Trump: Desperate and Dangerous
A reminder: A clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
Well, that didn’t go well. Last night, Donald Trump — desperately trying to reset his flabby, failing campaign — sat down for a live interview with the world’s richest internet troll.
The result? Two hours of glitchy, slurring, lisping, and monumentally boring bafflegab. If you have a life, you likely missed this clusterf*ck for the ages. So, let’s catch up quickly:
Trump’s interview with Musk devolves into yet another X catastrophe - POLITICO
The swirl of posts about technical difficulties echoed Musk’s previous X Live event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who launched his Republican presidential primary campaign on an X live interview with Musk. As appeared to happen with Trump’s event, the site’s livestream portal, which is audio only, crashed.
You remember that, right?
After a 45-minute delay the Trump “conversation” began... and everything got worse.
David Frum: “Meandering, solipsistic, and crushingly boring—the interview was an awful premonition of the rest of Trump’s life should he lose again, in November: wandering the corridors of his clubs, going from table to table, buttonholing the dwindling number of guests, monologuing relentlessly until they squirm away.”
Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien: “Trump is slurring his words, and is unable to clearly enunciate S-words, in unusually messy ways during this Musk interview. He had trouble hearing at the NABJ convention and at his Mar-a-Lago presser. He has declined and aged noticeably over the last year.”
The non-Trumpian trolls, naturally had a field day — on Musk’s own fail-site:
Happy Tuesday.
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A warning
Amid the ongoing festival of optimism (which I have been thoroughly enjoying), former prosecutor Andrew Weissman is sounding an alarm — IN ALL CAPS:
GIVEN THE DISTINCT PROSPECT OF JAIL, TRUMP IS GOING TO GET UGLIER, MORE RACIST, MORE VIOLENT, MORE CRIMINAL.
4 STATE AND FEDERAL JUDGES, IN CIVIL AND CRIMINAL CASES, HAVE HAD TO DEAL WITH HIS EFFORTS TO OBSTRUCT JUSTICE; HE'S BEEN CHARGED WITH OBSTRUCTION, INCLUDING OF A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, AND WAS CONVICTED OF DOING SO IN THE 2016 ELECTION.
FOR HIM, IT IS NOW "NO HOLDS BARRED" TIME. THE MEDIA AND LAW ENFORCEMENT NEED TO BE ON ALERT!
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My latest piece in The Atlantic picks up on Weissman’s alarmism: “Trump Is Setting the Stage to Challenge the Election.”
“Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways,” Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic today. Among those is Trump’s insistence on refusing reality: This weekend, the former president pushed a bizarre conspiracy theory that the massive crowds at recent rallies for Kamala Harris were faked by AI.
Apparently suffering from a severe case of crowd envy, Trump seized on right-wing social-media speculation and claimed that “NOBODY” had really shown up at Harris’s rallies. Despite extensive photographic evidence that thousands of supporters had turned out at an airport in Detroit, Trump insisted that the crowds “DIDN’T EXIST.” In fact, he declared, “there was nobody there,” and cited as evidence “the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane,” which did not reflect images of the crowd that was otherwise in plain sight.
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Trump’s claims were pathetically easy to debunk. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted, the reflection on the plane didn’t show the crowd because it was angled away from the platform where Harris and other Democrats spoke. “No AI,” wrote Bump. “No whistleblowing maintenance worker, ginned up from the ether to make the claim of dishonesty seem more credible. And no ‘cheating’ by Harris.”
All of this was so weird that novelist Stephen King — himself a master of horror fiction — wondered whether Trump’s surreal fabulism could possibly be real. “If it is,” he wrote on X, “Trump has really lost it.”
But Trump’s rally-crowd-denialism was also a warning of a different sort:
The former president is openly laying the groundwork for challenging the legitimacy of the November election.
After claiming that Harris had “CHEATED at the airport,” Trump telegraphed his other message: “This is the way the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And they’re even worse at the Ballot Box.”
