The “Truth” about JD Vance

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Before the Vice Presidential debate last night, I tested a hypothesis.

Hypothesis: Like Trump, JD is a sociopath.

Unlike Trump, JD is not a narcissist.

It’s a lot harder to work that to your advantage in a debate.

By that I meant that JD lies as much as Trump does, but because his ego is not as fragile as Trump’s, he would bulldoze through the same lies Trump wanted to tell without getting distracted by his own ego.

That prediction held up. JD smoothly lied over and over again. This is a man who — by description — came naturally to pitching the Iraq invasion. Occasionally (such as when Walz noted that Trump built just 2% of his wall and Mexico didn’t pay for it), Vance seemed to visibly wince about how bad the product he’s selling is. But otherwise he smoothly pitched policies that only work when they come packaged in fear-mongering and hatred. He smoothly claimed that censorship by private companies was a bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump siccing a mob on Mike Pence.

Earlier in the day before the Vice Presidential debate, I suggested one should read Amanda Marcotte and John Ganz’ columns of the day in tandem. The columns provide a useful background to the debate.

Marcotte observed that JD Vance routinely whines about press coverage not just because he’s thin-skinned, but because that whining is viewed as strength.

In the dull world of the extremely online right, where “cat lady” is forever the sickest of burns, it is also common to mistake throwing a tantrum for strength. “Free speech” is defined as “we speak, you listen — and faint in adoration.” Live in that space long enough and you start to think that yelling at a reporter for asking a question isn’t embarrassing behavior. No, in the online MAGA world, sputtering “How dare you!” at a journalist for doing their job is regarded as a feat of strength on par with storming the beach at Normandy. It’s tempting to see Vance whining yet again and assume that he’s sorely in need of therapy. That may be so, but it’s also true that his online space is a culture where whimpering like a spoiled child is mistaken for toughness, and he’s forgotten that most people are rightfully grossed out by it.

But in a piece explaining why there’s such a real risk Trump will still win, John Ganz raised another reason why, I think, JD whines so much about the media. Ganz noted that consensus media has collapsed in America — and Donald Trump has stepped into that void, cultivating rabid support from the fragmented world of disaffected conspiracy theorists left behind.

We are accustomed still to thinking of the country at its post-War self, dominated by mass media, mass politics, the mass movement, the struggle for political and cultural hegemony, that is to say, the struggle over the definition of common sense and what is “normal.” Prime Time. Must See TV. The water cooler. That’s all gone now. We should think of the United States today as being more like the country Gilbert Seldes portrays in his classic on 1800s America, The Stammering Century, where he documents not unified nation, but a patchwork of small movements lead by “fanatics, and radicals and mountebanks,” a country of “diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints…Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements…” Trump knows how to reach those people. Democrats today, much less so. Maybe they shouldn’t even try. I certainly think pandering to that tendency in American culture isn’t good. But maybe that’s not a tendency in American culture at all, it just is American culture.

Trump and Vance thrive on the fragmentation of America created by the collapse of the media. And so they treat the media as a performance of power.

Vance attacked experts and the media over and over in yesterday’s debate, appealing instead to “common sense.” He appealed to and encouraged distrust in government. His attack on what he falsely termed “censorship” was a defense of the crackpots Trump mobilized to attack the Capitol on January 6 (and he made two implicit defenses of Russian disinformation along the way).

The second most notable moment in the debate came when Vance complained that, “The rules were you weren’t going to fact check,” when he falsely claimed the Haitians in Springfield were undocumented. It was a tell. Vance and Trump need these false claims to sow division. They need these false claims to attack rationality.

Shortly before the debate, 60 Minutes announced that Trump was going to forgo their traditional pre-election interview. After 60 Minutes made the announcement, Trump’s bouncer-spox Steven Cheung tried to spin it in a way that didn’t amount to Trump chickening out again:

Here’s what Cheung said:

  1. Hunter Biden’s laptop
  2. Nothing was scheduled
  3. CBS was going to commit the “unprecedented” sin of fact-checking Trump

There’s a tiny bit more substance on the laptop comment than the normal invocation of “Hunter Biden’s laptop” as foundational moment in Trump’s cult than there normally is. Trump is complaining that he is owed an apology because Lesley Stahl refused to report on its contents in 2020 — ignoring the question of newsworthiness! — only after she could verify it.

Trump, 78, was referring to “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl admitting to him in a 2020 sitdown that she refused to cover The Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 because “it can’t be verified.”

I learned that from NYPost, which didn’t wait to verify the hard drive of a laptop before it misrepresented what an email said, which used a copy of the hard drive copy that had at least one email added to it after it left John Paul Mac Isaac’s custody, and which itself was based on a copying process that resulted in 62% bigger copy (measured in page size — blame prosecutors for doing that!) than the underlying laptop.

Even as Xitter, Google, and Facebook censor the JD Vance dossier stolen from a Trump staffer far more aggressively than anyone ever throttled NYPost stories about the Hunter Biden hard drive (outlets besides Xitter are fairly invoking a policy against foreign malign influence campaigns; Xitter claims it’s about Vance’s privacy), Trump is claiming he was injured because news outlets didn’t chase a laptop copy to which they were not granted access by Trump’s own lawyer.

But the function of his invocation of a hard drive that even the FBI never validated serves as the same marker it always does: Four years later, four years in which media outlets have still never found anything more than dick pics and completely legal influence peddling, merely the invocation of the hard drive serves as the foundation of an object of faith for Trump’s mob. One must believe in it even if one cannot validate it. Goodness knows, that’s what got Hunter Biden convicted on gun crimes.

Relatedly, on Monday, Judge Robert Richardson finally ruled on John Paul Mac Isaac’s defamation claims: none of his defamation claims held up (partly because he was a limited public figure, partly because most of his defamation claims never even mentioned him. Hunter Biden’s counterclaim was dismissed on statute of limitation grounds. Along with Judge Rudy Contreras’ decision, last Friday, that the disgruntled IRS agents can’t intervene in Hunter’s lawsuit against the IRS, he can include their lawyers in his claims, but cannot sue for a Privacy Act violation, the rulings close off much of what we might learn from these lawsuits.

The Hunter Biden hard drive and its aftermath will continue to serve as an untethered article of faith among those who need to believe the Bidens are more corrupt than Trump and his son-in-law.

And in that same world of faith, neither Donald Trump nor JD Vance are going to willingly participate in a venue where their false narrative of fear might be disturbed by facts.

Most people treat debate as a draw. Virtually all agree that, like almost all VP debates, it won’t make an ounce of difference in the race, because they never do. Even after admitting the latter point, though, Bulwark’s Jonathan Last assessed JD’s success in smoothly delivering those lies differently.

Vance was so good that I wonder if this debate might become a case of catastrophic success. Because tomorrow a whole bunch of people in Conservatism Inc. are going to be talking about how Vance is the post-Trump savior they’ve been waiting for.

I wonder what Donald Trump will think about that?

That’s the question I kept coming back to, all night long.

[snip]

I doubt Vance did anything meaningful to help Trump’s electoral prospects. But he absolutely helped his own prospects for 2028, or 2032, or whenever Trump leaves the scene.

Or gets pushed.

Donald Trump created his own fictional character, the successful tycoon who gets things done by firing people and exacting revenge.

