Tag: kamala-harris

We Need to Talk About Lionel

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Shortly before Election Day 2024, I came across an interview with the American novelist and political commentator Lionel Shriver on the website of Spiked, an online magazine based in Britain. The interview was titled “Why I Loathe Kamala Harris.”

For the uninitiated, Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1957;  as a child, she took the name “Lionel” as gesture of feminist defiance. Admirable enough. She is a well-regarded highbrow author whose most famous novel is the Orange Prize-winning We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), which was made into the 2011 film of the same name starring Tilda Swindon, directed by Lynne Ramsay. A-list, arty stuff all around. Educated at Barnard, with both a BA and MFA from that institution, and no relation to the Kennedy-adjacent political clan with the same surname, she is also a longtime expat who has lived in Kenya, Thailand, and the UK, and currently resides in Portugal, though she retains her US citizenship.

OK, with a pedigree that bog standard progressive, what was Shriver’s beef with Kamala?

Well, the first thing to understand is that Shriver is representative of a certain kind of self-styled “neutral” (to use soccer terminology) who wants to position themselves as above politics. I have some friends—on both the right and the left—who traffic in this same bullshit.

The left-leaning ones tend to be scornful of anti-Trump sentiment from their fellow progressives, taking the eye-rolling view that people like me who are outraged by Donald are naïve, since the powers-that-be have ALWAYS been terrible, so what’s new? To them I would argue that, be that as it may, Trump represents a unique escalation of that terribleness, posing much more urgent and deadly dangers that demand our attention, not selfish, too-cool-for-school solipsism.

Those on the right, meanwhile, tend to fancy themselves “libertarians,” and Shriver fits that mold perfectly: people who are ostensibly against the GOP and the Democrats in equal measure (the better to boost their view of themselves as above it all), but who devote 99% of their time to attacking the Democratic Party, with only the occasional, perfunctory acknowledgment that, oh yeah, Donald Trump is kinda bad too.

Shriver’s half hour-long October 23 video interview with Spiked is a master class in that rot. (The magazine prefers the lowercase “spiked,” but it’s my blog.) In reality, if one examines her positions, her past statements, and her writing, it becomes clear that she is really just another howling reactionary enamored of the general MAGA agenda, albeit papered over with an arty, chattering class veneer.

But this empress not only has no clothes, she doesn’t even have skin or muscle or sinew, just rotten right wing bones.

HATERS GONNA

Shriver is a natural-born provocateur who relishes the role. Speaking to The Standard in 2022, she described herself as a monarchist, albeit a “reluctant” one. (And I am still making up my mind about leeches as a medical treatment.) She was pro-Brexit, a COVID lockdown skeptic (cue the Eric Clapton), and a vocal critic of DEI initiatives and the Black Lives Matter movement who delights in “woke-baiting.” Like most right wingers, she also spends a lot of time worrying about trans people competing in women’s sports and thinks the rich pay too much tax. Above all, she is a strident opponent of what she sees as an out-of-control wave of immigration by non-European people into the US, the UK, and EU.

Many of these positions are framed as part of a vigorous belief in free speech, which raises the question of how she squares that will her admiration for a guy who sends people to foreign gulags for saying things he doesn’t like.

Indeed: Shriver consistently professes to dislike Donald Trump but rarely criticizes him, and in fact, regularly pays him sly compliments. (The Democrats she pays no compliments, sly or otherwise, just openly derides.) Almost every criticism of Trump that she makes—usually only after being prompted by her interlocutor—is followed immediately by praise that negates what came before. For example, she told Spectator TV last fall that “however weird” Trump is, he makes a lot of people feel “that he’s at least a powerful and strong figure.” And yeah, as she laughed to Spiked, he rambles for hours in his speeches and “doesn’t seem like someone who’s completely in his right mind” (“I mean, it really does seem demented to me”), at least he is capable of “filling time with words in a way that Kamala Harris is not.”

So what specifically does Lionel “loathe” about Kamala that precludes the generosity that is extended to Donald? Well, lots.

Shriver expresses glee that the Biden dropped out of the race and we got rid of a “geriatric, demented candidate” (again, her tolerance for geriatric, demented candidates seems to have skyrocketed in the Trump administration), and says she is glad that he was replaced “with someone who technically is in her right mind.” But that’s the last nice thing she has to say about Ms. Harris. From the Spiked piece:

I’ve really struggled to put my finger on it, but there’s something about Kamala Harris that makes me despise her even more than Joe Biden. The closest I’ve come to identifying it is there’s something centrally fraudulent about her. You know, she doesn’t ring true, and I don’t believe she has any convictions of any kind. They are purely convictions of opportunity….and the idea of having such an empty suit in the White House is anathema to me.

Her central argument is that Kamala is a calculating opportunist without any real policies or ideologies for which she feels authentic passion, except abortion. She goes on to engage in snickering ad hominem attacks, accusing Harris of plagiarism, and saying that she only wants to be president because it’s fun to get attention and wear a lot of different colored pantsuits. If that’s not petty enough for you, Shriver then proceeds to ridicule Kamala’s fashion sense—even though a moment ago that topic was held up as an example of her alleged lack of substance—declaring it “the worst of anyone who’s ever run for president.” (I dunno. William Henry Harrison dressed like dogshit.)

And a written transcript does not do justice to Shriver’s snide and condescending tone in delivering these sentiments. Shriver’s giggling, obsequious interviewer—Fraser Myers, a deputy editor at Spiked and host of its podcast—reveled in her comments and piled on. I was not familiar with Mr. Myers, but a quick survey of the Internet reveals a decidedly aggressive right wing social media presence, and previous employment at the pro-Tory Telegraph. (Although Spiked grew out of the Trotskyite British magazine Living Marxism, which folded in 2000 after being bankrupted in a libel suit, its politics lean much more right than left.)

Another of Shriver’s talking points was the popular GOP canard that Democrats have challenged electoral integrity just as much as Republicans if not more, citing Stacey Abrams in the 2018 Georgia governor’s race, the Russiagate allegations, and Al Gore in 2000…..as if asking for a recount is equivalent to a violent attack on the Capitol with the intent of lynching Mike Pence. But—again parroting others on the right—Lionel would have us believe that the left is just as bad when it comes to political violence as the right, explicitly equating the response to George Floyd’s murder with January 6th, and suggesting that if Kamala were to lose, we would be in danger of an armed uprising by Democrats. (“I think it may be a tossup who could be worse,” she told Myers.)

