I am still thinking about the election. Yeah, I figured. You probably are, too. Well, as I’m thinking, I’m realizing. Today, my realization was this:

I undervalued the importance of Joe Biden’s unpopularity.

It never recovered, not even as he dropped out. More than anything, that fact gives credence to the claim that the economy was the driving factor in the election. The electorate, still reeling from the effects of pandemic-relation inflation, simply voted against the party in power.

Whether it was the economy or perceptions of it is something I have discussed and will discuss again in future editions. For now, I want to stick with this realization – that I undervalued Biden’s unpopularity.

If you take Donald Trump out of the picture, as well as the fact that he’s an adjudicated rapist, a felon and an insurrectionist who stole government secrets – not to mention that he campaigned explicitly as dictator-in-waiting – this election would be more comprehensible.

Which is to say: of course the incumbent party lost.

It was not popular.

But of course, we can’t take Trump out of the picture. He’s a lying, thieving, philandering sadist who led an attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government after he botched, as president, the country’s response to the pandemic so badly that the electorate threw him out of the White House at record rates.

And it’s because we can’t take him out of the picture that I undervalued Biden’s unpopularity. I figured no matter how badly voters rated Biden’s performance, no matter how old he seemed to be, no matter how poor he might be at communicating his transformational record, it was still going to be better than how they saw the former president. After all, they already threw Trump out for the worst job performance ever. Why on earth would they rehire him after having fired him?

This affected my thinking about Kamala Harris, too. Even if a lot of the electorate was too sexist and too racist to vote for a biracial woman, no matter how great she is, I figured that the electorate had already fired Trump for gross negligence. As long as she acted normally, even a biracial woman would be seen as the superior option when compared to a deranged man who tried overthrowing the will of the people and who, nearly four years later, was clearly in the throes of dementia.

But all this was premised on an assumption: that Biden’s and by extension Harris’ low approval rating was not that important. Virtually every article I have written about the 2024 election was based on the idea that Trump’s blinding horribleness would overwhelm whatever deficit there was on the other side. I even assumed that it didn’t matter who that was, because the electorate would still vote against Trump.

I was wrong, obviously, but I didn’t start to understand why until I read an interview with some Harris campaign staffers. Specifically, I didn’t start to understand until I read what advisor David Plouffe said about the campaign’s internal polling. It never showed her ahead of Trump.

Let me say that again, with feeling:

Internal polling never showed her ahead of Trump.

How is that possible?

How is it possible when Trump himself was already unpopular, was indeed never popular, even when he was the president? And how can that be when Trump ran not a campaign so much as a vengeance movement in which he practically declared himself unfit? He even vowed to defund schools that required children to be vaccinated, reminding voters why they booted him out the first time around.

I have been thinking about this all day. At first, I thought Plouffe was lying, covering his ass, as it were, saying that there was nothing they could have done differently so don’t blame them for failing. They did the best they could, blah blah blah, but she was doomed from the start.

But then I thought about Biden’s unpopularity and by extension hers, and how that fact, under any other circumstances in any other election, would explain why she was never ahead. The president has been underwater since the last quarter of 2021. The vice president had a hundred days to turn that around. She came close, but fell short by about 230,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Some will say that Biden should have dropped out sooner, and they would be right, but only because they have the benefit of hindsight. While we don’t know what Biden’s internal polling was showing, we do know that Biden himself had enormous faith in the electorate to choose someone who was not promising to be a petty tyrant. For those of us who were so focused on stopping Trump that we were willing to overlook Biden’s liabilities, especially the fact that he hadn’t been popular in three years, his faith in America was good enough.

Why is Biden unpopular, even now? Perhaps it’s the economy. Perhaps it’s perceptions of the economy. (The rightwing media apparatus is larger today than it was four years ago and it’s getting bigger.) Whatever the reason, his unpopularity carried over to Harris, who was already shouldering a deficit in terms of time (100 days) and in terms of her sex and race. She came close to overcoming it all, but didn’t. (Would distancing herself from Biden have worked? Maybe, but I doubt it.)

I would like to end this on a note of hope, but honestly, I don’t know how. Like Biden, I had faith in the ability of voters to decide between a candidate who may not be the greatest for some and another who was the absolute worst for everyone. They fired Trump, but forgot why.

If there is hope, it’s in thinking about the destructive shortsightedness of the majority of voters. Just as they forgot why they fired Trump, they’ll forget why Biden and Harris were so bad that they had to give a criminal a second chance, putting him above the law. In victory, Trump is experiencing a popularity he never had as president. Given the attention span of voters, he’ll be back to where he started before long.

NOW READ: Democratic leadership missing in action as Trump tightens his grip

I told you the other day that I was doing less on the social media website formerly known as Twitter and more on a social media website called Bluesky. I’m part of a great migration, as it were, of millions of people, notably liberal types, who have decided to leave.

At Bluesky, I have found no Nazis and no bots, no ads for crypto or gold bullion or dildos. I have found a community of like-minded people who share my interests, especially democracy and the common good. (I have also found folks who love boxing, jazz and food, but I digress.)

It is not la la land. Already, I have gotten into passionate arguments over government policy with people with whom I’ll probably never agree. I have encountered assholes, too. (They are everywhere, alas.)

But I’d say most people are interested in debate in the sense that it reveals something important to them. They’re not interested in winning, as if debates were a game. People stick with the facts as they understand them. They do not, in my experience so far, flat-out lie. They do not mob you with half-truths, insults, smears and bullshit.

ALSO READ: Trump's failure and the next pandemic

I’m saying this in response to an opinion I have seen spring up since news broke of the tens of millions who have moved over to Bluesky. This opinion is tired and familiar, but nonetheless popular among certain op-ed writers. And I don’t see the pushback it deserves.

This opinion claims that liberals are afraid to argue with people they don’t like or don’t agree with, making them just as bad, or nearly as bad, as the people they dislike. It believes in “the marketplace of ideas,” which is to say, it believes that ideas must be tested for merit through rigorous competition. It stakes a claim on the “true” meaning of liberalism while implying that some liberals can be quite illiberal.

This opinion deserves a pushback not only because it’s popular among certain op-ed writers, but because it’s popular among people so influential that they elevate it to the level of conventional wisdom.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire television personality, asked why supporters of Donald Trump are not wanted on Bluesky. “You don’t have to follow them,” he said. “You can block them. You can filter words. Don’t you want @bsky.app to have all perspectives? I certainly do. As long as it’s civil, why not welcome different viewpoints.”

From the outset, what makes this opinion so frustrating is the fact that communities that have formed on Bluesky are already doing what Mark Cuban and other influential voices say they should be doing.

You can find AlterNet on Bluesky here.

There’s already openness to new ideas. There’s already engagement with different viewpoints. There’s already heated debates that are civil but that nevertheless reveal junctures at which opposing sides will likely never agree. There are already assholes on the website. (Alas.)

The question isn’t whether the thing that should be happening is happening. It is. The question is why that’s so difficult to see.

Part of the reason is the mistaken belief that communities, or even a democracy, can’t really be good and just without the inclusion of everyone, even people who voted for, or at least didn’t mind that much, a candidate who campaigned openly on bigotry and hate.

This is a mistaken belief because it makes a huge mistake – it believes that excluding people who are hateful is itself a kind of hatred.

It isn’t.

It’s an act of liberation.

There’s probably some room to debate some people who voted for Trump. Some of them really believed, though it confounds me, that the president who tanked the economy during the pandemic with his negligence and selfishness will revive it now that we’re out of it.

Otherwise, there is no room. Why? Because rightwing politics isn’t interested in debating points of fact and logic and interest. In the public square, its singular focus is shutting down its enemies.

In a civil debate, my opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s, provided that my opinion is grounded in something beyond the subjective. In rightwing politics, however, that’s not the case, because that can never be the case. Donald Trump is the only one who has the right to say what’s true and what’s false. He is the sole and ultimate arbiter of reality. Anyone who stands apart from that forfeits the right to exist.

In civil debate, everyone understands what it means to disagree. But in rightwing politics, there is no such thing as disagreement. There is victory and there is annihilation – and that’s it. Disagreement requires deference to the authority of facts, reason and mutual self-respect. But why would I respect your interests or your legal rights or even your humanity when such respect inhibits waging war against you?

Though rightwing politics does not recognize the rules of debate, it pretends to in order to lull enemies into believing that rightwingers can be persuaded. That’s where liberals, Democrats and serious people make their first mistake, in trusting the fundamentally dishonest.

In fact, it doesn’t matter what the debate question is – whether it’s “illegal immigration” or climate change or taxes. They won’t recognize the question as a problem, because the real problem is you. And if you are the real problem, what’s the real solution? Silence or annihilation.

For them, this is a warfare, not a civil debate, and failing to understand that will only make liberals, Democrats and serious people feel insane.

Which is why forming communities on Bluesky that exclude people who are fundamentally dishonest – whose only interest is wearing you down to the point of submission – isn’t just as bad or just as hateful.

The marketplace of ideas literally can’t function when mobs of liars, cheats and demi-tyrants attempt to colonize the minds of honest people who are interested in seeing the best ideas rise to the top.

Excluding them isn’t illiberal.

It’s an act of liberation.

You can find AlterNet on Bluesky here.

For now, I’m not getting involved in the debate over what Kamala Harris did wrong. For one thing, whatever conclusions are drawn now will almost certainly be forgotten by the time of the next election. For another, the debate takes vital attention away from the choice of the majority of American voters, which is to say, their terrible choice.

Why did they break for Donald Trump? Lots of worthy people are going to spend lots of time exploring that question. I won’t, though. What I know is that Trump campaigned on easily proven lies. What I also know is his supporters chose to believe them. What I care about now are the consequences of that choice, and those consequences are going to be bad for all of us, including everyone who voted for him.

This month, the president-elect said among the first things he’s going to do is eliminate the US Department of Education. That agency not only sends federal money to local school districts, it makes sure children are treated equally. This is usually understood in terms of race, but special-education is protected too, and it needs it. There was a time in American history when special-needs kids were told to sink or swim.

My kid is one of those kids, and if the funding and protection she now has disappears, I’m going to take that personally. I’m going to blame everyone who supported Trump. I won’t care if they didn’t believe he’d follow through on his pledge. I won’t care if they didn’t know about it. I won’t care if they were lied to by the rightwing media apparatus. I won’t care if the kids of Trump voters are themselves victims of their parents’ bad choices. I’m going to blame them and I will be right to.

ALSO READ: The end of left-leaning news?

Ignorance is no defense in law.

It should be no defense in politics either.

Trump has also promised to impose punishing tariffs on imported goods from countries like China and Mexico. Tariffs are a tax and every adult knows how a tax works. Yes, some of his supporters pretended not to know that importers pass that cost on to consumers. But whether they did or didn’t is going to be irrelevant to me when I’m paying two or three times more for necessities like food and clothing.

