Inherited a tough situation

Why Kamala Harris lost

Trump won because Harris inherited a tough situation from Joe Biden — and ultimately could not overcome it.

by Andrew Prokop

Four years after Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and left office in disgrace, the American people returned him to power in the 2024 election.

Major news outlets called most of the major swing states — North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — for Trump late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, giving him an Electoral College majority. Vice President Kamala Harris no longer has a path to victory.

The trend was broader than the swing states; there was a shift toward Trump across the nation, as he significantly improved on his performance in the 2020 election.

Indeed, it looks quite plausible that Trump could end up winning the national popular vote for the first time ever, though that will take some time to determine for sure, as it depends on the exact margin in slow-counting states like California.

Trump’s win will come with a new Republican Senate majority, as Democratic incumbents lost in Ohio and Montana. But as of Wednesday morning it is not yet clear which party will control the House of Representatives, and it could take some time to find out.

What is clear is that Trump won. How did this happen?

The blame game among Democrats will come fast and furious. But though the Harris campaign’s strategy is sure to be second-guessed, the extent and nationwide nature of the shift in Trump’s favor suggest she had an uphill battle all around — because of the widespread unpopularity of President Joe Biden and public disapproval of his record in office.

Harris inherited a tough situation from Biden – and ultimately could not overcome it

When Harris unexpectedly joined the presidential race in July after Biden stepped aside, she faced three formidable obstacles.

The first was a global trend: In the years since the pandemic, incumbent parties have been struggling in wealthy democracies across the world. The reasons for this are debated, though post-reopening inflation is likely a big one. But to win, Harris would have had to defy this trend.

The second was Biden’s unpopularity. The president was historically unpopular long before his disastrous debate with Trump, and poll after poll showed voters irate with his handling of the economy and immigration. Foreign policy, particularly the Israel-Gaza war that divided Democrats’ coalition, was a problem too. And since Harris had served in his administration as vice president, she had to figure out what to do about that.

Typically, such dynamics would seem to point to a “change” election where the incumbent party is booted. In such elections, the opposition can often put the blame for the current state of affairs on the incumbents, make vague promises that they’ll do things differently, and ride to victory.

Yet there was nothing typical about Harris’s opponent: Donald Trump. The fact that he had recently served as president in his own controversial term, with his own controversial record, seemed to present Harris with an opening. Perhaps she could brand herself the change candidate who would deliver a fresh, new approach, breaking from the failed politics of the past.

That brings us to the third obstacle: Harris’s own record. While running for president in 2019, Harris embraced progressive policy positions that Democrats now view as politically toxic, including banning fracking and decriminalizing unauthorized border crossing. So she had a choice to make: Should she stand by her old positions and promise bold progressive change, or should she tack to the center?

In the end, Harris took a kind of middle path. She downplayed, disavowed, or simply avoided mention of the policies she’d supported in 2019 — but she didn’t deliberately pick fights with the left in search of centrist cred, like Bill Clinton did in his 1992 presidential campaign. Harris wanted to keep the Democratic coalition happy, pleasing as many people as she could, rather than taking sides in any factional fights.

In addressing Biden’s record, too, Harris tried to strike a balance. She didn’t criticize Biden, throw him under the bus, or break with him — or the Biden-Harris administration’s policies — in any significant way. When pressed about voter anger over inflation and unauthorized immigration, she did not acknowledge error. Rather, she tried to argue that the economy was doing well now, and blamed Trump for not supporting a bipartisan immigration bill. And she did not shift on Israel-Gaza.

Harris’s hope was that she’d done enough to present herself as a new face, and that the fundamental unfitness of Donald Trump — and his unpopular record on issues like abortion and his attempt to steal the 2020 election — would ultimately prove to be decisive to voters disgruntled with both parties.

That hope was in vain.

Ultimately, much of the public was more resentful of inflation under Biden than they were about Trump’s attempted election theft. And so voters turned back to the candidate they kicked out of office just four years ago.

Is now in grave danger.......

