MARGARET SULLIVAN INADVERTENTLY DEMONSTRATES THAT EVEN A BETTER PRESS COULDN'T SAVE US FROM TRUMP

Margaret Sullivan, the former New York Times public editor and Washington Post media columnist, is alarmed by the media coverage of a speech Donald Trump delivered over the weekend. She faults the press for not doing a better job of reporting on Trump. Among the ways the press has failed, according to Sullivan:

The use of neutral language. If you merely read about Donald Trump’s deeply offensive rally this weekend in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, you probably thought it was about immigration. And about Trump up to his usual tricks of disparaging his rivals.

Here the lead of the report from Axios, for example:

“Former President Trump, in a self-described ‘dark speech,’ told a rally in Wisconsin yesterday that his opponent, Vice President Harris, is “mentally impaired’ and “mentally disabled.’”

Axios, which favors bullet points and boldface help for the tuned-out, let us know “Why It Matters”: “Even for Trump, it was weird, nasty and nonsensical — when he needed to be swaying ‘national security moms’ and other undecideds.”

Or here’s the top paragraph of the Washington Post report: “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump criticized Vice President Harris’s mental capacity Saturday, falsely claiming she was born ‘mentally impaired’ and comparing her actions to that of a ‘mentally disabled person.’ The remarks prompted criticism from advocates for people with disabilities.”

Here’s the Associated Press’s headline: “Trump lists his grievances in a Wisconsin speech intended to link Harris to illegal immigration.”

At this point, you'd expect Sullivan to suggest the kind of language the media should be using to describe the speech. But she doesn't. She merely tells her readers to watch a clip of it:

But if you watched the speech, or even snippets of it, you saw something quite different — an absolutely ugly and brutal attack on Kamala Harris, full of lies and racist misogyny. In case you missed it, watch a bit of it here.



Somehow, “the remarks prompted criticism from advocates for people with disabilities” just does not get the job done. Nor does “lists his grievances.”

Nor does Bloomberg’s news alert: “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a political vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Is that really what happened here?

So what did happen here? Sullivan says that the media fails in its duty to tell us, but then she fails in her duty to tell us.

I don't mean to pick on Margaret Sullivan. I think the fact that even she can't find the words to explain what's so horrifying about this suggests that maybe there aren't any words -- or to be more precise, maybe there aren't words that can convey what's so horrifying about this to people who've watched Trump for the past nine years and still aren't horrified.

Calling a political opponent "mentally impaired" and "mentally disabled" ought to be a very bad look for any candidate, and it should be self-evidently bad for reasons Joe Scarborough noted this morning:

“If [Harris] were so quote stupid, if she were so quote mentally impaired, if she were quote so mentally disabled, why did she destroy him in a debate for 90 minutes, humiliate him, and beat him so badly that he refuses to even debate her on Fox News?”

“That’s question number one,” he continued. “And if she’s had this mental condition from birth, then why did he give her thousands of dollars in 2014 for her political campaign when she was running for the United States Senate?”

But it's unsuitable language for any candidate to use -- except it isn't anymore, because talk radio and Fox News coarsened the political culture, in lockstep with Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich on, and now there's a large percentage of the voting population for whom there's nothing a Republican can say that will lead to a withdrawal of support, except perhaps a kind word about a Democrat.

And for many of the rest of us, Trump's demeaning, bigoted language -- Trump thinks all Black people are stupid, which is why his insults are taking this form -- is just an inescapable fact of American life, like gun violence and medical debt, something that clearly could be alleviated but never will be alleviated. You can never find the right words to say how unfit Trump is to serve because there will always be enough voters who think he actually is fit to put him within reach of 270 electoral votes.

Of course the press coverage of Trump and Harris could be improved. The media is making Harris jump through hoops, demanding more policy details and then speculating that the policies she released in response to these demands might be too wonky to impress voters.

The NYT wants details! No, no, that’s too many details.

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— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) September 26, 2024 at 7:03 PM

I'm not sure what else the press can do about Donald Trump's rage and ignorance besides report his words and fact-check his lies. We heard what he and his running mate said about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. The press has debunked the lies. Public officials in the state have debunked the lies. A debate moderator debunked the key lie in real time. And Trump hasn't lost a single point in the polls as a result.

Trump can't be discredited any more than he already has been. Our only recourse is a large turnout by people who are neither impressed by his rhetoric nor numbed by it.

VANCE ATTACKED WALZ'S CHARACTER BECAUSE HATING PEOPLE IS THE CORE PRINCIPLE OF MODERN AMERICAN CONSERVATISM

In a piece about J.D. Vance's thin skin, David Frum puzzles over one strategic choice Vance and the Donald Trump campaign made:

Immediately upon [Kamala] Harris’s selection of [Tim] Walz as her running mate, Vance attacked Walz over his military record. Walz had served in one rank, but retired at a lower rank because he had not completed all of the requirements to retain the rank permanently. Walz had on one occasion claimed that he had carried weapons “in war,” when he should have said “weapons of war.” Vance tried to amplify the discrepancy and the misstatement, but to little effect. When this line of attack fizzled, Vance switched to another: accusing Walz of deception because he had said that he and his wife had conceived a child by in vitro fertilization. In fact, they had used a different method of fertility treatment, intrauterine conception....

The point of the anti-Walz material was to depict the governor as a phony. But why pick that angle? Walz is a super-liberal governor of a state that was wracked by civil unrest in the upheavals of 2020. Surely that offers a more promising approach? Yet Vance chose otherwise. Why?

If Republicans wanted to attack Walz primarily on policy, they would have focused on depicting him as a "super-liberal governor." But they don't want to attack him primarily on policy.

Frum concludes that the accusation is a confession:

If Vance opted instead for the “He’s a phony” attack, it’s because Vance himself believes that the “phony” charge is the most powerful one he can fling. And why does Vance think that? Because he himself is such an extreme phony.

It's possible that Vance is projecting his own disgust with himself onto Walz -- as Frum writes, "Vance has changed his identity, beliefs, religion, personal history, even his name." But that's not the reason Vance went straight at Walz's character.

Vance made (failed) character attacks because the core principle of conservatism in America is that Democrats are bad people. Even when Democrats are attacked on policy -- say, immigration -- it's not because they're misguided, in Republicans' view. It's because they want to destroy America. Democrats are horrible people who want to do harm for the sheer pleasure of doing harm.

So immigrants aren't merely lazy, shiftless parasites, which is how bigots have generally characterized disfavored groups -- they're also subhumans who eat decent people's pets.

And Kamala Harris isn't just wrong on policy, according to Trump:

Trump in Wisconsin calls Harris "mentally disabled": "Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) September 28, 2024 at 4:07 PM

A colleague of Frum's at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, writes:

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic.

