James.galbraith

Arab Americans are one voting bloc that’s used to being slighted by both major parties. In 1984, Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate for president, returned donations made by Arab Americans; a campaign official at the time said it was the campaign’s policy to refuse contributions from that community. In 1988, Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis rejected an endorsement by an Arab American group. And in 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on banning Muslims from the country and claimed that Arabs in New Jersey cheered as the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11. 

Now, Arab Americans feel deliberately ignored and disrespected yet again. The Biden administration’s unflinching political and financial support for Israel — despite the rising death tolls and humanitarian crisis that the war in Gaza has wrought — has roiled the community, and the general lack of empathy the administration has shown for Palestinians has left a bitter taste in people’s mouths. 

When President Joe Biden dropped out and Vice President Kamala Harris became the party’s nominee, Democrats had a chance at a reset with a voting bloc that could very well tip the election. (Arab Americans make up hundreds of thousands of voters in key swing states.) But many feel the Harris campaign’s outreach to Arab Americans has been, to put it mildly, lackluster at best. 

“I was like, ‘All right, you have a blank slate, let’s see what you’re going to do with that,’” said Rowan Imran, a Palestinian American who lives in Phoenix. “That was very disappointing to see her dig her heels further in the ground and just uphold every single [Biden] policy … It was very clear that we’re just getting a different face with the same policies.”

As Harris rose to the top of the ticket, she had to find a delicate balance: distance herself enough from Biden to convince some voters she wouldn’t be the same as him on Gaza while still representing the US government’s policies as the sitting vice president. It’s a balance she never quite struck. At times, she criticized Israel’s actions that led to “far too many” civilian deaths and acknowledged the human toll in Gaza, but she would always couple those kinds of remarks with justifications for the war. Recently, after being asked about the prospect of losing Arab and Muslim voters because of Israel’s conduct, Harris said, “There are so many tragic stories coming from Gaza,” but that “the first and most tragic story is October 7.”

The numbers reflect a dissatisfaction with her approach: A recent poll showed Harris effectively tied with Trump among Arab Americans, leaving her nearly 20 points behind Biden’s numbers in 2020. Another poll showed Trump with a slight lead. 

Trump has been trying to take advantage of that. Earlier this week, for example, he tweeted that he would “stop the suffering and destruction in Lebanon,” referring to Israel’s escalating attacks in the region. He then directly appealed to Lebanese American voters by adding, “Your friends and family in Lebanon deserve to live in peace, prosperity, and harmony with their neighbors.” He also touted an endorsement he received from Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, a Muslim-majority city outside Detroit.

Given how close the election has been — with poll after poll showing a neck-and-neck race in swing states — it’s clear that Arab Americans, who make up a meaningful number of voters in must-win states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, can’t be taken for granted. And some liberals have been expressing frustration toward Arab American voters who refuse to vote for Harris, saying that Trump is worse for them because of policies like the Muslim ban. Harris echoed that frustration when she responded to pro-Palestinian protesters at a rally in August, telling them, “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that.”

But many Arab Americans are well aware of who Trump is and do resent the prospect of another Trump presidency. What they feel is that they’ve been pushed between a rock and a hard place.

A difficult choice

Some have dismissed Arab Americans’ concerns and potential protest votes as irresponsible, but the reality is much more complicated. Israel has been credibly accused of genocide, and if you’re a voter who genuinely believes that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide, then the choice next week might not be so easy: On the one hand, your vote can be used to hold the Biden administration accountable. On the other hand, it can be used to stop Trump’s assault on American democracy. And if you choose the latter, does voting for Harris mean that you’re giving the Biden administration a pass for its handling of Gaza?

Those are the kinds of questions haunting many liberal Arab Americans as they approach the voting booth. But democracy, the voters I spoke with argued, requires politicians to cater to the electorate, not the other way around.

Imran, a 35-year-old psychiatric nurse practitioner, had been a reliable Democratic voter. “I remember crying when Biden won and just feeling this sense of relief and, you know, someone that’s gonna reflect our values, be the voice of the people. And so that’s why a lot of this is so disappointing, because voting and supporting Kamala Harris, it should be a natural decision for me,” she said. “But because of the constant betrayal that we feel, the unconditional aid to Israel, the indifference to the lives of Palestinians, this has become the most complicated, impossible decision of my life.”

Imran is now planning to vote third party. And part of the reason that it’s been a difficult decision for her is because she acknowledges the dangers of a second Trump presidency. “We do not support a Trump presidency. We understand the dangers, the harm,” she said. But “people again feel abandoned, they feel betrayed. We’re seeing our leaders prioritize foreign interests over the lives of people who look like us. And that’s not something we can overlook. You know, votes are not just a given, they need to be earned.”

In her view, it’s not her personal responsibility to stop Trump; it’s Harris’s and the Democrats’. And if Trump has another go at the presidency, then it’s only the Democrats to blame, not the voters who defected. Choosing to sit out or vote third party is a way to remind the major parties that they aren’t doing enough.

Even those who might be voting for Harris have agonized over their decision, and some don’t even feel comfortable speaking about it because she was, after all, part of the administration that financed Israel’s war.

Asma, a 50-year-old medical professional in North Carolina, has voted in every election since she was 18. (Asma asked that Vox use only her first name so she can speak more freely.) And though she usually votes early, this time she’s still holding out in the hopes that she hears some commitment from Harris that she’ll deviate from Biden’s Israel policy. “I’m just looking for validation. I’m looking for basically Harris to do anything, something to show that she has some compassion or some interest in the views that Muslims hold,” Asma told me. 

But Harris never seemed to deliver. “We just wonder, what would she lose by being a little more inclusive in her humanity or her compassion or her empathy toward the Palestinians or toward Muslims?” Asma said. “When asked about Gaza, she doesn’t always have to talk about the October 7 hostages. Yes, we understand how you feel about that — you’ve made that plain and clear. Maybe you need to say something about the Palestinians and their plight, exclusive of [the hostages’] situation.”

Asma said the election has divided many in her community, with many people judging others for how they’re voting, and some saying that a vote for Harris is essentially a vote for genocide. But a lot of people, Asma said, would still prefer voting for Harris over Trump because they believe Trump would make the situation in Gaza even worse.

Still, some voters feel a certain level of guilt holding them back. If Gaza isn’t their red line, then what would be?

That’s how Houston Brown, a 33-year-old Atlanta resident, is thinking of his vote. “The most inconceivable thing you can think of is genocide. It’s horrific,” Brown, whose mother is Palestinian, said. “And if there are no consequences for that, there will be no consequences for anything.”

Brown was hopeful that Harris would distance herself from Biden on Gaza. And though he views her as more conservative than he’d prefer the Democratic candidate to be, he was still willing to vote for her, he said, because he doesn’t agree with any of Trump’s policies. “I would still vote for her regardless of that, regardless of my disagreements with her policies, if there was an arms embargo and a commitment to hold Israel accountable for what they’ve done,” he said.

Harris, of course, made no such commitment, and other moves by her campaign — such as refusing to give a speaking slot to a Palestinian American at the Democratic National Convention — made Brown feel like the vice president was not taking Gaza seriously. Now, Brown is likely going to vote third party, and if that means Trump might be back in the White House, that’s a risk Brown accepts. “The repercussions are what they are, and we’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” he said.

“I understand that it could be worse under Trump,” he added. “But 40,000 dead Palestinians isn’t any different than 40,000 dead Americans to me. And our policies have led to the murder of over 40,000 Palestinians.”

While Trump has tried to make appeals to disaffected Arab Americans, he’s also been saying he’d be even more supportive of Israel than Biden has been. Recently, Trump said that Benjamin Netanyahu was “doing a good job” and that Biden was, if anything, holding the Israeli prime minister back. Trump’s own record on Israel has also been bad for Palestinians. For example, he moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem — making the US officially recognize the city as Israel’s capital, despite the fact that East Jerusalem is still occupied Palestinian territory — and his State Department declared that the United States would no longer deem settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law.

