As journalists who focus on social media-enabled disinformation grow overwhelmed by the extent to which broad swathes of Americans have become detached from reality…
The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”
As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on X reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images—all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight—offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.
… NYT decided to do a puff piece on Elon Musk’s support for Trump.
Done as anything else than a corruption (which the piece largely ignores) or GOTV story, such a piece is in exceedingly bad taste.
All the more so given the way the NYT buries some of the most scandalous parts of the story.
In paragraph 23, for example, NYT cites two sources confirming that the Trump campaign intervened to get Xitter to take down links to the JD Vance dossier that Ken Klippenstein posted; it neither explains what was in the dossier nor names Klippenstein (indeed, aside from a photo caption, the article as a whole ignores JD Vance’s role in the Musk-Trump bromance).
The relationship has proved significant in other ways. After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform, according to two people with knowledge of the events. X eventually blocked links to the material and suspended the reporter’s account.
Donald Trump and top Republicans have spent years complaining that Twitter throttled, for two days, a NY Post story on the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s personal data that Trump’s personal attorney was disseminating. Elon Musk allowed propagandists to sort through Xitter’s internal discussions, and when Matty Taibbi misrepresented a reference to the takedown of dick pics, some of which Guo Wengui had altered, Musk outraged, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?”
Congress has held hearings! Trump still whines about the throttling of the NY Post story in his campaign rallies. That’s the excuse he uses for dodging the 60 Minutes interview.
This has been a central theme of right wing grievance for years. The Hunter Biden “laptop” is the founding myth in a far right reconceptualization of “free speech.” And when NYT catches Trump and Musk doing what they complain about, NYT buried that in paragraph 23.
More dangerous still is the way NYT misrepresents Elon Musk’s dangerous disinformation.
In the very last section of the 2,200 word story, starting around paragraph 33, NYT purports to describe Musk’s “misinformation,” suggesting he’s dumb, not deliberate.
If America PAC is the most ambitious and costly manifestation of Mr. Musk’s support for Mr. Trump, nowhere has his cheerleading been more evident than on X.
Since publicly endorsing the former president in July, he has posted at least 109 times about Mr. Trump and the election. And while he has said in the past that the platform should be “politically neutral,” he has used it to advance election misinformation and the baseless claim that Democrats are engaging in “deliberate voter importation” and “fast-tracking” immigrants to citizenship to gain control over the electorate.
One post with that claim this month has garnered nearly 34 million views, according to X’s own metrics, underscoring the scale of attention that Mr. Musk, owner of the platform’s most followed account, can command.
“Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars,” Mr. Musk wrote this month in a post that has gained nearly 18 million views. “This is existential.”
Online, Mr. Musk has painted a dark picture of what would happen if Mr. Trump lost, a circumstance that could hurt Mr. Musk personally. In an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged “trashing Kamala nonstop” and being all in for Mr. Trump.
If Mr. Trump loses, he joked, “how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”
This passage ignores Musk’s most important disinformation — things like his misrepresentation of hurricane response and his magnification of the most dehumanizing propaganda about migrants (including Haitians in Springfield, OH). NYT stupidly parroted Trump’s claim that they would replace normal turnout by sowing disinformation about this stuff, yet now they soft pedal how Musk is doing things that might get people killed.
Crazier still, NYT chooses not to mention Musk’s personal role in stoking far right anti-migrant violence in the UK, including his Tweet asserting that Civil War is inevitable. (NYT also doesn’t mention Musk’s attempt — with a legal fight all the way to the Supreme Court — to thwart Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump and his intransigence in the face of Brazilian legal requests as part of its response to a coup attempt.)
Musk has become a transnational vector for far right political violence.
NYT doesn’t mention that.
And finally, most insane of all, NYT doesn’t mention that Elon Musk has, more than once, joked about assassination and Kamala Harris.
After the Secret Service reached out to him the first time, Musk repeated the claim in the last week, joking with Tucker Carlson.
NYT calls this — repeated “jokes” about assassinating Kamala Harris — “insult[ing the Democratic Party’s] candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Elon Musk isn’t helping Trump get elected, NYT’s excuse for posting this puff piece. He’s helping Trump stoke fascism.
