TRUMP IS A TOXICALLY MASCULINE ANDY KAUFMAN, AND OTHER UNORGANIZED THOUGHTS

A few thoughts on one of the worst days in American history.


Eeyore

Remember all those gloomy posts I wrote when Joe Biden was in the race? Remember how you all told me I was an Eeyore who was bumming you out with my knee-jerk pessimism? Now we know: I was right. I was right about how compelling a figure Donald Trump continues to be in the eyes of 75 or 80 million voters. I was right to be pessimistic, and it's clear that I should have remained pessimistic even after Kamala Harris entered the race.

Trump is seen by millions as a capable problem-solver because most Americans experienced at least the first three years of his presidency as a reasonably nice time, and because decades ago he was the main character in fictionalized books and a fake reality TV series that told us he has the magic power to make great deals without breaking a sweat. They don't know that he knows nothing and that he lucked into a good economy, and that he presided over a sustained period of relative stability because he'd surrounded himself with capable people of a kind he'll never hire again.


Democrats and Republicans agree that Democrats are bad

A couple of days ago, Frank Wilhoit wrote something in the comments here I largely agree with:

People vote their emotional compulsions, which, by definition, are purely destructive; that is why all voting is negative-partisan. Trump will get one vote: his own. The votes that are recorded as his will be votes against, not Kamala Harris, but the Democratic Party and its constituencies. Comparably, Harris will get no votes at all; the votes that are recorded as hers will be votes against, not Trump, but the Republican Party and its constituencies.

History is on the side of the Republicans here, because they understand what is going on; that is why they focus exclusively upon degrading the Democratic brand. We do not understand.... We should have spent every moment of the past forty-five years screaming total rejection of the "conservative" pseudophilosophy, and nothing else.

Republicans have controlled American politics since 1980, either from positions of power or as a minority party blocking liberal and moderate change. Millions of Americans see the Republican Party as the normal party and the Democratic Party as the party responsible for all bad things. It's for the reasons Frank gives: Republicans denigrate Democrats every day, while Democrats offer olive branches to Republicans and praise at least some of them incessantly.

I don't know whether Kamala Harris's outreach to Republicans cost her votes, but it sent the message that being an ordinary Democrat is bad. It says that Democrats are good only when Republicans approve of them.

In this election, Harris lost and Democrats lost winnable Senate seats while voters embraced Democratic positions in referendum after referendum. In Florida, a referendum overturning the state's six-week abortion ban failed to win a 60% supermajority, but it won 57% of the vote. Florida also voted to return Trump and Senator Rick Scott to office by double-digit margins. Missouri approved constitutional protection of reproductive rights -- and gave both Trump and Senator Josh Hawley double-digit wins. Trump won Kentucky by more than 30 points, but an amendment to allow private and religious schools to use public funds lost by 30 points.

Democrats never tell voters, You support abortion rights. The Republican Party doesn't. You support universal background checks on guns and an assault weapons ban. The Republican Party is unalterably opposed to any restrictions on guns. You support higher taxes on billionaires. The Republican Party wants taxes on billionaires lowered. You support public education and oppose book banning. The Republican Party opposes public education and supports book banning.

Frank goes on to say,

It is too late now; one cannot suddenly "discover" a problem that has been in being for decades and try to whip up any urgency around it.

I'm not sure that's true -- but I suspect we'll never find out, because Democrats will never stick up for their party or regularly enumerate the flaws of the GOP.


Maybe ground game is meaningless

Every reporter who looked at the story agreed: Kamala Harris had a very good get-out-the-vote operation. Donald Trump's was outsourced to Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk, and it was terrible.

But apparently that didn't matter. As late as yesterday, I was reading stories and social media reports telling me that a typical Pennsylvania voter might get seven door knocks. But does that work? Many of us who aren't in swing states but give money to Democrats get repeated texts and email messages asking for more and more money. Don't we all find that annoying? Then why wouldn't a Pennsylvania voter who's being bombarded with TV ads, web ads, and mailers find it annoying to get multiple door knocks, phone calls, and texts?

Trump's get-out-the-vote operation was himself. It was being on TV every day, and appearing with surrogates his voters liked, Elon Musk in particular. Being visible is how he won.


But didn't voters think Trump is crazy?

I think Trump's voters see him as an angry Andy Kaufman. You don't know what he'll say on any given day when he takes the stage.. You can't tell whether he's doing a bit or has actually lost his mind. But you can't look away.

