Trump’s Midnight In America
He’s not hiding his authoritarianism. He’s selling it.
Three weeks and a day until election day, and this thing is tied, tied, tied. Nate Silver’s polling average has Kamala Harris up a tick under three points nationally—which might give Donald Trump the barest of edges at this moment in the Electoral College. Meanwhile, the last stragglers are starting to tune in: This race gets decided now. Happy Monday.
Two Months of Hate
by William Kristol
The Two Minutes Hate was a famous feature of Orwell’s portrayal of Oceania in 1984. The Two Months of Hate is now a notable feature of the 2024 U.S. presidential contest. Donald Trump and his allies are closing this campaign with two months of hate in a way we’ve never seen before. And it could work.
The September 10 presidential debate taught Trump and his campaign that they could not win if the campaign were . . . a debate. So Trump is refusing to participate in a second debate, or for that matter in any interview that might be a simulacrum of a debate. More fundamentally, Trump has abandoned any pretense of having to debate real issues or having to put forth any serious programs. Of course, Trump’s heart has always been in authoritarian demagoguery, not in democratic and civic debate. But in the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside.
It’s not just that, as Politico showed in ample detail this weekend, “Trump’s “racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”
It’s also, for example, Trump on Thursday calling for CBS to lose its broadcast license—and for Democrats to “be forced to concede the Election”—because he didn’t like the interview with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes.
Then yesterday Trump told Maria Bartiromo that an even bigger problem than “the people who have come in who are totally destroying our country” is “the enemy from within.” He called them “very bad people, sick people, radical left lunatics.” And he said they could “be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
This is, as the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser put it, “Straight up language of dictators and tyrants, who want to use the military on their own people.”
During all this time, JD Vance continues to refuse to say that Trump lost the 2020 election. But here too, the message has gotten worse. Vance no longer bothers to defend this Big Lie as plausibly true. Instead, Vance now says that he wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results because he didn’t approve of the way the Hunter Biden story was covered in the media.
“Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story which independent analysis said cost Donald Trump millions of votes?” he said in a recent interview with the New York Times. “I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised.”
But what are the implications of this? That if there’s something that you don’t like in a campaign, you don’t accept its result? Just as, I suppose, if you think there are too many immigrants in America, you’re entitled to lie about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio?
Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.
It’s shocking and depressing. One could tell oneself in 2016 that Trump won despite the lies and hatred. Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.
In his 1942 essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” Orwell discussed the “shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow.” This world had made it possible that “Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several Fascisms, [could] conquer the whole world.”
Orwell 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 Americans also want to believe instinctively that evil always defeats itself. But it doesn’t. We want to tell ourselves that it can’t happen here. But it can.
And it’s not just that it can happen here. Trump is now promising us that it will happen here.
Now of course, it needn’t happen here. The presidential race is a toss-up. And I think the Harris campaign understands that it needs to close by more effectively emphasizing what’s at stake.
But the burden can’t all be on the campaign or the candidate. Others could step up.
When Trump calls for the use of the military here at home, surely it is time for his former cabinet secretaries and retired general officers, John Kelly and Jim Mattis, to explain, straight to camera, how a Trump second term would be a threat to the Constitution they swore to uphold and to the nation they’ve served, and to urge a vote for Harris.
When Trump spews hatred at immigrants, surely it’s time for George W. Bush, the former Republican president, who was—in the tradition of his father and Ronald Reagan—a fierce critic of demagoguery against immigrants, to come off the sidelines and help in the good fight.
When Trump and Vance refuse to back away from the Big Lie, surely it’s time for other Republicans who care about the truth, like Mitt Romney, to spend time explaining to the country how serious the Big Lie was and is.
And if the Great and Good don’t choose to help as they should?
Well, here the people rule. If we’re to be saved from being governed by four years (or more) of hate, we’ll have to muster the votes to save ourselves.
The Sludge We’re Swimming In
by Andrew Egger
Bill warns that we’ve entering a dark chapter of the campaign, one that foreshadows political violence. But what if we’re already there?
Trump’s message is filtering down to his people through a decentralized network of fellow shit-spreaders whose scope and reach—as we noted Thursday—are difficult to analyze and understand. And as that message festers within its intended audience, it’s already creating the conditions for real-world mayhem.
This weekend, federal emergency responders working in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina found themselves scrambling in response to an unexpected threat. Per WaPo:
Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately.”
The message stated that National Guard troops “had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there [sic] were out hunting FEMA.”
Were internet-poisoned MAGA militia nuts actually stalking federal disaster workers through the North Carolina hills? Maybe—or maybe this was just a rumor that jangled the nerves of responders who are already jumpy from the torrent of inexplicable hate screaming toward them online. Either way, it temporarily disrupted federal efforts to assist search-and-rescue crews and deliver supplies. The online poison had real-world consequences.