And rather than explaining the risk, NYT simply buries it.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Musk-Kamala-assassination.jpeg470680emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-10-11 08:14:132024-10-11 08:20:49NYT “Censors” Elon Musk’s Jokes about Assassinating the Vice President and His “Censorship” of JD Vance Dossier
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:
Hunter Biden’s laptop
Nothing was scheduled
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.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Screenshot-2024-10-02-at-11.17.00.jpg10482300emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-10-02 07:18:402024-10-02 10:21:37The “Truth” about JD Vance
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.
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.
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 afterhe 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.
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.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-30-at-12.11.28.png1090608emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-09-30 08:06:262024-09-30 08:28:33As Kamala Harris Passes the Two-Thirds Mark, Trump Adopts Apocalyptic Language
At a press conference on Ohio’s efforts to respond to the chaos created in Springfield by a slew of bomb threats, Governor Mike DeWine revealed that a number of the bomb threats came from “one particular country” overseas.
We have people, unfortunately, overseas, who are taking these actions. Some of them are coming from one particular country. We think that this is one more opportunity to mess with the United States. And they’re continuing to do that.
After that, in a truly deranged Xitter manifesto basically arguing that if the media doesn’t platform the false claims of Nazis attacking migrants, they’ll shoot someone, JD Vance falsely claimed that that’s proof a double standard from the media, then continued to lie that Kamala Harris was responsible for the assassination attempts against Trump.
[R]eports today suggest they came from a foreign country, not–as the media suggested–a deranged Trump fan.
The double standard is breathtaking. Donald Trump and I are, by their account, directly responsible for bomb threats from foreign countries. Why? Because we had the audacity to repeat what residents told us about the problems in their town. Meanwhile, Harris allies call for Trump to be eliminated as the media publishes arguments that he deserved to be shot.
Vance integrated this attack into his stump speech in Sparta Michigan, claiming that, “the American media has been laundering foreign disinformation” and deliberately lying — before DeWine revealed this — when they noted the bomb threats followed Trump and JD’s false attacks on Haitians.
Bomb threats that shut down schools and police stations and city halls is not foreign disinformation, JD. They are threats, just like the threats Trump has elicited against prosecutors, judges, and witnesses in cases against him. Everyone has had to take those bomb threats seriously, because you never know when one will be real. A school principal can’t tell in real time if a threat is coming from overseas. The threats have caused real costs to the city and its residents.
And, even if all the threats are coming from overseas — which goes further than what DeWine said — they are a foreign attack on Springfield. A foreign attack on Springfield doing very real damage.
I find it curious that DeWine didn’t reveal which country — China, Iran, Russia are the likely candidates given DeWine’s description that the country is taking “one more opportunity to mess with the United States” — is calling in these bomb threats. A Trump supporter like DeWine would have incentive to reveal if it were either of the first two (China doesn’t do this kind of thing, but Iran adopted the identity of Proud Boys in 2020 to threaten Democratic voters). If it’s Russia — and even if it’s Iran — the foreign country would be doing the bomb threats for the same reason Trump and JD keep lying about Haitians: to stoke fear and division. If it’s Russia, they’d be doing so in support of the candidate selling fear and division. But whichever it is, it appears to be (given DeWine’s description), a hostile foreign country seeking to harm the United States.
And the Senator from Ohio, JD Vance, treats these attacks on his state with very real consequences as mere disinformation.
The Senator from Ohio is minimizing an attack from one foreign country so he can attack immigrants legally in his state. JD Vance is awfully selective about which foreign threats he wails about.
Update: Relatedly, yesterday The New Republic published my analogy between JD’s false claims and those made by trolls pushing Trump in 2016.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Screenshot-2023-11-02-at-13.16.30.png588688emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-09-18 05:35:472024-09-18 06:12:39JD Vance Makes Light of Actual Foreign Interference in His State
According to Marc Caputo, the cat-eating screech that was one of the most disastrous moments of Donald Trump’s debate was supposed to be a planned bit.
DONALD TRUMP HAD A PLAN FOR Tuesday night’s presidential debate. But then the cat, neither abducted nor consumed, got his tongue and talking points.
If the moderators hit him for spreading a baseless urban legend about Haitian immigrants eating cats in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, the ex-president was supposed to execute a classic rope-a-dope strategy: He would dodge the punch and place the blame for the story on town locals; then he’d pivot to attacking Vice President Kamala Harris and the media over the toll of rampant immigration on housing, healthcare, and crime in Springfield.
