I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.
-Doug J. Balloon (NYT Pitchbot)
This week's featured post is "Squirrel!"
This week everybody was talking about keeping the government open
It looks like House Republicans aren't eager to sacrifice themselves for Trump. Trump had been demanding that any deal to keep the government open include the Save Act, requiring proof of citizenship for a person to register to vote. It's not clear what real-world problem that was supposed to solve, since non-citizen voting is already illegal and there is no evidence that law has been ineffective. But it would reinforce among the MAGA faithful the false impression that non-citizens are voting Democratic in large numbers. That, in turn, might set up all sorts of shenanigans should Trump lose again in November. Wednesday, he posted this on Truth Social:
If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form. Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak – They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. Only American Citizens should be voting in our Most Important Election in History, or any Election!
Wednesday, however, Speaker Johnson was unable to pass such a resolution in the House, leaving him with no negotiating leverage against the Senate, where the Save Act is a non-starter. So yesterday he agreed to a clean continuing resolution that funds the government through December.
and attacks in Lebanon
Israel shifted its attention from Hamas to Hezbollah this week, with airstrikes on Lebanon and a sci-fi-like attack using exploding pagers.
and Mark Robinson
It's time for another round of Republican limbo: North Carolina candidate for governor Mark Robinson just set the bar lower than ever, and the GOP continues to contort its moral standards to pass under it with him.
So CNN found a bunch of messages Robinson posted to a message board on the porn site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012. (I haven't seen them, but I am told many include disgusting images.) In the printable ones, he proclaimed himself a "black NAZI" and advocated bringing slavery back, saying "Some people need to be slaves."
Robinson denies he posted those messages, but CNN has pretty good evidence it's him. If he's being framed, somebody must have started building the frame back in 2008, when Robinson was not a public figure.
Robinson was already trailing Democrat Josh Stein by 9.4%, largely because of his penchant for ridiculously inflammatory statements, like comparing transpeople to "maggots" and "flies", telling them to "find a corner outside somewhere" rather than use a gendered bathroom, and saying that "Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down." The posts on Nude Africa are shocking at one level, but on another level they sound like him. Whatever he says, he says bigly. David French puts it like this:
No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.
In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.
In the pre-Trump era, something like the Nude Africa posts would have been immediately disqualifying, and members of his own party would be demanding that Robinson leave the race. But the GOP is standing by him, because the only standard the Party has these days is loyalty to Trump, who hasn't rescinded his ringing endorsements, like when he called Robinson "Martin Luther King on steroids".
Instead, Trump is pretending Robinson doesn't exist. Robinson was neither invited nor mentioned at Trump's rally in North Carolina Saturday. But Robinson's staff is running away en masse.
Chris Christie connects Robinson to past MAGA losers like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and Hershel Walker in Georgia:
This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we're going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us.
French thinks Trump's damage to his party goes further:
In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.
and the race
Since my state-of-the-race post last week, the national polls haven't changed much: from Harris +2.7 to Harris +2.6 in the 538 average, and Harris +1.8 to Harris +2.2 in RCP. Some of the state polls look better, particularly Pennsylvania, which went from Harris +0.6 to Harris +1.3.
Trump's response to the Harris townhall Oprah did:
When I watched her interview yesterday with a woman who is destroying, through her complete and total incompetence, America, I couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah
It's hard to tell whether "not the real Oprah" is supposed to be metaphoric or whether he thinks she's physically been replaced.
Heather Cox Richardson looks at the history of the Electoral College, and the persistent advantage it gives Republicans. Unlike some historians, she doesn't attribute the origin of the EC to pro-slavery interests, but she believes pro-slavery interests made it impossible to eliminate in the 1830s. I hadn't realized that the winner-take-all provision for each state's electoral votes (other than Nebraska and Maine) wasn't part of the Founders' original vision.
and Trump's armed stalker
It's fascinating to me how quickly the second Trump "assassination attempt" story has come and gone, except inside the MAGA information silos.
One factor is how much less the story turned out to be than the first announcement -- that shots had been fired on a course where Trump was golfing. It turned out the shots had been fired by Secret Service agents at a guy hiding in the bushes with a rifle, who never got a good look at Trump. Without the agents' intervention, it might have turned into an assassination attempt. (So the Deep State saves the day again!) But all it really amounted to was an armed stalking.
And then there were the unnecessary conspiracy theories. Like: Trump's round of golf wasn't on his schedule, so how could the would-be assassin have known? It must have been an inside job! Well, cellphone records say he had been waiting in the woods for 12 hours. If you're looking for Trump, pick out a day when he's not campaigning and stake out his golf course. How much inside knowledge does that take?
Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail.
Then there was how quickly Trump moved to take advantage of the incident. A bunch of social media criticism went something like: "The first thing I do when someone tries to kill me is send out a fund-raising email."
MAGA World's attempts to "connect the dots" with the assassination attempt in Butler in July and from there link to Harris or Biden or the Deep State or some mysterious "they" were implausibly vacuous.
