by the Greyhound standard: If you were sitting next to a stranger on a cross-country bus, and he said something this detached from reality, you’d get up and move, wouldn’t you?
Friday night in Jonestown, Pennsylvania, Trump was introduced by Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, who (like Kamala) is Black. When Trump got on stage, he said:
That one is smart! You have smart ones and you have some that aren’t quite so good.
When I was growing up in the 1960s, I heard lots of people say things like this. But usually those statements explicitly included the N-word rather than just implying it. So I guess there has been progress.
He confessed to “interfering” in the certification of the 2020 election, but claimed
Whoever heard, you get indicted for interfering in a presidential election when you had every right to do it?
As MSNBC’s Joyce Vance noted, “There’s no right to interfere in a presidential election.” And former prosecutor Elizabeth de Vega added: “Keep talking, moron.”
On the trade deficit with China, he claimed “I had them down much smaller”, which is a fantasy. Here are the actual year-by-year US trade deficits with China. Note the peak in 2018, a Trump year, and the low in 2023, a Biden year.
He also claimed “China paid me hundreds of billions of dollars.” That might be a reference to tariffs, which Trump imagines are paid by foreign exporters rather than American importers. Ultimately, of course, tariffs are passed on to US consumers the same way that sales taxes are.
In the same interview, Trump called Kamala Harris “nasty” for the way she treated Mike Pence, presumably during their vice presidential debate in 2020. However, Harris supporters have never called for Pence to be hanged, as Trump supporters did on January 6.
But today begins a new week. Who knows what marvels it will reveal?
With a near-perfect convention in Chicago, Democrats stole themes Republicans have been running on for decades: freedom, opportunity, tradition, patriotism, family, manliness, small-town values, and who the “real Americans” are.
When they left Milwaukee, Republicans were happy with their convention. True, Trump’s acceptance speech had failed to stick the landing, and many were still uncertain that J. D. Vance had been the best (or even a good) choice for VP, but those seemed like quibbles. For four days — right up to the last hour of Trump’s 90-minute speech — the party had been united, put on a good show, and looked poised to do well in November against a Democratic ticket headed by Joe Biden.
And then Biden did something beyond Donald Trump’s imagination: He sacrificed his own ambitions for the sake of his party and the country. Republicans still resist grasping what Biden did: With occasional help from the NYT, they describe his voluntary withdrawal as a “coup” (as if January 6 hadn’t shown us what a coup really looks like) and keep portraying Biden as bitter and angry. Weeks later, Trump was still fantasizing that Biden would make a scene at the convention.
What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!
But Monday night, as in all his public appearances, Biden was gracious and generous towards Kamala Harris and the entire Democratic Party. If this was all an act, it was an act far beyond Trump’s abilities. Under no circumstances could Trump have contained his disappointments and resentments in front of a national audience for 50 minutes. And yet somehow, he imagined that “senile” Joe Biden could be such a brilliant performer. But Trump can hold those two thoughts together in his mind — Biden is senile and Biden can make an Oscar-worthy presentation — more easily than he can imagine the truth:
It’s been the honor of my lifetime to serve as your president. I love the job, but I love my country more.
Biden’s speech was just the beginning of a four-day master class in how to run a convention. All week, I felt like the Democrats were teaching Republicans how it’s done: You had Kid Rock and Jason Aldean? OK, we’ve got Stevie Wonder, John Legend, and Pink. We see your celebrity Hulk Hogan and raise you Oprah Winfrey. Your people waved signs saying “Mass Deportation Now!”, but we prefer “Freedom” and “USA”. Your rising talent was Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, but we could showcase people who are authentically gifted speakers: Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, AOC, Gretchen Whitmer, and Wes Moore.
I’ve got a message for the Republicans and the justices of the US Supreme Court: You can pry this wedding band from my cold, dead, gay hand.
Turning old Republican tropes upside-down became a repeating motif of the Democratic Convention. Republicans used to be the party that wanted to “defend marriage”, but now it is Republicans like the corrupt Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who threaten marriage, and Democrats like Nessel who pledge to defend it to the death.
But marriage was just one of the concepts that Democrats took back from a Republican Party that had owned them for too long.
