and now it really begins ...

[Jaime1234]

READ AND WEEP

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/us/politics/latinos-trump-harris-poll.html

[Jaime1234]

According to THE NUMBERS, some 180,000 fascists saw the Apprentice this past weekend. A bomb if I ever heard about one. Five persons per showing.- With a budget of $16m, without the huge ads, it will have to make $50m worldwide to not lose any money.

https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/anti-trump-apprentice-box-office-bomb/

https://www.the-numbers.com/weekend-box-office-chart

[BrianTCB]

READ 'EM AND WEEP, FORUM fas.cists!!!

Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame joins a long list of celebrities who support Kamala Harris.

[drjohncarpenter]

---->

PatriotTakes
@patriottakes

Neo-Nazis joined RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump’s boat parade and yelled, “white power,” “make America white again,” “heil Trump,” and racial slurs.

10:33 AM · Oct 14, 2024
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1845880663750394194

[Jaime1234]

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/14/investing/trump-stock-truth-social-election/index.html

[BrianTCB]

Kamala Harris Erases Donald Trump's Gains With Black Voters: New Poll

https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-erases-donald-trump-gains-black-voters-new-poll-1968790

A new poll reveals Kamala Harris has similar support from Black voters as Joe Biden did in 2020, contradicting previous claims that she was losing their support to Donald Trump.

The poll was conducted by YouGov for CBS News between October 8 and October 11. It found that 87 percent of Black likely voters would vote for Harris and 12 percent would vote for Trump.

YouGov's exit poll from 2020 found exactly the same party breakdown, with 87 percent of Black voters having said they voted for Biden, and 12 percent said they voted for Trump.

The results show a slight change from a New York Times/Sienna College poll published last week, which found Harris's support among black voters at 78 percent, and Trump's support at 15 percent.

With the race currently on a knife-edge, small percentage shifts in turnout among specific demographics in key swing states could determine the outcome of the election.

If elected, Harris would be the first woman to hold the White House and only the second Black person overall.

Polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight currently gives Harris a 53 percent chance of victory, against 46 percent for Trump.

[latebloomer]

What Elon Musk Really Wants
The Tesla and X mogul has long dreamed of redesigning the world in his own extreme image. Trump may be his Trojan horse.

By Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, 19 Oct 2024

In Elon Musk’s vision of human history, Donald Trump is the singularity. If Musk can propel Trump back to the White House, it will mark the moment that his own superintelligence merges with the most powerful apparatus on the planet, the American government—not to mention the business opportunity of the century.

Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.

Musk’s pursuit of this dream clearly transcends billionaire hobbyism. Consider the personal attention and financial resources that he is pouring into the former president’s campaign. According to The New York Times, Musk has relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee Trump’s ground game there. That is, he’s running the infrastructure that will bring voters to the polls. In service of this cause, he’s imported top talent from his companies, and he reportedly plans on spending $500 million on it. That doesn’t begin to account for the value of Musk’s celebrity shilling, and the way he has turned X into an informal organ of the campaign.

Musk began as a Trump skeptic—a supporter of Ron DeSantis, in fact. Only gradually did he become an avowed, rhapsodic MAGA believer. His attitude toward Trump seems to parallel his view of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, AI might culminate in the destruction of humanity. On the other hand, it’s inevitable, and if harnessed by a brilliant engineer, it has glorious, maybe even salvific potential.

Musk’s public affection for Trump begins, almost certainly, with his savvy understanding of economic interests—namely, his own. Like so many other billionaire exponents of libertarianism, he has turned the government into a spectacular profit center. His company SpaceX relies on contracts with three-letter agencies and the Pentagon. It has subsumed some of NASA’s core functions. Tesla thrives on government tax credits for electric vehicles and subsidies for its network of charging stations. By Politico’s tabulation, both companies have won $15 billion in federal contracts. But that’s just his business plan in beta form. According to The Wall Street Journal, SpaceX is designing a slew of new products with “national security customers in mind.”

Musk has only begun to tap the pecuniary potential of the government, and Trump is the dream. He rewards loyalists, whether they are foreign leaders who genuflect before him or supplicants who host events at his resorts. Where other presidents might be restrained by norms, Trump shrugs. During his first term, he discovered that his party was never going to punish him for his transgressions.

In the evolving topography of Trumpland, none of his supporters or cronies will have chits to compare with Musk’s. If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.

It’s not hard to imagine how the mogul will exploit this alliance. Trump has already announced that he will place him in charge of a government-efficiency commission. Or, in the Trumpian vernacular, Musk will be the “secretary of cost-cutting.” SpaceX is the implied template: Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing the affairs of state to nimble entrepreneurs and adroit technologists. That means there will be even more opportunities for his companies to score gargantuan contracts. So when Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he’s not imagining a reprise of the Apollo program. He’s envisioning cutting SpaceX one of the largest checks that the U.S. government has ever written. He’s talking about making the richest man in the world even richer.

Of course, this could be bluster. But it is entirely consistent with the rest of the right’s program for Trump’s second term, which involves dismantling the federal government—eliminating swaths of the politically neutral civil service and entire Cabinet departments and agencies. It is exactly the kind of sweeping change that suits Musk’s grandiose sense of his own place in human history.

This isn’t a standard-issue case of oligarchy. It is an apotheosis of the egotism and social Darwinism embedded in Silicon Valley’s pursuit of monopoly—the sense that concentration of power in the hands of geniuses is the most desirable social arrangement. As Peter Thiel once put it, “Competition is for losers.” (He also bluntly admitted, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) In this worldview, restraints on power are for losers, too.

With his government contracts—and his insider influence—Musk will become further ensconced in the national-security state. (He already has a $1.8 billion classified contract, likely with the National Reconnaissance Office, and, through a division of SpaceX called Starshield, supplies communications networks for the military.) At a moment when the government is confronting crucial decisions about the future of AI and the commercialization of space, his ideals will hold sway.

At Tesla, Musk assigned himself the title of “technoking.” That moniker, which sits on the line between jokiness and monomania, captures the danger. Following the example set by Trump, he wouldn’t need to divest himself from his businesses, not even his social-media company. In an administration that brashly disrespects its critics, he wouldn’t need to fear congressional oversight and could brush aside any American who dares to question his role. Of all the risks posed by a second Trump term, this might be one of the most terrifying.

https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/10/donald-trump-is-elon-musks-trojan-horse/680309/

[latebloomer]

Opinion: Donald Trump’s hysterical closing argument: Save the cows!
Among the beefs I have with his prophecies for a Harris administration: They aren’t even original.

By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, 18 Oct 2024

They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. And now, they’re banning the cows.