It was all strategized in advance. There was just one problem: It required Trump to execute it.
But when the topic of immigration came up, the former president got sidetracked by taking umbrage with Harris’s insistence that he had uninspiring rallies. He then mentioned the possibility of World War III. Only after that did he launch into the rumors of pet-eating, and then without preparing viewers about the backstory.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
This explanation — that Trump was only supposed to raise this if moderators dinged him for spreading a racist hoax — doesn’t make sense on several levels.
That’s true, most of all, because Trump himself raised the hoaxes he’s been spreading about Springfield and Aurora in his very first response, which was supposed to be about the economy.
On top of that, we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums. And they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions. Unions are going to be affected very soon. And you see what’s happening. You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast. I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country. I’ll do it again and even better.
DAVID MUIR: We are going to get to immigration and border security during this debate. [my emphasis]
Debate first responses at any debate reflect a campaign’s primary focus and should be fresh from debate prep (though Trump invited Laura Loomer to fly to the debate with him, which is whom Mike Allen and Jim “Pool Boy” VandeHei blame for the meltdown). And Harris hadn’t yet started the process of beating Trump to a quivering mess yet, so that can’t explain why Trump raised it unbidden.
Trump repeated his immigration attack (this time not mentioning Aurora and Springfield) in response to Harris’ accusation that Trump exported chip technology to China.
But when you look at what she’s done to our country and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly where it’s I believe 21 million people, not the 15 that people say, and I think it’s a lot higher than the 21. That’s bigger than New York state. Pouring in. And just look at what they’re doing to our country. They’re criminals. Many of these people coming in are criminals. And that’s bad for our economy too. You mentioned before, we’ll talk about immigration later.
Well, bad immigration is the worst thing that can happen to our economy. They have and she has destroyed our country with policy that’s insane. Almost policy that you’d say they have to hate our country.
His cat screech came not in response to a question to him about the hoax he had already raised (what Caputo claimed it was supposed to be), but as a follow-up to Harris’ response to Muir’s question about why the Biden Administration had waited so long to implement executive orders.
DAVID MUIR: But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: So I’m the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organizations for the trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings. And let me say that the United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country. That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking in guns, drugs and human beings. But you know what happened to that bill? Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress, and said kill the bill. And you know why? Because he preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And understand, this comes at a time where the people of our country actually need a leader who engages in solutions, who actually addresses the problems at hand. But what we have in the former president is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. And I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised. And I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your, your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.
DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, thank you. President Trump, on that point I want to get your response.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I would like to respond.
DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. 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. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far — the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She’s destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success. We’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community —
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television
DAVID MUIR: Let me just say here this …
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.
DAVID MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
DAVID MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll find out
DAVID MUIR: Vice President Harris, I’ll let you respond to the rest of what you heard.
VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Talk about extreme.
There’s little doubt that the psychic damage Harris did by calling his rallies “bor[ing]” rattled his response, leading him to first defend the virility of his rallies and only then to deliver the purportedly prepackaged Springfield comment, delivered as screech.
But what happened next is significant, given the retconning that Caputo got fed.
Trump’s meltdown might not have been so damaging were it not for Muir’s fact check, one of just three from the entire debate, but nevertheless the one that has led right wing trolls to offer bounties to try to create a less pathetic explanation than, “the people on my TV say.”
The timeline shows that Trump raised Springfield, what Caputo calls, “a baseless urban legend,” himself, when he was still fresh and unsullied by Harris’ attacks. Then he had his screech. And then Muir offered a fact check that — let’s face it — right wingers didn’t expect (which therefore Trump’s debate preppers likely didn’t either).
No one expected the push back that Muir actually gave after the fact, yet it is central to the effort to retcon the screech.
As an interlude, make sure you seek out the various versions of Trump’s screech set to music, which I first saw from this guy.
A few more things happened, though, between Harris’ pummeling of Trump, his screech, and the time when people started retconning it with Caputo: Stephen “Discount Goebbels” Miller similarly got pummeled, in that case by a Venezuelan journalist, José del Pino, asking why Miller — and by extension, Trump — have this ridiculous belief that Nicolas Maduro brought down crime by exporting criminals to the United States.