"Maliciousness" is the right word. If you disagree with Republicans, they denounce you as an evil person, even if you're a school shooting survivor. Wehner offers a greatest-hits compilation of remarks made by the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, Mark Robinson:

Regarding the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, in 2011, Robinson wrote, “Get that fucking commie bastard off the National Mall!” Robinson also has referred to the slain civil-rights champion as “worse than a maggot,” a “ho fucking, phony,” and a “huckster.” ... He referred to Michelle Obama as a man and Hillary Clinton as a “heifer.” He compared Nancy Pelosi to Hitler, Mao, Stalin, and Castro and mocked the near-fatal assault on her husband, Paul Pelosi....

He has used demeaning language against Jews and gay people. He has cruelly mocked school-shooting survivors (“media prosti-tots”).

Not enough dehumanization? Wehner has more:

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has blamed wildfires on a Jewish space laser, promoted a conspiracy alleging that some Democratic Party leaders were running a human-trafficking and pedophilia ring, and agreed with commenters who suggested that the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Florida, was a “massive false flag.” Another House Republican, Paul Gosar, has ... posted an animated video depicting him slashing the throat of a Democratic congresswoman and attacking President Biden.

Because, obviously, the congresswoman (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) and President Biden are evil and deserve it.

And there's Vance, of course.

In 2021, he said that the United States was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs, and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”

According to Vance, the childless cat ladies aren't just miserable. Stopping there might have made Vance's fellow conservatives feel sorry for the childless cat ladies. But no -- "they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too." And because they're Democrats, and therefore supervillains, they have the power "to make the rest of the country miserable." Destroy them!

This is why I'm so angry at Nicholas Kristof for saying that liberals should stop demeaning Trump voters, as if it's a one-way street. Demonization of Democrats is the core principle of the Republican Party. Coexistence is impossible. We are too depraved to be allowed to live our lives. We must be neutralized. By contrast, we just want to win a few elections and be allowed to live in a pluralist country. We loathe Trump, but the leaders of our party would not have dehumanized, say, Nikki Haley. That's the difference.

WHY I DON'T AGREE WITH DAN FROOMKIN THAT HARRIS MIGHT BE WINNING A BLOWOUT

I think Kamala Harris is the favorite to win this election. I wanted to say that right at the outset, in case you think I'm reverting to the gloomy predictions I made when Joe Biden was still in the race. I thought Biden was on course to lose the election. I still think he would have lost, and I think he would have lost even the popular vote. But Harris is a much better candidate -- more eloquent, more energetic, more in tune with the culture, more willing to talk in plain language about reproductive rights.

But I think Harris is only a slight favorite to win. FiveThirtyEight says she's winning 57% of its election scenarios. Nate Silver, after having Donald Trump in the lead for a while, has Harris at 58%. The bettors at PredictIt have Harris at 56 cents on the dollar, though Trump is at 48 cents. At Polymarket, Harris is at 51% and Trump is at 48%.

All that seems about right. Harris appears to be slightly ahead nationally and slightly ahead in the battleground states she needs. And while it would be nice if Dan Froomkin were right, I don't believe he is, for reasons I'll explain.

Froomkin writes:

Here’s a question for you: What if the dynamics of the 2024 presidential election have dramatically shifted — and the national media has been too busy doing stenography to notice?

What if Kamala Harris — after a spectacular entry into the race, a stunningly unified convention, and a devastating debate — is basically running away with it, leaving Trump in the dust, while the national media — still mortified by its failure in 2016 to see the extent of Trump’s support — stubbornly sticks to the safer narrative that it’s a horserace going down to the wire?

Froomkin rejects the polls -- "polls are garbage these days," he writes. I know most of you agree. This sounds right:

And the pollsters, whose arbitrary weightings make a mockery of science, travel in packs. They, more than anyone, are terrified of underestimating Trump support again. So maybe this time they’re overestimating it?

I could believe that, except for one thing: These pollsters are using the same weightings when they poll Senate and gubernatorial races in swing states. And what happens? Democratic candidates in those races are consistently outperforming Harris.

According to Real Clear Polling, Trump is up by 2 points in Arizona -- but Ruben Gallego is beating "Trump in heels" Kari Lake by 6. Harris is up by 1.2 in Nevada -- but Jacky Rosen is beating her Republican Senate challenger by 10. Harris is up by 0.4 in Pennsylvania -- but Democratic senator Bob Casey is up by 5.2. Trump is up by 1.2 in North Carolina -- but Democrat Josh Stein is leading Republican Mark Robinson by 7.7.

Why would this be happening? Because millions of voters blame the president when major national issues aren't going the way they like, and Harris, for obvious reasons, is seen as a stand-in for the president in a way that even an incumbent senator of the president's party isn't.

Many voters are still very upset about economic issues. Froomkin writes:

The economy, which used to be considered a solid indicator of whether an incumbent would win or not, is booming. Inflation is dead. The stock market is at all-time highs.

But most people don't own stocks. And inflation isn't dead if your household just gets by in ordinary times, as a large percentage of American households do, and you needed to dig fairly deep into your credit lines to pay for basics. Average credit card interest right now is nearly 25%. That's preposterously high -- an all-time high, in fact. Many people in this country are still paying interest on groceries they consumed a long time ago. They remember lower prices when Trump was president. That's why Harris isn't doing as well as Gallego or Casey. There's no need to overthink this.

Froomkin writes:

... Trump, by any normal standard, has lost it, mentally and emotionally. His speech – at rallies, and most noticeably at the debate – consists of rambling, apocalyptic, nonsensical, hate-filled rhetoric and lies.

He’s saying crazier and crazier things in order to get attention – which the media is giving him – but it’s hard to see that any of it is winning over more voters.

But Trump said crazy things when he was president, and many voters think it was just his personality and it somehow didn't translate to problems for America -- and besides, he's that business genius from The Apprentice, so he doesn't even need to think all that hard to solve economic problems, and he wrote The Art of the Deal, so he can effortlessly make deals to end all the wars. The way these voters remember it, when he was president that last time, life was okay, as long as you weren't an asylum seeker crossing the border with your family. Yeah, COVID sucked, but that was the virus's fault, not Trump's. (I think many of the voters who believe all this are not Trump superfans.)

Froomkin writes:

You could ... make a solid vibes-and-momentum argument that Harris is winning handily. In an extraordinary turnaround, Democrats now appear even more enthusiastic than Republicans.

Democrats weren't going to win this one without enthusiasm, and there was a bad enthusiasm gap when Biden was the candidate. But while Harris's voters are more enthusiastic than Trump's in some polls, the gap isn't massive:

There are still millions of Americans out there whose love of Trump constitutes their entire personality. Add in the "Well, he says a lot of crazy stuff, but groceries were cheap in 2019" crowd, and he still has a fairly solid bloc of voters.

Froomkin points out that pollsters underestimated Democratic support in the 2022 midterms. That's true. Poll defenders say pollsters underestmated Trump's support in 2016 and 2020. That's also true -- Trump turns out some voters who don't usually vote, and certainly don't bother to vote when he's not on the ballot, so pollsters don't count them as "likely voters."