As I’m standing in the checkout at Stop & Shop, sticker-shocked for the umpteenth time, I’m not going to be wondering what Kamala Harris could have done to persuade white working-class Americans to vote for her. I’m not going to feel sympathy for them, knowing that they decided to impoverish themselves out of spite and resentment. No, I’ll be too busy cursing them for the titanic a--holes they are.

Trump has also promised to deport millions of so-called illegal immigrants. He said he’ll only go after “the bad ones” and his supporters, even some Latinos, decided to believe a liar. But I’m not going to care how they came to that decision if the government starts snatching taxpayers out of their homes, arresting and detaining whole families, including US citizens, in the insane belief that doing so is going to make America great again. Why should I care about why they voted the way they did when the consequence of that choice brings chaos to communities, decimates the labor supply and raises prices?

Trump has denied it, but his Republicans are looking forward to taking another crack at repealing the Affordable Care Act. Tens of millions of Americans depend on Obamacare, including independent businesspeople, like me, who could not do what we do without the law. Voters who supported Trump are included in that number, but again, it does not matter to me whether they knew a vote for him was a vote for abolishing affordable insurance. I tend to lose interest in the reasons behind another person’s choices if those choices ruin me.

The conventional wisdom is that Trump inflamed resentments in order to win. What’s missing from that story is that the resentments are over race, or rather racism. Fact is, lots of white people feel like nonwhite people are taking something from them when they do better for themselves. Trump has made an art form out of getting white people to believe nonwhite people are robbing them, making them poorer, even when the economy is rapidly benefiting those same white people.

Well, when it comes to resentment, you haven’t seen anything yet.

If Trump does what he says, by the time he’s done, America is going to be poorer, sicker, weaker and more chaotic. In some cases, he will have done irreparable harm, as he did last time he was president, including to the people who supported him. And he will have done it because … well, it doesn’t matter. They made their choice and it was terrible.

And the rest of us will be right to resent it.

NOW READ: There's no 'waiting it out'

This is what they wanted.

I think the American people, especially those who supported the second candidacy of Donald Trump, deserve an explanation.

They knew who they were voting for. They knew he’s a convicted felon. They knew he’s an adjudicated rapist. They knew he grabbed women by the p----. His supporters knew all these things, and they voted for him anyway, less in spite of what they knew, more so because of it.

So Trump supporters deserve an explanation. They deserve to know why Matt Gaetz was forced to withdraw his name from the nomination to be the next US attorney general. Trump wanted him. A majority wanted Trump. And this is a democracy! If most Americans wanted a criminal president, what’s wrong with criminal attorney general?

Sure, Gaetz is said to have paid women for sex. It’s been said that one of them was under the age of a consent. It’s also been said, right before Gaetz pulled his name out of the running today, that he had more than one encounter with said minor. And not only did he have repeated sex with a minor – a crime pretty much everywhere – he’s said to have trafficked in sex, too, which is also a crime pretty much everywhere.

But so what?

Trump is not only above any ordinary sense of propriety but now he’s literally, thanks to a majority of Americans, above the law. Every single criminal case against him is melting into the air. It’s no wonder that his transition team is acting like his cabinet picks are inevitable. “There’s vote coming,” one advisor warned Senate Republicans. “And if you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a primary. That is all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance it.”

Yet here we are, the day his criminal nominee dropped out because a few Senate Republicans got nervous about confirming a statutory rapist and sex trafficker to be the country’s top lawman. The point of Trump is impunity – for decency, morality, the rule of law. A white man should never be held accountable by his inferiors, least of all women. This is what his voters wanted. Today, at least, impunity backfired.

Whatever the reason, impunity for women is a recurring theme. In addition to Gaetz, the nominee for secretary of health and human services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, allegedly assualted his nanny. Advisor Elon Musk allegedly groped a woman on an airplane. In a civil lawsuit, he's accused by eight former employees of fostering a climate of sexual harassment and discrimination against women at SpaceX.

But the stand out is Trump’s pick to be secretary of defense. Given the details of a 2017 police report, former Fox host Pete Hegseth accused of drugging and raping a woman after she confronted him on his “creeper” behavior during a Republican event that she organized.

The incident was reported “by a nurse who called [police] after a patient requested a sexual assault exam,” according to the AP. “The patient told medical personnel she believed she was assaulted five days earlier but couldn’t remember much about what had happened. She reported something may have been slipped into her drink before ending up in the hotel room where she said the assault occurred.”

The AP has the rest:

The woman … told police that she had witnessed the TV anchor acting inappropriately throughout the night and saw him stroking multiple women’s thighs. She texted a friend that Hegseth was giving off a ‘creeper’ vibe, according to the report.

… The woman and others attended an after-party in a hotel suite where she said she confronted Hegseth, telling him that she “did not appreciate how he treated women,” the report states.

A group of people, including Hegseth and the woman, decamped for the hotel’s bar. That’s when “things got fuzzy,” the woman told police.

She remembered having a drink at the bar with Hegseth and others, the police report states. She also told police that she argued with Hegseth near the hotel pool, an account that is supported by a hotel staffer who was sent to handle the disturbance and spoke to police, according to the report.

Soon, she told police, she was inside a hotel room with Hegseth, who took her phone and blocked the door with his body so that she could not leave, according to the report. She also told police she remembered “saying ‘no’ a lot,” the report said.

Her next memory was of lying on a couch or bed with a bare-chested Hegseth hovering over her, his dog tags dangling, the report states. Hegseth served in the National Guard, rising to the rank of major.

Hegseth denies all wrongdoing. He settled out of court. And anyway, he’s a private citizen. He wasn’t subject to a congressional inquiry, as Gaetz was. (The House panel was set to release its findings before he quit to accept Trump’s nomination.) Hegseth may still survive this scrutiny, and if that’s the case, Trump’s supporters may cheer.

This is what they wanted.

And this is a democracy, after all.

NOW READ: The musk rat

It takes time for things to stick properly, so please bear with me while I say again that Kamala Harris did not lose the election because of things she said. She lost because of things Donald Trump said she said.

So Democratic Party critics are basing their criticism not on what Harris said but on what Trump said she said, as they are accepting as true the allegations of the president-elect against the vice president.

By focusing on things that Trump said she said, rather than on things she said, these critics are missing the real lesson from the 2024 election – that her policies were not the determining factor in her defeat. It was the ear-splitting volume of the accusations against her and the absence of equal and opposite accusations against him.

In the final weeks of the election, the Trump campaign spent more than $29 million on television ads attacking Harris on trans rights. It was “by far, the biggest focal point when it comes to Trump’s ad spending — one of the best barometers of messaging priority there is,” wrote The Bulwark’s Marc Caputo on October 24. “By contrast, the campaign has spent $5 million over that same time period on TV ads on the economy, making that topic their fifth-most emphasized.”

According to a new study by a Democratic pollster, Trump’s attack ads largely explain the outcome of the election. The report calculated the percentage of swing voters who voted for Trump in the belief that Harris supported federal funding of transgender surgeries on undocumented immigrants. It was a whopping 83 percent.

Conclusion:

“These voters — who remained open to persuasion until the very end — delivered not just a rejection of Harris but what they believed the Democratic Party stands for, absorbing rightwing narratives.”

Harris didn’t lose because of things she said.

She lost because of things Trump said she said.

Critics of the Democratic Party will point out that, ackshually, Harris did say she supported access to gender-transition care for undocumented immigrants. But that was once, in 2019, during her first run, and it wasn’t a campaign pledge. She wasn’t running on it. She gave an affirmative answer to an ACLU questionnaire. This year, her campaign explicitly rejected the questionnaire as having any bearing on her platform as the 2024 nominee. Indeed, she did what critics say she should do. She backed away from lefty woke things like trans rights.

And it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because what she said, the substance of her message wasn’t as important to the outcome of the election as the volume of it, which is to say, the substance of what she said could not be heard through the din of the rightwing media apparatus. As media expert Matthew Sheffield said today, nothing was going to get through that, not even the shared reality of the economy. “Through seven TV channels, more than 1,500 talk-radio stations, and millions of social media posts. Republicans sold a fictional narrative about the economy to unsuspecting Americans. Trump inherited a strong economy from Obama and then destroyed it. Democrats never told the story.”

They couldn’t. No one was listening, because no one could hear it. Trump’s attack ads worked in tandem with thousands of media sites, including the one formerly known as Twitter, that have been operating around the clock since 2020, often in parallel with the Washington press corps. They were able to take one small thing Harris said years ago and turn it into a caricature so ridiculous that a convicted felon like Donald Trump could look like a viable candidate by comparison.

It was so loud some voters didn’t know what the Democrats stand for.

And that includes some Democratic voters.

Harris won more votes than Trump did in 2020 (she now has 74.3 million to his 74.2), but she did not win as many as Joe Biden in 2020. (He won 81.3 million votes, the most ever, while Trump won 76.8 million this year, the second-most ever.) Where did they go?

You could say voter suppression laws, but I think a bigger source of “voter suppression” was lies and propaganda, directly or indirectly from rightwing media outlets or from anti-trans attack ads, or in the form of “false-flag efforts” funded by billionaires, including Twitter’s Elon Musk, to make Democratic voters feel like there’s no point in voting for Harris. “The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” a top Trump adviser told the Post. Clearly, it worked.

The volume of the rightwing media apparatus, especially when it’s in sync with the Washington press corps, is so loud that it can feel like the ultimate arbiter of our political reality. As one CNN anchor put it this morning, this is Donald Trump’s America. We’re just living in it. Until there’s a liberal media apparatus, one that can meet bad info with good info, the Democrats will continue living in Trump’s America, too.

There’s an argument I want to discuss. It goes something like this: Donald Trump’s policies are going to alienate some of the people who voted for him. To be sure, many of them wanted something done about the economy. Prices were too damn high. But they didn’t sign up for tariffs, deportations and cuts to social services, like food stamps.

As a liberal pundit put it, Trump seems poised to follow through with that policy agenda, though going through with it is “political suicide.”

My question is why.

Why are we expecting so much from Trump voters? I’m not making a distinction between his base and those who chose to go along for the ride. I mean all of his supporters, and I’m asking: Why should we place our democratic faith, and the future of the republic, in their hands?

It’s not like Trump had an agenda to bring down the cost of living. All he said was “Make America Great Again.” Deport “illegals.” Suppress transgender rights. Beat down weak and marginalized folks. Voila!

His one economic plan was tariffs. A tax on imported goods from China and elsewhere will raise prices on everything, not just imports, as retailers will price-gouge under cover of inflation. They’re the opposite of what you do to reduce costs. And that’s why he lied. He said nations would pay for them, not companies bringing goods in.

His voters chose to believe him.

So let me get this straight.

People who can’t or won’t understand tariffs are going to deduce all by themselves that tariffs are the reason they’re now paying three and four times more for their sneakers, T-shirts and video-game consoles?