It goes without saying that this is all absolute tripe wildly divorced from reality or any demonstrable evidence, and would not be out of place on the most hair-on-fire right wing opinion show on Fox, OAN, or Real America’s Voice.

Well, Lionel is a writer of fiction, after all.

JUST DONALD BEING DONALD

OK, so Shriver doesn’t like the former Vice President. But even so, she recognizes how bad Trump is, and doles out a proportionate amount of criticism of him, right?

Uh, no.

In keeping with the libertarian dynamic I described above, Shriver prides herself on hating both parties equally, though only one ever comes in for abuse while the other habitually gets a pass. Risibly, she tries to justify this imbalance by saying she has more loathing (her word) for the Democrats because “the American media is saturated with nastiness about Donald Trump,” and there’s no need for “more people trashing his character.”

There’s nothing duller than talking about what’s wrong with Donald Trump, what kind of a terrible character he has, how he’s going to destroy American democracy, and he’s going to become a dictator. And it just puts me to sleep.

What a smug rationalization for a world-beating level of hypocrisy.

Shriver bemoans what she calls the “hyperbole” of the left when it comes to Trump, saying, “I’m not quite sure that he is the threat to democracy that everyone claims. We’ve already survived four years of his presidency.” She scolds progressives for taking “that one offhand remark about how he’d be a dictator on day one, literally,” calling them “a little silly” for so doing. In fact, she goes further and actually argues that the Democrats pose the greater danger of dictatorship in America—another popular Republican claim—and to support it, parrots the Fox News harping on what it argues was the “anti-democratic” nature of Kamala’s selection as her party’s presidential candidate.

But Trump’s not the only Republican who gets the kid gloves treatment.

Shriver is openly admiring of J.D. Vance for being smart and articulate (“I actually find him pretty impressive”)—except, I would argue, when ordering doughnuts—as well as “lucid,” “bright,” “formidable,” and “intimidating” to the left. She blithely excuses his submission to the Big Lie as the price of being on the Trump ticket (a tradeoff she apparently thinks is justified) and concludes that he, like Trump, is not “a fascist threat to democracy.”

“I don’t think he’s radical,” she told Spiked. “I don’t think he’s out to necessarily pass an abortion ban for the whole country.” Even though in 2022, J.D. Vance appeared on a podcast where he said exactly that, and that he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.” Referring to such a proposed ban, she also accused the Democrats of “constantly trying to pin that on Republicans.”

Yes, so unsporting of us to accuse them of saying the thing that they repeatedly say, over and over.

SEPARATING THE BULLSHIT FROM THE BULLSHIT ARTIST

I realize I’m sounding pretty snotty myself in this diatribe against ol’ Margaret Ann. But she started it.

I’m not gonna pretend I’ve read all of Shriver’s novels (let alone actually read them). Life is simply too short when I could be doing any number of other far more pleasurable and enriching things, like surfing, or listening to Nina Simone, or watching paint dry, all of which are infinitely preferable in my view. So unlike other artists whose work I enjoy despite their vile political views, like Morrissey or Mamet, for me there is no angst or dilemma when it comes to the not-so-divine Ms. S. But it’s still curious to encounter a highbrow artist whose politics are so odious.

At the risk of making a massive generalization, the political views of most artists skew left-of-center because the profession requires some degree of open-mindedness and empathy, two qualities not usually associated with right wingery, and declining in direct proportion as one moves further starboard on the political spectrum. There are, of course, some stark exceptions, but the general rule holds more often than not. That’s what a “general rule” is, no?

When we venture out of the arts and into “intellectualism,” things get a little trickier. (The Venn diagram of artists and intellectuals has a fat intersection, but it’s not quite a concentric circle.) Shriver straddles that line because she is both a writer of fiction and a political commentator.

So why fixate on her? Why not single out a self-satisfied right wing journalist like The New York Times’ insufferable Ross Douthat, or The Washington Post’s Meghan McArdle, or the WaPo’s even more repulsive Marc Thiessen? There are lots of right wing journalists who are plenty smart, their odious beliefs notwithstanding. But as history has made painfully obvious, intelligence is no bulwark against despicable political beliefs. Plenty of very intelligent people—even undeniably brilliant ones—have fallen under the sway of grotesque political ideologies.

As a documentarian, I have met and interviewed a few folks who fit that description, prominent right wing figures of whom it is often said, “They’re evil, but they’re brilliant.” Without mentioning any names, it’s been my experience that that is frequently not true. Usually these people are of perfectly fine or even above-average intelligence, but not at all brilliant. What they usually are is thirsty, and insecure, and desperate to prove how brilliant they would like to be seen as. That tracks, as the kids say, because the right wing ideology is very suited to damaged souls.

That said, Lionel does not strike me as being in that category. I’ve never met her, but her arrogance and sanctimony seem very genuine. So is that better or worse? (Discuss.) She is certainly not a dumb woman. Far from it: she’s real smart. But she feels like one of those highly intelligent people who are so deeply invested in their world view, even in defiance of inconvenient facts, that they are willing to embrace the most outrageous lies and hideous behavior in order to cling to it, and to twist themselves into Gordian knots to defend it, rather than break with their own mythology and acknowledge the difficult truth. And that’s pretty hard to respect.

THE JARABE TAPATÍO (ENOCH POWELL REMIX)

Per above, Lionel’s main hobby horse is a xenophobic stance on immigration that would give Stephen Miller a hard-on.

Recently she praised Trump’s deportations and renditions, saying that they put illegal immigrants on notice and are an example for other countries to follow. That is a cruel joke, of course, because she is herself an immigrant, living in a country other than her own. (Ironically, Shriver’s current domicile of Portugal is the preferred destination of many American progressives who want to flee Trump.) Describing her as an “expat”—the usual designation for privileged elites who live abroad, which even I reflexively did at the top of this essay—does not make any appreciable difference. It’s an appellation typically used for privileged foreigners who choose to live overseas, as opposed to the tired and poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse who are forced to flee their homelands for dear life.

Now, Lionel might argue that this is actually a point in her favor, as she is a “legal” immigrant. But the idea that it’s only “illegal” immigration that sticks in her craw doesn’t pass muster when so much of her shit-stirring has to do with race and ethnicity….and there is no better example that her satirical 2016 novel The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, about a dystopian America in the near future.

