In case you were in a sensory deprivation tank all summer (I wish I was), let me bring you up to speed.

Kamala Harris’s eleventh hour entry into the presidential race has marked an unprecedented turn of events in American politics. The neo-fascist Trump Party, which was cackling over what it saw as certain victory as recently as late July, is on its heels. The Democratic Party is showing an enthusiasm, a self-discipline, and a level of professional competence that are not usually keywords associated with that organization. (“Democrats in Startling Array,” as several wags quipped online.)

Awesome, right? Yes indeed.

But just sixty-two days out from Election Day, the race remains a dead heat. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Kamala with a four point lead nationally and rising, all of which is  a remarkable turnaround from Biden’s numbers just a few weeks ago. Other polls show her lead  to be as great as five or six points. But still others, like Nate Silver’s much-vaunted forecast, show the lead to which she initially leapt now slipping a hair, and Trump slightly favored to win the Electoral College (though never the popular vote) for the first time she entered the race. She is sometimes said to be gaining in the crucial swing states, while other assessments have Trump still leading there, especially in all-important Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There is talk of a Kamala landslide, but also of a soul-crushing repeat of 2016, with Trump’s perennial tendency to underpoll and then overperform on election day. And almost all those polls have a margin of error of plus or minus 2 points or so, which makes the contest even closer, essentially a tossup as it currently stands.

So all we can say with confidence is that nobody can say anything with confidence. This race is terrifyingly close, emphasis on the “terrifying.”

The question I have is: How the hell can that be?

Let’s set aside the Electoral College for now. Just looking at nationwide polling, even if Kamala is indeed winning by six, how is she not winning by forty? Cue the tired, old, and discredited story about Pauline Kael. But we must ask: how can it be that tens of millions of registered American voters continue to support Donald Trump, only slightly fewer than oppose him, enough potentially to put him back in office, given our anti-democratic, minority-favoring system?

It is indeed mind-boggling when one considers who Donald John Trump is and the record that he is dragging around with him, and the kind of campaign he is currently running. And that is a damning statement about the United States of America in 2024.

AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING

For the sake of time, let’s set aside Trump’s lifelong history of ghastliness and just focus on a few things he’s done lately, any one of which would have been utterly disqualifying for any presidential candidate in the past—or any Democratic candidate even now—let alone all of them taken together.

He has bragged of his desire to be a dictator, promised to build concentration camps, and threatened to use the power of the presidency to seek vengeance against his political enemies.

He suggested that the Presidential Medal of Freedom—which he gave to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Holtz, Ed Meese, Art Laffer, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Miriam Adelson, and Elvis—is a bigger achievement than the Medal of Honor.

He reposted a troll’s meme “joking” that Kamala Harris performed fellatio to hasten her political rise.

He insulted a gathering of prominent Black journalists to their faces.

He told the astroturfers of Moms for Liberty (designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) that elementary schools are performing gender reassignment surgery on children without their parents’ consent. (Factcheck: Yes, American healthcare sucks, but to my knowledge, no American elementary school is performing surgery of any kind, with or without parental consent.)

He continues to go around saying that Democrats not only support abortion on demand all the way up to the moment of birth, but that they also support killing babies even after they are born, and are doing so even as we speak.

He’s claimed his administration would be “great for women and their reproductive rights,” even as he admitted he was going to vote against codifying a right to abortion in the upcoming referendum in his new home state of Florida. He also flip-flopped on IVF, first announcing that he would not only keep it legal but make it free, then reneged after his forced birth base freaked out on him.

He announced he would be hosting an “January 6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, NJ golf club to raise legal defense funds for insurrectionists, with Rudy Giuliani among the scheduled speakers, then postponed it. (Note word choice: ”postponed,” not “canceled.” It may be back on if he wins in November, and held at the White House. But the defendants won’t need funds for lawyers, because he’ll pardon them. Maybe.)

He is—despite his absurd denials—inextricably associated with a 900-odd page American edition of Mein Kampf that openly lays out plans for a fascist regime.

He continues to issue One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-level social media posts, like this one, from May, and yes, he did write it in all caps:

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL, INCLUDING CROOKED AND CORRUPT PROSECUTORS AND JUDGES THAT ARE DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO INTERFERE WITH THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2024, AND PUT ME IN PRISON, INCLUDING THOSE MANY PEOPLE THAT I COMPLETELY & TOTALLY DESPISE BECAUSE THEY WANT TO DESTROY AMERICA, A NOW FAILING NATION, LIKE “DERANGED” JACK SMITH, WHO IS EVIL AND “SICK,” MRS. FANI “FAUNI” WADE, WHO SAID SHE HARDLY KNEW THE “SPECIAL” PROSECUTOR, ONLY TO FIND THAT HE SPENT YEARS “LOVING” HER, LONG BEFORE THE GEORGIA PERSECUTION OF PRESIDENT TRUMP BEGAN (AND THEREBY MAKING THE CASE AGAINST ME NULL, VOID, AND ILLEGAL!), AND LAZY ON VIOLENT CRIME ALVIN BRAGG WHO, WITH CROOKED JOE’S DOJ THUGS, UNFAIRLY WORKING IN THE D.A.’s OFFICE, ILLEGALLY INDICTED ME ON A CASE HE NEVER WANTED TO BRING AND VIRTUALLY ALL LEGAL SCHOLARS SAY IS A CASE THAT SHOULD NOT BE BROUGHT, IS BREAKING THE LAW IN DOING SO (POMERANTZ!), WAS TURNED DOWN BY ALL OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES, AND IS NOT A CRIME. HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!

(Pause for breath, and refill of soup bowl-sized Rob Roy.)

And finally, the kicker, in a story that has lately dominated the airwaves, Trump took a film crew to a section of Arlington National Cemetery that he was told by the Army—in advance, in no uncertain terms—was off limits for photography, and shot a campaign commercial there, using fallen servicemembers (you know, “losers and suckers”) and their grieving (if willing) families as props. He was even photographed standing over the grave of a dead Marine while grinning and giving his standard thumb’s up. When a cemetery staffer tried to stop them, Trump’s people verbally and physically assaulted her. When Donald subsequently began to take flak for the stunt, he blamed it on the Gold Star families themselves. Really, man: at long last, have you no sense of decency?

To resort to Trump’s own all-caps style, YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP.

(This last outrage is not academic for me. My mother is buried in Arlington, next to a spot that awaits my father. In fact, just yesterday he told me he is on his way there this week—still vertical, thankfully—for the funeral of an old friend.)

I could go on, in terms of Trump’s rap sheet, and needless to say, I’m leaving out the big ones: he mounted a violent coup, stole nuclear secrets, raped a woman, ordered the kidnapping of children, kowtowed to Putin and Kim, and fiddled while a plague killed hundreds of thousands.

So yeah, that sounds like someone who should reasonably be within striking distance of getting elected President of the United States. Again.

OUR BASTARD

When a litany of Trump’s horrors like this is recited, the usual rationalization for his supporters is, “Yeah, he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard. We need somebody who’s tough like that fighting for us in this messed-up world.” (Or at least that’s what we are told is their rationalization, by chinstroking New York Times pundits bending over yogi-like to explain the MAGA cult to us.)

And that may well be the rationalization that they tell themselves. But it just doesn’t hold water.

I hate to tell you this, fellas, but he is not fighting for you. He’s fighting for himself—for his own gain, and at the moment, to stay the fuck out of prison. He is not a disrupter and a rule breaker, at least not in any positive way. He’s a grifter and a charlatan and criminal and a cretin. And the proof is in the fact that nothing he does is good for you, his supporters. His record on unions, on taxes, on foreign policy, on health care, on education, on everything you can name: it all benefits the plutocratic class, and him personally, and/or the religious fanatics who are the foot soldiers for the 1%, except insofar as that has become a sorcerer’s apprentice relationship. It’s all an enormous con. And that is not news.  

The eagerness of Trump supporters to forgive and justify and explain away his behavior is bottomless. No matter what he does, they twist themselves into knots finding ways to excuse and defend it. (We can set aside the true reprobates, racists, and burn-it-all-down nihilists who actively thrill to Trump’s sins, the more godawful the better. They are beneath contempt. But we all know some, don’t we?)

It goes without saying that such generosity does not extend to even the slightest transgression by a Democrat, which is proof of the MAGA cult’s willful duplicity. Just to play word association for a moment, let me throw out these bon mots: “tan suit,” “Dijon mustard,” and of course, “email.” Can you imagine for a moment what MAGA Nation, or even the “legitimate” right wing press, like the Wall Street Journal, would say if Kamala and her staffers had pulled the shit that Trump did in Arlington? She would already have been tarred and feathered, and I’m not sure it would have been metaphorical.

As I’ve said many times, I do know some good people—however one wants to define that very nebulous term—who support Trump, just as there are some loathsome people who nevertheless vote blue. It mystifies me, and no two are exactly alike. But the majority of his voters do not fall into that category by any stretch of the term, motivated as they are by far more nefarious urges. I won’t veer into “very fine people on both sides” territory: there is no equivalence here except a false one. But no one can support Trump without engaging in a world class degree of denial, willful or otherwise.

Trumpers are insistent above all that he never made the “losers and suckers” comment, even though the remark was corroborated by a source as sterling as retried Marine four-star John Kelly, Trump’s second chief of staff (of four), and a hardline conservative himself. Still, they swear it’s a dirty lie (“He’s just a disgruntled former employee!”), which is a flashing red light indicating that that remark stings the most. I have heard this denial extensively from military people, and I hasten to remind you, dear reader, that is my tribe. I suspect that most of them know in their heart of hearts that it’s true, which is precisely why they doth protest so much.

