More than 45,000 U.S. dock workers went on strike today for the first time since 1977, nearly 50 years ago. The International Longshoremen's Association union, which represents 45,000 port workers, is negotiating with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike will shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping. Analysts from J.P. Morgan estimate that the strike could cost the U.S. economy about $5 billion a day. The strikers have said they will continue to unload military cargo.
Dockworkers want a 77% increase in pay over six years and better benefits, while USMX has said it has offered to increase wages by nearly 50%, triple employer contributions to retirement plans, and improve health care options. In the Washington Post, economics columnist Heather Long pointed out that the big issue at stake is the automation that threatens union jobs.
Although the strike threatens to slow the economy depending on how long it lasts, President Joe Biden has refused requests to force the strikers back to work, reiterating his support for collective bargaining. He noted that ocean carriers have made record profits since the pandemic—sometimes in excess of 800% over prepandemic levels—and that executive compensation and shareholder profits have reflected those profits. “It’s only fair that workers, who put themselves at risk during the pandemic to keep ports open, see a meaningful increase in their wages as well,” Biden said in a statement.
In the presidential contest, the Trump-Vance campaign is trying to preserve its false narrative. In Wisconsin today, Trump accused Vice President Harris of murder—although he appeared to get confused about the victim—and claimed that she has a phone app on which the heads of cartels can get information about where to drop undocumented immigrants. He also said that Kim Jong Un of North Korea is trying to kill him.
When asked if he should have been tougher on Iran after it launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured, Trump rejected the idea that soldiers with traumatic brain injuries were actually hurt. He said “they had a headache” and said he thought the attack “was a very nice thing because they didn’t want us to retaliate.”
Trump also backed out of a scheduled interview with 60 Minutes that correspondent Scott Pelley was slated to conduct on Thursday. 60 Minutes noted that for more than 50 years, the show has invited both campaigns to appear on the broadcast before the election and this year, both campaigns agreed to an interview. Trump’s spokesperson complained that 60 Minutes “insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in her interview as planned.
The campaign’s resistance to independent fact checking of their false narrative came up in tonight’s vice presidential debate on CBS between Minnesota governor Tim Walz, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s running mate, and Ohio senator J.D. Vance, running mate for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell and Face the Nation moderator and chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Brennan moderated the debate.
Walz’s goal in the debate was to do no harm to Vice President Harris’s campaign, and he achieved that. Vance’s goal was harder: to give people a reason to vote for Donald Trump. It is doubtful he moved any needles there.
The moments that did stand out in the debate put a spotlight on Vance’s tenuous relationship with the truth. When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."
Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”
There were two other big moments of the evening, both based in lies. First, Vance claimed that Trump, who tried repeatedly to repeal or weaken the Affordable Care Act, “saved” it. Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S.
Walz said: “That’s a damning non-answer.”
Former chair of the Republican Party Michael Steele said after the debate: “I don't care where you are on policy…. If you cannot in 2024 answer that question, you are unfit for office.”
It was significant that Vance tried to avoid saying either that Trump won in 2020—a litmus test for MAGA Republicans—or that he lost, a reflection of reality. While this debate probably didn’t move a lot of voters for the 2024 election, what it did do was make Vance look like a far more viable candidate than his running mate. Waffling on the Big Lie seemed designed to preserve his candidacy for future elections.
It seems likely that the message behind Vance’s smooth performance wasn’t lost on Trump. As the debate was going on, Trump posted: “The GREAT Pete Rose just died. He was one of the most magnificent baseball players ever to play the game. He paid the price! Major League Baseball should have allowed him into the Hall of Fame many years ago. Do it now, before his funeral!”
Former Cincinnati Reds baseball player Rose died yesterday at 83.
When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."
Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”
She’s often criticized for not offering the kinds of granular policy details pundits want (mostly for the sake of their own careers.)
But the truth is those don’t matter—not anymore.
We know what Kamala’s philosophy is by now.
That’s revealed to us in the kinds of policies she’s proposed, all of which share a theme. A tax credit for kids. A tax credit for houses. Penalties for price gouging.
Kamala calls all this a “new way forward.” Is it?
I think that oversells it. Quite a bit. Kamalanomics is neoliberalism, touched up here and there, softened at the edges. What does neoliberalism say? The hard version says: we must never interfere with the invisible hand, which is sort of an all-powerful superhuman being, omniscient.
Trump wants to bring jobs back to America.