As I say, I haven’t read much of Shriver’s fiction—I really gotta watch that new coat of paint on my fence dry—but I did feel compelled to read (some of) this one, and it’s troubling at best. Much of the novel is a polemic for free market capitalism. More tellingly, its vision of a “dystopia” hinges on the premise of Hispanic immigrants coming to dominate the USA. (Nightmare!) In the novel, whites are a minority in the United States, Spanish is the preeminent tongue, and the President is a pudgy, lisping, Mexican migrant who turns the country into a dictatorship. There are also digs at Chelsea Clinton and Paul Krugman, and a key plot point about an illegal immigration amnesty. The primary Black character, Luella, suffers from dementia—and incontinence—so extreme that her white husband (who married her in order to look more progressive) resorts to walking her on a leash. One senses not so much satire on the part of the author as willfully transgressive racist “humor” under the pretense thereof.

And Shriver didn’t do herself any favors in addressing the inevitable complaints about the book. She infamously wore a sombrero during a 2016 speech in Brisbane, Australia to protest what she believed to be oversensitivity on the matter of cultural appropriation. Many in the audience were pointedly not amused, including the writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who called Shriver’s speech “a poisoned package wrapped up in arrogance,” adding: “The stench of privilege hung heavy in the air, and I was reminded of my ‘place’ in the world.” (In response, the Brisbane Writers Festival formally disassociated itself with Shriver.)

I agree with Lionel that the very essence of writing fiction is imagination, and that authors need not be of the race and sex and specific life experience of the characters they create, any more than an actor playing a doctor should be required to actually have a medical degree. But it’s a huge leap from there to The Education of Little Tree. The Mandibles doesn’t commit that specific sin of outright imposterism, but it is certainly a piece of reactionary agitprop—Ayn Rand with an extra dollop of racism—that calls to mind works like The Camp of the Saints or The Turner Diaries.

Is it a big shock then, that the author of that book, who has so ostentatiously planted her flag in smack in the middle of a white nationalist right wing political movement, and loudly denounced the influx of immigrants in America and the rest of the Western world, would go after Kamala Harris with a viciousness usually reserved for catfighting soap opera divas?

CURRENTS OF ANXIETY

Soon after that Spiked piece, Shriver did a shamelessly gloating video interview with Spectator TV on the other side of Election Day called “The Election That Smashed Identity Politics.”

In it, she sneers at Harris’s supporters as feeling sorry for themselves, and affirms that while she disliked both candidates, the side that she “emotionally” wanted to win, did. She concedes that a Harris administration would “probably (be) safer for the country,” yet in the next breath crows: “But when I  learned that Trump had won, I felt quietly happy, with a little undercurrent of anxiety.”

Yeah, uh, those of us not fortunate enough to live a cossetted life in Portugal are feeling a lot more than “a little undercurrent of anxiety” right about now. 

Mostly she gloats that the election was “a summary rejection of progressive identity politics,” and continues the vicious personal attacks on Kamala that characterized her previous comments:

(It’s) a rejection of the fake, empty, insulting politics represented by Kamala Harris— not just her campaign, but her candidacy. I just found that her being run as a credible president of the United States insulted the electorate. Now, I completely accept that there are lots and lots of people who also look at Donald Trump that way. Okay, I understand that, and I kind of do too. But he is more credible than she is.

She is a nothing….I’m not persuaded that she believes anything else other than that it would be fun to be president.

As in the Spiked interview, she repeatedly accuses Kamala of being a mere opportunist, speaking of “emptiness,” “flimsiness,” a “refusal to be pinned down,” and of Harris as “someone who could easily be controlled.” (Hmmm, I wonder if she had the two candidates mixed up?) This time around, she also flat-out calls her “a DEI candidate.”

Again, she criticizes Harris for not giving enough policy details on her positions, having told Spiked that “at least Trump has an agenda.” Of course, that’s not true at all. Kamala and the Democrats had a coherent, detailed platform; you might not like it, but it was there. Trump, by contrast, had only “a concept of a plan” about health care, for example, even though he had already been President of the United States for four years. Indeed, that accusation about lack of detail may be among the most brain-blowing example of the double standard in the whole 2024 campaign.

But maybe Shriver meant that at least we knew that Trump wanted to deport millions of people, prosecute his political enemies, and give the rich another deficit-busting tax cut? OK—but does that really count as “better”? “Sure, Jeffrey Dahmer ate all those people, but at least the guy knew what he liked for dinner, right?”

This sort of gaslighting goes way beyond simple partisan politics, betraying an almost pathological hatred for Kamala. And I’m sorry, but given Shriver’s history, it’s hard to avoid thinking race is part of the equation. In her 2022 interview with The Standard to which I referred earlier, Shriver was as dismissive of Meghan Markle as she would be of Kamala Harris two years later, and while it would be unfair to conclude that pigmentation is the whole or even primary source of the animus, it is not exactly putting Lionel in the running for an NAACP Image Award.

Full disclosure: in that same interview, Shriver did cop to having “enormous misgivings about another Trump term,” calling it “unsettling.” But that brief qualifier is buried amid a wave of palpable pro-Trump giddiness and relentless kicking of Kamala when she was down. Shriver went on to tell Spectator TV that we should choose our leaders based on intelligence, wisdom, experience, education, contacts, and good instincts. (I’ll pause here, until the laughter dies down.)

As for the future, she scolded Democrats for “characterizing Trump as planning to imprison his opponents and to sic the military on anyone who doesn’t agree with him,” referring to those critics as “worrywarts and hysterics” who have engaged in “hyperbole” and “twisting what he has said.”

And they consistently did that with everything he said. So I’m not I’m not worried that he’s going to be throwing throw his opponents in jail in the same way that his opponents tried to throw him in jail. I always thought that that was an ironic accusation.

As with her Orwellian assertions about who is prone to violence, or undermines electoral integrity, or lacks details in their proposals, she says that Democrats, not Republicans, are the ones who engage in political persecution of their foes, presumably on the grounds that Trump was charged with crimes after he left office. Not to split hairs, but I would suggest there’s a big difference between credibly prosecuting a former president for demonstrable violations of the law and, say, arresting a judge in their own courtroom and perp walking them into a squad car for the cameras, or threatening to arrest John Roberts, or ginning up ridiculous charges against a member of Congress for allegedly assaulting police.

