Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 79
September 14, 2024
September 14, 2024
Five years ago, on September 15, 2019, after about a six-week hiatus during the summer, I wrote a Facebook post that started:
“Many thanks to all of you who have reached out to see if I'm okay. I am, indeed (aside from having been on the losing end of an encounter with a yellow jacket this afternoon!). I've been moving, setting up house, and finishing the new book. Am back and ready to write, but now everything seems like such a dumpster fire it's very hard to know where to start. So how about a general overview of how things at the White House look to me, today....”
I wrote a review of Trump’s apparent mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, stacking of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection.
Then I noted that the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), had written a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, on Friday, September 13, telling Maguire he knew that a whistleblower had filed a complaint with the inspector general of the intelligence community, who had deemed the complaint “credible” and "urgent.” This meant that the complaint was supposed to be sent on to the House Intelligence Committee. But, rather than sending it to the House as the law required, Maguire had withheld it. Schiff’s letter told Maguire that he’d better hand it over. Schiff speculated that Maguire was covering up evidence of crimes by the president or his closest advisors.
And I added: “None of this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”
“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”
Readers swamped me with questions. So I wrote another post answering them and trying to explain the news, which began breaking at a breathtaking pace.
And so these Letters from an American were born.
In the five years since then, the details of the Ukraine scandal—the secret behind the whistleblower complaint in Schiff’s letter—revealed that then-president Trump was running his own private foreign policy to strong-arm Ukraine into helping his reelection campaign. That effort brought to light more of the story of Russian support for Trump’s 2016 campaign, which until Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine seemed to be in exchange for lifting sanctions the Obama administration imposed against Russia after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The February 2022 invasion brought renewed attention to the Mariupol Plan, confirmed by Trump’s 2016 campaign advisor Paul Manafort, that Russia expected a Trump administration to permit Russian president Vladimir Putin to take over eastern Ukraine.
The Ukraine scandal of 2019 led to Trump’s first impeachment trial for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, then his acquittal on those charges and his subsequent purge of career government officials, whom he replaced with Trump loyalists.
Then, on February 7, just two days after Senate Republicans acquitted him, Trump picked up the phone and called veteran journalist Bob Woodward to tell him there was a deadly new virus spreading around the world. It was airborne, he explained, and was five times “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” “This is deadly stuff,” he said. He would not share that information with other Americans, though, continuing to play down the virus in hopes of protecting the economy.
More than a million of us did not live through the ensuing pandemic.
We have, though, lived through the attempts of the former president to rig the 2020 election, the determination of American voters to make their voices heard, the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd, the election of Democrat Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and the subsequent refusal of Trump and his loyalists to accept Biden’s win.
And we have lived through the unthinkable: an attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob determined to overrule the results of an election and install their own candidate in the White House. For the first time in our history, the peaceful transfer of power was broken. Republican senators saved Trump again in his second impeachment trial, and rather than disappearing after the inauguration of President Biden, Trump doubled down on the Big Lie that he had been the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.
We have seen the attempts of Biden and the Democratic-controlled Congress to move America past this dark moment by making coronavirus vaccines widely available and passing landmark legislation to rebuild the economy. The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act spurred the economy to become the strongest in the world, proving that the tested policy of investing in ordinary Americans worked far better than post-1980 neoliberalism ever did. After Republicans took control of the House in 2023, we saw them paralyze Congress with infighting that led them, for the first time in history, to throw out their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
We have watched as the Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with religious extremists, has worked to undermine the proven system in place before 1981. It took away the doctrine that required courts to defer to government agencies’ reasonable regulations and opened the way for big business to challenge those regulations before right-wing judges. It ended affirmative action in colleges and universities, and it overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion.
And then we watched the Supreme Court hand down the stunning decision of July 1, 2024, that overturned the fundamental principle of the United States of America that no one is above the law. In Donald J. Trump v. U.S., the Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of his official duties.