Or so says Donald Trump. No bull!

“Kamala even wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change,” Donald Trump told supporters in North Carolina. “That means no more cows. You know, this is serious.”

Ruminate on that.

“She wants to get rid of your cows. No more cows,” Trump warned an audience in Georgia.

The steaks could not be higher in this election.

If you are alarmed by Trump’s portrait of bovine abolition under a President Kamala Harris, the good news is you probably wouldn’t have to look at it much if it happens. This is because, according to Trump, Harris is also planning to ban windows.

“They want buildings taken down and new buildings built without windows,” Trump informed his followers in Wisconsin.

He explained at another stop that Harris will see to it that “new buildings are built without windows because, you see, a window is environmentally unfriendly, having to do with the heat, the gases and the sunlight.”

On Oct. 12 in Nevada, Trump put the two grave menaces together in a single, apocalyptic sentence: “They want to do things like no more cows and no windows in buildings.”

Under the stress of the final weeks of the campaign, Trump has somehow become even more bonkers than he already was. Over the past week, he proposed using the National Guard or the military against “radical left lunatics” on Election Day, and he called the United States an “occupied country.” He stood onstage at what was supposed to be a “town hall meeting” and swayed and danced to his campaign playlist for 39 minutes. He bickered with an interviewer at the Economic Club of Chicago and slurred words at a rally in Georgia. He threatened to impose 2,000 percent tariffs on cars. He called his opponents the “enemy from within” and made up stories about migrant gangs taking over buildings in Colorado. He held a Fox News event with women and proclaimed himself “the father of IVF,” then acknowledged he had asked a female Republican senator to “explain IVF” to him.

And his doomsaying has gotten even more outlandish. Under Harris, “America will be condemned to a fate of decline, desperation and despair,” Trump said at one stop. “Your family finances will be permanently destroyed. Your borders will be gone forever. Tens of millions more illegal aliens will invade our cities and towns. ... Medicare and Social Security will buckle and collapse.” He went on to say that businesses would be “worthless” and that Harris “would crash the stock market like in 1929, annihilate the pensions, 401(k)s and all of the retirement accounts” and cause “your income to plummet, your net worth to collapse, your tax bills to soar and your jobs to totally disappear.” But none of this will matter because, in Trump’s telling, she’ll also start World War III.

Perhaps the weirdest part of these prophesies of doom is that they aren’t even original. In the closing weeks of the 2020 campaign, Trump issued similarly cataclysmic visions — in some cases, word for word the same — about a Joe Biden presidency. They apparently didn’t come true. (We’re still here, after all, and so are the cows and windows.) Yet Trump is repeating the same loony forecasts this time around, as if 2020 didn’t happen. Not for the first time, he seems to think Americans have very short memories and don’t know how to Google stuff.

“Cows are out,” Trump said in September 2020. “They don’t want cattle.” Also: “We’re not going to have windows anymore.” And one month later: “You, too, can have no windows in your buildings.”

Four years later, there are still 87 million head of cattle on U.S. farms. And the multibillion-dollar U.S. window market is growing steadily. Yet it didn’t occur to Trump to defenestrate these wacky claims.

Over and over, Trump has predicted that “Kamala will deliver a 1929-style depression” and crash the stock market, thus eviscerating retirement savings. Back in 2020, Trump predicted that “on the chance that Biden got in, you will have a stock market go down like you wouldn’t believe.” He warned that “if Biden and Harris and the radical left gain power, they will collapse our economy and send our nation into a very steep depression.” It would be “a crippling depression, the likes of which you’ve never seen.”

Instead, Biden has presided over a three-year bull market, with stocks gaining more than 50 percent overall and setting records dozens of times this year. The economy grew at a substantially higher clip under Biden than under Trump and added more than 16 million jobs — compared with the 2.7 million lost under Trump.

Trump is claiming on the trail that “if I’m not elected, you will have no auto industry” and that, under Harris, “the auto industry would be nonexistent or dead. It will be dead. It will never be able to survive.”

Sound familiar? In 2020, Trump said that “a vote for Biden is a vote to eradicate your auto industry” — and that Biden would “close down manufacturing” in general.

Yet, miraculously, the United States continues to produce about 10 million new cars per year, second in the world only to China. Manufacturing output overall is up more than 20 percent since Biden took office, and American manufacturers have added more than 700,000 jobs.

Trump is lately calling Harris “the tax queen” who will increase your tax burden by varying amounts. Sometimes he claims that “they want to raise your taxes by five times.” Other times, “She’s going to double and quadruple your taxes.” Yet other times, she will hike taxes by only 72 percent. “I’ve never seen somebody that openly campaigns on the fact that they’re going to raise taxes,” he said this month.

Trump likewise claimed in 2020 that “Biden will raise your taxes $4 trillion” and was “the only guy I’ve ever seen who runs by saying ... ‘We will raise your taxes.’”

But his crystal ball failed him again. Federal tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product has remained largely unchanged under Biden.

In the current campaign, Trump warns that Harris “wants to ban fracking. ... She wants to ban anything having to do with fossil fuel.” Furthermore, “Kamala will crush the electrical grid of the United States of America,” and “your costs will go up and your lights will go out.”

And here is a Trump tweet from 2020: “Sleepy Joe Biden has vowed to ABOLISH the American oil and natural gas industries, and BAN fracking.”

For the record, the United States produced more crude oil than any nation in history over the past several years and is on course to do so again this year. It has also been producing natural gas at record levels.

On crime, Trump claims that Harris “was one of the founders of ‘Defund the Police,’ and she still believes that.” In his telling, she “supports abolishing cash bail” so that murder suspects can be released without posting bond. Harris “destroyed San Francisco” with crime, “then she destroyed California, and now she wants to destroy the United States.”

And back in 2020? “Biden wants to defund the police,” Trump alleged. “He’s going to defund the police. He’s going to cut it way down,” he said at another point. Biden, too, would “end cash bail, releasing dangerous criminals onto our streets.” Because of Biden’s policies that would “destroy America,” Trump said: “If Joe Biden is elected president, the chaos and bloodshed will spread to every community in our land.”

Biden did not end cash bail. Funds for police have generally risen. And violent crime, after increasing during the pandemic, has been falling for three years and is now below where it was during Trump’s final year in office.

Trump now prophesies the entire nation is coming to resemble a “migrant camp” under Harris, in which borders are “gone forever.” He explains: “She wants mass amnesty for people that have literally looked to destroy our country. ... It’s going to bankrupt your Medicare, bankrupt your Social Security.”