Donald Trump has won — and American democracy is now in grave danger

Trump’s second term poses an existential threat to the republic. But there’s still good reason for hope.

by Zack Beauchamp

The 2024 presidential election is over — and Donald Trump is the victor. There is no doubt about the election’s legitimacy: Trump is on track to win the Electoral College by a wide margin, and potentially win the popular vote for the first time.

Yet while the election itself was clearly on the level, what comes next may not be. Having won power democratically, Trump is now in a position to enact his long-proposed plans to hollow out American democracy from within.

Trump and his team have developed detailed plans for turning the federal government into an extension of his will: an instrument for carrying out his oft-promised “retribution” against President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and anyone else who has opposed him. Trump’s inner circle, purged of nearly anyone who might challenge him, is ready to enact his will. And the Supreme Court, in its wisdom, has granted him sweeping immunity from his actions in office.

In nearly every conceivable way, a second Trump administration will likely be more dangerous than the first, a term that ended in over 1 million deaths from Covid-19 and a riot at the Capitol. A predictable crisis — a president consolidating power in his own hands and using it to punish his enemies — looms on the horizon, with many unpredictable crises likely waiting in the wings.

Yet as dire as things are, America has reserves it can draw on to withstand the coming assault. Over the course of the country’s long democratic history, it has built up robust systems for checking abuses of power.

America’s federal structure gives blue states control over key powers like election administration. Its independent judiciary stood strong during Trump’s first term. Its professional, apolitical military will likely push back against unlawful orders. Its politically active citizenry has a proven capacity to take to the streets. And America’s world-leading media will fiercely resist any effort to compromise its independence.

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No country at America’s level of political-economic development has ever collapsed into authoritarianism. There are some reasonably close modern analogues, most worryingly modern Hungary, but even they are different in crucial respects.

This is not to make an argument for complacency or naive optimism. Quite the opposite: The next four years will be American democracy’s gravest threat since the Civil War; if it survives them, it will surely do so battered, bruised, and battle-scarred.

But this realism should not be cause for succumbing to despair. As grim as things feel now, it’s possible that — if people take the gravity of the threat seriously — the republic may come out intact on the other side.

Trump’s scary second-term agenda, explained

We do not know why, exactly, America’s voters have chosen to return Trump to high office. The data isn’t fully in, let alone analyzed in detail. But as murky as the electoral picture remains, certain elements of the policy future are crystal clear. Trump’s own comments, his campaign’s statements, and allied documents like Project 2025 give us a relatively coherent picture of what the agenda will be in the next Trump administration.

Much of it resembles what you’d see from any other Republican president. Trump will appoint corporate allies to lead federal agencies, where they will work to slash regulations on issues ranging from workplace safety standards to pollution. He has already proposed regressive tax cuts without off-setting hikes, which would increase the federal deficit in the same way as President George W. Bush’s fiscal policy did. He will likely take steps to curtail abortion access, end federal police efforts to rein in abusive police, and crack down on federal protections for trans people — all examples of how his agenda would hurt certain groups of people, typically already vulnerable ones, more than others.

Trump’s biggest breaks with his party in traditional policy areas will likely come on trade, immigration, and foreign policy. Trump has proposed a “universal” tariff on imported goods, a mass deportation campaign that detains suspected “illegals” in camps, and weakening America’s commitment to the NATO alliance. These policies would together be a recipe for economic decline, domestic turmoil, and global chaos — at an already chaotic time.

But perhaps the most dangerous Trump policies will come in an area that traditionally transcends partisan conflict: the nature of the American system of government itself.

Throughout the campaign, Trump has proven himself obsessed with two ideas: exerting personal control over the federal government, and exacting “retribution” against Democrats who challenged him and the prosecutors who indicted him. His team has, obligingly, provided detailed plans for doing both of these things.

This process begins with something called Schedule F, an executive order Trump issued at the end of his first term but never got to implement. Schedule F reclassifies a large chunk of the professional civil service — likely upward of 50,000 people — as political appointees. Trump could fire these nonpartisan officials and replace them with cronies: people who would follow his orders, no matter how dubious. Trump has vowed to revive Schedule F “immediately” upon returning to office, and there is no reason to doubt him.

Between a newly compliant bureaucracy and leadership ranks purged of first-term dissenting voices like former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump will face little resistance as he attempts to implement policies that threaten core democratic freedoms.

