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Jack Mallory

Somebody else fact check this. I've checked all over, sure looks like it's true but I can scarcely believe it.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-weirdly-simulates-sex-act-on-microphone-stand/

NYT says, "He played with the microphone stand as if trying to adjust it, stooped toward it and bobbed with his mouth open. The crowd roared with laughter. But observers on social media shared a 5-second clip of the moment, suggesting the former president was pantomiming oral sex. Those short clips quickly received millions of views."  Other media descriptions and the video clips leave far less doubt. Actually, no doubt.

Here, cut to the chase: at 3 minutes, but watch the whole thing for the completely surreal trip. https://x.com/benwikler/status/1852546912370544659

So if the raver on the bus seat next to you is pretending  to give blow jobs, do you get up and change seats? Would you vote for him?

Jay Shackford

The New York Times

THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Nov. 2, 2024

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

The New York Times editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Jay Shackford

All The Demons Are Here

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Washington.

Nov. 2, 2024

In the midst of the furor over Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his manipulative attempts to cover it up and figure out if he should lie about it or come clean, liberals began advancing the argument that the private character of a president should be differentiated from his public character.

Look at F.D.R., J.F.K. and L.B.J., they said. Lots of presidents betrayed their wives and deceived the electorate about their personal lives. But that should not distract from their public character, what they achieved and how they helped people while in office.

Donald Trump’s private life is marked by a cascade of sordid episodes. But so is his public life. Trump simply has no character.

When I asked a scholar what Shakespearean figure Trump most resembles, he replied that Trump is not complex enough to be one. You have to have a character to have a tragic flaw that mars your character.

And that raises the question: How did the America of George Washington never telling a lie, the America of Honest Abe, the America of the Greatest Generation, the America of Gary Cooper facing down a murderous gang alone in “High Noon” — how did this America, our America, become a place where a man with no character has an even chance of being re-elected president?

Once, character and reputation were prized in our leaders. “Character is like a tree, and reputation is like a shadow,” Lincoln said. When Claude Rains’s graft is discovered in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” he becomes suicidal out of shame.

Republican politicians bending to Trump’s will don’t know what shame is. And Trump, brazenly projecting every bad thing that he does onto his rivals, and boldly hawking sneakers, Bibles and cologne like a late-night cable huckster, has no shame.

Trump has exploited the widespread disillusionment that has curdled into cynicism about a ruling class rife with hypocrisy, self-aggrandizement and bad judgment.

Americans have felt let down again and again since the ’60s, with wars we shouldn’t have been in, occupations we shouldn’t have had, the bank scandals that were allowed to happen, trade agreements that hollowed out manufacturing hubs. Then there was the devouring pandemic. Many Americans felt left behind, fooled by Republicans and disdained by Democrats.

All the dislocation was exacerbated by social media algorithms igniting anger, outrage, resentment, conspiracies and fake stories.

Donald Trump is a human algorithm, always ratcheting up antagonism. He’s a personification and exploiter of all the things creating anxiety in people’s lives.

I sat in Madison Square Garden for eight hours last Sunday, working my way through a box of popcorn, a large pretzel and two bags of peanut M&M’s. I was surprised when some commentators reacted with shock at some of the insults slung that day.

For me, it seemed like a pretty typical Trump rally: ugly, dark, crude, denigrating, racist, misogynistic. (Sid Rosenberg, a conservative radio host, helped kick things off by calling Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a bitch.”) Speakers included Elon Musk, R.F.K. Jr. and Tucker Carlson, who thinks a demon clawed him while he was in bed last year. It is frightening to contemplate how much power this gruesome threesome will have if Trump wins a second term. It’s unimaginable that R.F.K. Jr., who doesn’t trust vaccines, could be in charge of health policy.

Bobby Kennedy may not believe in vaccinations, but somehow we’ve been immunized against outrage.

Trump just keeps finding new ways to make America lurch backward; he has cast women back into back alleys on abortion. This past week, it felt as if every day there was some new horror story about a young woman dying or nearly dying because doctors are scared of new legal strictures on reproductive care.

We’ll see if Madison Square Garden was a last hurrah or a harbinger with this crazy movement that cannibalizes institutions and people and souls and spits them out and then replenishes its ranks with new Trump enablers.

The bizarro gathering was seen as a turning point by Harris campaign officials, who told reporters that they thought that the rally’s nasty tone had helped Kamala Harris with voters who decided late, underscoring her emphasis on the positive versus the negative, the light versus the dark.

It’s no surprise that Trump provided last-minute evidence of the character he lacks. As he said about being the Protector of Women, he will do it “whether they like it or not.” That’s the way it is with Trump and women — whether they like it or not.

I would have been more shocked if Trump had used his big moment at the Garden to offer a sunnier vision, to recall growing up in Queens, longing to get to Manhattan, to offer some humorous anecdotes from “The Apprentice,” filmed a mile away at Trump Tower, or some reminiscences about Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali or iconic Garden sporting events.