But many voters who are sitting out or voting third party aren’t under the illusion that Trump is in any way a better alternative for Palestinians. For them, what’s happened in Gaza over the past year already constitutes the worst of outcomes: Israel has killed tens of thousands of innocent people, obliterated educational, religious, and health care infrastructure, created conditions for preventable diseases to spread, and targeted and killed journalists at an unprecedented rate.

“In no way do I imagine Trump is better for Palestine,” Brown said. But “I can’t imagine it worse. I don’t think the Democrats are doing anything to stop it — they’re actively supporting it. So if there’s no real change for Palestine, why would I reward the people who are doing this now?”

Where the Harris campaign goes from here

Arab Americans didn’t always lean toward Democrats. In 2000, Arab Americans predominantly voted for George W. Bush, and Republicans viewed them as a winnable demographic. But since the aftermath of 9/11 and the surveillance of Arabs and Muslims, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Republicans’ xenophobic and Islamophobic overtures to white voters, Arabs have steadily moved toward Democrats. In 2020, Biden won about 60 percent of the Arab American vote.

Democrats’ progress, however, seems to have all but evaporated. Now, there’s no question that there is a protest vote in the making among Arab Americans and others who, like Brown, feel like a vote for Harris is an endorsement of the status quo. Since the primaries, Democratic voters have organized around this issue, launching an “uncommitted” movement where hundreds of thousands of voters selected “uncommitted” instead of Biden during the Democratic primaries to register their discontent over his handling of Gaza.

The question is whether the protest vote will be big enough to swing the election in Trump’s favor.

“There is a ‘punish’ sense, and you hear that a lot, right? ‘We’re, we’re going to punish the Dems. They don’t deserve to win after what they’ve done,’” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “I think that’s a smaller number than one might be led to believe, but if it comes out to a tie as it is right now, those are a lot of votes Democrats will have left on the table … losing 60,000, 70,000 votes in Michigan — that’s a lot of votes to lose in the state that’s going to be close.”

Recently, Harris did address Arab Americans specifically and spoke more candidly about the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon that’s happening as a result of Israel’s assaults.

“I know this year has been very difficult given the scale of death and destruction in Gaza, and given the civilian casualties and displacement in Lebanon. It is devastating,” she said.

At this point, it might seem too little too late for Harris to change people’s minds. And for many Arab Americans and other supporters of the Palestinian cause, actions speak louder than words. And the lack of willingness on the part of the Biden administration to use the levers at its disposal to restrain Israel now leaves voters with a choice: take a unique opportunity to show that there can be electoral consequences for an administration facilitating the kind of war Israel has waged on Palestinians or help end Trump’s political career. But they can’t have both — at least not at the ballot box.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: If you've recently been laid off and have started the arduous process of looking for a new job, you've probably seen them on networking platforms like LinkedIn: postings for roles that are 30 days old, maybe more, with suspiciously wide salary ranges. They usually have hundreds, or even thousands, of hopeful applicants vying for the same position, but if you do a quick cross-check and notice that the role isn't posted on the company's actual website -- or any of their social media pages -- you should probably stop drafting that cover letter, because it's possible they're not hiring at all. "Ghost jobs," or ads for positions that aren't actually open, are a common phenomenon in the tech industry, which has been plagued by layoffs and budget cuts over recent years. As unemployed workers struggle to regain their footing, recruiters and career coaches who spoke with SFGATE warned that these fake jobs posted by real companies serve multiple, sometimes insidious purposes. According to a 2024 survey from MyPerfectResume, 81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled. While some respondents said employers did it to maintain a presence on job boards and build a talent pool, it's also used to commit psychological warfare: 25% said ghost jobs helped companies gauge how replaceable their employees were, while 23% said it helped make the company appear more stable during a hiring freeze. Another damning 2024 report from Resume Builder said that 62% companies posted them specifically to make their employees feel replaceable. They also made ads to "trick overworked employees" into believing that more people would be brought on to alleviate their overwhelming workload. After interviewing 1,641 hiring managers, Resume Builder researchers found that 40% of employers posted fake job listings in 2024, and that three in 10 currently had ghost jobs listed. The idea to post them mostly trickled down from HR, followed by senior management and executives, their June 2024 article continued. Though the listings were posted on multiple hiring platforms, the majority of them appeared on LinkedIn and the companies' websites. Evidence suggests this trend is taking hold throughout the Bay Area, too. A collaborative document circulating online reveals a growing list of employers accused of posting ghost jobs. Many of them, it turns out, are tech companies with offices based in California.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For the most part, Donald Trump has been mum on who he’d appoint to his administration if he wins.

But he has made one pretty clear promise: Trump has said he’ll let conspiracy theorist and vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health, food, and drug regulation. That could have massive consequences for public health and vaccine policy in America. If Kennedy were to completely get his way and deter vaccination, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles and polio could make a comeback.

Kennedy, who ended his third-party presidential run to endorse Trump in August, expects big things. He told supporters at a recent virtual event that Trump “promised” him “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others,” as well as the Department of Agriculture. Kennedy has also said he’d be “deeply involved in helping to choose the people” heading those agencies. 

Trump transition co-chair Howard Lutnick said Wednesday on CNN that Kennedy is “not getting a job” at the Department of Health and Human Services, but Lutnick voiced complete sympathy with Kennedy’s beliefs that vaccines cause autism. “I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr. and it was the most extraordinary thing,” Lutnick said, proceeding to say he believes in the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.

Though Trump has a muddled stance on the Covid-19 vaccines his administration approved, he’s long been a believer that childhood vaccines cause autism. He reiterated that belief in a call seeking Kennedy’s endorsement this summer (which was recorded and posted publicly by Kennedy’s son): Trump complained that babies now get too many vaccines and then “change radically.” He added: “I’ve seen it too many times.” 

It’s hard to make it clearer that Kennedy’s views would have deep sympathy at the top of Trump’s administration. In his first term, experts, scientists, and professionals remained in charge of such issues — hence the Covid vaccine development. But given the right-wing backlash against such experts that the pandemic brought, Trump’s second term could well be quite different. The risk that Kennedy would take a wrecking ball to public health regulation and especially vaccine policy is very real.

Tucker Carlson, appearing at an event with Kennedy this week, was positively gleeful about that prospect. “Can you imagine if you’re at FDA or NIH and Bobby Kennedy all of a sudden” came in, Carlson said, breaking off in laughter. “I mean, they must be dying!”

RFK probably couldn’t be confirmed by the Senate. He could exercise vast influence anyway.

Public health leaders, including some former GOP and Trump appointees, have been quite alarmed at the prospect of giving Kennedy sway over public health policy. Jerome Adams, who was Trump’s surgeon general in his first term, said Monday this “could further erode people’s willingness to get up to date with recommended vaccines” and that he was “worried” about the impact on Americans’ health.

Others have reacted with skepticism to the prospect of Kennedy getting a top agency job, pointing out that a post like HHS secretary requires Senate confirmation, a prospect that would seem unlikely even if the GOP regains control of the chamber. Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), the two most moderate Republican senators, serve on the committee that would consider that nomination.

Yet there is a model for how Kennedy could serve in government and exercise vast influence despite not being Senate-confirmed. Call it the Stephen Miller model. 

Miller, an extreme anti-immigration ideologue, served as a White House senior adviser (a job that doesn’t require Senate confirmation). But he exercised vast influence at federal agencies that handled immigration policy so much that he was dubbed “the president of immigration.” He berated agency officials to carry out his preferred policies and, when he felt some Trump appointees weren’t getting the job done, he engineered their ouster.

It is entirely possible that Trump could appoint Kennedy to a similar role if he wanted one. It’s far from clear whether Kennedy would prove as effective a bureaucratic operator as Miller, but he certainly matches Miller in obsessive monomania over his particular issue, having argued for two decades that vaccines cause autism, as a writer, an activist, and then as a political candidate. 

Another reason Miller had such influence is that it was believed throughout the Trump administration that he was speaking for Trump, that they had a “mind-meld” on immigration. And Trump’s comments have long made it clear he agrees with Kennedy on childhood vaccinations. 