People who voted against their own economic interests are going to figure out on their own what exactly those interests are, but only after they’ve been screwed over by the president they voted for?

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it would be easier to continue scamming these people than convince them that they’ve been scammed.

And the scamming will continue.

The rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, prevented these voters from knowing what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had done for the economy, inflation, wages and the GDP, but especially for the material interests of the white working class. Biden and Harris literally ditched 40 years of supply-side consensus in favor of growing the economy, as Biden liked to say, from the bottom up and middle out. But no one who watches Fox or listens to Joe Rogan or reads The Daily Wire or sees YouTube ads for gold bullion knows any of that.

This same rightwing media apparatus, which has only grown larger since 2020, is going to prevent Trump voters from knowing who’s responsible for price hikes, job losses and soaring interest rates that will be directly attributable to deportations, tariffs and other insane policies. If there’s someone to blame, it won’t be Donald Trump. It will be RINOs or “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialists” or immigrants.

If Trump voters are not especially attuned to the rightwing media apparatus, they will nevertheless feel its ambiance, as the Washington press corps habitually launders Trump’s talking points and, as we have seen, appeases him by either self-censoring or acting as if already under threat of investigation or prosecution by his administration.

If Trump voters are able to see through the fog of the rightwing media apparatus and the Washington press corps, they still might not understand the damage done by Trump’s economic policies, as his administration will almost certainly try to corrupt government data. The jobs report, inflation index, consumer spending – there will huge incentive to fudge those after Trump commits “political suicide.”

If Trump voters are able to connect all the dots and blame him for everything he did or didn’t do, as they blamed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for everything they did and didn’t do, so what? Is Trump going to respond to the backlash as if he were a normal president?

He doesn’t care about his party. He doesn’t care about the next election (presuming he doesn’t run again). It’s hard to see any incentive outside his self-interest that would move him to back off anything.

I haven’t mentioned the fact that these voters, even the ones who chose to go along for the ride, inhabit a world of fantastical fiction, absolute trash reality, that none of us should put our hopes in.

These people believe mothers “abort” babies after they’re born or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. They believe a student goes to school as a girl and comes back as a boy or if they don’t believe it, they don’t mind people who say so. Even if we give them the benefit of the doubt, and treat them more like children than adults, are we going to trust them to realize Trump is bad for them?

And even if Trump voters turn against Trump, thus creating an opportunity for the Democrats to win them over, are they going to recognize what the Democrats are offering in terms of economic policy given the hold the rightwing media apparatus has on them and given their past record of voting against their own economic interests?

I’ll pass.

I’ll pass on believing these people can learn the hard way what happens when you don’t take democracy seriously, when you can’t figure out whether it’s a good idea to put a crook in the White House. They don’t take their own lives that seriously, neither their physical nor spiritual selves, much less the fate of a constitutional republic.

I’ll put my faith in good people who seek out good trouble in the name of liberty, equality and justice for all. They’re a minority these days, but that’s OK. The world never changed for the better because a majority wanted it. It changed because a righteous minority demanded it.

Donald Trump nominated an alleged rapist and sex trafficker to be attorney general. He picked a Russian asset to be director of national intelligence. He chose a religious fanatic and Kremlin stooge to be secretary of defense. And for secretary of health and human resources, he selected an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who once had a literal brain worm, and who habitually takes (“legal”) steroids to maintain, at the age of 70, the appearance of a physique of a man half his age.

There are the obvious things to say about this motley crew. Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr are not qualified, respectively, to lead the agencies they have been chosen to lead. None has managed anything larger than an office. None has the expertise required. Gaetz has never worked in law enforcement, Gabbard in intelligence, Hegseth in military leadership or Kennedy in public health. Their only qualification is their loyalty to the man who picked them, and how they look to him when they are on television.

Right now, the discussion seems to be concentrated on the Senate Republicans, who will have majority control of that chamber in January. They will be responsible ultimately for vetting Trump’s cabinet picks. The question is whether they will find the courage to restrain the president-elect or roll over, either by approving them or by letting Trump have what he wants through recess appointments.

Among liberals, the discussion seems to be limited to the absurdities each of these people brings to governance as well as the dangers they pose. “Yes, shake your head at the seeming absurdity of these picks,” wrote MSNBC’s Jen Psaki. “But don’t stop there. These choices aren’t just controversial; they require us to stay vigilant about how each potential new Cabinet member could negatively affect our lives.”

But I think we’re missing the bigger picture. These nominations signal the totalitarian drift that’s coming to Washington and the country. Yes, that’s right. No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s time to start using that word.

Totalitarianism seeks dominion over the individual to the point where individuality is erased. That’s what happened to the Republican Party. Individuals have looked the same, talked the same, acted the same and thought the same for a long time. (The men sometimes literally dress the same as Donald Trump, with a blue suit, a long red tie.) After the election, however, Republican behavior has finally been totalized.

As one GOP congressman said, Trump “is the leader of our party. … His goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it. Every single word. If Donald Trump says jump three feet high and scratch your head, we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads.”

The objective is forcing the rest of America to conform the way the Republican Party has conformed. This can be seen in the anger expressed by some magas. It wasn’t enough to win. Losers must now shut up and get in line, too. As a Trump attorney said recently: “You’ve got to own when you lose and say: this is America. We have to stand behind President Trump.” Senate Republicans are likely to approve his picks, no matter how bad, because the losers must be taught a lesson.

Totalitarianism also seeks to dominate the individual’s mind by going to war against facts, reason, science and any useful meaning of the word “proof.” In normal times, pre-Trump, we could expect in the Senate a spirited debate over a president-elect’s cabinet nominations, beginning with whether they’re qualified. Such debate is going to be impossible now, because “being qualified” is a meaningless term.

It is a stone-cold fact that Kennedy’s views on vaccines are not only insane, but in direct opposition to the moral principles of public health. But that fact won’t be accepted as fact. It will be taken as evidence of Trump’s enemies trying to sabotage his presidency. And there’s no way to break through this conspiracist mindset, as Lindsay Beyerstein calls it. It is impervious, she said. “When scientists or the government or journalists come forward with evidence that vaccines save millions of lives and prevent untold suffering, the conspiracist answer is: Well, that’s what conspirators to kill our children would say.”

Because there’s no empirical anchor to conspiratorial thinking, totalitarians can make reality into whatever they want. Up is down, left is right – or in the words of the totalitarian regime in George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Therefore, the Republicans are likely to see nothing wrong with his picks. His nominee for the law is anti-law. His nominee for national intelligence is anti-intelligence. His nominee for national defense is anti-defense. His nominee for science is anti-science. But there’s no dissonance in the world of conspiratorial thinking. Up is the new down, and the only measure of morality is whether it pleases the dear leader.

The drift toward conformity and away from individualism isn’t limited to the GOP. Thanks to the rightwing media apparatus, which is global in scale, totalizing groupthink has also been growing in the culture at large. The trick is that it comes disguised as subversive individualism.

During his interview with Trump, popular podcaster Joe Rogan said “the rebels are Republicans now. They’re like, you want to be a rebel? You want to be punk rock? You want to, like, buck the system? You’re a conservative now. That's how crazy. And then the liberals are now pro-silencing criticism. They’re pro-censorship online. They’re talking about regulating free speech and regulating the First Amendment.”

If you are listening to liberals directly, you know there are no such efforts. But if you are listening the rightwing media apparatus, or if you just feel the conspiratorial ambiance that it generates, it’s possible to cast yourself as a man who’s bucking the system, as if the party of billionaires is the party of the common man, as if people who look the same, talk the same, act the same and think the same are punk rock.

But the strongest evidence of totalitarian drift is the plain awfulness of Trump’s cabinet picks. They have not earned the right to be called on. They haven’t studied or mastered their disciplines. They haven’t built reputations among leaders, peers and professionals in their fields. They haven’t overcome adversity and hardship. They haven’t reached high and achieved. They certainly haven’t followed the road toward the American dream, which asks us to work hard and play by the rules.

And that’s the point. Totalitarians fear individual excellence, first because they can’t understand it, and second because excellence threatens their goal of totalizing conformity. They are not humble enough to admit that they are mediocre people but they are arrogant enough to believe they can force the rest of us down to their level.

With this cabinet, Trump can pick up where his second campaign left off, which is movement toward “the consistent persecution of every higher form of intellectual activity …” as Hannah Arendt once wrote.

“Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” she said. “Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty” (my italics).

Donald Trump has dominated Washington for nearly a decade. You’d think the Very Serious People who explain our politics to us would have figured him out by now. But given the reaction to Trump’s recent cabinet nominations, members of the pundit corps apparently still find it convenient to gaze at the president-elect with childlike wonder.

Yesterday, he said he is nominating former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz to be the next United States attorney general. Gaetz is not only a yes-man. He’s not only an insurgent. According to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, he’s a statutory rapist. Indeed, a House ethics panel was poised to release a “highly damaging” report Friday. That won’t happen now. After Trump’s announcement, Gaetz resigned.

From what I can tell, the news of Gaetz’s nomination was stunning to the Senate Republicans who are tasked with confirming or denying his appointment. It was also stunning to people who should no longer be stunned. “The Gaetz nomination is so off-the-wall,” said Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein, “that I half believe he's sacrificial so Senate Republicans will have an easier time confirming all the other questionable picks, having shown their independence by icing Gaetz.”

I don’t mean to pick on Klein. I just think he’s representative of a kind of very clever and highly educated pundit who inhabits virtually all of the top media outlets in America, and who spends his time reading tea leaves to deliver fugue-like prognostications that are embarrassments of abstraction and complexity when the truth is lying in plain sight.

Trump wants a criminal to be the country’s top lawman.

He wants someone who will obey his every wish without regard for decency, morality, federal statute or starchy concepts like “the rule of law.” Trump campaigned on vengeance against those who wronged him. He vowed to pardon J6 insurrectionists after turning into martyrs of the “deep state.” He made himself clear when he said “the enemy within” is more dangerous than foreign adversaries like Russia. He spelled out what he wanted and the electorate gave its blessing.

There is only one law in America now.

Its name is Donald Trump.

Gaetz’s nomination is the logical conclusion of the unprecedented election of a former president who tried overthrowing the people’s will, who had been convicted of 34 felonies and who had been indicted on scores of other crimes. But Very Serious People don’t recognize the enormity of it all. Instead, they seem to insist on seeing politics as they always have seen it – as a contest of ideas between partisans who may disagree on details but agree on the fundamental values of America.

We are so far beyond the decorous debates of the past between liberals and conservatives that we need a whole new vocabulary to describe the kind of people Trump wants in his administration.

Gaetz isn’t “controversial.” He’s been credibly accused of sex trafficking minors. Tulsi Gabbard isn’t a “controversial” pick to be director of national intelligence. She’s a Kremlin asset. Robert F Kennedy Jr isn’t “controversial.” He’s a roid-raging anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, but Trump wants him to be in charge of health and human resources.