But that would have been the human thing to do. And Trump doesn’t care about human niceties. He just wants to be the biggest beast in the jungle, to take whatever he wants, in any way he can get it. At the Garden, an artist live-painted a picture, then revealed a pentimento of Trump hugging the Empire State Building, King Kong style.

Trump’s premier skill is an ear for the roar of the crowd — in person and in ratings. He will follow that roar anywhere and say anything to hear it.

Con men succeed because they tap into genuine yearnings in society. When Trump was a New York celebrity, he was famous for running his mouth, saying outrageous things and engaging in a mutually beneficial gossipy relationship with the tabloids. Then he learned the really dark arts. He began milking the emotions of Americans who don’t feel that things are working for them, who feel that government is corrupt and incompetent, who feel that it’s them versus Washington.

When Joe Biden jumbled his response to a vile remark about Puerto Rico by a comedian at Trump’s Garden rally — making it seem that Biden was calling Trump’s supporters “garbage” — Trump pounced. He turned the “garbage” comment into a “deplorable”-like slur against his fans, even putting on a neon orange vest and riding in a garbage truck to emphasize it.

There were two things Trump said to me during the 2016 campaign — when he was still speaking to me — that struck me as unusually honest.

I asked about the incidents of violence that were starting to erupt at his rallies. Wasn’t he worried about that?

No, he explained, he liked it rough; it added an air of excitement to the proceedings, he said. (This barbaric side of him came out on Jan. 6, as he watched television, savoring the violent scene he had egged on, saying about the rioters who wanted to hang Mike Pence, “So what?” He recently told Fox News it was “a day of love.”)

I also told him once that his persona was getting more belligerent and divisive. To me, he had seemed like a more benign, if crazily narcissistic, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon of a figure in the New York real estate days. Why was the former pro-choice Democrat going down such a dark and authoritarian path as a candidate?

“I guess,” Trump mused, “because of the fact that I immediately went to No. 1, and I said, ‘Why don’t I keep the same thing going?’”

Trump can play it round or square, pro-choice or anti-abortion, pro-TikTok or anti-TikTok, pro-crypto or anti-crypto. He has no philosophy, except: What’s in it for him? The only thread of continuity in his life is self-interest. He supercharged and retrofitted the Republican Party for his own benefit.

Trump told a Friday rally that he’s always “tossing and turning, spinning around like a top” in bed at night, thinking about the problems in the world.

don’t think he wakes up every day worrying about the country, and how to solve problems that people care about, or how to soothe our raw divisions.

He wakes up obsessing on how to reward himself and his family and friends and how to punish his enemies. He wakes up plotting how to pit people against one another.

Government can produce a positive effect only if it’s run by people who are serious about government.

And, as Kamala Harris said, Donald Trump is an unserious man.

Jay Shackford

Standing Up to Trump

Jeff Bezos endorsed a Trump-era slogan — “Democrsacy Dies in Darknewss” — for his newspaper, the Washington Post.  Why wouldn’t he let it endorse a candidate?

By David Remnick/Editor/The New Yorker

Oct. 30, 2024

In May, at a prison colony in the Siberian city of Omsk, a lawyer paid his weekly visit to his client, the Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza. They sat together in a small room, separated by a pane of glass. Kara-Murza, who had been poisoned in 2015 and 2017, presumably by Vladimir Putin’s secret police, was serving the second year of a twenty-five-year sentence for his public opposition to the invasion of Ukraine.

The lawyer had news to deliver: Kara-Murza had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for columns he had written for the Washington Post. The news, Kara-Murza recalled, “sounded like something from a different planet, from some kind of a parallel reality.” He was pleased, of course, though he assumed that he would never collect the prize in person. Like Alexei Navalny, like so many political prisoners before him, he believed that he would die in his cell.

Yet the unimaginable happened. On August 1st, Kara-Murza was part of a prisoner exchange, and in late October he stepped onto a stage at Columbia University’s Low Library, to receive his Pulitzer. He gave a brief speech to an audience that included the other winners—among them the Post’s David Hoffman, who had won for his reported editorials on the technologies that authoritarian regimes deploy to suppress dissent. The occasion, Kara-Murza admitted, was “surreal.”

For the staff and the readers of the Post, the next day was equally surreal: the paper’s publisher and C.E.O., William Lewis, announced that its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris would not run. All manner of explanation was offered—respect for the reader, a return to the editorial page’s more neutral roots—but these contortions convinced no one. Most concluded that what had happened was that the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who has plenty of business with the federal government, and with the election approaching, dared not offend Donald Trump. This was the same Bezos who had endorsed a Trump-era slogan for the paper—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—and supported a great deal of extraordinary reporting. Now, it seemed, Bezos was suffering from degeneration of the spine. Columnists expressed their embarrassment and anger. Three editorial-board members, including Hoffman, resigned. Within a few days, according to NPR, two hundred thousand readers had cancelled their subscriptions.

