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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Emphasis added.)

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

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

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

TRUMP IS NOT REALLY THE LEADER OF HIS OWN DISINFORMATION CULT

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

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

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

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

By early August, Trump was blaming Democrats:

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

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

Today is not just some isolated incident.

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

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

— JD Vance (@JDVance) July 14, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only then did Trump pick up on the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think they know he's losing. #Debate2024

— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) September 11, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now we have the cats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOTH SIDES DON'T DO IT, BUT THE MEDIA NEVER NOTICES

The Washington Post has just published a story by Tim Craig about Butler County, Pennsylvania, where a gunman tried to assassinate Donald Trump a couple of months ago. Here's the headline:

The angry, divisive fallout of the Trump shooting in Butler County

The assassination attempt has pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other in a way that one historian calls ‘outright frightening.'

Did you catch that? The shooting "has pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other." In the story, Craig writes that it's "the moment that split this Pennsylvania community in two ... as both sides dig in and try to ensure that their candidate wins enough votes here to capture a key battleground state."

All this suggests that the ugliness in Butler County is evenly distributed. It isn't.

Here's every ugly incident Craig recounts:

Heidi Marie Priest, a Democrat and local real estate agent ... organized the “Butler County Women for Harris” Facebook group....

The group quickly became a sort of therapy for local Harris supporters who said they had been too fearful to express their political beliefs. On a recent afternoon, about 80 people gathered at a small park, sat in a circle and shared why they are supporting Harris....

They had tried not to draw attention to themselves, but a heckler still spotted the group and yelled, “Trump 2024!” ...

Priest ... said she has received unnerving messages at her Realtor’s office since launching the Facebook group.

“How are you this blind?” one of the callers said in a voicemail. “You are as confused as Joe Biden. You are in the wrong state. You think you are home? Nah, you are a long way from home.”

Another member of the women’s group said she believes someone threw a brick at her car after she placed a Harris bumper sticker on it.

“I put it on Monday, and on Tuesday I walked out to my car and there is a brick on my windshield,” said Rhonda, 65, who asked to be referred only by her first name, out of fear for her safety....

When a Washington Post reporter pulled into the driveway of a home with a “Biden-Harris” sign on the lawn, a passing motorist screamed an expletive aimed at the president....

Sue Legacy, the homeowner with the Biden sign, said she is used to hearing motorists hurl expletives.

“The last election was the same thing,” Legacy, 61, said. “Tensions are volatile.”

Within two hours of the shooting, John Placek began displaying a digital billboard blaming Democrats for the assassination attempt. The sign shows Trump gripping an American flag along with a target over his face. Another billboard asks, “WILL THEY TRY TO ASSASSINATE PRESIDENT TRUMP AGAIN?” A third shows Harris with red horns and states “DEMOCRATS KILL BABIES AND DREAMS.” ...

Some Butler residents are getting similar messages in their mailboxes.

State Rep. Aaron Bernstine (R) sent a mailer to his constituents accusing the media and Biden administration of “all but pulling the trigger” on July 13....

Before Trump’s rally, [Democratic county commissioner Kevin] Boozel had been pressing Republican commissioner Leslie Osche and Butler’s sheriff to keep detailed records of how much the county was spending on Trump’s visit. Osche, who attended Trump’s rally, believed a formal contract was not needed, contending that security considerations should not be dictated by cost concerns.

According to phone messages released by Boozel, he texted Osche on the night of the shooting to check in on her and tell her the White House was offering assistance.

“How freakin dare you. We were right behind the President. You who wanted a contract. Our people did well. You will burn in hell. We don’t need their help. I will fully expose you. I hope you can’t sleep,” Osche wrote.

“So much for your professionalism,” Boozel replied.

“You don’t deserve professionalism,” Osche wrote back.

Is it accurate to say, "The assassination attempt has pitted Democrats and Republicans against each other"? It seems more accurate to say that Republicans are pitted against Democrats in Butler County.

The press never seems to see this. Craig has done a good job of reporting the story -- but he stuffs it into the same both-sides-do-it box that's used for every other story about politcal "polarization."

The truth is always the same: partisans on one side, partisans who are also angry intimidators on the other side. But it's never reported that way.

IN ADDITION TO "SANEWASHING," CAN WE TALK ABOUT "REALITY-WASHING"?

Donald Trump ranted and raved at a news conference on Friday, and didn't take a single question from reporters. After the news conference was over, Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times read a portion of Trump's remarks in a TikTok video:

@jamellebouie

yes i’m wearing a kikkoman baseball cap

♬ original sound - b-boy bouiebaisse

Here's part of what Bouie read, from a transcript of Trump's remarks:

Let me talk about job numbers, because as you know, they just came out. And they’re a basic disaster.

They are really bad. You had numbers that are shocking. Native-born Americans, we lost 1.3 million jobs, while foreign-born Americans were able to take all of those jobs. So foreigners coming in illegally, largely illegally into our country, took the jobs of native-born Americans.

And I’ve been telling you that’s what’s going to happen, because we have millions and millions of people pouring into our country, many from prisons and jails and mental institutions and insane asylums, traffickers, human traffickers, women traffickers, sex traffickers, which, by the way, that’s the kind of thing that people should be looking at because it’s horrible. And it’s turning out that migrant crime is far worse than any crime that we’ve ever experienced. If you look at Aurora, Colorado, they’re taking over the place. They took over buildings, and this is just the beginning.

You haven’t seen anything yet. You haven’t seen anything. It’s allowed well over 20 million people, in my opinion. Other people say, well, it’s only 13.

No, no. It’s much more than 20. I think it’s much more than 20. Our country is being invaded because of incompetent people like Kamala that doesn’t want to do one interview.

On Threads, Bouie posted a link to his TikTok video, with this description:

i have been doing a thing on tiktok where i just read a straight transcript of what trump says just to emphasize how insane he sounds.

