One phenomenon that continues to build is public announcements on twitter by sitting GOP politicos that they will be voting for Harris. This is not something I've ever seen before in these sorts of numbers.
This is not something I've ever seen before in these sorts of numbers.
Today we’re going to discuss civilization, collapse, and the future, with a little focus on America’s election.
A lot’s gone on in the last couple of days. Let’s do a quick recap.
• Trump’s own former Chief of Staff called him a fascist,
• Kamala called him a fascist,
• He reportedly admired Hitler.
Now. What does all this mean? Where are we, exactly? What’s going to happen next to America, and what does that imply for the world?
Big, big questions. Let me attempt to do them a little bit of justice.
How I Predicted American Collapse
It’s been a while since I predicted a thing I came to call American collapse. The story was simple, and I won’t rehash it for you, but in America I saw a repeat of the classic trends of the 1930s. Long-run stagnation, widespread immiseration, astronomical inequality: all of these are the classic recipe for fascism.
Not according to me. According to the greatest minds of the 20th century, like Keynes, whose book, “The Consequences of the Peace,” was about this startling insight: stagnation is the real drivers of fascism. This was a revolutionary insight. You see, back then, we didn’t understand. Why did Hitler arise? How had he seduced a society? What led Germany down this dark road, which dragged the world into war, and killed millions?
It was social science’s greatest question. Ever. Because World War was humanity’s greatest problem, ever, too, to date, and I don’t mean to belittle slavery and so forth, I’m just discussing how thinkers thought then. Nobody had much of a clue. All kinds of explanations were offered. None were very satisfying. It was Keynes who made the link between Weimar Germany’s stagnation, and the rise of Nazi Germany, as its consequence.
Hence, the title of the book that changed the world, “The Consequences of the Peace.” How did that book change the world? It remade the post-war world.
Leaders and thinkers of all kinds agreed that Keynes was right. And so they agreed, to, try and design a world where World War would never recur, ever, full stop, period, and to do that, they attempted to design institutions that would “never again,” in the famous words, allow fascism to rise.
Those institutions were things like the IMF and World Bank and UN and international courts and charters and treaties and trade organizations, plus America’s sort of soft control of levers of power, like back then, the gold standard, or international diplomacy, because back then, it was the last man left standing. Doesn’t matter—I can explain those later, and I’ve discussed them before.
The point is that we understood something back then.
This was the greatest lesson of the 20th century.
The Lesson We Forgot, and Why
I emphasize it because I want you to learn it. I think it’s important that you grasp it, I think it’s crucial that everyone gets it.
Right now, let me assure you, we don’t, and I’ll come back to that.
So. Now let me put Keynes great lesson, and remember, this is something that literally changed history and human civilization, to you in its simplest form.
Long-run stagnation causes fascism.
Causes. That is a causal link, and that matters, because it gives power. The powers to prevent, to ameliorate, and to predict. If we understand what causes something, we can do something about it.
Now. Some people will dispute this. Some people will “disagree” with it. They are only really flouting their ignorance. This isn’t an opinion. Keynes proved this, beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is knowledge. We know this, and to deny it or dispute it is to be the equivalent of a climate denier, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s foolish, so understand, this is something we should all know. In the way that it is a great lesson and a grave truth.
So. These are the roots of fascism. What do they tell us?
What they told me was that in America’s case, we were about to have big problems. That was years ago now. I saw stats like the middle class becoming a minority, people struggling, generations doing worse than the last, massive inflation for housing, healthcare, retirement, all the basics. These reminded me of Weimar Germany, not in a metaphorical way, but in a statistical one. Sure, things weren’t “as” bad, but in terms of the causal link I’ve explained to you, that doesn’t matter.
Stagnation causes fascism.
When I saw that in America, for example, incomes had stagnated for half-a-century, I was convinced that something ugly was right around the corner. This was Keynes’ point, after all. It was what centuries of social thinking and science had culminated in. Keynes stood on the shoulders like Rousseau, De Tocqueville, Hume, and many, many more, and his insight remains the single greatest idea we have ever had about society. How do we prevent World Wars?
How we keep democracies?