So before someone tried to retcon Trump’s meltdown with Caputo, both Trump and Miller had had humiliating meltdowns.
And before that, Miller had spent most of the two days leading up to the debate disseminating these same false claims, RTing at least ten tweets dehumanizing Haitians, especially in Springfield.
The retconning fed to Caputo lets not just Miller off the hook for spreading what Caputo calls “a baseless urban legend.” It lets JD Vance off too.
After all, Ohio Senator Vance was a key vector in the pet-eating story.
Even after people explained there was no evidence for it, even as he acknowledge that “these rumors [may] turn out to be false,” JD nevertheless encouraged other trolls to “keep the cat memes flowing.”
Caputo credulously accepts that JD’s explanation to Kaitlan Collins in the spin room (in an interview given around the same time that Miller was melting down when called on the fact that he was parroting Maduro’s false stats) that meming was just a way to highlight the underlying tensions in a small city with an influx of new residents, of whatever race and national origin.
It was left to his vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, to play cleanup and showcase the campaign’s strategy during an appearance on CNN 45 minutes after the debate had ended.
“This town has been ravaged by 20,000 migrants coming in . . . This is what Kamala Harris’s border policies have done,” Vance said. “The media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats . . . If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we’re going to keep on doing it because the media should care about what’s going on.”
The primary cleanup here was Caputo’s.
Caputo doesn’t mention Collins’ comparison of this hoax to Bigfoot. He doesn’t mention how Vance bulldozed through Collins’ point that Trump raised this even though officials have no evidence.
If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot. You have a sense of responsibility as a running mate, he certainly does as the candidate to not promote false information, right?
Similarly, Caputo cleaned up what he describes Jason Miller’s attempt to “polish” this conspiracy.
In a CNN interview Wednesday morning, Miller also tried to polish Trump’s immigration remarks from the night before. He insisted the story of pet-eating Haitians wasn’t far-fetched by boosting a story from the conservative website the Federalist about a Springfield resident who recently called 911 to report four Haitians each carrying a goose (but the story didn’t mention cats, dogs, or pets).
Miller complained about the bias of the moderators for failing to fact-check Harris on issues like fracking and said they should have talked about the Biden-Harris administration’s “airlifts” of Haitian migrants into the United States.
[snip]
Later that morning on Truth Social, Trump posted an image of the police report as well as video of a woman in the city of Canton, Ohio (which is 173 miles away from Springfield) who was arrested for eating a cat. The woman is a U.S. citizen and not of Haitian descent, according to press reports.
Yes, Caputo noted how ridiculous it was for Miller and others to point to Haitians carrying geese (or a troubled non-immigrant woman 100 miles away who did eat a pet) to claim their Haitian hoax was defensible.
He didn’t note that Miller was on CNN falsely claiming the Haitians in Springfield are illegal (or that they were brought in deliberately). That is, Caputo cleaned up the false premise here: that Trump and his team are calling legal immigrants illegals, and on that basis fearmongering about someone eating your pet kitty.
This is the real issue, both in the dissemination and Caputo’s willingness to repackage it.
All the evidence suggests this is not “a baseless urban legend.” Rather, it is a packaged neo-Nazi attack designed to sow violence against migrant communities.
According to a local leader in the Haitian community, while there were tensions, none of that boiled up until a car accident involving a legal Haitian ended up killing a school boy.
What were things like over the course of the first couple of years that you were living in Springfield? Was the community welcoming?
We were just here working peacefully and caring about our family and all of this. The community was okay. There was still a group of people in Springfield who saw the coming of the Haitians as a threat. But normally, generally, the community was so open with us. We had so many people working with us and things like this. Until the recent incident of the recent bus accident and people have been building up on that just to tell bad news about us.
So you think the bus accident was when things really started to change?
Yeah, it triggered it. There was some tension before but not like it came after the bus accident.
A neo-Nazi group responded to that by organizing a march in the town. And then one of them created a conflict at a local city commission.
Late last month, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Ties organized a march outside the Springfield Jazz and Blues Festival. At the Aug. 26 city commission meeting, Drake R. Berentz took credit for organizing that march while introducing himself via an anti-Black pseudonym. He was promptly removed from the hearing after stating, “Crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you bring in.”