Even if Kennedy does not officially join the government, he could still have a major impact on policy. If accurate, his claim that he’ll be “deeply involved” in Trump’s public health appointment decisions means he could choose like-minded allies to try and overhaul public health agencies.

The real question is whether Trump would stake political capital on what would surely be an intensely controversial overhaul of US vaccine policies. Despite his belief in the autism link, Trump simply didn’t choose to really do anything about it in his first term. If he were to win a second term, though, he would owe Kennedy for his support, and anti-vaccine sentiment has been rising on the right.

Perhaps the biggest mystery hanging over a potential Trump second term is just how out of control he has gotten since he left office. The Republican establishment would like to believe that, in practice, Trump will still heavily rely on them and appoint capable people rather than kooks to top posts. But perhaps Trump will feel less beholden to that establishment than ever and more willing to reward his extreme supporters. That’s certainly what Kennedy is betting on.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump hoped a garbage truck stunt Wednesday night would help shift the narrative away from his racist rally at Madison Square Garden that denigrated Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” and put it on President Joe Biden (who isn’t even running for president).

But instead, Trump left the media asking questions about his physical health after he nearly fell over while attempting to open the truck door. 

“Trump stumbles, drags his right leg, almost falls over, and tries at least three times to open the door,” MSNBC host Katie Phang wrote in a post on X. “Some transparency with Trump’s medical records would be nice.”

Ron Filipkowski, editor in chief of a media outlet that covers Trump’s bizarre behavior, has been pointing out for months that Trump has been dragging his right leg.

But Trump—who at 78 would be the oldest person ever elected president—has refused to release his medical records.

"This dude's nearly 80 years old. He damn near killed himself getting into a garbage truck," Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz said Thursday in Philadelphia.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who released her medical records on Oct. 12, has questioned what Trump is hiding by not releasing his own.

“One must question: Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?” Harris said at a campaign rally in North Carolina earlier this month.

 

It's not just Trump’s physical health that's in decline, but his cognitive ability too.

In October, The New York Times published an analysis of Trump’s speeches, finding that Trump has “seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately.” 

From the Times piece:

He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical. He voices outlandish claims that seem to be made up out of whole cloth. He digresses into bizarre tangents about golf, about sharks, about his own “beautiful” body. He relishes “a great day in Louisiana” after spending the day in Georgia. He expresses fear that North Korea is “trying to kill me” when he presumably means Iran. As late as last month, Mr. Trump was still speaking as if he were running against President Biden, five weeks after his withdrawal from the race.

More recently, Trump has been canceling events, with one of his aides reportedly telling podcast producers that he was too exhausted for an interview. 

It led the Las Vegas Sun, a newspaper in the critical swing state of Nevada, to write an editorial titled: “Donald Trump’s cognitive decline becoming a troubling concern”

“There is an unsettling and undeniable shift that is leading many experts, observers and even some Trump supporters to conclude that the former president’s mental acuity and sharpness are also in decline, that his physical health and stamina are waning and that his frustration and anger are boiling over,” the editorial says. 

The editorial continues: “He shambles about aimlessly, slurs his words and sometimes speaks gibberish. Always an effortless liar, now that his speeches are nothing more than a series of lies tangled in a mass inside his head, it appears he no longer even knows he’s lying.”

With his physical and mental health clearly in free fall, Trump is simply unfit to serve another four years. 

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Among the minority of Americans who support political violence, a large percentage of that group are reliant on conservative media, particularly Fox News. Those are the findings from PRRI’s 2024 American Values Survey of over 5,000 adults from across the United States.

Overall, only 18% of Americans said they would back political violence “because things have gotten so far off track.” But among those who were pro-violence, 41% were people who trust conservative news outlets. Of those who back violence, 30% said they trust Fox News the most as a source of information.

Support for violence was highest among Republicans, with 29% in favor. Among Democrats, only 8% said they would similarly back violence.

The bias in favor of violence reflects the rhetoric of Donald Trump, who has referred to Democrats and the left as an “enemy from within” while calling for a military response to dissent. Fox helped to launch Trump as a political figure and has used its daily coverage to continually boost his campaign and to attack Democrats.

The findings of the PRRI survey echo the recently released Civiqs poll for Daily Kos that showed an overwhelming majority (95%) of surveyed Fox News viewers who said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about fraud in the election. At the same time, multiple Republican candidates running for office this year have been pushing election fraud lies and conspiracies.

Fox News has promoted election myths throughout the 2024 campaign, feeding viewers with fresh material that these polls now show contributes to violent attitudes. The network has done so even after being forced to pay a near-$800 million settlement after it was sued for airing fraudulent election conspiracies about voting services firm Dominion Voting Systems.

Conservative MAGA activists have begun discussing their post-election plans for more Jan. 6-type attacks. “January 6th is going to be pretty fun,” one pro-Trump operative told CNN.

Whatever is to come, Fox News and their allies in conservative media played a key role in bringing the nation to this dark moment.

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Right-wing Republicans are up in arms over a new campaign ad that reminds women their vote is private and they do not need to vote for former President Donald Trump just because their husbands want them to.

"In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want, and no one will ever know," actress Julia Roberts narrates in the ad. "Remember, what happens in the booth, stays in the booth. Vote Harris-Walz."

Pastor Doug Pagitt, the executive director of Vote Common Good, the group that made the ad, told The Wall Street Journal that he often hears from evangelical women that they feel obligated to vote the same way as their husbands. This ad, he said, gives those women the permission structure to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The ad has Trump-supporting Republicans pissed.

Charlie Kirk, whose Turning Point USA organization is working on the turnout operation for Trump’s campaign, said it's horrible that women would “undermine their husbands” even though the husband “works his tail off to make sure that she can have a nice life.”

Fox News' Jesse Watters went even further, saying Wednesday night that he would consider it a form of cheating if his wife voted for Harris. 

“If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that's the same thing as having an affair,” Watters said of his wife, who at one point was his mistress during his first marriage.

After seeing the Julia Roberts ad, John McEntee, a former Trump White House aide and Project 2025 author joked that giving women the right to vote should be repealed. 

“This video has made me rethink the 19th Amendment,” McEntee said. 

Trump-supporting “Christian influencer” Dale Partridge explicitly said women must vote how their husbands tell them. “In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction. He is the head and they are one. Unity extends to politics. This is not controversial,” Partridge wrote on X.

The Republican rage that women would dare to vote Harris over Trump is yet another sign that they still do not understand that women are angry about Trump abortion bans across the country.

The Associated Press reported that women worried about reproductive freedom could swing the election to Harris in battleground states. Polling shows that women are supporting Harris by large margins, while men are backing Trump.

“In modern presidential politics, the gender gap has never been wider,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake and Republican pollster Amanda Iovino wrote in a joint New York Times op-ed published Wednesday. 

Democratic strategists added that the male reaction to the Julia Roberts spot is evidence that the ad needs to exist. 

“This type of sentiment is likely not new, but it's troubling that they're so willing to be out there with it,” Christina Reynolds, communications director of EMILY’s List, which backs female candidates who support abortion rights, wrote on X. “This is why we are reminding people their vote is private.”

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PICKLED

In 2016, Christy Lopez was an attorney at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division working on policing where, among other things, she led the team that investigated the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown. Lopez believes that her work spurred meaningful policing reforms, both in Ferguson and nationwide.

But as soon as Trump took over, things started changing fast. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply restricted the use of consent decrees — the legal tool Lopez and her colleagues used to force change in Ferguson. Lopez, who had left the Justice Department in 2017 to take a teaching job at Georgetown, could only watch from the outside as the work she took pride in was ground to a halt.

Today, she is sounding the alarm: Whatever the dangers of a first Trump term were, the risks of a second dwarf them.

“If Trump is elected, I would like to look back five years from now and say, ‘Oh, we were really alarmist,’” she told me.

“But I do worry that it’s actually going to be far worse.”