We saw the reactionary authoritarianism of the former president’s supporters grow stronger. In Republican-dominated states across the country, legislatures passed laws to suppress Democratic voting and to put the counting of votes into partisan hands. Trump solidified control over the Republican Party and tightened his ties to far-right authoritarians and white supremacists. Republicans nominated him to be their presidential candidate in 2024 to advance policies outlined in Project 2025 that would concentrate power in the president and impose religious nationalism on the country. Trump chose as his running mate religious extremist Ohio senator J.D. Vance, putting in line for the presidency a man whose entire career in elected office consisted of the eighteen months he had served in the Senate.
In that first letter five years ago, I wrote: “So what do those of us who love American democracy do? Make noise. Take up oxygen…. Defend what is great about this nation: its people, and their willingness to innovate, work, and protect each other. Making America great has never been about hatred or destruction or the aggregation of wealth at the very top; it has always been about building good lives for everyone on the principle of self-determination. While we have never been perfect, our democracy is a far better option than the autocratic oligarchy Trump is imposing on us.”
And we have made noise, and we have taken up oxygen. All across the country, people have stepped up to defend our democracy from those who are open about their plans to destroy it and install a dictator. Democrats and Republicans as well as people previously unaligned, we have reiterated why democracy matters, and in this election where the issue is not policy differences but the very survival of our democracy, we are working to elect Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
If you are tired from the last five years, you have earned the right to be.
And yet, you are still here, reading.
I write these letters because I love America. I am staunchly committed to the principle of human self-determination for people of all races, genders, abilities, and ethnicities, and I believe that American democracy could be the form of government that comes closest to bringing that principle to reality. And I know that achieving that equality depends on a government shaped by fact-based debate rather than by extremist ideology and false narratives.
And so I write.
But I have come to understand that I am simply the translator for the sentiments shared by millions of people who are finding each other and giving voice to the principles of democracy. Your steadfast interest, curiosity, critical thinking, and especially your kindness—to me and to one another—illustrate that we have not only the power, but also the passion, to reinvent our nation.
To those who read these letters, send tips, proofread, criticize, comment, argue, worry, cheer, award medals (!), and support me and one another: I thank you for bringing me along on this wild, unexpected, exhausting, and exhilarating journey.
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Notes:
September 13, 2024
After bomb threats today, officials had to evacuate two elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, and move the students to a different location. They had to close a middle school altogether. This is the second day bomb threats have closed schools and public buildings after MAGA Republicans have spread the lie that Haitian immigrants there have been eating white people's pets. Haitian immigrants, who were welcomed to Springfield by officials eager to revitalize the city and who are there legally, say they are afraid.
Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo today explained where the lie had come from and how it had spread. More than two months ago, they wrote, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is Trump’s vice presidential running mate, began to speak about Springfield at a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to tie rising housing prices to immigrants. The next day, at the National Conservatism conference, Vance accused “illegals” of overwhelming the city.
On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city. Right-wing social media posters pushed the story, usually with “witnesses” to events in the city coming from elsewhere.
In late August, posting in a private Facebook group, a resident said they had heard that Haitian immigrants had butchered a neighbor’s cat for food. Vance reposted that rumor to attack Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, on whom he is trying to hang undocumented immigration although it was Trump who convinced Republicans to kill a strong bipartisan border bill this spring. Springfield police and the city manager told news outlets there was no truth to the rumors.
Nonetheless, on September 10, Vance told his people to “keep the cat memes flowing,” even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.
Trump repeated the lie at the presidential debate that night, claiming, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Today, President Joe Biden demanded Trump stop his attacks on Haitian-Americans, but Trump doubled down, promising to deport the Haitian immigrants in Springfield if he is elected, although they are here legally.
The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate.
Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration.
Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.
In 1986, when it was clear that most Americans did not support the policies put in place by the Reagan Republicans, the Reagan appointees at the Justice Department broke tradition to ensure that candidates for judgeships shared their partisanship. Their goal, said the president’s attorney general, Ed Meese, was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”
That principle held going forward. Federal judgeships depend on Senate confirmation, and when McConnell became Senate minority leader in 2007, he worked to make sure Democrats could not put their own appointees onto the bench. He held up so many of President Barack Obama’s nominees for federal judgeships that in 2013 Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) prohibited filibusters on certain judicial nominees.