What was the meaning of this sorry episode? Or, for that matter, of the similarly last-minute decision of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, to kill a Harris endorsement that his editorial-page editors had drafted? (Cue the resignations. Cue the cancelled subscriptions.)

Every editor who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that endorsements are of modest influence at best. The editors of this magazine, when it recently published a lengthy essay describing (for the thousandth time) the authoritarian prospects of a second Trump Presidency, and endorsing Kamala Harris, had no illusions. Editors may be as prone to sanctimony as they are to the common cold, but there was never any thought that such an endorsement would suddenly tip the balance in the battleground states, much less win majorities in the Deep South or the Great Plains. The point was that we, like other publications, attempted to make a cogent case, and had the editorial freedom to do so.

Perhaps experience ought to tell us that it is ridiculous to clutch our pearls every time a person of immense political power or financial means acts in his own selfish interest. Bezos is hardly alone. Senator Mitch McConnell, who denounced Trump in the immediate aftermath of January 6th and, in private, has called him “stupid” and a “despicable human being,” is endorsing him. The billionaire Nelson Peltz has referred to Trump as a “terrible human being,” and yet is helping to bankroll him. Is there anything still to know about Donald Trump? Deeply conservative and reticent figures who have long working experience with Trump—such as his former chief of staff John Kelly and the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley—have gone on the record to declare him a fascist, a peril to national security, and yet they cannot seem to dissuade Elon Musk, Stephen Schwarzman, Paul Singer, Timothy Mellon, and a line of other plutocrats from backing him. Éric Vuillard’s “The Order of the Day” opens with a lightly fictionalized scene of two dozen German industrialists and financiers summoned, in 1933, to meet Hermann Göring, who demands their fealty. If the Nazi Party wins the election, Göring tells them, “These would be the last elections for ten years––even, he added with a laugh, for a hundred years.” Where have we heard similar “jokes”?

No small part of Trump’s authoritarian campaign is his insistence on dominance. And, though his aides and supporters are dismissive of comparisons to previous embodiments of fascism, the elements are all there: the identification of “vermin” and “the enemy within”; the threat to deploy the military against dissenters; the erasure of truth, the “big lie.” The maga rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday did not feature starched gray uniforms, swastikas, or disciplined salutes. Lee Greenwood is no Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. But the rhetoric was rife with scapegoating, racism, and lies.

In Russia, Putin has not replicated the Stalinism of the nineteen-thirties so much as he has modernized it. He has not gone to the trouble or the expense of re-creating the totalism of the old Gulag system. Instead, he carefully selects his victims—an opposition journalist here, a liberal politician there—and makes sure that their destruction is clearly understood by the Russian people. Similarly, the authoritarianism that Trump intends to establish will be of its moment. There will be no Lefortovo, no Treblinka. But mass deportations? That is a campaign promise, Trump told the crowd at the Garden, to be carried out “on Day One.”

The literature of anti-authoritarianism—Czeslaw Milosz’s “The Captive Mind”; Václav Havel’s essays and letters to his wife, Olga; Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs; Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies—are written by souls larger and vastly more heroic than common mortals. Yet they describe the ways that human-scale people, all of us, can refuse complicity, and act in the face of repression and outrage, if that is what public life comes to. The reporters and the editors at the Post who have resigned or spoken out against something as seemingly trivial as a spiked editorial may not be risking their lives or their immediate material comfort, but they are writing an endorsement that is worth signing on to: In order to stand up, one must have a backbone. ♦

Jack Mallory

". . . the private character of a president should be differentiated from his public character."

But what to do when the public character of a president is nearly, or equally, as repellent as the private character?

Trump's public, recorded, internationally visible on news media, social media, YouTube, millions of views from New Jersey to New Zealand, fellation of a mike stand hardly merits the adjective private. 

The public face of a once (and future?) President of the United States of America:

Jack Mallory

Ready to vote. 

Stephen Hatchett

"There are no atheists in foxholes!"  Dunno now who said that, but for myself, I'm finding it's true today.  

We've done what we can.  And we voted at least a couple weeks ago ---- but it seems like last year.

The serenity of a paddle on a quiet pond --- looks very very nice.

Jack Mallory

It was indeed, Stephen. 

In line at the polls at 6:50. Voted and gone by 7:20. The usual Penacook Norman Rockwell Election Day—everyone relaxed, friendly,  no electioneering. No idea who was red or blue, all pleasantly purple.

And, on the water by 8:30! Scarcely a leaf left on a tree at Grafton, so came back with a collection of reflections from the tree stumps that still stand in the shallows of the lake created in the early 20th Century. All providing me with a few hours of election amnesia. 4:20 now, and I still haven't listened to the news. 

Stephen Hatchett

Heck, it's 6:30 PM on the west coast, and I haven't looked at the news. And the electricity here will be turned off sometime between 8 and 10 pm tonite, until THURSDAY morning because of Red FLag fire danger conditions.  It will be sort of like the mid 19th century.