But do we really need that one incident to know that Trump is insulting and contemptuous of the profession of arms? He has a massive history on that count. Yet still his fans stick their heads in the sand and stay loyal to a shameless draft dodger not fit to wash John McCain’s jockstrap.

That, my friends, is the very definition of a cult.

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT (AND A LOT THAT’S NOT)

Not to downplay the culpability of Trump supporters, but part of the reason why his movement maintains such unaccountable strength is the useful idiocy and cynical collaborationism of the media. This past week offered a bevy of examples, beginning with what Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, described as “probably the worst, most appalling, most offensive, and just plain old asshat-stupid headline I’ve seen on a political story in many years.” It had to do with Kamala’s recent interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, who asked her about Trump’s allegation that she’s not really Black. Kamala refused to take the bait, wryly replying: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question.”

So how did Politico report that exchange? With the headline: “Next Question: Harris Evades Questions About Her Identity.” Tomasky writes:

It’s emblematic of what the political media in this country are doing so badly in covering this race. With dizzying regularity, Trump lies. He says toxic, antidemocratic things over and over again. And he still gets treated like a normal candidate. It’s often the case that the media, presented with another one of his addled rants, will dive in, scoop, and separate enough words to make it seem like he’s got enough actual gray matter gooping around in his skull to form a complete sentence, and present their director’s cut of his wandering mind for public consumption. 

The effect is to legitimize Trump….

Tomasky goes on to note that “this isn’t even the most glaring recent example of the press lying down on the job. That prize goes to the two New York Times reporters who recently gave us this gem, which ran under another genius headline: “Harris and Trump Have Housing Ideas. Economists Have Doubts.”

You can tell instantly what kind of article this is going to be—one of those classic on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand pieces that pretends to weigh evidence in a sober way and absolutely refrains from drawing any conclusions that might give offense to one side or the other. Except that in this case, the conclusion gives offense to anyone with a functioning brain.

Here’s the story’s second paragraph: “Their two visions of how to solve America’s affordable housing shortage have little in common, and Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed. But they do share one quality: Both have drawn skepticism from outside economists.” Tomasky again:

First of all: If you’ve been in journalism long enough then you know that you can find economists who’ll say anything, especially when it comes to picking apart a candidate’s plan. More importantly: “Ms. Harris’s plan is far more detailed” is Times-speak, as any veteran reader of that paper knows, for “Harris at least has a plan, while Trump doesn’t have anything close to a plan.”

In fact, Trump’s “plan” is to deport undocumented immigrants, putting them in concentration camps on their way out.

Wait a second. Are you kidding me? Trump’s “housing plan” is to deport people? And the most important newspaper in the English-speaking world is taking this idea seriously? What could these reporters—and more importantly, their editor, who is supposed to use his or her years of experience to guide them—be thinking? 

Tomasky suggests that a “reality-based article” comparing the candidates’ housing plans would have noted that Harris, “who talks about housing all the time on the stump, has a real and reasonably detailed plan that economists say has some good points and bad points.” Whereas:

Trump shows no sign of having given even 10 seconds of thought to the housing crisis (on Trump’s 20-point platform, the word isn’t mentioned), and by the way, he spent four years as president, during which time he amassed a thoroughly rotten record on housing and never once showed any interest in ameliorating the affordable housing crisis; how about that? 

If you want to look at it that way, well then, lots of things count as housing policy. Why aren’t we crediting Trump’s great “success” in seeing to it that hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily during the pandemic? That surely helped reduce housing demand! He’s one stable housing-policy genius, clearly.

Tomasky wasn’t the only journalist who jumped on that story. “At first, I thought this was a parody,” James Risen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter formerly of the Times told Margaret Sullivan, herself formerly the public editor of the Times, and subsequently media columnist for the Washington Post, who broke it down in a piece called “An Ugly Case of ‘False Balance’ in the New York Times.” (I quote Sullivan at length in my book Resisting the Right, in the chapter on the press.)

Sullivan notes that “(s)tories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond,” remarking that its political coverage “often seems broken and clueless—or even blatantly pro-Trump. There’s so much of this false-balance nonsense in the Times that there’s a Twitter (X) account devoted to mocking it, called New York Times Pitchbot.”

As journalists like Tomasky, Risen, and Sullivan prove, there are members of the press who get it, in spades. In fact, the best critiques of poor political coverage in the media come from other media professionals.