I became convinced something ugly going to happen, because all the statistics told me so. And the deeper I looked, the more they converged on the same story: long-run stagnation, hardening across generations, deepening across social groups, imploding the middle, turning society pessimistic, afraid, dark, easy meat for demagogues.
I understood, too, that something paradoxical had happened. After the last World War, other countries had built guardrails against fascism recurring. Strong and robust one, or at least as strong as they could have been made, then. But America hadn’t. Because of course last time around it was the last man standing, and the thinking then was that it was the only country that didn’t need to be hardened and protected, so that its democracy would endure.
So America didn’t build the protections that Europe did, for example. Which today everyone can see, generous social contracts, expansive safety nets, all of which prevent long-run stagnation, and thus, avert the hand of fascism from developing a killer grip over society. America never built any of those because it didn’t think it needed them.
And so something truly paradoxical happened. The country that led the last fight against fascism is the one that today is on the brink of it. It’s not me calling it fascism, it’s Trump’s own Chief of Staff, Kamala, historians who disputed using the term until right about now, a long, long list of people, who finally all agree what this is.
So this is happening for a reason that’s one of those strange ironies of history. Sure, America has a checkered history with social relations—but most societies do. Where my ancestors come from? Caste is still a thing, and those at the bottom are “untouchable.” Human ugliness is universal.
What happened in America was paradoxical, ironic, and different. Nobody thought it needed to be hardened against fascism, after the last World War, and so it wasn’t. Italy, Germany, Japan—LOL, pretty obviously they did. France, Holland, Belgium—they didn’t want to end up like those guys.
But America was the country that saved the world from fascism. It was the one that nobody thought, therefore, needed to have all these new institutions—new constitutions, new social contracts, new systems—to prevent it’s rise, in some distant future.
That future is right now.
The Next Stage of American Collapse
So is this the next stage of American collapse?
The answer to that question is: yes. But not in a simple way. In a conditional one, and then in a marginal one. That means: depending on the election, and then depending on what Trump does next. We all know that he’ll enjoy the powers of a dictator, that he wants them, and plenty of people, again, not really me, are worried that he’ll abuse them.
All of this is missing the point.
This isn’t about Trump, and I know that’s hard to hear, but I’m trying to teach you how these systems called societies and civilization work. If it wasn’t Trump, it would’ve been someone else, and if it wasn’t 2016, it might’ve been 2020. That part’s almost sort of random, and that was Keynes’ point, too—that stagnation causes fascism, remember, and in that sense, demagogues are going to arise. Doesn’t really matter who they are, though of course we remember their names, like Hitler. But it’s these laws of history that create them.
So. In America’s case, we have a society that repeated the mistakes of the 1930s, because, ironically, it was the one country that nobody thought would, given that it saved the world from the last stagnation-depression-fascism-war cycle.
If you see all that, then the question becomes much clearer, and easier to answer. America’s now poised to enter a very different phase in a society’s evolution, or devolution, and thanks to that, our civilization well could, too.
Let’s imagine an America that’s not really a democracy, or in our modern terms, a “significantly flawed” one, or one that’s, worse, downgraded formally, to an autocracy.
What happens next? A lot of things. Democratic institutions cease to function. Rights stop existing. Society is chilled. It’s controlled, in overt terms, for the purpose of a singular social mission, and I don’t have to tell you which one.
Beyond that, though, many things happen. Autocracies don’t tend to have very good credit ratings, and while America’s currently holding the global economy together, it’s also coming apart as America does. America’s credit rating is likely to be downgraded, and that will cause shocks emanating around the world.
As much as stock markets are booming right now, autocracies don’t tend to be—chuckle with me—very safe places to keep your money. That’s why debt ratings get downgraded, but its also why they don’t have shall we say stock markets wise people want to put their money into. As capital leaves, investment falls, and as investment falls, economies slow, jobs disappear, and the cycle of stagnation hardens.
This is all sort of what the world’s better economists are beginning to warn about when they say, no, Trump won’t be good for the economy. They mean it in a narrower sense, which is that raising tariffs is going to spike inflation, but let’s think about that in a broader sense, too.
What happened during the 1930s? To turn Weimar Germany into Nazi Germany? Germany was trapped in cycle of stagnation, and people had lost hope in having stable, let alone prosperous, lives again. And then the Great Depression happened. As it did, the world turned isolationist—tariffs and trade wars erupted. This made Germany’s cycle of stagnation worse, faster and faster, and all that is what really propelled Hitler to power.