Jack Mallory

Democracy's a bitch. But Orion was high in the night sky when I took Bodie out. 

John Smeby

"America" won last night! Please celebrate and support the new golden age of America!!

For month's now I have kept "my mouth shut", except the push-back on Stolen Valor, which is VERY near and dear to me. I figured you can't change stupid, so why try. I have already placed American flags out front of my home, probably will keep them there through Veteran's Day on Monday. I always fly an American flag off the wall on my garage, and only take it down when hurricane level winds are projected.

Again, congratulations to America, "she" had a great win last night!! (Both with the general population vote and the Electoral College)

Jack Mallory

As I said, sometimes democracy can be a bitch. But rather than invent bogus claims of voter fraud, as 45/47 did to obfuscate his defeat, it's time to reflect on why he won and how to react. This column, by Tom Nichols of The Atlantic, is a good way to begin that reflection. My own immediate plan is to increase my support of the ACLU, with its 100+ years of legal and political support for the civil liberties likely to come under attack from the incoming administration. 
 

"An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once comparedTrump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

"The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

"Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threats that appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.

"So now what?

"The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.

"For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.

"Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

"Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers.

"After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, then–Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to make Obama a one-term president, and obstructed him at every turn. McConnell, of course, cared only about seizing power for his party, and later, he could not muster that same bravado when faced with Trump’s assaults on the government. Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

"The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

"Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do."

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/11/trump-victory-democracy/680549/

Jay Shackford

(Editor’s Note: I guess it’s my time to eat some crow.  I was wrong, dead wrong.  I misread America. I committed one of the deadly sins in politics — I started believing without any doubts my own thoughts and perspectives.  Needless to say, this election will be analyzed and reanalyzed thousands of times over time. But for those of us who stayed up all night watching the returns come in deserve at least a ringside explanation of what might have gone wrong and why.  Below is Susan Glasser’s column in The New Yorker filed at 5:53 am this morning that does a pretty good job.). 

Donald Trump’s Revenge

The former President will return to the White House older, less inhibited, and far more dangerous than ever before.

By Susan B. Glasser/The New Yorker 

5:53 AM/Nov. 6, 2024

Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be. His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America “a garbage can for the world,” and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.

Trump’s defeat of Kamala Harris was no upset, nor was it as unimaginable as when he beat Hillary Clinton, in 2016. But it was no less shocking. For much of the country, Trump’s past offenses were simply disqualifying. Just a week ago, Harris gave her closing argument to the nation in advance of the vote. Trump “has spent a decade trying to keep the American people divided and afraid of each other—that’s who he is,” she said. “But, America, I’m here tonight to say: that’s not who we are.” Millions of voters in the states that mattered most, however, chose him anyway. In the end, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric about invading immigrant hordes, his macho posturing against a female opponent, and his promise to boost an inflation-battered U.S. economy simply resonated more than all the lectures about his many deficiencies as a person and a would-be President.

Eight years ago, at the dawn of what historians will call the Age of Trump in American politics, the outgoing President, Barack Obama, famously insisted that “this is not the apocalypse.” Privately, he summed up what would become the conventional view in Washington. Four years of Trump would be bad but survivable—the nation, he told a group of journalists just a few days before Trump’s Inauguration, was like a leaky boat, taking on water but hopefully still sturdy enough to stay afloat. Two terms of Trump, he warned, would be another matter entirely.

Four years later, after Joe Biden defeated Trump, Democrats and the dwindling ranks of anti-Trump Republicans made the fatal miscalculation of thinking that it was Trump who had sunk. Too many of them were sure that the hubris and folly of his reluctant exit from the Presidency had destroyed him politically. They saw him as nothing more than a sideshow—a malevolent figure in his Mar-a-Lago exile, but nonetheless a disgraced loser with no prospect of returning to power.

They were wrong. Rule No. 1 in politics is never underestimate your enemy. Trump’s enemies hungered for a reckoning, for Trump to pay a price, legally and politically, for the damage that he had wreaked on American democracy. Instead, Trump has now achieved an unthinkable resurrection. Even his four criminal indictments have served only to revive and reinvigorate his hold on the Republican Party, which is now centered more than ever on the personality and the grievances of one man. Almost sixty-three million Americans voted for Trump in 2016; more than seventy-four million cast their ballots for him in 2020. In 2024, it’s even possible, as votes are being counted overnight, that Trump might win the popular vote outright for the first time in his three races. With such backing, Trump, the first President since Grover Cleveland to be restored to the office that he lost, has vowed a second term of retribution and revenge. This time, shall we finally take him seriously?