That’s not a bad idea. It’s a good one, and it’s an incredibly necessary one, more so than pundits and elites and people yet know, because right now, the indications, scary ones, are that the jobs engine is utterly broken.
Jobs aren’t being created anymore. At least not the ones we should want, stable ones, well paying ones. What’s being created are part-time dead end low-wage jobs, which mean people are already having to cobble together lives of side hustles and so forth.
You can’t have a stable society that way.
So Trump’s idea isn’t a bad one.
And it’s sad that Democrats don’t get this much. Why aren’t they talking about bringing jobs back to America? Why do they think Americans will be happier just because Indians and Filipinos have jobs? They’re in la-la land, folks, still drunk on neoliberalism.
Does that mean you should trust Trump more? Nope. Of course not. It means that you should think all this through. See through Kamala’s branding and word games to understand that a softer version of neoliberalism is still…underwhelming. And maybe the opposite is true, too: Trump’s social stances are repellent, but his economic vision, if it’s a New American industrialism, actually…maybe that’s something that’s powerful to a lot of people, and for good reason.
When Vance lied again about the migrants in Springfield, Ohio, who are in the United States legally, Brennan added: "Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio, does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status."
Vance responded: "The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact-check.”
...
Then, Walz asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance refused to answer, saying he is “focused on the future,” and warned that “the threat of censorship” is the real problem in the U.S.
The general opinion seems to be that it was very even, but Vance slightly edged it.
When moderator Margaret Brennan noted during last night’s vice presidential debate that Republican nominee J.D. Vance had, once again, lied about the legal status of migrants in Springfield, Ohio, Vance retorted: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check!” As scholar of propaganda Pekka Kallioniemi noted, this was “[t]he epitome of post-truth politics.”
Vance lied throughout the debate and has lied throughout this campaign, and in that, he is following the MAGA Republicans and Trump, who has become entirely untethered from reality. Aaron Rupar, who watches Trump’s rallies, and Noah Berlatsky wrote in Public Notice that Trump’s growing mental incapacity was obvious yesterday, as in two rallies he made a “wide-ranging journey through conspiracy theories, hatred, and nonsense.” He “seems ever more adrift in his own fog of hate and ego,” Rupar and Berlatsky wrote, “He mixes up world leaders, confuses countries, garbles pronouns, loses track of his nonsense talking points.”
Vance’s post-truth world did not dominate last night’s debate. A Politico/Focaldata snap poll afterward showed that while party voters overwhelmingly declared their party’s nominee the winner, 58% of Independents backed Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz.
Before the debate, political consultant Stuart Stevens posted: “If you want to know what the campaigns think of their VP candidates debate, just watch how they schedule the candidates post-debate. After Cheney VP debates, Lieberman and Edwards basically disappeared, banished to tiny markets. If Trump world believes America wants more Vance, they can put him in big markets in big states. I’m doubting that will happen. I suspect that [the] Harris campaign gets Walz in front of more voters after debate. He wears well.”
Today, Stevens noted that the campaign is ramping up Walz’s schedule, sending him through Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona and adding more media, including “two national TV interviews, a podcast and a late-night TV appearance,” and that Trump said he was “satisfied with Vance’s ‘fantastic’ performance.”
But Vance’s willingness to lie matters to Trump, and nowhere more than in his refusal to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Vance has repeatedly said he would have done what Vice President Mike Pence would not: go along with Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, urging the states to approve “alternative” slates of electors than the ones that accurately reflected the choice voters made at the polls.
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) responded, “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Vance’s stance was poorly timed. This afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan released the government’s motion for immunity determinations, special counsel Jack Smith’s legal filing laying out the government’s case against Trump for his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The filing pulls from previously unreleased interviews, calls, and messages to paint a damning picture of Trump’s behavior as he tried to steal the presidency. Names in it are redacted, but journalists have already figured them out.
The filing is coming now because Trump and then the Supreme Court repeatedly delayed the case. After the Supreme Court decided that presidents are immune from prosecution for crimes committed as part of a president’s official acts, the court had to take on what constituted an official act. In today’s filing, Smith argued that where Trump “was acting ‘as office-seeker, not office-holder,’ no immunity attaches.” The government asks that “the Court determine that the defendant must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen.”
The facts of the case begin with a damning statement: “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”
Fundamental to those crimes was disinformation. The entire plan for keeping Trump in office depended on Trump and his loyalists lying to the American people, convincing them of a completely false story that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.
