The Five Dumbest Closing Arguments for Trump

They’re not bringing their best.

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IN JUST A FEW HOURS, REPORTS of votes counts across the United States will start coming in. What better way to finish out this election season from hell than with a look at the worst late-in-the-game arguments for voting for Donald Trump, the 78-year-old sociopathic narcissist who has run a campaign marked by blatant racism and misogyny, publicly spouted violent fantasies about his political opponents, made proposals that would likely tank the economy, and—last but not least!—tried to overturn the last election he lost.

(1) If Trump loses, there will be no competitive elections in the future because the Democrats will flood swing states with illegal immigrants to turn them solidly blue.

This “last election ever!” panic is being aggressively pushed by billionaire Elon Musk, who is not only a Trump surrogate but who has in the final stages of the campaign taken for himself something like the profile usually given to a presidential running mate.

This particular conspiracy theory is so bonkers, it shouldn’t even require a debunking, but here goes: Even if Kamala Harris pushes the legalization of millions of illegal migrants after having them shuttled to swing states, it takes at least five years for a lawful permanent resident to become a U.S. citizen (and, given the red tape, usually much longer than that, though maybe the Trumpists have a touching faith that Harris can cut the red tape!). Not all legalized migrants will vote reliably Democratic. (Remember the ”emerging Democratic majority” theory that held, back in 2004, that the growing immigrant population would help secure a Democratic lock on the Electoral College? One reason it didn’t happen was that a lot of Hispanics moved right.) Nor will all of them stay in swing states.

If Democrats were really this Machiavellian and strategic-minded, it would be a lot easier to “import” Democratic voters from, say, California or New York to Arizona and Pennsylvania. Especially since they’re already citizens and wouldn’t have to wait for legalization.

(2) The Democrats claim to be fighting for women’s rights but can’t define what a woman is.

Search on X for “can’t define a woman” and you will see an avalanche of variations on this claim. This comes from a famous moment when Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings if she could “provide a definition for the word ‘woman,’” to which a confused-looking Jackson replied, “I’m not a biologist.” This is obviously a reference to the contentious debate about transgender rights. There are legitimate questions about such issues as pediatric transition, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and transgender accommodations in single-sex spaces, from prisons to locker rooms. But for the most part, policies in this area are not determined by the federal government but by state and local authorities, and perhaps even more by cultural attitudes. An anti-transgender push by a new Trump administration would likely cause not only progressives and liberals to circle the wagons and resist even valid concerns about some forms of trans inclusion.

But while some Democrats may waffle on defining “woman” or “female,” the GOP ticket in this election has a presidential candidate whose rhetoric about women sometimes seems to define them as less than human. He verbally abuses them with particular relish (“dumb” is an epithet of choice). He also says things like, “I’m going to protect women whether they like it or not.” At worst, it sounds like . . . well, like something you’d expect from the guy who has been adjudicated liable for sexual abuse toward one woman, has been accused of it by many more, and has bragged about being entitled to grab women’s genitals because he’s a “star.” At best, it sounds like a paternalistic vision of womanhood out of the 1950s or even the pre-suffrage era: men know best, and women are childlike creatures under their protection.

And his running mate bashes women without biological kids as “childless cat ladies.” And one of his most prominent allies—a frequent speaker at his rallies—is former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, who in one of his recent speeches depicted the return of Donald Trump to power as the homecoming of a “pissed-off” father who will give his rebellious teenage daughter a “vigorous spanking.”

(3) Trump will stand firm against a rising tide of antisemitism.

Yes, there’s a real problem of antisemitism on the anti-Israel left (which has been harshly criticized by both Harris and Joe Biden). But antisemitism on the right has grown far more overt and more disturbing in recent years—and Trump and people around him have often stoked those flames. Trump has frequently singled out “liberal Jews” for attack (for instance, with a 2023 Jewish New year “greeting” taunting “liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel.” In an interview, Trump said that Jews who vote for Democrats hate their religion and Israel. Just last September, he declared that Jews “voting for the enemy” would bear much of the blame if he loses the election.

And then there are the people around him—like Carlson, who just two months ago hosted a Nazi-apologist “popular historian” on his podcast and has a history of Jew-baiting, from employing barely veiled antisemitic innuendo in his tirades against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to claiming that Jewish pro-Israel commentators, including those on the right like Ben Shapiro, have no loyalty to America. After Carlson’s interview with the “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was the real baddie of World War II, some Jewish Trump supporters, such as Jewish News Syndicate editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin, publicly pleaded with Trump and Vance to rebuke and repudiate Carlson. Didn’t happen—indeed, Carlson was a star speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, and he subsequently conducted the interview with Trump in which Trump infamously suggested that it would be good to put “war hawk” Liz Cheney in front of nine guns “trained on her face.” Does this bother any of the people who believe Trump will be a force against antisemitism?

Just yesterday, on the eve of the election, the news broke that the Trump campaign’s regional field director for Western Pennsylvania, Luke Meyer, had been fired after being exposed as a white nationalist podcaster and social media poster. To be fair, the guy thinks Trump panders to black and Jewish voters too much—by condemning “Jew-haters,” among other things. But he has also said that Trump underestimates “how much of his own campaign staff are ‘Jew-haters.’” Pro-Trump voters who look to him to oppose antisemitism also underestimate the degree to which he enables it.

(4) The prospective Second Gentleman has had an affair and has been accused of physically abusing an ex-girlfriend.

The first marriage of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff broke up back in 2008 following an affair he had with one of his daughter’s teachers. There’s also a tabloid report that he hit a girlfriend in 2012 (the ex-girlfriend herself has not spoken out about it, but anonymous friends of hers have made the claim). Speaking at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania yesterday, Megyn Kelly ripped into the media for failing to ask Emhoff about it.

Here’s the thing: Kelly said this while standing next to Donald Trump. Yes, the serial cheater who has bragged about his affairs with married women, paid hush money to a porn star, and was found civilly liable for sexually abusing a woman whose contemporaneous account of the assault was confirmed by several friends.

That takes some chutzpah.

(5) That Damn Squirrel! (and Raccoon)

Of all the “Vote Trump” pitches in 2024, this one has got to be the dumbest. Heard of Peanut the squirrel? This sciurid Instagram star was taken from his owner, upstate New York resident Mark Longo, and euthanized after biting a Department of Environmental Conservation officer. A second animal, Fred the Racoon, suffered the same fate; both squirrels and raccoons are illegal to keep as indoor pets in New York State, and biting a human is a death sentence for the animal because it must be quickly tested for rabies. This dumb, dumb story is complicated, involving possible complaints from social media rivals and valid questions about whether Peanut should have been treated like a wild animal given that the 7-year-old rodent had lived indoors since birth. But the right’s attempt to weaponize this incident as a symbol of tyrannical rule by Democrats has been both cynical and surreally, laughably bizarre.

JD Vance has suggested that Peanut was “a genius” and that “the Democrats “murdered the Elon Musk of squirrels.” Quite the galaxy-brained take.

Meanwhile, there is literally zero evidence that this has anything to do with party or ideology. Laws that ban or severely restrict the ownership of exotic pets exist in 40 states, with no self-evident red vs. blue split. In New York, one famous foe of legalizing ferret ownership was Rudy Giuliani, who once famously called a ferret advocate “deranged” and advised him to see a therapist.

On behalf of squirrels and humans everywhere, thank goodness the 2024 campaign is finally over.