IT'S WORLD-HISTORICAL FASCISM, BUT IT'S ALSO ORDINARY WHITE-GUY BIGOTRY

I could compare what happened yesterday in Madison Square Garden to a Nazi rally, and while that would be highly appropriate, what I saw reminded me of police message board transcripts gone public. Here's what speakers said yesterday at that Donald Trump rally:

A comic kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage,” then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.

Another speaker likened Vice President Kamala Harris to a prostitute with “pimp handlers.” A third called her “the Antichrist.” And the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson mocked Ms. Harris — the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father — with a made-up ethnicity, saying she was vying to become “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

Did yesterday's rally seem like the work of an organized, dangerous fascist party? Yes -- but the rally's rhetoric also seemed like ordinary casual conversation among bigoted white men when they think no one can hear them. Remember the cops who beat Rodney King in 1991 and sent messages to one another describing Black citizens involved in a domestic dispute as being “right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist’”? Remember the police offcial responsible for investigating workplace harassment in New York City being fired in 2021 after it was revealed that he'd written racist posts in a police discussion group called the Rant?

One referred to former President Barack Obama as a “Muslim savage.” Another labeled Dante de Blasio, the Black son of Mayor Bill de Blasio, as “brillohead.”

This is how bigoted men talk. Among cops, it reinforces a sense of grievance that often leads to brutality. It'll do the same thing among Trumpers if they win -- and, to a lesser extent, if they lose. This is a rising fascist movement, but it's built on ordinary hatreds that aren't new and that predate Trump's political career.

The speaker who drew the most attention was a comic named Tony Hinchcliffe.

“These Latinos, they love making babies, too. Just know that they do,” Hinchcliffe said, setting up his joke: “There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.”

A few moments later, the comedian took a second swing at a key voting bloc within the community: Puerto Ricans.

“There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” he said to a scattering of claps and jeers.

Wow, nobody could have foreseen that this guy would say anything offensive:

As he finished his set at a Big Laugh Comedy show in Austin [in May 2021], Dallas stand-up Peng Dang did a series of jokes related to #StopAsianHate." Then he graciously introduced the next comic, Tony Hinchcliffe, who asked the crowd to keep it going for “the filthy little fucking ch**k who was just up here.” No lie – Hinchcliffe’s actual words....

He goes far beyond the initial hit on Dang ... haranguing against Asians and Asian Americans, including mocking Dang’s set with references to it that Hinchcliffe delivers in a caricaturish Asian accent. He even berates white members of the audience, branding them “race traitors” for laughing at Dang’s jokes and saying their “hooping and hollering” had him “puking in a fucking bucket,” and he does it all without ever showing any sign of irony or humor.

Last week in Austin, I got to bring up Tony Hinchcliffe. This is what he said. Happy Asian (AAPI) Heritage Month! pic.twitter.com/9XG6upit2a

— Peng Dang (@pengdangcomedy) May 11, 2021

Pete Buttigieg thinks we shouldn't respond to this. Mark Harris disagrees:

No, with all due respect, Donald Trump just presided over a racist, nativist, fascist rally in the heart of New York City nine days before the election, and we should very much be talking about it and take what was said there dead seriously.

[image or embed]

— Mark Harris (@markharris.bsky.social) October 27, 2024 at 10:03 PM

I suspect that normie Americans tune out the big insults based on ideology -- "communist," "fascist," "Marxist," "Nazi" -- but they might be shocked by the ordinary bigotry of Tony Hinchcliffe in particular, calling other ordinary people "garbage" while standing before a lectern with Trump's name in big letters. Hating people -- being given permission to hate people -- is what Trumpism is all about, and is what being a Fox viewer has been all about for a quarter of a century, but most normies still don't understand that. Maybe now they will.

I know what Buttigieg is worried about. Ads like this didn't work for Hillary Clinton in 2016:



But maybe this time will be different. Trump can say his racist attacks on foreigners are a response to immigration policies that many Americans agree are flawed. He can shrug off his offensive remarks about women as just a fuckboy's locker room talk. But what's Tony Hinchcliffe's grievance? He just seems to hate Puerto Ricans for the sake of hating them. Maybe that will wake a few voters up to the nature of this movement.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: MEN ARE EMOTIONAL, BUT THEY'RE THE RIGHT EMOTIONS

If you ignore all of Maggie Haberman's fangirling in this story, the message is clear: Donald Trump is a sad, angry, emotionally needy man.

