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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A WAR AT HOME IS STILL A WAR, GUYS

A couple of hours ago, at Twitter and Threads, Robert Kennedy Jr. posted this:

pic.twitter.com/ul2sR31VvU

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) October 30, 2024

This is a reminder of one reason Donald Trump is winning over some young men, apart from the bro-ishness and misogyny of his campaign: Trump and his surrogates have young men convinced that a vote for Harris is a vote for war. Trump regularly says that a Harris presidency will lead to World War III, while he'll instantly, magically, and single-handedly end all the major wars taking place right now and prevent future wars by means of a slogan, "Peace Through Strength." Harris, regrettably, has welcomed the support not only of Liz Cheney (who has stood up for the rule of law in recent years) but also of her father, whom nobody admires these days and who was unquestionably a warmonger. Trump surrogates like Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard echo Trump's message, and most bros don't realize that what these surrogates really want is an alliance with Vladimir Putin rather than with NATO. To these voters, it all seems Bernie-esque.

But even if the bros believe what Trump and his retinue are saying about foreign wars, they need to understand that you won't need to be shipped overseas to die in combat in a second Trump presidency. Over at The American Prospect, Rick Perlstein runs through a frightening list of scenarios that many of us could face if Trump is elected. Bros who see Trump as a peace-loving isolationist ought to consider these:

WHAT IF YOU ARE IN THE ARMY, and are ordered to the border to transport children to deportation camps? Or shoot peaceful protesters? ...

Your pacifist son is forced to take the military entrance exam. What do you do? ...

You’re in the National Guard, and ... your unit is about to be federalized to move in on a New Jersey sanctuary city and bust down doors in Baghdad-style house-to-house raids because the migrants living there are “not civilians.” Do you follow orders, or do you risk the stockade?

Or you are a National Guardsman in Texas, and breathe a sigh of relief when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, draws the line against your governor’s interpretation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, claiming that because refugees from Venezuela “actually invaded” that state, literal war can be waged against these poor huddled masses yearning to breathe free. But your heart sinks when the governor acts anyway, replying with a piece of apocrypha credited to President Andrew Jackson: The court has made its decision; now let them enforce it. What’s your decision?

Maybe you care if the victims are brown people in a country you've never been to, but you don't care if they're brown people who live near you, but in a neighborhood you avoid. Nevertheless, this could still seem like a war. I suspect that Trump will round up the least violent, most law-abiding immigrants first, and that the criminals he talks about are the ones who'll hold out the longest,a nd shoot back. It might turn into a guerrilla war that will look an awful lot like the Iraq quagmire Trump now denounces.

*****

And on "illness," which is also mentioned in the tweet above, let me remind you once again that RFK Jr. has said that there's no such thing as a vaccine that's both safe and effective. He said this in July 2023 on Lex Fridman's podcast:

Fridman, July 6: You’ve talked about that the media slanders you by calling you an anti-vaxxer, and you’ve said that you’re not anti-vaccine, you’re pro-safe vaccine. Difficult question: Can you name any vaccines that you think are good?

Kennedy: I think some of the live virus vaccines are probably averting more problems than they’re causing. There’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.

On the same podcast, he said:

... if you say to me, “The polio vaccine, was it effective against polio?” I’m going to say, Yes. And if you say to me, “Did it kill more people ... did it caused more death than averted?” I would say, “I don’t know, because we don’t have the data on that.”

Now some reporting from CNN:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told supporters on Monday that former President Donald Trump has promised to give him “control” of several public health agencies, including the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture, if he wins a second term in November.

Kennedy ... said during a livestreamed organizing event that Trump told him he’d oversee a vast public health portfolio if the former president returns to the White House....

“The key that I think I’m – you know, that President Trump has promised me is – is control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and then also the USDA, which is – which, you know, is key to making America healthy. Because we’ve got to get off of seed oils, and we’ve got to get off of pesticide intensive agriculture,” Kennedy said, according to video of the event obtained by CNN.

I get some of this. I have questions about pesticide-intensive agriculture. But seed oils? This is podcast-level health quackery. And Kennedy said what he said about vaccines. I don't expect youngf, single bros to reject Trump because it might be illegal to get a COVID shot (or a polio vaccine) in his and RFK's America, but that alone should be reason enough for the rest of us to reject Trump.

