Great article by Fiona Hill. She has a lot of gravitas and experience and should be listened to. She understands the world very well and can pull together the different threads - Trump, Musk, Putin - and easily identify the type of world they are creating.
The end of the article landed with a thud for me. How close are we? We’re just one election away.
Boom.
I voted. I think it will be close. I also think Kamala is doing better than many polls indicate, and that part of Trump’s strategy is to sound overconfident on this side of the election, to then use it as evidence that another election was stolen from him. Our numbers showed we were ahead… how did we lose? It has been stolen.
I think we are heading for some interesting times.
Wonder if that comedian heathcliff or henchcliff or whatever his name is might have to go into hiding from his own ilk if his overt racism backfires. Or maybe he’ll run in 28.
Rogan has confirmed there were discussions with the Harris team but they couldnt make it work over the schedule. She obviously has limited openings and wanted to do it today but he rejected that as he was already busy that day. She also only wanted to book an hour and he said no saying his platform works better with a longer discussion.
I get Rogan is the go to place for Podcast guests and generally that means meeting his demands, but surely he understands this is a different sort of situation that justifies working with the interviewee.
The campaign and everything around has given up with dogwhistles. Last night on Abbie Phillips show on CNN their regular Trump apologist was arguing with Medhi Hassan (a Pakistani Brit now working in America after having made his name with Al Jazeera international) over his support for Palestinians when he said “I hope your pager doesnt go off.” Even in the era of Trump’s shocking conduct, I have never seen a moment where everyone had such an incredulous “holy fucking shit, did I just hear what I think I heard” like that.
This is obviously really bad electoral politics as while there is a lot of dog whistle racism the new group of non-white, non college educated Trump supporters will tolerate, you cannot straight up call them the N word to their face and not get a bad reaction. The obvious question is why now when they have made such inroads with this group? To me it is one of two answers
The worst of the movement are just giddy with expectation, think they already have it in the bag and are celebrating early. Metaphorically they are taking their hoods off.
This is part of the strategy to ramp up tension and hostility among a section of their base they think they need to cause public disturbances to give cover to their various efforts to fuck with the counts
I don’t think they’re trying to change minds, but trying to get people to show up and vote. That’s it. Get off the couch and go vote, look how terrible the other candidate is. Find motivation to show up. That kind of stuff.
Agreed - this election is about motivating the base not winning new voters. I think the media is building up more a narrative around this election than there really is.
Two weeks out, that is really the case for every election. It is one of the areas where the Democrats may have a massive advantage, simply because it is not at all clear what level of organization actually exists in the Trump campaign at the state level in some states. They have been really relying on the Congressiona/gubernatorial campaigns to do all that boring GOTV stuff, while simultaneously starving those campaigns of funds.
Abbie annoys me. So thankfully I didn’t watch. I would have vomited hearing that. I had to do a double take reading your post. Not sure why I am shocked any more, but occasionally I still am. Most of the time though, I just think despicable weirdos.
By the way, I am starting to come around to your option 2. That rally smacked of violent desperation.
For as detestable as Sarah Huckerbee Sanders is in her politics, she was a good operative. When Lara Trump replaced her at the RNC she completely defunded the local ground game efforts and shut down most of the physical locations they put time and effort into starting up. She just destroyed their GOTV infrastructure, all to direct funds towards Trump (and presumably his legal fees). There is now something like a 5-1 advantage the Dems have in terms of the number of physical locations running GOTV efforts as a result of this. To make up for that they have turned to Musk to run their GOTV efforts and that is going as poorly as you’d imagine. They are managing the effort via a new app that is supposedly shit (selected because someone involved in the effort gets paid for it being selected over other well vetted options) and they are having to resort to paying canvassers to do the work. And one rule of politics is when you have to pay your volunteers the work is shoddy as fuck and we have lots of reporting about that over the past months.
Lara is an amazing vocalist though. You can buy her single Hero from her album The Grifter for $100k. And you can buy two if you want to give one to a friend for $300k.
That’s how we used to sell our freshly caught Mackerel on the beach front as a kid - 1 for a pound of 3 for a fiver. You’d be amazed at the number of holiday makers who went for the fiver option.
Exactly. At that point they are just doing gig work, and that is why there are reports that about 1/4 of their reported canvassing engagements in AZ and NV were made up. Just fake info entered into the app so they can meet their quota and get paid. Volunteers actually do the work.
It is very obviously a real patchwork - the only uncertainty is to what extent the lower level campaigns have been grafted on successfully. However, the counterpoint to that is that there is an entire ecosystem of right-wing organizations (evangelical churches, etc) that run significant GOTV campaigns.
I remember in the 1980s there was a campaign run in central NC, where a candidate ran against a previously popular ‘Blue Dog’ Democrat - with a very explicit ‘pro-choice’ platform. While the Triangle area was split even then, the Bible Belt constituency was still strong and it was a surprise.
The real surprise was when the elected member became very clear that he meant pro-choice in schools (vouchers, etc) and was strongly anti-abortion. The local evangelical churches had delivered their vote despite the contrary public signal.
I said to the missus before the rally that I had a funny feeling that something was going to go terribly wrong and that they would end up regretting it. The stars were just too well aligned for it not to happen : From the comparisons already being made to the infamous Nazi rally of 1939 to the understanding that it was entirely Trump’s idea to go and do it there , when there was absolutely no need and nothing to be gained , simply because he wanted to go there and pretend to be King of NY for a day , in a city that fucking hates him , and where (allegedly) they were bussing people in from out of town to fill the stadium.