The seven-decade marriage between Donald J. Trump and New York City, like all of his most volatile relationships, was never going to end quietly.

Rejection at the ballot box would not be the final word. Decampment to Florida — another septuagenarian Manhattanite in nominal retirement down south — would not disappear him in earnest.

Felony convictions? Reconcilable differences, it seems, for one evening anyway.

On Sunday, Mr. Trump is bringing his presidential campaign to Madison Square Garden....

Haberman gives us publicist-level superlatives ("a remarkable gambit," "the brashest stop"), but what she's describing sounds more like an abusive ex-husband violating the terms of a restraining order:

More than anything, though, it is a reminder, a provocation, a warning: New York will never be rid of him entirely.

And he will never be done with New York.

“To him,” said George Arzt, a veteran of city politics who first met Mr. Trump in the 1970s, “this is a conquest.”

... His victory ... would position him once more as the vengeance-seeking specter idling above the skyline, a keeper of federal dollars that the city needs and of mental ledgers that he would never wipe clean as president.

He's both vengeful and self-pitying -- a common combination, especially among abusive men.

“I have been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state,” Mr. Trump said in 2019, announcing himself a permanent resident of Florida....

He has lashed out at Letitia James, the state attorney general, over a more than $450 million civil fraud judgment against him. He has thrashed Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, over the 34 felony convictions in his hush-money case, looking miserable through much of the trial, which compelled Mr. Trump to spend more time in the city than he had in years.

But the main message, whether or not Haberman realizes it, is that Trump is really, really needy.

“Every athlete wants to play in front of their home crowd,” said Joseph Borelli, the Republican minority leader of the City Council....

He has been a New Yorker and a lapsed New Yorker, at least until his mind wandered to a venue he had never filled — in a city that might never accept him but will, if he has his way, never escape him, either.

“This is a Queens boy,” Mr. Arzt said, “who thinks that if he comes to Manhattan, this is the world, and he’s conquering the world.”

There are voters who wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton and won't vote for Kamala Harris because "women are too emotional." But both of these women seem coolheaded and in control of their emotions, while Trump seems to be a slave to his, as do many of the men he's surrounded himself with (the desperately needy Twitter troll Elon Musk, the angry dorm-room pontificator J.D. Vance). But I guess these guys have the correct emotions, or at least have them in an acceptable testosterone-cocktail mix, because no one ever seems to say that pure emotional excess is a sufficient reason to reject Trump.

If Harris loses and we still have elections in 2028, I won't blame Democrats for wanting to nominate a man -- it may be the case that America will never be ready to elect a woman -- but if so, I hope they look outside party politics and find an angry, needy, overwrought headcase rather than a cool, steady Obama 2.0. The era of politicans who have the emotional regulation we associate with adults may be ending, and if so, Democrats need to keep up. They may need to find their own angry whiner. When I look at the current polls, I fear that might be what the U.S. electorate wants.

THE SIMPLE IDEA THAT WAS PROBABLY TOO COMPLICATED FOR THE HARRIS CAMPAIGN TO DISCUSS

I'm back, and I'd like to respond to something Yas posted while I was away, in light of a story from ABC:

While almost half the country sees former President Donald Trump as a fascist, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll published Friday, some who believe that say they'll still vote for him.

Among registered voters who regard Trump as a fascist, 8% support him regardless, the poll found.

Yas told us on Thursday that he thinks we're using the word fascist in reference to Trump in a simplistic and inaccurate way, to mean, for instance, He likes to talk about Hitler. ABC questioned some of the voters who say Trump is a fascist but intend to vote for him anyway. I agree that they don't quite know what fascist means, but the common thread in what they say is: He says a lot of mean stuff, but he doesn't seem to do anything really bad.

Analia, (ABC News is not using last names for privacy reasons) a 46-year-old accounting tour operator and former Democrat from Florida, explained she leans toward Trump because of his policies.

"I don't like him as the person that he chose to be, but I like his politics," she said. "But as a human being, I would never support."

When asked about an authoritarian leader, she said, "I think it's good for the country. I think we need some sort of order. I do like those kinds of things from [Trump]."

She said while people deserve freedom, a balance is necessary and society demands "certain rules" be implemented.

So to Analia, fascism just means "law and order."

Here's another ABC interviewee who prefers to remain anonymous:

"Personally, he's a fascist," she said. "Professionally wise, as president, I think he would do a good job."

"We can call our bosses fascist. Doesn't mean that they're not good bosses," she said.