And Trump and his team have already proposed many of them. Notable examples include investigating leading Democrats on questionable charges, prosecuting local election administrators, using regulatory authority for retribution against corporations that cross him, and either shuttering public broadcasters or turning them into propaganda mouthpieces. Trump and his allies have claimed unilateral executive authority to take all of these actions. (It remains unclear which party will control the House, but Republicans will be in charge of the Senate for at least the next two years.)

Ultimately, all this executive activity is aimed at turning the United States into a larger version of Hungary — a country whose leadership and policies are regularly praised by Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance, and Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts.

Hungary still has elections and nominal free speech rights; there are no tanks in the streets or concentration camps for regime critics. But it is a place where everything — from the national elections authority down to government art agencies — has been twisted to punish dissent and spread the government’s propaganda. Every aspect of government has been bent to ensure that national elections are contests in which the opposition never has a fighting chance. It is a kind of stealth autocratization, one that maintains the veneer of democracy while hollowing it from within.

This is why the second Trump presidency is an extinction-level threat to American democracy. The governing agenda Trump and his allies explicitly laid out is a systematic attempt to turn Washington into Budapest-on-the-Potomac, to deliberately and quietly destroy democracy from within.

Democracy is not lost

It is important to remember that, as dire as things are, the United States is not Hungary.

When Prime Minister Viktor Orbán came to power in 2010, he had a two-thirds majority in the country’s parliament — one that allowed him to pass a new constitution that twisted election rules in his party’s favor and imposed political controls on the judiciary. Trump has no such majority, and the US Constitution is nearly impossible to amend.

America’s federal structure also creates quite a few checks on the national government’s power. Election administration in America is done at the state level, which makes it very hard for Trump to seize control over it from Washington. A lot of prosecution is done by district attorneys who don’t answer to Trump and might resist federal bullying.

The American media is much bigger and more robust than its Hungarian peers. Orbán brought the press to heel by, among other things, politicizing government ad purchasing — a stream of revenue that the American press, for all our problems, does not depend on.

But most fundamentally, the American population has something Hungarians didn’t: advanced warning.

While the form of subtle authoritarianism pioneered in Hungary was novel in 2010, it’s well understood today. Orbán managed to come across as a “normal” democratic leader until it was too late to undo what he had done; Trump is taking office with roughly half the voting public primed to see him as a threat to democracy and resist as such. He can expect major opposition to his most authoritarian plans not only from the elected opposition, but from the federal bureaucracy, lower levels of government, civil society, and the people themselves.

This is the case against despair.

As grim as things seem now, little in politics is a given — especially not the outcome of a struggle as titanic as the one about to unfold in the United States. While Trump has four years to attack democracy, using a playbook he and his team have been developing since the moment he left office, defenders of democracy have also had time to prepare and develop countermeasures. Now is the time to begin deploying them.

Trump has won the presidency, which gives him a tremendous amount of power to make his antidemocratic dreams into reality. But it is not unlimited power, and there are robust means of resistance. The fate of the American republic will depend on how willing Americans are to take up the fight.

Arrest Immigrants

Arizona Passes Measure to Arrest Immigrants Who Enter US Illegally

Proposition 314 is all but certain, advocates warn, to open the door for racial profiling.

Melvis Acosta

Arizona voters passed Proposition 314, a measure that will allow state and local police to arrest people crossing the US border outside ports of entry and empower state judges to order deportations. The ballot measure passed with just over 62 percent of the vote. Advocates, including the ACLU of Arizona and the Florence Immigrant & Refugee Rights Project, have harshly condemned the measure, warning that it would open the door for racial profiling and harassment for people of color living in Arizona.

The law will likely face challenges, as immigration enforcement is a federal power, and similar state laws have been struck down in the past.

Arizona is no stranger to constitutionally questionable immigration laws. In 2012, the US Supreme Court struck down most of Senate Bill 1070, which made it illegal to be undocumented in the state, ruling that states don’t have the power to punish people for being in the country without documentation.  