"Insane" is the word most Trump critics would use for this. It's an increasingly common complaint that the media is engaging in "sanewashing," as Parker Molloy put it in a New Republic piece a few days ago.

Maybe the media should be questioning Trump's mental fitness. But I see a different problem: not "sanewashing," but "reality-washing."

What Trump says here is not completely divorced from reality. I'm sure his numbers came from this Fox Business story:

The new August jobs report shows employment numbers of U.S.-born workers and foreign-born workers going on two very different trajectories.

Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the Department of Labor, shows native-born Americans lost more than 1.3 million jobs over the last 12 months, while foreign-born workers gained more than 1.2 million jobs.

There's a reason for that: The U.S. population is full of Baby Boomers who are retiring. As The Washington Post reported in July,

The ranks of retirees are growing much faster today than the number of new workers, ushering in an unprecedented graying of America that will reshape our workforce and economy.

Immigrants are helping to fill that gap -- and the BLS numbers didn't say they're exclusively undocumented immigrants, as even the Fox Business story acknowledges:

The figures do not differentiate between foreign-born workers who entered the country with authorization, i.e. Green Card holders and those with working visas, and those who entered without prior authorization.

But in Trump's telling, we're not seeing a lot of older native-born workers retiring faster while fewer young native-born citizens enter the workforce. His version is that native-born Americans are being forced out of jobs and nearly all of the replacement employees are undocumented immigrants, many of whom are criminals or severely mentally ill. Your jobs are being taken by border-crossing criminal psychopaths.

This should be a big story: Trump is making claims that are so divorced from reality that they describe an apocalypse, not actual American life. These aren't normal political lies. They're not even "truthful hyperbole ... an innocent form of exaggeration," which is how Trump's ghostwriter described his habitual truth-shading in his first book, The Art of the Deal.

Here's another masssive lie about immigrants, from Trump's rally in Wisconsin yesterday:

Trump: "If you think you have nice house, have a migrant enjoy your house, because a migrant will take it over. A migrant will take it over. It will be Venezuela on steroids." pic.twitter.com/nmh4a7MP7W

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 7, 2024

In addition to Trump's claim that there will be widespread seizures of American homes by undocumented immigrants during a Harris presidency, he also says in this clip that the undocumented population will rise to a preposterous 100 million.

And Trump repeated another recent extreme lie yesterday:

Trump: Can you imagine you're a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school and your son comes back with a brutal operation. pic.twitter.com/ChmwpavFAH

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 7, 2024

I still say Trump isn't crazy or suffering significant dementia. He's just beginning to realize that he can tell any lie, no matter how divorced from reality it is, and no one will say that his lies are categorically different from ordinary political lies. To the media, there's no difference between Trump saying schools are forcibly performing gender reassignment surgery on children and Tim Walz saying that he and his wife conceived their children using in vitro fertilization when they really used intra-uterine insemination. A lie is a lie! Nothing to see here, folks!

Maybe the press has a sense of futility about fact-checking Trump -- it's never stopped him from insisting that the 2020 election was rigged, so why bother? And fact checking clearly can't kill other Republican Big Lies -- that Democrats support abortion after birth, or that entire cities were burned to the ground during the George Floyd protests in 2020. (Many Republicans other than Trump tell these lies and get away with them.)

If we continue to let Trump lie this brazenly without making the sheer magnitude of the lies a story, we run the risk that he'll become president and indict enemies or call out troops on disfavored groups based entirely on fictional scenarios. Once that happens, the press might finally tell us that he's the worst-ever purveyor of Big Lies, but it could be too late by then.

THE (UNIMAGINABLE) DEBATE RULE THAT COULD DEFEAT TRUMP: NO TIME LIMIT ON STATEMENTS

The headline of this Washington Post story pulls no punches:

Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes

The story -- written by four Post reporters, three of them women -- is equally straightforward:

Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser....

And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday.... Trump took no questions from the news media....

In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times....

For much of the summer in a tight presidential contest, Trump’s advisers have urged him to hew to a more disciplined message....

They have tried for weeks to pull him out of a self-pitying stage....

You get the picture. This was bad. I didn't think Trump was incoherent, but he was obsessive, bitter, and nasty. Try watching a little, if you can bear it:



I'm reading this alongside stories about the debate prep being done by Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris, according to Gabriel Debenedetti of New York magazine, isn't looking for a knockout punch in the debate:

The debate, say Democrats close to Harris, is simply not the venue for just pumping up her partisans or trying to fulfill a liberal fantasy of so aggressively confronting Trump that his own supporters have second thoughts about voting for him. Instead, Harris’s team believes it needs to be about finding moments to educate and convert the voters on the margins. And for a candidate whose rallies feature “A NEW WAY FORWARD” signage and repeated audience chants of “we’re not going back,” that primarily means trying to keep the focus on her own vision for the future and contrasting it with Trump’s.

Her campaign's research tells her that undecided voters are more likely to be swayed by positive messages about her than negative messages about Trump:

Just last week, the Democratic research group Blueprint tested messaging and found that pro-Harris forces would be smarter to rely on ads featuring a contrast and positive lines about Harris over negative ones on Trump — voters are twice as likely to be moved by the former than the latter, which are only useful on the margins. (The absolute worst-performing ads in Blueprint’s tests were purely anti-Trump ads, which were in some cases three times less effective at moving voters than ads focusing on the contrast in the candidates’ abortion-policy proposals.)

Hey, whatever works. But if I think about the debate in a realm of pure fantasy, I can easily imagine a Trump knockout that might influence the votes of undecided and swing voters. It could happen if there were a debate rule that would never be permitted in the real world -- no news outlet would agree to it, and Trump's advisers would reject it.

The rule: no time limit on the candidates' statements.