JD has no such persona. He has, instead, a flawless ingratiating ability to deliver lies credibly.

The debate is not going to affect the election.

But I think JD did what he needed, for his own wildly ambitious goals: He doubled down on undermining democracy, and ratcheted up the professionalism of Trump’s attack on truth.

Update: Added the ad that Harris did of the JD non-answer.

2024 Presidential Election: The Vice Presidential Debate

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

CBS News network hosts the vice presidential debate this evening beginning at 9:00 p.m. ET.

There will be no muted mics. I guess CBS thinks we can trust the couch fucker not to talk over Coach Walz.

There will be no fact checking. Apparently CBS also thinks the faux hillbilly who has flip-flopped on stuff like his opinion of Trump won’t spout anything contrary to what he’s said before.

I’m hoping tonight’s moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan ask something juicy — like whether Walz’s 1979 International Harvester Scout sports a very-well maintained original paint job or if he’s had it repainted.

Or whether Vance prefers something traditional like La-Z-Boy or if he’d prefer something trendier like West Elm or Restoration Hardware when it comes to couches.

My desired topics aside, I note ever-sketchy NYT decided to attack Walz today of all days. Never mind all the racist, misogynist bullshit Vance has unloaded — the NYT is going to save democracy by insisting Walz is telling an untruth rather than misstating what happened 35 years ago when he was abroad.

Tim Walz Said He Was in Hong Kong in 1989 During Tiananmen. Not True.

Mr. Walz taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.

By Danny Hakim and Amy Qin

Oct. 1, 2024 Updated 6:36 p.m. ET

Ugh. Like the tensions inside China weren’t high and sensed across all east Asia back then.

Couldn’t leave the NYT’s endorsement of Harris without some both-sides-ing.

~ ~ ~

This thread is dedicated to this evening’s debate. Please stay on topic, thanks.

As Kamala Harris Passes the Two-Thirds Mark, Trump Adopts Apocalyptic Language

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I continue to track the asymmetric pace of the campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Today is another milestone for the Vice President.

As of today, Donald Trump has <5% of his campaign left (36 days of 721).

As of today, Kamala Harris has a third of her campaign left (36 days of 107).

Back on August 17, I laid out six things that could destabilize the race. We’ve gotten versions of four of those, though without yet serious impact on the race.

  • There were no mass protests at the DNC. Neither, however, was there someone speaking for Palestinian people from the Convention podium.
  • With the assassination last week of Hassan Nasrallah and Israel’s expanding operations against Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Yemen, we have seen unforeseen escalation in the Middle East. Joe Biden seems incapable of understanding that Bibi Netanyahu was never a good faith negotiator. On top of the instability this will bring (and the ongoing threat of Iranian violence targeted at Trump), I worry that Harris’ choice to prioritize Republican endorsements over Palestinian speakers could harm her in Michigan (as Elissa Slotkin issues warnings about Michigan).
  • We did get a superseding indictment in Trump’s January 6 case (though without any new charges), but Trump succeded in delaying sentencing in his NY case. We may find out this week whether we’re going to get to see a redacted version of Jack Smith’s argument that Trump is not immune; indeed, given how Judge Tanya Chutkan issued a deadline for noon tomorrow, we may even see the argument itself this week. If we do, Trump’s attacks on Mike Pence will be at the center of the argument. Remember: Trump’s increasing fascistic language over the weekend has come after he got a first look at Smith’s argument, and his lawyers seem terrified of some of the claims made by witnesses that could get unsealed.
  • Kamala Harris did have a historically successful debate, but it has done little more than bump polling, slightly. That said, her campaign continues to goad Trump to make him look weak, most recently in a national ad and plane advertisement at the Alabama-Georgia game yesterday. Whether or not Harris pushes him to accept a second debate, the continued goading seems to keep him unbalanced. In recent campaign appearances, Trump has denied he fell into her trap at the debate, directly addressed rally-goers who were leaving (denying they were leaving), and freaked out about a fly.
  • Whatever the cause, Trump is increasingly unhinged in public appearances, though much of the press continues to sanewash his coverage. More and more, his rants adopt fascist language, such as yesterday when he either endorsed The Purge or Kristallnacht. Donald Trump looks weak and Donald Trump looks violent, but that is not yet a persistent news coverage theme (indeed, in his polling update, Nate Silver claims there’s nothing “like Joe Biden’s deteriorating public performances” that might be affecting the race in ways polling is not accounting for). If the press does begin to capture Trump’s weakness and violence, it may impact the race — but I’m not holding my breath.
  • Trump’s right wing running mate has drummed up terrorist threats against his own constituents in Springfield, OH, and more recently drummed up threats against a beloved Pittsburgh restaurant (while trying to tamp them down). We have not yet gotten right wing violence, neither localized nor mass. But understand that the far right Christian nationalists that Trump has been cultivating, most notably with JD Vance’s appearance with Lance Wallnau, have been an absolutely central factor in past political violence, including January 6. When Donald Trump mobilizes Christian imagery, he does so not because he believes in any of it, but because he believes in power, and he knows he can get people who mistake him for the Messiah to go to war for him. (An Evangelicals for Harris group just rolled out an ad interspersing Billy Graham warnings of the anti-Christ with clips of Trump.) We have not yet seen political violence against marginalized groups, but Trump is doing everything that has fostered it in the past. Nevertheless, most horserace journalists are ignoring that, just like they and their colleagues dismissed the risk of political violence in advance of January 6.

In my earlier post, I said we should be unsurprised by a Black Swan event (I suggested all-out war was one possibility, and given the escalation in the Middle East, it remains one).

The floods caused by Helene could be another. Right wingers are already trying to ensure this works like Katrina did for George W Bush. And whatever else, the flooding disproportionately affected the rural areas that Trump needs to win North Carolina (though North Carolina voters can forego voter ID requirements under an emergency exception). That said, the Helene response may also highlight two things — FEMA and NOAA — that Project 2025 aims to defund. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s attempt to forgo federal help may provide a contrast that shows how Federal help can make a difference in a catastrophe. And a whole bunch of conservative people just got bowled over by the impact of climate change, hundreds of miles from the nearest coast. If the Feds can respond to the damage on I-40 like they did to the I-95 or the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster, it may convince people in North Carolina that the government can too do something good.

Against that background, small shifts continue that could have significant payback in days ahead. As noted, Kamala has significantly cut Trump’s lead in perception of who will best manage the economy, and that happens as more good economic news rolls in. That’s where the horserace journalists are looking instead of Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric. That measure, at least, is moving in a positive direction.

Tomorrow marks two key events: a Vice Presidential debate that may prove more momentous than prior debates (and JD is much more resilient to goading than his boss is), and Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, one day closer to the day he can vote for Kamala Harris.

May Jimmy Carter live to see the first woman elected President.

The Other Problematic Subject Trump Hid

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[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

In this post:

Overview
Russia’s involvement
H. R. McMaster’s observations
Olivia Troye’s observations

~ ~ ~

Overview

Before the September 10th presidential debate, did you notice Trump and his campaign never backed off on the Arlington National Cemetery brouhaha?

Did you notice they actually leaned into their desecration of the cemetery with a campaign event?

The profanement of war dead is a taboo which would have ended other politicians’ campaigns and political careers. Why did the Trump campaign continue so firmly in this direction?