As for the choice of Fox host Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, he’s a Christian nationalist who would corrupt the military by purging generals who are “insufficiently loyal” to Trump; help unravel the postwar international order that America built and that all international trade and finance depends on, raising the specter of another world war; and lead the way in using the military in domestic disputes, including the assassination of Trump’s “enemies within.”

Hegseth isn’t a “controversial” choice.

He’s an abomination.

This isn’t 16-dimensional chess. This is blunt-force trauma. Gaetz isn’t a decoy so Trump’s other “questionable picks,” as Klein puts it, won’t seem so questionable to Senate Republicans. Trump is putting up an apparent rapist and sex trafficker, because he wants an apparent rapist and sex trafficker to be in charge of the administration of justice.

There are some who can still recognize the meaning of a lawless attorney general in the form of Matt Gaetz. On a conference call yesterday with a group of investors, CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin said the mood changed suddenly after news of his nomination came out. Sorkin said “the shift in tone went from, 'Wow, we're going to have a great economy and all of these things and I don't have to worry,' to, 'OK, maybe now I have to worry' was like in the blink of an eye."

What are they worried about?

“When it comes to law and order,” Sorkin said, “when it comes to the Justice Department and what this is ultimately going to look like, what prosecutions are going to look like, that threw a lot of people back on their feet … The question is whether they can stand up and say so publicly and I think unfortunately the answer is still no and especially no because of the role this individual may ultimately play” (my italics).

The rule of law is what makes it possible to be rich in the United States. It “is the foundation on which the security of property rests,” wrote Professor Heather Cox Richardson this morning. “There is a reason that foreign oligarchs park their money in democracies.”

But if Matt Gaetz becomes attorney general, at the behest of a president who is himself a criminal, traitor, fraud and rapist, the foundation on which the rights of property depend will cease to be as solid. Maybe the investor class thought they could control Trump. If so, they realized yesterday such hopes are illusory. And now it’s too late, as Sorkin said, “because of the role this individual may ultimately play” — because the rule of law won’t protect them from a lawless AG.

With the rule of law, the rich are rich. Without it, the rich are puppets.

Again, this isn’t 16-dimensional chess.

This is blunt-force trauma.

The debate continues over why Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris. So far, it seems to be centered on two related arguments. One is that Harris didn’t do enough to appeal to white working-class voters and their concerns about the economy. So they voted for Trump.

The other is that the Harris campaign had moved “too far to the left,” embracing transgender issues and other forms of “identity politics” that alienated voters, not just the white working class, but also some Latino and Black voters. They didn’t like that. They voted for Trump.

These arguments are quickly becoming the conventional wisdom, but that’s not because they are good or accurate or right. It’s because they are easy. It’s easy to blame the loser for the fact of her defeat. It’s much harder to assess the real and more vexing reason for Trump’s victory.

The allegation that Harris did not listen to working-class concerns is fantasy. She was explicit in her plan to expand the achievements of the Biden era, in which there was no recession, inflation went back to normal, unemployment sank to historic lows and real wages rose for everyone. Joe Biden invested hundreds of billions into working-class concerns, reviving manufacturing in ways no one has since the 1960s. Harris promised to help growing families, help growing businesses, help first-time homebuyers, break up corporate monopolies and most of all, crack down on price-gouging, especially at the grocery store.

She promised to continue what Joe Biden started, which was to put the power of the government on the side of people who work for a living and against people who own so much they don’t have to work.

That’s just a fact.

Also fact: The Harris campaign did not “move too far to the left” on transgender issues or any other form of “identify politics,” because she didn’t campaign on these issues at all, except when talking about the moral imperative to protect the rights of everyone, including the right to be who you want to be and to love whomever you want to love.

So the question isn’t whether Harris listened to voters’ economic concerns. She did. The question is why voters didn’t hear her. The question isn’t whether she “moved too far to the left” on transgender issues, etc. She didn’t. The question is why voters believed otherwise.

The answer is the rightwing media apparatus.

It is huge. It is everywhere. It is dominant.

And the Democrats have no counter to it.

Trump lied, and every single one of those lies was carried deeper and farther into the public psyche, by way of a menagerie of digital outlets, including Fox, X, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, podcasts and more, than anything we have seen in our lifetimes. It just didn’t matter what Harris was offering policy-wise. A majority of voters was not going to hear it. As Matthew Sheffield put it, she had a coalition. She had the policies. She had the tactics. Trump, however, had a “modernized ecosystem.”

“When you compare and contrast the Republican and Democratic parties, it’s crystal-clear that Republicans have created a sleek and modernized ecosystem, while Democrats oversee a tottering coalition based on outdated assumptions about how politics works,” he said.

While I still believe that propaganda never made anyone believe anything they didn’t already believe, and while I still think propaganda and white-power politics are mutually reinforcing, I’m going to leave those points for another time. For now, I think it’s important to put the rightwing media apparatus at the center of the election postmortem debate, because if we don’t, we’re going to learn the wrong lesson.

Voters who knew the facts voted for Harris. Voters who believed lies voted for Trump. That is the new fault line in American politics. To continue arguing about whether Democrats should or shouldn’t talk about this or that public policy is to continue having a 20th-century argument in the 21st. It used to be that it’s the economy, stupid. Now it’s the perception of it. We’re stupid if we don’t see the difference.

(This is not to say that policy itself does not matter. When they were divorced from candidates, voters chose liberal policies. This was also seen in successful votes to protect abortion rights in red states.)

If the presidential election wasn’t enough to convince you of the power of perception over reality, consider what’s about to happen. Trump has promised to impose punishing tariffs on imported goods from places like China and Mexico. If reality matters more than perception to Trump voters, they’ll turn against him the minute they start paying three and four times more for food, clothing, electronics and more.

They won’t turn against him. They won’t blame him, nor will they blame themselves for voting against their own interests. They will blame something, anything: immigrants, maybe, or some other imaginary cause of their pain. They will do that due to the influence of the rightwing media ecosystem. As Lindsay Beyerstein wrote, Donald Trump didn’t campaign against Harris. He campaigned against reality.

And won.

There are some liberals and Democrats, and some anti-Trump conservatives, who believe the post-pandemic economic issues explain the backlash against incumbent parties around the world. They have voiced hope in the persuasive power of reality. They believe that the Democratic Party will rise again once Trump tanks the economy.

I don’t know why the Democrats should believe that. Why would they put their fates in the hands of voters who are not only fearful, ignorant and superstitious but deliberately so. Are we supposed to believe they can determine on their own what’s best for them economically? Or can we trust them to believe whatever Donald Trump tells them to believe?

Point is, we should learn the right lesson from 2024. The Democrats can no longer afford to outsource their communication strategy to the Washington press corps. They must compete head-on with the rightwing media apparatus or risk leaving more votes on the table. They must recognize that an informed republic is the future of the party. And they must build an infrastructure toward that end.

I was wrong about this election. I was wrong about a bunch of things. Maybe I erred largely on the side of hoping too much. I hoped that most people in America understood that Donald Trump was the worst candidate of our lifetimes. And as a consequence of understanding that, I hoped that most people would make the right decision for themselves, their children and their country. How wrong I was.

I don’t blame Kamala Harris. I don’t think anyone should. The vice president ran pretty much the perfect campaign, according to people who have worked with presidential nominees. In terms of policy, in terms of messaging, in terms of get-out-the-vote – it was as good as anyone could expect from a candidate who started in July. Her campaign was “all gas, no brakes.” I think she did everything she could. So did all the pro-democracy people out there. It just wasn’t enough.

We can and will argue about why this happened. Some will say that Joe Biden should have decided sooner against running for reelection. Some say that Harris didn’t take this or that policy position to appeal to this or that voting bloc. Some say that a woman, especially a biracial woman, was never going to win anyway. Some say that the Washington press corps failed to inform the electorate properly. And so on.

While all of these complaints have merit in and of themselves, I think none of them explains what happened on their own. Bottom line: most people, which is to say, most white people in this still majority-white country, wanted what Trump was offering them, even though what he was actually offering was little more than machismo and vengeance.

Trump is, as a shrewd observer put it, the whitest white man we have ever seen. That can erase a multitude of sins. “So am I to understand that leading a coup, promoting the Big Lie, being found liable for rape and guilt of fraud, growing more extreme, threatening to be a dictator and suffering dementia actually strengthened Trump politically?” David Rothkopf said. “It does not compute.” But it kinda sorta does.

If it was hard for my liberal and Democratic brethren to hear before the election, it shouldn’t be now. Lots of Americans do not believe in democracy in any universal sense. They believe in democracy that is exclusive, indeed that is punitive. Trump has promised retribution against his enemies and lots of Americans liked the sound of that.

My hope was that there were more people who wanted our democracy to be inclusive than there were those who wanted it to be exclusive. My hope was that the story of progress in America, with expanding rights and opportunities for all, would continue the way it seemed to after Joe Biden’s election. It’s moments like this, in the aftermath of a shocking election, when I find myself second-guessing such hopes.

Some are already saying that the Democrat Party needs to soul-search. The election, said Connecticut’s Democratic Governor Ned Lamont, “was a real wake up call for Democrats. It was overwhelming. We can point to Trump’s personality, whatever you want to say, but Democrats lost a lot of the working families. We lost a lot of males — lost males of different races, color and creed. And it ought to be a wake up call, and we’ve got to be fighting for the middle class and fighting for them every day. And I think they feel like we lost sight of that.”

But I don’t think the Democrats need to change who they are and what they stand for to reach just enough white people in just enough swing states. The Biden presidency put the federal government on the side of the working and middle classes. Indeed, Biden talked endlessly about the dignity of work, a clear signal to “a lot of males.” The Harris campaign aimed to build on that by expanding Medicare, cutting taxes for families, helping small businesses grow, fighting for labor rights and so on. The Democratic Party as it stands is a multiracial party oriented economically toward everyone who works for a living.

In other words, the Democratic Party is populist in that it stands for and advances policies that are popular. The Republicans know and fear that. Otherwise, they would not have taken credit for infrastructure projects nationwide that Biden and the Democrats enacted and that nearly every congressional Republican voted against. Moreover, when pollsters ask respondents which policies they like best, majorities usually favor Democratic policies over policies that the GOP offers.

What the Democrats do not do, but that the Republicans do do, is single out to ridicule a subgroup or subculture for the purpose of making just enough white people in just enough swing states feel better about themselves. To be precise, the Democrats do not tear down immigrants or trans people or anyone to give the impression of justice being served to voters who believe that minorities are taking something from them. They do not dance around that gray area between bigotry and “the economy.” They don’t do that and never should. If they do, they will collapse, as a party, from the inside out.

But what should the Democrats do?