In 2020, Trump similarly alleged that Biden would “dissolve your borders.” Biden’s “plan to provide government health care to illegal immigrants would bankrupt our health-care system, collapse our hospitals and destroy Medicare.” Seniors would “lose the benefits they paid into” so that Biden could finance “open borders.”

After a big post-pandemic surge, illegal crossings are down sharply on the supposedly “open” border. And the latest solvency reports for Social Security and Medicare show improvement.

Trump’s prediction that World War III “is going to happen” if he isn’t returned to the White House is better understood in the context of his statement that there “would have been a nuclear war” if he were not elected in 2016. His claim that Harris “wants to confiscate your guns” should be seen alongside his 2020 claim that Biden would “shred your Second Amendment, confiscate your guns.” (Nearly 17 million guns were sold in the United States last year alone.) His nonsensical idea that Harris “wants to abolish the suburbs” (when she’s finished with the cows and windows?) has to be seen alongside Trump’s 2020 prediction that Biden would “destroy our suburbs.” He says Harris “wants to take away your private health care.” In 2020, Biden wanted to “eliminate private health care.” And yet, the percentage of Americans with private health insurance has somehow remained stable at about 65 percent.

He can’t even bring himself to trot a new metaphor out of the stable. In 2020, Biden was a “Trojan horse for socialism,” as NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald pointed out. Now “Kamala Harris is a Trojan horse for nation-destroying spending, communist price controls and open borders.”

The Oracle at Mar-a-Lago prophesied with all-caps confidence in 2020 that if Biden won, “Our Country would COLLAPSE!” He foretold, “Under Biden, there will be no school, no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgivings, no Easters, no Christmases, and no Fourth of July. Other than that, you’re going to have a wonderful life.”

If Biden won, Trump said, “China will own the United States. You’re going to have to learn to speak Chinese.”

Bet you a banned beefsteak that you won’t be sitting in your windowless home this Thanksgiving practicing Mandarin. But, by all means, let’s take him seriously when he says that, if Harris wins, “you won’t have a country left” and “our country is finished.”

The problem with this particular false prophet is that he tries to prove his auguries true even when they invariably fail to materialize. In 2020, he predicted that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged” — then fomented an insurrection in support of his lie. Now he’s saying that his opponents are “professional thieves” and that cheating is “the only way they’re going to win.”

You don’t need to be clairvoyant to see where this is going.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/18/trump-doom-windows-cows-ban-harris/

[drjohncarpenter]

Two weeks left to make a choice.

[drjohncarpenter]

VOTE HARRIS-WALZ for the future of democracy.

[drjohncarpenter]

Let's not forget "losers and suckers"
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/09/03/report-trump-disparaged-us-war-dead-as-losers-suckers/

[latebloomer]

TRUMP: ‘I NEED THE KIND OF GENERALS THAT HITLER HAD’

The Republican nominee’s preoccupation with dictators, and his disdain for the American military, is deepening.
By Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, 22 Oct 2024

n april 2020, Vanessa Guillén, a 20-year-old Army private, was bludgeoned to death by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood, in Texas. The killer, aided by his girlfriend, burned Guillén’s body. Guillén’s remains were discovered two months later, buried in a riverbank near the base, after a massive search.

Guillén, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, grew up in Houston, and her murder sparked outrage across Texas and beyond. Fort Hood had become known as a particularly perilous assignment for female soldiers, and members of Congress took up the cause of reform. Shortly after her remains were discovered, President Donald Trump himself invited the Guillén family to the White House. With Guillén’s mother seated beside him, Trump spent 25 minutes with the family as television cameras recorded the scene.
In the meeting, Trump maintained a dignified posture and expressed sympathy to Guillén’s mother. “I saw what happened to your daughter Vanessa, who was a spectacular person, and respected and loved by everybody, including in the military,” Trump said. Later in the conversation, he made a promise: “If I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help—I’ll help you with that,” he said. “I’ll help you out. Financially, I’ll help you.”

Natalie Khawam, the family’s attorney, responded, “I think the military will be paying—taking care of it.” Trump replied, “Good. They’ll do a military. That’s good. If you need help, I’ll help you out.” Later, a reporter covering the meeting asked Trump, “Have you offered to do that for other families before?” Trump responded, “I have. I have. Personally. I have to do it personally. I can’t do it through government.” The reporter then asked: “So you’ve written checks to help for other families before this?” Trump turned to the family, still present, and said, “I have, I have, because some families need help … Maybe you don’t need help, from a financial standpoint. I have no idea what—I just think it’s a horrific thing that happened. And if you did need help, I’m going to—I’ll be there to help you.”

A public memorial service was held in Houston two weeks after the White House meeting. It was followed by a private funeral and burial in a local cemetery, attended by, among others, the mayor of Houston and the city’s police chief. Highways were shut down, and mourners lined the streets.

Five months later, the secretary of the Army, Ryan McCarthy, announced the results of an investigation. McCarthy cited numerous “leadership failures” at Fort Hood and relieved or suspended several officers, including the base’s commanding general. In a press conference, McCarthy said that the murder “shocked our conscience” and “forced us to take a critical look at our systems, our policies, and ourselves.”

According to a person close to Trump at the time, the president was agitated by McCarthy’s comments and raised questions about the severity of the punishments dispensed to senior officers and noncommissioned officers.

In an Oval Office meeting on December 4, 2020, officials gathered to discuss a separate national-security issue. Toward the end of the discussion, Trump asked for an update on the McCarthy investigation. Christopher Miller, the acting secretary of defense (Trump had fired his predecessor, Mark Esper, three weeks earlier, writing in a tweet, “Mark Esper has been terminated”), was in attendance, along with Miller’s chief of staff, Kash Patel. At a certain point, according to two people present at the meeting, Trump asked, “Did they bill us for the funeral? What did it cost?”

According to attendees, and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant, an aide answered: Yes, we received a bill; the funeral cost $60,000.

Trump became angry. “It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a friendly Mexican!” He turned to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and issued an order: “Don’t pay it!” Later that day, he was still agitated. “Can you believe it?” he said, according to a witness. “friendly people, trying to rip me off.”

Khawam, the family attorney, told me she sent the bill to the White House, but no money was ever received by the family from Trump. Some of the costs, Khawam said, were covered by the Army (which offered, she said, to allow Guillén to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery) and some were covered by donations. Ultimately, Guillén was buried in Houston.

Shortly after I emailed a series of questions to a Trump spokesperson, Alex Pfeiffer, I received an email from Khawam, who asked me to publish a statement from Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s sister. Pfeiffer then emailed me the same statement. “I am beyond grateful for all the support President Donald Trump showed our family during a trying time,” the statement reads. “I witnessed firsthand how President Trump honors our nation’s heroes’ service. We are grateful for everything he has done and continues to do to support our troops.”