My guess is that these two pollster blind spots are canceling each other out, and therefore the polls are roughly accurate. Which means that even though Harris will probably win on the fundamentals -- Democrats have a conventional get-out-the-vote operation, while Trump has largely outsourced his to the increasingly incompetent Elon Musk -- it's still a tight race. But I'll be thrilled if Froomkin is right.

J.D. VANCE TO APPEAR WITH PASTOR WHO SAYS KAMALA HARRIS IS PRACTICING WITCHCRAFT

What advice did Nicholas Kristof give liberals late last month?

... since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.

It has also seemed to me morally offensive....

By all means denounce Trump, but don’t stereotype and belittle the nearly half of Americans who have sided with him....

Since the Obama presidency, Democrats have increasingly become the party of the educated, and the upshot has often been a whiff of condescension toward working-class voters, especially toward voters of faith.

Kristof quoted Bill Clinton's Democratic convention speech, in which the former president said, “I urge you to meet people where they are.”

Do you know "where they are," these "voters of faith" Kristof and Clinton urge us not to "demonize"? These Trump voters are cheering as Democrats are literally being demonized, especially the Democratic nominee for president.

Here's some news about an upcoming campaign stop in Pennsylvania:

U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, is scheduled to appear in Monroeville on Saturday at a town hall meeting hosted by Christian broadcaster Lance Wallnau. The event is scheduled for the Monroeville Convention Center....

That would be this Lance Wallnau:

Shorty after President Joe Biden announced in July that he would not be running for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and unabashed Trump cultist Lance Wallnau immediately began posting videos in which he warned that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel” and declared that she is “the devil’s choice.”

“What you’re seeing now is a real Jezebel,” Wallnau declared. “When you’ve got somebody operating in manipulation, intimidation and domination—especially when it’s in a female role trying to emasculate a man who is standing up for truth—you’re dealing with the Jezebel spirit. ... So, with Kamala, you have a Jezebel spirit, a characteristic in the Bible that is the personification of intimidation, seduction, domination and manipulation.”

“She can look presidential,” he continued. “That’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.”

When Harris triumphed in her debate with Trump, Wallnau said witchcraft was the reason:

When I say “witchcraft” I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult empowered deception, manipulation and domination. That’s what ABC pulled off as moderators, and Kamala’s script handlers set up the kill box. One sided questions and fact checking sealed the box. Witchcraft.… https://t.co/LMgz1Udkc8

— Lance Wallnau (@lancewallnau) September 11, 2024

And it's not just Harris and ABC that are tools of the devil (and comparable to Hitler's Nuremburg rallies):

MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau says "the left is loaded with demons" just like in Nazi Germany: "I don't think it's people anymore; I think you're dealing with demons talking through people." pic.twitter.com/oreD6bffbR

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 21, 2024

Wallnau is

a strategist and the public face of the revolutionary movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, is best known for his advocacy of the 7 Mountain Mandate, which is the idea that Christians are called to conquer seven “mountains” of society to achieve religious and political dominion: government, family, religion, arts & entertainment, media, education, and business.

Wallnau says he’s engaged in “the battle for the mountain of government.”

Wallnau's allies include Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, and the folks behind that discredited 2000 Mules documentary your right-wing relatives never stop quoting, Catherine Engelbrecht and True the Vote.

The mainstream media won't tell you much about Wallnau, even though Wallnau believes the media is full of demons and comparable to the Nazi regime.

Am I Watching the News or an Exorcism?#Demons #FakeNews #CNN #MSNBC

It seems like every time I turn on the news, I'm slimed by the presence of demons. Some of these liberal commentators don't even sound human anymore. Are you ready to join the fight against demonic influence in… pic.twitter.com/SHE1tQw5QW

— Lance Wallnau (@lancewallnau) April 5, 2023

How many journalists do you think are under the influence of demonic spirits? #Demonic #SpiritualWarfare #FakeNews #MediaMatters pic.twitter.com/TVRJ78BANF

— Lance Wallnau (@lancewallnau) December 26, 2022

Racism is evil. And so is the manipulation of racial issues for the acquisition of political power. What Germany did to propagandize its people is what leftist news outlets do today to manipulate the populace. They quarantine us in fear one month and ignight our cites the next. https://t.co/zealsaSRhO

— Lance Wallnau (@lancewallnau) June 3, 2020

Maybe a reporter will ask Vance about some of Wallnau's more incendiary statements, although the response will undoubtedly be Vance's stock evasion whenever it's pointed out that he's consorting with extremists: Just because I talk to someone doesn't mean I agree with everything they say. It would be better just to quote what Wallnau says at length.

Sixteen years ago, John McCain rejected the endorsement of a preacher named John Hagee after anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic statements by Hagee were widely reported in the media. By 2018, Hagee, who insists he's a friend of the Jews and Israel, was delivering the benediction at the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which had been moved there by Donald Trump, and the media barely said a word. Five years later, Hagee spoke at Nikki Haley's campaign kickoff, and Haley said, “Pastor Hagee, I still say I want to be you when I grow up.” Again, nothing from the media. So don't expect The New York Times or The Washington Post to quote Wallnau at length anytime soon.

THE RIGHT-WING POLITBURO HASN'T SETTLED ON A PARTY LINE REGARDING ERIC ADAMS, BUT IT'S CLEAR WHAT CORRECT THINKING WILL BE

The commissars who tell the Republican rank-and-file what to believe about everything don't seem quite sure what to say about the indictment of New York mayor Eric Adams. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News is going with "he's a corrupt Democrat":

"Another NY Democrat clouded in scandal. Time and again, they have proved they only care about their personal power and scoring political points, not what’s best for New York’s taxpayers. It’s time for people to send a message that they aren’t going to take it anymore," said New York Congressman Nick Langworthy.

"We can add another name to the list of high-ranking Democrats in Albany and New York City tarnished by scandal, including Governors Andrew Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer, who both resigned in disgrace," said New York GOP Chair Ed Cox. "One-party Democrat rule in New York City and New York State is not serving the best interests of our citizens, who continue to flee New York for states with lower taxes, more freedom and less corruption. It is highly likely that Mayor Adams will have to resign following the revelation of the specific charges against him."

But Murdoch's New York Post is going with a different approach:

In a statement, Adams implied exactly what's in this headline -- that the feds indicted him because he angered the Biden administration:

If I'm charged, I know I am innocent. I will request immediate trials so the New Yorkers can hear the truth. New Yorkers know my story. They know where I come from. I have been fighting injustice my entire life. That fight has continued as your mayor. Despite our pleas when the federal government did nothing as its broken immigration policies overloaded our shelter system with no relief, I put the people of New York before party and politics.