Did you notice how much this offensive behavior sucked up attention from Trump’s other deficits as a candidate and a human being?

Did you notice how much less we were laughing at his campaign after ANC but before Trump’s disastrous debate performance?

The violation of regulations and norms at ANC appear to be redirection: if the candidate and campaign act out badly enough, the subject is changed. The left would stop laughing at him.

Trump’s campaign tried to flip the public’s perspective of the ANC to make Trump the victim. They found Gold Star family members willing to stick their necks out for him to rationalize the offensive behavior. Very DARVO if you think about it; his campaign abused the law, norms, the rights of others, he walked on the graves of war dead for his own benefit, but somehow he’s the victim.

But again, this was and is redirection. What have they been trying so damned hard to hide? It’s something far worse than desecrating a national cemetery for war dead, violating regulations and assaulting a federal employee in the process.

Is Trump responsible for those killed in Afghanistan during his administration and through the withdrawal during Biden’s first year in office because of his negotiations with the Taliban and his subsequent hurried order to withdraw?

Is it because both former Homeland Security and Counter terrorism advisor to Mike Pence Olivia Troye spoke out at the Democratic National Convention decrying Trump’s leadership?

Is it because Trump’s former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster published a book released within days of the brouhaha at the ANC – a book in which Trump and his White House appear to be unfocused, unserious, and in thrall to hostile foreign nations?

Is it because Troye and McMaster know exactly how much blame Trump personally bears for those Gold Star dead on whose graves he campaigned?

~ ~ ~

Russia’s involvement

Many of you read Marcy’s post about Trump’s effort to hide his attempt to assassinate Mike Pence on January 6. Special Counsel Smith likely has all he needs for prosecution, but Trump doesn’t want his voters to know more about his threats to Pence’s life.

I believe Trump is also trying to hide something more from his potential voters: his role in the losses experienced up to and during the U.S. final pullout from Afghanistan. He may have been badly played by joint efforts by Russia and the Taliban, ultimately damaging the U.S. military’s efforts to depart in an orderly fashion without U.S. troop and coalition force casualties while leaving a functional Afghanistan government behind.

I’m sharing a partial timeline at this link which includes events related to Afghanistan during Trump’s term in office.

One thing stuck in my craw back when we tried to crowd source a timeline about a then-unknown issue an unidentified whistleblower reported about in 2019.

Why the hell was Russia so deeply engaged in the US-Taliban negotiations? It stuck out like a sore thumb to me. Unfortunately the media’s attention was swept away by the revelation of Trump’s attempted quid pro quo with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

After so many troops had been killed by Taliban, attributed to cash bounties offered by Russia, why was Russia involved in negotiations?

There was push back about Trump inviting the Taliban to Camp David to negotiate a deal – a move which would have legitimized the Taliban – thereby preventing Trump from going through with the invitation.

Did Putin encourage Trump to extend this invitation in order to undermine U.S. foreign policy, making us look weak enough to cave to a terrorist organization?

Why has this issue not been revisited by the media instead of going on and on for years now about Biden’s execution of the exit from Afghanistan?

When talking heads complained Biden should have either refused to honor Trump’s agreement and extend the exit past August 31, did they take into consideration possible traps which may have been set up by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vladimir Putin should the agreement not be effected as negotiated?

Granted, while Pompeo was negotiating with the Taliban and Russia over the terms of the US’s exit, there had been a little problem with an Iranian missile launch which failed and John Bolton’s departure from his role as Director of National Intelligence. Perhaps the media’s attention was redirected by these events as much as the brouhaha building over a then-unknown whistleblower and their complaint.

And yet after all the tension over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and the subsequent investigations, the apparent inclusion of Russia in the Afghanistan exit negotiations received scant attention.

Why is this not a topic for discussion now, when the guy ultimately responsible for the terms of withdrawal is running again for office?

The same guy who signed off on the agreement having made no effective response to troop deaths after Russian bounties were reported?

~ ~ ~

H. R. McMaster’s Observations

During the September 10 debate, Kamala Harris demonstrated just how easy it is to manipulate Trump. She brought up one of his obvious obsessions and he fell for it like Wile E. Coyote tripping into Road Runner’s Acme-branded holes.

It wouldn’t take much for Putin to do the same thing repeatedly. He’s had plenty of time and resources to learn about Trump’s narcissistic foibles and he’s likely applied this knowledge on a regular basis.

I’ve been reading H. R. McMaster’s latest book, “At War With Ourselves.” I must point out that McMaster isn’t a reliable narrator; it’s not clear if he played a game with the meaning of “collusion” or if he genuinely believed Trump didn’t collude with Russia in order to win the 2016 election.

But McMaster’s recollection of the Trump White House’s toxicity, riddled with internecine drama like Henry VIII or Louis XIV’s court, depicts a weak leader manipulated by many both inside the White House and out.

You can experience the flavor of the problem through Nicolas Niarchos’s review for The New York Times in which he describes how China’s Xi bent Trump over:

As McMaster writes in “At War With Ourselves,” the president could sometimes be kept on the straight and narrow with a clever dose of reverse psychology (Xi Jinping wants you to say this, Xi Jinping wants you to say that). But just as often, McMaster shows Trump to have been an unpredictable waffler who undermined himself to the advantage of his competitors on the world stage.

In November 2017, President Trump visited China on the third leg of a 13-day trip around Asia. It was his “most consequential” destination, McMaster explains. As they flew to Beijing, he warned Trump that Xi would try to trick him into saying something that was good for China, but bad for the United States and its allies. “The C.C.P.’s favorite phrase, ‘win-win,’” he recalls telling his boss at one point, “actually meant that China won twice.”

Trump seemed to hear him, but in the Great Hall of the People, the president strayed from his talking points. He agreed with Xi that military exercises in South Korea were “provocative” and a “waste of money” and suggested that China might have a legitimate claim to Japan’s Senkaku Islands. McMaster, his stomach sinking, passed a note to Gen. John Kelly, the chief of staff: Xi “ate our lunch,” it read.

McMaster described Putin’s effort to influence Trump during the 2017 G20 summit. Putin pressured Trump on shipments of Javelins to Ukraine, the same kind of arms shipments which were a bone of contention during the RNC’s efforts to draft a platform in 2016, and again during the run-up to Trump’s quid pro quo attempt with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

To appeal to Trump’s optimistic interpretation of the U.S.-Soviet alliance during World War II, Putin showed Trump a video of Russia’s Northern Fleet salvaging the USS Thomas Donaldson, a 7,200-ton Lend-Lease ship that a German U-boat had sunk in the arctic in 1945, before it could deliver its cargo of Sherman tanks. The idea was to evoke the memory of the United States and the Soviet Union as allies during World War II and to keep alive the pipe dream of conciliation with Putin’s Kremlin as the best way to advance both countries’ interests.

Putin used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him. Profilers and psychological operations officers at Russia’s intelligence services must have been working overtime. Even as the meeting stretched into its second hour, Putin did not run out of material. To suggest moral equivalence between U.S. interventions in Latin America and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin cited the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy declaration by U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt in 1904–5 stating that the United States could intervene in a country’s internal affairs if that country were engaged in chronic wrongdoing.