At the end of the campaign, Trump looked tired and his rants sometimes seemed incoherent, but he wasn't Joe Biden, who frequently stops speaking while he gropes for the right word or phrase. Trump just keeps going until his sentences and anecdotes end somewhere, then he looks pleased with himself and moves on. I think millions of people think he sounds like a normal guy on a talking jag, not like a dementia patient -- or, actually, a normal funny guy. They laugh at his jokes. I can't explain it.


Which brings me to Biden

This race was lost years ago. It was lost when inflation soared and President Biden didn't seem focused on the problem.

I criticized Matthew Yglesias's recent New York Times op-ed, which argued that any other Republican would have won this race easily. (As it turned out, Yglesias was wrong about Trump -- Trump actually was winning the race easily.) Yglesias's argument was this:

... almost everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living.

We now know that Harris's well-run and engaging campaign couldn't overcome this. But the race might have been different for her or Biden if Biden had been able to persuade voters that he cared and was working hard to make their lives better.

In 2012, voters were dissatisfied with the slow pace of recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. In late August 2012, 61.3% of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track, according to the Real Clear Politics average.

But Barack Obama could talk. He could make an eloquent case for himself and against his opponent. He seemed vigorous and hardworking. Joe Biden never persuaded voters that he had a handle on the problem of inflation. You and I know there's not much he could have done, but if he'd seemed engaged, Democrats might not have been in quite as deep a hole.

Interest rates are terrible now. I lived through the era of double-digit inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but credit card interest rates are higher now than they were then. In 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president, inflation was 12.5% and credit card interest rates averaged 17.3%. Now inflation is only 2.4% -- but credit card interest averages 21.76% for existing cards and 23% for new cards. And:

Half of credit cardholders surveyed in June as part of Bankrate's latest Credit Card Debt Survey said they carry balances over month to month. That is up from 44% in January....

One-third of U.S. adults (36%) have credit card debt that's higher than their emergency savings, according to Bankrate's findings. That's the same amount as a year ago and the highest since the personal finance site began asking the question in 2011.

We needed a president who seemed to get this. Biden didn't, and so Trump won.


And also, America is massively sexist

Sixty countries have had female heads of state, but it's starting to seem as if America never will. It's not just the two Democratic women who have lost -- Republicans consistently reject female candidates in presidential primaries. Many of us think Sarah Palin is no longer taken seriously as a Republican leader because she's ignorant, because she talks nonsense, and because she's a tabloid-friendly drama addict -- but how does that make her different from Trump? Palin is Trump with a vagina. He's dominated the last decade of American politics. She's a has-been.

America is full of Christian conservatives who genuinely don't believe women should hold leadership positions. It's also full of young and not-so-young men who feel disgust when women seem powerful or step into what they regard as male spaces. Hire female leads for a remake of a beloved buddy movie and they wail, "You're ruining my childhood!" How do you get an Angela Merkel or a Jacinta Ardern past all that?

In the days before Barack Obama, I assumed that the first Black president and the first female president would be Republicans. Now I don't think I'll live to see a female president. There are too many trad Christians and too many whiny boy-men -- and they just elected the biggest whiny boy-man of them all.

I LIKE THE VIBE SHIFT, BUT I DON'T TRUST IT

The polls are still close, but it feels as if pundits and self-proclaimed Knowers Of Things have begun to believe, maybe just in the past day, that Kamala Harris will win this election. The vibe shift started with the release of Ann Selzer's Des Moines Register poll of Iowa, which showed Harris leading by 3 in a state she's always been expected to lose. In the past, Selzer's polls have been extraordinarily accurate, so many Knowers believe she might have detected shifts in the electorate that other pollsters have discounted or missed altogether. If so, this could have positive implications for Harris in nearby states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and possibly even in Texas, which has a draconian abortion ban similar to the one that just took effect in Iowa.

But there have been bad polls for Harris, too, and they're not dampening the sense that Harris is on track to win. Jim Cramer of CNBC says Wall Street expects Harris to win. Journalist Tim Alberta made the rounds of cable news to talk about his conversations with Trump campaign insiders, many of whom are apparently fed up with the campaign and with Trump, with some hints that they don't think they're winning.

Tim Alberta reports that people close to Trump are becoming increasingly pessimistic : “I think that there is a real fear that the bottom has started to fall out here…that they are closing in about as weak a fashion as you possibly could.”
pic.twitter.com/1n2BAa7tju

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) November 5, 2024

Re: my comments on CNN and MSNBC this evening... yes, there are Trump staffers who no longer much care whether he wins or loses. Not exactly breaking news. Hard to overstate how terrible morale is inside of this campaign—and how much anger/resentment is felt toward the candidate.

