The Wheels on the Bus Go Off, and Off, and Off, and . . .
There have been better closes to presidential campaigns.
Well, here we go! It’s Election Eve, and we’ll be doing a special live show tonight exclusively for Bulwark+ members. Sam Stein will host, and A.B. Stoddard, Will Saletan, and Andrew Egger will be on hand to break everything down as we brace for what we all expect will be a very peaceful and relaxing Tuesday.
If you’re a Bulwark+ member already, expect a link to this live event in your inbox this afternoon. And if not, there’s no time like the present to clamber aboard:
Happy Monday.
The Big Guy Melts Down
by Andrew Egger
Back in 2016, Donald Trump, who had campaigned on what-will-he-say-next shock value for the entire cycle, buttoned things up in the last few weeks of the campaign. Keeping a lower-than-normal profile, he won over late-deciding independents who proved decisive in his upset of Hillary Clinton.
This time around, the big guy’s playbook has been, uh, different. The rhetorical rampage we’ve seen from our aging, raging, and exhausted former president over the last few days has been—I promise I don’t say this lightly—perhaps his craziest ever.
There was his attack Thursday on Liz Cheney, supposedly in reference to her foreign-policy views: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
There was his suggestion in a weekend interview with NBC News that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s program to “Make America Healthy Again” might include banning certain vaccines: “Well, I’m going to talk to him and talk to other people, and I’ll make a decision. But he’s a very talented guy and has strong views.” At a rally in Georgia last night, Trump rattled off a lengthy list of authorities he planned to give Kennedy: “I said, Bobby, you work on women’s health, you work on health, you work on what we eat, you work on pesticides.” The only thing he wouldn’t let Kennedy touch, he suggested, was U.S. oil production.
There was his staggering suggestion at a Pennsylvania rally Sunday that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House despite having lost the 2020 election. “I mean, honestly, because we did so well.”
That same speech featured still more “jokey” rhetoric of violence against the reporters covering his campaign. Noting the placement of the bulletproof glass surrounding him on stage, Trump said that “to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much.” What a knee-slapper!
He followed this up by referring to Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, whose shock weekend poll showed Kamala Harris with a 3-point Iowa lead, as “one of my enemies.”
Outside these moments, his speeches this weekend were a startlingly incoherent soup of free-associative gibbering. I mean, just look at this stuff:
You know, when I say insane asylums, and then I say Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Does anybody know? They go crazy. They say, “Oh, he brings up these names.” And of, well, that’s genius, right? Dr. Hannibal Lecter. There’s nobody worse than him. Silence of the Lambs. Who the hell else would even remember that? I have a great memory. But they always hit me. I don’t bring it up too much, because they have to take such a—“he brought up Hannibal Lecter, what does that have to do with this? What does it—” It has everything to do with it, right? He was, that’s who we’re allowing into our country. And we don’t want to allow that into our country. So I’ve done something for you that I haven’t done in 20 speeches. I’ve brought up Dr. Hannibal Lecter. And we’re allowing him in. You watch, these fake people will say, “Again he brought up Hannibal Lecter. Has absolutely nothing to do.” You know I do the weave, right? The weave. It’s genius. You bring up Hannibal Lecter. You mention insane asylum, Hannibal Lecter, you go, oh. Now, there’ll be a time in life when the weave won’t finish properly at the bottom. And then we can talk. But right now it’s pure genius, hey. I have an uncle, my uncle, Uncle John, my father’s brother. Forty-one years at MIT, longest-serving professor. So many degrees he didn’t know what the hell to do with them all. And the most complicated—I understand a lot of this stuff. You know, I believe in that. I mean, Jack Nicklaus is not going to produce a bad golfer. Right? You know, that’s the way it works. Uh, it’s just one of those things. It’s in the family, and it’s—whatever. But we have to save this country. We’d better save this country.
Here’s what’s plain from all this: With just days to go, Trump has lost some confidence in his advisers’ gameplan. It doesn’t seem coincidental that this week of explosions followed a CNN report that Trump’s co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita retweeted strong condemnations of Trump’s behavior in the wake of January 6th, even liking a post suggesting Trump’s cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him.
Along with top adviser Susie Wiles, LaCivita had been the wizard managing Trump’s campaign this cycle—allowing the candidate to act out enough that he wouldn’t get petulant and go rogue, while making sure the whole Trump show stayed relatively disciplined and on message. But the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta reported last week that the CNN story was a breaking point: “At that point, Trump told several people that LaCivita was dead to him—that he would ride out the remainder of the campaign, but would have no place in his administration or political operation going forward.”
Right now, Trump is doing the same thing he always does when he decides he’s surrounded by morons: He’s rolling the dice on his own ability to create chaos and thrive within it. In other words, he’s winging it—at a time when, again, he’s older, less balanced, more exhausted, crankier, and more stressed than ever.
The last undecided voters are, at long last, paying attention. We shouldn’t assume this stuff has no ability to change the course of history.
Worth the Anxiety
by William Kristol
Before waxing sentimental—and if you can’t wax sentimental now, as this journey approaches its end, when can you?—permit me to wax truthful: It’s been, at times, exhausting.