That effort started long before the actual election when it became clear to the Trump team that he was unlikely to win. They knew, though, that since Democrats were more likely than Republicans to use mail-in ballots, there would be an initial period when his numbers were higher than Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s.
In that case, Trump told advisor Roger Stone, his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short, he would simply declare before all the ballots had been counted that he had won. In the meantime, he planted the idea that the election would be stolen from him, publicly saying, for example, that he would “have to see” whether he would accept the election results and saying that the only way he could lose would be if the election was rigged.
On October 31, advisor Steve Bannon, whose specialty was disinformation, told a group of supporters that Trump was simply “going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner…that’s our strategy.”
That’s exactly what Trump did. He claimed there had been fraud in the election and that he had won. Then, as states continued to count votes, Trump’s operatives tried to create chaos at the polling places. When the vote count in Detroit swung toward Biden, for example, operative Michael Roman told a colleague there to “give me options to file litigation… even if itbis [sic],” apparently meaning “even if it is BS.” Smith noted that “[w]hen a colleague suggested there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election”—a riot in which Roger Stone had participated—Roman responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
Even as Trump publicly claimed victory, his campaign staff told him his chances of prevailing were slim. To win, they told him, he must carry Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. When the campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona on November 13, it effectively admitted Trump had lost the election. As soon as his lawyers conceded in Arizona, Trump sidelined his campaign staff and turned to Giuliani and lawyers who would back the Big Lie.
To overturn the election results, Trump and his loyalists turned to pressuring Republicans in the states he had lost, especially Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, as well as in states that used certain voting machines, to say the election had been fraudulent. When officials demanded proof of their claims, Trump and Giuliani threatened them, then accused them of betrayal and spread their names to angry supporters, who harassed them. Again and again, Republican officials told Trump his numbers were wrong and that he had lost the election. They begged him to stop spreading lies.
As for the idea that voting machines had been compromised, Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, publicly posted that claims of election fraud through voting machines “either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.” When Trump tried to get then–Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to publicize a report that claimed machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had affected the vote, McDaniel declined, saying she had already discussed the report with Michigan’s speaker of the house, who had told her the report was “f*cking nuts.”
By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes.
Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”
Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C.
Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail. Then, after Trump spoke with Bannon and lawyer John Eastman, who had come up with the legal argument for Pence’s power to affect the count, he simply lied on social media that Pence agreed the vice president could change the election results, then posted: “Do it, Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”
When Pence continued to refuse, on January 6, Trump told his supporters at the Ellipse that Pence had let him down and then continued to lie that the election had been stolen, assuring them they would “never take back our country with weakness.” Then he sent the crowd to obstruct the proceedings.
Trump sat in the small dining room off the Oval Office watching the Fox News Channel and scrolling through Twitter as the crowd broke into the Capitol. At 2:24, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” A rioter read the tweet through a bullhorn for the crowd. A minute later, the Secret Service had to evacuate Pence to a secure location. When told of Pence’s danger, Trump answered: “So what?”
When Congress came back after the riot, Trump and Giuliani tried to delay further, calling senators and one representative to slow the process down. It didn’t work. On January 7, at 3:41 in the morning, Pence announced that Biden’s election had been certified.
It was all a lie.
One hundred and forty police officers assaulted, close to $3 million in damage, close to 1,200 people charged, more than 450 serving prison sentences, a poisonous political movement taking root, and voter suppression laws…all because Trump couldn’t bear to have lost an election.
“Post-truth politics” has real-world repercussions.
Last night, when a reporter in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, asked him if trusted the electoral process this time around, Trump answered: “I’ll let you know in about 33 days.”
I didn't see any of it, it's on at 2am over here, just reports about how it all went down when I got up.
The general opinion seems to be that it was very even, but Vance slightly edged it.
J. D. Vance has floundered in the day-to-day “retail politics” aspect of the running-mate gig. (Take, for example, his recent strained interaction with a doughnut-shop employee.) But he nonetheless came across lucid at the lectern during last night’s vice-presidential debate. In the face of Democrats’ consistent characterization of him as “weird,” Vance slyly executed a strategy to make himself, and Trumpism, appear “normal.” He eschewed talk of “childless cat ladies” and ran from his own lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. That such a sentence needs to be written tells you all you need to know about the ugly tenor of this race.