President Biden will receive much of the blame for this catastrophic outcome—by refusing to step aside when he should have, the eighty-one-year-old President, who rationalized his entire candidacy four years ago on the existential need to keep Trump out of the Oval Office, will have contributed greatly to Trump’s return. Biden’s reckless insistence on running again despite the visible signs of his aging may well have been the 2024 campaign’s most consequential decision. When he finally bowed out, in late July, after a disastrous debate performance with Trump, was it already too late? This will be a hypothetical for the ages. Politicians from both parties make unfulfillable promises to the American electorate all the time. But the implicit premise of Biden’s candidacy might have been one of the most sadly impossible campaign pledges ever—as it turned out, there was to be no restoration of normalcy, no return to a pre-Trump America.

Harris moved swiftly and largely successfully to replace Biden on the Democratic ticket. She ran a polished if late-starting campaign during the subsequent hundred and seven days—a brief dash to Election Day more customary for a parliamentary election in Britain than for the years-long slog of endless politicking which Americans require of their candidates. But Harris, despite four years as Vice-President, had little national identity or constituency to fall back on. She was embraced by her party, thrown a rollicking, celebrity-studded Convention in Chicago, and cheered after her trouncing of Trump in their one and only debate, in September, but the net effect of her rise was to return the race to where it was before Biden’s implosion: deadlock.

In the weeks before the election, poll after poll in the seven battleground states found a contest within the margin of error. Pennsylvania and Nevada were a dead heat in the final Five Thirty Eight polling averages; Michigan and Wisconsin finished with a single-point advantage for Harris; and Arizona and Georgia showed a slight edge for Trump. Even that, in retrospect, turned out to be overly optimistic for Harris, who was losing, narrowly but decisively, in all of the battleground states at the time that the election was called. Her defeat in Pennsylvania—long considered her must-win bulwark—will probably lead to years of second-guessing her decision to bypass the state’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, as her Vice-Presidential running mate, in favor of Tim Walz, the governor of safely Democratic Minnesota. But, given her across-the-board defeat, perhaps it would not have mattered.

Harris now becomes one of a long line of incumbent Vice-Presidents who tried and failed to secure a promotion; her difficulty in separating herself from the liabilities of Biden’s record has proved why only one sitting No. 2, George H. W. Bush, has been elected to the Presidency since Martin Van Buren did so, in 1836. Too many voters appeared to have seen Harris as effectively the incumbent President in the race—at a time when large majorities of Americans report dissatisfaction with the direction of the country. This, according to Doug Sosnik, the White House political director for President Bill Clinton, is why ten of the twelve elections leading up to this one have resulted in a change of control in the House, the Senate, and/or the White House.

Trump’s victory, in that sense, was a predictable outcome for a Republican nominee, perhaps even the expected one. And yet what a leap of unthinking partisanship and collective amnesia it has taken for his party to embrace this twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, once-convicted con man from New York. Trump in 2024 was no regular G.O.P. candidate. He was an outlier in every possible way. In 2016, perhaps it was conceivable for voters upset with the status quo to see Trump, a celebrity businessman, as the outsider who would finally shake things up in Washington. But this is the post-2020 Trump—an older, angrier, more profane Trump, who demanded that his followers embrace his big lie about the last election and whose campaign will go down as one of the most racist, sexist, and xenophobic in modern history. His slogan is now openly the stuff of strongmen—Trump alone can fix it—and he will return to office unconstrained by the establishment Republicans who challenged him on Capitol Hill and from inside his own Cabinet. Many of those figures refused to endorse Trump, including his own Vice-President, Mike Pence. Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, the retired four-star marine general John Kelly, told the Times during the campaign that Trump met the literal definition of a “fascist,” and yet even that was not enough to deter the enablers and facilitators in the Republican Party who voted for Trump.

The new gang surrounding Trump will have few of Kelly’s qualms. He will make sure of that. One of the main lessons that Trump took from his Presidency was about the power of the staff surrounding him; his son-in-law Jared Kushner left the White House concluding that poor personnel decisions represented the biggest problem for their Administration. Soon after Trump left office, I interviewed a senior national-security official who spent extensive time with him in the Oval Office. The official warned me that a second Trump term would be far more dangerous than his first term, specifically because he had learned how better to get his way—he was, the official said, like the velociraptors in the first “Jurassic Park” movie, who proved capable of learning while hunting their prey. Already, one of Trump’s transition chairs, the billionaire Howard Lutnick, has said publicly that jobs in a new Administration will go only to those who pledge loyalty to Trump himself. Having beaten off impeachment twice, this second-term Trump will have little to fear from Congress reining him in, either, especially now that Republicans have managed to retake control of the Senate. And the Supreme Court, with its far-right majority solidified thanks to three Trump-appointed Justices, has recently granted the Presidency near-total immunity in a case brought by Trump seeking to quash the post-January 6th cases against him.

Throughout this campaign, Trump has been deliberately coy about his extreme and radical agenda for a second term. He disavowed Project 2025, the nine-hundred-page governing blueprint spearheaded by an array of his former advisers, eschewing the specifics that might have turned off voters in swing states. Trump said, for example, that he was no longer in favor of a national abortion ban, despite pledging to sign a twenty-week ban when he was in office the first time. Project 2025, if Trump were to adopt its proposals as his own, includes an extensive menu of ways to further restrict women’s access to abortion, contraception, and reproductive-health services.