McConnell also made it clear that he would do everything he could to make sure that Democrats could not pass laws, weaponizing the filibuster so that nothing could become law without 60 votes in the Senate.
McConnell became Senate majority leader in 2015 when voters gave Republicans control of the Senate, and when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell refused even to hold hearings for President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. McConnell’s justification for this unprecedented obstruction was that Obama’s March nomination was too close to an election, but the underlying reason for the 2016 delay was at least in part his recognition that hopes of pushing the Supreme Court to the right, especially on the issue of abortion, were likely to get evangelical voters to the polls.
Trump won in 2016, and Republicans got control of the Senate. In 2017, when Democrats tried to filibuster Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch to fill Scalia’s long-empty seat, then–majority leader McConnell killed the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees. The end of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees meant that McConnell could push through Trump’s nominees Brett Kavanaugh, with just 50 votes, and Amy Coney Barrett, with just 52 (in late October 2020, with voting for the next president already underway).
Throughout his tenure as Senate majority leader, McConnell made judicial confirmations a top priority, churning through nominations even when the coronavirus pandemic shut everything else down. Right-wing plaintiffs are now seeking out those judges, like Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas, to decide in their favor. Kacsmaryk challenged the FDA’s approval of the drug mifepristone, which can be used in abortions, thus threatening to ban it nationwide.
Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Trump appointees are joining with right-wing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to overturn precedents established long ago, including the right to abortion.
Controlling the country through the courts was the plan behind stacking the courts with Republican nominees and weaponizing the filibuster to stop Democrats from passing legislation. In March 2024, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that McConnell “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
When he took office, President Joe Biden went to work putting his own mark on the federal judiciary. Almost two thirds of his appointees are women, and 62% are people of color. He appointed the first Black female justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court. But now, Republicans are hoping to retake the Senate to make sure that those appointments will stop, along with any more legislation. Their right-wing appointees to the courts will take the business of lawmaking out of the hands of American majorities.
Republican leaders are throwing everything they’ve got at the Senate races in Montana and Ohio, where they hope they can pick up the seat they need to take control of the Senate.
Attacks on immigrants in Ohio might move that needle.
In 1890, Republicans faced a similar problem. They had lost the popular vote in 1888, although they installed Republican president Benjamin Harrison in office through the Electoral College, and knew the Democrats would soon far outnumber their own voters. So they set out to guarantee that they could never lose the Senate, which should enable them to kill popular Democratic legislation.
But they misjudged the electorate, and in the 1890 midterm election, voters gave control of the House to the Democrats by a margin of two to one, and control of the Senate came down to a single seat, that of a senator from South Dakota. In those days, state legislatures chose their state’s senators, and shortly after it became clear that control of the Senate was going to depend on that South Dakota seat, U.S. Army troops went to South Dakota to rally voters by putting down an “Indian uprising” in which no people had died and no property had been damaged.
Fueled on false stories of “savages” who were attacking white settlers, the inexperienced soldiers were the ones who pulled the triggers to kill more than 250 Lakotas on December 29, but the Wounded Knee Massacre started in Washington, D.C.
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Notes:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2024/sep/13/i-am-afraid-the-aftermath-of-springfield-ohio-misi/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/baseless-claim-haiti-immigrants-cats-springfield-ohio/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/10/trump-springfield-pets-false-claims
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/20/politics/senate-race-rankings-july-2024/index.html
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/14/ohio-montana-senate-races-gop-mcconnell-border-20204-election
Meese quotation in Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2018/brett-kavanaugh-senate-confirmation-vote-count/
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1162/vote_116_2_00224.htm
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/03/mitch-mcconnell-retire-trump-federal-judiciary.html
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/matthew-kacsmaryk-judge-shopping-texas/
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/can-biden-top-trumps-number-of-judicial-appointments/
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/22/biden-judges-trump-election-00159358
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September 13, 2024
History Extra for September 13, 2024
Americans began to use the term “Bourbon Democrat” in 1871 to represent those white men standing against the rights of the Black workers white southerners claimed were radical revolutionaries.