In America’s case, we risk a sort of repeat of all that—a nation trapped in a cycle of stagnation, making precisely the wrong moves, and hardening and accelerating just that cycle, with more isolationism, which causes trade to stop, investment to flee, and even just people to flee (how many Americans are going to run to Europe and Canada if they can if election goes the wrong way for them very shortly?)
All of that hardens an autocracy.
It’s how you lose a democracy. Not in the simplistic sense of “Trump bad!,” but in the much, much deeper one of historical forces, self-perpetuating cycles, causality, and Keynes’ magisterial insight about what causes fascism.
American Collapse, the 1930s, the 2020s, and Human Civilization
Why did we want to prevent fascism?
Remember with me. Not just because “it’s bad.” Not just because “democracy’s better.” Not for political or even moral reasons at all.
For pragmatic ones, and genuinely civilizational ones.
We wanted to prevent fascism, because last time around, it led to World War.
So as a civilization, we appear to be heading back on the road to the the unthinkable.
These are the civilizational stakes of what is happening now, the culmination of historical forces, and the meaning of these great macro-trends of the 1930s repeating themselves, with this ironic, deadly sting in the tail—the country that saved the world and ended its last World War was the very one we didn’t think needed to be hardened against the very conditions that led to that very sequence, since it was the last man standing. But because it wasn’t, history could repeat itself.
This is where we are today.
None of this is about Trump in this sense, it’s not about his hangers-on, it’s not about political sides anymore, even. It is about history, in this deepest and grandest—and most dangerous—of senses. I want you to really understand that, because right now, very, very few people do, and this is why we are where we are, watching history repeat itself, baffled, bewildered, unable to understand why, its greatest lessons lost.
We were already on a pretty risky trajectory civilizationally. But all this? It adds to this quantity I call civilization risk immensely, multiplying it by another factor entirely.
That’s not a warning. It’s something I want to teach you. That I want you to reflect deeply on. Not just react to, in the petty way we’ve come to hurl at one another. Just today, someone on Twitter said to me angrily, for no reason whatsoever, “you write like a twelve year old.”
My man, I thought to myself. I am just trying to teach you things every twelve year old should know. But most of us adults don’t, and more’s the pity. This person was panicked about fascism. Because they don’t understand how we get here and what happens next.
Now you do. In that knowledge is the only form of power we have right now. The point isn’t just to use it wisely. It’s to have it, and to give it, so that we don’t watch history repeating itself impotently, puzzled, shocked, dumbstruck, forever, as we are doing right now.
I hope we get past this.
We're in uncharted territory. The political army which answered Reagan's call for a war on government is close to achieving total victory. If Trump wins and brings in a GOP Congress with him I honestly don't think the country will ever be able to repair the damage. Hate to come across as a gloomy defeatist but at this stage all I can do is hope that the polls are wrong.
Trump’s threat to use the military on “the enemy within,” along with the recent statements of General John Kelly and other members of Trump’s administration who say he is a fascist, have fed growing concern that Trump’s reelection could spark a deadly conflict between MAGA Republicans and those they perceive as their enemies. But there has been far less attention paid to the civil war within the Republican Party.
On the Hugh Hewitt Show this morning, Trump boasted that he had “taken the Republican Party and made [it] into an entirely different party…The Republican Party is a very big, powerful party. Before, it stood, it was an elitist party with real stiffs running it.”
Trump’s analysis of his effect on the party is right. In 2015, the party had been controlled for years by a small group of leaders who wanted to carve the U.S. government back to its size and activity of the years before the 1930s, slashing regulations on business and cutting the social safety net so they could cut taxes. But their numbers were small, so to stay in power, they relied on the votes of the racist and sexist reactionaries who didn’t like civil rights.
Once he took office in 2017, Trump put the base of the party in the driver’s seat. Using the same techniques that had boosted Hungarian prime minister Victor Orbán, he attacked immigrants, Black Americans, and people of color, and promised to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights. After his defense of the participants in the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he began to turn his followers into a movement by encouraging them to engage in violence.