At the dinner later that evening, as the two leaders squared off for a long conversation, Putin handed Trump a list of ideas for collaboration, including the development of an amusement park near Moscow. I wondered if Putin hoped the list would leak, or if he planned to leak it later, to revive stories of Trump’s failed pursuit of business deals in Russia, feed the Russian collusion narrative, weaken Trump, and divide Americans further. (188-189)

It’s unfortunate for us that McMaster was no longer NSA when Trump met with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018; he might have written about that as he did the 2017 G20. We can only imagine how much worse Putin’s discussion with Trump was in Helsinki if Putin felt he’d achieved some success with his G20 ratcheting on Trump’s weaknesses.

What’s infuriating and frustrating about this text is McMaster’s dismissive attitude about “Russiagate” and allegations of “collusion” which he blames for increasing Trump’s defensiveness on a number of topics – but as already noted, this is what makes McMaster unreliable as a narrator.

And yet McMaster’s conflict about the intimacy of Trump’s relationship with Putin may have been the last straw leading to his termination as NSA.

JUST A few days after Russian assassins deployed the nerve agent in Salisbury, poisoning Sergei Skripal and his daughter, a story appeared in the New York Post with the headline “Putin Heaps Praise on Trump, Pans U.S. Politics.” When I walked into the Oval Office that evening, on another matter, the president had a copy of the article and was writing a note to the Russian leader across the page with a fat black Sharpie. He asked me to get the clipping to Putin. I took it with me. When I got home that night, I confided to Katie, “After over a year in this job, I cannot understand Putin’s hold on Trump.”

News was breaking about the poisoning in England, and I was certain that Putin would use Trump’s annotated clipping to embarrass him and provide cover for the attack. The next morning, I stuck to procedures and gave the clipping to the White House Office of the Staff Secretary, which manages any paper coming into and out of the Oval Office. I asked them to take their time clearing it and to come back to me before sending it to Putin via his embassy in Washington. Later, as evidence mounted that the Kremlin and, very likely, Putin himself had ordered the nerve agent attack on Skripal, I told them not to send it.

I told Trump, “Mr. President, do you remember the article and note you told me to send to Putin? I didn’t send it. Putin would almost certainly have used the note to embarrass you, alleviate pressure over the Skripal incident, and reinforce the narrative that you are somehow in the Kremlin’s pocket.”

Trump was angry. “You should have done what I told you to do, General.” “Mr. President, you can be angry at me, but you have to know that I was acting in your interest.” (308-309)

How often had Trump sent mash notes to Putin during his term in office? Was he sending them even during McMaster’s tenure as NSA but through another contact?

What were the prompts for these missives? Did any exchanges between Trump and Putin out of the public’s eye shape Trump’s agreement with the Taliban and the subsequent withdrawal from Afghanistan?

Did Trump have any exchanges like this which may have led him to take no action as U.S. troops were killed after it was learned Russia offered bounties on our service persons serving in Afghanistan?

Has Trump been sending mash notes to Putin even after leaving office through other contacts?

~ ~ ~

Olivia Troye’s observations

McMaster waited until three years after the U.S. exited Afghanistan to share his experience working in Trump’s White House. Publication date of his book was August 27, 2024 — three days before the third anniversary of the U.S. exit from Afghanistan and the day after Trump and his campaign violated ANC regulations profaning war dead.

Olivia Troye didn’t wait; her speech at the DNC convention this August wasn’t her first public statement about Trump’s foreign policy and general leadership. Two months after she left her role in 2020, she unloaded on the Trump administration particularly on Trump for his narcissistic approach to protecting the nation as the COVID pandemic unfolded.

She not only wrote a pointed Twitter thread but published a campaign video in which she as a lifelong Republican said she was voting for Joe Biden after her experience working in the Trump administration.

She unloaded again ten days before the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2021, in response to ill-informed smears by right-wing mouthpieces, some of whom had been obstructive about the Special Immigrant Visa program (SIV) which should have helped more Afghan allies enter the U.S.

Olivia of Troye @OliviaTroye

🧵There were cabinet mtgs about this during the Trump Admin where Stephen Miller would peddle his racist hysteria about Iraq & Afghanistan. He & his enablers across gov’t would undermine anyone who worked on solving the SIV issue by devastating the system at DHS & State.(1/7)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

I tracked this issue personally in my role during my WH tenure. Pence was fully aware of the problem. We got nowhere on it because Trump/S. Miller had watchdogs in place at DOJ, DHS, State & security agencies that made an already cumbersome SIV process even more challenging.(2/7)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

I met w/ numerous external organizations during my White House tenure who advocated for refugees & pleaded for help in getting US allies through the process. I got the phone calls & letters as the homeland security & CT advisor to Pence…(3/7)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

The system wouldn’t budge, regardless of how much this was argued about in National Security Council mtgs. The Pentagon weighed in saying we needed to get these allies through the process-Mattis/others sent memos. We all knew the urgency but the resources had been depleted.(4/7)

2:08 PM · Sep 17, 2021

The fear of people across the Trump Admin to counter these enablers was palpable. There were numerous behind closed door meetings held-strategizing how to navigate this issue. The Trump Admin had FOUR years…(5/7)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

..Trump had FOUR years-while putting this plan in place-to evacuate these Afghan allies who were the lifelines for many of us who spent time in Afghanistan. They’d been waiting a long time. The process slowed to a trickle for reviews/other “priorities”-then came to a halt.(6/7)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

To people like Ben Domenech, JD Vance & others who are making blanket statements & pushing narratives of convenience on Afganistan-especially on the SIV/allies issue-please, just stop. Your comments are uninformed & also hurtful. We see right through you.(7/8)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

Grateful for everyone advocating the urgency of getting our allies evacuated out of Afghanistan ASAP & those who are doing everything they can to help. It’s the least we can do for these individuals & it’s a matter of national security. The world is watching.(8/8)

11:29 AM · Aug 20, 2021

By the time Troye wrote this there were roughly 2300 U.S. troops on each of three shifts protecting the remaining facilities and personnel – a number wholly disproportionate to the number of Afghan fighters Trump’s agreement with the Taliban released from Afghan government detention.

There simply weren’t enough personnel to do everything well, thanks directly to Trump.

There were aggravating circumstances with the Taliban violating the agreement, thanks to Trump.

There was ample frustration trying to help Afghan citizens who’d helped the U.S. thanks to Trump allowing his little racist attack dog Stephen Miller to undermine the exit.

It would be nice if any credible journalist with experience covering defense and active war zones ever asked Olivia Troye if she observed any difficulties added to the withdrawal from Afghanistan by Russia or its proxies, or other hostile foreign nation, in addition to the obstructions created by Trump’s worst minions.

It’d be nice if journalists asked Troye if she ever observed exchanges as McMaster did, between the White House and Russia which were not made known to the public but were not classified.

Taking both Troye’s and McMaster’s observations into consideration, Trump fucked up Afghanistan for the sake of his re-election campaign and possibly ego stroking by Putin, leaving Biden a massive mess to clean up just as he fucked up the pandemic response. In both cases Americans died because of Trump’s fuckery.

And Trump had zero problems kissing Putin’s ass along the way.

~ ~ ~

Once again, the question: which part of this related to Afghanistan did Trump and his campaign believe needed to be obscured so badly they were willing to profane American war dead to that end?