NO, TRUMP IS STILL NOT "A SPENT AND EXHAUSTED FORCE"

Jamelle Bouie apparently believes that we're seeing the end of Trumpism:

i don’t know how you can watch this rally and not conclude that maga is a spent and exhausted force

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) October 27, 2024 at 8:32 PM

He elaborates in his column today:

I’m sure that, to some observers, all of this — even the terrible racist jokes — looks like the confidence and resolve of a determined political movement. But I think it’s just the opposite. Far from showing strength, the Madison Square Garden rally showed that however vicious and virulent its leaders and supporters might be, the MAGA movement is a spent and exhausted force, even if it is not yet defeated.

But being "not yet defeated" is how Trump defines victory -- if he wins, even with a minority of the popular vote, that means he's the most powerful, most virile, and most sexually attractive man on earth, even if he barely has the energy to get to the finish line. Remember, this is someone who was once in debt to the tune of nearly a billion dollars in the early 1990s, and he responded by, among other things, publishing a book called Trump: Surviving at the Top. That's what he cares about: not having ideas or a vision (as a real estate developer or as a politician), but just being at the top. He wants to be president. There may be a "determined political movement" behind him, but he's part of it only to the extent that it's determined to give him power and glory.

This doesn't mean he's indifferent to how he gets to the top. When he was actually building buildings, he wanted them to be big and garish. As a politician, he wants to be racist, vindictive, and corrupt. But the main message he's been sending since his first major business failures has been nothing more than Fuck you -- I'm surviving. At the top!

Bouie wasn't impressed with Trump's words at Madison Square Garden:

As for Trump’s speech, it was a long meandering mess, less vigorous than it was, to borrow a phrase, low energy. There was no positive agenda, no optimistic picture for the country, nothing that came close to the tone of either his 2016 or 2020 campaigns, when Trump would pivot, on occasion, to being a candidate of change and prosperity. Not this time: Trump gave the American public a rant, centered on his wounded ego and his desire for revenge and retribution.

But that's because we don't live in the world of 2016 or 2020. Thirty percent of the country loves his act, but Trump has intuited that he can still win the votes of another 15-20 percent of the country who don't like his act but assume they can just ignore it for four years by never reading or watching the news, an approach that's extremely easy in a post-newspaper, post-cable world. Those people think he'll make a lot of noise but be a normal president otherwise, all while magically ending every war and lowering prices to 2019 levels. They don't need him to be a statesman. They just need him not to be Joe Biden, whom they regard as a terrible president, even if they voted for him.

Are there enough of these people to get Trump a win? We won't know until next week. There might not be. But nothing Trump has done in this campaign -- not "They're eating the dogs," not the DJ party -- has alienated them. Trump will get at least 47% of the vote. He'll win, at minimum, 230 electoral votes.

Bouie continues:

Is this the message of a winning campaign with the energy and confidence necessary to push through to Election Day? Or is it the message of an undisciplined candidate who believes that his days in the spotlight are coming to an end and wants to make the most of them before he can no longer claim this kind of attention?

Have you heard of fuck-you money -- an amount of money so large that you don't need to care what your haters think? Trump has fuck-you political clout. He knew it two campaigns ago, when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. (It remains to be seen whether Tony Hinchcliffe's verbal gunshots on Seventh Avenue will lose votes for Trump.) This fuck-you clout might never be enough for Trump to win the popular vote in a presidential election, and it might not be enough for him to win the Electoral College more than that one time, but it's enough for him to stay competitive in a third straight election, after not only the DJ set and the pet-eating monologue but the felony conviction and the rape adjudication and the multiple indictments and the two impeachments and January 6. Fuck-you political clout means that Trump doesn't need to deliver inspiring speeches, or even coherent speeches. He's literally now like a rock star who shows up hours late for the gig and then plays whatever the hell he feels like playing, even if it's not what the audience wants to hear.