Freedom. Republicans used to style themselves as the party of freedom, but Tim Walz yanked that word away from them:
When Republicans use the word “freedom”, they mean that the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office. Corporations, free to pollute your air and water. And banks, free to take advantage of customers. But when we Democrats talk about freedom, we mean the freedom to make a better life for yourself and the people that you love. Freedom to make your own health care decisions. And yeah, your kids’ freedom to go to school without worrying about being shot dead in the hall.
Josh Shapiro tied it to Trump’s efforts to stay in power through fraud and force after losing the 2020 election:
It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their bodies. It sure as hell isn’t freedom to say, “You can go vote, but he gets to pick the winner.” That’s not freedom.
Family. When Ronald Reagan ran on “family values” with the support of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Republicans meant the (implicitly White and Christian) Mom-Dad-and-2.1-perfect-children families of 1950s sit-coms. But this week the DNC showcased and celebrated American families as they actually are.
It started with the candidates. On the surface, no family’s story could be more Reagan-era normal than the Walzes: Two White Midwestern high school teachers fall in love and are still together decades later, having raised a boy and a girl. But they are open about relying on fertility treatments to accomplish that feat, and they don’t keep their neuro-divergent son hidden at home. (More about him later.)
And then there’s the blended Emhoff-Harris family: A Jewish lawyer was married for 16 years and had two children (again, a boy and a girl). But then he got divorced, and five years later he went on a blind date with the Afro-Asian-American attorney general of California, who was herself the child of divorced parents. They got married and remain on good terms with his first wife (who produced a video for the convention). Doug Emhoff has always supported Kamala’s ambitions, and Ella Emhoff had tears in her eyes as the convention cheered for her apparently-not-wicked stepmother.
Family was everywhere in the convention speeches, with speaker after speaker quoting wisdom instilled in them by a parent, mentor, teacher, or coach. (You will search Donald Trump’s speeches in vain to find a comparable passage. In his stories, he has always known everything.) Harris presented her own it-takes-a-village childhood like this:
My mother worked long hours. And, like many working parents, she leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us. Mrs. Shelton, who ran the daycare below us and became a second mother. Uncle Sherman. Aunt Mary. Uncle Freddy. And Auntie Chris. None of them, family by blood. And all of them, family by love.
Family who taught us how to make gumbo. How to play chess. And sometimes even let us win. Family who loved us. Believed in us. And told us we could be anything. Do anything. They instilled in us the values they personified. Community. Faith. And the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated. With kindness. Respect. And compassion.
In the Democratic world, as in America, family is defined by love rather than blood. Your family is made up of the people you can count on when you need them, and not just the people who share your DNA.
Masculinity. The Republican Convention was nothing if not masculine. Trump entered the hall on Day 3 to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World“. And prior to the candidate’s acceptance speech the next night, Hulk Hogan tore off his shirt and lumped together Trump’s fraud convictions, his lost civil trials, and his assassination attempt as the work of a mysterious “they” who need to be punished.
When I look out and I see all the real Americans, I think about how Donald Trump, his family was compromised. When I look out there and I see Donald Trump, I think about how his business was compromised. But what happened last week when they took a shot at my hero and they tried to kill the next President of the United States, enough was enough. I said, “Let Trump-a-mania run wild, brother! Let Trump-a-mania rule again. Let Trump-a-mania, make America great again.” …
You know, guys, over my career, I’ve been in the ring with some of the biggest, some of the baddest dudes on the planet, and I’ve squared off against warriors, ooh, yeah, savages, and I’ve even, like I said, body slammed giants in the middle of the ring. I know tough guys but let me tell you something, brother, Donald Trump is the toughest of them all. …
This November, guys, we can save the American dream for everyone, and Donald Trump is the president who will get the job done. All you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags, all you drug dealers, and all you crooked politicians need to answer one question, brother. Whatchya gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trump-a-maniacs run wild on you, brother?
But the DNC presented a different model of masculinity, whose manliness is unlikely to “run wild” on anyone: Tim Walz — coach, teacher, soldier, mentor, neighbor, father. I’ve heard a new phrase used to describe Walz: tonic masculinity rather than the toxic masculinity of dominance and violence. Ben Ingman, who remembered Walz as his geography teacher and 7th-grade track coach, started his speech with this:
Tim Walz is the kind of guy you can count on to push you out of a snowbank. I know this because Tim Walz has pushed me out of a snowbank.
Ingman invited members of Walz’ state-championship-winning football team up onto the stage, and they cheered for their former coach.