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) November 5, 2024

A couple of reporters from Britain's Independent think Harris is finishing strong. Andrew Feinberg writes:

Harris ... is surging thanks to a series of late-game missteps by Trump and his allies. Those missteps include the disastrous decision to include a comedian who called Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage” in the lineup at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally late last month....

Privately, Democratic sources who spoke to The Independent are projecting confidence, with one swing-state party chair noting what they described as “a serious crossover vote among Republicans” and “explosive” turnout in early voting among key constituencies, including Latinos....

One Republican operative who has worked with the ex-president’s campaign in the past said it’s clear that Trump is “decompensating” in response to the late Harris surge.

“He’s realizing that he could lose the election, go to prison, and maybe die there,” they said.

The paper's Eric Garcia writes:

... I ... spent much of Saturday following both presidential candidates around North Carolina on the final weekend of the campaign and it had become clear to me that Harris had all the momentum, while Trump was grasping for straws.

This appears under the headline "I Followed Harris and Trump Round North Carolina. It’s Clear to Me Who’s Going to Win."

I know that Jon Ralston, whose reputation as a political seer in Nevada matches Ann Selzer's in Iowa, believes Harris will eke out a win in Nevada, despite a poor showing in the state's early vote. I know that the final New York Times swing-state polls showed Harris with leads in enough states to win the Electoral College. I know that Harris has more money and a far more experienced and professional get-out-the-vote operation. I know that her rallies are bigger and her crowds are more enthusiastic.

It's very, very plausible that all this will add up to a Harris win, maybe even a big win. But the race still feels like a coin flip to me. Trump was outspent in 2016 and won anyway. Trump's voters were far more enthusiastic about their candidate than Joe Biden's voters were in 2020, but Biden won.

In the polling averages from FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver, and Real Clear Polling, Harris leads in only two swing states, Michigan and Wisconsin. I know I'm supposed to believe that pollsters are overcorrecting for their botched predictions of a Hillary Clinton win in 2016 and a Biden blowout in 2020, so they're probably underestimating Democratic voters, especially women angry at the Dobbs decision, the way they did in 2022. But I think it's possible that they're underestimating those voters and underestimating the Trump fanboys and fangirls who vote only when he's on the ballot, and that the two misses could cancel each other out. I know it's the least likely outcome, but what if the polls are very accurate? If they are, Trump could win.

My head tells me that Harris isn't Hillary Clinton and there's no James Comey or email pseudo-scandal. It tells me that Trump's ground game has been outsourced to grifters. It tells me that women are furious. It tells me that young boy-men won't leave the house and go vote.

But I'm bracing for impact in spite of all that, just in case.

I'm also bracing for the fact that we won't be rid of Trump tomorrow even if he loses a blowout. He'll declare victory in about fourteen hours no matter what the voters did -- Harris could be on course to trounce Trump with Obama-in-'08-level numbers, she could be winning all the swing states plus Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa, and he'll still say he won. If he doesn't win, he'll fight to get the results overturned right up to Inauguration Day. So if you're sick of him, sick of his voice and his bronzer and his bigotry and the disgusting way he pronounces his L's when he's trying to be contemptuous and sarcastic, calm yourself, because he muight be more of a presence in the next two and a half months than he is even now.

But I don't think the Supreme Court will help him steal an election he legitimately lost. Lower-court judges, yes -- he'll file a bunch of lawsuits in Amarillo, Texas, regardless of where they ought to be filed, so Matthew Kacsmaryk can give him some wins he doesn't deserve. But the Supreme Court still believes it has most of the country bamboozled into believing that it operates within guardrails. I think the Supreme Court still isn't ready to overturn an election that everyone in America will have seen called by CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, AP, and, yes, Fox. (It's good news that Aaron Mishkin, the data nerd who runs Fox's election-night number-crunching operation, is returning this year. He's a straight shooter and he's the guy whose numbers led Fox to call Arizona for Biden first, so Fox is likely to report on the results in a straightforward way this year, too.)