Trump has been workshopping his claims that Harris’s candidacy is illegitimate; he has already suggested that the replacement of Joe Biden with Harris was somehow “unconstitutional.” (It wasn’t, because the Constitution is silent on party nominations.) In his weekend rant, Trump suggested that Harris “should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!”
In the 2020 race, Trump used the lie that the election had been stolen to incite a violent attack on the nation’s Capitol; now he and his allies have the added advantage of an infrastructure for sowing chaos the next time around.
One of Trump’s campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, has already made it clear that Trump may fight the outcome of the election long after November 5. “It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.
In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).
Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose.
As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”
In other words: A Trump facing defeat could be even more dangerous this year than he was in 2020, because the personal stakes for him are higher than ever:
Trump is already a convicted felon, but if he wins, he can make many of the remaining criminal cases against him go away. If he loses, he faces not only personal humiliation but also a potential legal nightmare. This makes Trump a desperate man—and that desperation could drive his actions even after the final votes are cast.
Speaking of desperation…
Axios: “Former President Trump's advisers are deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt.”
It’s Republicans’ turn to panic about their nominee and the polls — The Washington Examiner
With former President Donald Trump trailing in the polling averages for the first time in months, Republicans are starting to panic.
Trump’s deficits as a candidate have some Republicans privately pining for the switcheroo Democrats pulled off at the top of their ticket from President Joe Biden to Vice President Kamala Harris.
NYT: Inside the Worst Three Weeks of Donald Trump’s 2024 Campaign.
Close Trump allies have described this as the rockiest period of Mr. Trump’s campaign — and easily the worst since a late 2022 spree in which he mused about terminating parts of the Constitution and dined at Mar-a-Lago with a white supremacist and an outspoken antisemite.
Since then, Mr. Trump has picked fights with allies publicly and privately, including a broadside against Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia at an Atlanta rally — the kind of meanspirited public attack on a popular Republican that his own allies believe helped sink two Senate races in Georgia in January 2021 and could harm Mr. Trump in the state, a vital battleground in November.
Nota Bene
David French: To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris - The New York Times
Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”
What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?…
It’s not just Trump’s lies that are contagious, but his cruelty as well, and that cruelty is embedding itself deeply within one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies, conservative evangelicals. It is difficult to overstate the viciousness and intolerance of MAGA Christians against their political foes. There are many churches and Christian leaders who are now more culturally Trumpian than culturally Christian. Trump is changing the church.
And to what end?…
I’m often asked by Trump voters if I’m “still conservative,” and I respond that I can’t vote for Trump precisely because I am conservative. I loathe sex abuse, pornography and adultery. Trump has brought those vices into the mainstream of the Republican Party. I want to cultivate a culture that values human life from conception through natural death. Yet America became more brutal and violent during Trump’s term. I want to defend liberal democracy from authoritarian aggression, yet Trump would abandon our allies and risk our most precious alliances.
Your daily dog picture
Auggie and friend.
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Finally
We remain a sharply divided nation.
Two quick points:
1) DJT’s candidacy has been declared dead numerous times and yet like Rose somehow he goes on. That image of the ship going down was the Republican Party.
2) HL Mencken is alive and well in the writing of Charlie Sykes. No one else can say it like Charlie— “Two hours of glitchy, slurring, lisping, and monumentally boring bafflegab.” Mencken knew that language is a tool, a weapon to pierce the gasbags and granfaloons. Charlie wields the scalpel with the effect of a broad axe.
Trump-Musk sort of reminds me of two guys sitting around in the basement, drinking a few beers with some crock pot snacks while watching a football game. All of a sudden it hits them. "Hey, I like to cook, and you like to homebrew beer. What say we start a brewpub together?"
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong when two people vastly overestimate both their talent and their substance? All the more so when they live a life where money is no object and nobody else has either the guts or the power to tell them when they are not only wrong, but also pretty stupid about foisting their plan upon the world.. And so we arrived at last night's doom loop of disaster. The sad part is that they probably enjoyed it so much that they'll do it again. Ouch.