Pfeiffer told me that he did not write that statement, and emailed me a series of denials. Regarding Trump’s “friendly Mexican” comment, Pfeiffer wrote: “President Donald Trump never said that. This is an outrageous lie from The Atlantic two weeks before the election.” He provided statements from Patel and a spokesman for Meadows, who denied having heard Trump make the statement. Via Pfeiffer, Meadows’s spokesman also denied that Trump had ordered Meadows not to pay for the funeral.

The statement from Patel that Pfeiffer sent me said: “As someone who was present in the room with President Trump, he strongly urged that Spc. Vanessa Guillen’s grieving family should not have to bear the cost of any funeral arrangements, even offering to personally pay himself in order to honor her life and sacrifice. In addition, President Trump was able to have the Department of Defense designate her death as occurring ‘in the line of duty,’ which gave her full military honors and provided her family access to benefits, services, and complete financial assistance.”

The personal qualities displayed by Trump in his reaction to the cost of the Guillén funeral—contempt, rage, parsimony, racism—hardly surprised his inner circle. Trump has frequently voiced his disdain for those who serve in the military and for their devotion to duty, honor, and sacrifice. Former generals who have worked for Trump say that the sole military virtue he prizes is obedience. As his presidency drew to a close, and in the years since, he has become more and more interested in the advantages of dictatorship, and the absolute control over the military that he believes it would deliver. “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump said in a private conversation in the White House, according to two people who heard him say this. “People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” (“This is absolutely false,” Pfeiffer wrote in an email. “President Trump never said this.”)

A desire to force U.S. military leaders to be obedient to him and not the Constitution is one of the constant themes of Trump’s military-related discourse. Former officials have also cited other recurring themes: his denigration of military service, his ignorance of the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, his admiration for brutality and anti-democratic norms of behavior, and his contempt for wounded veterans and for soldiers who fell in battle.

Retired General Barry McCaffrey, a decorated Vietnam veteran, told me that Trump does not comprehend such traditional military virtues as honor and self-sacrifice. “The military is a foreign country to him. He doesn’t understand the customs or codes,” McCaffrey said. “It doesn’t penetrate. It starts with the fact that he thinks it’s foolish to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit himself.”

I’ve been interested in Trump’s understanding of military affairs for nearly a decade. At first, it was cognitive dissonance that drew me to the subject—according to my previous understanding of American political physics, Trump’s disparagement of the military, and in particular his obsessive criticism of the war record of the late Senator John McCain, should have profoundly alienated Republican voters, if not Americans generally. And in part my interest grew from the absolute novelty of Trump’s thinking. This country had never seen, to the best of my knowledge, a national political figure who insulted veterans, wounded warriors, and the fallen with metronomic regularity.

Today—two weeks before an election that could see Trump return to the White House—I’m most interested in his evident desire to wield military power, and power over the military, in the manner of Hitler and other dictators.

Trump’s singularly corrosive approach to military tradition was in evidence as recently as August, when he described the Medal of Honor, the nation’s top award for heroism and selflessness in combat, as inferior to the Medal of Freedom, which is awarded to civilians for career achievement. During a campaign speech, he described Medal of Honor recipients as “either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead,” prompting the Veterans of Foreign Wars to issue a condemnation: “These asinine comments not only diminish the significance of our nation’s highest award for valor, but also crassly characterizes the sacrifices of those who have risked their lives above and beyond the call of duty.” Later in August, Trump caused controversy by violating federal regulations prohibiting the politicization of military cemeteries, after a campaign visit to Arlington in which he gave a smiling thumbs-up while standing behind gravestones of fallen American soldiers.

His Medal of Honor comments are of a piece with his expressed desire to receive a Purple Heart without being wounded. He has also equated business success to battlefield heroism. In the summer of 2016, Khizr Khan, the father of a 27-year-old Army captain who had been killed in Iraq, told the Democratic National Convention that Trump has “sacrificed nothing.” In response, Trump disparaged the Khan family and said, “I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices. I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures.”

One former Trump-administration Cabinet secretary told me of a conversation he’d had with Trump during his time in office about the Vietnam War. Trump famously escaped the draft by claiming that his feet were afflicted with bone spurs. (“I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels,” Trump told The New York Times in 2016.) Once, when the subject of aging Vietnam veterans came up in conversation, Trump offered this observation to the Cabinet official: “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”

In 1997, Trump told the radio host Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.” This was not the only time Trump has compared his sexual exploits and political challenges to military service. Last year, at a speech before a group of New York Republicans, while discussing the fallout from the release of the Access Hollywood tape, he said, “I went onto that (debate) stage just a few days later and a general, who’s a fantastic general, actually said to me, ‘Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.’” I asked Trump-campaign officials to provide the name of the general who allegedly said this. Pfeiffer, the campaign spokesman, said, “This is a true story and there is no good reason to give the name of an honorable man to The Atlantic so you can smear him.”

In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

Baker and Glasser also reported that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, feared that Trump’s “‘Hitler-like’ embrace of the big lie about the election would prompt the president to seek out a ‘Reichstag moment.’”

Kelly—a retired Marine general who, as a young man, had volunteered to serve in Vietnam despite actually suffering from bone spurs—said in an interview for the CNN reporter Jim Sciutto’s book, The Return of Great Powers, that Trump praised aspects of Hitler’s leadership. “He said, ‘Well, but Hitler did some good things,’” Kelly recalled. “I said, ‘Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, (Hitler) rebuilt the economy.’ But what did he do with that rebuilt economy? He turned it against his own people and against the world.” Kelly admonished Trump: “I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing.’”

This wasn’t the only time Kelly felt compelled to instruct Trump on military history. In 2018, Trump asked Kelly to explain who “the good guys” were in World War I. Kelly responded by explaining a simple rule: Presidents should, as a matter of politics and policy, remember that the “good guys” in any given conflict are the countries allied with the United States. Despite Trump’s lack of historical knowledge, he has been on record as saying that he knew more than his generals about warfare. He told 60 Minutes in 2018 that he knew more about NATO than James Mattis, his secretary of defense at the time, a retired four-star Marine general who had served as a NATO official. Trump also said, on a separate occasion, that it was he, not Mattis, who had “captured” the Islamic State.

