A Glimpse of a Better Future
Plus: Trump’s increasingly remarkable obsession with CBS News.
“With Election Day 2 Weeks Away,” the New York Times headline reads, “15 Million Voters Have Already Cast a Ballot.”
We’re in the thick of it, folks: Happy Tuesday.
Why Harris-Cheney Matters
by William Kristol
Let’s not kid ourselves: The current moment is depressing.
The character of a Trump second term—both authoritarian and anti-constitutional, dangerous and squalid—has become as clear as could be. Yet Donald Trump is going to get the votes of nearly half the American electorate. Even if Trump falls short two weeks from now, the extent of his support casts a large shadow over our hopes for the future.
Having said that, I hasten to remind one and all that it’s critically important that Trump does fall short, that he does lose. And it is heartening that against the prospect of a Trump victory, some Republicans and independents have rallied to Kamala Harris’s side. Equally heartening is that Harris has welcomed these allies to the common cause.
Sitting side-by-side yesterday, Liz Cheney and Vice President Harris emphasized a joint commitment to defending the rule of law, the Constitution, the international order, and basic decency.
I don’t think anyone quoted Edmund Burke, but they could have: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
And so, against Trump’s authoritarian challenge, good men—and more notably perhaps, good women—have come together in association. It would be nice if a few more individuals joined in this effort and unambiguously put country over party. But in any case, we’ll be preoccupied over the next two weeks with the effort to prevail in defense of what’s very much worth defending.
We can take inspiration from Lincoln’s remarks to the 166th Ohio Regiment, on August 22, 1864:
It is not merely for today, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. . . .It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright. . . . The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.
Lincoln underscored that the soldiers he addressed were engaged in a struggle to perpetuate, to maintain, to secure their birthright. But that defensive struggle in the Civil War of course also made possible great advances. The Civil War led to the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Civil War led to “a new birth of freedom.”
Similarly, World War II was a defensive struggle. But it laid the groundwork for the creation of institutions to bolster a new, post-war order, one that sought to prevent such a war from occurring again and also to lay the foundations for a freer and more prosperous world.
We are not, thankfully, engaged in a struggle anything like the magnitude of the Civil War or World War II.
But in watching Harris and Cheney yesterday, I thought one could see glimpses not just of a defensive struggle, but of a better future, a future superior to the politics of recent decades, a future in which ossified ideologies would begin to break apart, in which younger leaders would seek not just common ground but fresh solutions to neglected problems, and new opportunities for all of us. I thought one could sense that we are fighting not just against something, but for something.
But to shape a new future, we first need to overcome the challenge of the present. We have to prevail in the battle before we can turn to winning the peace.
Trump’s Dumbest Crusade
by Andrew Egger
There’s a special indignity to the political moment in which we find ourselves. Not only is Donald Trump nakedly lusting to wield authoritarian power against his political enemies—he’s also singling out those enemies for what are genuinely the dumbest reasons we can imagine.
It was no shock earlier this month that Trump decided to do some rabble-rousing following Kamala Harris’s interview on 60 Minutes: He needed to justify his decision to skip the CBS interview himself.
What has been faintly surprising, however, is just how long and how hotly he’s kept this particular grievance burning. He is still spinning out lengthy anti-CBS screeds at rallies. In North Carolina yesterday, he called it “the biggest scandal in the history of broadcasting.” His campaign is threatening legal action against the network. It’s been his single biggest obsession this month on Truth Social, where he’s railed about it in nineteen separate posts, calling for CBS to lose its broadcast license and for Harris to be forced to forfeit the election over the matter.
What did CBS do to provoke all this? They edited an interview—showing a different clip of a single Harris answer online than they ultimately broadcast on their show.
It is seriously difficult to communicate how thuddingly stupid Trump’s complaints are here. If transmitting only selected pieces of a politician’s speech were a journalistic crime, every outlet under the sun, from the hardest right to the farthest left, would be guilty as sin. Editorial decisions over what or what not to include in interviews happen all the time. Trump knows this! The other day, he was on a live feed with Dan Bongino, asking to go “off the record.”
