Don’t Blame Kamala

If she loses—and it really is a toss up—the questions we must ask are about ourselves.

At a rally in Michigan last night, JD Vance waved off John Kelly’s warnings about Donald Trump’s fascist tendencies and affinity for Hitler’s generals, sneering at the decorated general and former Trump chief of staff as “a disgruntled ex-employee”: “I think everything that John Kelly said is not true.”

Hey, it makes sense. After all, who could possibly believe that Trump would in any way resemble Hitler? Happy Friday.

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Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Green Bay, Wisconsin, October 17, 2024. (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski / AFP via Getty Images.)

Against Complacency, Against Finger-Pointing

by William Kristol

A while ago, I quoted a passage from George Orwell’s terrific 1942 essay, “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” Orwell raised the possibility that “Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms,” could prevail in the world. And he remarked:

We in England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run.

We have “a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens.” This observation of Orwell’s, like Banquo’s ghost at the banquet, keeps appearing, unbidden, before me as I discuss the presidential race with allies. We on the side of liberal democracy really do have a hard time believing that right may not triumph.

Or if we do see that possibility—if our sentimental view of things looks as if it may not pan out—we flip from complacency to panic and finger-pointing. How could things have gone wrong? Why didn’t Kamala Harris respond to the immigration and crime and transgender advertising onslaught more effectively? Why was she so hesitant about separating from the Biden administration? Why the Walz VP pick? Why the failure to do better at this interview or that town hall?

All fair enough, I suppose.

But if you step back and look at the bigger picture, you’d have to say that Harris has done as well as could have been expected. Indeed, I’d say she’s done better than could reasonably have been expected.

Things could have fallen apart when Joe Biden suddenly stepped aside. Instead Harris was able to clinch the nomination very quickly, had a strong first few weeks, and erased the deficit Biden had bequeathed her. The Democratic convention was a success, as was her acceptance speech. Her performance at the debate with Donald Trump was first-rate.

The launch, the convention, and the debate: Those were the key tests, and she passed all of them. That should have been enough.

In a “normal” political environment it probably would have been. But we’re in the era of Trump. All kinds of revelations about, and proclamations by, Trump that would once have charted a path to defeat instead wash off the American public like water off a duck’s back. As does all the evidence that the economy is doing well, and that we’re not living in the midst of American carnage.

At the same time, the American political system has degenerated to the point that pro-Trump oligarchs can use their power without restraint, perhaps in collusion with pro-Trump dictators abroad. The liberal and centrist establishment, by contrast, is weak.

So the actual correlation of forces in the United States may not be, at this point, favorable to the defense of the rule of law and liberal democracy.

That’s the political environment we’re living in, and that Harris is running in. I think Harris nonetheless has a good chance to win. If she does, people will explain how their personal favorite part of the campaign was key to her success. But the fact is, even if she loses, she will have done as well as could have reasonably been expected.

Of course, people will ignore that and blame her. The losing candidate always gets thrown under the bus. But it will be wrong to do so. It’s been up to us, for a decade, to stop the bus of authoritarianism and nativism, of demagoguery and dissimulation, barreling down the highway. If that bus completes its dark journey ten days from now, we’ll be to blame.

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Someone Needs a Therapist

by Cathy Young

One might think we’d be unshockable by now when it comes to Tucker Carlson. But no, he managed to shock again Wednesday at the Turning Point rally in Duluth, Georgia, where, in a warm-up act for Donald Trump, his explanation of why Kamala Harris can’t be allowed to win this election spiraled into a teen-spanking fantasy. Kids, Tucker explained—like “your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter”—will run wild if you let them, and it’s not good for them. He then imagined the appropriate response:

Dad comes home and he’s pissed. . . . He’s not vengeful, he loves his children, disobedient as they may be . . . but he’s very disappointed in their behavior. . . . And when Dad gets home you know what he says? . . . “You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. . . . I’m not going to lie, it’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me, and you earned this.”

(That’s the abridged version without all the repetitions.)

Aside from the borderline pedophilic creepiness of this riff, it is also starkly emblematic of how Carlson—and all the Trump fans who wildly applauded and cheered him—view the president’s relationship to America; or Blue America, at least. Trump is the macho authoritarian father, they’re the disobedient kids who must be pummeled and terrorized into submission. For their own good, of course.

The fact that the disobedient child in this fantasy is a girl is not an accident either. The MAGA right sees Blue America as essentially female, or female-dominated—and, of course, currently led by a woman. The authoritarianism has a distinctly misogynist flavor, of a piece with all the other misogynist rhetoric we’ve seen from the right in this campaign: Real men are coming back to put all those misbehaving women in their place.

Oh, and never mind the “not vengeful” disclaimer. Watch the clip. The venom in Carlson’s voice and the glee on his face as he spins this repulsive fantasy and gloats over the pain inflicted on the “bad girl” are beyond creepy. It’s MAGA meets the Marquis de Sade.

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Quick Hits 

WE’RE SURE IT’S FINE: Nothing to see here, folks—just a Wall Street Journal report on how Elon Musk, who is spending well north of a hundred million dollars on a pro-Trump super PAC, whom Trump regularly says would serve as “secretary of cost-cutting” in a second Trump administration, and whose government contracts grant him a high-level security clearance, has “been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since late 2022.” From the piece:

The discussions, confirmed by several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials, touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.

At one point, Putin asked the billionaire to avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, said two people briefed on the request. . . .

One person aware of the conversations said the [U.S.] government faces a dilemma because it is so dependent on the billionaire’s technologies. SpaceX launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is the company NASA relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

“They don’t love it,” the person said, referring to the Musk-Putin contacts. The person, however, said no alerts have been raised by the administration over possible security breaches by Musk.

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FROM TIM’S LIPS TO GOD’S EARS: If you’ve got a tortured Nikki Haley Republican in your life, beg or bully them into reading the excellent piece from Tim up at the site this morning. Tim makes the case for a pragmatic Harris vote on practical policy terms based on “what we know Trump will do, what we worry Trump could do, and the realistic limits on left-wing excesses in a Harris administration.”

He goes chapter and verse, but the payoff is here:

Both a Harris and a Trump administration would have policies that you, the fence-sitting Nikki Haley voter, do not like. In fact, both administrations are trying to enact certain policies that are fundamentally at odds with your values!

But only one of these administrations would be led by an elderly, unchecked aspiring strongman who you know has deep character flaws that could manifest in myriad unpredictable ways with disastrous consequences.

Giving an unrestrained Trump four years to wreak havoc on the country is not worth the risk. That’s why his own vice president and chief of staff—who are almost certainly even more conservative and Republican than you!—aren’t on board with Trump. . . . Do you really think you are better suited to make this risk calculation than Trump’s top national security advisers and his own vice president?

That’s just a taste, though. Read the whole thing.

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‘WE GOT IMMUNITY’: If elected, Donald Trump plans to make good use of the sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts the Supreme Court created for the president earlier this year. Among the first scrutiny-free official acts he’d take: Firing Jack Smith, the prosecutor pursuing his alleged 2020 election crimes.

“It’s so easy,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview yesterday. “We got immunity at the Supreme Court. It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds. He’ll be one of the first things addressed.”

If Trump is elected, this will be a darkly funny spectacle: Watching SCOTUS’s just-so calibration of different immunity tests for different sorts of official, quasi-official, and unofficial acts fall to bits at the slightest touch from a rampaging, lawless president. Sure, many of the acts Smith is prosecuting Trump for have nothing to do with his official presidential duties—but firing the guy to make that all go away would be an official act, so it’s totally risk-free!

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