A national far right network with intimate ties to Trump’s team start magnifying disinformation from Springfield.
Shortly after, racist claims aimed at the state’s Haitian community began to surge online, boosted by known disinformation outlets and eventually echoed by GOP officials.
The unfounded narrative that Haitian immigrants were eating pets reached national attention after being repeated this week first by Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance (the junior senator from Ohio) and then his running mate Donald Trump at the latter’s debate with Kamala Harris.
The origins of the conspiracy theory remain largely unknown, but a New Lines investigation has identified several points of amplification from known spreaders of disinformation. Its fairly rapid spread reveals how extremist narratives travel from the fringes of the internet into the mouths of politicians, seemingly overnight.
Less than a week earlier, End Wokeness, an account on X (formally Twitter) that has been connected in the past to the white nationalist Jack Posobiec, shared a Facebook post alleging that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio. The claim was quickly repeated by the political commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, during his broadcast hosted on Steve Bannon’s media network.
Kirk commented that this brought the United States “one step closer to the great replacement,” referring to a white nationalist narrative that claims non-white immigrants are replacing white people in the U.S. The narrative was originally obscure but has been increasingly embraced by the GOP mainstream in recent years.
Kirk is a close associate of Posobiec. Both his claims and the End Wokeness account’s tweet reference a single anonymous post on a private Facebook group as proof of their claims.
This was followed up on Sept. 8, when the End Wokeness account tweeted a video from a Springfield City Commission meeting where an influencer and podcaster named Anthony Harris claimed Haitian immigrants were eating ducks in the parks. This seemingly spawned from a repurposed image of a man holding a dead Canada goose in Columbus, Ohio, taken a month before.
This entire story, then, is about creating false stories in order to stoke far right violence against immigrants. It’s not an urban legend. It is deliberate propaganda.
And as such, it’s little different from the deliberate disinformation used to stoke the Dublin or Southport riots. Indeed, the networks behind all of them have very significant overlaps.
What is different here is that Trump is running to regain the presidency on such a platform of such disinformation. Trump’s team is riddled with participants in this transnational effort to stoke fascism with viral disinformation targeting immigrants; some of them aren’t even serving prison terms in Danbury FCI for covering up January 6! And Elon Musk has been all too happy to encourage it on Xitter.
Because of this — because of the way Trump’s team participates in this — Trump’s meltdown calls for far more than embarrassed retconning.
I don’t doubt that this was an orchestrated, intentional smear, one that Trump flubbed because Kamala Harris first made Trump insecure and then because Muir came ready with a fact-check. The fact that Trump’s handlers are trying to excuse it away as — in the Axios version — a matter of the fascist conspiracists he has admitted into his old man bubble, is a tell, but also an opportunity.
He’s haunted. He can’t stand being seen as a loser. So it’s impossible to fully admit he didn’t win in 2020. He looks to distractions like crowd size and adoring coverage for solace. So, seemingly silly taunts — like Harris’ “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom” — hit deep.
He falls for fake news. For a guy who made “fake news” a household term, he falls for it often and easily. It wasn’t hard to learn that the allegations of Haitians eating pet dogs and cats were silly and wrong. But far-right activist Laura Loomer was on the plane ride to the debate with him, egging him on.
He’s old. A wise man told us three types of people never change: Old guys. Rich guys. Guys with their names on the building. So the chances that Trump — a 78-year-old, self-proclaimed billionaire with his name on buildings, bottles and golf courses — will change are, um, nil.
His bubble lies to him. All politicians live in self-protective bubbles. But Trump’s, which extends from his social media cocoon to his Mar-a-Lago luxury, is almost impossible to penetrate with hard truths. There’s always a Loomer to tell Trump he’s winning … even when he’s not.
Usually, this far right disinformation is supposed to be a little smoother than this — like JD delivered it, rather than the screech with which Trump did.
But, in spite of the excuses fed to Bulwark and Axios, the screech is the real thing. It is who Trump is. It is the ugliness with which this is all intended.
And rather than accepting excuses because the former President’s delivery made the ugliness readily visible in front of millions, we need to be clear that these memes are not, in fact, an effort to focus attention on the growing pains of a town with booming population.