We've been writing Trump's political obituary practically every day since the summer of 2015. Haven't we learned not to do that? Trump will be a spent force when he's dead, or when he's so deep in dementia that even his superfans can't deny his cognitive loss. Until that time, he'll be very, very difficult to beat. So let's hold off on the premature celebrations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Peng Dang (@pengdangcomedy) May 11, 2021

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

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

[image or embed]

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he will never be done with New York.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yas reminds us that as president he was fascist:

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

Yas reminds us of the generals who

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fascism and Other Matters

 

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

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

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

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

***

This is so embarrassing on CNN's part:

CNN — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bot Not For Me

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GONE FOR A FEW

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

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

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

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

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

Klein says:

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

Later, Klein elaborates on this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DONALD TRUMP, RELATABLE FUCKUP?

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

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

That's a 35-point gender gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SANEWASHING: DID THE NEW YORK TIMES INITIALLY CENSOR A REPORTER'S REFERENCE TO TRUMP'S DICK JOKE?

You probably know already that Donald Trump had a moment of disinhibition yesterday while campaigning at the Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, which is named after one of the most successful golfers of the 1950s and 1960s:

OMFG -- "When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said 'oh my god. That's unbelievable" -- Trump says that when other golfers showered with Arnold Palmer they would marvel at how big his dick is

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.bsky.social) October 19, 2024 at 6:24 PM

When this happened, The New York Times published two brief reports from reporter Michael Gold on its campaign blog. Neither one made reference to Trump's bizarrely inappropriate dick joke:

A Times reader emailed Gold to complain about this sanewashing:

Gold replied that he'd included a reference to the dick joke in one of his posts, but his editors had removed it:

He has replied and said to direct your attention to senioreditor@nytimes.com

[image or embed]

— Branden McEuen and it’s the same but he’s spooky so it’s not (@bmceuen.bsky.social) October 19, 2024 at 9:05 PM

The Times has now published a full story by Gold, and it leads with the dick joke:

At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity

The G.O.P. nominee repeated crude insults, and his supporters relished each moment. But the display could alienate swing voters.

Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer’s penis size and a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris.

The performance, 17 days before the election in a critical battleground state, added to the impression of the Republican nominee as increasingly unfiltered and undisciplined. It comes as some of Mr. Trump’s allies and aides worry that Mr. Trump’s temperament and crass style are alienating undecided voters.

Did reader complaints pressure the Times to run this story? Or was it the fact that most other media organizations, including The Washington Post, AP, CNN, USA Today, and even Fox, recognized the news value of the joke?

I can only assume that the initial decision not to publish Gold's dispatch as he wrote it was based on the bizarre affirmative action the Times practices with regard to Trump. When its reporters write about Trump and a Democratic opponent -- or, really, about all Republicans and Democrats -- it seems to seek equality of outcomes for Republicans rather than equally fair coverage. By "equality of outcomes" I mean that the Times wants readers to walk away never believing that Republicans are more extreme, more dangerous, or more unhinged than Democrats, even when it's objectively true that they are. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz aren't talking about anyone's genital size in their campaign speeches, so it's simply unfair for the Times to report that Trump is. That seems to have been the initial editorial judgment in this case.

*****

Is this age-related mental decline? I'm not sure. I remember that eight years ago Trump alluded to sexual activity on a successful real estate developer's yacht in a speech he gave at the Boy Scout Jamboree. In that speech, he refrained from saying anything explicit:

And he went out and bought a big yacht, and he had a very interesting life. I won’t go any more than that, because you’re Boy Scouts so I’m not going to tell you what he did.

(CROWD CHANTING)

Should I tell you? Should I tell you?

(APPLAUSE)

You’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life.

So look at you. Who would think this is the Boy Scouts, right? So he had a very, very interesting life....

On the one hand, he showed greater restraint in 2017. On the other hand: He said this to an audience full of Boy Scouts!

But what he's doing now is working. He may even be a slight favorite to win the election. So instead of asking, as Harris's campaign frequently does, "Is Donald Trump okay?," maybe we need to ask: Is America okay?

A SECOND TRUMP TERM: DUELING EXTREMISTS?