For now, I’ll say this: whatever they do, it had better be with the understanding that we are now living in a new age of fear, ignorance and superstition to such a staggering degree that we will go back, to paraphrase Harris, if the Democratic Party doesn’t take it seriously. Lies, propaganda and disinformation are coming from all corners of the globe, including from places like Russia, China and Iran, but the clearinghouse here is the GOP and the rightwing media apparatus.

Joe Biden and the Democrats saved the economy and made it the envy of the world. They pulled us out of a pandemic that killed a million of us. They brought prosperity back to every one of the so-called “left behind” counties. They tamed inflation post-covid without triggering a ruinous recession. But none of that mattered to swing-state voters awash in lies. The Forward’s Alex Zeldin put it this way: “If your media consumption is a Fox morning show, Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, Prager, Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, rightwing memes on reddit, Twitter and Instagram, and your nightly consumption is Fox, you will have no way of knowing anything good Democrats do.”

Today is the eve of Election Day. It’s tempting to presume there’s nothing left to say, but there always is. What do you want to know? That’s the question I put to followers. I couldn’t reply to all today, but I will try to get to the rest tomorrow before the polls close.

Do you see any warning signs for Kamala Harris? – @Maryqiae

Actually, I don’t. The thing that has me most concerned is polling in swing states that show a dead-even race. Polls, however, have been problematic, to say the least. It’s not that I think they are wrong. It’s that I don’t trust them as much as I used to. What I trust more are things like history, campaigns and “the fundamentals.” Those things are pointing the direction of victory for Vice President Kamala Harris. Among other reasons, voters have already decided Trump’s fate. Harris can reasonably be expected to win the states Joe Biden won in 2020.

2020 was, of course, before the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe and stripped rights from half the country, and empowered states to enact bans on abortions. The last two years have featured a steady and ominous drip-drip-drip of headlines about women bleeding out in parking lots and otherwise dying from pregnancy complications. A lot of people who otherwise hated abortion nevertheless still wanted it to be legal and are reacting badly to the policing of women’s bodies.

Nothing has broken in Trump’s favor during this election, not even his attempted assassination. That’s probably because whatever could break in his favor would have had to break against a tsunami the size of the generational backlash against Dobbs. Even in reliably red Iowa, something is happening such that white women over the age of 65, who would normally be expected to support the GOP candidate, are, according to one pollster, moving toward Harris by a 2 to 1 margin.

Do you think the election will make it to SCOTUS? – @MistyIvey2

The question is whether the election will be thrown to the Supreme Court. The fear is that Trump’s majority there will hand him victory.

That is a reasonable fear, and perhaps Trump himself is hoping for that outcome, but there’s only one circumstance in which that would happen – if the outcome of 2024 is as narrow as the outcome of 2000, with the winner decided by a few voters in one county in one state.

I don’t think it will be that narrow.

Don’t get me wrong. Our heads will spin with the number of legal challenges to vote counts in all swing states, just as we saw in the 2020 election. We can expect that from the Trump campaign. We may also see some skulduggery from GOP state election officials. Trump has talked about his “secret plan” to throw the election to the US House of Representatives, where it would be decided by state delegations. But I suspect such ideas and efforts to peter out, as they did the last time.

All bets are off if the outcome is razor-thin.

But I don’t think it will be.

I am curious how we heal the divisiveness. I am assuming Harris wins, but do we need to have some kind of process of finding common ground, rather than being split into two camps? – @Eldogal

This is a noble goal, and I applaud it, but I think the best way to “heal the divisiveness” in America is for the Democratic nominee win the election and establishing with that victory a new national consensus.

There was a time when centrism meant Democrats sounding like Republicans. That was in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s twin landslides. These days, in light of Trump’s unique threats to democracy and freedom, the Republicans who are backing Harris already sound a lot like Democrats. That’s the beginning of a new consensus. I would expect that trend to continue if Harris wins, if voters start feeling a growing economy and if the GOP continues drifting toward fascism.

What are your thoughts on MAGA not accepting the results? Do we see a repeat of the J6 coup attempt? – @the_bmusic

Maga is not going to accept the results of this election any more than they accepted the results of the last one. We all need to accept that. Other things we need to accept, because they will happen, include:

• Propagandists like Elon Musk spreading more lies.
• Some magas acting out violently.
• Some attempting another insurrection, perhaps.
• Denial by magas that Harris is a legit president.
• Total obstruction by congressional magas.

There will be blood, as it were. The question is how much. If Kamala Harris wins by a nose, a lot. If she wins convincingly, not so much.

But here’s the thing: We can’t let democracy depend on whether terrible people accept reality. If we do that, we will all go insane.

Instead, democracy must depend on good people who will to stand up for it and who will demand with the fullest voice possible that the authorities enforce the law when the magas inevitably break it.

If Donald Trump were running against a younger white male candidate, would this race be as close as it is? – @bevlogsbe

The presumption is that Harris’ race and sex are giving lots of white people a reason to take a second look at a lying, thieving, philandering sadist whose negligence during the covid pandemic killed a million of us and who attempted a paramilitary takeover of the US government.

My answer is maybe, but I don’t think so.

I don’t say this out of some misguided sense that Americans are less racist and sexist than we are made out to be. We are indeed those things and so much more. No, I say this because I don’t think the election is as close as it appears. It seems close, because the people who provide information about our politics have, for reasons that are far less noble than democracy and freedom, made it look that way.

So even if the Democratic nominee were white and young-ish and male, the Washington press corps would almost certainly find some way to play along with the Trump campaign’s effort to smear him. That combined with the news media’s need for fresh material that will get our attention would probably result in the appearance of a close race.

Lest we forget, Joe Biden’s “liabilities” were not restricted to his advanced age. The Republicans and the rightwing media apparatus spend a year building him up as the head of a crime family. House Republicans wanted to impeach him under the false pretense that he corrupted US foreign policy to enrich his son, Hunter, in Ukraine.

Why are we not hearing more from election official about election security to debunk all the nonsense about cheating? – @grantra

I was wondering the same until I heard Kamala Harris’s answer to a similar question. In essence, she acknowledged that Trump was sowing doubt about the election integrity. But assailing him for doing so risked compounding the problem. That’s why, in so many words, she chose to reassure us that the system is sound, that we can put our faith in it, and that nothing can undermine the people’s sovereignty.

Those are fine words, but what about bad actors? That’s for people who are not running for president to handle. For instance, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. During a presser today, he said, “Anybody who thinks it’s time to play militia, F around and find out.

He added: “Anybody who thinks it’s time to insult, to deride, to mistreat, to threaten people, F around and find out. We do have the cuffs. We do have the jail cells. We do have the Philly juries. And we do have the state prisons. So if you’re going to try to turn an election into some form of coercion, if you’re going to try to bully people, to bully votes or voters, if you’re going to try to erase votes, if you’re going to try any of that nonsense, we are not playing. F around and find out.”

I don’t have access to all local news media everywhere, but I’m guessing other law enforcement officials are also getting out in front of local news cameras to send a similar message to their communities, though I’m also guessing not quite as colorfully as Larry Krasner did.

With less than a week to go, let’s talk about expectations, specifically the widespread expectation that this shouldn’t be a dead-even race.

The idea usually comes from liberals and Democrats, who tend to believe that Donald Trump is such a uniquely dangerous threat to democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law that it boggles their minds to see him running neck-and-neck with Kamala Harris.

The foremost problem is that liberals and Democrats presume too much. They presume that all Americans, by dint of being American, believe in democracy. They think that if Trump and the Republicans would stop “playing politics,” they’d snap out of their rightwing fever.

They won’t, however, because they are not “playing politics.” This is their politics. They look at other human beings, but do not see other human beings. They see something less than human, animals perhaps, or vermin, that deserve not respect as much as annihilation. Cheating is acceptable. Violence is, too. Anything’s permissible when you are convinced that your enemy’s victory threatens your very existence.

This is not to say that they do not believe in democracy. They do, but it’s an exclusive kind, one just for them – a democracy for white people. This is not to say that they don’t believe in equality. They do, but it’s an exclusive kind – an equality between men. Women have their place in society, but it’s always subordinate to a man’s place.

Where liberals and Democrats make a mistake is in presuming that universal democracy is the rule of American politics and that “playing politics” is the radical departure from it. It isn’t a departure, because universal democracy isn’t the rule. It’s one kind of politics, the good kind, that is necessary in the fight against the bad kind of politics.

The bad kind of politics didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It won’t end with him either, not even if Kamala Harris defeats him. Millions of people in this country are going to vote for him, because they want what they believe he represents, and that’s not a shame in the way some liberals and Democrats say. It is, rather, just the way things are.

What Trump has done is bring out into the open the bad politics that had previously been hidden under the surface of the Republican Party. As long as it lay hidden, where Republicans could plausibly deny its existence, the good kind of politics could be deprived of a good fight.

But now that the bad kind of politics is out in the open, and now that it’s on brink of destabilizing nearly 250 years of democratic progress in America, the good kind of politics has a chance to settle the score, and establish a new national consensus in which universal democracy is, if not the rule, then the political norm against which the bad kind of politics will face a serious numerical disadvantage over decades.

More than 20,000 people showed up for Donald Trump’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, the site of the last major fascist rally in 1939. But more than 75,000 people showed up for Kamala Harris’ rally last night at the Ellipse in Washington, the starting point of Trump’s attempted paramilitary takeover of the US government in 2021.

It’s a pattern in our history. Whenever the fascists come out of the shadows, anti-fascists stand ready to face them. Heather Cox Richardson wrote that, “in 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue.”

Trump wanted a show of force with a rally in the media capital of the world, said Jonathan V Last. But then Harris turned out nearly four times as many. “This is the kind of power Trump understands,” Last said. “And I suspect that when he saw her crowd, he lost his shit.”

I don’t want to make too much of crowd sizes, but the difference between 20,000 people and 75,000 people is probably similar to the difference between the public’s perception of the election and the reality of it, which is to say: It’s probably not as close as it seems.

It looks close, because national polling averages make it seem so, and they make it seem so, because rightwing pollsters game the polling averages by manufacturing numbers favorable to rightwing politics.

The election looks close, moreover, because the Washington press corps habitually plays along with rightwing politics, thus giving the impression that Harris is doing worse than she actually is. (Consider the dust-up over Joe Biden’s “garbage” comment. He didn’t say what he’s said to have said, but Harris is being forced to deny it anyway.)

And the election looks close because the waves of disinformation and lies that have been coming from the Kremlin are amplified by Trump, the Republicans, the rightwing media apparatus and the world’s richest man, who has himself reportedly met with Vladimir Putin.

If the race is indeed close, liberals and Democrats would benefit from reassessing their assumptions and realizing that they may be taking for granted past victories over the question of whether democracy should remain the exclusive kind or be expanded to be universal. To say the race shouldn’t be this close may sound savvy and sophisticated, but what it actually does is overlook the necessity of political combat.

No one in power ever gave freedom.