He described Walz’ coaching style, which also took the track team to a state championship:
Coach Walz got us excited about what we might achieve together. He believed in us, and he helped us believe in each other.
It was important to have a person who was so well-liked on campus, a football coach who had served in the military. Having Tim Walz as the adviser of the gay-straight alliance made me feel safe coming to school.
Over the last several years there’s been this kind of perversion that has taken place, which is to suggest that the measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you beat down, when what we know is the real and true measure of the strength of a leader is based on who you lift up.
To the best of my knowledge, Tim Walz has never body-slammed anybody in the style of Hulk Hogan. But he has consistently lifted people up. And occasionally he has pushed them out of snowbanks.
Walz was only one of many examples of tonic masculinity at the DNC. Another was Astronaut/Senator Mark Kelly, who wordlessly walked his wife Gabby Giffords onto the stage and literally served as her right hand, managing the iPad that contained her speech so that she could gesture with her left hand, the one that still functions. He filled his role so egolessly that I did not even realize what he was doing until I watched the video a second time. (You can bet that if Melania ever needs that kind of help, Trump will move on to Wife #4.)
And then there was Biden himself, sacrificing personal ambitions so that the country he loves will not slide into autocracy. I was reminded of the ending of Lev Grossman’s The Magician King (the middle book of his Magicians trilogy). After plans have succeeded and the day has been saved, the god Ember appears to enforce the rules that have been broken along the way: Quentin (the trilogy’s main character) is to be banished from Fillory, the magical realm he has loved since childhood, when he thought it was fictional.
Quentin protests that he deserves better, because he has been the hero of this story, and “the hero gets the reward.” “No Quentin,” the god replies. “The hero pays the price.”
If American democracy is saved again in 2024, it will be because Joe Biden was willing to pay the price. That’s what a real man does.
That video went viral, but drew ridicule from Trumpists. Former conservative talk-show host Charlie Sykes described it as “the definitive Rorschach Test for the world’s worst human beings”. One of those human beings, Ann Coulter, posted a picture of Gus crying with the comment “Talk about weird …” Former congressman Mike Crispi called Gus “Tim Walz’s stupid crying son” and a “puffy beta male”. He also tweeted “Barron Trump is the future. Tim Walz’s children are nobody’s going nowhere.” And conservative radio host Jay Weber tweeted:
Sorry, but this is embarrassing for both father and son. If the Walzs represent today’s American man, this country is screwed: “Meet my son Gus. He’s a blubbering bitch boy. His mother and I are very proud.”
But Tim Walz is man enough to endure disdain from the Jay Webers of this world, if that’s what it takes for his son to share important moments with him. Personally, I have two reactions: First, you can fake almost anything in politics, but you can’t fake a reaction like Gus had. And second, I imagine most fathers saw Gus and thought: “I wonder if my children feel that way about me.” Pete Buttigieg’s husband Chasten tweeted:
I hope to inspire my kids so much that when they see me speak of the dreams and passion I have for my country they are moved to tears like Gus Walz was. @Tim_Walz has dedicated his life to service and has clearly exceeded in being an excellent, supportive, and loving father every step of the way. We should all be so lucky to know a love like that.
Religious writer John Pavolitz traced the roots of the Republican urge to bully those who don’t fit their cookie-cutter view of the world:
This week has reminded us how morally poisoned our collective bloodstream is.
And the sad part of all of this is, we all know how we got here.
We are witnessing in real-time, the cost of elevating someone like Donald Trump to power: of normalizing his ignorant name-calling, his exploiting of differences, his bullying of those who are vulnerable or different, his hatred of expressions of love that he is incapable of.
This pattern was on display nine years ago when he mocked a disabled reporter and what should have been a campaign-killing moment became the first in an expansive and still-growing resume of filth.
Tradition. Republican rhetoric is full of respect for tradition, from “originalist” legal theory to “that old time religion”. But the current Republican Party is trapped in the present by its worship of Trump. The Republican Convention honored no pre-Trump Republican tradition, and at times gave the impression that the GOP had not existed until Trump came down his escalator in 2015.
By contrast, some of the finest and most emotional moments in the Democratic Convention centered on what the Party owes to the heroes of its recent past. Joe Biden, of course, is not past yet, since he is still president. But he has stood for his last election, so the long ovation he got Monday night and the chants of “Thank you, Joe” that could erupt at any moment constituted a profoundly sentimental send-off.