Franklin Foer thinks he knows why Elon Musk is working so hard to get Donald Trump elected:

Like so many other billionaire exponents of libertarianism, he has turned the government into a spectacular profit center. His company SpaceX relies on contracts with three-letter agencies and the Pentagon. It has subsumed some of NASA’s core functions. Tesla thrives on government tax credits for electric vehicles and subsidies for its network of charging stations. By Politico’s tabulation, both companies have won $15 billion in federal contracts. But that’s just his business plan in beta form....

Trump has already announced that he will place him in charge of a government-efficiency commission. Or, in the Trumpian vernacular, Musk will be the “secretary of cost-cutting.” SpaceX is the implied template: Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing the affairs of state to nimble entrepreneurs and adroit technologists. That means there will be even more opportunities for his companies to score gargantuan contracts.

I have no doubt that Musk would like to award himself massive contracts to do things the government is doing now. I'm sure Trump would back him, and I'm sure the federal courts would allow this to happen.

But would Musk want Musk-led companies to do everything the government does now? If there's anyone delusional enough to think that could be possible, it's Musk, but I don't really believe he wants to oversee national parks or generate labor statistics. I think he'd try to capture the parts of the government that could make him the most money (and get him the most publicity) and simply decide that the boring stuff doesn't need to be done at all. He'd do what he did at Twitter: announce a jaw-dropping reduction in the federal workforce (at Twitter, he said he cut 80% of the staff) and simply leave every most of the federal government (apart from the military) underfunded and understaffed. That's what a "secretary of cost-cutting" would be expected to do, right?

Musk is an attention addict. He wants to be loved and feared. His motives these days clearly aren't limited to making money. Proposing this would get him a lot of attention and make him seem like a fearless Randian destroyer of uniparty pieties about the size and role of government. He'd love that.

Trump would also be thrilled. Remember, he's been a Fox News addict since long before MAGA. From Fox he's imbibed the Reaganite dogma: government is always bad.

Of course, Musk might be propose cuts where the Project 2025 crowd might want to keep the head count the same and simply replace the old workers with zealot loyalists. I think we could have dueling crackpots with dueling agendas.

I don't buy the stories about Trump's attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 -- I certainly don't believe the recent Politico story claiming that people linked to Project 2025 will be banned from working in a Trump White House -- but I don't think Trump particularly cares about the Project 2025 agenda one way or another, except for the parts that are personally beneficial to him. If he wins, I think the 2025ers will be one faction of extremists in his White House who'll be competing for his attention. I know there's a widespread belief that he'll be too impaired to be a full participant in his own administration if he wins, but even in weakened form, I think he'll demand deference. Anyone who's dealt with people in their declining years knows that they can be very demanding as they decline. That's what I expect from Trump if he's president again.

In a second Trump White House, the dueling power centers won't be the Establishment right vs. the right-wing crazies. It'll be multiple varieties of right-wing crazies competing with one another. The rest of us will be rooting for injuries.

TRUMP IS BIDEN, IF BIDEN WERE A STUPID, NARCISSISTIC RIGHT-WING HATEMONGER

You won't like this one, but here goes.

Politico Playbook is acknowledging the obvious signs of Donald Trump's struggles in the late stages of this campaign:

Recently, it’s become something of a pattern: Trump is scheduled for an interview with a neutral media outlet, the date nears and then ... things fall apart.

It happened just this week to planned Trump sit-downs with NBC in Philadelphia and CNBC’s “Squawk Box” — and that’s on the heels of him backing out of a “60 Minutes” episode earlier this month.

So why is this happening?

Playbook has learned that yet another outlet was given an explanation by Trump’s team for why their own interview wasn’t coming to fruition: exhaustion.

The Trump campaign had been in conversations for weeks with The Shade Room about a sit-down interview. The site, which draws an audience that is largely young and Black, hosted an interview with Harris just last week.

But as no interview materialized, Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign....

In a conversation earlier this week, when describing why an interview hadn’t come together just yet, a Trump adviser told The Shade Room producers that Trump was “exhausted and refusing [some] interviews but that could change” at any time, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

I keep telling you that I don't believe Trump is experiencing serious dementia yet -- some impairment, yes, but he can still function most of the time. Last night, at the Al Smith dinner, he seemed perfectly capable of delivering a version of his stump speech, with some new jokes (written by "a couple of people from Fox") and a few ad-libs. But maybe that's no surprise -- Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, kept giving speeches until 1994, five years after he left office, even though he'd been displaying signs of mental decline for a decade before that.