I understand that the swing voters who are supporting Trump without being MAGA superfans or Fox News cultists are people who've accepted that Trump is an angry blowhard, but believe he's a person who can make inflation go away and intimidate other world leaders, in part because he's an angry blowhard. They have naive ideas about Trump's anger, believing it's an outward manifestation of a toughness he developed as a New York businessman. They also have a naive understanding of his business career, most of it based on The Apprentice.

So when they see "mean tweets," as his fans call them, they shrug them off. But people who know Trump's temperament only from short social media posts and 25-second video clips may never have seen Trump at great length. It's exhausting -- and he looks exhausted. Get Trump revved up and he just seems sourer and sourer. He wears himself out with his own rage. He doesn't look like the doer Apprentice watchers imagine he is. He just looks like a frustrated, ineffectual old man.

In my fantasy debate, Harris gets the first opening statement and ends it with a crisp, subtle zinger. The zinger gets under Trump's skin and he fills the rest of the 90-minute timeslot -- all of it -- with a rambling babelogue full of paranoid theories, resentful digressions, and Fox News buzzwords. He wears the audience out and wears himself out. To swing voters, it doesn't look presidential at all.

I'm sorry it can't happen. But I think it's possible that, between now and November, Democrats, liberal commentators, and social media video clippers will succeed in focusing the rest of America on what this angry, weary old man is really like. The liberal effort to highlight Trump's rambling answer to a question on child care this week was a start. We need more of that.

MY UNPOPULAR OPINION ABOUT TRUMP'S RHETORIC: IT'S NOT GIBBERISH, IT'S BULLSHIT

Yesterday, after his speech to the Economic Club of New York, Donald Trump responded to questions, including this one:

If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable, and if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

Here's his response:

Q: What specific legislation will you commit to to make child care affordable?

Trump: Well, I would do that and we're sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about… pic.twitter.com/v8gqLUHS2v

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 5, 2024

A transcript of his long, meandering answer:

Well, I would do that, and we're sitting down, and I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I'm talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care is. Couldn't, you know, there's something, you have to have it – in this country you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to — but they'll get used to it very quickly – and it's not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Uh, those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to take care.

We're gonna have - I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about.

We're gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care, uh, is talked about as being expensive, it's, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in. We're going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let's help other people, but we're going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It's about Make America Great Again, we have to do it because right now we're a failing nation, so we'll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.

I'm supposed to believe that this is incoherent word salad, and is further evidence that Trump is in an advanced state of dementia. However I think what he said makes sense -- in a way. Brendan Nyhan sums up my take on this:

For the record, he's trying to say the cost of child care will be taken care of by his tariff and economic growth, but he can't say one thing about child care because he *doesn't know anything about it* and he's blustering through like a student who didn't do the reading.

Right. Trump knows nothing about the cost of child care or specific proposals to fund it, so he talks around that and says that his magic tariffs will generate massive amounts of revenue -- presumably with zero inflation! -- as will economic growth and the same crackdowns on "waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country" that every Republican has promised since at least the late twentieth century, and as a result we'll be able to toss huge amounts of child care money at families with young children and still have plenty left over for everything else we need to do. Oh, and we'll stop running deficits!

This isn't dementia. This is lying. It's actually the same sort of lying Republicans have done for decades, except that they've said that their tax cuts won't result in revenue-reducing shortfalls and he says that tariffs will make all of our economic problems go away, including revenue shortfalls, without creating any new problems of their own. Being a dishonest used car salesman who'll promise you anything to make the sale is, in part, how Trump got here. He wins or comes close in general elections because, after a decade of The Apprentice, many people who aren't superfans hear him and say, Well, he's a brilliant businessman, so I trust him when he says he can do this.

I understand why Kamala Harris's campaign and other Trump critics want to portray this as the product of a brain that no longer works the way its owner wants it to work. I hope that message hurts Trump at the polls. But Trump's brain is still working more or less as intended. He's a lifelong bullshit artist and he's still reasonably good at bullshitting. (At the end of his answer, the audience gives him a round of applause, even though his listeners are people who know his numbers can't possibly add up.)

And now here's a riff from the speech itself that's being mocked:

Trump the day after another school shooting: "They had AK-47s. The ultimate guns. AK-47s. They can blow lots of people away real fast." pic.twitter.com/W60zd13vwU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 5, 2024

But this also makes sense -- at least if you consume massive amounts of right-wing media. It's not about the school shooting. Here's a transcript:

Colorado. Aurora. Has anyone been there? I think you'd better stay away for a little while. They had AK-47s. The ultimate guns. AK-47s. They can blow lots of people away real fast. And the sheriff didn't want to touch 'em. Nobody wants to touch 'em. "Sheriff, there's eighteen Venezuelans attacking my building. Would you please come over and straighten out this situa--?" He's got a deputy. You know what they say? "Ah, well, no thanks. Let's call in the military." They're taking over, and I said this four years [clip cuts off]

Like your right-wing uncle whose rants every Thanksgiving are incomprehensible unless you watch six hours of Fox News a day, Trump is assuming that everyone in his audience is familiar with a story that's been heavily pushed by the New York Post, Fox, and other right-wing outlets.

If you believe these sources, you think the entire city of Aurora, Colorado, has been taken over by a Venezuelan criminal gang. But other news sources tells a different story. Here's AP:

Police in the Denver suburb of Aurora say a Venezuela street gang with a small presence in the city has not taken over a rundown apartment complex — yet the allegation continues to gain steam among conservatives and was amplified by former President Donald Trump in a Wednesday Fox News town hall where he said Venezuelans were “taking over the whole town.”

The unsubstantiated allegation gained momentum following last month’s dissemination of video from a resident in the complex that showed armed men knocking on an apartment door, intensifying fears the Tren de Aragua gang was in control of the six-building complex.

However, city officials indicate the buildings, along with two other apartment complexes, were run down because of neglect by the property manager, CBZ Management.