Here's one pleasant surprise so far, though it's in the "dog that hasn't barked" category: The GOP hasn't made a concerted effort to offer trumped-up evidence that the vote is massively rigged by the Democrats. There have been voter-roll purges and there are Republican officials preparing not to certify, and all that is bad enough, but I thought by now the message of the Republican Party would be that the voting process in blue areas was hopelessly corrupted. I thought polling places in Democratic areas would be shut down or occupied by National Guard troops by now. I thought governors and state attorneys general would be making headlines identifying alleged massive breaches of election integrity. I also thought there might be shootings, bombings, or fires at early voting sites.

I assumed that Republicans knew Trump's 2020 steal attempt looked implausible because he seemed to make up all his evidence after the fact, so this year they'd try to lay the groundwork for a steal early. That hasn't happened, either because they don't want their own people to give up on voting, because they don't really care if Trump wins, or because, like the Supreme Court, they're still not ready to go full mask-off post-democratic. We'll see what happens today, but we still have democracy now, more or less, even in red states. And Harris really might be on her way to a win.

NO, IT'S NOT TRUE THAT ANY OTHER REPUBLICAN WOULD BE RUNNING AWAY WITH THIS

One day before the election, Matt Yglesias has a Big Idea:

Any Other Republican Would Be Running Away With This

Yglesias's theory:

... almost everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.

It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked ... and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living.

So Democrats would lose to any Republican candidate other than Trump, Yglesias believes. He doesn't intend this as liberal-bashing.

It is not a left-right thing.... Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium.

Nevertheless, he concludes:

Under the circumstances, it’s Republicans who should be asking why the race is even close and Democrats who should be breathing a sigh of relief to be heading into a coin-flip election.

But America isn't like most other affluent democracies because we don't have a parliamentary system -- we choose a president directly. Personalities matter a great deal -- and on the Republican side, some of the personalities are as grotesque as Donald Trump without his bizarre charisma. Others are batshit crazy.

Yglesias probably imagines that Nikki Haley would have become the Republican nominee if Trump hadn't run, because she was the last opponent standing in the primaries. But as I've said many times, Haley was the runner-up for the nomination only because Ron DeSantis was effectively the second-choice Trump, a lib-owning authoritarian. In a Trump-less GOP field with only the same candidates running, DeSantis probably would have won. During the primaries, he had a 62.2% approval rating among Republicans, the best of any non-Trump candidate, and nearly 40 points better than his disapproval rating, according to FiveThirtyEight; Haley's approval rating among Republicans was only 43%, with a 39.9% disapproval rating.

So while it's true that Haley seemed like a strong general election candidate -- in polls taken through March of this year, she led President Biden by 4.4 points, according to Real Clear Polling, and some non-partisan polls showed her with a double-digit lead -- DeSantis was struggling against Biden: RCP said he and Biden were tied as of January 2024. When he dropped out of the primaries in January, DeSantis was widely disliked by the general public -- his ratings were 31.7% favorable, 46.7% unfavorable, according to FiveThirtyEight. I think Biden might have beaten him, and Harris might have beaten him handily.

Yglesias seems to assume that Republicans would have nominated a respectable-looking candidate if Trump hadn't run. Why? Why assume that a party whose recent state-level nominees have included Mark Robinson, Herschel Walker, Royce White, Kari Lake, and Blake Masters would pick someone electable? There's a strong likelihood that if Trump hadn't run, the party's presidential nominee would have been a batshit-crazy MAGA influencer -- Mike Flynn, Mike Lindell, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr., or some other lowlife.

It's possible that the sheer number of whackjob candidates might have split the whackjob vote and given the race to a respectable-seeming candidate -- but many, many respectable-seeming candidates probably would have run as well: not just Haley, DeSantis, Chris Christie, Tim Scott, Mike Pence, and Vivek Ramaswamy, but also Glenn Youngkin, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott, Brian Kemp, Chris Sununu, and others. Trump bashers like Liz Cheney and Larry Hogan probably would have run, and while they would have done poorly, they would have further diluted the vote for top-tier respectable-seeming candidates. And the crazies would have spent the primaries pushing the not-quite-as-crazies to the even more extreme right. There's no reason to believe that the candidate who emerged from that process would be certain to win a general election.

It's possible that a Trumpish whackjob could have won this election. But it's not inevitable. There's no reason to assume the GOP would have chosen a better candidate.

MAYBE WE SHOULD HAVE JUST GIVEN TRUMP A MULTI-YEAR CABLE DEAL

So this happened:

... during his rally in Milwaukee on Friday night ... [Donald Trump] experienced microphone problems before he then simulated fellatio on a microphone stand.

