They Served With Trump. They Have a Warning.
They Served With Trump. They Have a Warning.
Alums of his presidency hit the road in Pennsylvania last night. But whether they can reach their target audience remains to be seen.
Hurricane Milton, which slammed into Florida as a Category 3 storm last night, has been nearly as bad as advertised, although the absolute worst-case scenario—catastrophic storm surge throughout the city of Tampa—blessedly did not come to pass. Still, the damage will be gargantuan, and we don’t yet have a sense of the scale of the human tragedy; we hope you’ll keep everyone affected and the first responders on the scene today in your prayers. Happy Thursday.
A Breath of Fresh Air
by Andrew Egger
GLENSIDE, Pennsylvania—Liz Cheney, it turns out, still draws a crowd. Fresh off her Wisconsin endorsement of Kamala Harris last week, Cheney came here last night to bring her message of warning about Donald Trump to the Philadelphia suburbs. Glenside’s Keswick Theatre seats 1,300. She packed the house.
Cheney was appearing alongside three other Cassandras of democracy: Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews. All served in the Trump administration. Since his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, all have become ferocious critics.
In a bizarre presidential contest that asks people to weigh questions like “who will commit to the peaceful transfer of power” against questions like “who will bring down the price of eggs,” their message was straightforward: Don’t get distracted.
“His own vice president is not supporting him,” Farah Griffin said. “Multiple chiefs of staff. Former national security advisors. Multiple former Department of Defense heads. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His White House comms director. Deputy press secretary. Another White House comms director. The list goes on. All of us who saw him up close and personal as president, some of the senior-most roles and the most consequential roles, are the people saying he should be nowhere near the Oval Office.”
The event, hosted by the group Democracy First, was in keeping with the Harris campaign’s strenuous attempts to court a small but still significant group: that remnant of Republican voters who have long mistrusted Trump, but who still have not taken the psychological plunge of voting for a Democrat for president.
The latest New York Times/Siena poll suggests this outreach is bearing fruit: 9 percent of GOP voters now say they plan to support Harris, up from 5 percent just a month ago. Polling from the Democratic-leaning outfit Blueprint, shared first with The Bulwark yesterday, showed that 36 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who backed Nikki Haley in this year’s GOP primary now intend to support Harris.
In Glenside, though, most who showed up weren’t from this fence-sitting demographic. They were Democrats—well-meaning liberals who wanted to pay their respects to the courage shown in recent years by Cheney and company, who just can’t get their heads around the fact that this is still a close race.
“I’ve been canvassing independents and what [the campaign] thought were persuadable Republicans, and they are so not even on the fence,” attendee Judy Chinn mourned to The Bulwark. “They are voting Republican.”
These interactions have provided the election with an element of surrealism for Democrats. Not long ago, it would have been unfathomable for them to imagine cheerfully attending an event headlined by a Cheney; it would have been remarkable to see so many close aides to a former president warn that he was unfit and unstable; it would have been inexplicable to knock on doors and find that people simply weren’t persuaded by those warnings.
Voters like Chinn are looking for a lifeline back to a politics that makes sense to them. For them, Cheney and company represent just such a lifeline. So despite the speakers’ dire warnings about the looming danger of Trump’s return to power, the atmosphere was remarkably upbeat.
Cheney spoke of Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6th Committee, noting that Hutchinson was around her own daughters’ age: “I would only hope that if they ever were faced with what you were faced with, that they would conduct themselves with the kind of grace and character and honor that you all have.”
Meanwhile, the younger women spoke of the courage they had derived by looking up to Cheney.
“People have their reasons for not wanting to be more vocal,” Hutchinson said. “It can be scary at times, it can be frightening. But what frightens me more is the possibility of a second Trump term.”
A local voter named Leslie Katz told The Bulwark she saw similarities between the hurdles these Trump alums faced and those other women confront in their professional lives. “That is, not being heard and not being seen as trustworthy and reliable, or being someone that people can actually see as a leader,” said Katz. “And I think the fact that they spoke truth to power and they stood up in the face of all this crap they got and have been getting is I think what a lot of women will identify with. And I think that’s where the appeal is, regardless of what side of the aisle you’re from.”
All this is pleasant, but the niggling question remains: Can the women’s message reach the people that matter—or will the good feelings in the room be the extent of their impact?