---

Many, many people have warned that Trump is a threat to American democracy. Many others have argued that these warnings are politically inert, that focusing on abstract concepts like “democracy” and “the rule of law” removes political debate from the concrete concerns people want addressed by government. Do people struggling to pay the bills have time to care about such matters of principle?

Yet in reality, the two things are inseparable. Trump’s plan to turn the government into a tool of his own personal will would have extraordinary consequences for Americans’ everyday lives. It would disrupt, or potentially even devastate, core functions of government that we’ve long taken for granted.

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a case in point.

Founded by the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the Division is tasked with enforcing federal law regarding anti-discrimination and civil equality. This is a mammoth responsibility, covering areas of law that shape the fundamental experience of American democracy. Its attorneys launch hate crimes prosecutions, investigate discrimination in employment and housing, and sue states when their voting rules run afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

If Trump returns to power, the department could easily be turned from a tool for protecting civil rights into a means of undoing them. Trump and his allies have laid out fairly specific plans for doing just that — plans that, if enacted, would mean a far more radical and methodical transformation of the federal rights civil apparatus than what we saw in Trump’s shambolic first term.

The department’s Voting Section — which played a critical role in defending the integrity of the 2020 election — would be twisted, its attorneys replaced with cronies working to validate Trump’s lies and shield Republican-controlled states from federal scrutiny. Its anti-discrimination litigators would be tasked with investigating “anti-white” discrimination, effectively turning the Civil Rights Act on the minority citizens it was written to defend. And Lopez’s former colleagues working on policing would not only let abusive cops skate, but potentially even investigate local law enforcement Trump believed weren’t aggressive enough toward alleged criminals.

We can see here that a second Trump administration would likely mean the inversion of the traditional purpose of federal civil rights law. Its guardrails against authoritarianism, discrimination, and abuse of power will be twisted toward advancing them.

And it’s just one of many ways in which Trump’s pursuit of power at any cost would have tangible and direct consequences for ordinary Americans’ lives.

Trump’s plan to invert the Civil Rights Division, explained

Trump has vowed to use a second term to enact “retribution” against his enemies.  The Justice Department, and specifically the current Civil Rights Division staff, are at the top of the list. 

At the end of Trump’s first term, he issued an executive order creating a new classification for civil service jobs — called Schedule F — that would have allowed him to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants and replace them with handpicked allies.

While Trump left office before his team could implement Schedule F, he has promised to reissue the order “immediately” upon returning to office. In anticipation, his allies have compiled long lists of civil servants they’d like to fire and loyalists they’d like to put in their place — preparations that have led one expert on federal administration to conclude that 50,000 firings is now “probably a floor rather than a ceiling.”

Trump’s allies have focused on the Civil Rights Division as one of their chief targets for Schedule F and other power grabs. Project 2025 — widely seen as the chief planning document for a Trump second term despite the campaign’s disavowals — has an explicit, detailed plan for taking it over. 

The document calls on the next Republican president to “reorganize and refocus” the division, aiming to make it into “the vanguard” of the administration’s crusade against “an unholy alliance of special interests, radicals in government, and the far Left.” It is one of three Department of Justice divisions singled out in the document’s call for “a vast expansion of the number of [political] appointees” overseeing and directing its conduct. 

This is all part of a broader plan for eroding the Justice Department’s traditional independence. While the attorney general is appointed by the president, their staff is given wide leeway to follow the law rather than the president’s dictates. Political personnel are strictly prohibited from interfering with specific investigations and cases. That’s why the current Justice Department could pursue a case against Hunter Biden with no fear of retaliation from his father.

Trump and top deputies have declared their intent to change this.

“The notion of an independent agency — whether that’s a flat-out independent agency like the FCC or an agency that has parts of it that view itself as independent, like the Department of Justice — we’re planting a flag and saying we reject that notion completely,” Russ Vought, a key second-term Trump planner, said in a 2023 interview.

When you put these three proposals together — seeding the Civil Rights Division with Trump political appointees, using Schedule F to replace career prosecutors with ideological allies, and ending department independence — the full picture becomes clear. If Trump has his way, a second term means a Civil Rights Division operating not as a (relatively) neutral division dedicated to enforcing civil rights law, but as a tool of the Trump agenda in all the areas it covers.

This is very threatening for government employees and obviously offensive to the notion of a neutral civil service. But what would this mean for most Americans in practice? What does it matter, really, if one bureaucrat is swapped out for another?

Election law politicized

On November 9, 2020, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s allegations of fraud in the just-concluded presidential election. 

The probe, announced after the election had been called for Joe Biden, was controversial inside the Department. It raised fears that Barr, no stranger to conspiracy theories about voter fraud, was trying to validate Trump’s claims of a stolen election. 

Yet the professional probe, staffed by veteran investigators in the Civil Rights Division and elsewhere, found no evidence of mass fraud. On November 23, Barr told Trump the investigation was “not panning out.” The neutral, competent investigation gave the attorney general the ammunition he needed to stand up to the president.

Now imagine if things were different, if these career investigators had been Schedule F’d out, replaced instead with Trump-aligned attorneys. 

What if they had come to Barr and said that, actually, the bogus statistical arguments that the election was stolen had merit? What would he have done then? How would reports of such findings, however bogus, influence the rest of the country — including Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress?

It’s an example that illustrates the importance of the Civil Rights Division. 

The American system is unusual, in global terms, by granting most power over election administration to state and local authorities. While this system makes it hard for the federal government to rig elections, it makes it comparatively easy for state-level officials to cheat and discriminate (Jim Crow being the signature example).

The Civil Rights Division’s election work is one of the primary checks on such abuses. It protects the right to vote, enforcing laws like the Voting Rights Act. It also works to protect the sanctity of the results after elections, identifying and investigating allegations of illegal conduct by state and local administrators during the voting process. 

Its main area of responsibility is allegations of discrimination, but it also regularly cooperates with other divisions in investigating other kinds of allegations like voting fraud (as happened in November 2020). While the Supreme Court has significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Division is still able to bring cases that matter.

In a second Trump term, this work could be turned on its head. Instead of trying to stop abuses at the state and local level, they might at best ignore them — and at worst try to force local officials to engage in them

The chapter of Project 2025 on the Justice Department, authored by former Trump DOJ official Gene Hamilton, sketches out how this would work in detail. It argues that Kathy Boockvar, who was Pennsylvania’s secretary of state in 2020, “should have been (and still should be) investigated and prosecuted” under a post-Civil War law called the Klan Act — designed, as you might guess, to break the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Boockvar’s crime, per Hamilton, was issuing a legal interpretation designed to address the unprecedented increase in mail-in ballots during the pandemic. She issued guidance to counties that if a provisional mail-in ballot were “spoiled” — meaning rendered defective through, for example, damage during the shipping process — that voters would have an opportunity to correct them. Hamilton calls this a “conspiracy against rights,” a crime laid out in the Klan Act. 

When I spoke to Justin Levitt, an election law expert and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division, he told me “it’s difficult to convey how crazy” such a case would be.

The Pennsylvania rule is, in his mind, a very reasonable interpretation of a constitutional obligation to avoid disenfranchising people over minor ballot issues. Even if Boockvar’s interpretation were dubious, nothing in the Klan Act suggests that the DOJ would be empowered to prosecute her for it (as the law simply doesn’t cover good-faith mistakes by elected officials trying to count more ballots).

“I know an awful lot of federal prosecutors [and] I don’t know one who would bring this case,” he tells me.

Hence why Schedule F is so important. It’s almost certain that no experienced Justice Department prosecutor would bring this case, be they Democrat or Republican, because they would recognize it’s an absurd reading of the law. But if Trump can put the Division under his thumb, inserting cronies in oversight positions and firing a huge swath of the career staff, he can get people like Hamilton in a position to do what they want.

Jake Grumbach, a political scientist who studies state-level voting laws, tells me that such politically motivated prosecutions of state officials is “the most dangerous thing” the Justice Department can do. 