They are going to keep trying to kill Trump. This is only beginning. This stops only when we win in November.
The Butler guy was a conservative gun-nut who wanted to kill somebody important. Trump appears to have been a target of opportunity. Trump's golf-course stalker is more plausibly motivated by politics, but we don't yet know how. Neither appears to have any Biden/Harris connection.
Apparently the stalker did intend to assassinate Trump, but his motives don't sound like they were lifted from any Democrat's speeches.
Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled,” the letter says.
Republicans blaming Democratic rhetoric and calling for them to "tone it down" are just laughable, when Trump continues to call Harris a Communist and say at every rally that Harris and Biden are "destroying our country". Here, in one sentence, he calls out inflammatory Democratic rhetoric while using his own:
Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country.
Trump has never once addressed the death threats his fans make against anybody who gets in his way: Judges Merchan and Chutkan, DAs Fani Willis and Alan Bragg, election workers like Shaye Moss. And he promises to pardon those convicted for committing violence in his name.
Vance complains that Democrats (truthfully) labeling Trump a "threat to democracy" is "going to get somebody killed", but then goes on to lie about Haitians eating people's cats.
It's not working for them.
and how the media covers Trump
NYT reporter Maggie Haberman was interviewed on NPR Thursday, and showed real cluelessness about why her newspaper in particular and the media in general are being criticized.
I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. ... I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally - they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don't really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly - and the media is not a monolith. It's not a league. But this industry that exists to do that - I don't see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That's been very confusing to me. ... I'm talking about criticism on the left.
James Fallows responded on X by suggesting someone at the Times address the specific criticisms people are making: like why Biden's cognitive issues got highlighted while Trump's are ignored, and "Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot".
This drew the satirical NYT Pitchbot into the discussion, which Jonathan Chait slammed as a "hacky, tin-eared comedy account". That caused the Pitchbot's author to drop his comedy mask and engage, making some very good points.
I don't think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there's been no coverage of Trump's dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden's age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. [The press has refused to publish the Trump emails Iran hacked.] That's a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It's that simple. It doesn't mean that the Times hasn't taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That's how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.
I'll add my two cents: The media in general, the NYT, and Haberman in particular have been doing a bad job covering Trump. They've been applying lower standards to him, for example, often covering what-he-meant rather than what-he-said, when they refused to give Biden that consideration. Lots of serious journalists like Fallows have noticed, as well as humorists like the creator of the NYT Pitchbot. It takes real arrogance to lump together the people who notice your failings and dismiss them as "an industry dedicated to attacking the media".
and you also might be interested in ...
The Federal Reserve finally has started cutting interest rates, signalling that it believes inflation is no longer a major threat to the economy.
In Brazil, Elon Musk and his X social media platform have been fighting the law. The Guardian reports: "The law appears to have won."
The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.
Musk had been resisting removing the accounts (basically for denying that former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro had lost his reelection bid) citing his commitment to free speech. However, he only seems to resist requests from liberal democratic governments. He has been much more cooperative with the governments of Turkey and India, the article notes.
If you want to dig into the nuts-and-bolts of creating a sustainable economy, particularly how that economy will generate and distribute electric power, you should be reading David Roberts' "Volts" blog on Substack. (Like most Substack blogs, Volts will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the content even if you don't.)
I don't quote Volts that often, usually because it delves deeper into the details than this blog ought to. But one recent post worth your while is his interview with Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden's Council of Economic Advisors and the chief economist for his Invest in America Cabinet. She's discussing the "$910 billion in announced investments all across the country in semiconductors, clean energy, manufacturing, batteries and EVs, bio-manufacturing, heavy industry, and clean power" that has come from the big bills Biden got passed before Republicans took over the House: the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS Act.
What I find interesting here is not so much the specifics as the public/private investment approach she describes. As she puts it: "Markets don't always deliver optimal outcomes. But, on the other hand, markets are amazing." Markets themselves are neither blind nor all-wise, but they do certain things very well. Government incentives should lay out the playing field, but private-sector players should play the game.
It seems to be working. The public investment capital is drawing in many times that much in private investment. New productive capacity is being built and jobs are being created -- many of them in the parts of the country that need jobs most. The public investments are not just in basic research -- a role Roberts notes that even many libertarians endorse -- but in opening the bottlenecks that keep research advances from being implemented.
Interestingly, this public money is turning into the exact opposite of patronage. By targeting areas that have suffered from disinvestment and job flight, the Biden administration has wound up channeling most of this investment money to Republican counties.
and let's close with something graphic
When I joined BlueSky, not that many people were on it yet. So the first people I followed were just about anybody I had heard of, like comic-book creator Kurt Busiek ("Astro City"). From there, by following people other people followed, I wound up with a social-media feed very different from what I see on X: odd and creative and whimsical.
That's how I discovered Sarah Andersen. Sarah's cartoons tend to be witchy, cat-oriented, and just slightly dark. I've been enjoying them.
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