The news site Denverite tells us this:

There are a handful of apartment buildings in Aurora owned by CBZ Management, a company based in Brooklyn, New York. For years, residents of several of those buildings have complained about rats, mice and insects, concerns over crime and poor treatment by management.

All that predates the arrival of tens of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in the Denver area.

For the past two years, Aurora has been working to get the property owners into compliance with the law, said Jessica Prosser, Aurora’s director of housing and community services, at a press conference in August.

Many newly arrived Venezuelans and other Spanish-speaking immigrants were placed into those apartments by nonprofits....

We know there have been recent assaults and shootings at and near some of the properties. Aurora Police arrested a man on suspicion of attempted homicide and say he is connected to Tren de Aragua.

Police also said the allegations of rent theft have surfaced at several CBZ Management properties....

We also know there is a video of men with guns entering one of the apartments at The Edge at Lowry. Aurora Police have not confirmed the identity of those men.

At that same apartment complex, Denverite reporters saw multiple mice and bedbugs; mold growing in a bathtub; a stove that hasn’t worked for two months; a sink that won’t drain; and a broken fan.

However, the entire city of Aurora has not been taken over by the gang, as the Colorado Republican Party claimed in a fundraising email. Police have been at The Edge at Lowry speaking with residents, and the Aurora police chief says that no gang is running the apartment complex. Residents said the same at a Tuesday press conference at the building.

The video is disturbing.

NEW VIDEO armed group at troubled #aurora #colorado apartment complex now home to many migrants. Councilmember @DaniJurinsky says gangs have taken over the complex @KDVR @AuroraPD pic.twitter.com/J1uie8Y2M6

— Vicente Arenas (@vicentearenastv) August 28, 2024

But it's clear that CBZ Management, the Brooklyn-based company that runs this building, is extraordinarily neglectful. The Republican mayor of Aurora called the company "out-of-state slumlords." Online comments about the company, in both Colorado and Brooklyn, are universally negative (click to enlarge):

We can have a conversation about immigrant gangs in America. That's fine. But this is a complicated story. And it's definitely not a story of a gang takeover of an entire city, as Denverite notes:

Walk through Aurora, and it’s clear: The gang has not taken over the city, even as some gang members have committed a handful of crimes. Blocks away from The Edge at Lowry, neighbors shop in local stores, mow their lawns, ride their e-bikes and carry on life as usual.

Trump's rhetotic is dishonest, hyperbolic, and inflammatory -- but that's bog-standard for Republicans in 2024. He's not losing his marbles. He's just telling phony stories.

IF YOU'RE CERTAIN THAT THE GOP'S ELECTION FRAUD NARRATIVE IS FALSE, DON'T HEDGE

There's a story in The New York Times by Alexandra Berzon about the Republican argument that significant numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting in American elections, and voting exclusively Democratic. The piece is a mixed bag. The headline is good:

Republicans Seize on False Theories About Immigrant Voting

"False" is good. "False" is unambiguous. But here's the subhead:

Activists, party lawyers and state officials are mobilizing behind a crackdown on a supposed scourge of noncitizens’ casting ballots. Voting rights advocates say the effort is spreading misinformation.

"Supposed" is skeptical, but it's a retreat from "false." And then the two-sentence structure of the subhead suggests that there realy is room for disagreement.

A few paragraphs in, Berzon tells us:

There is no indication that noncitizens are voting in large numbers. And yet the notion that they will flood the polls — and vote overwhelmingly for Democrats — is animating a sprawling network of Republicans who mobilized around former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a rigged election in 2020 and are now preparing for the next one.

This is accurate as far as it goes -- but this framing, which is standard for the mainstream media, provides a huge opening for Republicans. Non-citizens aren't voting "in large numbers"? What does that mean? Does it mean they are voting in fairly significant numbers, but Democrats want us to let it slide because the numbers aren't "large"?

As one Times reader says in the comments:

The important phrase, routinely underplayed by both sides, is "in large numbers." The Right want us to believe that illegal voters turn out on election day in innumerable hordes, while the Left (as in this article) discount "large numbers" dismissively, as if small numbers were nothing to worry about. But US elections are almost always won by a razor thin minority. Even a couple of thousand votes either way can and does make all the difference. In such circumstances, even small numbers are a major concern.

But it's not true that "US elections are almost always won by a razor thin" margin. In 2022 House elections, the average margin of victory was 28.9 percentage points. In that year's Senate elections, it was 19.6 percentage points.

Yes, we've all been told that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because of close wins in several battleground states. But "close" meant a 10,457-vote margin of victory in Arizona, an 11,779-vote margin in Georgia, a 20,682-vote margin in Wisconsin, a 33,596-vote margin in Nevada, an 80,555-vote margin in Pennsylvania, and a 154,188-votes margin in Michigan. These margins go unmentioned in Berzon's story.

Now, how many votes by undocumented voters are there? Many, many paragraphs into the story, we're told this:

A recent analysis published by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, found that the number of votes cast by noncitizens discovered through state audits in 2016 ranged from three in Nevada, out of over a million votes cast, to 41 in North Carolina, where nearly five million votes were cast.

Many more paragraphs later, we're told:

One researcher, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights group, recently reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s data and found just 68 documented cases of noncitizens’ voting going back to the 1980s. And although the current frenzy is focused on undocumented immigrants, only a small fraction of those cases — just 10 — involved people living in the country illegally.

Voting by undocumented immigrants at this level couldn't possibly have tipped any of Biden's close states to Trump, even assuming that every undocumented voter voted for Biden. (It's an article of faith on the right that undocumented immigrants who manage to vote always vote Democratic, but this assertion is always presented without evidence.)

Yet although these numbers make it clear that Republicans who campaign against voting by undocumented immigrants are targeting a problem that barely exists, Berzon "balances" these statistics with Republican propaganda:

Republicans argue that even one illegal vote is too many and that the data is not capturing the scope of the potential problem given the millions of undocumented immigrants in the country.