Freedom has always been taken from those in power.

It’s a pattern in our history.

“Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant,” Harris said on the Ellipse Tuesday night.

“Across the generations,” she said, “Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing, proved to the world that a government of, by and for the people is strong and can endure.”

She added: “The patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls and Stonewall, on farmlands and factory floors … did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms … only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.”

No, they didn’t.

I think we will rise to the occasion again.

We have a week to go before Election Day, and like many of my comrades in the pundit corps, I’m being asked what I think is going to happen. Here are some thoughts, with others on the side.

Donald Trump believes he’s going to lose
That’s what he’s telling us when he complains about cheating. Yes, he’s eroding public trust in the institutions of government, but first and foremost, he’s saying that he believes Kamala Harris will beat him.

No one in his right mind would triple down on his base of support, knowing such a strategy is not enough to win a presidential contest. But that’s what Trump has done. His campaign looks like he’s talking to the same people, over and over, because he is. He makes no effort to broaden his appeal outside the bubble of white-power politics.

This is lazy and breathtakingly obtuse. And it forces him to do two things. One is complain about cheating in advance. The other is lie.

His rally at Madison Square Garden was widely panned by neutral observers for being racist, sexist and even fascist. A day later, he took to his social media site to falsely allege the discovery of “THOUSANDS of potentially FRAUDULENT” voter documents in Pennsylvania.

This afternoon, he held a presser to respond to the backlash against the MSG rally, especially that a speaker there said Puerto Rico and all of its American citizens were “an island of garbage.” In reality, the rally was a categorical hate-fest, but Trump said he was “like a love-fest.”

Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien said that whenever Trump “loses political ground,” he retreats to claims about voter fraud. It’s “like clockwork,” O’Brien said. So is Trump’s lying. We can set our watches to the likelihood of him saying that you didn’t see that thing you actually saw. Who are you going to trust, he says in essence, me or your lying eyes?

This is not what a winner does. A winner believes in his ability to win over a majority of the American people – or at least a majority of the voters in swing states that determine presidential elections. A winner looks forward to being tested and to showing the world what he’s made of. A loser doesn’t do that. He fears the test. He fears seeing all the lies he tells to others and to himself proven conclusively wrong.

In order to conceal the truth about him, he does what losers do.

Trump is bad at politics
You could say, as O’Brien did, that Trump resorts to loser tactics when he “loses political ground,” but you could put that another way.

He resorts to them when he gives ground away.

His campaign evidently felt it was a good idea to insult Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally a couple of days before holding a rally at an arena located in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of a majority-Latino city (Allentown) in the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania. According to Politico, some residents are so enraged by “island of garbage” that they’re planning to protest the rally, thus bringing more attention to a campaign that can’t break out of its bubble of white-power politics.

A party official in Allentown, who said that his Latino family is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, said of Trump that “it’s not the smartest thing to do, to insult people — a large group of voters here in a swing state — and then go to their home asking for votes.”

That’s a nice way of putting it.

Another way is that he’s bad at politics.

Back in the day, before Trump came along, we used to be able to count on both hands the number of unforced errors a candidate made. Recall that Republican nominee Mitt Romney was well-known for his gaffes.

In between the blunders, Romney ran a serious campaign. We could identify his gaffes, because they were the exception to the norm.

There are such exceptions with Trump. They are the norm. His campaign is nonstop gaffing. He overwhelms us with them. We never talk about them, because we put on the pile of “more of the same.”

Trump could win. If he does, it will be because just enough white people in just enough places were willing to believe his lies and overlook his errors. He could also win by cheating and staging another coup, this one perhaps legal. But let’s also not kid ourselves.

If he loses, and I think he will, no one is going to look back at nine years’ worth of campaigning and say that it’s worth emulating.

Harris believes she’s going to win
My main point is that the vice president is running a masterful campaign. Even if she’d had a year to prepare, I don’t think she could have put together a better operation than the one she has now. And as long as she executes according to plan, she’ll probably beat Trump.

With the help of Joe Biden, Harris orchestrated instantaneous unity within the Democratic Party, despite its factions and infighting. Since the convention, she has done what you expect from a nominee who is trying to win: she has expanded her base of power to include people who are not Democrats, namely Republicans, but also nonvoters.

She has done that with a mix of policy proposals, especially those that target price-gouging and the high cost of living, and basic appeals to reestablishing the regular order in political business. In doing so, Harris is creating a new kind of consensus. Or more precisely, she’s claiming as her own a consensus that has already emerged.

As if to illustrate the point, Barbara Pierce Bush, the daughter of former Republican president George W Bush, came out Monday in support of Harris. She said she hoped that voters would support the vice president toward the goal of protecting women’s rights. She joined the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania over the weekend.

Along with Liz and Dick Cheney, and scores of other prominent Republicans, the addition of a Bush daughter suggests two things.

One is that Kamala Harris is standing at the mid-point in American politics. She represents the new centrism. The other is that Donald Trump is standing outside the mainstream. He’s a partisan candidate. She’s a bipartisan candidate, the first such candidate of my lifetime.

Though the aggregate of quality national polls is showing that Harris has a slight lead over Trump, that’s not the reason I’m hopeful.

I’m hopeful because Trump is bad at politics and acts like a loser.

Meanwhile, Harris is good at politics and acts like a winner.

I think the clearest evidence that being called a fascist is hurting Donald Trump is the reaction by “independent” and GOP talking heads who foolishly defend him against the allegations or deflect them.

Their thinking goes something like this:

Yes, yes. It was bad when Trump said, as president, that he wanted “Hitler’s generals.” It was also bad when his former chief of staff said he fits the profile of a fascist. And OK, it was really bad when the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said he’s “a fascist to the core.”

But we’re used to all that, they say. That’s just Trump being Trump. The real question is how will Kamala Harris appeal to undecided voters.

I’ll tell you how she’s going to do that.

By calling him a fascist.

Among these talking heads, there is a working assumption – that undecided voters are not moved by politics but only by policy. If Harris hopes to win them over, they say, the question is what policies are they looking for and how is she going to sell those policies to them.

There is a second assumption layered on top of the first – that Harris can’t reach them with policy if she’s focused on politics. Conclusion: calling Donald Trump a fascist is going to alienate undecided voters.

These assumptions were implicit in Republican pollster Frank Lutz’s commentary last night after the CNN town hall, in which the vice president put the word “fascist” in her own mouth for the first time.

“The pivot to the ‘threat to democracy’ messaging also coincides” with her drop in polls, Luntz said on Twitter Wednesday. “Nearly all forecasts now give Trump a higher chance of winning in November.”

That’s not quite right. Trump’s lead, if you want to call it that, is within the margin of error in polls that shows him a bit ahead of Harris. You can call it “a higher chance of winning” or you can call it a dead heat.

Point is, Luntz assumes cause and effect. He assumes that the more she says Trump is a threat to democracy, the lower her polling will go. Conversely, he assumes that the more she talks about policy, the higher it will go. This interpretation is based on conventional wisdom since the 1990s. It says openly attacking your opponent backfires.

I think there’s something to this conventional wisdom about undecided voters. Obviously, Kamala Harris does, too. That’s why she has spent so much time on the campaign talking about popular government policies that will improve the lives and lift the fortunes of ordinary Americans.

But I also think this conventional wisdom largely gets undecided voters wrong. Policy and politics are not necessarily two distinct things to them. They can be two things, but they are not always. What’s more is that undecided voters very often don’t care about policy. What they care about is often something murkier, like character or vibes.

You could say calling Trump a fascist doesn’t “close the deal.”

But you could say it does.

Given what we know, I think the second one is right.

I’m not alone. CNN’s John King asked a panel of undecided voters for their thoughts after watching Harris call Trump a fascist for the first time while characterizing him as unstable and unfit. She said that while he has an “enemies list,” she has a “to-do list.” King asked the panel if anyone is more likely to vote for Trump. No hands. King confirmed that everyone was either open to Harris or committed.

This is just one TV panel, but it seems to represent a meaningful correction to the conventional wisdom, especially the idea that voters are so inured to Trump’s villainy that nothing he says or does will make a difference. We heard that after he was convicted on 34 felony counts. We heard it again after two former generals said that he’s a fascist.

And yet, when a CNN panel of undecided voters heard Harris’ case for herself and against Trump, they were not prone to giving the former president a second chance. They were not alienated by the vice president’s arguments. They were open to her or committed.

Given all that, the panel’s pro-Harris reaction could be interpreted as if they had learned about the details in the case against Trump for the first time or had finally understood those details with sufficient clarity. In other words, there’s another, third assumption – that undecided voters have heard it all and what they really want to know is policy.

No, they have not heard it all, and Harris knows it.

“I don’t necessarily think that everyone has heard what you and I have heard repeatedly,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, before explaining to the audience what many of them might not know, which is that:

“The people who know Donald Trump best, the people who worked with him in the White House, in the Situation Room, in the Oval Office, all Republicans … who served in his administration, his former chief of staff, former national security advisor, former secretaries of defense and his vice president, have all called him unfit and dangerous.”

She went on: “They have said explicitly that he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. They have said that he should never again serve as president of the United States. We know that’s why Mike Pence is not running with him, why the job was empty. And today, we learned that John Kelly, a four-star Marine general, who was his longest-serving chief of staff, gave an interview recently in the last two weeks of this election talking about how dangerous Donald Trump is.”

She added: “Why is he telling the American people now? I think of it as if he’s putting out a 911 call to the American people. Understand what could happen if Donald Trump were back in the White House. This time, we must take seriously: those folks who knew him best and who were career people are not going to be there to hold him back.”

How is she going to convince millions of people who already know all this? Cooper had asked. Her answer was they don’t already know.

They need to be told. Once they are told, they will be convinced.

That’s been her campaign from the start. It’s not about the odds, but the stakes, with basic faith in the people to make the right choice.

Kamala Harris was on Fox last night. This morning, most people seem to be focused on the moment when she called out host Bret Baier.

She had been addressing the fact that Donald Trump has been talking about using the US military against US citizens. Baier paused, saying “we asked that question today,” then played a clip of Trump speaking.

But what he showed was an edited version. Fox cut out the part that Harris was referring to. “That clip was not what he’s been saying about ‘the enemy within’ that he has repeated when he’s speaking about the American people,” Harris said. “That’s not what you just showed.”

Here’s what Trump said: “It is the enemy from within and they're very dangerous. They are marxists and communists and fascists. I use a guy like Adam Schiff. They made up the Russia, Russia-Russia hoax. … We have China, we have Russia, we have all these countries. If you have a smart president, they can all be handled. The more difficult are, you know, the Pelosis, these people, they’re so sick and they're so evil."

In past remarks, he said acts of war against “the enemy within” are justifiable. Over the weekend, he named California Congressman Schiff. Yesterday was the first time he named the former House speaker and her husband as possible targets of assassination. (Paul Pelosi was in fact nearly killed by a home intruder inspired by Trump.)