So Trump is a fascist because he's like a demanding boss.

And then there's this guy, also anonymous, who appears to believe that Trump might want do something terrible, but will be hemmed in by guardrails:

"It's something that I'm kind of having to look past," he said. I don't necessarily want to, but considering the candidates we have ... I feel like it's something I kind of have to do."

He also expressed that he does not think Trump can impose fascism in America.

"I don't think he can actually implement it, but I do see him as at least trying," he said.

And there's the problem: Many voters think he's mean or angry or actually fascist, but either they don't believe he wants to do anything really bad or they think he does, but he can't get away with it.

Yas reminds us that as president he was fascist:

I guess what I hope is that [Kamala Harris] will express that reality, of Trump's own intentions and those of his minions ... and their actual historical record in the last round, of the Muslim ban and the semi-secret partnership with Putin, and the concentration camps on the Mexican border, and the threats to our traditional security alliances while Trump flirted with notorious dictators, and the attacks on renewable energy, and his unconstitutional efforts especially during the immigration crises and Black Lives Matter protests [of] 2019-20 to put the US under military occupation, and his current promises to arrest and prosecute those who tried to prosecute him, to deport millions of undocumented immigrants who have been living here peacefully harvesting our food and building our homes for the last 30 years, to "denaturalize" citizens he regards as offensive ... to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants and replace them with party cadres selected by the Heritage Foundation....

Yas reminds us of the generals who

continually worked to frustrate him and thwart his will, even to block him from using nuclear weapons.

But if you're not Muslim and not an immigrant border crosser and not a federal civil servant and not part of any Trump prosecution and if you never joined a protest when he was president, all that was just noise. Even January 6 was noise. And Trump didn't use nuclear weapons, even though he wanted to. He didn't pull the U.S. out of NATO, even though he wanted to. He didn't overturn the results of an election, even though he wanted to.

I think most of these voters would recoil from Trump if he'd managed to do some of the really extreme stuff he was prevented from doing. You and I know that he plans to stock his administration with loyalists this time, and won't hire anyone who might challenge him when he wants to do something crazy. We know that he didn't understand how to staff an administration the first time, so he filled his White House with people who prevented him from doing many of the truly horrifying things he wanted to do -- but that won't happen if he wins again.

Millions of voters think a Trump second term would be like his first term, and no one has tried very hard to tell them why it won't be. It's not rocket science -- it's simply "Trump appointed people from the Establishment last time, and that's what kept us from really veering into Crazy Town. This time, Trump intends to appoint only people from Crazy Town."

Apparently the Harris campaign thinks this is too complicated an argument for American voters -- and sadly, the campaign might be right.

If Trump wins, it's because millions of voters know he has dangerous instincts but don't believe he can act on them, or believe he makes dangerous threats but is mostly just blowing off steam. This time will be different might have been too complicated a message for the Harris camnpaign to use, but if so, that's why Trump might win.

Fascism and Other Matters

 

It's amazing how much Republicans (I don't mean people who "identify" as Republicans, I mean party cadres, the activists who do the work and enjoy the rewards, ideological and material, because that's the kind of party the GOP is now) despise their voters.

While both sides have been criticized for misleading fundraising tactics, “[t]he Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side,” they report.

One sad example: “One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.”

"I love the poorly educated," said Trump, but I think his understanding of "love" is a relationship where he gets a lot more out of it than he puts in, if you know what I mean.

***

This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

CNN — 

Kamala Harris lifted language from a Republican attorney when she testified in front of Congress in 2007, a CNN review of her testimony finds.

Experts CNN spoke with said that the instance, first reported by conservative news outlet the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday, raises concern but does not constitute a serious example of plagiarism.

The instance occurred when Harris was district attorney of San Francisco. She testified at the time before the House Judiciary Committee in support of the John R. Justice Prosecutors and Defenders Incentive Act of 2007, which would have created a student loan repayment program for state and local prosecutors and public defenders.

Her prepared testimony lifted paragraphs from the prepared testimony of Paul Logli, then a Republican state’s attorney from Illinois and chairman of the board of the National District Attorneys Association, who testified before the Senate two months earlier. The paragraphs use the same survey and nearly identical language to each other.

It's not an example of plagiarism at all, serious or otherwise! It doesn't raise any legitimate concern of any kind! Whatever the "Washington Free Beacon" may think or pretend to think. Congressional testimony isn't graded for originality of language. You're not expected to try to be creative. You're not expected to make it personal, unless it is your personal testimony.

