When You Thought He Couldn’t Sink Lower

Once more, with feeling: When Trump tells you who he is, believe him.

Donald Trump’s two strongest personality traits each had a moment on the campaign trail yesterday. 

At a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the buffoon: “I’m here for one very simple reason. I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic and Latino community.”

And later, on stage with Tucker Carlson in Glendale, Arizona, the menace. Here he was on former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney: “She’s a radical war hawk. 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.”

Four days until election day. Be on the lookout for an email later this morning where we will lay out out our plans for election week. There’s something for everyone. Let’s all be together. Happy Friday.

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Trump speaks with Tucker in Glendale, Arizona, yesterday. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images.)

Once More, Proudly Never Trump

by William Kristol

“Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

When an increasingly unstable Donald Trump took his increasingly unhinged campaign to Arizona last night, how did the crowd respond to this image of violence against Liz Cheney?

They cheered. They joined their master in the sick thrill of voyeuristically imagining an act of violence against an American political opponent.

One reason demagogues are so dangerous is that their moral sickness is contagious.

This demagogue is the man that nearly the entire Republican party and conservative movement are assembled behind in the contest for the presidency of the United States. This demagogue is the man respectable Republicans and high-toned conservatives rationalize supporting. This demagogue is the man other Republicans and conservatives won’t oppose directly and unequivocally, even if they won’t cast ballots for him.

So now we have a stark threat of violence against Cheney. In the vast mob of Trump acolytes, apologists, and accommodators, will any voices be heard to speak up? Will any of Cheney’s former colleagues from the House rebuke Trump? Will any of Cheney’s former supporters and admirers from the Wall Street Journal and National Review say a chastening word? From George W. Bush and Condi Rice to Paul Gigot and Rich Lowry, will we hear anything in defense of Cheney? Anything denouncing Trump for his threat of violence?

I expect not.

Cheney’s words two-and-a-half years ago, in the first session of the January 6th Committee, remain true:

Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

A friendly interviewer suggested to me the other day that it was unfortunate that the effort of which I’ve been a part is known as ‘Never Trump.’ You’re for the Constitution and the rule of law and liberal democracy at home and abroad. It’s a shame that it gets characterized as simply ‘Never Trump.’ You and your colleagues at The Bulwark care about more than opposing one individual.

And so we do. Of course we all would welcome a future where our stance towards Trump isn’t the primary thing that defines us. But I ended up demurring from my interlocutor’s expression of goodwill.

It is the right thing at this moment to be primarily anti-Trump. Trump and his movement are the litmus test. If someone’s not anti-Trump and anti-Trumpism, how seriously can you take that person’s profession of respect for the Constitution, or for liberal democracy at home or abroad, or for the cause of decency in politics?

In the olden days, there were anti-communists who chafed at being defined as “anti” something. Much effort was expended in explaining what we were for, not just what we were against. This was reasonable.

But at the end of the day, we were anti-communists. And we were right to be that. Before that our parents had been anti-fascists. They had been right to be that.

So, as this 2024 presidential election comes to an end, we are of course pro-rule of law and pro-Ukraine and pro-immigrant and pro-many other things. But like Cheney, I don’t shy away from the phrase “Never Trump.” It’s the right fight, and I’m proud to have had a small part in it.

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It’s the Economy, Stupid

by Andrew Egger

If Kamala Harris wins next week, she’ll have done so in large part by closing the gap on the economy, the issue voters routinely cite as their highest-priority this cycle and one where polls had shown Donald Trump wiping the floor with Joe Biden. The latest NPR/Marist polls, out overnight from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, show closely divided opinions on who is best to handle the economy, with Trump holding edges of one point, one point, and five points, respectively.

And if Harris loses, it may be in large part because she wasn’t able to turn the issue from a liability into a position of genuine strength.

I am sorry, but this is nuts!

During the doldrum middle years of Biden’s term—when America was finally paying the piper for years of big-time pandemic spending, supply chains were struggling to unsnarl themselves, and inflation outpaced wage growth—the public rapidly soured on the president’s economic stewardship. But then, even as economic indicators improved rapidly through late 2023 and 2024, the public stayed sour. Having revised their opinions once, they proved reluctant to shift them again.

This incongruity between the economic vibes and the economic facts was notable even by this summer. But the economic outlook has improved so much since this summer that it’s genuinely remarkable now. From the month before the COVID pandemic began to this September, U.S. prices have increased by 21.4 percent, while U.S. wages have increased by 26.3 percent, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data last month by the Center for American Progress. This wage growth wasn’t clustered at the top, either: the biggest real-wages beneficiaries over the past four years have been low-wage workers.