Rather, they are a deliberate attempt to dehumanize people to either sow fear among voters — Trump even targeted this at union voters! — or violence if that fails.
After Kamala Harris rattled his ego, Trump showed himself for who he and his extended network really are. When people show you who they really are, believe them.
Update: Paul Waldman notes the intentionality of all this as well.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-12-at-14.25.59.png1080928emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-09-12 11:45:082024-09-12 13:21:03Trump’s Handlers Attempt to Retcon His Fascist Attack on Haitian Migrants
JD Vance has gotten a lot of deserved criticism for the offhand way he dismissed the Apalachee School shooting.
If you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.
[snip]
I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality we live in.
[snip]
We don’t have to like the reality that we live in. But it is the reality that we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.
Trump, of course, famously told the families grieving after a shooting in Perry, Iowa, “It’s just horrible, so surprising to see it here. But have to get over it, we have to move forward.”
It’s not just that JD’s proposed solution is to box everyone up in aquariums like the Secret Service has done to Trump, but the way in which both men want to pray (or feign prayer, in Trump’s case) and move on.
Compare that to how Trump’s own people are treating his own shooting.
Vance, of course, didn’t blame some “psycho who wanted to make headlines” for Trump’s shooting. Instead, he blamed Joe Biden.
And Trump’s top propagandist, Stephen Miller, won’t shut up about Trump’s shooting.
Trump’s people want people to obsess about his own shooting, a month ago, even while minimizing the impact of a shooting that killed four, including two kids. That’s true, even though all the evidence to date suggests that Thomas Crooks shares many similarities with school shooters like accused Georgia shooter Colt Gray, including a fascination with previous school (and in Crooks’ case, presidential) shooters.
Even given all of the Secret Service’s failures, Donald Trump was not a soft target, like schools are. But ultimately he, too, was vulnerable to an assault rifle in the hands of a disturbed young man hoping for notoriety.
Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance don’t want to get over that shooting attempt, and the murder of Corey Comperatore. They need Trump to be more special than all the kids gunned down in their schools. They need Trump’s shooting to have a meaning they won’t ascribe to the murder of children in their classrooms.
And yet Trump is no more special a victim than the teenagers killed in Georgia.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Screenshot-2024-09-06-at-2.33.41 PM.png1008804emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-09-06 10:05:512024-09-06 10:05:51“If You Are a Psycho and You Want to Make Headlines”
Since the day after the debate in June, I have conceived of the shift from a Joe Biden to a Kamala Harris campaign in three ways: The Vice President would more vigorously explain the wildly successful policies of the Biden-Harris Administration. She might (and indeed, has started to) chip away at the Double Hater logjam that has embodied presidential elections since 2016. And she would speak about choice far better than Biden ever could.
At the time, I maintained that Gretchen Whitmer was the only Democrat nationally who speaks better to choice than Harris does. In assuming the presidential ticket, Kamala’s team has made abortion something far more. They have made reproductive rights a cornerstone of a revamped democracy agenda.
That has happened in a curious way. Dobbs only happened because the Supreme Court has become a supercharged, wildly undemocratic wing of right wing policy. The fight to get abortion referenda on state ballots has repeatedly, perhaps most notably in Ohio, had to first defeat anti-democratic efforts to disempower referenda generally. In Wisconsin, voters first had to put Janet Protasiewicz on the Supreme Court before they could turn to protecting reproductive choice, but organizing to do that has laid the groundwork for renewed Democratic vitality. To restore reproductive rights, in state after state, democracy must be renewed.
But all that’s in the background. Kamala’s team has succeeded in making abortion something more: the most obvious item on a laundry list of the ways the far right has tried to take rights (and books) away, a fight for Freedom, one that has enthused millions of younger voters, especially women of child-bearing age.
And so, as I thought it might, Kamala’s focus on choice is one of the things that has remade the race.
It didn’t take rocket science to offer that prediction (though surprisingly few pundits did so, and most people pushing for a Thunderdome primary, who were overwhelmingly men, missed it). Democrats have successfully run on choice since Dobbs; it has played a central role in Democratic campaigns even in places like Andy Beshear’s Kentucky. Yet Kamala’s clarion voice on the issue largely got ignored as people plotted for ways to bypass the first woman Vice President to replace Biden.