My Sixth Amendment Sense about Jack Smith’s Proposed Book Report

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Jack Smith initially filed his proposal on how to release his book report making the case that Trump is not immune from the January 6 charges against him under seal. After getting a first look at it (and the underlying filings), Judge Tanya Chutkan issued this order, unsealing it, and giving Trump very little time to respond to Smith’s proposed redactions in the motion itself, less than five days, with slightly less than two weeks to do redactions on the exhibits themselves.

MINUTE ORDER as to DONALD J. TRUMP: The Clerk of the Court is directed to file on the public docket the Government’s “Motion for Leave to File Unredacted Motion Under Seal, and to File Redacted Motion on Public Docket,” ECF No. 245. It is hereby ORDERED that Defendant shall file under seal any objections to the proposed redactions in the Government’s Motion for Immunity Determinations by 12:00 PM on October 1, 2024, and shall file under seal any objections to the proposed redactions in the Appendix to that Motion by 5:00 PM on October 10, 2024. Signed by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on 9/27/2024. (zcll)

Why do you give a deadline of mid-day for the initial objections? I would not be surprised to see Trump ask for more time.

I expect Trump to complain about at least one other thing (though let’s be honest; he’s going to complain about all of it).

Smith wants to include the quotes from sensitive material, but not the identity of the people quoted, in the immunity filing itself.

In the Motion’s text, the Government has not redacted quotations or summaries of information from Sensitive Materials, but in the footnotes has redacted citations that reveal the non-public sources of such information, including grand jury transcripts, interview reports, or material obtained through sealed search warrants. In the proposed redacted Appendix, the Government has redacted non-public Sensitive Materials in their entirety. And the Government also has proposed limited redactions to some publicly-available materials, such as the defendant’s Tweets, when such material identifies or targets an individual who—because of their status as a potential witness or involvement in underlying events—may be susceptible to threats or harassment, or may otherwise suffer a chilling effect on their trial testimony.

Trump may have even anticipated this proposal; Trump’s response to Smith’s request for an oversize brief twice raised concerns about confronting witnesses.

The proposed approach is fundamentally unfair, as the Office would attempt to set a closed record for addressing unfiled defense motions by crediting their own untested assessments of purported evidence, denying President Trump an opportunity to confront their witnesses,

[snip]

In this case, including through the Motion, the Special Counsel’s Office is seeking to release voluminous conclusions to the public, without allowing President Trump to confront their witnesses and present his own, to ensure the document’s public release prior to the 2024 Presidential election.

In the hearing on this on September 5, John Lauro similarly emphasized the import of cross-examining witnesses — including immediately before he first raised the election.

They’ve had the ability to subpoena witnesses. They’ve had the ability to take people into the grand jury. They’ve had the ability to interview witnesses.

We’ve not had a full and fair opportunity to cross-examine. So they’re asking for an asymmetrical protocol, where they submit information which we don’t have the ability to cross-examine.

[snip]

These important issues, which the Supreme Court has said are of great magnitude to the country, should not be decided by an asymmetrical proffer from the Government without President Trump’s ability under due process, the Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment, to meet these witnesses and cross-examine them.

[snip]

MR. LAURO: Well, it’s incredibly unfair in the sense that they’re able to put in the public record at this very sensitive time in our nation’s history —

THE COURT: Ah.

MR. LAURO: — which we can’t ignore, that they’re able to, you know, basically load up on what they think this case is about without our ability to meet those factual assertions with the right to cross-examine. The other issue that’s very problematic here, your Honor, which we’ve not addressed, most of this information is under seal. So if we’re going to go that route, then we’re going to have to have at least some determination among counsel as to what is unsealed and what is not unsealed. If we’re going to go that proffer route, we’re certainly going to put in the record a number of documents which we believe are incredibly exculpatory, which are now currently under seal.

We often forget, Trump’s lawyers have seen all this, in discovery. They’ve been panicked about certain aspects of this case for some time, including the degree to which prosecutors could tie Trump to the crime scene, stuff that would not be remotely official (especially — even if — it involved siccing a mob on his Vice President).

We’ve known for 18 months that groups of rioters focused on Mike Pence — including, according to at least a few cooperating witnesses, the group that has the most obvious ties to Trump, the Proud Boys.

Even John Roberts might balk at the argument that ties between Trump and the militia he riled up at the first debate are protected under the duties of the President.

And — I predict — John Lauro is going to make a Sixth Amendment case that Jack Smith can’t unseal these things.

Judge Chutkan has already made it clear she’s uninterested about Lauro’s arguments about “this sensitive time.” But Lauro has already laid the foundation to make a Sixth Amendment argument about how (and if) this evidence can be made public.

Iranian Hackers Compromised Roger Stone’s Email Eight Years After Russian Hackers Exfiltrated DNC Emails

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DOJ unsealed the indictment against three Iranian hackers it accuses of targeting Donald Trump’s campaign (as well as a bunch of other victims, including one of his top State Department officials).

Perhaps the most remarkable detail is this.

On May 25, 2016, Russian hackers started exfiltrating the emails from the DNC that Trump and his rat-fucker would exploit to beat Hillary Clinton.

On May 23, 2024 — two days short of eight years, to the day — Iranian hackers first compromised one of two Roger Stone email accounts they hacked.

As noted, Trump waited to call the FBI, in part because Susie Wiles was worried the FBI would make them hand over their email server (as Hillary had done during the campaign where Trump beat her). As a result, Iranian hackers remained in the account of Victim 11 — from whom they stole the JD Vance vetting materials, among other things — for two months.

According to the indictment, Iranian hackers were in Roger Stone’s account (what must be his Hotmail account) for almost a month, from May 24 to June 20.

 

On June 15, the hackers used Roger’s account to try to hack another Trump account (probably Susie Wiles), though that failed, which may have led Microsoft to cop on, leading to the expulsion of hackers from the Hotmail account.

After they were kicked out of that account they got into his Gmail account, apparently for a day.

Now, I might allow myself to feel a touch of schadenfreude that Roger Stone has been victimized in the same kind of influence operation he exploited against Hillary.

Except for this: As I keep saying, one of the reasons this is worse — more dangerous — than what happened to Hillary is that these people are also trying to exact revenge for the killing of Qasem Soleimani. The indictment says that almost verbatim: One of the goals of this operation was to “steal information relating to current and former U.S. officials that could be used to advance the IRGC’s malign activities, including ongoing efforts to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani.” The indictment describes that the hackers successfully targeted someone who played a key role in the Abraham Accords in Trump’s State Department, then started making travel reservations for the person using their stolen passport.

They’re not just using this information to affect the election. They’re using it to track people.

It turns out it was never fun and games.

VP Harris’ Haley Play

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This week, Greg Sargent has had two good podcasts on swing state politics, first with the campaign strategist for North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, Morgan Jackson, and then with Josh Shapiro. Both talked about the import of losing by less in rural areas — something Barack Obama did successfully, something that Senate candidate Elissa Slotkin says she’s attempting on Michigan.

But Jackson focused on something else: he noted that Nikki Haley received 250,000 votes in the March 5 primary, the day she dropped out. If Harris can convert any of those voters, it can chip into the 10,000 votes by which Joe Biden lost North Carolina to Trump in 2020.

Nikki Haley got almost 300K votes on February 27 in the Michigan primary.