As president, Trump evinced extreme sensitivity to criticism from retired flag officers; at one point, he proposed calling back to active duty Admiral William McRaven and General Stanley McChrystal, two highly regarded Special Operations leaders who had become critical of Trump, so that they could be court-martialed. Esper, who was the defense secretary at the time, wrote in his memoir that he and Milley talked Trump out of the plan. (Asked about criticism from McRaven, who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Trump responded by calling him a “Hillary Clinton backer and an Obama backer” and said, “Wouldn’t it have been nice if we got Osama bin Laden a lot sooner than that?”)

Trump has responded incredulously when told that American military personnel swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. According to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s recent book, Donald Trump v. the United States, Trump asked Kelly, “Do you really believe you’re not loyal to me?” Kelly answered, “I’m certainly part of the administration, but my ultimate loyalty is to the rule of law.” Trump also publicly floated the idea of “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” as part of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and keep himself in power.

On separate occasions in 2020, Trump held private conversations in the White House with national-security officials about the George Floyd protests. “The Chinese generals would know what to do,” he said, according to former officials who described the conversations to me, referring to the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army, which carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. (Pfeiffer denied that Trump said this.) Trump’s desire to deploy U.S. troops against American citizens is well documented. During the nerve-racking period of social unrest following Floyd’s death, Trump asked Milley and Esper, a West Point graduate and former infantry officer, if the Army could shoot protesters. “Trump seemed unable to think straight and calmly,” Esper wrote in his memoir. “The protests and violence had him so enraged that he was willing to send in active-duty forces to put down the protesters. Worse yet, he suggested we shoot them. I wondered about his sense of history, of propriety, and of his oath to the Constitution.” Esper told National Public Radio in 2022, “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at General Milley, and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?’” When defense officials argued against Trump’s desire, the president screamed, according to witnesses, “You are all friendly losers!”

Trump has often expressed his esteem for the type of power wielded by such autocrats as the Chinese leader Xi Jinping; his admiration, even jealousy, of Vladimir Putin is well known. In recent days, he has signaled that, should he win reelection in November, he would like to govern in the manner of these dictators—he has said explicitly that he would like to be a dictator for a day on his first day back in the White House—and he has threatened to, among other things, unleash the military on “radical-left lunatics.” (One of his four former national security advisers, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir, “It is a close contest between Putin and Xi Jinping who would be happiest to see Trump back in office.”)

Military leaders have condemned Trump for possessing autocratic tendencies. At his retirement ceremony last year, Milley said, “We don’t take an oath to a king, or a queen, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator … We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.” Over the past several years, Milley has privately told several interlocutors that he believed Trump to be a fascist. Many other leaders have also been shocked by Trump’s desire for revenge against his domestic critics. At the height of the Floyd protests, Mattis wrote, “When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens.”

Trump’s frustration with American military leaders led him to disparage them regularly. In their book A Very Stable Genius, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, both of The Washington Post, reported that in 2017, during a meeting at the Pentagon, Trump screamed at a group of generals: “I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” And in his book Rage, Bob Woodward reported that Trump complained that “my friendly generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals.”

Trump’s disdain for American military officers is motivated in part by their willingness to accept low salaries. Once, after a White House briefing given by the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, Trump said to aides, “That guy is smart. Why did he join the military?” (On another occasion, John Kelly asked Trump to guess Dunford’s annual salary. The president’s answer: $5 million. Dunford’s actual salary was less than $200,000.)

Trump has often expressed his love for the trappings of martial power, demanding of his aides that they stage the sort of armor-heavy parades foreign to American tradition. Civilian aides and generals alike pushed back. In one instance, Air Force General Paul Selva, who was then serving as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president that he had been partially raised in Portugal, which, he explained, “was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. In America, we don’t do that. It’s not who we are.”

For Republicans in 2012, it was John McCain who served as a model of “who we are.” But by 2015, the party had shifted. In July of that year, Trump, then one of several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, made a statement that should have ended his campaign. At a forum for Christian conservatives in Iowa, Trump said of McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

It was an astonishing statement, and an introduction to the wider public of Trump’s uniquely corrosive view of McCain, and of his aberrant understanding of the nature of American military heroism. This wasn’t the first time Trump had insulted McCain’s war record. As early as 1999, he was insulting McCain. In an interview with Dan Rather that year, Trump asked, “Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.” (A brief primer: McCain, who had flown 22 combat missions before being shot down over Hanoi, was tortured almost continuously by his Communist captors, and turned down repeated offers to be released early, insisting that prisoners be released in the order that they’d been captured. McCain suffered physically from his injuries until his death, in 2018.) McCain partisans believe, with justification, that Trump’s loathing was prompted in part by McCain’s ability to see through Trump. “John didn’t respect him, and Trump knew that,” Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide and co-author, told me. “John McCain had a code. Trump only has grievances and impulses and appetites. In the deep recesses of his man-child soul, he knew that McCain and his achievements made him look like a mutt.”

Trump, those who have worked for him say, is unable to understand the military norm that one does not leave fellow soldiers behind on the battlefield. As president, Trump told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed such value on finding soldiers missing in action. To him, they could be left behind, because they had performed poorly by getting captured.

My reporting during Trump’s term in office led me to publish on this site, in September 2020, an article about Trump’s attitudes toward McCain and other veterans, and his views about the ideal of national service itself. The story was based on interviews with multiple sources who had firsthand exposure to Trump and his views. In that piece, I detailed numerous instances of Trump insulting soldiers, flag officers and veterans alike. I wrote extensively about Trump’s reaction to McCain’s death in August 2018: The president told aides, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he was infuriated when he saw flags at the White House lowered to half-mast. “What the **** are we doing that for? Guy was a friendly loser,” he said angrily. Only when Kelly told Trump that he would get “killed in the press” for showing such disrespect did the president relent. In the article, I also reported that Trump had disparaged President George H. W. Bush, a World War II naval aviator, for getting shot down by the Japanese. Two witnesses told me that Trump said, “I don’t get it. Getting shot down makes you a loser.” (Bush ultimately evaded capture, but eight other fliers were caught and executed by the Japanese).

The next year, White House officials demanded that the Navy keep the U.S.S. John S. McCain, which was named for McCain’s father and grandfather—both esteemed admirals—out of Trump’s sight during a visit to Japan. The Navy did not comply.

Trump’s preoccupation with McCain has not abated. In January, Trump condemned McCain—six years after his death—for having supported President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. “We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare,” Trump told an Iowa crowd. “Obamacare is a catastrophe. Nobody talks about it. You know, without John McCain, we would have had it done. John McCain for some reason couldn’t get his arm up that day. Remember?” This was, it appears, a malicious reference to McCain’s wartime injuries—including injuries suffered during torture—which limited his upper-body mobility.