Trump encountered numerous problems with his microphone during his hour-long address, with the crowd even chanting at one point “fix the mic.”

“Fix the mic huh. You gotta be kidding. Do you want to see me knock the hell out of people backstage?” an irritated Trump responded....

In what was undoubtedly the strangest part of the whole situation, Trump then took the microphone off the stand and began simulating fellatio.

In the unlikely event that you haven't seen this, the simulated fellatio happens at 1:47:

The full clip is even weirder.

WHY IS TRUMP PERFORMING FELLATIO ON A MICROPHONE?!

pic.twitter.com/tnZyn3vHgn

— The Millennial Snowflake 🇵🇸 (@Teh_Snowflake) November 2, 2024

We're getting the usual responses. Tom Nichols in The Atlantic: "if my father in his late 70s had simulated a blow job in mixed company—never mind in front of an audience that included children—I’d have brought him in for a complete neurological workup." It's the same response we're getting to a recent Trump "weave":

Still under-covered that there is obviously something seriously, medically, degenerative-condition wrong with his brain and it's been accelerating rapidly.

[image or embed]

— Andy Craig (@andycraig.bsky.social) November 3, 2024 at 7:40 AM

I'll keep saying it: This is disinhibition, not dementia. Is simulating fellatio on a microphone a surefire sign of dementia? If so, then a thousand standup comics need to be institutionalized. Comics do this all the time.

That's what I see in that clip: a guy who wants to be president, but who'd be just as happy if he had the top-rated comedy specials on Max or Netflix. He's been complaining about technical problems at his rallies lately, but I wonder if he's complaining partly because he thinks of it as a bit, something the audience enjoys. He needs their laughter. He needs that dopamine hit, over and over again. He wants to be the fifth face on Mount Rushmore, but I also think he wants to be Howard Stern in 1991, at the peak of his fame.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if, for some reason, HBO or another cable channel had given Trump a deal for a series of comedy specials, maybe before he decided to run for president, maybe after he lost in 2020. (In this scenario, I'd combine the post-2020 cable deal with a termination of all legal cases against Trump, even though the bastard doesn't deserve it.) Would he have been content with that? A series of live appearances before adoring crowds of goateed pickup-truck drivers, videotaped and broadcast on cable to large audiences of other goateed pickup-truck drivers? That might have been all Trump needed to satisfy his seemingly unquenchable thirst for admiration.

But don't I think that meandering Hannibal Lecter monologue above is a sign of dementia? Nahhh. Established comics sometimes become extremely self-indulgent, because they know their audiences are on their side and will wait for the jokes. Ever seen late-period Lenny Bruce, when he spent the majority of his time discussing the transcripts of his obscenity trials rather than telling jokes? That's what Trump's "weaves" remind me of.

(Bruce, of course, used a lot of drugs and was greatly impaired at the end as a result. I'm not ruling out Adderall or some other drug as a partial explanation for Trump's meanderings.)

Did I ever tell you about seeing Eddie Murphy at a comedy club in the early 1980s? I was trying to do standupback then and I was terrible, but I happened to be at Catch a Rising Star in New York on an audition night when Eddie Murphy, who'd just started to become a star, showed up with some Satuday Night Live associates to do a set. This was a common occurrence -- established comics liked to work out new material at comedy clubs on off nights. Murphy took the stage, and I don't think he told a joke for the first eight muinutes or so. He just rambled, mocking the audience, mocking the auditioners. If, like me, you were an auditioner, the audience gave you one joke -- if you didn't make them laugh, they were ready to ask for the check, or they tuned you out and chatted with their friends. But they were chuckling at Murphy even when he said nothing particularly funny for an extended period of time, because they expected to enjoy him.

When Murphy finally started doing his material, the audience loved it. I remember a bit involving Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton having anal sex. It was incredibly adolescent -- "I know that you know that I know that you know that you want to fuck me in the ass" -- but Murphy was an amazing mimic and had perfect timing, and it killed.

That's what Trump wants to be. With 20/20 hindsight, I almost wish we could have given him what he wants.

And yes, a guy who's running for president because he wants to be loved is really, really unfit to run the country.

TRUMP COULD MAKE CONTAGION GREAT AGAIN

This could be America's future if Donald Trump wins the presidency -- and it could be Red America's future no matter who wins:

A regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID-19 vaccines to residents in six counties after a narrow decision by its board.

Southwest District Health appears to be the first in the nation to be restricted from giving COVID-19 vaccines....