The Post approach to this story is clearly the one that's preferred by right-wing base. From the comments to a Breitbart story about the indictment:

Many understood that corruption charges, sexual harassment allegations or child porn found on his computer would be levelled against Adams when he kept saying illegals will "destroy" the city. He got rid of NYC's right to shelter which caused some illegals to move on to other US cities offering free beds. He made democrat Biden/Harris look bad and hurt their plans for NYC and thats something democrats dont forget.

****

When he started tellin the truth about all the illegals and how the city couldnt handle it he was doomed. When you join up with them to get you installed you had better do what they tell you or stuff like this happens.

****

He also told to the potato to not send more illegals to NYC!!

****

The entire DOJ is now a political instrument. They destroy enemies of the regime. This is the same BS that Trump faces

And at Fox:

Funny how all this started after he criticized Biden for immigration policies. Is it real, or lawfare. The sad part is that the question has to be asked.

****

He was "falling out of line" with Biden and Kamalas rules of survival. To many questions about border security and breaking points for NY citizens. I'm not fan of Adams, but this was a clear mow down.

Adams is an ex-Republican and has frequently consorted with Trump supporters:

Eric Adams dined this evening at Rao’s with John Catsimatidis and Bo Dietl pic.twitter.com/bV0LPiPQc5

— David Freedlander (@freedlander) July 9, 2021

That's not why he's been indicted, but it's why I'm not surprised that he's feeding the Murdoch media a storyline. (Catsimatidis is a billionaire Trump donor, though he's also given to Democrats, and Dietl is a former New York City police detective and former Fox on-air personality who says he was once hired by Fox to spy on women who said they'd been victims of sexual harassment at the channel.)

At this point, I assume the Murdoch press and the rest of the right-wing media will drop the corrupt-Democrat approach to this story and go all in on the narrative that Eric Adams is being persecuted by the Democratic Deep State. And, like Chris Hayes, I also assume that Adams will successfully appeal his likely guilty verdict:

The Supreme Court will be Republican even if Kamala Harris wins. Adams is corrupt and can't win on the merits, so he might as well lay the groundwork for a successful appeal to the Court's ideologues by positioning himself as an enemy of Democrats.

WHY YOUR RIGHT-WING RELATIVES THINK FANI WILLIS'S BLUETOOTH NAME IS A RACIST REFERENCE TO SEX

Last weekend, I went to the Elon Musk hellsite to find reactions to CNN's bombshell story about Mark Robinson. I found this whataboutist tweet from a self-styled "Political Commentator and Content Creator" with more than 50,000 followers, including Roger Stone:

Democrats: Mark Robinson watched porn videos 20 years ago.

Fani Willis’ Bluetooth: pic.twitter.com/ZOuu9HXDzR

— Joseph Pino (@JosephPino_) September 20, 2024

Fani Willis, of course, is the prosecutor in Donald Trump's Georgia felony case. It seemed implausible -- to put it mildly -- that her Bluetooth name is "Gorilla Grip Pussy Pal." (The phrase is a sex reference, but Gorilla Grip is a company that makes rug grippers and other housewares.) However, the clip looked real. What was going on?

I learned that the clip is real, but it's not from the evidentiary hearing that led to the resignation of one of Willis's special prosecutors, ex-boyfriend Nathan Wade. It's actually from the trial of Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer on the set of the Alec Baldwin film Rust, who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter after Baldwin inadvertently shot a cinematographer using a prop gun loaded with a real bullet. On February 23, 2024, a liveblog of Gutierrez-Reed's trial published by Britain's Independent reported:

The prosecution has called Jason Hawks, the owner of Hawks Consulting, which specialises in helping attorneys extract digital information from cell phones and other devices.

The prosecution asked Mr Hawsk to read text messages pulled from a phone allegedly belonging to Gutierrez-Reed.

The name on the phone was reportedly “Gorilla Grip P**** Pal.”

Five days later, on February 28, Gateway Pundit published this:

I found the headline in this Bitchute video. You can still find links to the post on X/Twitter...

But the original post is gone. It doesn't even show up in archives.

Nevertheless, the false story spread. Here's a tweet posted not long after the Gateway Pundit story went live:

Gorilla Grip Pussy Pal 🦍 pic.twitter.com/txWtIzx4jh

— True Son of Liberty🗽 (@Mdcinc6) February 28, 2024

A radio talker from Tucson was spreading the story a few hours later. The next day, a Trumpist congressman was alluding to it, and one of the people in his replies was already in on the joke:

pic.twitter.com/irFzg2Aksg

— ✵°✵｡✰ 𝕄𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕚 ✰｡✵°✵ (@Mandi_17_) February 29, 2024

A few days later, Willis was linked to the Gutierrez-Reed clip in TikTok videos posted by comedians Marvin Hunter, who has nearly a quarter million followers, and Steve Brown, who has more than 60,000.

And now this lie is everywhere -- Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram -- and most of the Google results for the phrase refer to Willis, not Gutierrez-Reed.

I'm sure I've missed a few steps in the journey from fake news to meme, but this is obviously a disgusting, racist pile of deliberate disinformation. And your right-wing relatives believe it -- believe that a Black woman would use the word "Gorilla" when IDing her phone for Bluetooth, and would name the device in a sexual way. But of course they'd believe it, right?

THE MANOSPHERE AND EVANGELICAL ROOTS OF TRUMP'S PROMISE TO BE A "PROTECTOR" OF "LONELY," "DEPRESSED" WOMEN

Yesterday, Donald Trump made some peculiar promises to women in a Pennsylvania speech:

The former president ... declared, “I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector....”

He continued:

I will make you safe at the border, on the sidewalks of your now violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege, and with our military protecting you from foreign enemies, of which we have many today because of the incompetent leadership that we have. You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not going to be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion!

We expect Trump to tell us that he'll magically make all the crime in America disappear if he's elected. That's nothing new. But now he's saying that if he's elected, women will no longer be lonely?

Just prior to this, he said:

Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, much poorer; are less healthy than they were four years ago; are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago; are paying much higher prices for groceries and everything else than they were four years ago; are more stressed and depressed and unhappy than they were four years ago; and are less optimistic and confident in the future than they were four years ago. I believe that. I will fix all of that and fast.

Again, we expect him to say he'll make inflation and crime go away with a wave of his hand. But he's arguing that he can end female depression. Why is he saying this, while promising to be a "protector"?

Trump's speechwriters appear to be tapping into ideas from the highly patriarchal world of conservative Christianity, as well as ideas common among manosphere misogynists. If you're familiar with the manosphere, you know that incels and right-wing fitness bros believe that feminism is making women miserable by pulling them away from their rightful place as tradwives who marry as virgins and then live under the protection of their men:

It's about choosing the myth of your life/narrative; you've chosen the life of the lonely, depressed, hedonic, and nihilistic single childless lady. I've chosen the path of hard work aiming at making the world around me better, being a protector and provider, husband, and father.