But the agenda that Trump has publicly committed himself to is cause enough for grave alarm. He has said that he will begin “mass deportations” of undocumented migrants as soon as his new term begins; that he will be a dictator for a day when he is sworn in, on January 20th; that he will pardon the thousands of January 6th “hostages” who stormed the U.S. Capitol, in 2021, on his behalf; and that he will go after his opponents, the political “enemy from within,” deploying the U.S. military to quell domestic disturbances and even suggesting that Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who dared to challenge him while wearing America’s uniform, was guilty of treason and deserving of execution. It is not inconceivable that Trump will move quickly to follow through on earlier threats to fire independent officials, including two of his own appointees whom he later turned on—the F.B.I. director Christopher Wray and Jay Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Even before his Inauguration, Trump’s victory will shake alliances and embolden autocrats around the world. What power will nato’s Article 5 guarantee of mutual defense hold with an American President who has publicly said that, as far as he is concerned, Russia can do whatever it wants to nato members who do not, in Trump’s view, pay their fair share? And what about embattled Ukraine, whose ability to fight on against Russia has been sustained by billions of dollars in U.S. military aid that Trump opposed? Trump has promised he can end the war in twenty-four hours—how will he do that, other than to pressure Ukraine to cede its stolen territory to Russia in exchange for peace on Vladimir Putin’s terms?

On the economy, many Trump voters seemed to have believed his promise to restore the greatest economy in the history of the world—though it never was. Independent experts believe that his vows to enact sweeping tariffs on goods from other countries and to deport immigrants will likely result not in a boom but in an inflationary, deficit-busting spiral that will make those same voters nostalgic for the Biden-era price hikes that contributed to Trump’s return to power. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, spent more than a hundred million dollars helping to elect Trump and promoting his lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories on his social-media site, X; what, now, can we expect as Musk, a major government contractor through his SpaceX venture, seeks to collect on his investment? Even before announcing that he planned to make Musk his unofficial “Secretary of Cost Cutting,” Trump already had plans to oust vast numbers of nonpartisan federal employees by executive order and replace them with political appointees—a move he attempted just before his defeat, in 2020, but which was swiftly overturned when Biden took office. All of it portends a deeply destabilizing period for the country and the world, which is still highly dependent on American power and leadership. And it is likely to happen with a swiftness that may stun Trump’s opponents.

At Harris’s rallies, her audiences during these past hundred and seven days would chant her slogan, “We’re not going back!” But, it turns out, we are. Harris fell short. Americans, at least enough of them to tilt the outcome, chose Trump’s retrograde appeal. The question now is a different one: not if we are going back but how far? ♦︎

Stephen Hatchett

I know I'm hardly alone.  The feeling of grief is almost overwhelming.  Partly it is, as I saw one commenter put it yesterday, a feeling of "abandonment by my countrymen".  Lies and huge money have succeeded in seizing power with the intent to do evil -- for really no other reason than to feed the ravenous quest for more money or more ego gratification.  How could so many have just failed to see what is so obvious to me?  Or have just failed to care about it enough? Or were just too bigotted.

No one was ever persuaded by being called a fool or otherwise put down; it just backs that person into a corner. Harris, bless her, didn't,  and I should not do that now.  Time will tell.

Meanwhile I will re-up-up my support for the ACLU (proud card-carrying member since 1967) and support my congresspeople. They are good folks.

Glad to be in California.

Jack Mallory

Steven and I have both turned to the ACLU as an organization most likely to be relevant to our concerns under the incoming administration, as dissent, even democracy itself, become categorized as the enemy from within. Here is some info about the ACLU's focus and activities. 
 

I just set up a recurring monthly donation. 

If you're interested in ways to contribute, time or money, here's a starter link. We may not be able to fix stupid, but we can work together to protect Americans from a demagogue.

https://www.aclu.org/action
 

Jack Mallory

Well, his first failed campaign promise. 

“Trump has more than once promised to end Russia's war on Ukraine before he's inaugurated. 

“‘That is a war that's dying to be settled. I will get it settled before I even become president,' Trump said in the September presidential debate against Harris. 

“He has also said in a May 2023 CNN town hall that he'd end the conflict 'in 24 hours.’” 
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-harris-campaign-promises-2024-election/

Been well over 24 hours since Harris conceded.

BTW, re: unfulfilled campaign promises--now that he's been reelected will Mexico be paying to build the wall?