While policymakers in Texas banned health departments from promoting COVID vaccines and Florida’s surgeon general bucked medical consensus to recommend against the vaccine, governmental bodies across the country haven’t blocked the vaccines outright.

This story, from AP, doesn't say that COVID vaccines are banned in these counties, but it does say that people who rely on local government for their shots -- "including people without housing, people who are homebound and those in long-term care facilities or in the immigration process" -- will lose that access to vaccination.

Many observers have just now realized that a Trump presidency could make contagion great again:

I expect terrible things if Trump wins. Until recently, however, “explosive growth in infectious diseases” wasn’t on my Bingo card www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-tra...

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— Paul Krugman (@pkrugman.bsky.social) October 31, 2024 at 10:00 AM

The interview that inspired that Krugman post was reported on by Puck's Tara Palmeri on Thursday:

In a bizarre interview with [CNN's] Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s transition chair and Cantor Fitzgerald C.E.O. Howard Lutnick revealed that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had successfully convinced him, over a two-and-a-half-hour conversation, that vaccines cause autism (they don’t)—a worrying signal given Trump’s recent pronouncement that he would let Kennedy “go wild on medicines.” Earlier this week, R.F.K. claimed that Trump promised to give him “control” of the Health and Human Services agency—seen by many as an apparent quid pro quo for his Trump endorsement.

There's nothing "bizarre" about the Lutnick interview. Opposition to vaccines is mainstream in the contemporary Republican Party.

But why are we just noticing this now? We knew about the possibility of an RFK role in a second Trump administration back in August, a couple of days before Kennedy dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump. At the time, NBC reported this:

For weeks, Kennedy’s campaign has floated his interest in a Cabinet position in a future Trump White House while publicly denying he would accept it....

On Tuesday, Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, told an interviewer the campaign was weighing whether to “join forces” with Trump and suggested that Kennedy would do an “incredible job” as secretary of health and human services. Trump later told CNN that he “probably would” appoint Kennedy to some role.

Krugman and others in the media should have been alarmed then. The Harris campaign could have been running anti-Kennedy ads focused on possible lost access to vaccines then. I respect the choices the Harris campaign has made, but it seems to me that a few ads saying that Trump and Kennedy might take away access to childhood vaccines might have appropriately scared parents of young children, the elderly, and people with compromised immune systems.

Palmeri believes that Kennedy would have trouble getting approved in the Senate for a Cabinet position.

But I’m told it’s conventional wisdom inside Mar-a-Lago that it would be impossible to get Kennedy confirmed in the Senate, even if Republicans pick up more than two seats. More likely, I’m told, he could be expected to wind up with a “czar”-like advisory role similar to what’s been promised to Elon Musk....

So who would head the Department of Health and Human Services in a Trump administration if not Kennedy? Possibly this guy, who got a brief mention in the AP story quoted above:

Florida’s top health official, whose tenure has been marked by his warnings against vaccines, threats to TV stations for running abortion ads and frequent clashes with public health experts, has emerged as a candidate to run the Department of Health and Human Services in a potential Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the process.

Joseph A. Ladapo is on a list of HHS secretary candidates being assembled by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been charged with helping select staff for the nation’s health and food agencies if Donald Trump wins office, according to the people....

Ladapo, who has served as Florida’s surgeon general since 2021, has repeatedly defied public health practices — such as failing to urge parents to vaccinate their children or keep unvaccinated students home from school during a recent measles outbreak — drawing scorn from public health experts who say his decisions have imperiled Florida residents....

The prospect of a vaccine skeptic such as Ladapo in a national health role has alarmed public health experts, pointing to his decision to warn Florida residents against the mRNA coronavirus vaccines while citing debunked claims....

Ladapo drew national attention in the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, writing essays for the Wall Street Journal that questioned coronavirus vaccines, mask-wearing and other interventions. The articles won him support from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who recruited the University of California at Los Angeles professor to serve as his top health deputy.

I don't know why this wasn't this a major issue in the campaign. Maybe Harris didn't want to lose the votes of liberal and moderate suburbanites who are mildly vaccine-skeptical. Whatever the reason, it was an opportunity missed.