In the following years, Trump’s hold on his voting base enabled him to take over the Republican Party, pushing the older Republican establishment aside. In March 2024 he took over the Republican National Committee itself, installing a loyalist and his own daughter-in-law Lara Trump at its head and adjusting its finances so that they primarily benefited him.
But while older leaders were happy to use Trump’s base to keep the party in power, the two factions were never in sync. Established Republican leaders’ goal was to preside over a largely unregulated market-driven economy. But MAGA Republicans want a weak government only with regard to foreign enemies—another place where they part company with established Republicans. Instead, they want a strong government to impose religious rules. Rather than leaving companies alone to react to markets, they want them to shape their businesses around MAGA ideology, denying LGBTQ+ rights, for example.
In 2024, those tensions are stronger. Trump’s promise to build a tariff wall around the country contradicts the established Republicans’ reliance on free trade. His vow to deport 20 million immigrants threatens to devastate entire sectors of the economy. Both plans are widely panned by economists. Yesterday, twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists warned that Trump’s economic plans would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits, and greater inequality.” On Morning Joe today, economic analyst Steve Rattner noted that Trump’s plans would cut the gross domestic product in the U.S. by 8.9%, creating a severe recession or a depression.
MAGA Republicans are fiercely loyal to Trump, but it is not clear how much they offer to those trying to get elected in more moderate districts. Extremist abortion bans have fired up significant opposition to Republican candidates, and that opposition does not appear to be weakening. "My wife…was miscarrying and bleeding out,” John Legend said today on the podcast of Broncos legend Shannon Sharpe. “Her life was in danger, and for the government to say, 'Oh, we need to evaluate this to make sure you're sufficiently dying before you can have an abortion'—that’s what they’re saying in...all these states where they have Trump abortion bans. Not your doctor, not you and your family. The government. No! Stay out of it!... We don’t need the government to be involved in it. And if the government’s involved, that means the police and the district attorney are involved in medical decisions. That's crazy!”
“He is killing us!” Mika Brzezinski said this morning on Morning Joe. “He is putting us at risk. He is making us afraid to have babies. He is putting our reproductive health at risk and some women have died already because of this…. What’s happening with women right now is real, and it is playing out across America.”
MAGA extremists in the House of Representatives did the party as a whole no favors when they took control of the chamber in 2023 and made it virtually impossible for the Republicans to govern. Party members took weeks to agree on a House speaker and then threw him out, marking the first time in U.S. history that a party has thrown out its own speaker. With MAGA extremists unwilling to compromise on their demands, the Republicans were unable to pass almost any legislation at all, including appropriations bills and the long-overdue farm bill.
Their determination not to yield an inch continues. A Trump-endorsed Republican candidate challenging a Democrat incumbent in New York could not name a single Democrat she would be willing to work with if she is elected. “These people are not fit to govern,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) posted today.
MAGA Republicans are already signaling their intent to expand their power in the House should Republicans retain control over it: Ohio representative Jim Jordan appears to be considering making a bid for House leadership, while others have their eye on committee chairs. Joe Perticone of The Bulwark explored today how “Trump’s Already Stuffing House GOP ‘Normies’ in a Locker” as they feel obliged to defend everything he does, even when his former White House chief of staff says he is a fascist.
But the struggle between the Republican factions has not gone away in the past few years. Indeed, it appears to be escalating as evidence mounts that Trump will not be able to continue to lead the party. Earlier this month, 230 doctors publicly called on Trump to release his medical records, “Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity," they wrote. Today, 233 mental health professionals organized by conservative lawyer George Conway’s Anti-Psycho PAC warned both that Trump “appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up,” and that his malignant narcissism makes him “grossly unfit for leadership.”
But if Trump’s grip is slipping, who will take over the party?
In a new biography of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) by Michael Tackett of The Associated Press, obtained by CNN, McConnell condemned the MAGA movement and blamed Trump for making it hard for the Republican Party to compete. He called Trump “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.” He also went after Florida senator Rick Scott for his leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the party’s campaign arm.
Trump loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) promptly called McConnell’s comments “indefensible.” Scott said he was “shocked that [McConnell] would attack a fellow Republican senator and the Republican nominee for president just two weeks out from an election.”