The article sparked great controversy, and provoked an irate reaction from the Trump administration, and from Trump himself. In tweets, statements, and press conferences in the days, weeks, and years that followed, Trump labeled The Atlantic a “second-rate magazine,” a “failing magazine,” a “terrible magazine,” and a “third-rate magazine that’s not going to be in business much longer”; he also referred to me as a “con man,” among other things. Trump has continued these attacks recently, calling me a “horrible, radical-left lunatic named Goldberg” at a rally this summer.

In the days after my original article was published, both the Associated Press and, notably, Fox News, confirmed the story, causing Trump to demand that Fox fire Jennifer Griffin, its experienced and well-regarded defense reporter. A statement issued by Alyssa Farah, a White House spokesperson, soon after publication read, “This report is false. President Trump holds the military in the highest regard.”

Shortly after the story appeared, Farah asked numerous White House officials if they had heard Trump refer to veterans and war dead as suckers or losers. She reported publicly that none of the officials she asked had heard him use these terms. Eventually, Farah came out in opposition to Trump. She wrote on X last year that she’d asked the president if my story was true. “Trump told me it was false. That was a lie.”

When I spoke to Farah, who is now known as Alyssa Farah Griffin, this week, she said, “I understood that people were skeptical about the ‘suckers and losers’ story, and I was in the White House pushing back against it. But he said this to John Kelly’s face, and I fundamentally, absolutely believe that John Kelly is an honorable man who served our country and who loves and respects our troops. I’ve heard Donald Trump speak in a dehumanizing way about so many groups. After working for him in 2020 and hearing his continuous attacks on service members since that time, including my former boss General Mark Milley, I firmly and unequivocally believe General Kelly’s account.”

(Pfeiffer, the Trump spokesperson, said, in response, “Alyssa is a scorned former employee now lying in her pursuit to chase liberal adulation. President Trump would never insult our nation’s heroes.”)

Last year, I published a story in this magazine about Milley that coincided with the end of his four-year term. In it, I detailed his tumultuous relationship with Trump. Milley had resisted Trump’s autocratic urges, and also argued against his many thoughtless and impetuous national-security impulses. Shortly after that story appeared, Trump publicly suggested that Milley be executed for treason. This astonishing statement caused John Kelly to speak publicly about Trump and his relationship to the military. Kelly, who had previously called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,” told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Trump had referred to American prisoners of war as “suckers” and described as “losers” soldiers who died while fighting for their country.

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly asked. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs, are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

When we spoke this week, Kelly told me, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”

Kelly and others have taken special note of the revulsion Trump feels in the presence of wounded veterans. After Trump attended a Bastille Day parade in France, he told Kelly and others that he would like to stage his own parade in Washington, but without the presence of wounded veterans. “I don’t want them,” Trump said. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Milley also witnessed Trump’s disdain for the wounded. Milley had chosen a severely wounded Army captain, Luis Avila, to sing “God Bless America” at his installation ceremony in 2019. Avila, who had completed five combat tours, had lost a leg in an improvised-explosive-device attack in Afghanistan, and had suffered two heart attacks, two strokes, and brain damage as a result of his injuries. Avila is considered a hero up and down the ranks of the Army.

It had rained earlier on the day of the ceremony, and the ground was soft; at one point Avila’s wheelchair almost toppled over. Milley’s wife, Holly­anne, ran to help Avila, as did then–Vice President Mike Pence. After Avila’s performance, Trump walked over to congratulate him, but then said to Milley, within earshot of several witnesses, “Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded.” Never let Avila appear in public again, Trump told Milley.

An equally serious challenge to Milley’s sense of duty came in the form of Trump’s ignorance of the rules of war. In November 2019, Trump intervened in three different brutality cases then being adjudicated by the military. In the most infamous case, the Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher had been found guilty of posing with the corpse of an ISIS member. Though Gallagher was found not guilty of murder, witnesses testified that he’d stabbed the prisoner in the neck with a hunting knife. In a highly unusual move, Trump reversed the Navy’s decision to demote him. A junior Army officer named Clint Lorance was also the recipient of Trump’s sympathy. Trump pardoned Lorance, who had been convicted of ordering the shooting of three unarmed Afghans, two of whom died. And in a third case, a Green Beret named Mathew Golsteyn was accused of killing an unarmed Afghan he thought was a Taliban bomb maker. “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state,” Trump said at a Florida rally.

In the Gallagher case, Trump intervened to allow Gallagher to keep his Trident insignia, one of the most coveted insignia in the entire U.S. military. The Navy’s leadership found this intervention particularly offensive because tradition held that only a commanding officer or a group of SEALs on a Trident Review Board were supposed to decide who merited being a SEAL. Milley tried to convince Trump that his intrusion was hurting Navy morale. They were flying from Washington to Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, to attend a “dignified transfer,” a repatriation ceremony for fallen service members, when Milley tried to explain to Trump the damage that his interventions were doing.

In my story, I reported that Milley said, “Mr. President, you have to understand that the SEALs are a tribe within a larger tribe, the Navy. And it’s up to them to figure out what to do with Gallagher. You don’t want to intervene. This is up to the tribe. They have their own rules that they follow.”

Trump called Gallagher a hero and said he didn’t understand why he was being punished.

“Because he slit the throat of a wounded prisoner,” Milley said.

“The guy was going to die anyway,” Trump said.

Milley answered, “Mr. President, we have military ethics and laws about what happens in battle. We can’t do that kind of thing. It’s a war crime.” Trump said he didn’t understand “the big deal.” He went on, “You guys”—meaning combat soldiers—“are all just killers. What’s the difference?”

Milley then summoned one of his aides, a combat-veteran SEAL officer, to the president’s Air Force One office. Milley took hold of the Trident pin on the SEAL’s chest and asked him to describe its importance. The aide explained to Trump that, by tradition, only SEALs can decide, based on assessments of competence and character, whether one of their own should lose his pin. But the president’s mind was not changed. Gallagher kept his pin.

One day, in the first year of Trump’s presidency, I had lunch with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, in his White House office. I turned the discussion, as soon as I could, to the subject of his father-in-law’s character. I mentioned one of Trump’s recent outbursts and told Kushner that, in my opinion, the president’s behavior was damaging to the country. I cited, as I tend to do, what is in my view Trump’s original sin: his mockery of John McCain’s heroism.

This is where our conversation got strange, and noteworthy. Kushner answered in a way that made it seem as though he agreed with me. “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I found this baffling for a moment. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment. In Trump’s mind, traditional values—values including those embraced by the armed forces of the United States having to do with honor, self-sacrifice, and integrity—have no merit, no relevance, and no meaning.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-military-generals-hitler/680327/

This article has special relevance for Elvis' fans: He achieved a stellar record while in service, and was proud of it all the rest of his life. One can only imagine his reaction to Trump's narcissistic self-service.