Even the threat of a civil rights investigation can scare state-level administrators into compliance with what the feds want. A weaponized Justice Department would mean these officials would feel significant pressure to twist their election administration systems into whatever contorted shape Trump was calling for at the moment — with potentially devastating consequences for electoral fairness.

Civil wrongs

While voting rights law is an especially significant area of the Civil Rights Division’s work, it’s far from the only one. 

The Civil Rights Division’s raison d’etre, the entire point of it being a separate and distinct component of the federal government, is to enforce the modern consensus that discrimination on the basis of identity is a pervasive and systematic problem that requires significant federal resources to address.

Trump and his closest allies believe something more like the opposite, that federal civil rights law isn’t a solution to the problem of discrimination against minorities but an agent of discrimination against whites, men, and Christians. As such, they aim to flip the entire civil rights code on its head by using the Civil Rights Division as “the vanguard,” in Hamilton’s language.

“Anything [in law] can be weaponized,” says Kristy Parker, a former Civil Rights Division attorney who worked on policing. “That’s the problem.” 

Since the last Trump administration ended, top Trump aide Stephen Miller has worked with Hamilton at a new law firm — America First Legal — that focuses on “anti-white” discrimination in employment. 

America First filed a suit that successfully blocked a pandemic-era program to distribute financial aid to minority- and woman-owned restaurants. It sued the NFL over the Rooney Rule, which requires that teams interview at least one nonwhite candidate for high-level coaching vacancies, and it went after Northwestern University for allegedly prioritizing hires of minority and non-male faculty members.

In April, Axios’ Alex Thompson reported that America First was “laying legal groundwork” for a full-court press against “anti-white racism” in the event that Trump retakes control of the Civil Rights Division.

This is something that Hamilton explicitly calls for in his Project 2025 chapter. He writes:

The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.

In reality, what Hamilton calls “discrimination” are actually efforts to address discrimination. There is overwhelming evidence that American society continues to allocate resources unfairly on the basis of race. Without affirmative steps to rectify this situation, entrenched inequalities like the racial gap will never disappear. What Trump and his team call “anti-white discrimination” are efforts to close gaps between groups, not open them.

The Trump team aims to invert federal oversight over local prosecutors in a similar fashion.

In 2023, the campaign released a policy video in which Trump vows to task the Civil Rights Division with investigating “progressive prosecutors.” The basic argument is that these prosecutors, who see part of their mission as reducing the effects of mass incarceration on the Black community, are effectively engaging in race-based discrimination in favor of Black offenders.

“I will direct the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical left prosecutor’s offices, such as those in Chicago, LA, and San Francisco, to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based enforcement of the law,” Trump said.

Much like the attempt to prosecute Boockvar, trying to jail “progressive prosecutors” is not something the department’s professional staff would ordinarily contemplate doing. Even if Trump succeeded in replacing them via Schedule F, it’s hard to imagine any such investigation yielding charges that could stand up in court.

But the fact that such investigations would almost certainly fail to yield charges does not make them harmless. Even spurious investigations entail coercive measures — like subpoenas, searches, and audits — that can make it difficult for “progressive prosecutors” to do their jobs. 

There’s also a political aspect to the threat, as many of Trump’s proposed targets are in elected posts. Elected officials are generally responsive to threats to their reelection chances, and being a target of a DOJ civil rights probe looks really bad to prospective voters.

Consent decrees, the mechanism Lopez used to deal with bias in Ferguson, are one of the most powerful tools available to federal prosecutors for addressing bias in policing — and another target in a second Trump term.

The process begins with a fact-finding investigation, uncovering evidence of systematic use-of-force problems and/or racial discrimination. The next stage involves lengthy negotiations with police departments that culminate in a tangible and enforceable set of reform benchmarks for the department. If the benchmarks aren’t being met to the Civil Rights Division’s satisfaction, its attorneys can haul cops in front of a judge and demand answers.

The previous Trump administration limited their use going forward, but a second one might roll them back.

The Obama administration negotiated a historic number of consent decrees, but these are approaching their negotiated sunset dates. The Biden administration has tried to bargain with departments for extensions, as well as implement new ones, but police departments have been dragging their feet. Lopez believes they are anticipating the possibility of a Trump victory.

“Almost any jurisdiction that is currently negotiating a consent decree is going to wait to see what happens in November,” she says. 

If this delaying tactic works and Trump’s Civil Rights Division vacates consent decrees across the board, Lopez warns of aggressive police being unleashed across the country. Trump’s wild rhetoric about policing — his recent statement that cops should be permitted “one really violent day” to combat crime — would further encourage abuse.

The attorneys tasked with limiting police abuses would, in a second Trump administration, be responsible for encouraging them.

A government “for the people” — for now

As important as the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is, it is far from the totality of government work.

The Justice Department has eight other litigating departments beyond the Civil Rights Division, where attorneys prosecute everyone from terrorists to tax cheats. It has five separate police agencies, including the FBI and US Marshals Service. It oversees all federal prisons and studies federal criminal convictions to see if any merit presidential pardons. It has nine separate grantmaking authorities, which provide funding for local authorities supporting everything from assisting sex trafficking victims to encouraging innovation in local alternatives to policing.

The Department of Justice is one of 15 federal departments, each of which has its own diverse and important set of responsibilities. There are also important agencies separate from the department structure, like the CIA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

All of them perform critical work that contributes to the standard of living Americans have come to take for granted. This work depends on experienced, dedicated civil servants who know how to do the job, and all of it could be disrupted by Trump’s plans to give their jobs to partisan hacks.

Every day, the EPA works to monitor and address pollution poisoning our rivers and drinkable water. The Bureau of Labor Statistics churns out job numbers and other reports that the Fed and other places depend on to make good economic policy. US Citizenship and Immigration Services helps keep families together, approving permanent residency and citizenship applications for foreign spouses of American citizens. The Department of Energy manages America’s nuclear weapons and power plants, making sure we don’t experience a Fukushima or Chernobyl-level disaster.

Now imagine the people who know how to do this routine stuff are either thrown out of office or put under the thumbs of political commissars. That’s the danger here. 

Trump and his team have laid out their plans in detail, in official statements proposing a revival of Schedule F and semi-official documents like Project 2025. Even if you agree with many of their policy ideas, they need to be implemented competently and lawfully in order to work. Throughout history, in the United States and elsewhere, the imposition of political control on a civil service has been a recipe for incompetence and anti-democratic abuse.

The United States has a democratic government: a deeply flawed one, but one by the people and for the people. Trump’s plan is to make it for him and his alone, and he has a decent chance of succeeding if elected. We often take our relatively novel form of government for granted; if we lose it, we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Correction, November 1, 5:45 pm ET: This story misstated the timing of Christy Lopez’s decision to leave the Justice Department. She had announced her planned departure prior to Trump’s 2016 election win.

Joe Biden is no longer competent at speaking in public. This makes him a poor surrogate for Kamala Harris’s campaign, but he is also the president, and therefore an extremely prominent surrogate for the Democratic nominee. 

This generated a problem for Harris Tuesday night when Biden set out to criticize dehumanizing rhetoric at a recent Trump rally and ended up spouting a garbled stream of words that may or may not have dehumanized all Trump supporters as “garbage.”

Conservatives have thus expressed their collective horror at the spectacle of a US president disparaging Americans whose only sin was disagreeing with him politically. But even if one stipulates that Republicans’ tendentious reading of Biden is correct, their professed outrage is not merely hypocritical but perniciously misleading. 

At worst, the president disparaged conservative voters momentarily, before disavowing that sentiment in his very next breath. During his time in office, meanwhile, Biden has showered federal resources on heavily Republican parts of the country. Trump, by contrast, derides progressives and immigrants as “enemies” and “vermin” without apology, and reportedly sought to block disaster aid to Democratic strongholds. 

There is one candidate in the 2024 race who sees wide swaths of the American public as less than human, and it is not Kamala Harris. The furor over Biden’s disjointed remarks serves to obscure this reality.

Trump dehumanizes his political adversaries without apology or equivocation. Biden does not. 