— Shane (@Love_Being_Fit) August 26, 2024

That is a woman's purpose.
Because when she's old and alone with no children or grandchildren and no man will give her attention anymore, she inevitably will become very depressed.
Buy lots of cats and wine.
More American women are on meds than ever before in history.

— xxNIL8xx (@XNil8xx) April 1, 2023

Notice the reference to cats in the second tweet. J.D. Vance's "childless cat ladies" insult comes from the manopshere. The manosphere believes that every woman who delays marriage and childbirth while concentrating on a career ends up a lonely, miserable anti-depressant addict who owns many cats and guzzles wine every night.

The notion that men are meant to be providers and protectors is very popular on the Christian right. When I Googled the phrase "men are protectors," the first hit I got was this -- which is from a Catholic dating site:

... As a man, it is in our nature, and is our duty, to protect. As we prepare ourselves for marriage, it is important that we have learned how to protect ourselves spiritually, and are able to provide security and safety for our future spouse and family.

... We live in a world where people have been dragged from their cars and beaten, simply for a bumper sticker. Others have been attacked for wearing a hat. Kids have been victimized by evil or sick classmates. Riots have turned downtowns into apocalyptic movie scenes. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but we are our own safety measure. Once we realize this, and we take our duty as protectors seriously, it leads us to the conclusion we should be able to stop these events, right?

... Despite the stigma of force, the talk of toxic masculinity, and the push for more “civilized” men, I’ve been hard put to find a woman who doesn’t say she wants to feel protected and safe with their husband. Now, providing not just a feeling of safety, but actually providing it, is something we single men can do both in preparation for marriage, and in our duty as men in the single life.

A couple of hits later, there's this, from a minister:

God’s Word (not me!) says that women are weaker than men, and that men should value them and care for them.

Weaker in what way, you might ask? Are women weaker mentally than men? Certainly not! The valedictorian of the college I serve at is often a woman! Are women weaker spiritually? Definitely not. Are women weaker emotionally Well,...sometimes....maybe alot?....maybe sometimes not at all.

But those areas are not the main thrust of this passage.

Are women weaker physically than men? Absolutely they are. It is God’s design, it is God’s plan, it is God’s template that men are stronger, bigger, faster, and generally taller than women.

And men are to be aware of that fact, and to put a value (honor) on their wives. When something is very valuable, what do you do with it? You protect it!

Men are made to be protectors. It is in our nature. It is in our physical design.

Did you read the New York Times story about the surprising uptick in church attendance by Gen Z men? Young men are now more religious than young women, and young guys' view of themselves as stronger and thus more protective is clearly the reason for their increased interest in church attendance -- while misogyny is the reason women are fleeing.

... within Gen Z, almost 40 percent of women now describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, compared with 34 percent of men, according to a survey last year of more than 5,000 Americans by the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute....

The men and women of Gen Z are also on divergent trajectories in almost every facet of their lives, including education, sexuality and spirituality.

Young women are still spiritual and seeking, according to surveys of religious life. But they came of age as the #MeToo movement opened a national conversation about sexual harassment and gender-based abuse, which inspired widespread exposures of abuse in church settings under the hashtag #ChurchToo. And the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 compelled many of them to begin paying closer attention to reproductive rights.

Young men have different concerns.

... they place a higher value on traditional family life. Childless young men are likelier than childless young women to say they want to become parents someday, by a margin of 12 percentage points, according to a survey last year by Pew.

Yes, but I'm sure they expect their wives to change all the diapers.

These guys mythologize themselves:

Kitron Ferrier is a senior at Baylor University in Waco....

Following Jesus is difficult, Mr. Ferrier said. “It’s about denying yourself, and denying the lust of the flesh,” he said. He appreciates a church like Hope, where leaders are frank about the intensity of the self-sacrifice he sees as a requirement for the Christian faith.

“Young men are attracted to harder truths,” Mr. Ferrier said.

It's because critiques of masculinity make them feel persecuted:

“Religion is coded right, and coded more traditionalist” for young people, said Derek Rishmawy, who leads a ministry at the University of California, Irvine.

For some young men he counsels, Christianity is perceived as “one institution that isn’t initially and formally skeptical of them as a class,” especially in the campus setting, Mr. Rishmawy said.

The rapist Republican candidate is tapping into all this. We'll see whether Gen X men actually get themselves to the polls as a result.

MARK ROBINSON ISN'T A TRUMP CREATION -- HE'S CARL PALADINO 2.0

Yesterday, in a column denouncing North Carolina's Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, David French wrote:

Trump loses now or the Republicans are lost for a generation. Maybe more.

The reason is plain: The yearslong elevation of figures like Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.

The notion that Robinson is a star because Donald Trump made him one is conventional wisdom now. Chris Christie made the same argument on ABC yesterday:

"This was predictable. Mark Robinson's tenure in public life has shown erratic, sometimes highly offensive statements over and over again and Donald Trump supported him and endorsed him. In fact, he called him better than Martin Luther King Jr. on steroids," Christie said.

The former governor added: "This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we're going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us...."

But as I told you a couple of weeks ago, Robinson wasn't made a GOP star by Trump. He became a star in the Republican Party because, in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, he attended a city council hearing in Greensboro and denounced efforts to cancel a gun show, in a bombastic speech that was captured on video. Then, as New York magazine's Zak Cheney-Rice reported in June, this happened:

... a clipped version of his speech exploded across conservative messaging apps and social-media feeds.... Mark Walker, a Republican who represented Greensboro in Congress, shared the video on Facebook and racked up millions of views, which Robinson estimates helped his own following double overnight. Within the week, a private car was chauffeuring Robinson to Winston-Salem for an interview with Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends. “How can we follow you on social media,” asked Earhardt, “and will you ever run for office?”

... the National Rifle Association cast Robinson in a commercial featuring video from his speech. “Anyone who is concerned with holding onto the Second Amendment, I absolutely think they should join the NRA,” he said solemnly. The organization flew him to Dallas for its May convention, where President Donald Trump was a speaker. The commander-in-chief did not stop by Robinson’s green room, but Robinson flew home dazzled and started to parlay his underground celebrity into appearances where GOP voters might take notice.... Robinson was fêted by conservative media and gun groups so often — the World Forum on Shooting Activities flew him to Nuremberg, Germany, and gave him an award — that he quit his job at Davis Furniture, a manufacturing plant in nearby High Point.

In 2020, when Robinson ran for lieutenant governor and won, Trump didn't issue an endorsement in the race. So you should blame the gun lobby and the right-wing infosphere for Mark Robinson, not Trump.

The mainstream political world believes that the Republican Party wasn't toxic until Trump announced his presidential candidacy in 2015. But long before that happened, there was Carl Paladino.

Remember him? He was in the real estate industry in Buffalo when he decided to run for governor in the New York Republican primary. The year was 2010. In April of that year, a news outlet in western New York reported that Paladino had some toxic email habits.

Last week, we received a deluge of emails that Carl Paladino had sent to a veritable who’s who of Buffalo-area politicians, media types, hangers-on, hacks, and appointees....