THE IMMIGRANT CRACKDOWN COULD BE THE EASY PART FOR TRUMP (Plus: Reasons to Hope We Never Get to That Point)

I don't know who'll win the election on Tuesday. Yesterday the forecasts turned against Kamala Harris again, although there are new state polls from Marist and CNN that look good for her. I'm pleased that Donald Trump and his supporters seem to be freaking out about Harris's lead among elderly early voters in Pennsylvania, about the fact that the early vote in skewing female by double digits in key states and skewing Democratic by large margins in those same states according to polls of early voters. I'm glad they're upset about that Julia Roberts ad urging women to vote Harris without telling their Trumpist husbands. And I'm encouraged by this report from Puck's Tara Palmeri about the talk in Trumpland:

... as the early results from Pennsylvania reveal an influx of first-time female voters who will likely break for Harris, a newfound anxiety is taking hold....

While [Trump's] inner circle feels confident about winning the Sunbelt, they recognize that they have a good chance of losing Michigan, where the gender gap is stark and students are coming out in record numbers. (A new CNN poll shows Harris up 5 points in the state.) So the situation in Pennsylvania—where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote—has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.

... “They’re going so crazy here,” said a campaign source. “Anyone who hears how rabid they are about this issue can’t walk away from this and think they feel comfortable about where they’re at in PA. They’re talking about criminal referrals. They want to find poll watchers who they feel are engaged in voter suppression so that they can refer criminal prosecutions.”

I worry about Republican intimidation at polling places -- but why isn't it happening already? In some states, more than half of the expected electorate has already voted. Are these old men, Trump and Roger Stone and the rest, planning an Election Day intimidation campaign when, for their purposes, they should have been planning a pre-Election Day initimidation campaign? Did these creaky old bastards forget that it's not the 1980s anymore and people vote early now?

*****

But I think a Trump victory is quite possible, and I think Michelle Goldberg's "biggest fear" about a Trump presidency would happen right away:

My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.

But a Trump White House will be a strange mix of authoritarianism and incompetence. I assume that Trump, if he wins, will issue orders to start the immigrant roundup on January 20, and quite a few immigrants will be seized that day.

But then what? I think he'll be too incompetent to delay the process until he has somneplace to put the detainees -- you can't build a detention camp in an afternoon -- so many of the first ones will be sitting on buses in handcuffs with nowhere to go. But all Trump will care about is getting footage of the raids. Either there'll be bodycam footage or cooperating law enforcement authorities will allow reporters to shoot video, the way they have for decades when they're planning showoffy SWAT raids.

This roundup will be vicious in some ways and inept in others. The most peaceful, law-abiding immigrants, including some who have had the legal right to live here, will be rounded up first. Among the first targets will be hard-working Haitian legal residents in Springfield, Ohio. In Aurora, Colorado, Trump will probably round up the people who aren't in gangs, while the gang members slip away because, y'know, they're criminals, which means they have some experience in evading capture.

The roundups will skip large portions of the undocumented immigrant population, partly because Trump and his authoritarian hacks won't do a careful job of assembling the goon army necessary to do the roundups clinically and efficiently, and partly because Trump will make it clear to employers that he'll spare their immigrant employees if they bribe him (which they will).

But the supporters of the crackdown won't mind. Remember, rank-and-file right-wingers believe in anecdotes, not data. Tell them about three violent crimes committed by immigrants and they believe we have an immigrant crime wave. They never think about the fact that Fox and Trump are highlighting every crime committed by immigrants and ignoring tens of thousands of crimes committed by people born in this country. If the anecdotes they hear are all biased one way, they'll believe that what they're being told demonstates a trend. And that's how they'll respond to news reports of immigrant roundups: They'll see a lot of footage of these roundups on Fox and think Trump is winning the war, even if he's rounding up far fewer immigrants than he promised.

And if eventually it becomes clear that the crackdown is failing to deport the number of immigrants Trump promised to deport, I suspect that won't hurt him. I always think of the parable of the two Bushes: George H.W. Bush sent troops to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, succeeded in that mission, declared victory, withdrew the troops, and then lost reelection a year and a half later. George W. Bush went to war with Saddam, deposed him, occupied Iraq, then got stuck in a quagmire -- but he was still a "war president" when it was his turn to run for reelection, and he won. So I think Trump might actually benefit from failure in his immigrant crackdown, at least for a while. He'll be a "war president." His followers and many Americans in the middle will rally around him because the crackdown isn't happening efficiently. (We'll need to "stay the course.")

I'm not saying that Trump will be a popular president if he wins. I'm saying that this might be his best-tolerated outrageous act. He's much more likely to be resented for his inflationary economic policies, for cracking down further on abortion, and for other acts that will directly affect American citizens.