Outside, when it was over, volunteers handed out REPUBLICANS FOR HARRIS yard signs to the departing crowd. In a fit of cynicism, I tracked down a few people who accepted them: Are any of you, I wondered, actually Republicans for Harris?
Only one woman, Kathy K.—she declined to give her full name—said she was still a registered Republican. She hoped her party could still recover from Trumpism, although she had only ferocious words for most of its current elected officials: “I think they’re a bunch of spineless men who were cowering in their offices on January 6th, and they all knew what happened. They knew it was a lie. And yet they still want to cling to power and they’re not speaking up.”
As I was speaking with two sign-taking attendees, Lisa Martenson and Jennifer Wiley, a few others walked by and asked about them. “We’re Democrats,” Martenson responded. “We have Republicans in our family.” She was referring to her Harris-supporting Republican husband.
“Oh, good,” the passerby replied. “Will they put those out, do you think?”
“Oh,” Martenson laughed. “He’s putting it out.”
Don’t forget: The Bulwark is hitting the road next week! Tickets for our Detroit event (October 19) will go on sale later today, while Philadelphia (October 17) and Pittsburgh (October 18) are already selling fast. If you’re in the neighborhood, come hang out! You can get all the relevant info here.
Do Not Congratulate the Normie GOP
by Bill Kristol
Trumpism is a horror show, and the Trumpists who strut upon its stage, full of sound and fury, are pretty horrifying. So one’s inclined to praise those normal Republicans who avoid joining in the most ghastly performances of the horror show.
Not that these respectable “normie” types have had the nerve to actually oppose Trump. That would apparently be a bridge of courage and principle too far. Some may privately disdain him. But they are almost uniformly supporting him for a second term as president.
These normie Republicans, their admirers point out, have tried to minimize their participation in some of the worst features of Trumpism, even as they back Trump. They aren’t personally crazy, and often aren’t personally cruel. Those who want to believe in a constructive future for the GOP place great hope on them.
But they don’t deserve much praise, and they aren’t worthy of much hope. Because they refuse to be honest about the craziness and cruelty in the candidate and movement they support, they end up legitimizing and strengthening the craziness and the cruelty.
These fellow travelers provide false comfort that you can retain a modicum of dignity and decency as you go along with Trump and get along with Trumpism. In doing so, they strengthen Trumpism.
Take Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of Virginia.
He’s a rich and successful guy. He’s not some kind of personal weirdo or moral monster or political degenerate. When you talk with normie Republicans who hope for a post-Trump future, they mention him as the kind of leader they’d like to see in 2028.
But a detailed new report in the Washington Post is a good illustration of how compromised such types have become—have chosen to become—in the age of Trump. In a way, the article is about a relatively small issue in Virginia. But it nicely illustrates the moral bankruptcy and political irresponsibility of the normie, Trump-supporting elected Republican:
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has been warning that illegal immigration poses a threat to democracy as he campaigns this fall for former president Donald Trump, boasting about purging 6,303 noncitizens from the state’s voter rolls during his first 2½ years in office.
“Noncitizens will be prosecuted if they vote,” Youngkin cautioned last month during a telephone rally with Trump in which the former president spoke of an “invasion” by criminal immigrants and claimed his opponents will “cheat” to defeat him.
But a review of state court records and interviews with elections officials found no evidence that any noncitizens have tried to vote during his term in Virginia, which does not allow residents who are not citizens to vote in any elections. As few as three people have been prosecuted for illegal voting of any kind in Virginia between Jan. 1, 2022, and July of this year, the records showed. None of those cases involved a question of citizenship.
Most of the 6,303-name purge stemmed from errors on paperwork at the Department of Motor Vehicles, officials said. In many cases, legal citizens simply forgot to check a box indicating citizenship, registrars and other elections officials said. In other cases, rather than trying to evade detection, people flagged themselves as noncitizens while filling out the voter registration forms that the DMV automatically generates during routine transactions.
In Virginia, people who were mistakenly removed from the rolls have mostly been able to get themselves restored, and the practical effects of Youngkin’s efforts have been kept to a minimum.
The guardrails in Virginia’s electoral and legal systems have held. But they’ve also been weakened. By Youngkin.
And the impact is not just or mostly confined to Virginia. As the Post notes, Youngkin’s “rhetoric about the threat of noncitizen voting” is “part of a concerted strategy by the GOP to sow mistrust in November’s outcome and lay the groundwork, should Trump lose again, for election challenges.”