The term was loosely associated with what Americans knew of the European House of Bourbon, from which sprang monarchies throughout the ages. One of the branches o…
September 12, 2024
Today, Trump backed out of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. He tried to spin his fear as a sign of strength, claiming that “Polls clearly show that I won the Debate,” and so there was no reason to debate again, but boy, is that going to be a hard sell.
First of all, as journalist Ahmed Baba points out, “This man has never, in his life, denied a stage with millions of viewers…. Trump’s post-debate internal polls must be brutal.” Second, he hardly looks dominant as TikTok is overflowing with memes making fun of his “They’re eating the dogs” moment and as Vice President Harris made fun of his “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act to a packed 17,000-seat stadium in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Tim Miller of The Bulwark wrote: “Impotent Trump was too intimidated to even look Kamala’s direction at the debate and now he wusses out of the rematch. Cannot recall a more dramatic demonstration of beta weakness in a campaign setting.” Harris posted on social media that “we owe it to the voters to have another debate,” and reiterated that sentiment to her cheering supporters in Greensboro.
In a speech to about 550 people in Tucson, Arizona, Trump insisted he had scored a “monumental victory” in the debate, referred to Minnesota governor Tim Walz as the vice president, slurred his words, and appeared to be having trouble reading off the teleprompters. CNN tonight compared one of Trump’s 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton to his performance on Tuesday, and the difference was stark.
Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic today that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline. His tangents and inability to get to a point suggest “a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process.” “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” he wrote.
Trump continues to try to dominate the political debate by refusing to back off any of his assertions, doubling down on the lies about immigrants eating pets and teachers giving students sex change operations. He called Harris a “Marxist communist fascist socialist,” clearly just stringing words together.
Meanwhile, he is giving off vibes of desperation. This afternoon he announced he would launch his crypto platform “World Liberty Financial” on X Spaces on September 16, hardly the sign of a presidential candidate convinced he’s about to regain his position as the leader of the free world.
It has been notable for a while that Trump’s wife, Melania, is nowhere to be seen, and Trump has begun to cling to provocateur Laura Loomer, who has vowed utter loyalty to Trump and is evidently quite happy to be seen with him. This is a problem for the Republican Party because of her history of conspiracy theories and open racism. As Joe Perticone and Marc Caputo of The Bulwark note, Loomer has referred to Vice President Harris as a “drug using prostitute,” for example, and suggested she has not given birth to children because “she’s had so many abortions that she damaged her uterus.”
Loomer’s extremism has made other Trump supporters urge him to keep her at a distance, sparking an embarrassing public fight. Two of those trying to get Trump to isolate Loomer are Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Their chilliness prompted Loomer to fight back on social media, questioning Graham’s sexual identity and calling attention to Greene’s extramarital affair and comparing her to a “hooker.”
The public fight between Loomer and Trump’s more restrained supporters—and who would have thought Greene would fall in the “more restrained” category?—illustrates something Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today.
Marshall noted that the Republicans are essentially running two campaigns for president in 2024. One is run by Trump himself, and it is based on Trump’s personal grievances and stories from his rallies that have little relationship to reality. In 2016, Trump blew up the American political scene with his idiosyncrasies, and his unique style led him to the White House. But 2024 is a different moment. The campaign is faltering as Trump appears increasingly unhinged, afraid to be on a stage with Harris, and seemingly unable to distinguish fact from fiction.
The other campaign is being run by Trump’s campaign managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who quietly recognize that Trump is in decline and are trying to run a much more traditional campaign. Like Lindsey Graham when he drew Loomer’s wrath, they keep urging Trump to talk about the economy and to dial back the craziness to avoid driving off voters interested in stability. While they are unable to contain Trump, they are trying to win the election by hammering away at swing state voters with ads attacking Harris and trying to make her look radical.
