Brace Yourself
It's going to get ugly out there
Sixty-two days until the election and Donald Trump is already at the throwing-sh*t- against-the-wall-stage of the campaign.
As you undoubtedly know, Kamala Harris has changed her opinion on fracking. But (by my latest count) Trump changed his positions on abortion four times just over the weekend. And don’t get me started on Trump’s latest proposals on IVF, which is now the latest freebie he’s handing out. Suffice it to say that Trump was trying to neutralize the abortion issue with his pinwheeling evolutions, but only managed to highlight his desperation and incoherence.
As Dan Pfeiffer noted in his newsletter, “The Message Box”: “The impetus for Trump’s erratic, scattershot approach to abortion and IVF is clear. While he likes to truth/tweet with false bravado about the polls, he has fallen behind in the national polling average. The race has gone from near-certain victory to very possible loss. The driving force behind that shift is a massive gender gap in the electorate.”
How big is the gender gap? In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll of voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, 55 percent of men supported Trump while just 39 percent of women did — an enormous 16-point difference.
I think it’s safe to say that JD Vance isn’t helping Trump close that gap.
Happy Tuesday.
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You need more dog pictures, don’t you?
Auggie on a road trip is always the navigator.
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Saturday night Auggie.
The asymmetry. It burns.
You may have missed this over the weekend: “Trump says he had 'every right' to interfere in the 2020 election.”
“Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up?” Trump said. “When people get indicted, your poll numbers go down. But it was such, such nonsense.”
BTW: No, he did not have “every right” to interfere with the election, but his confession is clarifying, don’t you think?
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Trump also accused Harris of being a “nasty person.”
"The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible," he said on Fox News.
Mike Pence? Trump’s vice president? This guy?
…
“What?” commented David Corn, “Did she call him the p-word and incite the violent mob that chanted “Hang Mike Pence”? Because if she did, she probably should drop out of the race.”
**
Meanwhile, the media continues to flail. Here’s Margaret Sullivan — the former public editor of the NYT — on the paper’s recent coverage of the race.
I heard from [former Times investigative reporter James] Risen a few days ago…. He wrote to express his outrage at his former employer for a recent story. I pay particular attention to him as a former Timesman himself and a journalist of integrity.
“At first, I thought this was a parody,” Risen told me. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Even more unfortunately, the lack of judgment it displays is all too common in the Times and throughout Big Journalism as mainstream media covers Donald Trump’s campaign for president.
“Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts,” is the headline of the story he was angered by. If you pay attention to epidemic of “false equivalence” in the media — equalizing the unequal for the sake of looking fair — you might have had a sense of what was coming.
The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.
Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme.
“Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common …But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” The story notes that experts are particularly skeptical about Trump’s idea, but the story’s framing and its headline certainly equate the two.
“Why does this keep happening, not just in the Times but far beyond?” asks Sullivan. “Nearly 10 years after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the media has not figured out how to cover him.”
And what’s more — what’s worse — they don’t seem to want to change. Editors and reporters, with a few exceptions, really don’t see the problem as they normalize Trump. Nor do they appear to listen to valid criticism. They may not even be aware of it, or may think, “well, when both sides are mad at us, we must be doing it right.”
**
Back in April, I tried to address the problems confronting journalists in 2024. This is what I wrote in The Atlantic:
The media challenge will be to emphasize the abnormality of Donald Trump without succumbing to a reactionary ideological tribalism, which would simply drive audiences further into their silos. Put another way: Media outlets will need all the credibility they can muster when they try to sound the alarm that none of this is normal. And it is far more important to get it right than to get it fast, because every lapse will be weaponized.
The commitment to “fairness” should not, however, mean creating false equivalencies or fake balance….
In the age of Trump, it is also important that members of the media not be distracted by theatrics generally…. Relatedly, the stakes are simply too high to wallow in vibes, memes, or an obsessive focus on within-the-margin-of-error polls. Democracy can indeed be crushed by authoritarianism. But it can also be suffocated by the sort of trivia that often dominates social media.
And, finally, the Prime Directive of 2024: Never, ever become numbed by the endless drumbeat of outrages.
You can read the whole thing here.
The Autumn of Oligarchs
Elon Musk is not only one of the world’s richest men, he controls a major social media site, and is flexing his political clout on behalf of a Trump 2.0 presidency in which he hopes/expects to play a major role.
He is also obviously going through some things. So, attention ought to be paid.
Under Musk, the site formerly known as Twitter has become a vector of disinformation and bigotry, and Musk has thrown himself into the project with extraordinary zeal. This weekend, we got an example, when he posted an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris wearing a cap with a hammer and sickle. “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one,” Musk declared. ‘Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”
Subtle, the master of the universe is not.
But Musk’s latest foray into Trumpish trolling dovetails with the Trump campaign’s new “hardline” attack on the vice president. Reports CNN:
[Trump] and his running mate, JD Vance, implied her mixed race — heritage that millions of Americans share — is evidence of a sinister “chameleon”-like character that also explains policy reversals on energy and immigration. In an ugly moment, he amplified a sexually themed social media slander against her. And his dark campaign ads allege she will slash Social Security benefits by welcoming millions of undocumented migrants to the country.
**
But it is another Musk post that deserves more attention. In it, the billionaire seems to endorse (or at least entertain) the suggestion that power be devolved upon a race of male ubermenschs, who alone can be trusted to make decisions in a “Republic of high status males.”
The theory, written by an anonymous user, suggests that the only people able to think freely are “high [testostrone] alpha males” and “aneurotypical people”, and that these “high status males” should run a “Republic” that is “only for those who are free to think.”
“People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism,” the post reads.
“Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse new information with an objective ‘is this true?’ filter,” it adds. “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”
Finally…
**
No words.
Perhaps, I didn’t hear Kamala correctly, but what I heard her say was that her values on fracking hadn’t changed, but her policy views have. I believe that one of the characteristics of a good leader, is being able to put one’s own values aside for the good of the country. Personal values and policy decisions aren’t always in harmony. I appreciate her ability to be objective and rational.
Charlie you are certainly right about the state of so called mainstream media. It used to be a pillar of investigative journalism. It had credibility. It asked tough questions and wanted answers to them.
In my opinion it is not that mainstream media has not learned to cover Trump. They aren’t even trying to.
Integrity has fallen victim to vanity and greed. It is more important to get likes and revenue than to inform the public.
No wonder the public can’t trust them anymore nor should they. They really are not much more credible than Fox.
When Trump calls Harris a communist, a socialist and a fascist in the same breath, ask him to define each. When he says I hear… or I’m told… ask him the source. Simple yet they never even try. The foundation of journalism was what where and why.
The free press is supposed to protect the citizens and provide the news not amplify stupidity.
Just another pillar of our democracy that has become badly eroded.