Technology elites, including Elon Musk, who is pouring money into Trump’s campaign, and Peter Thiel, who backs Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance, also appear to be making a play to control the Republican Party, challenging both the established Republicans and the MAGAs.
And then there are the Republican voters, some of whom are abandoning the MAGA Republicans who are now openly embracing fascism. Today, Republican state senator Rob Cowles of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who has served for almost 42 years, announced he would vote for Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris. David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, also indicated he would be casting his ballot for Harris.
In 1880, when the Democrats went off the extremist cliff, voters forced it to move to the center.
In 1879, after the bitterly contested 1876 election, voters gave Democrats control of Congress. So convinced were Democrats that the American people backed their determination to overthrow Reconstruction, they refused to fund the government unless Republican president Rutherford B. Hayes pulled the federal government out of the southern states. (They also tried to get a federal pension for Confederate president Jefferson Davis.)
“If this is not revolution,” Civil War veteran House minority leader James A. Garfield (R-OH) said, “which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.”
Observers had expected the 1880 election to be a romp for the Democrats, who reiterated their demands in their party platform, but voters backed Garfield’s defense of the country and of Black rights and elected him to the White House.
The unexpected loss prompted the Democrats to toss aside their former Confederate leaders and shift toward the northern cities. For president in 1884 they backed former New York governor Grover Cleveland, who had broadened Black appointments to office and desegregated the New York City police force, and who had worked closely with New York Assembly minority leader Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, to reform the worst abuses of the industrial system. Cleveland won with the help of significant numbers of crossover Republican voters, dubbed “Mugwumps,” thereby securing the roots of the modern Democratic Party.
Abstract
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known colloquially as “forever chemicals”, have been associated with adverse human health effects and have contaminated drinking water supplies across the United States owing to their long-term and widespread use. People in the United States may unknowingly be drinking water that contains PFAS because of a lack of systematic analysis, particularly in domestic water supplies. We present an extreme gradient boosting model for predicting the occurrence of PFAS in groundwater at the depths of drinking water supply for the conterminous United States. Our model results indicate that 71 to 95 million people in the conterminous United States potentially rely on groundwater with detectable concentrations of PFAS for their drinking-water supplies prior to any treatment.
American Collapse, the 1930s, the 2020s, and Human Civilization
...like Keynes, whose book, “The Consequences of the Peace,” was about this startling insight: stagnation is the real drivers of fascism. This was a revolutionary insight. You see, back then, we didn’t understand. Why did Hitler arise? How had he seduced a society? What led Germany down this dark road, which dragged the world into war, and killed millions?
It was social science’s greatest question. Ever. Because World War was humanity’s greatest problem, ever, too, to date, and I don’t mean to belittle slavery and so forth, I’m just discussing how thinkers thought then. Nobody had much of a clue...
Marty Baron@PostBaron
On political endorsement
This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.
@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner
@jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
A bombshell story last night from the Wall Street Journal reported that billionaire Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, who is backing the election of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump with a daily million-dollar sweepstakes giveaway and gifts of tens of millions to the campaign, has been in regular contact with Russian president Vladimir Putin since late 2022. Reporters Thomas Grove, Warren P. Strobel, Aruna Viswanatha, Gordon Lubold, and Sam Schechner said that the conversations “touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
Musk’s SpaceX, which operates the Starlink satellite system, won a $1.8 billion contract with U.S. military and intelligence agencies in 2021. It is the major rocket launcher for NASA and the Pentagon, and Musk has a security clearance; he says it is a top-secret clearance.
Today, NASA administrator Bill Nelson called for an investigation into the story. “If the story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia,” Nelson told Burgess Everett of Semafor, “then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”
Musk appears to be making a bid for control of the Republican Party for a number of possible reasons, including so he can continue to score federal contracts and because the high tariffs Trump has promised to place on Chinese imports would guarantee that Musk would have leverage in the electrical vehicle market.
But Musk has competition for control of the party. Today, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who lead the establishment Republican faction and the MAGAs, respectively, and thus are usually at loggerheads, issued a joint statement condemning Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for “labeling [Trump] as a ‘fascist.’” They suggest she is “inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.”