Vance seemed to be following a simple three-word mantra: Tone it down. Cameras showed him warmly greeting his opponent, Tim Walz, before and after the contest. He wore a bright-fuchsia necktie, a softer version of the MAGA-red power tie. He didn’t raise his voice, nor did he appear overly combative and childish like his running mate. Although he’s still not broadly liked by voters, for some viewers, last night’s version of Vance proved palatable: “I thought Vance would be a little more radical, taking a page from Trump, but he seemed fairly calm and complimentary,” a 77-year-old voter from Central Pennsylvania told The New York Times.
On the other side of the screen you had Tim Walz, a candidate who has been almost too good at the folksy, eye-level stuff (Change your air filter, folks! Clean those gutters!). On the debate stage, though, Walz didn’t strike a bold, confident figure. From the jump, his eyes went wide with apprehension, and he seemed to spend much of the night on the defensive. His twisty answer about his false claim that he was in Tiananmen Square during the 1989 massacre took far too long to reach its destination: I misspoke.
Both candidates ensured that the evening stayed disconcertingly friendly—good for Americans’ blood pressure, bad for properly holding an opponent’s feet to the fire. Per NBC, voters heard Walz and Vance use agree, agreement, and I don’t disagree more than a dozen times throughout the broadcast. This amiable atmosphere likely helped Vance in particular. And though Walz’s favorability rating also increased among viewers, the reality is that his repeated attempts to extend an olive branch had the unintended side effect of making the Trump-Vance ticket seem like a legitimate choice this November.
As my colleague David Graham noted, the most revealing moment of the night came near the very end, and, sadly, it’s unclear how many viewers were even still tuned in to witness it. Walz asked Vance whether he believed that Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged, and reverted to spinning some strange yarn about Facebook and censorship. “That is a damning nonanswer,” Walz said. “Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election. That’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage.”
It was a sharp, if understated, Walz retort. In this moment, and in many other moments throughout the debate, Walz did not expose the depths of MAGA extremism. He could have more forcefully laid bare the truth about his rival, but he mostly stuck to highlighting policy differences. Pence was absent from that microphone opposite Walz not merely because Pence and Trump disagree. Pence has been cast out of Trump’s world because many members of the MAGA movement consider Pence a traitor worthy of scorn—or something much worse.
Casual news consumers might forget certain details of January 6. The Trump-directed mob didn’t just charge down the National Mall from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Earlier that day, a group had literally erected a gallows outside Congress. Chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” rang out among the insurrectionists. None of this was a joke. It wasn’t a performance. Some Trump supporters wanted to execute the former vice president. And, as all of this unfolded, nobody knew whether Trump was going to take the necessary steps to stop such an event from happening. What sort of person would ever take Pence’s place?
Vance may have come across as disarming last night, but persuadable voters should listen to his messaging on the stump. As my colleague Elaine Godfrey recently wrote, Vance has the dangerous ability to squeeze Trumpism “through his own post-liberal-populist tube and produce something that looks like a coherent ideology." Meanwhile, a key component of Vance’s appeal, at least in Trump’s eyes, is that Vance won’t “betray” him like he believes Pence did. That historic “betrayal” is the only reason why America is able to have what will hopefully prove to be a fair election in five weeks.
Walz didn’t have to stomp his feet, or yell, or act like a jerk—that wouldn’t have worked, and it’s not his nature. But this election’s only vice-presidential debate exposed the true danger of polite normalization. Throughout the debate, Walz failed to remind viewers just how extreme of a moment, and a movement, Trump has created. He wasn’t debating a fellow potential vice president; he was squaring off against someone who may ignore the Constitution in service of an aspiring authoritarian. If Trump wins this election, another free one is far from guaranteed.
Vance is a cerebral, Ivy League–educated lawyer who once referred to Trump as “cultural heroin,” but, right now, he’s aiding and abetting Trump on his steady march to autocracy.
As I wrote earlier this year, Vance has successfully fashioned himself into Trump’s Mini-Me. Like any politician, he can turn that dial whichever way he wants, whenever he wants. Last night, Vance used grace as a Trojan horse for Trumpism, and Walz’s reciprocal friendliness and diplomacy unfortunately helped Vance squeeze through the gate and into America’s living rooms.
What did you think of the Vice-Presidential debate?
Here’s what I thought. It was actually a good…debate. For once. Not just a shouting match. Yet in that, you might wonder: who won?
And I think the answer to that is: nobody did.
Let me explain, and we’ll take each candidate turn by turn.
How I Think Tim Walz Did, or Why the Democrats Aren’t Winning
How do you think Tim Walz did? Pundits are already crowing that he “lost,” because he “struggled.”