You're supposed to testify as accurately as possible, and it's a good idea to go over it with some lawyers to make sure it says what you want it to say. If some lawyers have already written it up well, there's no reason to rewrite it. Since Harris and Logli were both doing the same job in front of different committees, she in the House and he in the Senate advocating for this perfectly good bill (even though Logli is a Republican). 

Bot Not For Me

 

I'm still doing the daily Wordle, partly animated by my hatred of The Times's Wordle Bot and its critique of my performance, even when it praises me:

Who is it talking to? I didn't have this kind of strategic vision at this point. I was just looking to see if the answer contains any more of the commoner letters, and hit two of the letters. That was a good Turn 2 result!

I had no idea at this point that there were only two remaining words, of course, let alone what words they were. The Bot knows, because it only takes seconds to run through all the mathematical possibilities. (If I thought of "beaut" I wouldn't like it, I don't think Wordle's list is the same as the bot's, and that's the kind of word it would recognize but not deploy; on the other hand I have this feeling they've already used it, just a few weeks ago—if I'd thought of "gamut", on the other hand, I certainly would have tried it.) 

My own puzzle going into turn 3 is where do the A and U go? How many English words end in "-UT"? I don't have a list in my head, I have to game it out.

The first word that comes into my head that meets the new conditions is unknown to the Bot, so it thinks I'm the stupid one. Typical. 

But don't tell me that wasn't skillful! The move gives me all the information to force me to get the right answer. It must be  GA_UT, because those are the only possibilities left for the vowels, and (bonus!) it must start with a G. All I need now is to hit on the right letter for the third position, and that's easy—I know the word perfectly well, though I couldn't conjure it out of the void.

And it's complaining I don't deserve it. I'm "luckier". 

GONE FOR A FEW

I'm skipping town for a few days. I'll be back on Saturday, but stop by in the meantime -- there'll be guest posts here, I believe, and they'll be smarter than anything I would have written.

IF HE'S ELECTED, TRUMP WON'T BE A PUSHOVER FOR PROJECT 2025

In an audio essay that's transcribed here, Ezra Klein says what I've been thinking about Donald Trump's recent behavior: that Trump, as he ages, is more tired and more prone to rambling, but mostly he's experiencing increased disinhibition, not dementia -- which makes sense because he was always much more disinhibited than the rest of us.

Whatever you think of that idea, you should consider another part of Klein's argument: that Trump still seems largely in control in his world. Klein quotes what Tim Walz said after Trump's bizarre DJ set at a Pennslvania town hall:

It was strange. But if this was your grandfather, you would take the keys away.

Klein says:

I don’t think Walz has this right. Trump did not freeze up on that stage.... He did not lose where he was in the moment. If anything, he was all too present.

Later, Klein elaborates on this:

What we saw on that stage in Pennsylvania, as Trump D.J.’d, was not Donald Trump frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. It was the people around him frozen, paralyzed, uncertain. He knew exactly where he was. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do. But there was no one there, or no one left, who could stop him.

If Klein is right about this, as I suspect, then Trump will still have a great deal of power if he's elected president. The campaign aides who couldn't persuade him to go back to taking questions at that town hall will be in his admininstration. Kristi Noem, who stood on stage with him and did the "YMCA" hand gestures by his side, will probably be in his cabinet.

As Klein notes, when Trump was president, members of his administration prevented him from doing many of the things he wanted to do:

In 2018, The New York Times published a bombshell Op-Ed by an anonymous member of the Trump administration who said he, a Republican, was part of the internal resistance to Donald Trump, in which — quote — “many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

... In 2019 a senior national security official told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “Everyone at this point ignores what the president says and just does their job. The American people should take some measure of confidence in that.”

But if Trump wins next month, this time should be very different:

But now the people around Trump have spent four years plotting to dismantle everything that stopped Trump the first time.... That’s what Trump’s inner circle is spending its time and energy doing. Don Jr. told The Wall Street Journal, “We want people who are actually going to follow the president, the duly elected president, not act as sort of unelected officials that know better, because they don’t know better.” He went on to say, “We’re doing a lot with vetting. My job is to prevent those guys.”

I’ve heard this from a number of people preparing for a second Trump term. Personnel was a problem in the first. Vetting for loyalty is the answer.

That's why I don't believe that a second Trump presidency would go the way most liberals now seem to think it would, with J.D. Vance and his Project 2025 allies quickly taking over from a diminished, weakened Trump. Trump may be weaker now, and more disinhibited, but he still has the power to intimidate the people around him.

And he appears to be gaining in the polls, so maybe he truly understands how he benefits from generating outrage and even bafflement. If so, that's a sign that there hasn't been much cognitive decline in one of the few corners of his mind that's ever functioned well -- the part that knows how to keep him in the headlines.

The expected leader of the coup to dethrone Trump as the head of his own second administration is J.D. Vance. But as Klein notes, "Don Jr. was one of the people who reportedly persuaded Trump to pick Vance." Maybe you think Junior misjudged Vance. Maybe you think he's in on the plot. I think Vance might be less dangerous to Trump than you think. By inclination, he's a follower, not a leader -- he hitched himself to the Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld crowd at Yale Law, he hitched himself to Peter Thiel, and now he's hitching himself to Trump.

I'd also remind you that right-wing groups like to play the long game. It took them half a century to overturn Roe v. Wade. They didn't care. Having to fight for decades meant that the money kept rolling in for decades. They don't need to win it all in the next four years.

If Trump wins, the Project 2025 crowd will act in defiance of him some of the time, but he'll push back on them at other times -- and many times they'll agree, or Project 2025 will pursue policy goals Trump doesn't care about and wouldn't have cared about when he was younger. But he'll still do what he wants much of the time, because he still intimidates the people most loyal to him, who'll be right by his side.

DONALD TRUMP, RELATABLE FUCKUP?

We continue to be told that young men are backing Donald Trump while young women prefer Kamala Harris. A new Washington Post poll of battleground states has numbers:

The gender gap between the candidates amounts to 14 percentage points.... The divide is largest among younger voters, with women under age 30 favoring Harris by 20 points while men under 30 favor Trump by 15 points.

That's a 35-point gender gap.

A New York Times op-ed by pollster John Della Volpe offers the usual reasons for this:

Today’s young men are lonelier than ever.... Men under 30 are nearly twice as likely to be single as women their same age; Gen Z men are less likely to enroll in college or the work force than previous generations. They have higher rates of suicide....

Mr. Trump has tapped these anxieties by weaving a hypermasculine message of strength and defiance....

His playbook? A master class in bro-whispering: championing crypto, securing the endorsement of Dave Portnoy — the unapologetically offensive founder of Barstool Sports — and giving U.F.C. President Dana White, who embodies the alpha-male archetype that appeals to many young men, a prime spot at the Republican National Convention. Mr. Trump has also cultivated relationships with simpatico comedians, pranksters, influencers and Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk — all while his team bombards podcasts and social media with misinformation and memes to rally his troops.

But doesn't Trump sometimes seem like a guy who doesn't know what he's talking about? Hasn't he said and done many things that seem ridiculous or baffling? "They're eating the dogs"? The town hall that turned into a DJ set, with Trump doing his awful two-fisted dancing? The Arnold Palmer penis story?

I think young men find Trump's campaign-trail lapses relatable. It's not just that they might really believe Haitians in America are eating people's pets, or might enjoy Trump's smutty anecdotes. I think they also might notice that Trump is being accused of campaign incompetence or dementia -- and that endears him more to them.

After all, many of them were diagnosed with ADHD because they couldn't sit still in school or stop disrupting class. They might not like Trump's taste in music, but they can relate to someone who shows up and just doesn't feel like doing the work.

They appreciate the way Trump suggests that he not only can solve all the world's problems, but can do it quickly and easily -- he conveys a sense that he can succeed at many things without doing any hard work. That's what they want to do!

Why are young men attending college at lower rates than young women? Aren't they attending the same schools as their sisters? Being good in school has always been seen as weird and unmanly by most Americans, and I think that mindset is having a greater and greater impact on young men's choices. Boys with good grades are seen as weird losers and not very masculine -- they're like girls, who are allowed to be good in school. It's much cooler to be an amusing fuckup.

When we express horror at Trump's latest baffling act on the campaign trail, I think we sound, to these young men, like annoyingly responsible scolds. Obviously, they like Trump's offensive humor because they like offending people, but they also relate to Trump's refusal to restrain his speech because trying to avoid giving offense to people is hard work. It's almost like schoolwork, and the same people are good at it, for the same reasons -- because they're grade-grubbing goody-goodies who seem to like spoiling everyone else's fun.

Trump is not trying to spoil their fun. Trump isn't trying to make them work hard or think hard about anything. And Trump seems to fuck up a lot, although he doesn't think he's done anything wrong. They like that. They relate to that.