Shriver even expresses enthusiasm for Musk coming in to shrink the size of the federal government, saying:

I think the idea of eliminating all departments is brilliant, and I love the idea of trying to pull back and comb through the morass of regulations that federal government levies on everybody. It it’s a huge job. I’d be surprised if they got very far with it, but I would love to see someone to try.

EXHILIRATE YOURSELF

All that was six months ago.

As with her novels, I’m not a regular reader of Lionel’s column in The Spectator either, as I prefer to maintain my mental health. But I checked in with her recently to see what she’s saying now that Trump has been back in power for over 100 days. I was curious. After insisting that talk of his authoritarian impulse was so much hysteria, how would she respond to the mass deportation campaign, including extrajudicial kidnappings and the renditioning of people to foreign gulags without even a whiff of due process? How would she feel about to the weaponization of the DOJ to persecute his political enemies; to the attacks on the courts; to the wanton corruption and the wholesale conversion of the US presidency into a shameless mechanism for the enrichment of Donald J. Trump? Would she ignore that stuff altogether? Deploy more rationalizations and excuses? Continue to offer perfunctory dismissals of his transgressions that also functioned as backhanded plaudits? Or would she try to claim that she knew all along that he was a monster, without copping to how her excusal of that monstrousness abetted his return to power and the current sorry state of affairs?

I’ll admit that I was pretty stunned at what I found.

Despite her earlier pooh-poohing of Trump as potential autocrat, Lionel does not seem at all bothered by the stark evidence to the contrary in last three months. In fact, very much the opposite. She reports that she is “exhilarated” by what he is doing—once again, her word not mine. Read for yourself:

While never a Trumpster, I found the initial weeks of the 47th presidency exhilarating. No more racial preferences in the military, the federal government or universities that receive federal funds. Yes! Finally, aggressive prosecution of immigration law, with the flow of illegal aliens slowed to a trickle. Yay! Cutting wasteful and wokeful spending. Grand! Pushing Europe to pay more for its own defence. Fine! Men banned from women’s sport. About time! It’s official: there are only two sexes. Shouldn’t really have to announce what we all know from the age of two, but apparently we do – so good show! The end of ineffectual, self-destructive net-zero policies when 80 per cent of the world still runs on fossil fuels. Effing fabulous! I’m even keen on being able to buy higher-volume shower nozzles, which you wouldn’t think should require presidential intervention in the Land of the Free.

Her only compliant? That Trump has not used legislation to carry out what she calls “his commendable initiatives,” but rather, relied on “flimsy executive orders, lazy and monarchical edicts that a Democratic president could instantly reverse four years from now.” (I find it interesting that she thinks there will even be free elections four years from now, let alone that the Democratic candidate might win, especially given that she wishes that party would stay “far longer in the wilderness to learn its lesson [careen left, fall off edge of Earth].”)

No, Trumpist authoritarianism does not seem to bother Lionel at all, and indeed actively thrills her. Bemoaning the damage to the global economy that Donald’s tariffs will admittedly do, her greatest fear is that the electorate will turn on him and reverse the Project 2025 agenda that is now in progress, saying, “I desperately want us to bury Woke World deep under the sea like a depraved Atlantis. That opportunity could now be slipping away.”

One thing we can conclude from this, perhaps, is that Shiver’s definition of “authoritarianism“ is not like most people’s, nor the dictionary’s. Another is that she is simply a colossal hypocrite and self-deluding egomaniac. (Careful what you wish for, Lionel. With that masculine name of yours, Trump’s “pro-family”/ tradwife bigots may well come for you, too, despite your valiant service to the autocracy.)

But in a way, seeing her post-election commentary makes me less bothered than before, as it bluntly exposes her as a hack. Many people clocked that about her well before November, even as others gave her the benefit of the doubt on the basis of her literary credentials. But now there can be no doubt. For anyone other than the MAGA faithful and their fellow travelers, Lionel Shriver has no credibility whatsoever as a serious political observer. She is nothing but a brazen fascist collaborator and enabler, and an insufferably smug one at that.

So I’ll leave the final verdict on Shriver’s place in literature to the critics. But when it comes to politics, if she is remembered at all, I suspect she will go down as one of these strange, pro-fascist artistic outliers: File under Ezra Pound.

History will not be kind to the Lionel Shrivers of the world, nor to Lionel Shriver herself.

*********

Photo: David Azia / AP

The Last Two Weeks of Democracy?

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It is no exaggeration to say that two weeks from now, if Donald Trump defies the odds—yet again—and wins the presidency for a second time, we may be looking at the end of participatory democracy in the United States. (Note to hairsplitters: yes, I know Donny would not take office until noon on January 20, 2025. But “The Last Eleven Weeks of Democracy” does not really sing.) I have been part of the large chorus sounding this alarm for the past several years, as have many of you, dear readers, I am sure. It is hardly news. But now that the moment of truth is nearly upon us, it is especially nerve-wracking.

I am not writing to say that I believe that is sure to happen. Far from it. We have it within our power to beat him like a whipped dog. But even if we do, it’s going to be a nailbiter, and that in itself is telling and alarming.

I wrote recently about how astonishing (and depressing) it is that this election is as close as it is, after nine years of seeing Trump in action, and in particular, after a year or more of hearing his angry, vengeful plans should we return him to power. In any rational world, Kamala would be leading in a blowout. For that matter, in any rational world, Joe Biden would be leading in a blowout, despite his age and declining cognitive capacity, and Kamala would not have been called upon to step into the race in the first place.

But news flash: We ain’t in a rational world. Obviously.

I don’t feel the need to explain why Trump’s re-election would signal the end of democracy. Feel free to peruse the news on any random day over the past two years. He has openly announced his disdain for the rule of law (including a call to “terminate” the Constitution), his desire to be a tyrant, and his eagerness to put an end to free elections in this country. Debates over whether to apply the “F word” to him and his political project have long since been rendered moot. As many sage observers have noted, Trump—unlike many would-be autocrats—is not trying to hide his authoritarian impulses or policy prescriptions: he is trumpeting them.