Every one of these was originally sent by or forwarded by Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. WNYMedia.net has confirmed their authenticity through several sources and different means. They’re real.

... many of the emails included anti-Obama birther claims, and others were just pictures of naked women....

Some of Paladino’s emails contain hardcore pornography. One contains a video clip involving bestiality. Other emails display an attitude of misogyny or blatant racism....

In December 2008, Paladino forwarded a message entitled “Obama Inauguration Rehearsal” including a video clip showing African tribesmen dancing in a village. This video is very popular in the white supremacist community and has been posted at the Neo-Nazi Stormfront website.

And there was this:

Five months after this story broke, Paladino won the Republican primary for governor, an upset victory over the party establishment's candidate, Rick Lazio. Paladino lost the general election to Andrew Cuomo, who was the state's attorney general and is the son of beloved ex-governor Mario Cuomo, but his vote percentage was six points higher than the total amassed by the previous Republican gubernatorial candidate, John Faso, in 2006 against Eliot Spitzer.

Paladino ran as part of the first class of Tea Party candidates. Now we remember the Tea Party embarrassments, among them Christine O'Donnell, who lost a Delaware Senate seat Republicans could have won after she beat an establisment candidate in the primary. She lost the general election for obvious reasons, including this statement aired on Bill Maher's show:

"I dabbled into witchcraft -- I never joined a coven. But I did, I did. I dabbled into witchcraft. I hung around people who were doing these things. I'm not making this stuff up. I know what they told me they do," she said.

"One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn't know it. I mean, there's little blood there and stuff like that," she said. "We went to a movie and then had a midnight picnic on a satanic altar."

Also:

O'Donnell's outspokenness on conservative social values, particularly her support for abstinence and opposition to the use of condoms and masturbation, has set her apart from many prominent Tea Party candidates, who've primarily focused on economic issues.

O'Donnell told TV talk show host Phil Donahue in 2002 that "condoms will not protect you from AIDS." And in a 2006 appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" she said efforts to promote condom use are "anti-human."

She's also received new attention for comments she made in 1996 on MTV's "Sex in the '90s" in which she likened masturbation and pornography to adultery.

Weird, as Tim Walz would say. But Paladino and O'Donnell didn't drag down the Tea Party or the larger GOP -- Republicans gained 6 seats in the Senate and 63 in the House that year. And while most of the Republican candidates that year weren't considered unacceptably extreme -- though another loser was Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin, who insisted that pregnancies are rare as a result of "legitimate rape" -- many of the rank-and-file members of the Tea Party movement were extremists and racists. Surely you remember this image, which, according to CNN in 2009, had been "popping up in e-mails, on Web sites and at Tea Party protests for weeks":

By 2010, only 41% of Tea Party members were certain that Barack Obama had been born in America, according to a CBS poll. But none of this prevented a GOP rout in the 2010 midterms.

The Tea Party was a collection of Mark Robinsons who were funded by the Koch network and relentlessly promoted on Fox News. Trump made the GOP realize that its candidates can be just as racist and conspiratorial as its base voters and win Republican primaries (and, often, general elections). But the party was becoming what it is now years before Trump entered politics.

TRUMP PICKED VANCE BECAUSE HE WANTED A LOYALIST, NOT AN HEIR

Ezra Klein has written a pretty good piece on Project 2025. It's good on the reason you should ignore Trump's disavowals of the project and its architects:

... now Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump.

Klein says that Trump wants to be more ideologically flexible than the authors of Project 2025 -- "But if Trump wins, he will need plans and he will need people," he writes, and the people best positioned to run his administration are Project 2025 ideologues:

The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he has. It is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.

But I don't agree with Klein when he says this about J.D. Vance, who's closely allied with the people behind Project 2025:

Everyone knew Mike Pence did not represent Trumpism. But Trump chose Vance to be the heir of the MAGA movement.

The notion that Trump chose Vance as an heir is now conventional wisdom, but I find it implausible. Trump may be the most narcissistic person who's ever lived. I don't think he cares at all what happens to his movement, or to America, once he's gone -- when he's dead, in his view, nothing important will exist, except monuments and other tributes to him. He's put some distance between himself and the person who'd be his most obvious heir, his son and namesake. Don Junior is almost more MAGA than Dad and centers his life on Republican resentment politics. Yet Dad still keeps him at arm's length. And the other obvious heir, daughter Ivanka, keeps Dad at arm's length.

Yesterday I criticized a New York Times op-ed by Jason Zengerle, but I think Zengerle's tale of how Vance was chosen is plausible:

[Tucker] Carlson was a crucial advocate of Mr. Vance when Mr. Trump was deciding on a running mate. In June, after receiving word that Mr. Trump was leaning away from Mr. Vance and toward Senator Marco Rubio of Florida or Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Mr. Carlson reportedly called Mr. Trump from Australia, where he was on a speaking tour. He warned Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio and Mr. Burgum were neocons who supported military adventurism overseas. If Mr. Trump chose one of them for his running mate, Mr. Carlson said, U.S. intelligence agencies would try to assassinate him.

Beyond that, I think Vance persuaded Trump that he wouldn't be the kind of Establishment figure who'd oppose Trump when Trump as president sought to do something outrageous. Rubio and Burgum seemed likely to go behind Trump's back and prevent him from, say, withdrawing from NATO or building a moat with alligators on the southern border. I think Trump sees Vance and someone who'd back him without question if he did those things (and Vance really would).

I also think Trump likes people who criticize him, then recant and kiss his ring. He appreciates Lindsey Graham for precisely that reason. Rubio was also a critic who became a Trump defender -- that's one reason I think he remained on Trump's shortlist until the very end. But Vance seemed like more of a MAGA purist, particularly on Russia and Ukraine.

Klein writes:

Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment. It is telling that it is Vance, not Trump, who wrote a glowing [foreword] to [Heritage Foundation president Kevin] Roberts’s forthcoming book. Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.

I think Vance and the creators of Project 2025 really are the future of the Republican Party (or the MAGA movement, which is the same thing). But I don't think Trump cares. He just wants Mafia-level loyalists around him if he wins.

IN THE NEW YORK TIMES, JASON ZENGERLE SANEWASHES FOX NEWS

Jason Zengerle has published a New York Times op-ed under the headline "The Strange Afterlife of Tucker Carlson." It tells us some things worth knowing about Carlson's popularity ("Mr. Carlson’s podcast now regularly sits in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast rankings and occasionally even beats 'The Joe Rogan Experience' for the top spot") and about Carlson's access to Donald Trump (Zengerle reminds us that Carlson lobbied for J.D. Vance when Trump was looking for a running mate, and probably made the sale by telling Trump that if he chose either of the other two men on his short list, 'neocons" Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum, "U.S. intelligence agencies would try to assassinate him").