In Texas, a similar bill that sought to allow police to arrest people crossing the US-Mexico border outside ports of entry into the state has been repeatedly blocked from going into effect because of legal challenges from the Justice Department and immigration advocacy groups that say the law infringes on the federal government’s sole authority over immigration.

The Arizona and Texas measures are part of a growing number of anti-immigrant proposals from Republican state lawmakers nationwide. The League of United Latin American Citizens—one of the largest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country—found that state lawmakers had already proposed 233 anti-immigrant bills over a month before Election Day, more than four times the total number from 2020. 

Abortion Rights Won... For now

Missouri Voted on Abortion Rights and Abortion Rights Won

A victory in spite of herculean efforts by state Republican officials.

Madison Pauly

The first state to ban abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade just became the first state to have a near-total abortion ban reversed by popular vote.

The people of Missouri voted on Tuesday to create a constitutional right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about abortion, birth control, and health care during pregnancy—approving Amendment 3 by almost 54 percent of the vote as of 11:30 p.m. Central Time, according to the Associated Press.

Amendment 3 was part of a nationwide effort by reproductive rights groups to use ballot initiatives to restore abortion rights state by state after the Supreme Court wiped out the national right to abortion. On Election Day this year, 10 states voted on abortion rights ballot measures.

In deep-red Missouri, where the state government is controlled by avowed abortion foes, even getting this initiative before voters was a feat. Republican state officials repeatedly threw up barriers to the process of certifying the ballot language and gathering signatures, leading to a series of bitter legal battles that all, ultimately, were decided in favor of abortion rights advocates. As Mother Jones reported last week:

Amendment 3’s proponents, a coalition known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, have traveled a rocky road just to get the measure before voters. They’ve overcome blatant obstruction by top state GOP officials, multiple legal challenges, and deep internal divisions over whether the initiative should allow the state to ban abortions after fetal viability. The final text protects abortion rights until viability, and permits later abortions if needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

The new constitutional amendment now sets up a legal challenge to Missouri’s abortion ban as well as to the constellation of restrictions that made getting an abortion almost impossible in the state even before the fall of Roe. As I wrote last year:

The reality is that, even before Dobbs, abortion access in Missouri was close to nil. The legislature had passed too many burdensome and medically unnecessary rules designed to be impossible for abortion clinics to comply with. In the years prior to Dobbs, the only clinic still offering abortions was a Planned Parenthood location in St. Louis, which performed about 100 abortions annually. “Many, many Missourians for years now have gone to Kansas or Illinois to access care, because the states had fewer restrictions,” explains Emily Wales, CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which stopped offering abortions at its Missouri locations in 2018. 

In this environment, the success of the initiative shows the enduring power of abortion rights as a motivation for voters—and their enduring anger against deadly laws that curb pregnant people’s power to control their bodies and their futures.

He is retarded...

Elon Musk Just Became One of the Most Powerful Men in the World 

The billionaire’s bet pays off, and he’s not done playing.

Anna Merlan

There’s no overstating how good election night was for Elon Musk. With Donald Trump’s victory, Musk—already the richest man in the world, thanks in part to lucrative federal contracts—has also made himself a major force in politics. During a Spaces conversation hosted on his X platform on Tuesday night, Musk said that America PAC, the newly-formed pro-Trump super PAC into which he poured millions of dollars, is “going to keep going after this election,” promising to begin preparing for 2026’s midterms, judicial contests, and other local races. Such commitments are another indication of how far-reaching and consequential he aims to make his new political ambitions. 

At this point, there’s no telling how big of a role Musk’s enthusiastic Trump boosterism actually played in the former president’s reelection. But Musk has already taken credit for improving Republicans’ ground game, despite America PAC’s having faced a widely-publicized story by Wired that cast serious doubt on its effectiveness. Largely Black canvassers told reporter Jake Lahut that they were “tricked and threatened” into working for the PAC, and then were trundled into seatless UHauls, given unrealistic quotas, threatened with having to pay their own hotel bills if they didn’t meet them, and left stranded with no way home.

Despite the controversy, Trump gave Musk generous credit for his victory, singling him out during his Wednesday morning victory speech. “We have a new star,” he declared. “A star is born: Elon… He’s a character, he’s a special guy, he’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses, we don’t have that many of them.” 