What does "the potential problem" even mean in this context? Researchers have looked at the actual problem, and it's not a problem.

Cleta Mitchell, whose Election Integrity Network organized the July conference call of activists, said she believed that the “vast numbers of illegals” in the country represented a “huge threat to the integrity of our elections.”

But it clearly doesn't! Berzon's numbers make that clear.

“I’m sure you would agree that every illegal vote cancels a legal, citizen’s vote — so that even one such vote is a problem for democracy,” she said in an email to The Times.

Yes, it's a problem -- a tiny, tiny problem that's not affecting the outcome of elections.

And yet Republicans are given even more column inches to make their bad-faith case:

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the Public Interest Legal Foundation have tracked alleged instances of noncitizen voting, some of which turned out to be wrong. Even small numbers can decide tight elections, they say....

But number this small aren't deciding tight elections.

Readers who read to the end of the story will come away understanding how flimsy the GOP's evidence is:

In 2019, Texas’ secretary of state, David Whitley, claimed he had identified nearly 100,000 noncitizens on the rolls and demanded that many produce proof of citizenship. Subsequent lawsuits and examination by voting rights advocates showed that the review was based on faulty methodology: The list included many people who had once submitted immigration documents to obtain a state identification. But they had since become naturalized as citizens, making them lawful voters. Mr. Whitley resigned amid blowback from the episode.

The key point is that Republicans can't point to a single election in which there's documented evidence of voting for Democrats by non-citizens in sufficient numbers to change the electoral outcome, and that should be Berzon's lede. That should be the lede of every journalist who writes about this. The supporting evidence should be the vast discrepancy between the actual number of voter-fraud cases and the victory margins in the elections Republicans are challenging.

The evidence is all on one side. No responsible journalist should treat a GOP "fraud" crusader as in any way credible.

ANTI-TRUMP REPUBLICANS SHOULD BE ROOTING FOR THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA TO LOSE, TOO

Politico Playbook tells us today that some Republicans who are publicly loyal to Donald Trump are secretly hoping he'll lose:

Some of the Republicans wishing for a Trump loss include long-standing GOP figures throughout the nation who bleed red and wouldn’t dare to say this publicly but who are more than ready to move on from the Trump era.

We're told that free-market conservatives don't like Trump's protectionism, abortion opponents don't like his reproductive-rights flip-flopping, and defense hawks don't like his opposition to internationalism. Elsewhere at Politico, Jonathan Martin makes the Trump haters' case: Republicans are likely to win the Senate this year, which would constrain a Kamala Harris presidency; it would be easier to run as a Republican in 2026 with Harris in the White House; and Trump is really annoying:

He’s incoherent on abortion rights, unable even to appear at a cemetery without creating a political mess and is so bothered by those who’ve suffered the wounds of war that he slights Medal of Honor recipients. And, running against a female opponent, he’s pushing blowjob jokes about her and his last female opponent.

And that’s just the last two weeks.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s routine self-sabotage, mocking his advisers’ attempt to keep him on message, refusing to learn the basics of issues over nine years after he entered politics and making little effort to appeal to those in his own party who are uneasy with him.

The counterargument is so obvious that even Chris Cillizza gets it:

There is zero interest among the party base to abandon the national populism of Trump.... The party is all about sticking it to the man and giving the finger to the media these days. And the base seems to like it just fine thank you.

It amazes me that almost a decade into Donald Trump there are still Republicans out there who think that somehow this is a blip, an anomaly — that all they need is one more election and then everything is going to go back to “normal.”

THIS is normal now for the Republican party. And will be until Trump dies — and possibly much longer than that.

And besides, the Republican Party is the way it is right now for reasons that go way beyond Trump. Martin is wrong about this:

Republicans vastly underperformed a promising midterm in 2022 in part because of below-replacement-level figures [Trump] elevated. And they may lose winnable races again this year — think the Senate race in Arizona and governor’s race in North Carolina — because Republicans have become overly captive to candidates in his image.

The Republican Senate candidate in Arizona is Kari Lake, who positioned herself as a Trump clone in her failed gubernatorial race two years ago and is doing the same this year in a Senate race she seems to be losing. But the party's gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina is Mark Robinson, whose rise to prominence had nothing to do with Trump.

Just after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Robinson delivered an angry pro-gun speech at a city council hearing in Greensboro, North Carolina. Here's what happened then:

... 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?” Robinson replied blushingly that he and his wife, Yolanda Hill, had discussed a bid for elected office, but for now he was focused on completing his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

That calculation began to shift after 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.

He ran for lieutenant governor, and won -- but now he's trailing in the governor's race and is on the defensive about multiple scandals and his own inflammatory remarks.

Trump didn't make Mark Robinson a star. Institutions that pre-dated Trump made him a star: Fox and the rest of the right-wing media, along with the NRA and the rest of the gun lobby. And that's the GOP's real problem.

Donald Trump isn't the sole reason that the Republican Party is extreme and unpalatable to many middle-of-the-road voters. The party began its modern era of intolerance in the days of Ronald Reagan, but the extremism metastasized under the influence of talk radio and then Fox News. Now add the podcasts, news and opinion websites, and social media accounts (as well as entire social media platforms), and you've got a well-oiled rage-inducing machine that urges GOP base voters to hate everyone who isn't a right-winger in good standing (whatever that means at the time). Politicians who tap into the rage inevitably succeed, at least in Republican primaries and deep-red states and districts. But normal people are alienated. Republicans can win nationally under these conditions, but just barely.

Trump won't go away no matter what. Martin writes, again incorrectly:

... the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party.

But Joe Biden's popular-vote win in 2020 was by the second-largest margin of any presidential election in this century. It didn't matter. Even if Harris exceeds Biden's vote margin, Trump will say the election was stolen, and the majority of his voters will believe him. They'll believe him because the right-wing media will amplify his message.