However, Zengerle also writes this:

The people who are still paying attention to Mr. Carlson are getting an even more extreme version of him than the one they saw on Fox News. No longer subject to the guardrails of a publicly traded media company or even nominal corporate supervision, Mr. Carlson has further descended into the fever swamps. He’s described Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky as “ratlike” and a “persecutor of Christians,” accused Harvard of advocating “white genocide” and alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and former Attorney General Bill Barr covered it up.

This paragraph sanewashes Fox News.

I've been telling you for more than twenty years that the mainstream media pays far too little attention to the inflammatory messages in the right-wing media. Three decades ago, mainstream news outlets weren't monitoring Rush Limbaugh and other radio talkers. Later, they chose not to report regularly on what Fox News hosts were saying, leaving that to progressive monitoring organizations like Media Matters and Think Progress. As a result, mainstream journalists had no idea where rank-and-file GOP voters were getting their increasingly extreme ideas. Mainstream news organizations sent a lot of reporters into a lot of diners after the 2016 election. Those reporters could have just watched a little Fox every week or read some stories (or transcripts of prime-time hosts' monologues) at FoxNews.com.

Does Zengerle really believe that Carlson was restrained when he was at Fox? Carlson may not have called Zelensky "ratlike" when he was at Fox, but in December 2022 he complained that Zelensky "arrived at the White House dressed like the manager of a strip club." As for calling Zelensky "a persecutor of Christians," in December 2022 Fox posted a video of a Carlson monologue with the headline "Tucker Carlson: Zelenskyy's Cabinet Is Devising Ways to Punish Christians."



(Carlson's claim, as the fact checkers say, needs context. At about 3:15 in the video, Carlson says that Zelensky's "Cabinet is now devising ways to punish Christians for practicing their banned ancient religion in Ukraine." In fact, Zelensky has been at odds with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Last month, he signed a bill banning the church in his country, citing its ties to Russia, which the church insists it has cut. The church has seen its membership decline sharply in Ukraine since the Russian invasion -- but that has been accompanied by a membership increase in the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which has no Russia ties. That Christian church is not being persecuted.)

Last year on his podcast, Carlson did say that pro-Israel donors to Ivy League schools had previously funded what his interviewee, Candace Owens, called "anti-white explicit racism"; Carlson said the schools "were calling for white genocide." Carlson may not have said exactly this while he was at Fox, but he came close, as Vanity Fair noted in 2021:

“In schools they are teaching this. Race hate,” seethed Tucker Carlson on February 19 while bemoaning a school program calling for “white allies” to “acknowledge the reality of racism.” By April, Carlson had moved on to parroting a white nationalist conspiracy theory, warning his audience that the Democratic Party is carrying out a massive racial “replacement” plot to swap America’s majority-white electorate with “more obedient voters from the third world.”

On Thursday night, Carlson took his racial paranoia to its inevitable end point by predicting that America is heading for an all-out race war. After mockingly decrying criticism against “white rage”—a reference to General Mark Milley’s thoughtful congressional testimony that has been derided by the right—Carlson then invoked the Rwandan genocide by asking his viewers, “The question is, and this is the question that we should be meditating on day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, this cycle, before it’s too late? How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?” Given that Carlson discussing was flanked by an onscreen graphic that read “ANTI-WHITE MANIA” during the segment, his choice reference to the East African genocide—which led to the deaths of as many as 800,000 people, mostly of a minority ethnic group—was clearly an implied way of warning his audience that the teaching about systemic racism could result in a similar slaughter of white Americans.

And while Carlson may not have directly "alleged that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered and former Attorney General Bill Barr covered it up," here's a still from a 2019 Carlson interview with Louisiana senator John Kennedy after Kennedy expressed suspicion about Epstein's death:

Here's the interview.



Note that it's prefaced by a clip of Senator Kennedy saying the following to fellow senators, in that insipid faux-folksy manner of his:

SENATOR KENNEDY: Christmas ornaments, drywall, and Jerry [sic] Epstein: Name three things that don't hang themselves.

Tucker Carlson is maybe a millimeter to the right of where he was on Fox News. But most mainstream journalists have no real idea what he used to say on Fox -- or what any other current or former Fox host says. They and their editors have chosen not to report on the messages coming from some of the most influential media outlets in America -- with rare exceptions, like this elaborate 2022 New York Times piece on Carlson, which was very good, but was clearly seen at the Times as a "one and done" report, after which they could go right back to ignoring the content of Fox broadcasts. You can't understand what's happened to the Republican Party in America without knowing what's in GOP voters' media diet. But most mainstream outlets don't care to find out.

EVERY TRUE REPUBLICAN COULD SHOOT SOMEBODY ON FIFTH AVENUE AND NOT LOSE ANY REPUBLICAN VOTERS

A couple of weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucuses, Donald Trump made a memorable boast:

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump remarked at a campaign stop at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. "It's, like, incredible."

Eight years later, he's in his third consecutive close presidential race, and he might win for the second time. He's trailing in the polls and seems likely to lose, but one thing is clear: no matter what he's said or done, he's lost only a handful of Republican voters.

Many people believe Trump has a unique appeal to the GOP base. He doesn't. The case of Mark Robinson proves that every Republican in good standing could shoot somebody and not lose party voters.

It's possible that Robinson will be brought down by the latest story: that he posted comments for years at a porn site called Nude Africa that included graphic descriptions of (undoubtedly imaginary) sexual encounters, along with pronouncements such as "I'm a black NAZI!" and “I’m not in the KKK. They don’t let blacks join. If I was in the KKK I would have called him Martin Lucifer Koon!” But four years ago, when he was elected lieutenant governor, and earlier this year, when he won the Republican gubernatorial primary with 65% of the vote, it was widely known that he had a long history of posting conspiratorial, anti-Semitic, anti-Black, and anti-LGBTQ remarks on social media.

It didn't matter. He hated the people Republican voters hate, so nothing he'd ever said or done could be a dealbreaker for the base.

In early August of this year, the virulently anti-abortion Robinson made an ad in which he and his wife revealed that she'd had an abortion. Not long after that, his opponent, Democrat Josh Stein, began running an ad that featured a clip of Robinson saying that abortion is "about killing the child because you weren't responsible enough to keep your skirt down." Axios quoted a Republican political operative who said, "The 'skirt' ad has been the most effective messaging point against Robinson to date because it speaks beyond the issue of abortion. It speaks to the issue of blaming women." Then, in early September, a North Carolina news outlet reported that Robinson was once a regular at a porn shop in Greensboro, showing up as often as five times a week.

After all that, Robinson trailed Stein by only 5 points in a Victory Insights poll, and by only 8 in an Emerson College poll. Unlike Trump, Robinson appears to be losing swing voters, a process that's likely to continue in the aftermath of the latest story, but it's clear that the vast majority of Republican voters are still with him. He might still drop out of the race, although his name will appear on the ballot and voters who want to pick his replacement will have to vote for him, but he's vowing not to quit, and if he hangs on until the end, I think it will be a single-digit loss.