Observers immediately pointed out that, in fact, it is Trump who has repeatedly called Harris a fascist—as well as a Marxist and a communist—and that those calling Trump a fascist are former members of his own administration like former White House chief of staff General John Kelly, or leaders like former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump himself appointed to his position and who called Trump “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Harris’s contribution to this discussion was that when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Harris directly if she thinks Trump is a fascist at a town hall this week, she answered: “Yes, I do. And I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”
Aside from the gaslighting of attacking Harris for something that Trump is the one doing, the statement seemed a calculated attempt to demonstrate Republican solidarity. But it was glaringly obvious that McConnell and Johnson found that solidarity only in attacking Harris. Their statement contained no praise of Trump.
The struggle over the Republican Party also seemed evident in yesterday’s decision by the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, biotech tycoon Patrick Soon-Shiong, to kill that paper’s planned endorsement of Harris. Choosing not to make an endorsement in the race, Soon-Shiong said that he thought an endorsement would “add to the division” in the country. Elon Musk praised his decision.
Today the Washington Post also decided not to make an endorsement in the presidential race, despite the fact a piece endorsing Harris was already drafted. Publisher William Lewis said the paper was returning to its roots of not endorsing presidential candidates, although it has endorsed candidates for decades and did so in its early years as well. His statement seemed a weak cover for the evident wish of the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to avoid antagonizing Trump.
Bezos gives Musk a run for his money at being the richest man in the world. But while Musk wants high tariffs against China to protect his access to electric vehicle markets, Bezos’s fortune comes from Amazon, and high tariffs would shatter his business. When he was in office, Trump went out of his way to find ways to hurt Amazon to get back at Bezos for unfavorable coverage in the Post.
Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Mariel Garza, along with journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein, resigned from the paper after its decision not to endorse Harris, and nearly 2,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. The Washington Post, too, has seen about 2,000 subscribers bow out, and fourteen of the newspaper’s columnists called the decision not to condemn Trump’s threats to the “freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution” “a terrible mistake.” Cartoonist Ann Telnaes published a blacked-out square, playing on the Post’s motto that democracy dies in darkness.
Readers are speaking out against the Washington Post for demonstrating what scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder calls “obeying in advance” the demands of an authoritarian leader (although Washington Post legal journalist Ruth Marcus, who signed the letter calling the decision a terrible mistake, pointed out that the Post itself was publishing the many letters of condemnation). “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given,” Snyder’s “On Tyranny” reads. “In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
The aftermath of the Post’s decision demonstrated what scholars say will happen after such obeying. Rather than winning favors, such a demonstration of weakness invites further abuse, as anyone who has watched Trump in action ought to know by now.
Trump’s people pounced, with advisor Stephen Miller posting: “You know the Kamala campaign is sinking when even the Washington Post refuses to endorse.”
Trump then promptly went a step further, claiming that Democrats had taken part in “rampant Cheating and Skullduggery…in the 2020 presidential election” and warning that in 2024, “WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again…. Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Trump’s threats are designed to convince people he is a strongman who will inevitably win the 2024 presidential election. But to do that, he will have to go through the voters, who are demonstrating their enthusiasm for Democratic candidate Harris and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
After the announcement by the Washington Post, others stepped up to endorse Harris. The largest Teamsters union in Texas endorsed Harris before her rally tonight in Houston. In a blistering editorial, the Philadelphia Inquirer endorsed Harris, saying: “America deserves much more than an aspiring autocrat who ignores the law, is running to stay out of prison, and doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”
Tonight, Trump taped a podcast episode with Joe Rogan in Austin, Texas, hoping to reach Rogan’s large audience. He was still on the ground in Austin when he was supposed to be appearing at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, and blamed the long taping for the fact he was three hours late to the rally. Tired of waiting, rally attendees streamed out. When he finally arrived, about 47,000 viewers watched the PBS live stream of the rally.
Harris was in Houston, where she took the fight for abortion rights to the heart of a state where an abortion ban has endangered women and driven up the infant mortality rate. People began standing in line before sunrise to get into the rally at the Houston Shell Energy Stadium and filled the 22,000-seat stadium to capacity. About 2.5 million people watched the PBS live stream.
Harris shared the stage with actor Jessica Alba and music legends Beyoncé and Willie Nelson, who asked the crowd: “Are we ready to say Madam President?”
What's your point?