Nikki Haley got over 75K votes ono March 12 in the Georgia primary.

Nikki Haley got 110K votes on March 19 in the Arizona primary.

Nikki Haley got over 75K votes on April 2 in the Wisconsin primary.

Nikki Haley got over 150K, more than 16% of the vote, on April 23 in the Pennsylvania primary, over a month after she dropped out.

To be sure, most polls show that Trump is still winning an overwhelming majority of the self-identified Republican voters. Trump will get most of these votes.

But Harris’ cultivation of Republican endorsements makes more sense when you think of the one-sixth of the Republican primary voters who voted against Trump long after Haley dropped.

And that’s why two recent endorsements are of particular interest. Last Friday, the co-chair of Haley’s Iowa campaign endorsed Harris.

I served as an Iowa state co-chair of the Nikki Haley for President campaign. I think both parties let us down by selecting two candidates for president in or near their 80s. I was at a loss.

Then, when President Joe Biden stepped down and endorsed Kamala Harris as his replacement, I decided to see who she really was. I was impressed with how she handled herself saying that she wanted to “earn everyone’s support.” She showed willingness to listen to a wider range of views to solve problems.

So I am supporting Kamala Harris for president.

On Wednesday, two key Haley supporters in Michigan endorsed her, including her co-Chair Bill Nowling (who once worked for Rick Snyder).

We disagree, sometimes strongly, with Vice President Harris on some of the ways we increase opportunity for everyone, but we believe she is a person of integrity. And right here, right now in this important election, character and integrity matter most of all.

We can’t say the same thing about former President Trump. Trump builds up himself by tearing down America and Americans. Just last week, during a speech that was supposed to be about battling antisemitism, the former president said the Jewish people would have “a lot to do with” the reason he might not win in November. During his televised debate with the vice president, Trump said Haitian immigrants living in Ohio were, “eating the dogs. They’re eating cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” America deserves better.

But it is more than just the strange things he says. Trump is no conservative.

I talk about most of these Republican endorsements, starting with that of the Cheneys, as providing a permission structure for Republicans to consider Harris.

But getting Haley’s former state leaders is something else, because it provides an ability to tap into a local network of like-minded never-Trumpers.

If this election turns out to be as close as people expect, it wouldn’t take many Haley voters converted into Harris voters to make the difference. If Harris wins, and by more than expected, these Republican Harris supporters can start what Liz Cheney is now proposing, a third party, representing actual conservatives who are opposed to the radical nuts who took over the Republican party.

No one knows if this concerted effort to court Republicans will work. If it fails, the time it took may end up being one of Harris’ biggest mistakes.

Reid Epstein’s Economic Polling Anxiety

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NYT’s Reid Epstein, who fairly routinely says things that make it clear he misunderstands what he’s watching, recently substantiated a whine that Kamala Harris doesn’t do enough interviews by claiming that Trump faces challenging questions at those things he labels press conferences.

Mr. Trump has, however, held three recent televised news conferences with the mainstream reporters covering his campaign, who posed challenging questions on numerous fronts.

Today, Epstein’s out with a complaint that Kamala Harris’ interview with Stephanie Ruhle was a softball interview with a friendly interviewer. His first piece of evidence to substantiate his complaint is that rather than answering a question about why Trump polls better than her on the economy, Harris instead, “blasted Mr. Trump’s record.”

The MSNBC host’s second was about why voters tend to tell pollsters that Mr. Trump is better equipped to handle the economy.

Ms. Harris responded to the fairly basic and predictable questions with roundabout responses that did not provide a substantive answer.

Instead of offering any explanation for why Mr. Trump polls better on the economy — a matter that has vexed Democrats as President Biden has overseen a steadily improving economy — Ms. Harris instead blasted Mr. Trump’s record. She blamed him for a loss of manufacturing and autoworker jobs and said his tariff proposals would serve as an added sales tax on American consumers.

It was a friendly interview! But it was also more substantive than the press conferences that Epstein has fooled himself into believing presented challenging questions. And her assertions were factually correct (though WaPo says she misstated the manufacturing job loss).

For example, here’s the answer he’s complaining about:

RUHLE: But, still, polling shows that more — most likely voters still think Donald Trump is better to handle the economy. Why do you think that is?

HARRIS: Well, here’s what I know in terms of the facts.

Donald Trump left us with the worst economy since the Great Depression, when you look at, for example, the employment numbers.

RUHLE: It was during COVID, and employment was so high because we shut down the government, we shut down the country.

HARRIS: Even before the pandemic, he lost manufacturing jobs, by most people’s estimates, at least 200,000. He lost manufacturing plants. Ask the autoworkers how he lost auto plants.

We have grown over 20 new auto plants. He has an agenda. Let’s just deal with it right now going forward, not to mention what happened in the past.

He has an agenda that would include making it more difficult for workers to earn overtime, an agenda that would include cutting off access to small business loans for small businesses, an agenda that includes tariffs to the point that the average working person will spend 20 percent more on everyday necessities and an estimated $4,000 more a year on those everyday necessities, to the point that top economists in our country, from Nobel laureates, to people at Moody’s and Goldman Sachs, have compared my plan with his and said my plan would grow the economy.

His would shrink the economy. Some of them have actually assessed that his plan would increase inflation and invite a recession by the middle of next year. So, the facts remain that Donald Trump has a history of taking care of very rich people.

And I’m not mad at anybody for being rich, but they should pay their fair share — but tax cuts for the billionaires and the top corporations in our country, and then not really paying much attention to middle-class families. My perspective on the economy is, when you grow the middle class, America’s economy is stronger.

And there’s empirical evidence to prove my point correct.

Harris listed:

  • The decline of manufacturing jobs under Trump
  • The historic rise of manufacturing jobs under Joe Biden
  • Biden’s investment in the auto industry
  • Several Project 2025 policies that would hurt small businesses
  • Trump’s proposed tariffs, which even GOP economists loathe
  • Her plan to make taxes more fair

Ruhle asked a horserace question (and challenged Harris on the cause of the collapse of the economy under Trump), and Harris responded by listing a bunch of policies — those enacted under Biden, those she plans to do if elected, and those Trump has proposed — distinguishing her from Trump.

Later in the interview, she would observe that Trump is just not very serious on policy issues, in the kind of comment that drives Trump nuts and reassures certain kinds of voters who value overt strength. (I keep wondering whether I’m allowed to say Madam Vice President is dick-wagging, but this is language that resonates with a certain kind of often male voter.)

I — frankly, I’m going to — and I say this in all sincerity. He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues. And one must be serious and have a plan, and a real plan, that’s not just about some talking point ending in an exclamation at a political rally, but actually putting the thought into, what will be the return on the investment, what will be the economic impact on everyday people?

Never mind that Harris made a bunch of factual claims that almost never get covered at NYT. In an interview in Pittsburgh, she addressed manufacturing (and her opposition to Nippon Steel buying the local plant in Pittsburgh). That’s transparently obvious smart politics.

She spoke to voters, not Reid Epstein. She told a story about the economy, and poor Epstein is sad she didn’t tell a story about polling. She did what good politicians do: Answer the question that voters care about, not the one that horserace journalists care about.

Meanwhile, Epstein’s colleague Michael Gold wrote another of his sanewashing posts on Trump the other day, with the headline, “Trump Pitches ‘New American Industrialism’ and Luring Foreign Manufacturing.”