[drjohncarpenter]

America has a choice to make in two weeks.

Should be an easy one.

[latebloomer]

Opinion: The double standard for Harris and Trump has reached a breaking point
Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post, 24 Oct 2024

Something is wrong with this split-screen picture. On one side, former president Donald Trump rants about mass deportations and claims to have stopped “wars with France,” after being described by his longest-serving White House chief of staff as a literal fascist. On the other side, commentators debate whether Vice President Kamala Harris performed well enough at a CNN town hall to “close the deal.”

Seriously? Much of a double standard here?

Somehow, it is apparently baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way. I don’t know the answer to the chicken-or-egg question — whether media coverage is leading public perception or vice versa — but the disparate treatment is glaring.

This week, it became simply ridiculous.

Retired Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly — who served as Trump’s homeland security secretary for six months, then as his White House chief of staff for a year and a half — said in an extended interview with the New York Times that Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

This followed a similar shocking assessment by retired Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the final 16 months of Trump’s presidency. Milley is quoted in Bob Woodward’s latest book, “War,” as saying that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”

It is hard to overstate how extraordinary this is. Two of the nation’s most honored and respected warriors, both of whom worked closely with Trump for extended periods, warned the nation about the grave danger of returning him to the White House. Respecting the tradition of keeping the armed forces out of partisan politics, neither Kelly nor Milley went so far as to explicitly endorse Harris. But they clearly intended their remarks to be understood by those who might vote for Trump as flashing red lights and blaring sirens.

The Times published audio of the Kelly interview, in which he describes how Trump “commented more than once that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’” In a separate interview with the Atlantic, Kelly recalled Trump telling him that he wanted obedient generals like “Hitler’s generals.” Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government,” Kelly told the Times.

During Wednesday’s town hall, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris whether she believes Trump is a fascist. “Yes, I do,” she replied — and that was the headline from the event. But news stories and commentary also questioned her decision to pivot from questions about specific policy positions — almost all of which she has already spelled out in considerable detail — to attacks on Trump and warnings about the danger he poses to our democracy.

Let’s review: First, Harris was criticized for not doing enough interviews — so she did multiple interviews, including with nontraditional media. She was criticized for not doing hostile interviews — so she went toe to toe with Bret Baier of Fox News. She was criticized as being comfortable only at scripted rallies — so she did unscripted events, such as the town hall on Wednesday. Along the way, she wiped the floor with Trump during their one televised debate.

Trump, meanwhile, stands before his MAGA crowds and spews nonstop lies, ominous threats, impossible promises and utter gibberish. His rhetoric is dismissed, or looked past, without first being interrogated.

Imagine if Harris were promising to end the war in Gaza on her first day in office but wouldn’t say how. Imagine if she were proposing a tariffs-based economic plan that economists say would destabilize the world economy and cost the average family $4,000 a year in higher prices. Imagine if she were promising a “bloody” campaign to uproot and deport millions of undocumented migrants who are gainfully employed and paying taxes. And imagine if Harris were vowing to use the military to go after her political opponents, as Trump repeatedly pledges.

Kelly and Milley are hardly the only career servicemen to sound the alarm about a potential second Trump term. Two of Trump’s defense secretaries, Marine Corps Gen. Jim Mattis and Army Lt. Col. Mark T. Esper, and one of his national security advisers, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, have also warned about Trump’s erratic performance as commander in chief.

They join a long list of civilians who worked in the Trump administration and say there should never be another one. Never has there been such a chorus of officials who served a president telling the nation that under no circumstances should he be elected again.

Oops, there I go again, dwelling on the existential peril we face. Instead, let’s parse every detail of every position Harris takes today against every detail of every position she took five years ago. And then let’s wonder why she hasn’t already put this election away.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/24/harris-trump-cnn-town-hall/

The media have long debased political reporting, referring to teams, battles and battlegrounds, and failing to specifically and deliberately label lies as lies. They've been striving for a long time more for sensationalism (click-bait) than for informing the boy politic about the actual state of the nation and the world.

And so, here we are....

The Democratic Party has its share of villains and nincompoops, but the Republican Party has set a course directly opposed to serious, factual, responsible public discourse, and now virtually espouses authoritarianism -- and we have a close election?

May God have mercy upon us!

[drjohncarpenter]

VOTE HARRIS-WALZ.

Democracy matters.

[G.I. Blues]

and they all want to make a return on investment

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, CURRENT president.

Angry Staffer
@Angry_Staffer

Let’s talk about why having adults in the room matters, shall we?

In the fall of 2022, you might remember Russia accusing Ukraine of preparing to use a dirty bomb against Russian troops.

This was designed as a false flag pretext to Russia using tactical nuclear weapons.

Intelligence estimates had odds at a coin flip - 50/50 - that Russia would use low-yield nuclear weapons to keep Ukraine from retaking Kherson or threatening Crimea.

So, what did the Biden administration do?

They prevented World War 3.

SecDef Austin told Russian Defense Minister Shoigu that we knew exactly what Russia was planning, and that the consequences to crossing THAT Rubicon would be unlike anything Russia had seen.

Jake Sullivan convinced Ukraine to call the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in to inspect Ukraine nuclear facilities and publicly shoot down rumors that they were building a dirty bomb.

Then, members of the administration reached out to literally everyone: China, Israel, Turkey, India, etc. and urged them to reach out to their Russian counterparts to reiterate the point: Russia would be a complete pariah on the world stage if they followed through with this plan.

Biden got President Xi of China on the phone personally, convincing Xi to publicly address the nuclear issue and to tell Putin not to go there.

Was Putin actually going to nuke Ukraine? Obviously, it didn’t happen—and it’s hard to prove a negative—but Western intelligence agencies certainly thought it was possible.

I say all of this to remind you that experience matters. Competence matters.

Trump wants to replace career civil servants with Trump loyalists if he wins. This kind of whole of government approach to any crisis would be impossible to execute in that situation.

Vote accordingly.

9:30 AM · Oct 23, 2024
https://x.com/Angry_Staffer/status/1849126226360754363

President Joseph R. Biden and his staff, including Vice-President Harris.

Leading the country and the WORLD, making things better and SAFER for all of us.

[drjohncarpenter]

VOTE BLUE.

One week to protect our precious democracy from these criminals.

[drjohncarpenter]

Yesterday, EX president.

Politics

This Is Trump’s Message

At his Madison Square Garden rally Trump’s argument was hate and fear.