Musk and Trump both said during the campaign that Musk will head a “Department of Governmental Efficiency,” which they have floated could slash federal spending by as much as $2 trillion, a strategy that could throw the country into economic chaos. While there’s also no guarantee that DOGE—a jokey acronym referencing Musk’s favored cryptocurrency—would actually come to pass, such an arrangement would see Musk wielding power over agencies that are currently investigating his companies, including the SEC, which is probing his 2022 acquisition of Twitter.

Even in the face of Trump’s clear victory, Musk’s America PAC is still working to impute that pro-Harris election fraud took place on Tuesday. In a Wednesday tweet, America PAC called to impose new voter ID requirements, reposting a tweet from a user that claimed ”Kamala won all the states that don’t require voter ID.” (There are already 36 states that either require or request voters to show ID at the polls, and while Harris did win several states without strict voter ID laws, there’s no evidence it’s due to fraud. Instead, they tended to be liberal-leaning states where she was heavily favored.) 

In the hours following the election, Musk has begun articulating a broader and more draconian vision. This was signaled in his Spaces conversation, when he said America PAC would weigh in on district attorney races to encourage tough-on-crime candidates. “We have to have DAs that protect the citizens of their cities,” and “put repeat violent offenders in prison,” Musk added, describing the agenda as “doing common sense stuff.”

Musk has continued to toggle between these two polls—a dark and paranoid vision of how America functions, and giddiness at a Trump victory, and his role within it—from Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.

“I think there’s a sea change in the country,” Musk concluded, at the end of the Tuesday night Twitter space. “I hope I’m not wrong about that.”

If you are surprise.. YOU ARE A FUCKING STUPID PILE OF SHIT...

After Win, Trump Fans Admit “Project 2025 Is the Agenda”

“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol.”

Julianne McShane

On Wednesday morning, some of Trump’s favorite fans finally felt comfortable joking about what the next president has long denied: Project 2025 has always been the plan for a second Trump term.

“Now that the election is over I think we can finally say that yeah actually Project 2025 is the agenda. Lol,” right-wing podcast host Matt Walsh wrote in a post on X of the 900-plus-page extremist guidebook. Walsh’s message soon got picked up and promoted by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who was recently released from prison, where he landed after ignoring a subpoena from the House January 6 Committee. “Fabulous,” Bannon said, chuckling, after reading Walsh’s post out loud on his War Room podcast today. “We might have to put that everywhere.”

Benny Johnson, a conservative YouTuber with 2.59 million followers who has called affirmative action “Nazi-level thinking” and said Trump should prosecute Biden for human trafficking of immigrants, also chimed in: “It is my honor to inform you all that Project 2025 was real the whole time,” he posted on X.

Bo French, a local Texas GOP official who recently came under fire for using slurs about gay people and people with disabilities on social media, wrote: “Can we admit now that we are going to implement Project 2025?”

Walsh, Bannon, and the others are not the only people in Trump’s orbit who have made these promises. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, there is a long list of his connections to it, which include many people who have similarly said that Trump plans to enact the policies if reelected. Russell Vought, a potential next chief of staff profiled by my colleague Isabela Dias, said in a secretly recorded meeting that Project 2025 is the real Trump plan and the distancing tactic was just campaign necessity.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign, the RNC, and the Heritage Foundation—the right-wing think tank behind the plan—did not respond to repeated requests for comment from Mother Jones.

If these claims are true, then Trump could potentially see an erosion of support from his base. As I reported in September, an NBC News poll found that only 7 percent of GOP voters had positive views of Project 2025, while 33 percent held negative views. That is not entirely surprising when you consider the drastic ways it could radically reshape American life if enacted. It calls for banning abortion pills nationwide; using big tech to surveil abortion access; rolling back climate policies; enabling workplace discrimination; and worsening wealth inequality. 

Embrace of the politics of hate and fascism........

America Meets Its Judgment Day

Trump’s victory signals a national embrace of the politics of hate and a possible fascist future.

David Corn

Every election is a Judgment Day, but this one more so than any other in the history of the nation.