Thus far in this campaign, a focus on abortion has also provided a way to make visible the patriarchy presumed in most threads of the right wing coalition backing Trump, especially but by no means exclusively Christian nationalism. Lest voters ever forget, Kamala’s campaign keeps rolling out one after another video in which JD Vance demands women get back to the role his Church dictates for them: breeding children.
A number of things — the successful convention, a surge in registration among those women of child-bearing age, polls showing that abortion is the most important issue for a larger number of voters — have led horserace journalists to finally cop on.
Or perhaps they’re just noting Trump’s response to Kamala’s focus on choice. I think choice (and the way it harms Trump with women voters) is one reason Trump’s team made Tulsi Gabbard a more formal surrogate; in their appearance together in LaCrosse, billed a Town Hall, Tulsi told the story of her own attempt to conceive using IVF, effectively adopting Tim Walz’ story and focus. Certainly, it’s the reason why, over the course of one day, Trump said wildly contradictory things about choice.
Yesterday, both NYT and WaPo had stories describing the background to that. Trump whisperers Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who in July first seeded the false narrative that a GOP platform that enshrines fetal personhood reflects a “softened” stance on abortion, treat it as primarily a matter of messaging.
Back in 2022, the former president had told allies — as the Supreme Court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade — that the move would hurt his party. Since that year, when Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterm elections, Mr. Trump has been privately emphatic with advisers that in his view the abortion issue alone could kill their chances of victory in November. And he is willing to make as many rhetorical and policy contortions as he deems necessary to win.
It is through that narrow political lens that Mr. Trump has been weighing the subject, despite his role in reshaping the Supreme Court that overturned the landmark 1973 abortion decision.
The results have been confusing and fluid, a contradictory mess of policy statements as he has once again tried to rebrand himself on an issue that many of his supporters view in strict moral terms, and had come to believe that he did, too.
[snip]
Still, even by Mr. Trump’s standards, the past few weeks have been head-spinning for people trying to keep track of his slippery social conservatism.
Twice divorced serial philanderer Donald Trump doesn’t have social conservatism. He has a politically expedient con. Trump has convinced Christian nationalists he was anti-choice in public while attempting to limit the political damage of anti-choice policies behind the scenes. And that con is running headlong into the consequences of the actions he took to sustain the con.
WaPo states this more clearly; this is not about messaging (though WaPo cites Republicans mocking how bad Trump’s messaging on it is). It’s about Trump’s record. Trump had wanted to run on other policies, immigration and Trump’s distorted claims about the economy, but now he’s having to answer for his anti-choice policies.
Many Republicans are hoping that other topics, like the economy and the border, will take precedence for voters, and they cite polls showing broader voter interest in those issues than in abortion.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that women voters will compare the Trump and Biden-Harris administrations, and that under Trump, “the economy was better, groceries and gas cost less, our neighborhoods were safer, and young women like Laken Riley were still alive” — a reference to a Georgia student allegedly killed by someone who entered the country illegally in 2022.
But, as noted, in the month since she has entered the race, Kamala has made abortion the primary issue for more voters than immigration is, and it rivals the economy as the most important election issue among women voters.
Swan and Maggie describe how Trump became what they describe as “agitated” after watching the way the DNC made abortion a primary focus.
In private, Mr. Trump was agitated by the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, according to a person close to him, many of which tied him to Project 2025, an effort by people supportive of Mr. Trump to develop policy proposals for him if he wins that include restrictive ideas for reproductive measures. He was especially bothered by Ms. Harris’s assertions that a second Trump term would further imperil abortion rights.
This is more than agitation.
It is flailing.
Panic.
A recognition that he is losing because of actions he took as President, he is losing because of what the payoff he owed to social conservatives who put him in the White House, a far right SCOTUS, did to women. What NYT journalists with another book contract describe as “head-spinning” is not about branding, it’s about panic because Kamala threatens to hold him accountable for his actions.
No matter how many contradictory statements Trump makes about what a second Trump term would do, there’s no escaping what his first term did do. There are no backsies on Dobbs. There are no backsies on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. There aren’t even any backsies on that platform granting fetuses protection under the 14th Amendment, even if NYT’s Trump whisperers continue to pretend that didn’t happen.