Yet an alarmingly large segment of the American population is totally cool with Trump, and therein lies the problem. They are a minority, yes, we should never forget that, but a minority large enough and radical enough to make significant trouble. Frankly, it has ever been thus, from the very founding of the country by our forefathers in contentious compromise over the matter of human bondage. That authoritarian strain—one that favors privileged classes oppressing the rest, sometimes quite brutally—has been at the core of the American dilemma for our entire existence as a nation. We famously fought a bloody civil war over it, a war whose repercussions continue to be felt powerfully to this day. And Trump represents that dilemma’s latest flashpoint.

The United States therefore is about to undergo an acid test of the highest order. We are a country that ostentatiously fancies itself a beacon of democracy, “the shining city on a hill,” the leader of the Free World as we used to say during the Cold War, the “indispensable nation,” and lots of other highfalutin, self-flattering folderol. Now we stand on the verge of electing an openly fascist candidate who makes a mockery of every value we claim to hold dear. And tens of millions of Americans love it.

The question before us now is whether the rest of us can summon the will to stop them at the ballot box.

WHO YA GONNA CALL?

In the immediate wake of the 2020 election, I wrote a piece for this blog called “The Ghost of Grover Cleveland,” named for the last president to make a successful return to the Oval Office after being ousted from it. In it, I optimistically floated the hope that a twice-impeached, disgraced ex-president who had presided over the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans during a pandemic that he managed (“managed” in bigass quotes) with depraved indifference would find it hard to win the White House again. And that was before he tried to overturn a free and fair election by force, before we knew about the stolen classified documents in Mar-a-Lago, before he was found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in a pair of civil trials and ordered to pay $82 million in restitution, before he was convicted of 34 felonies related to tax fraud and electoral interference stemming from hush money payments to a porn star.

I didn’t rule it out, but I posited that it would be hard.

Oh, naivete, thy name is Bob.

In that piece, I wrote that it was very likely that Trump would continue “to control the Republican Party like a high-priced dominatrix, tormenting the Biden administration from exile, maintaining an only slightly diminished profile in the media (with its obvious addiction to covering this trainwreck), and preparing himself for his revenge in 2024…..Trump will be able to keep a chokehold on his party, freeze the field of other potential Republican contenders, dictate GOP policy as the de facto leader of the opposition, remain in the spotlight he craves, and most importantly for him, raise money hand over fist from his cult of reliable suckers until they are bled dry.”

That part was pretty much a bullseye, even if I do say so myself.

I also quoted a Republican consultant named Patrick Griffin who told the right wing Washington Times: “Donald Trump is not exactly going to follow Jimmy Carter, who is out building homes with Habitat for Humanity after leaving the White House. This is going to be the worst leader in exile the world has ever seen.”

Bullseye again.

I also predicted—and it wasn’t hard—that the Republican Party would continue bend to Trump’s every whim. “To grasp the depths of the GOP leadership’s servility, one has but to witness their craven obsequiousness even in this lame duck period, when they know he will soon be out of power, to the point of sitting on their collective hands while he tries to mount a coup.” And the coup of which I spoke was of the Brad Raffensperger-pressuring kind; January 6th hadn’t even happened yet. And even that did not ultimately crack the GOP’s pathetic subservience to this grifter.   

Lastly, I suggested that Trump’s legal troubles, which were then only looming, would hamper his run in ’24: 

(O)nce he leaves office he is going to be hit with a tsunami of legal problems and criminal prosecution, almost surely including felony charges for everything from bank fraud to money laundering to tax evasion. Come 2024 he may well be in prison, or at least under indictment. (Not that that would stop him from running, or his supporters from voting for him.)

Of course, Trump being Trump, he will only use such legal and financial woes as fuel for his candidacy, given that his political career has always been built upon personal grievance, in a feedback loop with the grievance of his supporters. But there is a limited appeal to that model, and the last four years have largely exhausted it.

You can see that my batting average was beginning to dip there. (Everyone OK if I switch metaphors from archery to baseball?) I did not anticipate just how successfully Trump would be able to manipulate the legal system with his patented strategy of delay delay delay, even though he had done so his whole adult life, or how far his handpicked Supreme Court would go in shamelessly assisting him.

Because on the whole, back in December 2020, I largely shared the prediction of smart observers like Steve Coll of The New Yorker and Yascha Mounk and David Graham of The Atlantic that Donald Trump was likely to fade into irrelevance as even his diehard followers got bored with what Mounk called “the ever more histrionic antics of the sore loser they just kicked out of office.” Or as I put it:

Trump may soon be a marginal figure in American culture: a pathetic, unhinged old man rambling around his Florida mansion in the grip of increasing cognitive decline, in between trips to the courthouse, beset with financial woes, ranting at an ever-diminishing following and leaving the rest of the country scratching its collective head at how this guy was ever president in the first place. 

Correct on every count, except the crucial last one.

PROGNOSIS NEGATIVE

So here we are.

It would be one thing if Trump had made a convincing case for his return to power, even if it was a dishonest, demagogic one. (Does anyone think he could make any other kind?) But his campaign, if it can be called that, is a dumpster fire on the deck of the Titanic as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade.

Not only has Trump made an open embrace of fascism the centerpiece of his campaign, he has also displayed over and over again his patently obvious cognitive decline with his rambling and incoherent public statements, even if the mainstream media repeatedly gives him a pass while scrutinizing Kamala within an inch of her life. He careens from one outrageous episode to the next, holding rallies in states he can never win, insulting everyone in sight, and making outrageous promises he could never keep but for which he is never sufficiently held to account by the media or the Democratic Party. In the past couple weeks alone he has blamed Zelenskyy for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, held a 39 minute dance party in lieu of a stump speech, reiterated the violence-inciting lie about Haitian immigrants barbecuing stole housepets, told a crowd about the size of Arnold Palmer’s dick (do pro golfers really shower together, ever?), spewed vulgarities about his opponents like an eighth grader, bragged about taking away the right to an abortion to right wing audiences while lying out the other side of his mouth that he did no such thing, doubled down on Nazi-like rhetoric about fellow Americans as “the enemy within,” called January 6th “a day of love,” and of course repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And that is but a small sampling.

In the past—and even now, with any other politician—any one of those things would have been immediately and automatically disqualifying. The mind reels.