The Obamas gave a pair of top-flight speeches, with many observers suggesting history will remember Michelle’s as one of the best convention speeches ever. No one could fail to note the appropriateness of Hillary Clinton addressing a convention trying once again to elect the first woman president. (In one reaction shot during Hillary’s speech, Gwen Walz was in tears.) Her mention of Trump’s felony convictions inspired a “Lock him up” chant, which Hillary handled perfectly: She neither encouraged it nor cut it off as she tried to suppress a smile.
But any Republican legacy had vanished down the memory hole: Mitt Romney? The Bushes? Dick Cheney? Paul Ryan? Kevin McCarthy? John Boehner? Mike Pence? They have all become unpeople, because there is no room for them in the Trump personality cult.
Who is really American? I’m not sure which politician coined the phrase real Americans, which I just quoted Hulk Hogan using. I first registered it in 2008, when Sarah Palin kept identifying the rural White counties where she was popular as “real America”. The phrase almost never gets defined, but we all know generally who it points to: White straight native-born Christians who speak English at home and have no obvious mental or physical dysfunctions.
A lot of the legitimacy of Trump’s claim to have won the 2020 election rests on this vague sense that some Americans are more real than others. Even people who understand the absurdity of Trump’s fantasies that vote totals were changed overseas or large numbers of non-citizens voted or mail-in votes were faked or some other less specific claim — even many of them feel in their hearts that Trump should have won, because so many of Biden’s votes came from Blacks, or naturalized Hispanic or Asian citizens, or gays, or Jews, or others whose American-ness is questionable. Real Americans, the people whose votes should count, overwhelmingly supported Trump.
A related question is what an immigrant has to do, beyond the formal naturalization process, to really be American. Melania Trump is a White Christian immigrant, and Usha Vance is a Hindu born in America to Indian immigrants. Presumably they are both OK, so it must be possible.
In a column for The Washington Post, Matt Bai examined how the two VP candidates articulated conflicting visions of what makes someone an American. Vance denied that “America is an idea” and postulated instead that “a group of people with a shared history and a common future”.
Of course there’s room for immigration and racial diversity in Vance’s worldview; his own wife is of Indian descent. But in his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity.
But Walz presented a different view.
In the America Walz described in his convention speech, it doesn’t matter what language you speak at home or what god (if any) you worship, or whether you have kids (naturally or otherwise). Because as long as you believe in the American promise of liberty and adhere to its laws, you’re just as American as anyone else, and anybody who doesn’t like it should “mind their own damn business.”
Community, in Walz’s telling, isn’t defined by somebody’s idea of cultural norms, but rather by your connection to your neighbors. If you’re willing to help out with a stranded car or a bake sale, then he doesn’t care if you’re an atheist or a cat-owner (or, God forbid, both).
Walz’ view, to me, seems very appropriate for a high school teacher: America is neither an abstract idea nor an ethno-cultural nation like France. America is a project. If you pitch in, you belong.
How was this possible? Democrats were able to take these themes (and several others) away from Republicans because the GOP has spent years giving them little more than lip service. When Ron DeSantis began banning books and threatening teachers who taught inconvenient facts about American history, those actions raised no debate about freedom within the Republican Party. There has been no controversy about nominating a philandering, twice-divorced, pussy grabber to lead the party of family values. When one jury of ordinary Americans found Trump responsible for sexual assault, another ruled beyond a reasonable doubt that he had committed fraud, and he avoided his other felony indictments through delaying tactics rather than by challenging the evidence against him, members of the law-and-order party attacked the justice system rather than question their allegiance to a criminal.
The convention speech that brought this all home was by former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger:
I’ve learned something about my party too, something I couldn’t ignore: The Republican Party is no longer conservative. It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself.
Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on—listen—he puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.
As a conservative and a veteran, I believe true strength lies in defending the vulnerable. It’s in protecting your family. It’s in standing up for our Constitution and our democracy. That—that is the soul of being a conservative. It used to be the soul of being a Republican. But Donald Trump has suffocated the soul of the Republican Party. His fundamental weakness has coursed through my party like an illness, sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.
Whatever they may have meant to past generations, in 2024 Republican values have become a “show” with “no real strength” behind them. That’s why Democrats were able to take them back this week.
The Weekly Sift 