Don’t get me wrong: How voters view Harris on the economy is important. How voters view a candidate on their most important issue often predicts the winner. As Gallup explained in a piece arguing that most measures of the election favor Republicans, the party that does better on the issue voters view as most important almost always wins the election.

This measure has been highly predictive of election outcomes in Gallup trends dating back to 1948. The party rated as better at handling the most important problem has won all but three presidential elections since that year. The question was not asked in 2000, and the two parties tied in 1980, when inflation was the top issue. The only time the measure was out of sync with the outcome was in 1948, when Americans believed the Republican Party was better able to handle the most important problem (international issues) but returned Democratic incumbent Harry Truman to office.

Gallup rolled this out with a recent poll showing that the economy remains the most important issue — though their poll results are suspect, given that just 4% of respondents said abortion was their most important issue (it’s probably twice that).

At the end, Gallup suggests that voters will figure out they don’t like Democrats. Gallup doesn’t consider that maybe its poll shows way too many voters rate immigration most important and far too few rate abortion as such.

Nevertheless, the two major party presidential candidates have similar favorable ratings in Gallup’s September poll, echoing presidential preference polls that suggest a neck-and-neck race between Trump and Harris.

It is possible that Americans’ voter preferences may align better with their views of the state of the nation between now and Election Day. Trump led in most presidential preference polls this summer when Biden was the presumptive Democratic nominee and Americans’ unhappiness was focused on the incumbent president. The election results will reveal the extent to which Harris, the incumbent vice president, is saddled with Americans’ frustrations with the current administration or is able to rise above those.

That is, Gallup is sure the voters are wrong, not its own polling.

This is probably a good time to recommend Rick Perlstein’s review of W. Joseph Campbell’s Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections, which describes how serially unreliable presidential polling is.

But back to Reid Epstein, who judges Vice President Harris as a weak candidate because she’s speaking to voters, not Reid Epstein.

Polls, from all pollsters, generally show this to be a tight race, with results varying from Trump leading by one to Harris leading by seven.

Where there’s an interesting variation is on just this issue: how voters say the two candidates are doing on the economy.

NYT’s own poll — which is one of two most pessimistic for Harris — shows a significant 13% gap, about where things stood this summer.

But as WaPo reported yesterday, other polls show something different going on: They show that Harris is cutting into Trump’s lead on the economy.

Although voters still favor former president Donald Trump over Harris on handling the economy, his advantage has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. Trump now averages a six-percentage-point edge on the economy, compared with a 12-point lead against President Joe Biden earlier this year, according to an analysis of five polls that measured voters’ opinions before and after Biden dropped out.

A Fox News poll this month, for example, found that 51 percent of registered voters favor Trump on the economy, compared with 46 percent who favor Harris. That’s compared with a 15-point advantage Trump had over Biden in March. Other recent polls — by ABC-Ipsos, NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist, USA Today-Suffolk University and Quinnipiac University — show similar shifts.

WaPo credits overall economic trends and Kamala’s fresh face on these issues.

Underlying that sea change, analysts say, is the fact that Americans are feeling better about the economy. Prices are stabilizing, interest rates are coming down and wages are rising faster than inflation. At the same time, voters seem to view Harris as a clean slate, unburdened by the rapid run-up in prices that has plagued Biden for much of his presidency.

Plus, political strategists say, she has struck a decidedly different tone on the issue. Unlike Biden, who spent a lot of time trying to convince Americans that the underlying economy was great, Harris has come across as more sympathetic to their everyday struggles. Her economic policies — including a slate of new proposals rolling out this week — have focused on issues important to middle-class voters, including affordable health care, housing and childcare. Harris is scheduled to speak on the economy Wednesday in Pittsburgh.

“She’s been very aggressive about laying out specifics, and that’s what people want,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “It also helps that she’s a new face with a new set of life experiences, so people don’t assume her policies will be the same as Biden’s. And on top of that, inflation is abating. The fact that prices have stabilized and seem more predictable — that goes a long way.”

I suspect that it’s not just that Harris has approached this differently, it’s also that her own approval ratings have increased. Voters’ “feels” about Harris have dramatically improved, and as a result, they trust the facts she’s providing about the economy.

Those may be related. That is, voters may like her economic empathy, they may like her emphasis on being raised middle class that jaded reporters like Epstein find shallow.

Whatever it is, a number of polls are showing two key trends: Harris’ approvals are going up, dramatically (Biden’s are inching up), and more voters are beginning to prefer her on the economy.

They may well be showing that Harris’ strategy, including a media strategy that speaks to voters not horserace journalists, that emphasizes both her economic empathy and her wonkiness, is working — that no matter how much Epstein whines, Harris has a better handle on what to do about polls showing voters prefer Trump by shrinking margins on the economy than Epstein does.

It’s like the NYT story on Tim Walz’ trip to Erie, a swing county in the most important state, which twice bitched that Walz didn’t answer questions about a stupid Trump attack, that some of Walz’ cousins prefer Trump.

Mr. Walz also frustrated a handful of reporters as he refused to answer shouted questions.

[snip]

Mr. Walz ignored shouted questions from reporters about news articles that surfaced Wednesday over his own distant Republican relatives pledging to vote for Mr. Trump. But at his rally in Erie, he seemed to nod at those reports as he tied Mr. Trump to a set of conservative policies he described as harmful to democracy, women, workers and the middle class.

“So you tell your relatives because, look, we all got them — we know we got to keep talking to them — he said what he would do,” Mr. Walz said of Mr. Trump. “And I believe him.”

Epstein claims to care about voters’ opinion on the economy, but he’s so wrapped up in making himself the story that he ignored Harris’ effort — an effort that seems to be having some effect — moving voters’ opinion about the economy.

Harris is telling the story that Epstein refuses to.

That is, she’s doing her job.

This really does seem to be the problem with the NYT this year — and by no means just with Epstein. NYT wants the story to validate the horserace as horserace, it wants to validate a self-imagined measure of their own savviness, rather than focus on the voters’ needs and preferences. Epstein quite literally complained that Harris used her opportunity to do something about her (shrinking) deficit in polling on the economy, rather than indulging his needs by emphasizing it.

As Harris says, her mother taught her never to let others tell her who she is, but to show people who she is.

Reid Epstein, whom the NYT pays to cover Harris’ campaign full time, apparently missed that bit.

Don’t Make the Same Mistake with Iran that Denialists Made with Russia

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I read the book by Aaron Zebley, James Quarles, and Andrew Goldstein on the Mueller investigation. Regarding the investigation itself, there were no new details. Where the book does break new ground is in describing the discussions with Trump’s attorneys and DOJ officials, especially with regards to the debate about whether to subpoena Trump. I’ll return to those details in a follow-up.

But I want to point to something they said in their afterward. They describe that Barr’s treatment of the report helped sow doubt about the import of the Russian attack on US democracy in 2016.

Perhaps the most significant casualty of Barr’s handling of the report was the truth about Russia’s attack on the United States during the 2016 election. The Russian government interfered in our democracy in sweeping and systematic fashion. Those are the first substantive words of our report. This statement is beyond dispute, and yet many in America do not know that, and still others deny it.