If Trump were to win under these circumstances, it seems likely that he would not be the driving force in his own administration. The power of the office would then be wielded by Vice President J.D. Vance, a reality we should confront in the few weeks left before the election. Vance is a religious extremist, of course, whose recent willingness to smear Haitian immigrants with a lie so long as it might enhance the Republicans’ chance of winning was despicable.
Aside from the Christian nationalism and the lies, Vance recently said he sees American history as “a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins.” The Northern Yankees in the late nineteenth century stood for protecting the right of all men to equality before the law, while the Southern Bourbons—probably named originally for Bourbon County, Kentucky, before the name came to represent those who supported the idea of royalty—wanted to get rid of the Fourteenth Amendment that protected Black rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment that established the right of Black men to vote.
Vance said today’s “Northern Yankees” are what he calls “hyper-woke, coastal elites”: the ones trying to protect equal rights. “The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around and influential in this country for 200 years,” Vance said. Or, as people understood it in the late nineteenth century, they were former Confederates who opposed Black rights. “And it’s like the hillbillies have really started to migrate towards the Southern Bourbons instead of the Northern woke people,” he concluded, in an evident hope that they would control the American future.
Extremist Republicans used to hide that sentiment. Now the man who could become the acting president is openly embracing it.
At the same time MAGA leaders are trying to turn out their base, they are also working to make it harder for Democrats to vote. Yesterday, the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court decided to permit Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to have his name taken off the ballot in that state, although, as Mark Joseph Stern reported in Slate, he did not ask to be removed until four days after he withdrew from the race, which was five days after the deadline for withdrawing.
By the time he withdrew, county election boards were already printing ballots, and the court’s decision will require nearly three million ballots to be destroyed and new ones designed and printed. According to North Carolina’s state election director, this will take 18 to 23 days and will cut into early voting. North Carolina law requires state officials to mail ballots to Americans living abroad and to service members by September 6, the day that early voting was supposed to start.
As Stern points out, Trump and Harris are effectively tied in North Carolina, and early voters there skew Democratic.
Last night, musician Taylor Swift won seven awards at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, mostly for awards surrounding her song “Fortnight.” In her acceptance speech for “Video of the Year,” she said: “[T]he fact that this is a fan-voted award and you voted for this, I appreciate it so much. And if you are over 18, please register to vote for something else that’s very important coming up, the 2024 presidential election,” Swift said, although she could hardly be heard over the roar from the crowd at her call for them to vote.
Pollster Tom Bonier has been following registration numbers and said that there has been a massive increase in voter registrations after Swift’s endorsement of Harris. “This intensity and enthusiasm is really unprecedented at this point. It’s even bigger than what we saw after the Dobbs decision in 2022.”
Today, Republicans in North Carolina sued to overturn the decision of the state election board that students and employees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can use state-approved digital IDs as identification for voting.
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Notes:
https://www.wfla.com/video/taylor-swift-urges-people-to-register-to-vote-at-vmas/10036447/
The BulwarkLaura Loomer Looms Over Trump LandTWO OF DONALD TRUMP’S top congressional surrogates are pleading with the former president to ostracize right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer from his ranks over incendiary comments she’s made on social media…Read more12 hours ago · 328 likes · 86 comments · Joe Perticone and Marc A. Caputohttps://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/politics/laura-loomer-florida-gop-primary/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/09/trump-harris-debate-cognitive-decline/679803/
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-two-campaigns
The BulwarkJD Vance and the “Southern Bourbons”1. Choosing Sides…Read more20 hours ago · 390 likes · 391 comments · Jonathan V. Lasthttps://histsociety.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-on-earth-was-bourbon-democrat.html
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4871613-north-carolina-supreme-court-rfk-jr-ballot-win/
https://www.ncsbe.gov/results-data/voter-turnout/2022-general-election-turnout
https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/north-carolina-unc-chapel-hill-digital-voter-id-challenge/
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September 12, 2024
History Extra for September 11, 2024
On the twentieth anniversary of the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, the weather was eerily similar to the bright, clear blue sky of what has come to be known as 9/11. George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers o…
History Extra for September 10, 2024
Republican politician Richard Nixon so thoroughly distrusted television after his own disastrous debate with Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy in 1960 that when he ran for president again in 1968, his campaign hired a young advertising executive to package him for voters. He ditched policy positions in favor of emotional appeals. “Voters are basically …
September 11, 2024
Today’s fallout from last night’s presidential debate between Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican nominee former president Donald Trump has shown Harris solidifying her dominant position. Trump increasingly looks as if the anger he has been displaying is a way to hide the fear that he is losing control.