For now, I think Trump doesn't have enough energy to maintain a full campaign schedule, so we get moments like his bizarre decision earlier this week to end a town hall early and turn it into a DJ party.

Trump will probably be in a state of full-blown dementia eventually, though I'm not sure when. Now I think he's where Joe Biden is -- minus Biden's obvious intelligence, mastery of facts, empathy, and decency, none of which Trump ever had.

The fact that The New York Times became utterly obsessed with Biden's age in the first half of this year doesn't take away from the fact the paper eventually published a story about Biden's mental state that was detailed, blanced, and, to me, persuasive. It appeared shortly after his bad debate with Trump, and it portrayed the president as often clear-headed, perceptive, and knowledgeable:

In the days since the debate debacle, aides and others who encountered him, including foreign officials, described him as being in good shape — alert, coherent and capable, engaged in complicated and important discussions and managing volatile crises. They cited example after example in cases where critical national security issues were on the line.

Aides present in the Situation Room the night that Iran hurled a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel portrayed a president in commanding form, lecturing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by phone to avoid a retaliatory escalation that would have inflamed the Middle East. “Let me be crystal clear,” Mr. Biden said. “If you launch a big attack on Iran, you’re on your own.”

Mr. Netanyahu pushed back hard, citing the need to respond in kind to deter future attacks. “You do this,” Mr. Biden said forcefully, “and I’m out.” Ultimately, the aides noted, Mr. Netanyahu scaled back his response.

But frequent travel and sheer exhaustion impairs him:

Mr. Biden’s trips to Europe were marked by moments of sharpness in important meetings — including a complex session on diverting income from Russian assets to aid Ukraine — mixed with occasional blank-stared confusion, according to people who met with him. At some points, he seemed perfectly on top of his game, at others a little lost....

But when it came time for the president’s own speech on D-Day, he delivered it forcefully and clearly, gathering momentum and ending on a vigorous note.

Biden was struggling to deal with multiple crises while running an underdog campaign for president. No wonder he was tired. That would be a strain on a younger person.

Biden starts with a knowledge base that's much greater than Trump's. He's been a serious man dealing with serious national and (especially) global issues for half a century. He's spent a lifetime absorbing real information, not the simplistic, bias-confirming junk Trump gets from Fox News. Biden is still quite capable of tapping into that knowledge base and making sound judgments. (Trump has never been capable of making sound judgments, except when he's trying to attack an enemy or keep his name in the papers.)

Biden is humane and empathetic. Trump has always been a hate-filled bigot and narcissist.

Take away everything that has made Biden a gifted public official, add hate and an off-the-charts level of egotism, and you have Trump a decade ago. Then add the same level of impairment to each, and you have Trump and Biden now.

And Trump was always a glib, trash-talking motormouth, while Biden always struggled with public speaking. They've both declined, but Biden's decline leaves him grasping for words. Trump gives us word salad, but he just keeps talking. Unfortunately, to many people, he comes off as more articulate as a result. (I don't just mean his superfans. Remember that the Trump voters who don't love him but just want egg prices to be lower tend not to be the best-informed voters in America, so they can't tell that his "weave" monologues are a bunch of malarkey.)

If Trump is elected, he's likely to decline further -- or he'll keep a very light schedule, maybe even lighter than the schedule he kept when he was in the White House, and his handlers will manage to squeeze four years out of him, the way Reagan's handlers managed to get him to the end of his second term.

Trump is declining. It's just not clear how fast. The way most liberals talked about him when he was president, by now he should be marking his third or fourth year on a locked memory-care ward. Instead, he's still functioning, more or less. And he might eke out a few more years, as an evil, stupid man in slow but persistent decline.

NO, VANCE AND THE PROJECT 2025 CABAL WON'T DEPOSE TRUMP IF HE WINS

Among liberals on social media, this has become conventional wisdom:

FORWARD TO DONALD: MAGA/GOP Project 2025 is set up to function best when, if you're elected, you are removed from office by Vance, using the 25th Amendment. The Lincoln Project spells it out for you right here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2TZ... The GOP knows you're an old loser & would dump you ASAP!