Or take another—possibly even weirder—story from the weekend. On Saturday, a man was arrested outside Donald Trump’s rally at Coachella, supposedly after trying to access the event in an unregistered vehicle with fake media passes and loaded guns in his car.
“I truly do believe we prevented another assassination attempt,” local Sheriff Chad Bianco—himself a big-time Trump fan—told reporters Sunday. Much of pro-Trump media ran with it: “Third Trump assassination attempt thwarted,” blared the New York Post.
The story quickly caromed around the MAGA internet, with personalities like Charlie Kirk adding their own spice to it: “The individual reportedly expressed an intent to ‘kill the president,’” Kirk wrote.
Even elected officials got in on the fun: “The deranged left is still intent on stopping president Trump by any means necessary,” tweeted Rep. Nancy Mace. “I’m glad law enforcement was able to stop this lunatic and will keep them and President Trump in my prayers.”
Except—there turned out to be little reason to believe the arrested man, Vem Miller, wanted Trump dead. On the contrary, Miller is a Trump superfan, who counts among his friends a number of MAGAsphere influencers.
And some of these friends thought his arrest itself was highly fishy.
“The man they just arrested for supposedly ‘trying to kill’ Trump in Coachella is my good friend and business partner,” reality TV personality and MAGA poster Mindy Robinson posted on social media . “Vem had just exposed a huge Deep State cover-up involving the Feds and the Bundy Ranch scandal. So I firmly believe this is 100% some kind of set-up in retribution for exposing it.”
Robinson’s post was shared by none other than Michael Flynn, the retired lieutenant general most notable now as a pro-revolution Trump sycophant. “Wow. Something is very amiss with this entire ‘attempt,’” he wrote, adding: “All war is deception.”
To recap: All of MAGA is sure something very ominous went down this weekend—they’re just split on what it was. Half seem to think it was a Trump assassination attempt by the villainous Miller thwarted by the noble cop Bianco. The other half seem to think it was a deep state plot orchestrated by Bianco, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, against the courageous Miller.
I’ve written a number of times before about MAGA true believers’ paranoid tendency to accuse one another of being left-wing Antifa/deep state interlopers the moment internal disputes arise. This seems like the latest example. But it signals something else as well.
We’re entering the closing leg of an insanely high-octane election at a time when millions of our fellow citizens have hooked themselves to an IV drip of energy-drink conspiracy content. Their social-media algorithms pour the poison into their veins until they see plots and machinations behind every rock and bush. And this time, they’re determined that those plots will not succeed.
Our Philly, Pittsburgh, and Detroit shows this week are sold out! If you didn’t score tickets, you can still get on the waitlist. If you already got your tickets, we look forward to seeing you in a few days!
Quick Hits
BRINGING THE HEAT: The Liz Cheney: Unchained tour continued in an interview on Meet the Press this weekend. Cheney denounced House Speaker Mike Johnson, who formerly served under her in GOP leadership as deputy whip.
“I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his constitutional obligations,” Cheney said. “The claims of fraud Donald Trump was making [in 2020] . . . [Johnson] knew those to be false. He was told that, not only in discussions with me, but also by the House Republican counsel.”
Johnson, for his part, uttered soothing words on the same program. “Everybody can sigh and take a deep breath,” he said. “Our system is going to work.” Congressional Republicans would doubtless certify any election, he assured his listeners—just as long as that election “is fair and free and legal.”
FALLING IN LINE: Lots of remarkable stuff in this weekend New York Times report about a recent dinner involving Trump and some of the GOP’s biggest donors:
Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances.
He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more and help him more.
He disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded.” He complained about the number of Jews still backing Ms. Harris, saying they needed their heads examined for not supporting him despite everything he had done for the state of Israel.
Most remarkable of all: who chose to attend. One of the billionaires on hand was Betsy DeVos, former education secretary under Trump. “Ms. DeVos’s attendance was notable,” the Times notes, “in part because she had resigned from Mr. Trump’s cabinet the day after the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, criticizing his rhetoric in the lead-up to the violence.”
Cheap Shots
Can some journalist simply hold JD Vance to account by asking "You said you wouldn't certify the 2020 election because some media temporarily blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story. Since Elon Musk's X recently blocked media from publishing material about you personally, Mr. Vance, do you think Kamala Harris should block certification in 2024 if she loses?" This shouldn't be hard -- why is no one doing it? https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trump-camp-worked-with-musks-x-to
“Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.”
What a statement on the American electorate. And one that JVL has made for several months. Talk about depressing. The voters want this.
The men that Bill mentions, they are neither good nor great. They are abject cowards, to include W.