But I don’t think so. I don’t think people are going to suddenly turn around and like him any less.
He didn’t sound like a politician, and that’s a good thing. He sounded like the kind of guy you could go to the bar with, and watch a football game.
That’s a good thing. Not sounding like a politician is why Walz is so popular as a public figure. He sounds normal, to put it in his own words. He’s significantly more liked than Kamala, and it’s easy to understand why. She comes off as a politician, in the standard DC mold, using that body language, that vernacular, that jargon, that delivery. Walz doesn’t.
So I don’t think Walz lost, by any stretch of the imagination.
What I do think is that he failed in a certain way, but that’s not his fault—it’s a much larger problem with the Democrats.
The Democrats aren’t losing, per se, but they’re not winning, either. And we all know that they should be. The reason they aren’t is very simple: the economy. People don’t trust them on it, and yet they refuse, stubborn as hell, to admit it. And so they can’t do anything about it.
And that brings us to JD Vance.
How I Think JD Vance Did, or Can You Really Go From Creepy to College Boy?
How do you think he did?
I noted three particular lines he repeated.
People are struggling. To pay the bills. Times are tough.
The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
We should stop shipping jobs offshore, especially to places where they become “slave labor.”
It’s hard to disagree with any of that.
Tim couldn’t say any of that, for a much bigger reason than him. The Democrats refuse, as I said, to admit any of this.
But how hard is this to say?
You see, the reason people don’t trust the Democrats on the economy is that they feel detached from reality.
We are in the midst of a major global cost of living crisis. The biggest one in half a century. And that’s after decades of stagnation.
What are the Democrats thinking? I can’t think of a political mistake more foolish than this. People everywhere are feeling dejected, miserable, and angry. China, India, Europe. Nobody has anything resembling a good economy right now.
And yet because liberals won’t admit it, they keep on losing, serially, the far right surging.
So it was left to Vance to say the things that Americans feel.
He came off as reasonable. Now, I’m not saying he is. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
If the goal was to introduce America to JD Vance as a thoughtful guy, who says, as he put it, “common sense” things, then that goal may well have been achieved. I’d bet a lot of people were nodding along in agreement…
..And I’d bet that the Republicans’ advantage on the Number One Issue, the economy, is only going to get stronger.
But of course there’s another layer to all this.
Vance’s stances on social issues. Which have been widely mocked, because they’re not just reprehensible, they’re almost incomprehensible, seeming to come from the 17th century. He calls women “childless cat ladies.” He’s against IVF, not just abortion. Etcetera.
At the debate, he did something interesting. He seemed contrite. He said: I want to learn from people more about these issues.
And that raises a certain question.
There’s performance, and then there’s reality. There’s marketing, and then there’s the product.
If the marketing is: hey, we’re reasonable guys, then is the product still something like…
We’re going to take away your basic rights. We’re going to end your healthcare. We’re going to give the mega rich even more billions. And by the way, you won’t have a democracy anymore.
So I think it’s only fair to ask whether all this was just a front, marketing, spin, JD Vance the nice guy, not JD Vance the weird, toxic-tech-bro-toxic-masculinity-Incel-creep who wants to take away the most basic rights there are in a society, and rewind it several centuries, especially for women, minorities, the LGBTQ, and many more.
Did JD Vance sell America on this new persona, the nice, thoughtful college boy? Or is America wise enough to ask again, to press, hey, do you actually still think all this? Is this just more lies from a side renowned for them, and are you actually going to take away rights right down to IVF, healthcare, association, privacy, expression, and more?
Nobody Won the Debate, and America Deserves Better
In that sense, I think that nobody won the debate.
Rather, it exposed several levels of failures.
The failure of the Dems to not have an economic message that’s totally detached from reality. Why can’t they say things as simple as JD Vance? Just say them, for Pete’s sake? The Dream feels unattainable, people are struggling, times are tough, and so on? They’ve ruled out saying that, because their media guys tell them not to, and that’s a message that’s not resonating.
They’re left with anodyne, mealy-mouthed stuff without real power in it—“the opportunity economy” and so on—but in times like this, people need to trust you, and that trust comes from acknowledging their reality, which is that things are not good for most people. The Dems aren’t trusted because they can’t even say the most basic words about the plight of most Americans that JD Vance did, and that’s sort of embarrassing, stupid, and insane, if you ask me.