It is true that these editorial choices on where and how to package an interview can have the effect of making politicians come across as sharper than they are. But, again, the footage that Trump insists was hidden was actually posted online. What are we doing here, folks?
What’s particularly ridiculous about Trump’s crusade here is this: No single politician has benefited more from the salutary effects of media trimming than Trump himself. Writers like Parker Molloy have been describing this phenomenon—which some have regrettably termed “sanewashing”—for years:
The general practice went like this: The press would take something Trump said or did—for instance, using a visit to the Centers for Disease Control to ask about Fox News’s ratings, insult then–Washington Governor Jay Inslee, rant about his attempt to extort Ukraine into digging up dirt on Joe Biden, and downplay the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the U.S.—and write them up as The New York Times did: “Trump Says ‘People Have to Remain Calm’ Amid Coronavirus Outbreak.” This had the effect of making it seem like Trump’s words and actions seemed cogent and sensible for the vast majority of Americans who didn’t happen to watch his rant live.
Trump spends hours at rallies waxing conspiratorial, whining, threatening, and making boorish jokes, all in an incoherent free-associative ramble he’s taken to calling “the weave.” Journalists, tasked with squinting at all that and figuring out what Trump is actually saying, sift through for some chestnut of information they can put in their article. In sparing their readers all that sound and fury, they often don’t (or can’t) include full quotes. Thus their writeups often fail to communicate the full effect of Trump’s lunacy. And when they do capture it, Trump will then insist that they missed the sarcasm in his voice, or his sycophants will say he shouldn’t be taken literally.
They want not just the benefit of the edit but the benefit of the doubt. But don’t dare extend that to 60 Minutes! In that case, heads have got to roll.
Quick Hits
THE GOLDEN ARCHES: It isn’t as cruel and sinister as whipping up false stories about migrants eating pets, but Trump World’s growing obsession with finding proof that Kamala Harris didn’t actually work at McDonald’s briefly back in the ‘80s has to at least tie for the dumbest sideshow of the race.
Yesterday, the Daily Mail tabloid published an article seeming to suggest McDonald’s was covering for Harris: “McDonald’s claims they are missing Kamala Harris’s employment records as staff are ‘sworn to secrecy.’” In reality, McDonald’s simply acknowledged that “we and our franchisees don’t have records for all positions dating back to the early ’80s.” (McDonald’s restaurants are independently owned and operated franchises, so—duh.) The “sworn to secrecy” bit? That was a random employee at the location where Harris says she worked telling the Daily Mail that “I’m sorry, I don’t have any information” on Harris’s employment records. (WHAT ARE THEY TRYING TO HIDE??) Nevertheless, the piece bounced around the MAGA internet as though it were a smoking gun disproving Harris’s claims.
It’s a striking example of how the Steve Bannon “flood the zone with shit” strategy works. Team Harris can’t spend time engaging on this nonsense; there’s no way to do so without looking ridiculous. But simply ignoring the howling media apparatus spinning it up 24 hours a day doesn’t feel like a great strategy either.
RUSH $20 TODAY . . . AND TODAY . . . AND TODAY: This CNN report on how online political fundraising can prey on dementia patients is sickening:
The 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas had saved for decades, driving around in an old car and buying clothes from thrift stores so he’d have enough money to enjoy his retirement years.
But as dementia robbed him of his reasoning abilities, he began making online political donations over and over again—eventually telling his son he believed he was part of a network of political operatives communicating with key Republican leaders. In less than two years, the man became one of the country’s largest grassroots supporters of the Republican Party, ultimately giving away nearly half a million dollars to former President Donald Trump and other candidates. Now, the savings account he spent his whole life building is practically empty.
The story of this unlikely political benefactor is one of many playing out across the country.
Cheap Shots
If Trump thinks CBS should have released all the footage of the Harris interview, then I assume he'll have no problem with Mark Burnett releasing all the un-aired tape they have from The Apprentice....
Kamala Harris is running an outstanding campaign. She's a conventional, slightly left of center politician whose opponent is, as Will Saletan correctly notes, openly running as a fascist. If Harris loses it won't be because of anything she did or didn't do. It will be because of who *we* are.