[image or embed]

— SANTA CLAUS (@santaclausalaska.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 11:41 PM

The linked ad from the Lincoln Project -- which is titled "Brutus" -- tells Trump:

If you win, J.D. will come for you. You won't see him until it's too late. He won't wait until you make a mistake. J.D.'s plot to invoke the 25th Amendment is already underway. Your cabinet betrayed you before. Why would it be different now?

... Republicans want someone younger, smarter, someone stable. A leader who will execute Project 2025 without your problems. Rupert's Wall Street Journal said, "Vance's version of Trump is better than the real thing." J.D. switched from Never Trump hater to your running mate in record time. You thought that was real? You think he won't stab you in the back to seize ten years of power in the White House? So yes, Donald, they really are out to get you.

And the one who will betray your presidency is right by your side.

Nahhh, it's not going to happen.

You all remember January 6, 2021. You remember how angry Trump's supporters were when they realized Congress was about to ratify Trump's defeat. How angry do you think they'll be if there's an attempt to remove him in a palace coup? Trumpers' immediate conclusion will be that George Soros and the World Economic Forum are trying to remove Trump from office, and that the vice president and the members of the Cabinet are swamp-dwelling, globalist, America-hating traitors.

Trumpers own guns. Trumpers know how to make fertilizer bombs. Would you want to be a Cabinet member who voted to remove Trump from office? Would you feel confident about the safety of your family?

And I wish more people would actually read the 25th Amendment. It's not long -- just five paragraphs. Yes, it says that the VP and the Cabinet can declare that the president is no longer fit to serve:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

But it also allows the president to respond by saying he is fit to serve -- at which point he becomes president again:

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office....

Of course Trump will do that. Even if he's too far gone into illness or dementia to do it for himself, loyalists working for him will do it. Yes, I realize that many people in his White House will be more loyal to the radical project of restructuring American life than they are to Trump. But there will be many ride-or-die Trump loyalists, and they'll back him. (Even as he declines, Trump will make clear to these loyalists that they must never acknowledge any weakness on his part. That's how he thinks. And they'll agree, and act accordingly.)

So what happens then? Trump is restored to the presidency unless...

unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.

So they'll have to declare Trump unfit to serve again, further enraging the MAGA crazies. And then?

Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress ... determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

So a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress would be needed to remove Trump. As these votes approach, the death threats will shift to representatives, senators, and their families, especially Republicans. Maybe you think all Democrats will vote to remove Trump -- although I'm not sure why they'd do that if they believe Vance would be a more effective fascist than Trump. Even if all Democrats do vote to remove Trump, will Republicans dare, as gun-toting members of the MAGA army rally in the streets?

There's an alternate scenario:

Trump's trying to get the NY case moved to federal court again. So the plan is that Trump gets elected, resigns, is pardoned by Vance, and GTFO of Dodge. Then the yokels get their election, the billionaires get a reliable dipshit to do their bidding, and fuck everyone else.

— The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) October 16, 2024

I don't buy it. What can Vance do with pardons that Trump can't do himself with a Justice Department that bends to his will, as well as a Supreme Court that's infinitely willing to rewrite the Constitution in order to expand executive power? Also, Vance couldn't pardon Trump on non-federal charges in New York and Georgia, at least under the law as it exists now. The federal courts might twist the words of the Constitution to give Vance that power -- but why not just give it to Trump directly?

Trump wants to be free of legal liability, but he also wants the ego boost of being the most consequential person on earth. He won't cede that willingly. It would make him look weak -- the worst possible failing, in his eyes.

So if Trump wins, don't expect him to leave office early, unless it's in a pine box.

STEVE KORNACKI AND JOHN KING COULD SAVE DEMOCRACY

The Bulwark's Jonathan Last thinks GOP efforts to overturn a Harris victory will be worse than Donald Trump's attempted steal in 2020. At Threads, Last writes:

I don't think people appreciate the sudden crisis we'll face if Kamala Harris *wins*....

First: Republicans are absolutely convinced that Trump is going to win again. There's no bed-wetting. No doubt. They have returned to the same levels of confidence that they had at the RNC, even though they're now losing or tied in polls.