Joanie Bender (Grosfeld)

Thanks Stephen and Jack for your very good posts. I know many of us are heartbroken for what could have been, an inclusive country and more work on climate and support for Ukraine and NATO to name just a few.  
well I like that the ACLU is out there. We are now the peaceful but forcefull resistance movement.  I'm sad the majority would vote for a fascist and racist but some thought the economy would be better.  Trumps economic plans are not to benefit everyday Americans.  Oh well.  At least we have each other.  Love, Joanie❤️

Jack Mallory

More post election analysis from just plain folks. From my old Vietnam Veterans Against the War buddy the Right Reverend (or however United Methodist Clergy title themselves) Jackson Day. I add his affiliation for those who think it might suggest divine guidance in his thoughts. 

”This will be my first venture into post-election analysis:
"1.  The Democrats are blaming each other for all kinds of things, but they STILL don't get what I think drove the election:  the economy.  

"2.  To the Democrats, the economy means employment statistics and the stock market, which were doing great.  But 65% of American families have family income under $100,000 and the same percentage have no stake in the stock market.  For the majority of Americans, how the economy is doing means what's happening to the price of a dozen eggs in the supermarket.  Until the Democrats realize this, they will stay out in the wilderness.

"3.  The party of Trump capitalized on this.  "Make America Great Again" does mean, for some people, make America White again, make America straight again, etc.  But I think a large driver is "Make eggs affordable again."  

"4.  When the party of Trump tries to govern, they'll discover that a lot of their promises are inflationary.  Putting high tariffs on imports will raise the prices of the imports and things made of the imports. Reducing taxes without reducing government spending will mean that the dollar gets worth less.  It will also mean more dollars in the hands of consumers, but the same amount of good to buy, which will raise the price of goods.  Deporting immigrants will raise the price of agricultural products that the immigrants were helping harvest.  It will also cost money.  Basically everything the Party of Trump has promised will raise the price of eggs, and the people who voted for him will turn against him.

"Full disclosure:  I am not an economist.  I took a course in Economics in college.  'A little knowledge is a dangerous thing....'"

I think he's right in his metaphorical focus on the price of eggs in the election results, and the likely outcome of Trump's policies, when he figures them out. I will echo Jack's full disclosure, however: I too took an Econ class in college. Got a D in it. 

Catherine Owen

I thoight David Brooks' column in the NYT made some interesting points about what amounted to class differences between Democrats and Republicans. 

Jack Mallory

Catherine, I thought Brooks made the most  sense when he speculated: 

"My initial thought is that I have to re-examine my own priors. I’m a moderate. I like it when Democratic candidates run to the center. But I have to confess that Harris did that pretty effectively and it didn’t work. Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable."

Here's the link for other folks: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/opinion/trump-elites-working-class.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I did get a chuckle when Brooks claimed that "Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet." The image of Trump as a participant in class war on the side of the working class must be spinning Karl in his grave!

Joan Ruggles (Young)

This loss is personal for me. My son who just this morning landed in Baku Azerbaijan for the COP29 conference (UN Climate Change Conference) is Chief of Staff for the US Special Envoy for Climate Change. The next 2 weeks he has the difficult job of trying to explain to the other members from nearly 200 countries, that appearances to the contrary, the US will still be involved in trying to mitigate climate change. It’s going to be a pretty hard sell. In January 2017, Trump closed our Climate Change office and withdrew from the Paris Accord. He will certainly do it again and my son and 22 of his colleagues will be fired. 

What’s worse, DT will withdraw from the world, he will withdraw from any climate change efforts and has promised to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act which provides incentives for wind and solar energy, electric vehicle production and other clean energy projects. This will kill 343,000 jobs including those in electric vehicle plants in Georgia and South Carolina. 

“Promises made promises kept” as DT says.

“America” (whatever that means in quotes as per Mr Smeby) did not win. We all lost.

Jack Mallory

Joan, it's encouraging to remember that although Nixon was also elected twice, he was forced from office in disgrace by both Democrats and Republicans the second time around. This would require the Republican Party to regain its sense of decency and respect for the Constituton a second time around.

Jay Shackford

Democrats and the Case of 

Mistaken Identity Politics

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist, The New York Times, reporting from Washington

November 9, 2024

Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.

Donald Trump won a majority of white women and remarkable numbers of Black and Latino voters and young men.

Democratic insiders thought people would vote for Kamala Harris, even if they didn’t like her, to get rid of Trump. But more people ended up voting for Trump, even though many didn’t like him, because they liked the Democratic Party less.

I have often talked about how my dad stayed up all night on the night Harry Truman was elected because he was so excited. And my brother stayed up all night the first time Trump was elected because he was so excited. And I felt that Democrats would never recover that kind of excitement until they could figure out why they had turned off so many working-class voters over the decades, and why they had developed such disdain toward their once loyal base.

Democratic candidates have often been avatars of elitism — Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and second-term Barack Obama. The party embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like “Latinx,” and “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, People of Color).

This alienated half the country, or more. And the chaos and antisemitism at many college campuses certainly didn’t help.

“When the woke police come at you,” Rahm Emanuel told me, “you don’t even get your Miranda rights read to you.”

There were a lot of Democrats “barking,” people who “don’t represent anybody,” he said, and “the leadership of the party was intimidated.”