In the context of Trump’s Big Lie, smaller lies from more apparently reasonable actors matter. They help legitimize Trumpist lies about massive election fraud. They help lay the groundwork for another Big Lie this November.
The case of Youngkin can serve as a reminder that normie Republicans shouldn’t be let off the hook. The normie Republicans are not upholding democratic norms in the face of Trump. Instead, they’re normalizing Trumpist lies and demagoguery. And so they’ve chosen to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Quick Hits
CALL YOUR LAWMAKER: One weird thing about decentralized online misinformation and rumor mongering after a crisis is how difficult it is to actually track. These days, that crap isn’t just coming from big figureheads who are easy to keep tabs on, like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, or Elon Musk. It also froths up from a clutch of often-anonymous engagement farmers and micro-influencers—accounts with names like “The Constitutionalist” and “I Meme Therefore I Am.”
If you aren’t being funneled this stuff organically—that is, if your social-media algorithms don’t already have you pegged as a conspiracy-brained right-wing lunatic—it’s hard to know just from browsing online how widespread the cancer is.
But you know who does tend to have their finger on the pulse of right-wing crankery? Members of Congress! After all, the cranks and those duped by the conspiracists are the ones more likely to pick up the phone to yell at their elected representatives.
That probably explains why GOP lawmakers are feeling obliged to spend their time this week releasing statements like this one from North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards, trying to tamp down wild rumors surrounding one small town that was hit particularly hard by the hurricane, Chimney Rock.
It’s good to see Edwards and others speak up in the face of a tsunami of bullshit. But what happens when the bullshit is about the election results and not the hurricane response? At that point, we fret, all the incentives will be to just go along with the cranks.
WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME AN IMMIGRANT: Speaking of insane cranks spreading lies about hurricanes, here was Donald Trump at a rally in Michigan just last week: “The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money [for hurricane relief] . . . They spent it all on illegal migrants. They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank.”
We all know Trump makes up lies like this constantly. But before we read this excellent new piece from Popular Information, we hadn’t realized quite how many of Trump’s lies follow exactly the same brain-dead formula: Identify problem. Blame immigrants.
Just go down their bullet points:
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for a “crime wave.”
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for voter fraud.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for driving up housing costs.
The Trump campaign claims undocumented immigrants will bankrupt Medicare and Social Security.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for taking jobs from American citizens.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for smuggling fentanyl.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for inflation.
MORE HALEY VOTER DATA: We mentioned above the Blueprint poll on the preferences of Republican and independent Nikki Haley voters. Here are some more numbers from that survey that stood out to us because they seemed pretty counterintuitive.
The most effective messages and campaign promises that Harris can deploy to boost support among this group is to affirm her plans to protect Social Security and Medicare. Yes. They want to see someone strengthen the entitlement programs. “A campaign promise to protect Social Security earns a 30-point boost for Harris with Haley voters and the top testing message in the poll, earning a 21-point boost, related to Harris’s plans to protect the programs as opposed to Trump’s intentions to gut them in favor or tax cuts for the rich.”
One thing that didn’t work with these voters: Attacks on Trump’s foreign policy. “The worst-testing messages related to Harris’s support for Ukraine as opposed to Trump’s coziness with Putin. . . . Similarly, Harris’s support for Ukraine and, separately, Israel were among the least effective policy promises for convincing Haley voters.”
Cheap Shots
Donald Trump has identified the most pressing problem with the military: Too few drill sergeants imitating Full Metal Jacket, too many service-members dabbling in drag. You’ll want to click through for this:
Bill, you're right. Normie Republicans are no heroes until they put country over party. And, frankly, until they even put country over career.
Our educational system is really under severe distress. How can any school or teacher compete with our social media. So few of us actually can effectively interact with each other, or communicate effectively, because of the addiction of the internet algorithms reinforcing our beliefs.
When I was in school- 60 yrs ago, my teachers all opened up my mind with different perspectives on everything that I didn’t always get at home. The television was shut off until homework was done and dinner was finished. Now kids are on their phones before school, during school, and late into the night. Also many of the most vocal parents don’t want their kids exposed to information that differs from their own beliefs. Closed minds will eventually lead to a dysfunctional society.