Struggling for nine years against what we saw as a threat to our democracy, to our decency, to our country—it can wear you down. And seeing how susceptible much of the American public has been to demagoguery; observing leaders fail to rise to the occasion; watching old acquaintances and friends make choices that seemed to me bewildering and indefensible—it’s been, at times, dispiriting.
And then you ask: What have we achieved, even if we prevail tomorrow? We’ll have avoided catastrophe. That’s not nothing. But have we accomplished much that’s positive? We may have avoided going over the cliff. But have we carved out a new road of progress into new and sunlit uplands? And there’ll be so much work still to be done. It can be, at times, discouraging.
But I am not exhausted, dispirited, or discouraged. We at The Bulwark are not exhausted, dispirited, or discouraged. And I’m confident you who are reading this are not exhausted, dispirited, or discouraged.
We’ve all had the privilege of being allowed to fight a good and worthwhile fight. We have nothing to complain about. We’ve been asked to do a lot less than our forebears in their epic struggles for democracy and liberty. We’ve been asked to do a lot less than our counterparts abroad fighting for their homelands against unimaginable slaughter and brutality. Our choice, in twenty-first century America, has been an easy choice, and not a particularly onerous one.
I will also say that it has also been an invigorating one, even an inspiring one.
So much of politics is slogging ahead on familiar paths. Sometimes there’s so much slogging that you forget why exactly you thought this path was the right path, or why you ended up on it.
But occasionally two roads really do diverge in a wood. And you have to choose. And it’s reassuring when, after treading down one road for a while, you’re convinced you made the right choice.
You’re convinced that you make the right choice not because you have such great faith in your own insight or understanding. You’re convinced because you look around at your companions, and you see that they are the kind of people whom you want to be fighting alongside. Their presence gives you confidence that it is the right path, that it is the right side.
It’s the right side, and it would be good to do our best to make it the winning side. There’s a day left before Election Day. Vote. Persuade as many others as you can to vote—for democracy, for decency, for freedom. Leave no stone unturned.
Early this year I quoted the sentimental Victorian poet, William Ernest Henley:
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
It may be sentimental, but it is true that democracy as a form of government does allow us—to a degree remarkable in human history—to try to be masters of our fate, captains of our souls. We have had the extraordinary good fortune to live in a great democracy, probably the greatest the world has seen. The least we can do is help save it.
A bit of exhaustion is a small price to pay.
Quick Hits
WHAT’S NEXT FOR MAGA: One thing we’ve wondered about for a long time is: What comes after Trump? Sure, there’s plenty of wannabes who’d love to inherit his cult of personality and his populist banner. But is anybody actually up to the task? JD Vance, with his negative charisma? Tucker Carlson, who’s fallen in a year from king of cable to livestreamer ranting about demon attacks? Kari Lake, who’s staring down the barrel of a second consecutive statewide loss in Arizona?
Some MAGA voters are pondering the same questions, and they don’t have any better answers than the rest of us. Over at Politico, David Siders has a great new piece talking to them about it. “It does make me worry,” one tells Siders, saying she has no idea who could follow in Trump’s footsteps: “The movement is mostly him.”
WHAT WENT MENTIONED AND WHAT WENT UNMENTIONED: Kamala Harris’s closing rally last night, at Michigan State University, was notable in two respects. The first, as a campaign adviser noted to us, was that she never uttered the word “Trump.” The adviser said it was the “first rally since she became the candidate where she did not” name the former president. But what she did say was more important than what she left unsaid. Harris started the speech by discussing the situation in Gaza, pledging to pursue an end to the war and bring “dignity” and “self-determination” to the Palestinian people. She’s uttered versions of this before. But it was the prioritization of the issue—notably in a state with a larger Arab and Muslim population and while speaking on a college campus—that was different.
THIS STUFF IS REAL: The close of the election is dominated by horse race coverage. And, frankly, that makes sense. We’re all dying to better understand the outcome. We want to consume polling and memos and tidbits of data that will tell us who is ahead. But it’s also worth remembering that there are incredible stakes at play for people who are not in our hyper-political bubble. We were reminded of that when we read this piece by Politico’s Myah Ward, which looked at the election through the lens of a family that was separated at the border during Trump’s administration—a family whose psychological scars from that policy have not yet healed.
MITCH SLAPPED: Trump, on the trail yesterday, mocked Mitch McConnell, saying he couldn’t wait until he was gone, and then laughed in delight when he asked the crowd: “Can you believe he endorsed me?” More than anything else, this exemplifies the GOP under Trump. He’s abusive and demeaning to the Republicans who dare step out of line, knowing full well they all will get back behind him, at which point he mocks their subservience. Good job, Mitch.
Cheap Shots
What strikes me most about Ann Selzer's poll is that boomers, whose parents were alive during the rise of European fascism, are stepping up and saying, "Not on our watch." Now, maybe the boomers are just trying to protect their 401K's and Social Security, but I don't think that alone can explain why so many white people over 65 are voting for a "San Francisco liberal." When Kamala wins, we will owe a huge debt of gratitude to the women of this country and the boomers.
Thanks to you Bill and the entire Bulwark team. It has brought me some sense of sanity to feel like a passenger on this journey with you folks, through your writings, podcasts, YouTube, tweets and appearances at the Texas Tribune. Let’s hope that Election Day can help start turn the page on Trump and Trumpism.