Donald Trump played to the irritation of many Americans disgusted at being regarded as insensitive for talking the way they’d always talked. At rallies, he referred to women as “beautiful” and then pretended to admonish himself, saying he’d get in trouble for using that word. He’d also call women “darling” and joke that he had to be careful because his political career could be at risk.

One thing that makes Democrats great is that they unabashedly support groups that have suffered from inequality. But they have to begin avoiding extreme policies that alienate many Americans who would otherwise be drawn to the party.

Democrats learned the hard way in this election that mothers care both about abortion rights and having their daughters compete fairly and safely on the playing field.

A revealing chart that ran in The Financial Times showed that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion. White progressives think at higher rates than Hispanic and Black Americans that “racism is built into our society.” Many more Black and Hispanic Americans surveyed, compared with white progressives, responded that “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Gobsmacked Democrats have reacted to the wipeout in different ways. Some think Kamala did not court the left enough, touting trans rights and repudiating Israel.

Other Democrats feel the opposite, calling on the party to reimagine itself.

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a vulnerable Democrat in a red congressional district in Washington, narrowly held her seat. The 36-year-old mother of a toddler and owner of an auto shop told The Times’s Annie Karni that Democratic condescension has to go. “There’s not one weird trick that’s going to fix the Democratic Party,” she said. “It is going to take parents of young kids, people in rural communities, people in the trades running for office and being taken seriously.”

Representative Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said the party needs rebranding. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone,” he said. “I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

On CNN, the Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky said that Democrats did not know how to talk to normal Americans.

Addressing Latinos as “Latinx” to be politically correct “makes them think that we don’t even live on the same planet as they do,” she said. “When we are too afraid to say that ‘Hey, college kids, if you’re trashing a campus of Columbia University because you aren’t happy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that that is unacceptable.’ But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we don’t know what to say.”

Kamala, a Democratic lawmaker told me, made the “colossal mistake” of running a billion-dollar campaign with celebrities like Beyoncé when many of the struggling working-class voters she wanted couldn’t even afford a ticket to a Beyoncé concert, much less a down payment on a home.

“I don’t think the average person said, ‘Kamala Harris gets what I’m going through,’” this Democrat said.

Kamala, who sprinted to the left in her 2020 Democratic primary campaign, tried to move toward the center for this election, making sure to say she’d shoot an intruder with her Glock. But it sounded tinny.

The Trump campaign’s most successful ad showed Kamala favoring tax-funded gender surgery for prisoners. Bill Clinton warned in vain that she should rebut it.

James Carville gave Kamala credit for not leaning into her gender and ethnicity. But he said the party had become enamored of “identitarianism” — a word he uses because he won’t say “woke” — radiating the repellent idea that “identity is more important than humanity.”

“We could never wash off the stench of it,” he said, calling “defund the police” “the three stupidest words in the English language.”

“It’s like when you get smoke on your clothes and you have to wash them again and again. Now people are running away from it like the devil runs away from holy water.”

Joan Ruggles (Young)

With all due respect Jack, we don't live in the same world we did when Nixon was president. Nixon was shamed out of office after pressure from fellow Republicans. There is no longer shame in this president and there is no longer a Republican party who would dare confront Trump. The Republican party is now the Trump party for probably the rest of our lives.

I just can't resolve my dismay and confusion about how over 60 million people in this country looked at a lying, rapist and convicted felon who is promising retribution, revenge and worse on our immigrant community, the press, political rivals and anyone else he doesn't take a liking to - those voters looked at him and said this is the best we've got. This is who we want our children to admire and emulate. This is who should lead the free world.

I don't know that country. I'm not a part of it. I don't feel like I belong here anymore. And I love this country. 

Jack Mallory

I agree, Joan, about the state of the Trump Party today. That's what I meant about the Republican Party needing to regain a sense of decency and respect for the Constitution.

What you are feeling is very much the sense of moral injury that some Vietnam veterans feel about the war. A society they had been raised in, trusted, looked to for moral context and guidance, appeared to have lost its basic moral instinct and sent us to war in a little country that posed no threat to us, or U.S. 

To resettle in that society we had to find an understanding of how WE as individuals had lost, or ignored, our own moral way in order to understand how our friends, relatives, and neighbors had done the same. If I could understand and forgive my own actions in choosing to go to Vietnam and my actions while there, I could understand and forgive those who sent me.

Similarly, if we can find a sense of empathy for those who perhaps are in situations of financial stress, have a sense of political powerlessness, of cultural displacement that we don't share and made political decisions accordingly we may be able to understand those choices. We need to be what MAGA dreads--WOKE to MAGA's own moral failings and their causes! Not approving, not accepting, but understanding their origins and context. Good luck, it ain't easy!

*******

Lest we take ourselves TOO seriously . . . Small pup in a big pile of leaves:

And this was not really Divine wrath after the votes were tallied, but clouds to the east reflecting the sun setting in the west: