TRUMP COULD BE A SYMPATHETIC FIGURE NOW, BUT HE CAN'T HELP SABOTAGING HIMSELF

Yesterday there was a second attempt on Donald Trump's life. The would-be shooter, Ryan Routh, registered as an unaffiliated voter in North Carolina in 2012 and voted in the state's Democratic primary that year, but he also tweeted his support for Trump in 2016. He turned against Trump during his presidency and gave money to Democratic presidential candidates in 2019 and 2020, among them Tulsi Gabbard from his adopted state, Hawaii, but he turned against Gabbard as well, as you can see from this collection of his now-deleted tweets. In recent years, as those tweets make clear, Routh became obsessed with defending Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Taiwan. He had crackpot notions about using Afghan soldiers as a foreign legion in both countries. According to the collected tweets, he wanted Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramasawamy to unite as a ticket in opposition to Trump this year. But he also spent a great deal of time trying to persuade pop stars -- Bruno Mars, Sting, U2, Elton John, Five for Fighting, the Dave Matthews Band -- to record a pro-Ukraine anthem, and he even offered his own lyrics for a song to be called "We Are One."

Also, Routh was arrested in 2002 after a run-in with law enforcement in North Carolina; among other things, he was charged with possession of a weapon of mass destruction, namely a fully automatic machine gun. According to Wired, the charging officer in the case, Tracy Fulk,

says Routh was well known for getting into armed confrontations with police. “I wasn’t the only one who had a standoff with him,” she says. “We always knew he had weapons.” Guilford County court records show Routh was charged dozens of times, often for driving-related offenses, going back to the early 1980s. Asked why he wasn’t in jail, Fulk says, “All we can do is arrest them and then obviously it goes into the court system and they decide all of that. It’s frustrating at times.”

But this is America, so of course he could get his hands on another gun.

*****

When I think about assassination attempts on Republicans, I think about this photo:

That's Ronald Reagan in the hospital after being shot, wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. Five months earlier, Reagan had won an election in which his opponents had described him as a bloodthirsty anti-Communist madman who'd get us into World War III. His rhetoric made that a reasonable fear. But here he was, humbled and vulnerable-looking. Reagan's public image was very carefully managed, so we know that this photo op happened because Reagan's aides wanted him to be seen this way. And it worked: In the weeks following the assassination attempt, Reagan's approval rating rose to 68%.

Donald Trump and his advisers don't understand the lesson to be learned from this.

When the shooting in Pennsylvania took place a couple of months ago, within seconds Trump tried to stage-manage the public response. He rose from the ground with his fist in the air and repeatedly chanted the word "Fight!" That had a strong appeal to the kinds of voters who were already inclined to vote for him. However, he probably needs at least some voters who would like to see him show vulnerability, the way Reagan did. But Trump's father and his mentor, Roy Cohn, taught him never to look vulnerable, so he squandered his first opportunity to capitalize on an assassination attempt. He showed vulnerability in the first part of his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, but then he devoted the majority of the speech to airing the same old grievances he always airs.

When pundits said the assassination attempt probably guaranteed him a landslide win in November, they assumed that the shooting would help him appeal to voters' common humanity. But Trump blew it. He just wanted to look like a tough guy.

And he's about to blow it again. He won't pause to do a soft-focus interview in which he humanizes himself. He's pivoting right back to this:

Former President Donald Trump plans to visit Springfield, Ohio, "soon," a source familiar with the planning said.

He and his running mate spread gasoline by claiming falsely that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, and now Trump is headed there to light a match.

Trump can't bear to look like anything other than an aggressor, even at a moment when he'd benefit politically from a different look. That's one big reason why he's losing.

J.D. VANCE AND CHRIS RUFO'S PET-EATING "EVIDENCE": I CALL BULLSHIT

A few days ago, one of the worst people in America, Christopher Rufo, offered a "bounty" for evidence that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

(Original tweets here, here, and here.)