Meanwhile, the debate failed to really get to the truth of who JD Vance is. Is he the thoughtful college boy who’s going to moderate and check Daddy Trump’s worst, most reckless, and most crazy impulses? That’s the image he wanted to portray. But nobody pressed him enough, asking: hey, do you still want to take away IVF? Because that’s creepy, weird, and obsessive, since it has nothing to do with you.
And if you do, what’s with your obsession with other people’s freedoms? Why are you like fixated on taking those away? How is that “common sense” and how does that square with restoring the Dream? Isn’t the Dream that we can all pursue life, liberty, and happiness? So why are you like creepily into just making everyone try to live the way you want them to?
Those are serious failures, by the way.
In all this, I’d bet that many Americans are going to come away trusting the GOP even more on the economy. Than they already do. Because it’s true, that jobs shouldn’t be shipped offshore to places that are indeed one step above slave labor. It’s true that people are struggling and the Dream feels out of reach. These are the most elementary truths of all when it comes to the economy. It is common sense, and…
What does it say when JD Vance says it, but the Democrats won’t?
At the same time, Americans might just buy into the image Vance portrayed, which softens the GOP as some kind inquisitive force for freedom. Is it? Has Trump really moderated enough to be interested in expanding people’s freedoms? I doubt it, myself, but these days, I can hardly bring myself to place much trust in the Democrats either. Hey, at least they’re not the fascists is hardly the stuff of grand inspiration.
The Democrats need a sharper message. A more powerful one. Real vision. Rooted in what life is like today for people. Not just what their cosseted advisors imagine it to be.
The GOP, meanwhile, has a very strong message, on the issue that matters to people most, the economy, and they’re managing to sort of cast a spell that they might not be as bad as they seem on social issues.
So who won? I think everyone lost.
The reality is if the GOP wins, the economy will probably improve, but only at the expense of basic rights. If the Democrats win, their muddled economic vision will probably stall out, but at least, hey, it won’t be the Handmaids’ Tale.
Not exactly wonderful choices, if you ask me.
And so here I am, like so many. Uninspired, cautious, hesitant, and doubtful. In that sense, nobody won. America is a society in pretty grave circumstances, and it deserves better leadership than this.
I wonder if the power behind Biden/US is ready to grab all the oil in the Middle East.
This seems like an End Game scenario.
Israel/US is goading the ME countries to attack them—thereby having their flimsy casus belli to destroy and occupy.
The Wolfowitz Doctrine states the US will retain control or hegemony over the global community.
We’ve only recently been losing that grip.
The Rand Corp wrote the plan for ‘extending Russia’ which I shared here long ago. That plan backfired; it extended the US instead and killed alot of Ukrainians, while intentionally making life in Europe more difficult than it had to be. US’ shabbily orchestrated management of Ukraine to damage Russia also bolstered BRICS membership, a major thorn in the US backside, and now fissures show weakened US alliances.
So next up, genocide in Palestine. I don’t know what the underlying goal was, but countries are stepping up to openly denounce the US—Israel has lost soooo much good will. Israel is becoming a pariah in the eyes of the people of this world. The formerly agreeable African states are taking Israel to the ICC. Small poor countries like Yemen are forcing Goliath to spend 2 million a shot to deflect their $2000. missiles.
80% Democrats
70% Republicans
74% Independents
want this stopped immediately AND ALSO want justice for Palestinians—involving prosecution of Biden and his crew for war crimes.
So, they win—and the world as we know it is over.
I’m sure you won’t like this world.
Or the people win—and the world as we know it is over.
This could be much better.
The vast difference in the will of the people and the behavior / rhetoric of their masters is bringing this situation to a historic flashpoint.
Some kind of big change is coming.
I’m hoping for the best.
Don’t be still dickering around, campaigning for the dirtiest SOB in American history who brought down the US.
Kamala Harris / Biden say $750. is all they have per family—the DAY they sent billions to a European piracy project.
Israel is an American military outpost, planted in the 40s for the specific goal it is aggressively attempting to accomplish now—total conquest of Arabia. The US, using its proxy Israel, is murdering historic numbers of civilians in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen
Biden is a vegetable, laying on the beach, on vacation from setting in motion the end of the world.
"America is a society in pretty grave circumstances, and it deserves better leadership than this."
I don't know about that. You could say that about the whole f-ing planet.
I associate "neoliberalism" with the Clinton era – you're right, it's a term which has become useless jargon – but at its base it involves a friendlier relationship with business and banks. The thing is, I don't see how the USA can be reformed without some degree of cooperation with the business and banking sector. Not with a right-wing judiciary.