By David A. Graham

241027_racist candidate speaks at MSG.jpg

Adam Gray / Bloomberg / Getty

October 28, 2024, 12:11 PM ET

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country.” A minute later: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff — for a minstrel show in 1874.

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror — presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This — all of this — is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness.

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland. (The Trump campaign said that Hinchcliffe’s routine “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” which is also absurd. He was invited by Trump to appear at a rally for Trump’s campaign, and made the joke standing at a lectern emblazoned with Trump’s name.)

The Trump campaign itself may be perfectly happy with how it all went down. Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in Manhattan, a place that still enthralls him, was packed to the rafters for him. Counterprotests were muted, even as speakers at the rally boasted about entering the beating heart of liberalism. (As The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, New York City has moved somewhat toward him, though any hopes of his winning the city or the state remain far-fetched.)

The whole point of the rally was provocation. Trump has long demonstrated a view that it’s better when people are talking about him — even if they’re outraged — than talking about anyone else. The record is murky: Trump won in 2016 but lost the popular vote, lost in 2020, and led his party to poor performances in 2018 and 2022. But he appears to believe that this year could be different. Trump calculates that if people are thinking about immigration and race, they will move toward him, even if they disapprove of the policy solutions he’s offering (or just don’t believe he’ll implement them).

Some Democrats agree, and fret that the Harris campaign’s recent turn toward attacking Trump is a missed opportunity for the Democrat to make a positive case for herself or refocus on economic issues. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward warns in an email that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” while Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a Harris surrogate, warned that the rally was “bait.”

As a matter of electoral calculation, focusing on the offensive remarks last night may be unhelpful for Harris. But as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-madison-square-garden-rally/680424/

VOTE HARRIS-WALZ for DECENCY, EMPATHY and a STRONG DEMOCRACY.

[Jaime1234]

Humongous victory for Trump

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation/supreme-court-allows-virginia-to-resume-its-purge-of-voter-registrations/

[BrianTCB]

Victory? Yeah right. LOL...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/virginia-results

Tell me again how it's a victory?

dem-voters-virginia.png

women-voters-virginia.png

[drjohncarpenter]

Today, EX president.

Editorial:

Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becoming a troubling concern

AP24303574162285_t650.jpg

Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024, in Palm Beach, Fla.

Wednesday, Oct. 30, 2024 | 2 a.m.


Donald Trump’s racism, sexism, xenophobia and penchant for corruption have long made him unfit for any public office, let alone the presidency. But as he continues his bid for a second term in the White House, there is an unsettling and undeniable shift that is leading many experts, observers and even some Trump supporters to conclude that the former president’s mental acuity and sharpness are also in decline, that his physical health and stamina are waning and that his frustration and anger are boiling over.

Americans from both sides of the political spectrum should be alarmed by Trump’s words and behavior. The nation must confront the fact that beyond his hateful character, he is crippled cognitively and showing clear signs of mental illness.

There’s no need to resort to armchair psychology to interpret what’s apparent. If victorious, Trump would be the oldest president ever inaugurated. In recent weeks, he has canceled an increasing number of public appearances, with Trump’s own campaign citing the candidate’s exhaustion. When he does appear publicly, Trump struggles to complete sentences or sustain coherent thoughts, and has shown a pronounced difficulty concentrating and a tendency to repeat himself, sometimes within the same sentence.

At a recent rally in New Hampshire, for example, Trump began to discuss infrastructure and wound up segueing into a disjointed monologue about loyalty and perceived injustices against him, ending with a bewildering comment about windmills causing cancer.

This is not an isolated incident. A recent analysis by The New York Times noted that Trump’s rally speeches over the past eight years have become darker, longer, more profane and increasingly unfocused and unhinged — a troubling sign that he is no longer able to articulate ideas or reason in ways we expect of our leaders. This makes him prey to manipulations by his own staff or, worse, the control of foreign adversaries.

He shambles about aimlessly, slurs his words and sometimes speaks gibberish. Always an effortless liar, now that his speeches are nothing more than a series of lies tangled in a mass inside his head, it appears he no longer even knows he’s lying.

He has called for the imprisonment of journalists, pledged to purge the government of “deep state” operatives he perceives as disloyal and is amplifying his tyrannical rhetoric. He has also increased his public praise for dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping while using increasingly fascist language to describe those he deems political enemies. The former president has even suggested using the military against his domestic critics — an approach reminiscent of repressive regimes in history that has often been the precursor to creeping authoritarianism.

With Trump’s fragility comes an increasing dependence on enablers who show a disturbing willingness to indulge his delusions, amplify his paranoia or steer his feeble mind toward their own goals. Among these enablers is his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Should Trump be deemed unfit to serve, Vance would step into power.

Once a “Never Trump” conservative who openly criticized Trump as a danger to the republic, Vance has since fully embraced an extremist ideology, morphing into a vocal MAGA supporter who seems eager to emulate Trump’s worst instincts.

Beyond his weird obsession with childless women whom he says are “deranged” and “sociopathic,” and his penchant for spreading conspiracy theories about immigrants and other marginalized communities, Vance poses a different threat to democracy than Trump. He has repeatedly demonstrated that he is little more than a puppet of his billionaire hedge fund benefactors and has openly stated he would have refused to certify the 2020 election, suggesting he would subordinate constitutional principles for personal profit and power.

His willingness to discard any principles shows that he would likely not push back against Trump’s excesses or his deteriorating mental stability. Instead, he might embrace a Trumpian authoritarianism, exacerbating the very dangers we face with Trump’s current mental decline.

If history has taught us anything, it is that democracies are fragile. America’s founders designed the presidency to be a stabilizing force. Trump’s instability, paired with his and Vance’s increasing willingness to trample democratic norms and visible contempt of anyone not like him, has transformed what might have once been seen by conservatives as an uncomfortable leadership style into an existential threat to American democracy.

For those who believe in a country governed by checks, balances and the rule of law, a return to Trumpian leadership is dangerous in its own right. But to do so with an impaired leader who cannot govern competently and a fellow authoritarian waiting in the wings is perilous.

As voters consider Trump’s latest bid for the presidency, it’s essential to recognize that this election is not merely a choice between policy platforms or party loyalties. It’s a test of our willingness to safeguard our nation from leaders whose fitness for office is in serious question. This election is about protecting the integrity of our democracy from those who would let it collapse in the name of power, loyalty or expedience.

Donald Trump has never had the moral compass to lead this country. But even his supporters cannot afford to ignore the signs that he may no longer have the mental faculties to lead it either. The stakes are simply too high.

https://lasvegassun.com/news/2024/oct/30/trumps-decline-has-been-alarming/

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