As detailed in volume I of our report, Russian operatives working for the Internet Research Agency visited the United States in 2014 to gather intelligence for what they called “information warfare” against the United States. They returned to Russia and—sitting at their desks in Saint Petersburg—planned and advertised rallies to support Trump at specific US locations, invited Americans to attend, provided banners for Americans to wave, and then handed off logistical responsibilities for the events to real Americans. The goal of these activities, along with their yearslong campaign of false-name social media accounts, was to further divide Americans and cause them to think and behave in particular ways—including at the voting booth in 2016.

Meanwhile, Russian military intelligence hacked into email accounts belonging to the Democratic team supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then dumped emails and other documents they had stolen at specific times during the campaign to harm Clinton and bolster Trump. The Russians also leveraged WikiLeaks to release the stolen information, and, like the Russians, WikiLeaks timed its releases to favor Trump’s candidacy.

While these operations were underway, Russian government officials and their proxies reached out to multiple Trump campaign officials. George Papadopoulos was one example. A month after Trump appointed him as a foreign policy adviser in March 2016, Papadopoulos received word about a Russian government offer to assist the Trump campaign through the anonymous release of information information damaging to Clinton—“dirt” in the form of “thousands of emails.” This offer coincided with the Russian military’s then secret hack-and-dump operation.

It is beyond dispute that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election to support Trump—that was no hoax. They worked to secure his win. Our investigation of this work was no witch hunt.

[snip]

It has not seemed to matter, for instance, that our hack-and-dump indictment, which was backed by financial, email, and other records, demonstrated irrefutably that the Russian military executed this operation. Three days after the indictment came out, Trump dismissed it all in a press conference in Helsinki, Finland, after Putin—standing a few feet to Trump’s left—told him, “It’s not Russia.” Trump and his advocates declared it all a hoax, taking Putin’s word over the plain facts. And millions of Americans have taken this as truth, siding with Kremlin propaganda over the US Department of Justice.

We are now heading into another election. Russia interfered before, Russia is emboldened, and Russia is interfering again. Bob described Russia’s actions as one of the most serious attacks on democracy he has seen in his career—chilling words from the person who helped lead America’s fight against terrorism following the 9/11 attacks. As he put it in his 2019 testimony, the Russians are interfering in our democracy “as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.”

I’ve obviously written a lot about this. It’s the central focus of the Ball of Threads podcast that LOLGOP and I are doing.

I fear that, because of the polarization Trump has deliberately stoked, many lefties are doing the same thing that Trump’s MAGAts did with Russia: treat credible allegations that Iran is targeting him, both for hacking and assassination, as a hoax.

Regarding the hacking, as happened in 2016, it is not just the Intelligence Community (one, two) attributing the hack in real time. Both Microsoft and Google have described the operation. As I explained repeatedly regarding the 2016 Russian attack, big American tech companies have a similar kind of global reach as the NSA, and when someone uses their infrastructure to target someone, they have both the tools and an independent incentive to get the attribution right. There’s really no reason to doubt the attribution, from three of the entities with the best global reach in the world, that Iran targeted Trump’s campaign.

Regarding Iran’s attempt to assassinate Trump, there’s also no reason to doubt that. While the case against Asif Merchant, whom DOJ accused of trying to solicit a variety of operations targeting Trump, does rely on undercover FBI employees posing as wannabe hitmen, the underlying tip — from the guy Merchant allegedly asked for help recruiting a hit team — appears to be organic, just someone calling the cops. Plus, the effort bears certain resemblance to the effort to solicit assassins for John Bolton, arising from the same motive of revenge for the Qassem Soleimani killing.

According to court documents, on Oct. 22, 2021, Poursafi asked Individual A, a U.S. resident whom Poursafi previously met online, to take photographs of the former National Security Advisor, claiming the photographs were for a book Poursafi was writing. Individual A told Poursafi that he/she could introduce Poursafi to another person who would take the pictures for $5,000-$10,000. Individual A later introduced Poursafi to an associate (referred to in court documents as the confidential human source or CHS).

On Nov. 9, 2021, Poursafi contacted the CHS on an encrypted messaging application, and then directed the CHS to a second encrypted messaging application for further communications. Poursafi offered the CHS $250,000 to hire someone to “eliminate” the former National Security Advisor. This amount would later be negotiated up to $300,000. Poursafi added that he had an additional “job,” for which he would pay $1 million.

As I noted in my first post on the Merchant arrest, the Pakistani man took 20 minutes before he let the FBI in to arrest him, meaning he may have had time to destroy evidence. There’s no reason to assume Merchant’s efforts to hire assassins was limited to the NYC source who called the FBI, nor is there reason to assume that Merchant was the only one recruiting assassins.

Indeed, as I keep noting, we can’t rule out that Ryan Routh (who was indicted yesterday and will face trial before Aileen Cannon, and whose son was arrested Monday after the FBI found CSAM at his house while conducting a search presumably related to his father) was recruited by Iran. His sympathy for Iran and his antipathy for Trump were both public, he imagined himself a fighter, and he had international ties from his efforts to recruit fighters for Ukraine. Both the Bolton efforts and the Merchant plot relied on secure digital operational security, and the six phones Routh had in his truck indicate he was communicating in unusual ways, even for — especially for — a person with possible mental illness. And the timing of Routh’s movements — he left North Carolina August 14 and traveled to Florida, scoped out Trump events in August, September, and October, and conducted reconnaissance for much of the month leading up to his arrest — match the planned timing of the Merchant plot. For a variety of reasons (not least that Routh has due process rights and an incentive to flip, if he did have co-conspirators), if the FBI did suspect an Iranian tie, they wouldn’t say more than they already have done, including references to Iran in his detention memo.

In the wake of Routh’s indictment yesterday, the IC briefed Trump on ongoing assassination threats from Iran. And while his comments to Fox — suggesting that Kamala Harris was weak on Iran — were typical Trump garbage, Trump’s Xitter account posted something that — for him — is downright gracious, recognizing the bipartisan support to expand Secret Service funding.

It is perfectly reasonable to call out the double standards of Trump himself, in responding stupidly to the hacking attempt, in ignoring his own role in the stalking of Barack Obama and pretending he has faced unique threats, in media outlets refusing to publish stolen emails.

Trump’s narcissistic behavior is one reason it’s so easy for hostile countries like Russia and Iran to stoke division.

But that doesn’t mean you should make it easier for them, by doubting the word of neutral parties who attest the threat to Trump is real. The Russian attack continues to do real damage, to this day, because the investigation into it led to such polarization. If I’m right about the Steele dossier (Ball of Thread version), some of that was by design, while some of it was the auspicious upside (from the perspective of Russia) of targeting a narcissist. But the result is the same: By targeting Trump, you can elicit the tribalism that damages the US, regardless of Iran’s (or Russia’s) other efforts. A great deal of the polarization in the US, a great deal of the conspiracism on the part of Trump supporters, and therefore a great deal of the extremism, stems from the response to the Russian attack and investigation.

Whether a country backs Trump or wants revenge against him, the goal is the same: to end US hegemony and extend authoritarianism. There are public, rational reasons to believe that Iran really is targeting Trump. There are no good reasons to instead irrationally doubt those public attributions.

Update: In an appearance in North Carolina, Trump said there could be a tie to Iran, and complained that DOJ had not yet broken into the six phones found in Routh’s truck.