After debates, surrogates for a nominee talk to journalists in what’s known as a “spin room,” where they try to spin the event in favor of their candidate. John Bowden of The Independent described his time in last night’s spin room as “the strangest moments of my political career.” As usual, Republican surrogates immediately attacked the moderators for fact-checking the debate.
But it was clear, Bowden wrote, that the campaign officials were panicking. Even Fox News Channel reporters said that Trump had performed badly, and Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called the debate a “disaster.” But MAGA Republicans, whom Trump has elevated far beyond any position they could achieve without him, were lashing out on his behalf.
Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance attacked the moderators and doubled down on the lie that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets, despite statements from Springfield police and the town manager that there is no evidence for such a statement. Anti-immigrant Trump advisor Stephen Miller melted down when Hispanic reporter José María Del Pino asked him where he got his figures saying that crime in Venezuela had dropped dramatically.
The Trump campaign had told reporters that Vance would be the top surrogate for the evening, but after the debate, Trump himself appeared in the spin room to override his surrogates’ attempts to blame his performance on the moderators and instead assure reporters that he had won the debate. It is highly unusual for a candidate to go to the spin room in person, and his appearance demonstrated that Trump was aware that he was in trouble. Reporters seemed to agree: “If you won tonight, why are you here?” one can be heard saying to him. “Why not let the performance speak for itself?”
“Trump has come in the spin room and he is desperately trying to get the attention that I think he needs as oxygen at this point,” an MSNBC reporter told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. “Is he literally standing there like he’s his own surrogate trying to get people to talk to him about his own performance?” Maddow asked. “Wow. That’s something. That is not a sign of strength or confidence in your own performance when you’re trying to extend past the final bell….”
Answering questions did not appear to help him. When asked once again to answer whether he would veto a national abortion bill, he answered: “It was a perfect answer on abortion, and I’ve done a great job on that, and I’ve brought our country together.” And then he walked out.
All day today, he posted and reposted statements that he had won the debate—including a message of support from former Tenet Media commentator Benny Johnson, whose paycheck was paid by Russia—but it was hard to miss that Trump’s performance was historically bad. Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who studies focus groups, said that “[a]cross the board,’ a “focus group of swing voters from swing states” thought Harris won the debate. Longtime Republican pollster Frank Luntz went on record saying that Trump’s debate performance would cost him the presidential race. The Harris campaign’s ongoing trolling of Trump was perhaps even harsher: it posted the entire hour and forty minute debate as a campaign ad.
Meanwhile, by 2:00 this afternoon, Taylor Swift’s endorsement had prompted 337,826 people to start the process of registering to vote.
All day today, reporters fact checked Trump’s statements, proving them lies. But lies have never damaged him; they reinforce his dominance by forcing subordinates to agree that the person in charge gets to determine what reality is. Victims must surrender either their integrity or their ownership of their own perceptions; in either case, once they have agreed to a deliberate lie, it becomes harder to challenge later ones since that means acknowledging the other times they caved.
That’s why the lie about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration is so important: it is the foundational lie on which all the others stand. Harris, who spent her legal career dealing with criminals and abusers who depend on this technique, knew exactly how to undermine it. She made fun of it, making his “obsession with crowd sizes” a national joke. The jokes set him off not only because he cannot bear to be laughed at, but also because challenging that lie challenges all the others.
Following Harris’s lead, posters on social media turned to memes today, setting Trump’s assertion that “they’re eating the cats,” to Vince Guaraldi’s theme “Linus and Lucy” from the Peanuts movies, for example, and designing the same statement as a Dr. Seuss book, as well as posting pictures of live pets wrapped in bread and rolls.