Republicans who are tired of Trumpist tactics should seek to deprive their own media outlets of oxygen. I don't know how that would work, but it's clear that those outlets will continue practicing the politics of rage, paranoia, and conspiratorialism long after the next president is inaugurated. That means Donald Trump or a Trump imitator as the 2028 GOP nominee, and it means more Mark Robinsons in other races. That's the future, unless serious changes are made.

HARRIS'S TRUMP-NEUTRALIZATION TECHNIQUE ISN'T TEACHABLE

At Public Notice, David Lurie says that Kamala Harris "is cutting off Trump’s political oxygen":

... Harris is well aware of how engaging with Trump’s most reprehensible maneuvers and taunts poses the danger of sinking herself into the mud with him, and even allowing him to gain political benefits from what should be massive political missteps — such as Trump’s claim that Harris recently “happened to turn Black.” And Harris, almost alone among Trump’s many political opponents, has come up with an effective strategy for responding to Trump’s gutter politics game: ignoring it.

She did this most notably in her CNN interview with Dana Bash.

When Bash asked Harris to comment on Trump’s contention that she “happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of [her] identity,” ... Harris simply shut down the line of questioning by responding, “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.” When a plaintive Bash asked, “That’s it?“ Harris replied, “That’s it.”

... When a showman like Trump is no longer the center of attention, he turns into that most pathetic of Hollywood creatures: a has-been. With her “that’s it” declaration, Harris left Trump standing alone in the pit, covered in mud, with nobody to wrestle.

I hope Lurie is right about this -- Harris is doing well in the polls, but it remains to be seen whether she's doing well enough to overcome the GOP's Electoral College advantage. But it's clear that she's successfully brushing off Trump's attacks in a way his previous opponents haven't.

But could they have done what she's doing? Think about his main 2016 primary challengers: Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson. I'm sure I'd have a hard time convincing most of you that Trump is charismatic (though I think he is, regrettably). However, I think you'd agree that he's more charismatic than those candidates. Not one of them inspires voters the way Harris has since she entered the race. It's hard to imagine any of them doing so even under ideal (i.e., Trump-free) conditions. So when Trump attacked them, they had two choices: respond uncharismatically or say nothing uncharismatically. They didn't have the choice of saying nothing and using charisma to ease their way past the attacks, because they didn't have charisma. So Trump won all those fights.

Trump had the same advantage in the 2024 primaries. Ron DeSantis? It's hard to imagine a big-league politician with less charisma. And while Nikki Haley appeals to some voters, she's not exactly compelling. Trump beat them while barely campaigning against them. It's as if the memory of his past smart-assery was more compelling than the real-time campaigning of his opponents.

Trump's 2016 general election opponent was Hillary Clinton. Clinton inspires good feeling in many voters, but it's hard-earned: she's not a naturally gifted politician like her husband in his prime, or like Barack Obama. When she ran that year, too many voters had been primed to dislike her by decades of smears, and other voters were angry at her for positions she'd taken over the years on war, crime, wealth, and other issues. So it would have been hard for her to brush off Trump's attacks the way Harris has. She wasn't running a campaign that was inherently exciting.

Joe Biden got away with a low-charisma campaign in 2020 because so many people were fed up with Trump, and because conditions in the pandemic year led us not to expect traditional politicking. In 2024, voters expected a normal campaign, and Biden was four years older and less able to deliver.

Until now, Trump hasn't faced an opponent the camera loves. He hasn't faced an opponent who generates excitement among the base the way he did among his base in 2016. (And even though his speeches are weirder and shakier, the base still senses charisma in the idea of him.)

Kamala Harris has the ability to generate large amounts of good feeling. That's what's allowing her to shrug off Trump's attacks. It's not something that can be taught.

A CHARITABLE EXPLANATION FOR THE LATEST NEW YORK TIMES REPORTING FAILURE

In the New York Times story I discussed yesterday -- Shawn McCreesh's report from the Moms for Liberty gathering -- there's a detail that was apparently too good to check. A conference attendee was explaining why Donald Trump's offensive social media posts don't bother her:

“I don’t care what he says — it’s just about actions,” said Panina Mintz, a microbiologist from Galloway, N.J., who said she was a Democrat until the pandemic; she felt that the Democrats and government bureaucrats were too draconian in their lockdown measures. “As a voter, if you’re relying on tweets, that’s your problem. It’s not mine.”

Mintz claim that "she was a Democrat until the pandemic" was debunked by social media users in a few hours. One found this at a right-wing Substack:

Dear Cherry Hill Voters
Just Say “No” to the Bond Referendum

Our good friends in Cherry Hill are facing an uphill battle in the November 8th BOE election. Pnina Mintz, Ph.D., has recently been elected to chair the Cherry Hill Republican Organization after many years as a vocal conservative leader in both social and fiscal issues of Cherry Hill.

Another found this:

Once again NYT cannot be bothered to do even a tiny bit of due diligence. They talk to Mom For Liberty Pnina Mintz of NJ, who says she was a Democrat until the pandemic. Voter records show she’s been a registered Republican since at least 2008

[image or embed]

— Leporello (@sigill.bsky.social) Aug 31, 2024 at 8:42 PM

Something similar happened at CNN a couple of weeks ago:

A man introduced as an undecided voter during a CNN segment following Kamala Harris' speech on Day 4 of the Democratic National Convention has a history of supporting MAGA online. CNN host Gary Tuchman said all panelists claimed to be undecided voters at that time.

Meet Bryant Rosado, who, when asked to grade Kamala Harris' speech, gave it a "C" while the other seven panelists rated it either an "A" or a "B." ...

Rosado then confirmed he wasn't ready to vote for Kamala Harris. Moments later, he raised his hand, indicating that he was ready to make a commitment. When asked, he stated that he was now voting for Trump.

... despite telling CNN that he was an undecided voter who just decided to vote for Trump, Rosado has a substantial MAGA social media history....

On Twitter, Rosado retweeted Trump's mugshot multiple times. The retweet of Donald Trump's post of the mugshot contained a link to Trump's website, which redirected to a fundraising page....

Rosado has other pro-Trump social media posts. In 2022, Rosado tagged Elon Musk in a tweet asking to "Bring Back Trump" and "Make Twitter Great Again." He retweeted a picture of Trump at Mar-a-Lago with another call to "reinstate Trump on Twitter." ...

Rosado indicated disappointment that Vice President Mike Pence refused to overturn the electoral college vote for Trump. Rosado replied "SMH," shake my head, to a CNBC tweet on January 6th reporting that "Mike Pence rejects Trump's call to overturn Biden election."

You get the picture. So why doesn't the media do due diligence on these people? And why don't mainstream news outlets ever make the opposite mistake?

An uncharitable explanation for this would be that much of the mainstream media wants Trump to win and allows Republicans to get away with this sort of thing because of that pro-Trump bias. But let's give the press the benefit of the doubt. There's a reasonable explanation that doesn't involve journalists actively colluding in Republican deception.

I think the mainstream media makes these mistakes because journalists can't quite imagine why anyone would do this. Journalists don't make the opposite mistake because Democrats simply don't try to pretend they're Republicans or independents. Democrats think doing that would be weird -- and they're right.

By contrast, Republicans and the right-wing media are obsessed with trying to convey the impression that moderate independents and (especially) Democrats are suddenly seeing the light and switching their allegiance to the GOP.

A decade ago, we regularly talked about "Fox News Democrats" -- pundits such as Tammy Bruce, Kirsten Powers, Bob Beckel, and Lanny Davis, lawyers such as Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley, and pollsters like Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen (and, more recently, Mark Penn). For years, Fox has retained a stable of commentators whose job is to say, I'm a Democrat, but people in my party have gone crazy.

Some Republicans have gone the opposite way, especially in the Trump years, but generally they're well-known pundits or nationally prominent elected officials (or former elected officials) whose political allegiances are readily examined. Many of these people will be Republicans in good standing again if the party ever becomes slightly less crazy.

The Murdoch press, by contrast, likes to pretend that little-known citizens are suddenly waking up to the sinister truth about Democrats and abandoning the party in this moment of unusually dangerous Democratic extremism. (In the right-wing media, every moment is a moment when Democrats are worse than they've ever been.) Here's a column that ran last week in Murdoch's New York Post. The author is Maud Maron:

RFK Jr. could persuade moms like me to choose Trump as ‘Kennedy Republicans’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s endorsement of former President Donald Trump is a classic example of Ronald Reagan’s famous explanation for the change in his political allegiance: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.”

And it has the power to tip the election in Trump’s favor, especially in the swing states that will decide it....

Kennedy, a blue-blood Democrat from the nation’s most famous political dynasty, is speaking to many fellow “former Democrats” — especially newly activated moms like me.

Maron is not, in fact, a "newly activated mom." As she acknowledges later in the piece:

I even ran for office as a Democrat — for City Council in 2021 and Congress in 2022 — trying doggedly, and unsuccessfully, to pull my party out of the fringe left and back to the moderate middle.

And not only that:

In 2019, Maron co-founded Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education NYC (PLACE NYC) to oppose Bill De Blasio's plans to widen access to selective middle and high schools....

In 2021, Maron and Yiatin Chu co-founded the New York City Chapter of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which advocates against Critical Race Theory....

She's been writing for the Post since 2020; her first column was a denunciation of anti-bias training headlined "Racial Obsessions Make It Impossible for NYC Schools to Treat Parents, Kids as People." Other columns include "Why This Pro-Choice Democrat Is Voting Lee Zeldin for Governor" and "DeSantis Did What Hochul Won’t — Boot a DA Who Won’t Do Their Job," both published during the 2022 New York gubernatorial election that pitted Democratic incumbent Kathy Hochul against Zeldin, a Trumpist Republican. In 2023, Maron spoke at a Federalist Society forum and at a rally sponsored by the Independent Women's Forum.

So, no, Maud Maron is not a "newly activated mom." But the GOP and the Murdoch press regularly try to sell voters on the notion that Republican (or pseudo-Republican) activists and operatives are just ordinary Democrats who've had road-to-Damascus conversions to the Republican cause.

I've said for years that the mainstream press doesn't pay enough attention to the right, especially the right-wing media. The MSM ignored talk radio during its heyday and has mostly ignored Fox News and other right-wing cable channels. Internet grumblers like me know the right's obsessions, but most reporters at The New York Times and CNN don't. So they're surprised, I think, whenever someone claims to be a former Democrat who saw the light just yesterday.

A FAILED ATTEMPT AT HUMANIZING TRUMP? IT WORKED ON YOUR PAPER'S REPORTER.

Michelle Cottle of The New York Times has just published an op-ed about Donald Trump's appearance at a Moms for Liberty convention. Her headline reads:

Trump Tried to Humanize Himself. Better Luck Next Time.

Cottle writes:

Before the event, [Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany] Justice shared with me her hopes for the encounter. She wanted Mr. Trump to talk parental rights, of course, but she also wanted folks to see a softer side of him: “He’s a dad. He’s a grandfather. He loves his family. We’ve seen him working with his family in politics and business, right? I hope the American people get to know Donald Trump in a little bit of a different way. He’ll get to express his love for his family. I think that’s going to resonate with American voters.”

In theory, this was a brilliant opportunity for Team Trump, which is desperate to humanize the candidate and get him to talk policy rather than simply slag his political enemies.

In practice, the evening kept veering off course precisely as you’d expect.