Second: Unless Harris is winning in a blowout, the race will be too close to call until late into the night. (Or possibly the next day. Or the rest of the week.)

So on Tuesday night, the Harris campaign and all of the news orgs will be frozen and unable to say what the outcome is.

None of this will stop Trump. He is likely to declare victory on election night, possibly before 11pm, even.

The problem is that, unlike in 2020, once Trump declares victory this time it will immediately become Republican dogma.

At least 40 percent of the country will believe that Trump is the duly-elected, incoming president of the United States.

And something close to 100 percent of Republican elites will either confirm Trump’s claim, or pointedly refuse to contradict it.

This group will including every elected swing-state Republican at state and local levels.

... If Harris is ultimately declared the winner on Wednesday (or Saturday!), half of the country—and all of elite Republicans—will have (a) internalized the idea that Trump won and (b) publicly committed to this proposition.

What happens then?

It'll be a crisis.

... And that's the *best* case scenario for the next month.

This is plausible. However, there's a countervailing force -- not a noble one, but one that's important to democracy, even though it's all about profit. That force is electoral data wonkery.

Steve Kornacki at NBC, John King and Harry Enten at CNN, Nate Cohn at The New York Times -- these people attract eyeballs. They keep people watching and clicking. What they do on election nights is nerd out as data comes in. If Harris is winning (or still able to win) while Trump and other Republicans are claiming a Trump victory, the data nerds will be looking at counted votes, exit poll results, and past vote tallies in uncounted precincts and giving us granular assessments of the state of the race. They'll be telling the truth as far as they know it (and they know a lot): for instance, that Trump may lead by X number of votes in Georgia, but uncounted votes from Georgia's four most populous counties are likely to be Democratic at roughly the rate they were in 2020, so the state is still too close to call but could easily go blue.

Normie Americans trust these data nerds, and they should -- when the votes are being counted, they're honest about what they know and don't know. The mainstream media gives us a lot to complain about, but this is a good thing.

If the data nerds' narrative becomes the story most Americans believe, 2024 won't be much worse than 2020.

But what will Fox do? Historically, on election nights, Fox has tried to play vote counting straight. In 2012, Fox's data nerds called Ohio for Barack Obama over the strenuous objections of on-air commentator Karl Rove. And, of course, Fox called Arizona for Joe Biden very early on Election Night 2020.

However, Fox fired two executives connected to that early call of Arizona. So we don't know what Fox will be saying on November 5.

I think Fox will still try to play it more or less straight, but will also take every bad-faith allegation of voter fraud very, very seriously. I don't know what the other news organizations will do about those allegations, or whether they'll actually hold up vote counting. If state and local governments shut down vote counting in response to those allegations, we're in for a very bumpy post-election period.

And Last is right to focus on the fact that "close to 100 percent of Republican elites" will be echoing Trump's allegations of fraud. That didn't happen in 2020 on Election Night. Many Republicans never got on board.

Trump didn't even have all his false arguments lined up until days after the polls closed. For a while, all he had was I'm leading now, so stop the count. But news organizations knew the count wasn't finished, and they told us. The data nerds told us where the votes hadn't been counted. So the mainstream media's take was that it was an honest election.

I don't know whether Trump and the GOP can change the way normie Americans learn about the results. If they start early, as they clearly intend to do, I fear they can. But if Harris is winning, it's possible that it will be by a large enough margin to make the fake fraud allegations irrelevant. Or Harris's team needs to be very good at rapid response. Or we'll have to rely on the media to trust election officials who are being honest. (Hey, it happened in the post-election period last time.)

We don't know what the courts will do, but I'm not 100% certain that the Republicans on the federal judiciary are fully on board with Trump or J.D. Vance. I think they'd still prefer a bog-standard Koch Network Republican to either of them. (Both Trump and Vance occasionally express support for economic populist ideas that would make the non-rich richer, and we can't have that.) Trump will get a few lower-court wins from his own judges, but I think most of the Republicans on the courts still want to seem as if they're just calling balls and strikes, and will back away from overturning a legitimate election, the way they did in 2020.