Baier and Fox tried hiding that from its audience.

The vice president wouldn’t let them.

And the reaction this morning has been huzzah!

“Fearless and tough”
But if we really listen to what Harris said, we’d see there’s more going on than merely calling Fox out the sanewashing of Trump’s delusions and dissociations. She’s defining what is means to be strong in a democracy. In effect, she said that a president must have the courage to face dissent. He cannot fall to pieces whenever people complain. And he sure-as-hell can’t murder them when his feefees get hurt.

“We both know that he talked about turning the American military on the American people,” Harris said. “He has talked about going after people who are engaged in peaceful protest. He’s talked about locking people up, because they disagree with him. This is a democracy, and in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. This is what is at stake …”

So she wasn’t just scolding Fox for sanitizing Trump. She was scolding Fox for preventing its viewership from seeing that Trump is actually a wimp. Indeed, he’s so brittle that Fox and the entire rightwing media apparatus must protect him by stopping their audiences from seeing the truth. “This is a democracy,” Harris said, with righteous fury in her voice. If he can’t tolerate politics, Trump has no business in politics.

Harris demonstrated what real strength is. And it’s that demonstration that will almost certainly leave an impression longer lasting than anything she ever said about policy. As a former politico noted, Harris is “a woman so confident she would go into the lion's den, so tough and ready to be president that she could take the heat. The non-verbal message was she is ready to be president, fearless and tough.”

Staring down Putin
Her strength is borne of experience, including the crucible of war.

In his new book, Bob Woodward recounts when the Biden-Harris administration learned that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky didn’t believe it, though, not even after Kamala Harris met with him to say that he needed “start thinking about things like having a succession plan in place to run the country if you are captured or killed or cannot govern.” She worried it might be the last time she saw him again.

Woodward also recounts when with the Biden-Harris administration concluded that Vladimir Putin was ready to use nukes. Joe Biden twice confronted Putin in 2021. During the second meeting, Woodward wrote, Biden reminded Putin there are no winners in nuclear war. Putin, however, “raised the risk of nuclear war in a threatening way.”

The Biden-Harris administration stood its ground, though. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin called the Kremlin to explain that if they go nuclear, “all the restraints that we have been operating under in Ukraine would be reconsidered,” according to Woodward. Two days later, the Kremlin tried lying its way to using nukes. It said the Ukrainians were planning to use a “dirty bomb.” “We don’t believe you,” Austin said in response, according to Woodward. “Don’t do it.”

And they didn’t.

That’s strength.

“This is what is at stake”
It’s tempting to imagine what Donald Trump would have done, but we don’t really need to imagine. On a podcast today, he blamed Zelensky for Russia’s decimation of his country. The rest of Trump’s remarks came straight out of the Kremlin playbook. If he had been president, instead of Biden, he would have believed Putin’s lie about Ukraine’s “dirty bomb.” He would have opened the door to a nuclear holocaust. And anyone who protested would have been subject to assassination.

That would be a demonstration of autocratic power.

But not strength.

“This is what is at stake,” Harris told Bret Baier.

Do you want a president who can handle criticism at home and who can face conflicts abroad? Or do you want a president who will crack down on political dissent and bend a knee to America’s enemies?

Do you want a strong leader?

Or a leader who will use power to cover up his weakness?

I think there are two conversations about Donald Trump’s fitness that are happening in tandem, but are not connecting, as they should.

One of them is a belief in some quarters that the former president is a fascist. This is the older of the two. It started after he was elected in 2016. It has grown in intensity, crescendoing over the weekend when he called on using the U.S. military against his critics who are American citizens.

“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said in a Fox News interview. “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric is getting darker and more aggressive, according to Politico’s survey of 20 of his most recent campaign rallies.

The other conversation is younger, but growing fast. That one surrounds concerns that Trump may be facing a deteriorating mental state. It seemed to snap into focus Monday when Trump “swayed and bopped” on stage to music for 39 minutes in a “bizarre town hall episode,” according to the Washington Post.

His unsettled state also surfaced during an interview with the top editor of Bloomberg News. “By any objective standard,” claimed writer Aaron Rupar, it “was a disaster.” Rupar went on to say that his campaign now “undoubtedly realizes his rapidly degrading condition doesn’t play well with audiences beyond the MAGA cult.” Trump's team then decided to cancel appearances with mainstream media outlets and return to the safer territory of his own rallies and Fox News.

Was it a disaster? Bloomberg's writeup was more neutral, highlighting his plans to "overhaul the US economy through dramatic tariff increases and more direct consultation with the Federal Reserve." Trump said "his policies would result in substantial growth despite projections that his agenda would fuel inflation and spike the national debt," though Bloomberg questioned the impact on small businesses.

“It’s going to have a massive effect, positive effect,” Trump remarked.

Conversations about fascism and Trump's state of mind feel like they’re running on parallel tracks. Some say he’s unfit because he’s a fascist. Others say he’s unfit because he appears to be losing focus. But if we’re going to “try to get to the bottom of who he is,” as veteran Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said this morning, we ought to see these conversations as mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive. They are not two but one.

The question of which came first, Trump’s seeming fascism or his changed mental state, was apparently on the mind of Mark Milley. During the Trump Administration, he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the nation’s highest-ranking military man.

In an interview with Bob Woodward, Milley said Trump is “a fascist to the core,” and called Trump “the most dangerous person to this country.”

Milley’s thinking about Trump's nature has evolved since talking to Woodward for his 2021 book, Peril. That book explored Trump’s leadership in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that point, Milley thought Trump’s erratic behavior suggested “mental decline.” Since retiring, however, Milley said he's come to believe Trump is a “total fascist.”

Whether Trump is actually a fascist is the subject of much debate. A recent Guardian column by David Runciman averred that "Project 2025 [a document linked to former Trump aides] is not a fascist document...its approach is more consistent with the goal of getting sympathetic judges on the courts than a private militia into gear." It also said of Trump's verbal attacks on hecklers during his rallies, "this isn’t fascism either. Trump’s style is to lash out against anyone he gets affronted by and to express his personal grievances in the language of the mob. It’s dangerous and it’s demeaning. But... Trump has done almost nothing to organise [sic] his own shock troops."

Added Runciman, in the liberal Guardian newspaper, "Trump is an enabler, not an originator of political violence. He is too passive to be truly fascist."

Fascist or not, this doesn't get at what some see as Trump’s cognitive descent. According to now critic, former Trump reality star and aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, who spoke on CNN last night, Trump on “The Apprentice” as reality-TV star could remember the complexities of a business deal, but Trump the president couldn’t remember cabinet members’ names.

“The reason Donald Trump is canceling these interviews is that when he starts to stumble, he starts to pivot,” Newman told CNN’s Lauren Coates. “He wants to talk about you. He’ll start attacking you, Laura, instead of talking about policy issues, because he can’t recall what they are. He cannot repeat consistently his position on key issues like the economy, like crime or like immigration that are key issues to voters.”

This is what may have happened in the Bloomberg interview.

When host John Micklethwait pressed Trump to defend his position on the use of tariffs, which even the Wall Street Journal objects to, Trump didn’t mount a counterargument, as you might expect from someone who polls better on the economy than his presidential rival. Instead, as Newman predicted, Trump pivoted to attack Micklethwait: “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years about tariffs as negative and then have somebody explain to you that you are totally wrong,” he said.

Trump's positions on various issues, however, have been consistent. He supports increased tariffs, lower taxes, and stricter border and immigration policies.

“Unplanned verbal escalation”

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough asked Bob Woodward this morning to explain why Trump does not stick to normal GOP talking points. “Why does he always go to this violent rhetoric?” he asked, referring to Trump’s wish to be a one-day dictator, to jail his political enemies and terminate the Constitution. “Why does he make these violent claims when he knows that if he just talked about the economy, he would likely do better?”

Woodward’s answer is familiar to those who argue Trump is a fascist. “I think he wants to show he’s tough," Woodward said. "Being tough is central to Trump’s self-persona. He thinks that’s powerful.”

But the rest of Woodward’s answer slips into the conversation about Trump's state of mind. “The trouble with all of that, the basics of decision-making, debating and weighing, just does not take part in Trump’s circle,” he said. “There’s no planning. Who’s the team?... It’s Trump working on these problems himself.”

He could be “working on these problems himself” because he values his own counsel most. But he could also be “working on these problems himself” because he's forgetful, and it reflects his state of mind.

“It all comes from Trump,” as Woodward said. “It is unplanned. It is absent a team. … It is unplanned verbal escalation.”

I think Woodward was right to suggest that undecided voters might not believe Trump is a fascist or even care about his policy positions.

Woodward said they might want to know whether he’s fit to be president. He’s not, Woodward concludes. His voters think differently.

During a national emergency, it’s good to say that “we’re all in this together.” Whether it’s a war, a pandemic or a hurricane, everyone is affected. Everyone has a stake in the outcome. And if we don’t believe and act like we are all in this together, the crisis will get worse.

This idea of collective fate in the face of dire threats to our lives and fortunes is conventional. So much so that it beggars belief when rightwing politicians tell us that, actually, we’re not all in this together.

It beggars belief so much that it’s just easier, mentally speaking, for ordinary people who have a sense of the national good to say that rightwingers don’t really mean it. It’s easier to believe they really do share the same core values as we do, but aren’t living up to them.

It’s easier to call them hypocrites.

In defiance of God
Rightwingers are not hypocrites, though. They believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups. The former is good, right and deserving. The latter is bad, wrong and undeserving. When there’s a national emergency, the federal government should help the ingroup, because it’s the only group that constitutes a “real nation.”

Meanwhile, the outgroup can take care of itself.

Or die trying.

Not only do they believe American society is divided into ingroups and outgroups, they believe it ought to be. The orders of power should be vertical and hierarchical. That is the ideal, because that is “natural.”

For this reason, liberal efforts to flatten the orders of power, so that the outgroup has as many rights and privileges as the ingroup, are seen by rightwingers as a perversion of the natural order of things.

To them, we are not all in this together, because we can’t be.

If we were, that would be in defiance of God.

Barbarism, not hypocrisy
No matter how many times rightwingers tell us what they really believe, the rest of us cling to the belief that they really don’t.

Stubbornly, we insist that they will set aside politics during a national emergency and that, in the end, they will choose nation over party.

While some of us realize that they will never set aside politics, not even during a national emergency, most of us don’t understand why.

The reason?

They already put the nation above all else. The politics that we keep expecting them to set aside are in service to the nation as they define it, and they define the nation in ways most Americans never would.

For most people, the nation is everyone. We’re all in this together.

For rightwingers, the nation is them. You’re with us or against us.

They are not hypocrites. They are the “real Americans,” God’s chosen. They are not failing to live up to their values. They are realizing them.