Rufo now claims to have his hard evidence -- except that his claim doesn't involve Haitians, doesn't involve an incident in Springfield ... and looks a lot like bullshit.

EXCLUSIVE: We have discovered that migrants are, in fact, eating cats in Ohio. We have verified, with multiple witnesses and visual cross-references, that African migrants in Dayton, the next city over from Springfield, barbecued these cats last summer.https://t.co/8QveTJy4Vp pic.twitter.com/PxuJQ7fJc9

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 14, 2024

None of which prevented J.D. Vance from retweeting the claim and adding:

Kamala Harris and her media apparatchiks should be ashamed of themselves.

Another "debunked" story that turned out to have merit.

Now, let's examine the "evidence" as described on Rufo's Substack:

Our investigation begins in a run-down neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, the closest major city to Springfield, about a half-hour’s drive away. We identified a social media post, dated August 25, 2023, with a short video depicting what appear to be two skinned cats on top of a blue barbeque. “Yoooo the Africans wildn on Parkwood,” reads the text, referring to Parkwood Drive. The video then pans down to two live cats walking across the grass in front of a run-down fence, with a voice on the video warning: “There go a cat right there. His ass better get missin’, man. Look like his homies on the grill!” ...

We spoke with the author of the video, who asked to remain anonymous but confirmed its time, location, and authenticity. He told us that he was picking up his son last summer, when he noticed the unusual situation. “It was some Africans that stay right next door to my kid’s mother,” he said. “This African dude next door had the damn cat on the grill.”

We then identified the home by matching it to the visuals in the video and cross-referencing them with the eyewitness. When we knocked on the door of the first unit, a family answered, telling us they were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and that all of the surrounding units were occupied by other African migrants.

One of the residents told us that her former neighbors, also from Africa, had lived in the adjacent unit until last month. They had a blue grill and the father would find meat in the neighborhood. “Her dad was going to find meat,” she said. “Her dad was going, holding a knife.” The current residents also showed us a blue grill of the same make and model as in the video, which the former neighbors had abandoned after they moved out. There were at least ten cats wandering around the complex and another resident complained that they were breeding on the property.

According to the original witness, whose son was friendly with the neighbors, there was no doubt about what happened last summer. “They was barbecuing the damn cat!” he said. His son’s mother had previously witnessed the family butchering a mammal on the street, but the cats on the barbeque put him in such a state of shock, he felt the need to film it.

A reminder: The Democratic Republic of the Congo is not Haiti. It's not even on the same continent as Haiti. But hey, Those People all look alike, right?

So this allegedly took place in the wrong city, with migrants from the wrong continent. The sources are two anonymous witnesses, and the documentary "evidence" is a social media video that isn't linked to a contemporaneous post. Seems like a solid story so far!

Now, have you noticed anything unusual about the cooking technique demonstrated in the video? Try to suppress your revulsion at the possibility that cats are being cooked. Think about how we cook other animals on a grill. (My apologies -- I'm going to talk about the idea of cat grilling for the next several paragraphs.)

If you were cooking a chicken on a grill, or maybe a game animal like a rabbit, would you cook it with the legs up in the air?

You wouldn't. You'd separate the pieces, or maybe spatchcock the animal, flattening it so the legs would get grilled as well as the body.

That's what you'd do to cats if you were actually grilling them. But if you were making a phony video about cat grilling, this is how you'd depict it. You'd want it to look as if you just happened upon the barbaric practice taking place in someone else's yard and had to film it from some distance. How would you get the animals on the grill to look like cats if all the pieces were flat on the grill? It would be impossible. So they're depicted this way, with legs in the air, a way no one would ever actually cook them.

And even if you think the griller didn't think the legs were worth grilling, maybe because they don't have enough meat, answer me this: How would you flip these cats over to grill the other side?

So this video is fake. Maybe it was legitimately posted on social media last year or maybe it was a fake recently created, but it was created to slander immigrants either last year or a couple of days ago. That won't prevent J.D. Vance from citing it as genuine, probably all the way to November.

THE VOTERS WHO ARE KEEPING TRUMP IN THE RACE THINK HE'S AN IDIOT

On Tuesday night, Kamala Harris exposed Donald Trump for what he is: a vain, insecure, ignorant, misinformed extremist with anger management issues. Okay, that's not quite accurate -- to some extent, Trump did this to himself. The slander directed at Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio ("They're eating the dogs") was something Trump said without prompting. He made himself look like an idiot.

And yet his poll numbers aren't collapsing. Let's look at national polls taken since the debate: A Data for Progress survey now has Harris up by 4, but that's only one point better than her lead in the group's previous pre-debate poll. A survey from Redfield & Wilton Strategies has Harris leading by 2, unchanged from her lead in a poll conducted by the firm in late August. Reuters/Ipsos has Harris leading by 5 among registered voters -- which is good, but not much better than her 4-point lead in a late-August survey. Morning Consult gives Harris a 5-point lead, but it was 4 before the debate.

All of these are encouraging numbers, but Trump's support hasn't collapsed. Why is that?

The easy answer is that Trump's superfans will never abandon him. That's true, but he hasn't remained competitive in this election just because of the superfans. There aren't enough of them. He's remained competitive because people who don't worship the ground he walks on continue to support him. Paradoxically, they're as unlikely to reject him after that debate as the MAGA loyalists.

Here's the problem: Trump supporters who aren't superfans already seem to recognize that he's an obnoxious, angry blowhard. They've priced that in to their decision this year. Their view is that if he's elected president, he'll say a lot of awful things, and he'll post terrible things on social media, but he'll also make inflation go away magically. So it doesn't matter to them that he looked like an idiot on Tuesday night. They already thought he was an idiot -- but they think he's an idiot who can make prices lower using that business magic they saw him display on The Apprentice.

Take a look at the poll CNN conducted immediately after the debate. Debate watchers thought Harris did a better job by a 63%-37% margin, and had a 45% favorable view of Harris after the debate (44% unfavorable), while Trump's favorable/unfavorable numbers were 39%/51%. Yet 55% trust Trump more than Harris on the economy, "a margin that’s slightly wider than his pre-debate edge," according to CNN (35% trust Harris more).

Or look at the Data for Progress poll. In that survey, 56% of respondents said Harris performed better in the debate (37% chose Trump). When asked about Trump's pet-eating allegations, 80% of respondents said the remarks were either "very weird" (64%) or "somewhat weird" (16%). Even 69% of Republicans thought they were weird.

Yet Trump trails Harris in the poll by only 4 points, 50%-46%. Voters trust Trump more on inflation (though it's only 49%-44% in this survey). That plus a lead on immigration (50%-44%) seems to counter all this:

Voters believe Harris is more composed (+19), honest (+13), and intelligent (+8) than Trump. They also believe that Harris is the “candidate of the future” (+11), fights more for the working class (+10), and is more moderate (+17) than Trump. Conversely, voters believe Trump is weirder (+16) and more extreme (+24) than Harris.

Here's a bonus fact that I hope the Harris campaign uses to needle Trump: 49% of voters think the word "insecure" applies to Trump, while only 39% think it applies to Harris. (I don't understand how Harris's number could be that high.)

So there are clearly voters who recognize Trump's character flaws and back him anyway.

I'm not pointing this out because I'm feeling the gloom and doom I was feeling when Joe Biden was still in the race. I think Harris is in pretty good shape, and is a slight favorite to win. I'm just trying to understand why the race is still close.

Maybe Trump will double down on rage, resentment, and Laura Loomer-style conspiratorialism, and his numbers will continue to erode. Or it might be that Harris has to challenge him more forcefully on the economy, because the gettable voters she needs are willing to vote for a guy who says immigrants eat pets if they think he can lower the price of eggs.

MARK PENN GOES MASK OFF AS A GOP DISINFORMATIONIST, BUT HE'LL STILL GET TO SCOLD DEMOCRATS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Kamala Harris wiped the floor with Donald Trump in Tuesday night's debate, so the GOP and its propaganda wing are now insisting that there was A Conspiracy So Vast to throw the debate to Harris. The Murdoch media has signed on to this effort by giving Mark Penn and his fellow Fox News Democrat Andrew Stein a spot on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where they argue that ABC cheated Trump:

[Harris] enlisted every charge ever leveled against Mr. Trump, regardless of the truth. That included, to name a few, the false claims that he favors a national abortion ban and opposes in vitro fertilization, that he called neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., “very fine people,” and that he threatened a “bloodbath” if he loses the election.

Each is untrue: Mr. Trump has made clear he opposes a national abortion ban. He favors IVF and has even said the government should pay for it. He condemned the Charlottesville neo-Nazis. And he predicted a financial “bloodbath” for the auto industry if he loses and the Biden-Harris electric-vehicle mandates progress.

Had the moderators turned to Ms. Harris after these lies and said, “That has been debunked,” we might be having a totally different conversation about the debate, given how she tends to react when challenged.

The moderators fact-checked Trump on outrageous assertions that are unambiguously false: No state allows a born-alive infant to be murdered. Authorities in Springfield, Ohio, have said that no one is eating pets in their community. By contrast, the supposed debunking of the charge that Trump said there were "very fine people on both sides" in Charlottesville has itself been debunked. The "bloodbath" remark was ambiguous -- Trump was talking about the economy, but then he said, "Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath, for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it," which at least suggests that he anticipates a society-wide apocalypse if he loses the election. And when there's a conflict between Trump's current positions and past statements -- or statements found in the Project 2025 manifesto, which is largely written by Trump advisers -- what are the undisputed facts about Trump's positions?

Beyond that, Penn and Stein's swipe at Harris -- "given how she tends to react when challenged" -- is absurd. How does she react when challenged? Based on the events of Tuesday night, when she was challenged relentlessly by Trump, she reacts with poise, precision, eloquence, and a command of the facts. I'm sure she would have handled an ABC fact-check or two deftly and effectively. (I guess it would be unfair to expect Trump to maintain poise when being questioned on accuracy.)

What's more, Penn and Stein are gaslighting us. Harris didn't out-debate Trump because he was fact-checked. She out-debated him because she showed him for what he is, a vain, angry man with extreme ideas. There wasn't a fact check involved when Trump had a meltdown over Harris's (accurate) assertion that attendees get bored at his rallies and leave early. And Trump's widely mocked slander of Haitian immigrants in Ohio -- "They're eating the dogs" -- occurred before ABC's fact check.

Penn went further on the podcast of John Solomon, a formerly respectable journalist now best known for peddling Russia-friendly falsehoods about the Biden family and Ukraine in collaboration with Rudy Giuliani. Here's what Penn said to Solomon about how ABC handled the debate:

"I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don't know how much of this was planned in advance," Penn told the "John Solomon Reports" podcast.

"I don't know what they told the Harris campaign. I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate. I think the situation demands nothing less than that," he added.

(Emphasis added.)

In the Journal op-ed, Penn merely accuses ABC of pro-Harris bias. Here, in a just-asking-questions way, Penn is suggesting that ABC might have colluded with the Harris campaign to rig the debate, even though Harris's triumph didn't depend in any way on ABC's fact checks.

There was no such collusion and Penn knows it, but he's being a good disinformationist in an attempt to bring down the party he hates, a party that exiled him years ago, a party whose nominee he and his wife wanted to defeat with their No Labels project this year.

And yet I'm certain that we'll see Mark Penn on the op-ed page of The New York Times next month, or two years from now, or four years from now, and he'll be scolding Democrats as he always does for failing to move far enough right for his tastes. His bio will still include some version of "Mark Penn was a pollster and an adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton from 1995 to 2008," and no acknowledgment of his time advising Donald Trump on impeachment or his role in the attempt to ratfuck the 2024 presidential election to prevent a Democratic victory. Penn is anti-Democratic hack, but that fact will never be acknowledged at the Times.

TRUMP IS NOT REALLY THE LEADER OF HIS OWN DISINFORMATION CULT

In Tuesday's night's debate, after Kamala Harris said that Donald Trump had promised to "weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies," Trump replied,

This is the one that weaponized. Not me. She weaponized. I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.

But as Isaac Arnsdorf notes today in The Washington Post, Trump wasn't an early adopter of the false and slanderous argument that his shooting was the fault of his politcal enemies.

On the first night after Donald Trump was injured in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., some supporters and allies, including campaign staff, immediately began blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats before any information was available about the shooter or his possible motive. Trump himself didn’t go there. In his first public statements after the July 13 shooting, Trump thanked law enforcement, offered condolences to the rallygoers killed and wounded, and called for unity.

By early August, Trump was blaming Democrats:

Trump himself made that claim during his speech in Atlanta on [August 3]: “Remember the words they use, ‘they are a threat to democracy,’” he said. “They’ve been saying that about me for seven years. I think I got shot because of that, OK.”

But J.D. Vance -- who hadn't yet been officially named Trump's running mate -- was blaming Democrats within hours of the shooting:

Today is not just some isolated incident.

The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.

That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) July 14, 2024

This message spread first among extremely online right-wing influencers, and only then did Trump pick up on it. The same appears to be true of the cat-eating blood libel against Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, as Public Notice's Liz Dye notes:

According to the Springfield News-Sun, the racist meme started with a post to a Facebook group for residents of the Ohio town. The poster claimed that a neighbor’s daughter’s friend had discovered her cat butchered near a home lived in by Haitians, and further that the poster had “been told” that pet dogs as well as wild geese and ducks had been killed as well....

But local police never received any reports of pets being killed....

Charlie Kirk, Kremlin-funded Benny Johnson, and even Elon Musk all tweeted about it on Monday. But things really got out of hand when Trump’s vice presidential candidate JD Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, joined the fray.

“Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio,” he tweeted on Monday, shamelessly trying to blame Vice President Harris for the nonexistent problem. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

All day Monday and Tuesday, as Trump “prepped” for the debate, the weirdos who populate his social media feed vomited out meme after meme of Trump protecting cats and ducks — most of them clearly generated using Elon Musk’s AI, known as Grok.

Only then did Trump pick up on the story.

Most people who aren't Trump supporters see the Republican Party as a cult of Trump. They cite evidence such as this recent poll, which tells us that Democrats trust a wide range of news sources for accurate election information, but Republicans seem to trust only Trump:

But Trump isn't the textbook cult leader who is the sole source of information for his followers. As we see from the examples above, Trump isn't even the sole source of his own pronouncements. By the time he makes some of his pronouncements, his followers have already been primed to believe them by online shitposters, podcasters, and right-wing cable channels such as Fox News and Newsmax.

The poll question cited above is poorly constructed. It doesn't break out Fox News or Elon Musk's X as separate choices. It doesn't mention podcasts -- if there'd been a "Podcasters such as Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, and Candace Owens" option, I'm sure it would have scored very high among Republicans. "Donald Trump and his campaign" is Republicans' #1 choice because it's the only choice that, in the view of Republicans, isn't fatally poisoned by liberalism.

Republicans don't trust Trump on everything. Ask them how they feel about the vaccines whose development he used to tout as one of his great accomplishments until he began to be booed at rallies for boasting about them. Remember how supporters forced him to flip-flop on Florida's upcoming abortion referendum. That's now how personality cults work.

A year ago, I wrote this about the idea that the GOP is a Trump cult:

I'm reminded of our discovery, sometime during the post-9/11 era, that terrorism was being inspired not directly by charismatic leaders of Al-Qaeda or ISIS, but more immediately by lesser-known online influencers. The behavior of the followers was cult-like, but it seemed like cultural worship of certain ideas (and violent tactics) rather than worship of Osama bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. That, in a somewhat less violent form, is what we've had on the American right for years, even if it looks like a personality cult now.

The GOP cult is a disinformation cult -- followers want to believe any lie that reinforces their belief that the people they hate are evil -- but the lies come from multiple sources. In that post a year ago, I provided a partial list: "Steve Bannon and Christopher Rufo and Jack Posobiec and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens and Elon Musk and Andrew Tate and Moms for Liberty and dozens of other people who aren't Trump." Let's add Elon Musk and J.D. Vance and Benny Johnson and Donald Trump Jr. and Chaya Raichik and Catturd and whoever runs End Wokeness, a superspreader of the cat story. Who's radicalizing your Trumpist neighbors? The people I've named are as much at fault as Donald Trump -- if not more so. And they'll be doing this long after Trump is gone, unless the GOP has suffered a series of defeats so bruising that it cuts the disinformationists loose.

HOW THE RIGHT-WING MEDIASPHERE -- AND TRUMP'S FRAGILE EGO -- SET HIM UP FOR FAILURE LAST NIGHT

Nearly everyone who watched the debate last night concedes that Kamala Harris won, and won big, including Republicans.

My phone and my X mentions are being flooded by Trump supporters complaining about the debate.

I think they know he's losing. #Debate2024

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 11, 2024

Some of the commentators who concede that Harris won imply that she manipulated Trump into debating badly. This is from a Wall Street Journal editorial:

She won the debate because she came in with a strategy to taunt and goad Mr. Trump into diving down rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity that left her policies and history largely untouched. He always takes the bait, and Ms. Harris set the trap so he spent much of the debate talking about the past, or about Joe Biden, or about immigrants eating pets, but not how he’d improve the lives of Americans in the next four years.

This suggests that there's another Trump in there somewhere who is wise and statesmanlike. I don't think so. I agree with Dan Froomkin:

Donald Trump did not “have a bad debate.“ He was exposed for who he is.

— Dan Froomkin (PressWatchers.org) (@froomkin) September 11, 2024

There is no competent Trump. There is no statesmanlike Trump. The person we saw last night is the person who will be president if Trump wins, a person who spends his life in "rabbit holes of personal grievance and vanity."

Trump has always been cultural conservative -- a racist, a fan of "law and order," an admirer of strongmen and authoritarians -- but years of binge-watching Fox News have made his opinions and prejudices worse. Now he has a set of opinions -- on renewable energy vs. fossil fuels, on immigration, and so on -- that are made up of talking points from the right-wing informationsphere. When he says that windmill noise causes cancer, he's repeating an idea spread by pseudo-scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry.

But that's how his mind works -- his ego is so fragile that he can't bear to be wrong, so he clings desperately to any assertion that reinforces his notion that he's right. Windmills kill birds! Solar energy is useless when it's cloudy! Of course, the right-wing infosphere is a machine designed to reassure all of its consumers that their prejudices and resentments are right.

But a serious problem for Trump is that the right-wing infosphere is becoming even more divorced from reality than it was in the recent past. I'll give you an example, but first, some background.

I've been watching the spread of right-wing messaging for a couple of decades now. I've noticed that the right's messages aren't all spread in the same way or in the same forums. Some messages are really far-fetched and would be perceived as preposterous if they spread to the mainstream: school shootings are faked, the government controls the weather from a facility in Alaska, that sort of thing. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page have avoided endorsing these ideas. They're meant to bind voters to the GOP, but only the most gullible ones.

But in recent years, as Fox News has begun losing its primacy on the right while the Internet has increasingly been the main source for what rank-and-file right-wingers believe, fringe ideas have become more mainstream: Barack Obama birtherism, the allegedly stolen election in 2020, QAnon's notion of a vast elitist pedophile ring that somehow excludes all Republicans.

And now we have the cats.

When even J.D. Vance was spreading scurrilous stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, I was surprised -- not because right-wingers are spreading hateful and dangerous blood libels about immigrants (that happens all the time), but because Republicans weren't confining the spread of this preposterous and easily disproved story to the fringier parts of their infosphere. They were going mainstream with this.

But of course they were. In 2024, it's hard to restrict a story like this to the fringe. Naturally, Elon Musk promoted it, as did many online influencers and Trumpist members of Congress.

Trump hates immigrants, so of course he seized on this story and talked about in the debate. Trump's confirmation bias is tied to his delicate ego, which always needs to say, See? I was right. A few years ago, he might not have even noticed this story. But the tiers in the right-wing mediasphere have collapsed, so the confirming messages Trump is exposed to are stupider. And he believes them.

That wasn't the only example of Trump falling for conspiracy theories that might not have reached him a few years ago. Remember this from last night?

People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that.

Harris had needled Trump on the boredom some of his fans feel at his rallies, and he rose to the bait -- but he added the conspiracy theory that her crowds are Astroturfed. What's more, when he said, "And then showing them in a different light," he might have been alluding (in a garbled way) to rumors that the crowds in Harris clips were generated by AI. He has a desperate need to be the most popular politician, so he'll believe anything that confirms that belief.

Trump simply can't take in information that challenges his beliefs. His ego can't handle it. The right-wing infosphere flatters Trump the way dictators flatter Trump: by telling him what he wants to hear. That's the person Kamala Harris showed us last night, and that's why we can't allow him to win the presidency again.

THAT TIMES STORY ABOUT TRUMP'S INCOHERENCE: I QUESTION THE TIMING

After a great deal of criticism, including critiques from elsewhere in the elite mainstream media (The Atlantic, The New Republic), we finally have a story in The New York Times about Donald Trump's age and rhetorical semi-coherence. It was written by a top Times journalist, Peter Baker, and it's a reasonably good piece, starting with the headline ("As Debate Looms, Trump Is Now the One Facing Questions About Age and Capacity"). It ticks through most of the recent Trump babelogues that have made commentators question his mental health: the discussion of child care ("Mr. Trump wandered through a thicket of unfinished sentences, non sequitur clauses and confusing logic that tied the answer to tariffs on imports," Baker writes), the electrocution/shark rant, the scurrilous claim that schools are forcing gender surgery on students ("Sometimes he makes false claims that are so far-fetched, they make him appear detached from reality"), and others. We're reminded of previous moments when Trump lost his grip on reality:

He has mixed up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, declared more than once that he beat Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton and while arguing that he is mentally fit gave the wrong name for his former doctor.

Many observers are hoping that this is just the beginning -- that the Times and the rest of the press will focus on Trump's age and mental capacity as obsessively as they focused on Joe Biden's.

I'm skeptical. I think the point of this article was to quiet critics, after which the Times will be able to tell those critics, "But we covered that already."

I also think this appears at the best possible moment for Trump -- right before the debate, when he benefits from lowered expectations. The Times could have published a story like this at any time over the past several months. Publishing it now gives Trump a low bar to clear tonight. Since he's probably well rehearsed and since the debate format discourages him from rambling and meandering, he probably will clear that bar. Headline tomorrow: Trump wins debate, or at least Trump stands firm.

I don't want to accuse the Times of choosing this moment to run a story about Trump's babbling for precisely this reason, but I do believe the paper has a vendetta against both Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for refusing to submit to a Times interview. So maybe that really is why the Times is addressing this issue now, for the first and, I suspect, last time.