By now we ought to understand that for his true believers, all that stuff falls under “feature not a bug.” They LIKE that he is that way. But what of ostensibly rational Republicans, independents, and others who don’t love “Trump being Trump,” but are somehow gonna vote for him anyway? (We can leave out of the discussion the cynical opportunists like Vance, Rubio, Graham, Hawley, et al who know how bad he is, but long ago rationalized their obeisance to him.) Their reasons—tribal, financial, self-deluding, or what have you—matter not at all in the end, only the fact of their ultimate complicity.

If the race were being decided purely on policy—which is to say, on the facts—Kamala would be running away with it. (The Washington Post recently reported that, when presented with Harris’s agenda and Trump’s side by side in a blind taste test, Americans resoundingly prefer her positions to his, even in areas like crime and immigration where—inexplicably—a slim majority says it trusts him more.) On character, too, Trump’s deranged behavior and brazen, undisguised promise that he will dismantle the very foundations of American governance and turn it into nothing more than a mechanism for score-settling and punishing his political enemies ought to be dealbreakers, even for so-called conservatives, doncha think? But tribalism and demagoguery, it turns out, are remarkably powerful….much more so than we foolishly believed not so long ago.

Then there is the segment of Americans who have tuned it at all out, including folks on the far left, exhausted by the barrage of disinformation, misinformation, fake news, pro wrestling-style antics, and deliberately provoked divisiveness. But that is yet another trick of the authoritarian right, well documented by everyone from Hannah “Banality of Evil” to Steve “Flood the Zone with Shit” Bannon: hammering the populace with propaganda that aims not to convince but merely to destroy the willingness (or ability) to think critically, or care, until those subjected to it are numb, jaded, and resigned to the false belief that “both sides are equally bad” and what’s the point of voting, or caring about politics at all?

Of course, the most magic trick of all was taking the shame of January 6, when even contemptible Republicans like McConnell and Graham—briefly—could not deny the ghastliness of Donald Trump, and inverting it over the course of four years into a perverse badge of honor and litmus test for the nationwide Jonestown that is the contemporary GOP. Observing that process alone ought to tell us all we need to know about how and why Donald Trump is within a frog hair of regaining the presidency.

But again: As maddening as it is that Trump is even in this contest, we must not give in to fatalism. Generating a sense of despair among Democrats and independents—an illusion that Trump’s victory is a fait accompli—is another part of the Republican playbook, extending even to right wing polls trying to create a false sense of momentum on Trump’s behalf in hopes of being a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This just in: It ain’t. Not by a longshot. We must remember that if the race is that close and Trump has potential triumph in his grasp, SO DOES KAMALA. Of course we would all prefer a saner world where she’s assured of any easy win. But the operative word is “win,” not the adjective modifying it. We can push her to victory, and render all this angst and dread irrelevant.

In that case, fake right wing polls showing Trump cruising to victory serve another purpose: laying the groundwork for claims they wuz robbed if and when they do lose.

ALL YOU FASCISTS BOUND TO LOSE

Even ahead of the outcome of the election, this much we know already: America is not well, and in two very distinct ways.

The first is systemic. In the Electoral College—like so many of America’s ills, a result of our slaveholding history—we have a patently un-democratic, antiquated, countermajoritarian method of choosing our head of state. Our indefensible allegiance to this institution means that unique among advanced democracies using the presidential system, we do not choose our leader by popular vote, but instead allow a conniving minority to take power. (For a deep dive on that, see Elie Mystal’s recent piece in The Nation, “A Lesson in Basic Civics for People Who Stubbornly Defend the Electoral College.” I’ll have more on that in an upcoming post.)

Twice in the past six presidential elections the loser of the popular vote has won the election regardless, thanks to the Electoral College—both times benefiting the Republican candidate, with help from the Supreme Court the first time and from the Kremlin the second. Prior to that, it had happened only three times in the preceding 211 years, all in the 19th century. But now, thanks to shifting demographics, it is pretty much a 50/50 coin flip every time. And it might happen again in just two weeks, as Kamala is all but certain to win the national popular vote by several million (as did Hillary and Joe), while the result in the Electoral College is far less clear.

So that is awful.

But the second diagnosis is even more damning.

We have a radical minority of tens of millions of Americans who are totally fine with fascism. If that were not so, the tyranny of the Electoral College would be far less damaging. But enough Americans fall on the fascist continuum—from the casual and apathetic who aren’t sufficiently bothered by it, to the firebreathing fanatics who actively thrill to it—to allow them to exploit our fucked up system and potentially seize power. Even if we avoid that fate come the first week of November, it promises to be a photo finish, and that is far too close for comfort.

And that is the best case scenario.

How to reckon with those twin ills is a question for another day. If we’re lucky that day will come in early November, if we manage to stave off the anti-democratic threat in the short term. If not, we will have a far more pressing and urgent set of concerns to contend with.

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Photo: Doug Mills The New York Times

The Truth About Cats and Dogs

Published on by thekingsnecktie6 Comments

For weeks now in the pages of this blog I’ve been complaining about how the press has been “sanewashing” Donald Trump, giving him a pass on outrageous and deranged comments that for any other politician would have been not just campaign-ending, but career-ending.

That phenomenon has been in play since he descended that golden escalator in Trump Tower in 2015, but has been particularly egregious of late. Trump claims that elementary schools are performing gender reassignment surgery on children without their parents’ knowledge and the press reports his remarks with headlines like “Trump Ties Healthcare to Public Education.” OK that one is fictional, but it’s actually not any more outlandish than any of the real examples out there, like the incomprehensible word salad he unleashed in answer to a straightforward question about childcare, which prompted The New York Times’s headline “Trump Praises Tariffs, William McKinley to Power Brokers.” Or when he risibly says, without explaining how, that his proposed tax cut for the 1% won’t add $7 trillion to the national debt—atop the cut he gave those same rich people in 2017 that already added $7 trillion the debt—and The Washington Post reports that “analysts are skeptical.” The pattern has gotten so bad that Alexandra Petri mocked it in the pages of that very paper in a piece called “The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine.”.

But during the debate last Tuesday night there was no media mechanism to hide his crazy, and Donald could not gaslight us any longer as the whole nation saw before its eyes how shamelessly dishonest and absolutely batshit this motherfucker is. The nonstop lies, baseless attacks, and incomprehensible stemwinders wildly detached from reality that poured out of his cakehole over that 90 minutes were, uh, instructive, and there was no editorial filter there to mitigate them.