What the rest of us fail to understand is that those values are horrible. They are not only illiberal and anti-democratic, they are barbarous.

So barbarous that it beggars belief.

It’s easier to call them hypocrites.

You can’t shame a zealot
Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is the reason why a Florida Republican could say with a straight face that FEMA funding should come in advance of Hurricane Milton even though she voted to cut it a few weeks prior.

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna falsely implied that Kamala Harris and the Biden administration were withholding disaster relief, even though she “voted to shut down the federal government, vetoing a measure to extend FEMA funding by $20 billion,” according to the New Republic. “Luna was among 82 House Republicans who voted against the deal and one of 11 Florida lawmakers who cast dissenting votes.”

Luna’s critics would allege that she’s saying one thing but doing another, but it’s the opposite to her. Demanding government money if it helps the ingroup is in keeping with withholding government money if it hurts the outgroup. Indeed, the concept is so natural to Luna that she’s falsely accusing the vice president of doing the very same thing.

When Republicans like Luna do this, critics often despair. They say there’s no bottom for these people. There’s no shame. They’ve abandoned their principles. They’ve followed Donald Trump too far.

Again, it’s the opposite.

They are realizing their principles.

They want a society in which the ingroup gets the blessings of freedom and democracy, and all the government assistance, while the outgroup gets whatever’s coming to it. If a hurricane plows into Florida, God’s chosen must be helped! If it plows into Puerto Rico, well, tough luck.

They want such tyranny, because they believe God wants it.

You can shame a hypocrite.

You can’t shame a zealot.

No such thing as collective fate
Barbarism, not hypocrisy, is also the reason Trump can betray America without risking his reputation among zealots for putting America first.

To them, it doesn’t matter that, as president during the pandemic, he sent Vladimir Putin covid tests for his personal use, as the country struggled with shortages. It doesn’t matter, as my senator Chris Murphy said, that “he decided to let Americans die to keep Putin alive.”

The “America” in “America first” is not America. It’s the ingroup. And the ingroup has more in common with Russia than the outgroup.

Russia is a top-down society in which the orders of power are strictly maintained. Liberal efforts to flatten those orders democratically are crushed, often violently, with every instrument of the state.

In times of national emergency, as there is with Russia’s war against Ukraine, there is no such thing as a collective fate. They don’t believe “we’re all in this together.” The weak are sacrificed by the strong.

Russia is the ideal.

It’s what the ingroup believes America should be.

And if Trump helped an ally in God’s plan, so be it.

Barbarism is bizarre
Joe Biden didn’t say “we’re all in this together,” but he meant that when he said there are neither blue states nor red states in the face of national emergencies like Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton.

“There’s one United States of America,” he said, “where neighbors are helping neighbors, volunteers and first-responders are risking everything, including their own lives, to help their fellow Americans.”

To meet our collective fate, we must be able to trust each other, and to do that, everyone must have good information. That’s why Trump and the Republicans are lying so much. It doesn’t matter that they’re hurting their own. What matters to them is preventing the spirit of solidarity from destabilizing rightwing forces that keep us apart.

Biden offered a liberal alternative to barbarism.

“Former President Trump has led the onslaught of lies,” Biden said. “Assertions have been made that property has been confiscated. That’s simply not true. They’re saying people impacted by these storms will receive $750 in cash and no more. That’s simply not true. They’re saying the money needed in this crisis is being diverted to migrants. What a ridiculous thing to say. It’s not true. Now the claims are getting more bizarre. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, from Georgia, is now saying the government is literally controlling the weather – controlling the weather! It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s got to stop.”

The lies and disinformation won’t stop, of course, because zealots like Greene believe they’re fighting for their country. They believe Donald Trump is their champion. They believe they are God’s chosen.

If they were hypocrites, they could be shamed into doing the right thing and acting like we really are all in this together. Hypocrisy isn’t the problem, though. Barbarism is, no matter how bizarre it seems.

Yes, it’s scary when Donald Trump says he’ll respect the outcome of the 2024 presidential election if, and only if, he’s the winner.

It’s scary when the whole GOP follows his lead, either by refusing to admit he lost the last election or by avoiding the question entirely.

It’s even scarier when the Washington press corps plays along.

But when it comes to “the Big Lie,” we may be overthinking it.

To be sure, “the Big Lie” is evidence of malicious intent, but it’s also evidence of something else – that the former president is a loser.

If he had had the right stuff, he’d bring it. He doesn’t.

So he lies.

“A false political world”
“The Big Lie” is the foundation of “the maga movement,” according to Professor Heather Cox Richardson. In her dispatch this morning, the popular historian said that it and Trump’s other lies “are not errors.”

In her newsletter, Letters from an American, she said that the lies “are part of a well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world. Voters begin to base their political decisions on that fake image, rather than on reality, and are manipulated into giving up control of their government.”

JD Vance refused to answer Tim Walz when he asked, during the vice presidential debate, if Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance later said he indeed won. That prompted media figures to ask other Republicans where they stand. House Speaker Mike Johnson called it a “gotcha question.” US Senator Tom Cotton said only that Joe Biden won.

Trump never says he can win
This is dangerous stuff for obvious reasons, but I think everyone would benefit from stepping back and remembering that a man who can’t accept defeat is a loser. A party that can’t tell him the truth is a losing party. Indeed, Trump keeps telling us he doesn’t believe he can win.

After nearly a decade, we are so accustomed to his weirdness that we forget the basics of competition. A candidate who believes he can win says he can win, and he says that on the basis of his iron-clad belief in the American people to choose the best candidate to lead them.

Trump never says that.

Ever.

He says things only a loser would say, like the only way his opponent can beat him is if she cheats. A candidate who brings his A game never accuses anyone of cheating in advance, because doing so would be admitting that he doesn’t have what it takes to win on his own power.

Well, that’s Trump. He doesn’t have what it takes.

All he has is lies.

“Weakness masquerading as strength”
We also forget that a candidate who believes he can win on his own power doesn’t prepare supporters for failure. Trump does that whenever he puts conditions on the election’s outcome. To win, he needs his base to be fired up, but he dampens that fire with his incessant talk of competition that he can’t possibly defeat on his own.

A winner believes he or she is worthy and stands ready to test that belief. A loser doesn’t believe he’s worthy and won’t risk failing the test.

Gavin Newsom had Trump’s number before the September debate:

“He’s weakness masquerading as strength,” the California governor said. “This is a fragile guy. He’s a broken person. He really is, and as a consequence of that, he’s incredibly vulnerable to reverting to who he really is, which is someone who doesn’t necessarily feel worthy.”

What losers do
Some say Trump isn’t really campaigning. He’s just buying time for state-level Republicans to suppress votes or challenge results. Some believe Speaker Johnson is preparing to deny certification of the vote.

Again, this is dangerous stuff, but it’s still worth saying:

That’s what losers do.

They don’t trust themselves and what they have to offer to try their best. They’re terrified of seeing their self-delusions proven false. They literally can’t put any faith in anything bigger than themselves, because they can’t see anything beyond their own meanness and mediocrity.

The mean and mediocre will never concede
It’s important to point out that Trump and the Republicans are lying about, well, virtually anything in the hope of creating “a false political world” that voters will use to hand over their rights and freedom. It’s important to sound the alarm, so voters don’t surrender in advance.

But it’s also important to point out that “a false political world” is itself evidence, not only of malicious intent but also weakness. Every time Trump complains about being cheated out of the White House in 2020, he’s admitting he didn’t have what it takes to win on his own power.

And it’s important for the rest of us to see that weakness for what it is.

If we don’t, we risk undervaluing our strength.

The future of freedom and democracy cannot depend on Donald Trump and the Republicans admitting defeat. The mean and the mediocre will never concede to their own. They must be forced.

No, the future of freedom and democracy depends on people who value the national good coming to a conclusion and sticking with it.

These are losers.

They deserve to lose.

And they will.

After last night’s vice presidential debate between US Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, there’s a moment that will stick with us, as it explains a lot about politics today.

After Vance lied, again, about Haitian immigrants, moderator Margaret Brennan said: “Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."

Vance replied:

"The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”

Vance was referring to the debate rules. These rules were agreed to in advance by Vance, Walz and CBS News, the debate host. There would be no live fact-checking for the duration of the event. There would be online fact-checking, but not from the moderators.

So Vance expected to lie without interference. When Brennan spoke truthfully, saying that Haitians who live and work in Springfield are there with the blessing of federal law, he looked almost shocked.

This morning, liberals and Democrats are saying his reaction is so typical. Vance wants rules that allow him, Donald Trump and the Republicans to lie and lie and lie, regardless of the consequences.

But that’s only half right.

Perfect distillation
Vance wants rules and laws that protect him and his friends. But he wants the same rules and laws to punish his enemies. He wants the law to explicitly recognize in-groups and out-groups. And he wants those in authority to recognize the difference when applying the law.

Most of us believe the law should be applied without fear or favor. Everyone is subject to the law. Everyone should be treated equally under it. When the law isn’t applied equally, we call that an injustice.

But most of us don’t understand how equality is seen by Vance, Trump and the rest of their maga movement. Equality is no virtue. It’s a vice. The in-group should never, ever, be treated the same way as the out-group. When the law is applied equally, they call that an injustice.

This debate moment is the perfect distillation of composer Frank Wilhoit’s old saying. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

The importance of impunity
Liberals and Democrats often call this hypocrisy, but we’re not talking about saying one thing while doing another. MAGA does not pay lip service to equality. It opposes it. Vance was outraged by Brennan fact-checking him, but he would have no problem with her fact-checking Tim Walz.

It’s better to call it impunity – for the rule of law and the other small-r republican principles that are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. Everything about MAGA politics depends on everyone else honoring those values while MAGA subverts or violates them.

This impunity is central to their idea of freedom.

If they are not free to break the rules, they are not free.

More than a “damning non-answer”
This was again perfectly distilled during another debate moment. Walz asked Vance directly if Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. He paused before saying, “I’m focused on the future.”

“That’s a damning non-answer,” Walz said.

It was more than that.

Vance immediately asked Walz if “Kamala Harris censored Americans from speaking their minds in the wake of the covid situation?” He was referring to Trump and the Republicans who were spreading lies about the disease and to the vice president’s role in combating those lies.

Walz ignored him, but the answer, for Vance, is yes. Maga wants to lie and lie and lie, not only about the covid but about the election, and anyone like Harris who stands up for the truth violates their “freedom.”

Unfairness is the point
The conventions of decency ask us to at least try to be honest. That’s why Brennan, even though she wasn’t supposed to fact-check Vance, felt compelled to. His lies about Haitians were too ugly to overlook.

But asking MAGA to be honest violates their First Amendment rights, and holding them morally accountable for what they say is censorship.

“F you, CBS - how DARE YOU,” wrote Megyn Kelly last night.

The rules bind you, but protect me. If they don’t, I’m free to break them. Indeed, my liberty depends on having impunity for the rules.