That might be true -- but the Times reporter sent to cover the event, Shawn McCreesh, covered the event as if it was an unserious gathering of wine moms, which had the effect of humanizing both Trump and Moms for Liberty, an organization known for instigating book bans while its members harass and threaten teachers and school officials.

McCreesh was Maureen Dowd's assistant for five years, and he uses the flippant, LOL-nothing-matters tone Dowd used when she was a campaign reporter:

It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.

There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.

It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic.

Just a bunch of silly, "agitated" women "wandering around" half drunk. Nothing for liberal Times readers to worry about here!

And when the Moms show their true far-right colors, they get a mulligan from McCreesh:

The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”)....

Oopsie!

Quoting Justice, McCreesh assures us that Moms for Liberty is just a group of regular old moms:

“These are women that have largely never been political,” Tiffany Justice, the group’s co-founder, said. “They’re people who, in the busiest time of their lives, realized that they needed to get involved in politics.”

"Never been political"? When Moms for Liberty was started, co-founder Bridget Ziegler was married to the chair of the Florida Republican Party. (The Zieglers are still married, but Christian Ziegler was fired and Bridget Ziegler left her position after it was revealed that they regularly sought out women for threesomes, one of whom accused Christian of rape.)

The conversation with Trump at the convention gets political, but McCreesh's assures us that it's just an appeal to strong parental instincts:

“Who would want men playing in women’s sports?” he asked, as the women booed.

There is a reason Mr. Trump mentions the issue of transgender athletes at pretty much every rally he speaks at — it is a powerful, motivating one for many parents, and he knows it.

But is it? McCreesh says this as if it's obviously true, but there's no evidence in polling that the issue of transgender athletes motivates many Americans at all. In the first three months of this year, Gallup asked Americans, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" The question was open-ended, so all the answers were unprompted. Here's a list of every concern mentioned, from the ones most often mentioned in March to the ones least mentioned:

It's possible some of the 3% of respondents whose replies were listed under the heading "Ethics/Moral/Religious/Family decline," or the 2% who said education was their top issue, specifically mentioned transgender athletes. It's also possible that the 3% of respondents to a May 2024 Fox poll who said "social issues" were their #1 electoral "deal-breaker" specifically cited trans athletes. But it's clearly not the burning issue McCreesh wants us to believe it is.

Trump may not have talked much about his kids or grandkids, but McCreesh assures us that he slandered an Olympic athlete in a very human way -- "happily," in fact, and at the level of sports talk:

Mr. Trump happily rehashed the controversy around the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria who hit her opponent, Angela Carini of Italy, so hard she sobbed and quit. He mimed a jabbing motion. “The left is not a hard punch, for those of you who are not into pugilistic affairs,” he explained, and the women chuckled at his odd turn of phrase. “She looked like she got hit by a horse.”

Ms. Khelif, who won a gold medal in Paris, endured intense scrutiny over her gender and false accusations by critics that she was transgender.

In fact, Trump slandered Khelif at this convention by saying that she had "transitioned." McCreesh doesn't think that's worth mentioning.

McCreesh writes:

Ms. Justice said she worried about transition surgeries that are paid for in part by the government and asked Mr. Trump what he could possibly do about it as president.

“Well, you can do everything,” he said. “President has such power.” The women clapped.

Left unmentioned: Trump's scurrilous assertion that gender surgery is peformed on students in schools without the consent of either parents or the students themselves.

“But uh the transgender thing is an incredible thing… your kid goes to school & comes home a few days later with an operation the school decides what’s going to happen with your child & you many of these childs 15 years later say “what the hell happened who did this to me?”

🤦🏻‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/BNyNscBgUB

— Jennifer Jenkins Brevard (@JenkinsBrevard) August 31, 2024

This was all about humanizing Trump, and McCreesh tells us that the effort partly succeeded:

Ms. Justice wanted to draw out his softer side. She asked him about fatherhood. He told a story about how his daughter Ivanka Trump (“beautiful girl, beautiful everything”) gave up her clothing company (“you remember the Ivanka line? She was making so much money with that thing — it was so hot”) to go into government, but then got a ton of bad publicity. “It’s much easier to be a Democrat. Let me put it that way,” he said.

“Tell us about your mom a little bit,” said Ms. Justice.

Mr. Trump talked about how much he loved his mother and how she came from Scotland. “Did you know that some of the biggest, smartest, most brilliant leaders come from Scotland, and nobody talks about it?” he asked. “Or, at least their parents came from Scotland.” They laughed some more.

He had the roomful of women charmed.

To be fair, McCreesh thinks Trump undermined this attempt to charm-wash him:

And yet he just couldn’t help himself. Unprompted, he began to recount how he sparred with Megyn Kelly of Fox News during a 2015 Republican primary debate. She had asked him about his long history of making misogynistic remarks, and he insisted it was only the comedian Rosie O’Donnell whom he had insulted in crude terms.

“You remember, right?” he said. “Only Rosie O’Donnell. That was a tough one. Only Rosie O’Donnell.” He did a scold-like impression of Ms. Kelly: “‘You’ve said this and that’ — I won’t use the terms — ‘you’ve called women this and that and that...’”

There was some awkward giggling.

“I said, ‘Only Rosie O’Donnell,’” Mr. Trump reminisced, “and the place went crazy.”

This is sexist and disgusting, but it worked for Trump in the 2016 campaign. He won that battle with Kelly. He treated O'Donnell as a punchline, and his fans laughed. Then he went on to win.

It was a lie, of course, and it's still a lie. Trump has attacked many women -- verbally and physically. McCreesh never mentions that.

The O'Donnell lie reduces Trump's sexism to a one-on-one spat, and a showbiz spat at that. It's not J.D. Vance attacking an entire group of women. It's not even Trump attacking Kamala Harris in sexual and racist terms.

So it's not Trump-hugs-his-grandkids humanization. But it's humanization nonetheless. And intentionally or not, Shawn McCreesh helped.