Observers correctly noted that the racist trope of immigrants eating pets dehumanizes marginalized people who are already vulnerable, putting them in danger. While posters and media have repeatedly pointed out that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are there legally and have revitalized the city, making fun of those sharing such a stupid lie has a different kind of potential to defang it.
And, aside from Trump’s evident worry, there are signs that Trump is vulnerable. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had scheduled a vote today on the continuing resolution to fund the government before the government will have to shut down on October 1. That measure included the voter suppression measure Trump demanded yesterday in all caps. Today, Johnson pulled the vote.
Republicans are also breaking with Trump over the idea of an interest rate cut. Trump does not want the Fed to lower the cost of borrowing money before the election despite the softening job market—cheaper money should bolster the economy and provide more jobs—and has vowed that if he is reelected, he will take control of the Fed, which is now an independent institution. But Republicans are backing away from his demands. Representative Dan Meuser, a Trump supporter from the swing state of Pennsylvania, told Jasper Goodman and Eleanor Mueller of Politico that he supports a cut. “You’ve got to put the greater good ahead of looking political,” he said.
Today the share price of Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), the owner of the Truth Social platform, fell to new lows. The stock fell more than 10% today, ending the day at $16.68 from a high over $60 a share in April. In May, Trump’s stock was valued at more than $6 billion, although the company is losing money and has very few users. The drop over the last several months has wiped away more than $4 billion of that value. Trump needs money for his legal bills and settlements, as well as his businesses, and can begin to cash out on his stock soon, but selling much of it was always going to be a problem because if he dumped it, the bottom would fall out. Now selling is a problem because its value is dropping.
In the face of concern that Trump and Vance have been suggesting they would challenge the results of the 2024 election, the Department of Homeland Security took steps to protect the January 6, 2025, session of Congress that will count the electoral votes that will decide the presidency. They have put January 6, 2025, on the same security level as the Super Bowl or a major event like the U.N. General Assembly.
Finally, today is the 23rd anniversary of 9/11, the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, and Trump used its commemoration to demonstrate another dominance trait: that he will behave however he wishes. Trump attended a remembrance with right-wing extremist Laura Loomer, who has shared not only the false pet-eating conspiracy theory, but also the false theory that “9/11 was an Inside Job!” Recently, she posted an appalling attack on Vice President Harris. Today she posted that she joined Trump because “I believe in unconditional loyalty to those who are deserving. And there is nobody more deserving of our loyalty and unwavering support than Donald Trump."
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris each issued statements about the anniversary. Biden vowed that the nation will never forget the attack, those lost, their families, and “the heroic citizens and survivors who rushed to help their fellow Americans. And never forget that when faced with evil—and an enemy that sought to tear us apart—we endured.”
Harris echoed Biden. She also emphasized the national unity the crisis created as people came together to deny the terrorists the achievement of their goal “to attack and destroy our way of life—our democracy, our freedoms, and everything we hold dear as Americans.” She thanked the military personnel who served in Afghanistan and elsewhere to root out terrorism, and urged Americans to “reflect on what binds us together as one: the greatest privilege on Earth, the pride and privilege of being an American.”
All three were at a commemoration of 9/11 today. Trump and Harris shook hands, and he tried the dominance trick of using the handshake to pull Harris toward him, which she firmly resisted. His social media website confirmed that the world of professional wrestling is very much on Trump’s mind as he apparently tried to reassure himself he, and not Kamala Harris, is the dominant political figure in the country. He clearly doesn’t want to agree to another debate and is trying to spin his reluctance as a show of power.
“In the World of Boxing or U[ltimate] F[ighting] C[hampionship] when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’” he wrote. “Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92–8, so why would I do a Rematch?”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/11/republicans-defy-trump-fed-rate-cut-00178758
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/11/congress-election-certification-protection-riot-00178809
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/29/business/trump-truth-social-stock/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/us/politics/trump-media-stock-truth-social-debate.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-911-laura-loomer-conspiracy-theorist-rcna170743
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Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), Truth Social, September 11, 2024, at 12:01 PM.
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