On Sunday, at a rally for Trump at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hinchcliffe referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” During a video call with Latino supporters Tuesday night, Biden said of the incident:

And just the other day, a speaker at [Trump’s] rally called Puerto Rico a ‘floating island of garbage.’ Well, let me tell you something. I don’t — I — I don’t know the Puerto Rican that — that I know — or a Puerto Rico, where I’m fr— in my home state of Delaware, they’re good, decent, honorable people.

The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.

That is the official White House transcript of the remarks, at least. Republicans argue that what Biden actually said was, “the only garbage I see floating out there is his [i.e., Trump’s] supporters.” In other words, Biden says he was calling Hinchcliffe’s demonization of Puerto Rico garbage, while Republicans say he was calling all Trump supporters trash.

It is impossible to distinguish “supporter’s” from “supporters” by ear. So, it cannot be known with certainty what Biden intended in the moment that those words escaped his lips. The surrounding context, however, undercuts the GOP’s interpretation. Immediately after uttering his controversial statement, the president said the following:

Now, Trump has di— tried to divide the country based on race, ethnicity, anything that does harm, to take their eye off the ball about what the terrible things he’s done and will do. But Kamala Harris has fought for all Americans and will be a president for all of America.

It is possible that Biden intended to 1) deride all Trump supporters as “garbage,” and then 2) immediately tout Harris’s commitment to fighting for human trash. But that strikes me as unlikely, particularly since the president has never said anything like that before during his half-century in public life.

Whatever Biden intended though, it is indisputable that his very next sentences disavowed the idea that Republican voters are “garbage” whose interests should be ignored. And after his event was over, Biden insisted that his intention had merely been to describe Hinchcliffe’s rhetoric as “garbage.”

Trump, meanwhile, is unequivocal in his belief that Democrats constitute “enemies from within” who must be vanquished. 

On Fox News last weekend, Howard Kurtz told Trump that “enemies from within” is “a pretty ominous phrase, if you’re talking about other Americans.”

“I think it’s accurate,” Trump replied.

The Republican nominee has also suggested that some of these enemies might need to be “handled” by “the military,” likened his political opponents to “vermin,” and claimed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

Just last week, Trump described America as “a garbage can for the world,” arguing that other nations deposit their human refuse into the United States through immigration. 

Notably, Trump’s demonization of immigrants is not confined to those who lack legal status or even citizenship. He has baselessly accused legal US residents from Haiti of eating people’s pets and vowed to deport them. And he has described American citizens who came to this country through the diversity visa lottery as “horrendous” and “the worst of the worst.”

Trump did not feel compelled to disavow any of these statements after making them, nor to reassure the country that he wants to fight for every American. To the contrary, he is unabashedly committed to directing the power of the federal government against his political opponents and the millions of US residents whose presence in this country he abhors.

There isn’t the slightest equivalence between Biden’s rhetorical posture toward Republican voters and Trump’s toward Democrats and immigrants. And a similar gap surfaces when one examines each president’s actual governance.

Trump doesn’t just compare Americans he dislikes to garbage — he tries to treat them like it

During his time in office, Trump explicitly sought to aid Americans who’d voted for him while spurning those who dared to oppose him, multiple administration officials told Politico’s E&E News. 

As deadly wildfires ripped through California, Trump initially refused to approve disaster aid because the state had voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, according to Mark Harvey, his administration’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council. Harvey says that Trump only changed his mind after being shown vote totals demonstrating that there were more Trump supporters in Orange County, California, than in Iowa. 

Olivia Troye and Kevin Carroll, former homeland security officials in the Trump administration, both back up Harvey’s story.  

“Trump absolutely didn’t want to give aid to California or Puerto Rico purely for partisan politics — because they didn’t vote for him,” Carroll told The Guardian  earlier this month. Carroll went on to say that his former boss, then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, had to “twist Trump’s arm” to get him to release federal funding to those areas following the wildfires and Hurricane Maria, respectively.

Trump also withheld millions in wildfire aid from Washington in September 2020 because the state’s governor had criticized him, and the aid ultimately was not approved until Biden took office.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s memoir lends further credence to these claims. In 2019, after Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle, DeSantis asked then-President Trump to order the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to pay 100 percent of the state’s recovery costs, instead of 75 percent, as was customary.

According to DeSantis’s book, Trump replied, “They love me in the Panhandle.  I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?”

Trump proceeded to order FEMA to pay 100 percent of Florida’s recovery costs. And yet, just two months earlier, he threatened to veto legislation that would have extended the same courtesy to Puerto Rico. And his administration proceeded to withhold $20 billion in hurricane relief from the island for a protracted period of time, while Trump reportedly told Kelly and then-Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney that he did not want a “single dollar going to Puerto Rico.”

The Biden administration has shown no comparable favoritism. To the contrary, its response to Hurricane Helene — which ravaged many conservative communities on the East Coast — has earned plaudits from Republican officials. 

Meanwhile, Biden’s signature piece of legislation — the Inflation Reduction Act — has actually directed disproportionate funds to red states. And Biden has also directed considerable federal funds toward improving infrastructure in conservative-leaning rural areas. 

Trump supporters who profess outrage at Biden’s words are guilty of more than hypocrisy

In sum, one presidential candidate is associated with a man who might have once referred to Republican voters as garbage momentarily — before immediately disavowing that idea, and after dutifully advancing the interests of conservative regions during his time as president. That candidate herself, meanwhile, has said, “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for” and “I believe the work that I do is about representing all the people, whether they support me or not.”

The other presidential candidate has personally likened large swaths of the American public to “vermin” and “garbage” — repeatedly, and without apology — after seeking to choke off federal aid to Democratic victims of wildfires, and pledging to prosecute his political opponents the next chance he gets. 

Any public official who condemns Harris for somehow abetting the dehumanization of ordinary Americans is not merely guilty of hypocrisy, but of wildly misleading voters about an issue of vital importance: which presidential hopeful would — and would not — treat their least favorite segments of the American public like trash.

The Supreme Court issued a surprising order on Wednesday morning that allows Virginia’s Republican governor to openly defy a federal voting rights law. Though the Court didn’t announce how every justice voted in Beals v. Virginia Coalition for Immigrant Rights, only its three Democrats publicly dissented.

The GOP-controlled Court’s order is surprising because the federal law at issue in Beals, known as the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), is so clearly written. It prohibits states from “systematically” removing “the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” within 90 days of a primary, or general election for federal offices. Virginia began a purge of about 1,600 voters, who its top Republican officials claim are noncitizens, exactly 90 days before the upcoming election. (A federal court later determined that some of the purged voters were, in fact, citizens.)

Realistically, this purge is unlikely to change the result of any races this election. Virginia has consistently voted for Democrats at the presidential level since 2008, and it’s not even clear how many of the people caught in this purge are lawful voters who intended to cast a ballot. But the Court’s decision to back the purge could have tremendous national implications because it suggests that the justices will allow states to ignore the NVRA.

Previously, two lower federal courts ordered Virginia to abandon the purge, at least until after the election, and to restore the purged names to the state’s voter rolls. Wednesday’s order does not explain why the justices decided to reinstate this purge.

One reason why the case is worrisome, however, is that Virginia’s Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares made several arguments in defense of the purge that would effectively neutralize the NVRA’s 90-day pause on voter purges altogether. 

Because the Supreme Court did not explain its order in Beals, it is impossible to know whether a majority of the justices accepted Miyares’s most aggressive arguments. It is likely, however, that the Court will return to this case at a future date — the order in Beals is temporary and will likely only leave this purge in place during the current election cycle — and when the Court does so, it could potentially repeal an important voting rights law.

Virginia’s legal arguments would effectively repeal the ban on voter purges close to an election

Miyares made several arguments to justify reinstating the purge, some of which are less consequential than others. He claimed, for example, that the plaintiffs’ in this case — the Justice Department and an immigrants rights group — waited too long to file the lawsuit. This argument isn’t particularly persuasive, but it would at least leave the NVRA intact if the Court ruled in the Virginia GOP’s favor on this narrow procedural ground.