Referring to Trump’s aforementioned speech to Moms for Liberty, and his fictional assertion of sex change operations in our schools, Tomasky writes that “in uttering this balderdash in public (Trump) is either knowingly lying or in precipitous cognitive decline. No third choice, I’m afraid—we’re either in the front half of A Face in the Crowd or the last pages of Flowers for Algernon.” Yet the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times all covered this appearance with headlines that were anodyne as Wheatena, and none of them mentioned that whopping lie. (For his part, Tomasky suggested the 100% accurate headline, “Trump, at Moms for Liberty Event, Makes Bizarre and False Claims about Schools and Transgender Youth.)”

I would add to that Hall of Shame an editorial in the WaPo last week originally titled “Harris and Trump are Different. They Need to Explain How Different.” (Since changed to the only marginally better, “America Has Two Presidential Candidates. Let’s Compare Them.”) In it, the Post’s editorial board purported to furrow its collective brow and compare the “policies” of the two candidates—a more broadbrush version of the housing policy piece. In reality, it offered a master class in treating this election with the same old wildly inappropriate “horserace” mentality and normalizing the fascist candidate. Not a single mention of how one candidate is a twice impeached convicted felon who tried to mount a violent coup and promises to be a dictator, all of which is more germane than beardstroking musings on their respective policies on the deficit. The piece was glaring evidence of how the media has learned nothing since 2016…..or actively does not want to.

As Tomasky notes, many of these “bothsidesist” articles spring from a wildly misguided impulse to prove the reporter’s “objectivity” (or the newspaper’s or TV network’s). “See? We’re tough on Democrats too!” Except to do so requires an outrageous, dishonest, and destructive false equivalency, one that puts acne on a par with gangrene. “Reporters and editors need to stop worrying so much about whether what they’re producing is fair,” Tomasky writes, “and worry a lot more about whether it’s true.”

Sullivan goes on to note that the press even failed in covering the Arlington story, as journalist Ben Kesling, who served in the US Marine Corps (there are no “former Marines,” as they will tell you), wrote in Columbia Journalism Review:

Lumped together, the reporting this week left readers and listeners, especially with no knowledge of the military, at a loss to understand what actually happened—and crucially, why it mattered so much. The Trump campaign had successfully muddied the waters by alleging that the photographer had been invited to the event by family members of soldiers buried there.

But as any veteran knows in their bones, the solemnity of the ceremony is exactly why the unauthorized photographer had no business being there—regardless of who invited them. Section 60, the part of the cemetery where the incident occurred, is one of the most sacred places for this generation of troops. It is where those who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried. Those graves are visited not by tourists looking for historical figures, but by mothers and fathers visiting their fallen son or daughter. In Section 60, wounds are still raw. Political activity there is never appropriate, and under the law, only cemetery staffers and approved photographers are permitted to film or take pictures there. 

Kesling, Sullivan writes, argued that the whole affair came off “like a bureaucratic mix-up or some tedious violation of protocol,” not a deeply disrespectful moral failure, which it surely was.” She then asks the pertinent and pointed question:

Why does this keep happening, not just in the Times but far beyond? 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.

PHOTO FINISH

It is mind-boggling to think that Trump still has a decent chance of winning this race. By any conventional measure, his presidential campaign is a dumpster fire atop a trainwreck amid a shitshow, lacking any coherent strategy, and with a wildly erratic, openly deranged nominee atop the ticket. Yeah, that was true in 2016 as well, but Trump benefitted from a lot of luck, including a novelty factor that has long since worn off, help from Russia (whether he coordinated with them or not) and from Jim Comey, and some grievous mistakes by the DNC. But Trump 2024 makes Trump 2016 look positively mild. It says something when a story breaks that RFK Jr chainsawed the head off a dead whale and strapped it to the roof of his car and it’s not even the weirdest thing in the news all week.

And yet he is still neck and neck with Kamala.

What that tells us is that there is something deeply wrong in our country. It also tells us that even if Kamala wins—inshallah—we will continue to have this problem until the neo-John Birch white nationalist theocratic movement in the United States is eradicated.

Back, briefly, to the subject of Trump’s underpolling. A few weeks ago I mentioned in passing the conventional wisdom that his support is consistently underestimated because a fair number of his voters are too embarrassed to admit to pollsters that they’re going to vote for him. But in a recent Atlantic piece on the topic, pollsters reported the opposite: that in phone polls, a significant number of respondents screamed “I’m voting for Trump—fuck you!” The good news is that those people used to be discounted, because they didn’t complete the verbal questionnaire. Now they are being recorded as votes for Trump, which makes more sense, and may make the polling more accurate, including the current state of the race. We shall see.

I suspect that history will look back on this period of American history as one of mass psychosis, dwarfing McCarthyism. What say we make sure that period is a brief one, limited to a single Trump term and his window-pounding mischief-making from the outside looking in afterward, and not renewed for four more years?

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Kamala Harris: Noah Berger/AFP via Getty Images

The Former Guy: Image posted by Trump advisor and serial sexual harasser Corey Lewandowski