Trump said a number of absolutely deranged things that evening, but by far the most attention-grabbing and durable in the public consciousness was his comment about immigrants supposedly eating household pets in the town of Springfield, Ohio. In some ways, it was no different—and in some ways less extreme—than many of his other remarks, like his claim that the Vice President of the United States is a Marxist, or his continued assertion that Democrats support (and are actively practicing) the murder of newborn babies. Another low point was Trump’s inability to explain his healthcare plan, even after nine years of promising a “beautiful” replacement for Obamacare, and nine years of failing to provide even a single concrete detail. (Even more outrageous: his insistence that he can’t work on it now, because he’s not yet president.) Asked if he had even a plan, Trump said he had “concepts of a plan.” (Am I the only one who thought of that throwaway line from Annie Hall, where someone at a Hollywood party says, “Right now it’s only a notion, but I think I can get the money to make it into a concept, and later turn it into an idea.”)

But the sheer weirdness of the pet-eating story seems destined to go down in American political history, along with other memorable Trumpisms like “I alone can fix it,” “stand back and stand by,” “that makes me smart,” and of course my personal favorite, “losers and suckers.”

For once, the ridicule was immediate and intense. Susan Glasser of The New Yorker quipped, “I’ve watched every Presidential debate for the past two decades, and I can’t think of anything that ranks higher in pure stupidity.” Hank Azaria voiced the Simpsons’ Chief Wiggum responding to the crisis; a musical parody went viral. And the response continues to carry on, even as I write this five days after the event. Trump, naturally, has only doubled down, recently adding geese to the menu. (Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry indeed.) “Trump Drags New Animal into His Debunked Claims Haitian Migrants Are Eating Pets” noted The Independent drily.

It’s all hilarious, right?

Except for this:

Following Trump’s lies about pet-eating, some of his hideous disciples called in bomb threats to two different elementary schools in Springfield, forcing them to be evacuated, and a third threat to a middle school which had to be closed completely. The next day, two hospitals, a medical clinic, and a fourth unspecified facility received similar threats. Wittenberg University, a small private liberal arts college in Springfield, canceled all activities following anonymous threats to Haitian members of the community, including warnings of a mass shooting that required the intervention of the FBI. And lest you think it was just the proverbial and perennially blamed “lone wolf,” the Springfield city government reported that bomb threats were also emailed “to multiple agencies and media outlets” in the town. Bomb-sniffing dogs had to be deployed to schools, city hall, the county courthouse, and even DMV offices.

So as funny as it is, it really ain’t funny at all. Virtually everything Trump says and does is inevitably a provocation for political violence by his fanatic cult.

(I DON’T WANNA BE BURIED IN A) PET SEMATARY

At his rallies, Trump has inexplicably been known to praise the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs fame—whom he does not seem aware is not a real person—so he obviously has an interest in cuisine. (Try the taco bowl at the Trump Grill!) But where did this particular culinary fantasy come from?

According to Heather Cox Richardson, citing Hunter Walker and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo, it originated more than two months ago, with James “J.D.” Vance nee Bowman, a US Senator from that very Buckeye state, trying to blame immigrants for rising housing prices in Springfield, accusing “illegals” of swarming the city. Like Trump’s subsequent comments, Vance’s had very real and scary repercussions. HCR takes up the story from there:

On August 10, about a dozen neo-Nazis of the “Blood Tribe” organization showed up in Springfield, where one of their leaders said the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders” and blamed the Jews for the influx of migrants. The neo-Nazis stayed and, on August 27, showed up at a meeting of the city council, where their leader threatened council members. On September 1, another white supremacist group, Patriot Front, held its own “protest to the mass influx of unassimilable Haitian migrants” in the city.

That led to an urban myth (sometimes called a “lie”) posted in a private Facebook group about  Haitian immigrants allegedly butchering a neighbor’s cat for food, which Vance reposted. Officials in Springfield have repeatedly denied the stories as completely unfounded. “Nonetheless,” Richardson writes, “on September 10, Vance told his people to ‘keep the cat memes flowing,’ even though—or perhaps because—the rumors were putting people in his own state in danger.”

And while, as always, the cruelty is in and of itself the point, Vance and his ilk have another more concrete motive as well.

The widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to regain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown, who has held his seat since 2007. Brown and Montana’s Jon Tester, both Democrats in states that supported Trump in 2020, are key to controlling the Senate. 

Two Republican super PACs, one of which is linked to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have booked more than $82 million of ad space in Ohio between Labor Day and the election and are focusing on immigration. 

Taking control of the Senate would enable Republicans not only to block all popular Democratic legislation, as they did with gun reform after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, but to continue to establish control of America’s judicial system. So long as their judges are in place to make law from the bench, what the majority of Americans want doesn’t matter.

HCR explains that stacking the courts and utilizing the filibuster were key parts of the GOP plan to stop Democratic governance in its tracks. She goes on to quote Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern:

(McConnell) realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called “law.”

As I say: Not funny at all.

THE MASTER DEBATER

The good news is that the debate has cast a blinding public spotlight on Trump’s mental unfitness from which he could not flee, cockroach-like. It’s sweet. The last debate showed Joe Biden to be a doddering old man, precisely the narrative the GOP had been relentlessly propagating for the last three years. This time, Trump was cast in that role. And in fact, far worse than just benignly “doddering.” CNN recently produced an eyepopping video comparing the Trumps of 2016 and 2024. He was always a lying POS, but he used to put the act across with a veneer of rationality, or at least in semi-complete sentences. Now he’s openly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. (For even more evidence of his cognitive decline, check him out on Letterman in the ’80s.)

My one complaint, in keeping with The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, is that the moderators’ first question to Trump at the debate should have been: “Given that you tried to overthrow the last presidential election by force, why the hell should any American consider putting you back in the White House?” It wasn’t, but they still did a pretty good job of holding his feet to the fire, even if they did get bullied into turning his mic on when he should have been shut down. Trump’s time of possession was like 43 minutes to Kamala’s 37, but as Benjamin Wallace-Wells noted in The New Yorker, the more he talked the better she did.

Kamala got under Trump’s skin with carefully calculated barbs to which he could not resist responding, even when it was tactically stupid to do so, taking the bait every time it was offered. “I wish I had fish that stupid,” my fishermen friends told me. In front of God and the world, Trump displayed the impulse control of a toddler, if that isn’t an insult to toddlers—not a great look on someone auditioning to be leader of the free world, again. It was the meltdown we had all longed for.