At least two of Miyares’s arguments, however, essentially asked the Supreme Court to repeal the ban on purges close to an election — or, at least, to render it unenforceable.

First, Miyares claimed that, by blocking Virginia’s purge, the lower federal courts that heard this case violated the Supreme Court’s decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006), a vague opinion warning federal judges to be cautious about altering a state’s election procedures close to an election. 

But as the trial judge who heard the Beals case explained, court decisions enforcing the federal ban on last-minute alterations to voter rolls “are always going to be close to elections” because disputes will only arise if changes are made in the three months immediately preceding Election Day. Indeed, a federal court cannot halt a purge that takes place outside of the 90-day window because such purges are lawful (provided they comply with all other provisions of federal law).

Purcell’s warning against altering election rules close to an election, moreover, does not derive from the Constitution or any statute. It is, instead, a pragmatic rule that the Supreme Court invented due to concerns that late-breaking changes to a state’s election law could “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.”

That matters because the Court held in United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative (2001) that these kinds of rootless, judge-made legal rules cannot overcome a federal statute. Courts, according to the decision, “cannot ‘ignore the judgment of Congress, deliberately expressed in legislation.’” So Congress’s decision to enact a ban that can only be enforced during the 90 days before an election should override the principles that drove the Court’s Purcell decision.

Additionally, Miyares claimed that the 90-day ban on voter purges does not apply to noncitizens. But this argument has no basis in statutory text. The NVRA applies that ban to any “systematic” attempt to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” Noncitizens are ineligible to vote, and therefore count as “ineligible voters.” There’s really no other plausible way to read this statute.

Nevertheless, Miyares did attempt to make a textual argument for why noncitizens are exempted from the statute, but that argument is difficult to parse. In his brief, Miyares pointed to an entirely different provision of the NVRA, which applies to voter “registrants.” He then argued that noncitizens do not qualify as “registrants.”

Having made this seemingly irrelevant argument, Miyares then made the logical leap that noncitizens do not count as “ineligible voters” because “only a ‘registrant’ can become a ‘voter’ in the first place.” But no one claims that noncitizens can become voters. Everyone agrees that noncitizens are ineligible to vote. That’s why they qualify as “ineligible voters.”

In any event, if the Supreme Court fully embraces this argument, it would also effectively neutralize the 90-day ban. Under Miyares’s approach, all a state would have to do to evade the 90-day ban is to claim that the voters it seeks to purge are noncitizens. If those voters turn out to be citizens, they may eventually restore their voting rights, but potentially not until the election has already passed.

Since the justices didn’t explain their initial decision in Beals, we will have to wait until a later date to find out if the Court’s Republican majority wants to kill the 90-day ban on voter purges entirely, or if they just wanted to protect Virginia’s purge during this one election cycle. 

With mere days left on the 2024 political campaign trail, you might have noticed the Trump camp has increasingly turned to scapegoating familiar targets, including immigrants, the press, and women. It has also increasingly doubled down on attacks on trans people. 

A recent report by ABC News revealed that nearly a third of recent campaign funds — or $21 million, per ABC’s report — for television advertising has been spent on transphobic messaging from the Trump campaign and various conservative political groups. The independent journalist collective the Bulwark pushed the total even higher, to $40 million poured into transphobic advertising within the last five weeks.

The ads, paid for by the Trump campaign, use a litany of transphobic coding, including photoshopping Kamala Harris to appear as though she’s posing beside a nonbinary person in a mustache and a dress, despite plenty of evidence that this strategy is a turn-off for voters. “Kamala even supports letting biological men compete against our girls in their sports,” one ad declares. All three ads attack Harris for supporting gender-affirmative care for trans prisoners, including surgery where medically necessary. 

“Kamala is for they/them,” each ad concludes. “President Trump is for you.”

Given that trans people make up barely half of 1 percent of the US adult population and that trans-related issues are low on the priority list of most voters, many might find it baffling that Trump has focused so much of his attention on singling out trans people. Indeed, two different media research groups, the left-leaning Data for Progress and video marketing firm Ground Media, working in partnership with GLAAD, each released studies last week finding that the ads had no real impact on voter decision-making and instead alienated many viewers, even among Republicans, who felt they were “mean-spirited.” 

So then why do them? Well, there’s “winning” in terms of appealing to voters, and then there’s “winning” in terms of determining the conversation. Keeping the focus on trans people — Harris’s actual policy proposals do almost nothing to advance the status of trans citizens — fires up a certain base and crowds out other discussion. 

But the fallout here isn’t voters distracted from the real issues. The fallout instead comes in an important detail from one of those aforementioned studies. Ground Media found that while the negative messaging didn’t change viewers’ minds about Kamala Harris, it did significantly increase viewers’ negativity about trans and nonbinary people across all demographics. 

In other words, these ads help to reinforce the idea of a common enemy. They are continuing — which is to say winning, in a very real sense — the larger ongoing culture war against queer and trans people. The willingness of Trump and his supporters to invest in these ads arguably indicates that even if Harris wins the election, marginalized communities in red states will still be under threat from Trump supporters and from growing legal restrictions on those regions. 

But trans people aren’t isolated targets. They are scapegoats in the historical sense — canaries in the coal mine for the growing march of fascism in the US.  That puts all of us in danger.

Trump centering transphobia in his campaign strategy is not new. It’s the culmination of a decade-long conservative political strategy of weaponizing anti-trans messaging to undermine and reverse what was a broad cultural shift toward LGBTQ equality. 

In 2013, in a landmark move, the American Psychiatric Association reclassified gender dysphoria — the feeling of not being aligned with your presumed-at-birth gender — so that it was no longer classified as a mental disorder, thereby setting the stage for a much-needed societal shift toward accepting and understanding trans people. 

The following year, Time magazine placed Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox on its cover, declaring that trans rights were “America’s next civil rights frontier.” 

The backlash was almost instantaneous. A month later, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest protestant religious group in the country, passed a resolution singling out trans people and stating, “[W]e oppose all cultural efforts to validate claims to transgender identity.” 

As the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision to legalize same-sex marriage took effect, conservative groups turned away from targeting queer people to instead target trans people in a “divide and conquer” strategy, as a conservative organizer named Meg Kilgannon summarized in a 2017 Family Research Council panel: “For all of its recent success, the LGBT alliance is actually fragile,” she told the assembly. “If you separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”

To do this, conservatives joined forces with unlikely allies, including “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” to drum up antagonistic sentiments against trans people. Right-wingers spread alarmism, rolling out dozens of anti-trans bathroom laws across the nation, then using them to introduce other transphobic ideas into local conservative platforms, all of them coming straight out of the moral panic playbook. These tactics didn’t directly address the sociocultural progress that trans people were making; instead, they cultivated a new wave of unfounded fear and alarmism about trans people themselves.  

And the propaganda has only gotten more effective over time. Where transphobic bathroom bills mostly failed a decade ago, they’re now coming back into fashion; last week, Odessa, Texas, passed a bathroom bill that offers a $10,000 bounty paid to anyone who spies a trans person using the “wrong” bathroom. 

The core elements we see used to attack and oppress trans people in the US in 2024 aren’t really about trans people; we’ve seen these same fearmongering tropes weaponized against numerous marginalized groups throughout history. 

They serve a greater political purpose — not just to demonize one specific group of people but to reinforce an in-group mentality that can then be deployed against all enemies. These attacks are a political cudgel.

This strategy harks back to another era of fascism. It’s vital to recognize the parallels to Hitler’s Germany here (especially given John Kelly’s recent allegations that Trump praised Hitler himself): to understand that trans and queer people aren’t being attacked in isolation, but rather in tandem with immigrants, the disabled and mentally ill, and women. 