Never before has a major party run a nominee described by retired military leaders who worked with him as a “fascist” and a serious threat to American democracy. Never before has the electorate been provided the choice of a nominee who previously refused to accept vote tallies, falsely declared victory, covertly schemed to overturn an election, and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to stay in power, as well as one whose mismanagement of a pandemic caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Never before have Americans been asked to return to office a politician who waged a massive disinformation operation fueled by the most vicious vitriol to exploit hatred, racism, misogyny, and ignorance.

Is America a nation that accepts and embraces all that? The answer is yes.

Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—more than half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe autocrat to lead the nation once again. Trumpism triumphed, and the godhead of this cult has become both the first fascist and the first convicted felon to win an American presidential election.

Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, Vice President Kamala Harris, a latecomer to the race, ran a conventional campaign. She touted the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, presented a compelling personal story, offered a host of generally realistic policy proposals, and critiqued her opponent—doing all of this mostly accurately. Her last-minute elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket raised the question of whether the United States could elect a Black woman president. Counterpoised was another question: Can a criminal awaiting sentencing (found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to keep secret his supposed extramarital affair with a porn star) who has been indicted for other alleged crimes, and who has called for the termination of the Constitution (so he could be reinstalled as president), be elected commander in chief and the nation’s top defender of the Constitution?

There was nothing subtle about the 2024 election. It pit the political extremism Trump has embraced and fomented to drive his red-meat base to the polls against Harris’ effort to expand her pool of voters by forging an alliance of progressives and independents, centrists, and Republicans concerned about the danger Trump poses to democracy. More so than in his previous campaigns, Trump endeavored to demonize his opponents. He peddled the false claim that the United States has descended into a hellscape with an economy in a “depression” and gangs of criminal migrants armed with military-style weapons conquering towns and cities across the land. Looking to stoke grievance, resentment, and bigotry, he asserted that “evil” Democrats, assisted by a subversive media, have purposefully conspired to destroy the country. He essentially QAnonized American politics. He dismissed Harris as “low IQ” and not truly Black. He called her supporters “scum.”

Trump debased the national discourse further than he had in the years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015. That included violent talk of retribution, which included suggesting deploying the US military against “radical left lunatics,” putting Liz Cheney on trial for treason before a military tribunal and placing her before a line of guns, and executing retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For years, Trump has forced American politics into a downward spiral of unprecedented indecencies and anti-democratic impulses. And this year, more than 71 million Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris campaigned not only to implement a host of left-leaning policies related to such fundamental matters as health care, women’s freedom, and middle-class economics, but to prevent a would-be autocrat from gaining control of the US government. That’s a heavy lift for any one candidate.

The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites. At Trump rallies, the former reality TV celebrity staged his own version of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell envisioned in 1984. He decried his rivals—“the enemy within”—for sabotaging America and directed his followers to vent tribalistic fury at these targets, exploiting their rage and, yes, ignorance.

At one of his final rallies—held in a half-empty arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday—when Trump called Harris dumb, he was met by approving and angry shouts from the crowd: “She’s an idiot.” “She’s a moron.” “She’s a puppet.” “Lock her up.” One Trump supporter there told me Harris was too stupid to make a decision about anything and former President Barack Obama was calling all the shots. Another Trump devotee wore a sweatshirt that declared, “Say No to the Hoe.” (Racism and misogyny in a single slur.) One of the most anticipated moments of Trump’s rambling and repetitive speech occurred when he assailed the press. As soon as he started his now-familiar anti-media screed, many in the audience pivoted to face the journalists and TV crews on the riser toward the rear of the arena, shook their fists at them, and screamed profanities. This seemed to be fun for them.

Attendees I spoke with echoed Trump’s talking points, insisting that gangs of thugs from overseas are terrorizing American cities, that the nation is a crime-ridden disaster, that US government funds are being siphoned from a host of programs and handed to immigrants, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One fellow said he was for Trump because his 401(k) retirement fund was strong when Trump was president and now was in the dumps. When I explained that’s virtually impossible, given the Dow Jones average is now more than 44 percent higher than its best mark during the Trump years, he just shrugged and insisted President Joe Biden and Harris were to blame.