If Harris wins and the GOP can't get the manistream media to take its fraud narratives seriously, we should be able to get through this. But even then, it will be worse than it was four years ago. And it might be a lot worse.

TRUMP IS BATSHIT CRAZY, BUT IN TWO SEEMINGLY CONTRADICTORY WAYS

If Kamala Harris needs to give voters more evidence that Donald Trump is unfit to serve as president, Trump seems to be helping her out by serving that evidence up on a platter. The problem is, he's serving up two kinds of evidence, and they risk canceling each other out.

Last night, this happened:

Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode

The town hall, moderated by South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. Donald Trump offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses. But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention....

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night.

That's from The Washington Post. Watch the Post's supercut and try to keep your jaw off the floor. Then show it to everyone you know who's not a committed supporter of Kamala Harris:

Donald Trump’s town hall began with questions from preselected attendees for the former president. He offered meandering answers on how he would address housing affordability and help small businesses.

But it took a sudden turn after two attendees required medical attention.… pic.twitter.com/7PuQoKf8ZZ

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 15, 2024

I think a lightly edited version of the Post's video could be a Kamala Harris campaign ad, maybe even with no commentary, or with a single word at the end: "Weird" or "WTF?"

But here's the problem: This image of Trump seems to contradict another side of Trump that Harris and Tim Walz are trying to warn voters about in the closing days of the campaign.

CNN reports:

Former President Donald Trump suggested using the military to handle what he called “the enemy from within” on Election Day, saying that he isn’t worried about chaos from his supporters or foreign actors, but instead from “radical left lunatics.”

“I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump said told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

“I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he added.

At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, Harris lit into Trump in response to this:

“He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or who will not bend to his will the enemy, an enemy of our country. It’s a serious issue,” Harris said Monday night. “He is saying that he would use the military to go after them. ... We know who he would target because he has attacked them before: journalists whose stories he doesn’t like; election officials who refuse to cheat by filling extra votes and finding extra votes for him; judges who insist on following the law instead of bending to his will.” ...

“Donald Trump is increasingly unstable and unhinged. And he is out for unchecked power. That’s what he’s looking for,” Harris said.

In Wisconsin yesterday, Tim Walz reminded his audience who else is on the target list:

Donald Trump, over the weekend, was talking about using the U.S. Army against people who disagree with him. Just so you’re clear about that, that’s you. That’s what he’s talking about. This is not some mythical thing out there. He called it “the enemy within.” And to Donald Trump, anybody who doesn’t agree with him is the enemy. I tell you that not to make you fearful or anything. I tell you that because we need to whip his butt and put this guy behind us.

Walz is right. Did you join in a peaceful women's march after Trump's inauguration in 2017? Did you join a silent, prayerful vigil after the death of George Floyd in 2020? The next time you exercise your First Amendment rights that way, the guns might be aimed at you.

But how do you get wavering voters to reconcile these two Trumps -- the doddering dancer and the bloodthirsty would-be tyrant?

Trump is both of these people. History shows us that you don't need full control of your mental faculties to be a tyrant. You just need rage, unlimited power, and goons to do whatever your whims demand.

I don't think Trump is experiencing full-blown dementia yet, but in that town hall his mental battery had clearly run down by evening. He might be in the condition that people close to President Biden have described -- he's far less able to function at night after a few days of exhausting work or travel, but he's more or less his old self at other times. A Trump in this condition could still do a lot of damage.

But you can understand why, as Shawn McCreesh of The New York Times told us yesterday, there are Trump supporters who don't believe Trump's most inflammatory pronouncements:

Mary Burney, a 49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station ... did not believe the former president would really persecute his political opponents, even though he has mused about appointing a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and members of his family. “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do,” she said. “No, no.”

Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.

“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

That nice guy doing the two-fist dance? He wouldn't hurt a fly!

Republican propagandists know how to serll this kind of double message. They've persuaded their voters that Joe Biden is both a dementia case who can't find the bathroom unaided and the mastermind of a global criminal enterprise. I hope Harris and Walz can communicate a similar idea, because the sometimes addled Trump is still able to keep a sharp mental focus on the people he hates, and if he's elected, he'll have the means and the will to do them -- us -- a lot of harm.