I mean, come on! If not for the three people Trump added to SCOTUS and those, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, paid for by the same far right Christian nationalists that pushed Vance as a candidate, Trump would be sitting in trial for his attack on January 6 as we speak. Trump is only here, in the race, because of those ideologues who were willing to alter the Constitution to serve a far right agenda. Trump has survived thanks to that Court; he is panicking as he considers the possibility it’ll sink him as well.
And even as Kamala already has Trump panicking, it could get worse for Trump and his party.
There’s something about the WaPo version of this story that I can’t get out of my head; it’s actually one of the reasons I went through the trouble of writing this post. Its subhead (presumably not written by the journalists) suggests Trump’s wild gyrations on choice come during the “final stretch” of the campaign. “Heading into the campaign’s final stretch, Republicans careen between their base and swing voters on the powerful issue of reproductive rights.” The temporal observation, that we’re in the last stretch, is undoubtedly true viewed through the lens of the traditional interminable US presidential campaign. Labor Day kicks off the last, most intense period of a campaign, though importantly, the period when low-information voters first start to tune in. Given Trump’s attempt to stave off criminal charges by announcing his run early, in November 2022, it’s far more true of Trump, who is 91% of the way through his run to regain the presidency.
Not so Kamala Harris.
As I calculated Wednesday, Kamala is just starting the second third of her campaign, what we might call her second trimester if it were three times as long. As of today, she has 60% of her campaign, 64 days of 107, left to go.
And so, even as Kamala has already made Trump an equivocating wreck, nine-tenths of the way through his campaign and just in time for low-information voters to witness it, she has only just laid a foundation to build on. Even as the press described Trump’s flopsweat as abortion threatens to ruin his bid, Kamala’s campaign rolled out a bus tour to focus on reproductive rights.
They are, quite literally, taking it to Trump, to Palm Beach, for the kickoff.
Today, Team Harris-Walz is announcing the launch of its “Fighting for Reproductive Freedom” bus tour with a kickoff event in Donald Trump’s backyard in Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday, September 3. Senator Amy Klobuchar, Harris-Walz campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Republican TV personality Ana Navarro, and reproductive rights storyteller Anya Cook will hold Trump directly accountable for the devastating impacts of overturning Roe v. Wade, including threatening access to IVF.
This fall, the bus will make at least 50 stops in key states, touching blue communities and red ones, with support for reproductive rights transcending party lines. Each stop will emphasize the stark contrast between Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, who will restore the protections of Roe when Congress passes a bill to do so, and Donald Trump and JD Vance, who will enact their dangerous Project 2025 agenda to ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control, create a national anti-abortion coordinator, force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions, and jeopardize access to IVF.
This is a bus tour of diverse surrogates, not Harris or Walz themselves. The grand-daughter of César Chávez, Julie Chávez Rodriguez, is the only royalty on this bus. But the bus provides the campaign a low-effort way to build on the foundation established at the DNC, to try to yoke state referenda more closely to partisan races, to try to make races like that of Florida Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (or that of Angela Alsobrooks or Dan Osborn) more competitive. If that works, who knows how close Kamala might make the Florida race itself? Even assuming Kamala won’t beat Trump in his own state, it will serve to reinvigorate a state party that had been struggling, but which also just recently delivered embarrassing defeats to Moms for Liberty, the book-burners who serve as both Ron DeSantis and Trump’s surrogates to reach women.
Thus far, horserace journalists have been absolutely loathe to hold Trump accountable for the bad things that happened when he was President: his failures on COVID as well as jobs lost for reasons other than pandemic, the spike in crime, his corruption of rule of law.
But Kamala has finally made Trump own something, his role in stripping women of their bodily autonomy.
And in response, Trump has started to panic.
Update: This Public Notice piece on the press’ willingness to let Trump flip flop on choice with impunity him on it names several other policies he should not have backsies on either.
There’s no earthly reason to give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. Besides dismantling the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, the Trump administration also tried to undermine private insurance coverage for abortions, prohibited clinics from receiving federal funds under Title X if they even referred people elsewhere for abortion services, and slashed grants for teen pregnancy prevention programs. A second Trump administration will be comprehensively terrible for reproductive rights generally, not just abortion, and no amount of uninformed flip-flopping will change that.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Kamala-Freedom.png640480emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2024-09-01 08:28:142024-09-02 10:04:55There Are No Backsies on Dobbs