We saw this with Herschel Walker two years ago in Georgia. The headline of a Vox story published two weeks before Election Day 2022 summed up his Georgia Senate race: "Herschel Walker Is an Epically Flawed Candidate. He Could Still Win." Walker was an anti-abortion zealot who'd paid for a girlfriend's abortion. He'd denounced absentee fathers but was an absentee father to one of his own children, and it was learned during the campaign that he had children he hadn't even acknowledged to his campaign staff. He was credibly accused of domestic violence by former romantic partners and his own son. He said peculiar things at campaign appearances, like this bizarre monologue about horror movies:



Then he lost the November election to incumbebnt Democrat Raphael Warnock by only one point, and when the race went to a runoff because neither candidate won 50% of the vote, he lost to Warnock by only three points.

There's only one way Republicans can lose the support of the party's voter base: by consorting with the enemy. If you're Liz Cheney, you're a pariah in the party. But Robinson is fine.

And no, I don't believe even this will lose him GOP votes:

Despite a recent history of anti-transgender rhetoric, Robinson said he enjoyed watching transgender pornography....

“I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s f*cking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” Robinson wrote. “And yeah I’m a ‘perv’ too!”

Obtaining sexual gratification from people you don't believe deserve human rights? That's what slaveowners did, and when you try to talk about that fact now, or teach it in schools, Republicans get angry. So this won't bother the Republican faithful.

I think they're much more likely to be grateful to Robinson for denouncing Martin Luther King.

In a series of seven posts in October 2011, Robinson disparaged Martin Luther King in such intense terms, calling him a “commie bastard,” “worse than a maggot,” a “ho f**king, phony,” and a “huckster,” that a user in the thread accused him of being in the KKK.

The base believes whites are the real victims of racism in America. They'll hear about this and wish they could say what he said.

I could have written this post about other Republicans -- Matt Gaetz, for instance. (He won his last election 68%-32%.) Just remember the principle: any Republican who clearly despises the people Republican base voters despise will retain their support under any circumstances.

WHAT IF A POPULAR VOTE/ELECTORAL VOTE SPLIT WENT THE OTHER WAY?

The New York Times has just published the results of a new presidential poll, which shows Kamala Harris and Donald Trump tied at 47% each among likely voters. An accompanying poll of Pennsylvania shows Harris leading by 4 points, 50% to 46%.

This combined result is unexpected, and I suspect it happened because the Times/Siena polling operation is tying itself in knots in an attempt to avoid underestimating Trump's strength in November. Maybe the raw numbers have been adjusted to match a turnout model that's more Republican than the models of other pollsters, which means weighting for white people, and maybe that led to an unanticipated result in Pennsylvania. The Times tells us:

... in 2024, Democrats — first with Mr. Biden and now Ms. Harris — have showed relative strength with white voters, and the Pennsylvania electorate is whiter than the nation overall.

Ms. Harris was winning 46 percent of white voters in Pennsylvania in the new set of polls. In 2020, Mr. Biden won 43 percent of white voters nationally; Hillary Clinton received just 39 percent support from the group in 2016.

I don't think Harris will really do better in Pennsylvania than she does nationwide, but Times poll analyst Nate Cohn says the polls, or at least the "high-quality" polls, are trending this way:

Yes, our poll average shows Ms. Harris doing better nationally than in Pennsylvania, but if you focus only on higher-quality polls (which we call “select pollsters” in our table), the story is a bit different. Over the last month, a lot of these polls show Ms. Harris doing relatively poorly nationwide, but doing well in the Northern battleground states.

When Cohn says that Harris is doing "relatively poorly nationwide" in these polls, he mostly means that she's leading by 1 or 2 points, so I'm not too worried. Her leads range from 3 to 6 points in the majority of the polls in the Rust Belt swing states -- Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

But these results lead me to consider an unlikely scenario: Despite all the warnings from Nate Silver and others that this election could end in yet another popular vote win for the Democrat and an Electoral College win for the Republican, what if the opposite were to happen? What if Harris were to lose the popular vote and win all the Rust Belt swing states, and therefore win the Electoral College? How would the country handle that?

We know how Donald Trump and MAGA Nation will handle this or any other kind of Harris win, including a landslide in both the popular and electoral vote: by claiming fraud and by trying to encourage officials in tight states not to certify a Harris win, mostly through intimidation. They'll say the Electoral College vote should go to Trump because they see clear evidence of fraud -- and I think they'll be joined by "respectable" Republicans who argue that Trump should get the win because, in their view, there seems to be evidence of fraud. They'll also say that Trump was handicapped during the campaign -- by his civil and criminal cases, by attempts to remove him from state primary ballots, by assassination attempts, and by anti-Trump media bias. (There was clear media bias against Al Gore and Hillary Clinton when they ran, but no one ever suggested that we should hand them the presidency for that reason, even though they both won the popular vote.)

And in the "liberal" media, there will undoubtedly be pundits who say the Electoral College should give us a "unity government," making Trump president and Tim Walz (or even Kamala Harris) vice president -- or maybe they'll recommend a Harris/Vance administration instead. Either way, it's a preposterous idea, which won't prevent it from being proposed by Pamela Paul, Kathleen Parker, Nicholas Kristof, and/or Van Jones.

Assuming none of this works and Harris and Walz take office in January, the GOP, right-wing media, and much of the mainstream media will never stop questioning the new president and vice president's legitimacy, even though the subject was largely dropped when George W. Bush took office in 2001 and when Trump took office in 2017. The mainstream media will demand that Harris "govern from the center," and perhaps choose a Cabinet that's half GOP. It'll be exhausting.

This is where I remind you that there was speculation in 2000 about a Gore Electoral College win accompanied by a Bush popular vote win. On November 1, 2000, six days before Election Day, the New York Daily News published a story in which Republicans promised an all-out effort to prevent Gore from taking office under those circumstances:

“The one thing we don’t do is roll over,” says a Bush aide. “We fight.”

How? The core of the emerging Bush strategy assumes a popular uprising, stoked by the Bushies themselves, of course.

In league with the campaign – which is preparing talking points about the Electoral College’s essential unfairness – a massive talk-radio operation would be encouraged. “We’d have ads, too,” says a Bush aide, “and I think you can count on the media to fuel the thing big-time. Even papers that supported Gore might turn against him because the will of the people will have been thwarted.”

Local business leaders will be urged to lobby their customers, the clergy will be asked to speak up for the popular will and Team Bush will enlist as many Democrats as possible to scream as loud as they can. “You think ‘Democrats for Democracy’ would be a catchy term for them?” asks a Bush adviser.

Democrats never did that when the opposite scenario occurred, partly because Gore concentrated on fighting for a Florida recount. Republicans fought harder (and dirtier). And now Americans largely accept these splits. But we'll see what happens in the unlikely event that we have a split favoring Democrats.