Say these were the only economic facts you knew about the present moment. Four-and-a-half years ago, America was enjoying what Trump routinely calls “the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Since then, unemployment has remained historically low, the stock market is historically up, and while prices outstripped wages for a period, wages have now surged back into the lead. If you want, you can argue that this represents only modest progress. And as today’s job reports shows—with far less than expected gains caused, in part, by hurricanes and labor strikes—the long-term stability of this economy remains unknown.

But that’s true of any economy. And surely a modest improvement over what was previously the “greatest economy” ever is still a pretty good economy!

And now imagine someone told you that the intervening years also saw a global pandemic that killed seven million people, ground global commerce to a temporary standstill, and caused massive shocks up and down the economy that reverberated for years. Suddenly “modest improvements over the previous status quo” would start to look less like something to be cheerful about and more like a genuine triumph.

There’s a reason that heavy inflation kills voters’ economic confidence. The price tags on items at the grocery store do not include cheerful reminders that the buyer’s purchasing power is improving too. When prices go up, it feels like somebody out there must have fucked up. But when you get a raise, you don’t thank the macroeconomic environment; you congratulate yourself on a job well done.

Even granting this, though, it’s hard to shake the sense that many voters’ vibes about the state of the economy have gotten well and truly wack. My mind keeps straying back to a quote a small-town North Carolina realtor gave the New York Times back in August, explaining his economic grouchiness: “The last four years, I’ve paid more tax than I’ve ever paid.”

What’s so remarkable about this? Income tax rates have been annually decreasing in North Carolina. The reason this guy is paying more tax than ever is because he is making more money than ever. This isn’t just determination to see cloud rather than silver lining; this is grouching about the sunburn you got from all that economic sunshine.

You have to wonder: Is there more Team Harris could have done to win the messaging fight? She and her boss spent the back half of 2023 making the steel man case for Bidenomics—was it wise to give that argument up just when the economy was starting to roar again?

But maybe all that was out of her hands. Biden, after all, was still in the captain’s chair during the period when Democrats worked hard to sell the country on its own revived prosperity; this spring, he scrapped that messaging in favor of playing “I feel your pain”-style notes. And Democrats have long shuddered at the idea of crowing about the economy, fearful they’ll look detached or out of touch. 

We’ll never know whether an effort led by Harris to sell the good news might have played out differently. But maybe this was the opportunity Democrats missed by ridin’ with Biden for as long as they did: the chance not just to fight to a draw on the economy next week, but to dominate on it.

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Quick Hits

A TALE OF TWO VANCES: There were moments during JD Vance’s lengthy interview with Joe Rogan yesterday where you could catch glimpses of the sort of sharp, reasonable, policy-first figure the senator once hoped to become. This, for instance, is an incisive critique of the limitations of Democrat-led campaigns against such nebulous concepts as “misinformation”:

The entire modern Democratic party grew up in an era where there was consensus. . . . They grew up in an America where social trust was just so much higher. And I think a lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that that high level of social trust came organically from the way that American society worked. And if you have people trying to reimpose it from the top, it actually degrades the very thing that you are trying to create.

You know what, there’s something to that! But here’s another thing that degrades social trust: trafficking in wild conspiracy theories such as—oh, what’s a good example—suggesting that parents are making their kids trans to help them get into good colleges:

If you are a middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your kid goes into Harvard or Yale, like, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle-class kids. But the one way that those people can participate in the D.E.I. bureaucracy in this country is to be trans.

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ELON. PLEASE. MAKE. IT. STOP: Top GOP officials in Georgia have had to take to X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, in order to warn folks against a wild conspiracy theory about Hatians voting multiple times. Secretary Brad Raffensperger released a statement as well, calling it “likely foreign interference” and urging Musk to act.

“We ask Elon Musk and the leadership of other social media platforms to take this down,” the statement read. “This is obviously fake and part of a disinformation effort.”

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ALL APOSTROPHES: The White House’s press office altered the official transcript of President Joe Biden’s remarks on Tuesday, in which he called supporters or a singular supporter of Donald Trump “garbage” for spewing racist bile. As the AP reports: “The change was made after the press office ‘conferred with the president,’ according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP.”

This is now a three-day story, which is obviously not great for Biden or Harris. But while the official stenographer should be left alone, free to operate without pressure, the fundamental issue still remains. “Supporters” and “supporter’s” are homophones. If the White House insists Biden was saying the latter and the transcription office heard the former, there is just no reconciling the dispute.

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