Some were unaware that retired Gens. John Kelly and Milley had called Trump a “fascist.” Those in the know dismissed these remarks as comments uttered by traitorous men envious of Trump or being paid by dark forces to undermine the Republican nominee. Many in the audience were wearing hats and T-shirts proclaiming Jesus backed Trump, and the ones I asked about this said that since Jesus had chosen Trump to be the victor in this race, only cheating could defy God’s will. (Apparently, God and Jesus can’t stop the steal.) Indeed, most of the Trump people I encountered said they would not accept a Harris win as legitimate, and a few remarked that there would be violence if Trump were declared the loser. They were fundamentalists: The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.

It’s not a radical observation that Trump tried to win through hate. Harris, as was much commented upon when she became the presidential nominee, talked up joy. At her rallies, she highlighted the rhetoric and values of community, noting that Americans can work together to address challenges. She repeatedly promised to listen to those who oppose her views and consider Republicans for posts in her administration if she were to prevail. That might have been just nice talk. But it was better than fueling division and, as Trump did, vowing to use the power of the presidency to investigate and prosecute critics and opponents and to root out of the federal government civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. Certainly, there was anger on the Democratic side: over the Dobbs decision and those politicians enacting or advocating severe restrictions on women, over the lack of action on climate change, over the horrific war in Gaza. But at Harris events, she did not seek to channel that into paranoid and dehumanizing assaults against Americans on the other side. Her stance—at least, rhetorically—was that all Americans count. Trump’s position: Trump uber alles, all others are “vermin” and the “enemy.”

American politics has always contained an us-versus-them element, and the battle can be fierce. But Trump turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he lied, he insulted, he appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He waged war on reality, seeking to lead millions into a cosmos of fakery and false narratives that boosts an ultra-Manichean view of the world. He saw his path to power as exacerbating the divisions within American society. He has been an accelerationist for tribalistic discord, explicitly threatening the norms and values of democratic governance. His answer to what ails the United States is strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior. Harris ran as a feisty Democrat who wants to work with Congress to tackle assorted problems.

These were profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to choose which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash in values for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, voters were forced to pick a side, to render a verdict on Trump’s war on truth, democracy, and decency and Harris’ traditional embrace of pluralism and established norms.

At this fork in the road, Americans made a decision on what sort of country the United States will be. A judgment has been reached: This is a nation to be ruled by Trump’s politics of hate. It can happen here, and it has.

NAZI AMERICA

The NAZI PUNKS have seized control! 

The stupid dumb fuck slack jaw racist shit bags have fucked the country over. 

They are too stupid to live, they need to get out of the gene pool. 

Lets hope the orange turd dies soon...

Looking fat and old, melania also...

 

Gender divide

A gender divide among Michigan voters could preview the state’s electoral results

From CNN's Kylie Atwood and DJ Judd

Many Michiganders who spoke to CNN in Kent County Tuesday are split down gender lines when it comes to casting their ballots: Many female voters are backing Vice President Kamala Harris, while many male voters are voting for former President Donald Trump — a possible preview of just how turnout among genders could impact the state’s results on Election Day.

Emmanuel and Joe Farage, brothers who are voting in the presidential election for the first time, say that they are backing Trump because of his economic policies. Their home is politically divided along gender lines: Their father is a Trump supporter and their mother is a Harris supporter, and they see the gender split among their friends as well.

“Most of my guy friends are voting for Trump,” said Emmanuel, 21. But when it comes to their female friends?

“Most of them I think are voting for Kamala,” said Joe, who is 20 years old.

Marie Hoekman, who voted for Trump in 2016, said that her decision to now vote for Harris is influenced by reproductive rights for women.

“A lot of it is women’s reproductive rights, just learning that even just like some like birth control methods that are very available now could potentially be outlawed,” Hoekman told CNN. “That is terrifying to me and to the people I love and that really pushed me over the edge to it.”

She is not alone.

Kelly Sowle, a 63-year-old Michigan voter who is also backing Harris, explained that “respect for women’s rights” is her “number one” issue. The right to abortion is enshrined in the Michigan constitution after voters overwhelmingly supported it in 2022, but Sowle is concerned about new challenges to that right if Trump wins.