I think Goldberg is overestimating the popular outrage in response to the immigrant crackdown. She writes:

If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past.

I don't think there'll be large protests. When I imagine the response to this, I think of the response to the heavy-handed "law and order" police tactics of the 1980s and 1990s: White Americans who lived in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas overwhelmingly approved of the tactics, and even whites who lived in cities not far from the neighborhoods where the crackdowns took place largely shrugged them off. Stop-and-frisk and police brutality weren't happening in white neighborhoods. In Rudy Giuliani's two terms as mayor here in New York, the crackdowns didn't shock white people's consciences until cops instrumentally raped Abner Louima and killed Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.

Will there be a violent crackdown on dissent as well as a violent crackdown on immigrants? To some extent, yes, and it will be ugly. But Trump is terrible at personnel and at organization in general -- will he be able to assemble multiple armies to commit multiple forms of repression? I don't think he can outsource this to the personnel operation of Project 2025, which is more focused on bureaucrats than brownshirts.

I think there'll be levels of disruption in a second Trump presidency that will be shocking to people who expected merely a tough boss who happens to pop off on social media a lot, but I think the immigrant crackdown could be less troubling to the public than we expect. If a second Trump presidency happens, I think public anger will be mostly based on economic and social issues -- renewed inflation, book banning, repression of sexual minorities in suburban schools with socially moderate-to-liberal parents, a further crackdown on abortion, the end of Obamacare and possibly Medicaid, with Medicare and Social Security also under attack. I think a meat ax taken to the federal budget by Elon Musk could leave school districts without lunches, flood victims without aid, roads in long-term disrepair. I expect issues like these to alienate Americans first. I wish we lived in a country where the immigrant crackdown would send millions into the streets and threaten Trump's presidency -- but I don't think it will work that way.

SOMEDAY TRUMP WILL BE GONE -- BUT THE CRAZINESS WILL REMAIN

We're often told that America will be a much better place once Donald Trump is driven from politics, by whatever means -- defeat, death, retirement, prison, dementia. We're told that MAGA will die, because no one can replace Trump as its figurehead.

I agree that Trump has a unique appeal to the lunkheads who love him. It's hard to imagine J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis replicating that fandom.

But I wonder if we're looking at this the wrong way. Instead of focusing on the leadership of modern conservatism, maybe we should be looking at its followers.

Here's a story from CNN about Trump supporters' schemes to overturn a Kamala Harris win. Please pay attention to what these people believe:

“Yes, the steal is happening again,” Emerald Robinson, a right-wing broadcaster with nearly 800,000 followers on X, declared in a blog post earlier this month, criticizing the fact that votes may take days to count in some states. “It doesn’t take days to get election results. It takes days to cheat.”

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who donated millions of dollars to efforts investigating the 2020 election, warned on Telegram this week of a cyberattack that would rig the election and lead to imminent “death and cannibalism” unless Americans stand together.

And Greg Locke, a prominent Tennessee pastor who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6 riot, told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the US would be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be man-made” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote.

“If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one,” Locke predicted....

... GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ... has also floated a conspiracy theory that recent US Capitol Police training exercises are connected to a plan by congressional Democrats to keep Trump out of power even if he wins.

Millions of people find all this plausible, and are outraged by it. Once Trump is no longer in politics, where will this conspiratorial rage go? It won't go away. It's much older than Trump's political career -- thirty years ago, millions of Republicans believed Bill Clinton had a murderous "body count" that would put a serial killer to shame.

Clearly there's a massive audience for right-wing conspiratorialism, so the people who spread this variety of disinformation will just keep doing it, even in Trump's absence. It will still enrage voters even if the Republican Party is no longer led by a compulsive liar and conspiratorialist.

In the past, this energy helped sustain Republican solidarity even when the GOP's leaders didn't directly embrace it the way Trump has. In the future, even if the leaders of the GOP seem respectable, this energy will remain. The conspiratorialism won't seem like a core GOP principle to most observers, but it will still keep millions voting for the party. And eventually there'll be another party leader who embraces it openly.

I don't know who'll take over the Republican Party when Trump is no longer the leader. I don't think it will necessarily be a politician -- it could be Tucker Carlson or Mike Flynn or Charlie Kirk or Don Jr., or it could be Elon Musk hand-picking the next presidential nominee because he can't run himself. But whoever takes the reins when Trump is gone, I don't see the craziness we associated with MAGA going away.