Kamala’s performance was likewise all we hoped for, and more. In a stark split screen, she exposed Trump for the lying, deranged, cognitively impaired cretin he is while demonstrating her own fitness to be head of state, refuting Trump’s relentless racist and misogynist attacks by dint of her sheer command of the stage and of the facts. For anyone watching with a shred of objectivity, it was a hugely impressive audition for a promotion from her current job to the next higher gig, which is the 47th President of the United States.

In another example of the double standard applied to Trump, it was also the performance Kamala almost had to deliver: anything short of that TKO would have been adjudged a failure. Once again, a woman—and a person of color, let alone a woman of color—had to be twice as good as a white man to get anything close to the same credit. Luckily, she was about a million times better. As The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last asked of remaining doubters among so-called centrist voters, “What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris?”

But given the curve on which the MSM perennially grades Trump, I half expected the press to let his debate debacle slide too. On that count I was pleasantly surprised. Evidently it was just too disastrous, even for people who selfishly prefer a horserace, and the verdict was uniformly scathing, even in the right wing media.

Never one to be bothered by the facts, Trump is still going around insisting the “everyone” agrees he won the debate, citing totally made-up polling of 92% to 8%. (The air is surprisingly thin at sea level in Mar-a-Lago.) The real numbers are more like 63-37 in favor of Kamala, almost exactly the reverse of the debate on June 27 that eventually forced Biden out of the race. And that 37% likely represents a Kool Aid-drunk segment of the electorate that would say Trump won even if he simultaneously vomited and shat himself on live TV.

Despite his wolf tickets, Trump himself was and is clearly rattled, as evidenced by the appearance of John Barron himself in the spin room afterwards—the sure sign of a desperate, defeated debater. In that room, Never Trump conservative Tim Miller of The Bulwark repeatedly (and gleefully) asked him why he couldn’t even “look in the alpha dog vice president’s general direction.” Trump refused to answer, slinking away tail-between-his-legs the way a beaten dog does.

Only a few Republicans made half-hearted attempts to defend their man, mostly with predictable complaints about the moderators for, you know, factchecking him instead of rolling over in front of the steamroller of deception like reporters usually do. Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) whined that Kamala kept “sneering and jeering at (her opponent) like a child,” behavior he seems to think is unpresidential or something. (He knows his party’s nominee is Donald Trump, right?) In the UK, the Torygraph tried to blame Biden for Trump’s self-own on the cats-and-dogs thing with some sort of Rube Goldberg-style explanation I can’t begin to understand. On both sides of the Atlantic, there is no absurdist bridge too far for the right wing.

To that end, The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial titled “Trump Lets Harris Off the Debate Hook,” claiming that the Republican nominee missed his chance to attack his Democratic rival on policy. As Andy Millman would say, are you having a laugh? Trump has no “policy” except for the 920-odd page blueprint laid out in Project 2025, translated from the original German. 

Yet even the Journal, in a piece by Peggy Noonan, called it a “decisive” win for Kamala, though the Pegster still sniffed that the win was “shallow.” Well, boo-hoo. I’ve noticed that Republicans are perfectly happy to take any kind of win for their own side, shallow or otherwise, decisive or not. In fact, they’re happy to take a win even when they lose.

CLEANUP ON AISLE FIVE

We may have just seen the two most decisive and important presidential debates—in a row, no less—since Nixon neglected to shave in 1960. But the question remains what the ultimate outcome will be.

Brendan Buck, formerly an adviser to John Boehner and Paul Ryan, was emblematic of many observers—especially those who tilt conservative, anti-Trump or otherwise—in noting that Kamala indeed wiped the floor with Trump, but it may not matter. That is a sad fact of our hyper-polarized, anti-democratic political system, where a minority of white nationalist radicals comprising a cult of personality around a shameless con artist can legally take the reins of power. We all know that lots of presidential candidates have won debates and gone on to lose the election, including Hillary in 2016 and Gore in 2000, both of whom also won the popular vote. And this election in particular is not being contested in a reality-based world where the obviously superior candidate can expect to triumph over a human dumpster fire. Case in point: a majority of Americans continue to tell pollsters that they trust Trump more on the economy (!), immigration (!!) and foreign policy (!!!). Yes, and I think a flaming bag of dogshit would make an excellent neurosurgeon.

Mind-boggling. So maybe Buck is right and the debate might not matter.

But then again, it might matter a lot, especially in a race this close, where a few thousand votes in certain counties might make all the difference. We don’t know what its long-term impact will be, but it damn sure didn’t hurt. Famed GOP pollster Frank Luntz sure thinks so, declaring Trump’s campaign “over.” Every millimeter Kamala gains, and her continued momentum, are highly encouraging.

Is the Trump cult of personality beginning to fracture at last? Is our long national nightmare coming to an end, and sanity returning to the body politic? Maybe Trump’s campaign is in chaos, with the likes of  George Will and even torture enthusiasts Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales publicly coming out against him. (Not Peggy Noonan though! She still thinks a twice impeached, 34 times convicted felon and openly aspiring dictator might offer a better vision for America’s future than some uppity Democrat!) But we’ve had far too many premature announcements of his political demise to fall for that yet again, Lucy-and-Charlie-Brown-style. Lately Trump’s been hanging around with Laura Loomer, a far far right wing racist nutjob and 9/11 truther who makes Marjorie Taylor Greene look like Grace Kelly. Is that a sign of how he far gone and pathetic his campaign has become, or of how bad our future might be?

As the presence of Ms. Loomer suggests, in the fifty-some days remaining before the election, if Trump begins to panic and sense defeat (which he clearly seems to be doing), you can bet that the ugliness and the viciousness of his attacks on Kamala Harris, and his side’s willingness to cheat in order to win, or just to cast doubt upon their loss, even to the point of engaging in violence, will only rise. So caution: rough road ahead.  Trump could still win.

It has long been the case that a Trump victory this November would be a shocking injustice and a brutal irony almost too much to bear. That remains so. But after that debate, and his appalling performance on national television in front of millions of Americans, it would be more horrific than ever. Watch this space…..or better yet, get out and vote, and be prepared to counter the inevitable right wing ratfucking that has already begun, and will carry on right through Election Day and after.

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Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Thanks Ed Engel for the Oklahoma! Joke.