The strategy at work deploys moral hysteria, a culture-wide “othering” of marginalized groups, and most importantly a push for a government response to the perceived problem of these outlying groups. By unifying around the public’s negative perceptions of these groups, the Republican Party amasses power and control at all levels of government. Trump has threatened repeatedly to wield that amassed power against his political opponents if he is reelected. And this, ultimately, is the real threat — not just to trans people, but to everyone.

As Election Day approaches, anxiety is naturally rising over whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win.

But there’s reason to be anxious about another prospect, too: just what Trump and his supporters will do if Harris wins narrowly.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that the only way he could lose is if Democrats cheat. It seems clear he will try to deem any Harris victory illegitimate. Many expect he will reprise in some form his shocking behavior after the 2020 election, when he tried to overturn Biden’s win — and that his supporters may try in some way to help him.

There are a number of new safeguards in place this time around making any such election-stealing effort by Trump less likely to succeed, as Barton Gellman wrote in Time last week. A 2022 law reformed the vote-certification process, which may make it more difficult for Trump to procedurally overturn any results. Trump is no longer the incumbent president and can’t use the powers of the executive branch. And authorities are more thoroughly preparing to preempt a January 6-esque mob action.

Yet though it may be procedurally more difficult for Trump to challenge the outcome this year, the risk is that procedure and legality will end up mattering less this time around — that, instead, Trump will bring us into a world where force and partisanship and the naked drive for power could well triumph over any remaining norms.

Even an attempt at this could bring the country to a more dangerous and chaotic place — but it’s also possible, particularly in the event of a close race and a narrow Harris win, that it could succeed in restoring Trump to the White House, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney has written. 

For one, the Republican Party has become more MAGA-fied since 2020, and has largely made its peace with defending the indefensible: Trump’s election denialism. 

The 2020 GOP was deeply conflicted about Trump’s election-stealing scheme; almost all key GOP officials with positions giving them responsibility over the results — governors, statewide election officials, state legislatures, and Vice President Mike Pence — declined to help carry it out.

Since then, many critics have been purged from the party, while others have made their peace with Trump. Additionally, Trump’s team, along with a supporting web of Republican activists, has had four years to prepare to challenge the results again. Last time around, their effort was shambolic and improvised; this time, they likely understand far better where the pressure points are. 

For instance, if Republicans hold the House, Speaker Mike Johnson could try to interfere with certifying the results – a fear intensified among Democrats by Trump’s recent public statement that he and Johnson have “a little secret.” 

But perhaps the most ominous threat is that, this time around, there’s a widespread expectation in the MAGA world that Trump is sure to win (even though the polls clearly point to a very close race that could go either way). “Donald Trump’s surrogates, allies and foot soldiers appear supremely confident he’ll be re-elected president next week,” Zachary Basu of Axios reports, adding that this “is setting the stage for a wholesale rejection of a potential Harris victory by Trump supporters.”

If a Trump win fails to materialize despite the right’s expectations, the fury and outrage among his supporters could prove far more intense than in 2020 — particularly given Trump’s ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to Election Day. His supporters, already primed to believe in voter fraud, could mobilize more quickly and seriously around the belief that the election was stolen from Trump and that something must be done about it. 

That means, unless Trump chooses to back down — unlikely, given his past conduct — the country could be headed to an even more dangerous place. 

Fears of an enraged MAGA base

Here’s one way to think about the risks ahead: Last time, 74 million people voted for Trump. But very few of them lifted a finger to try and help him steal the election.

Trump’s 2020 election theft effort gained steam slowly and focused initially on legal and procedural efforts to overturn the results. Pro-Trump protesters, including far-right groups like the Proud Boys, began to pop up more in the closing months of 2020, in Washington, DC, and in state capitals, but scattered violence and intimidation tactics did little to impact the process of certifying the election. 

Then, on December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted that there would be a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” adding, “Be there, will be wild!” That proved sufficient to mobilize a little over 50,000 people, of whom about 10,000 came onto the Capitol grounds; of those, 2,000 or so made it inside the building. It was a traumatic day for the country — and yet it is worth noting that only a relative handful of the vast US population were involved.

This time around, Trump falsely claiming victory and leveling fresh accusations of fraud could prove even more effective at mobilizing his base’s resentment, using their fury as a de facto weapon to intimidate Republicans and election officials into embracing his lies. The conditions are there: Four years have passed in which “the election was stolen from Trump” has become Republican conventional wisdom — which means this year’s message would be, “Are you really going to let them steal it again?” Harris outperforming her polls would be treated as immediate, damning proof of a rigged election. 

Trump also has a clear set of enemies at which to point his supporters, should he lose and refuse to accept that loss. In 2020, defining exactly who was stealing the election from him was more challenging — he was president, after all. This time around, he can blame the Biden-Harris administration and feed conspiratorial fears that “they” are stealing the election to keep her in power. Elon Musk’s ownership of X could help Trump better spread misinformation about supposed voter fraud. Dangerous lone wolves could be radicalized to violent action.

The political context of the current Trump-dominated GOP may spur the party to depart further from the law or procedural norms, which would raise the chances both of system breakdown and violence. The sympathies for Trump among much of law enforcement and the military are also concerning in such scenarios — if the MAGA base really rises up, would law enforcement restore order? 

Such scenarios may sound like absurd fear-mongering, more fit for a less stable democracy, but Trump’s utter lack of restraint and willingness to shatter democratic norms for power may mean those other countries have relevant lessons for us.

The scenarios most likely to actually change the outcome are probably less about violence, and more that Trump will triumph in the procedural struggle — that he will get some Republican officials in the states or Congress, or conservative judges, to throw out state results showing a Harris win under bogus pretenses. 

This would lead the country into uncharted territory. Would Congress pick a winner? Would Biden step aside and recognize its verdict, if it did? How such a crisis would be resolved is impossible to foresee.

American democracy in the balance?

There is, of course, still reason to hope it won’t get anywhere near that bad. 

Despite many predictions in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, that event was not in fact followed by a new wave of far-right violence during the Biden years. The memory of aggressive federal arrests and prosecutions of the January 6 rioters — and state-level prosecutions of members of Trump’s own team — made clear that such behavior came with consequences, and memory of those consequences could deter future unrest (including from Trump himself, who would face renewed legal jeopardy in the event of an election loss). 

Perhaps the American public, including the right, simply isn’t that engaged or fired up about politics and they just won’t care too much if Trump whines that the election was stolen. Or perhaps Trump supporters will simply not prove as likely to descend into political violence as liberals fear.  

This month, the Washington Post asked dozens of Trump fans at rallies how they’d interpret and respond to a Trump defeat. Nearly everyone they interviewed believed the 2020 election was stolen from him and the 2024 election might be stolen too. But, per the Post, these Trump fans “notably did not express interest in a repeat of the heated rhetoric that led to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.” Instead, they suggested they’d respond to Trump’s defeat with resignation. 

The risk, though, is that Trump and the most hardcore MAGA believers will push for something different — that he’ll use every tool at his disposal to try to get back into power. And if they can convince millions of Trump’s voters to join him in that effort, the danger will be very real.

What drives Donald Trump and his movement’s belief in voter fraud and election denialism?

Of course there’s the superficial, and obvious, layer: a sense of aggrievement, a desire for retribution from a man known for never admitting a loss, and a movement that believes him unequivocally. There’s also a slightly deeper ideological sense — frustration from a political party unable to accomplish its policy goals because of an electoral loss. But at the core, research and political theorists (including my colleague Zack Beauchamp) argue, there’s an outright sense of racism and bigotry — the reactionary animus of a conservative white majority losing its grip on power, is radicalizing against democracy in a bid to hold on, and leverages voter fraud as a way to explain this change.

In that context, the extreme misogynistic and racist speech on display at Trump’s Sunday night rally in Madison Square Garden was no coincidence. It happened as speaker after speaker warned about the threats nonwhite people pose to the country and its elections.

There was Steven Miller, the extreme anti-immigration hawk, warning that Trump is fighting a system trying to “take away your voice, take away your vote, to take away your right to have your own country.” To vote for Trump is to protect American identity, he said: “America is for Americans and Americans only!” (“America is for Americans” was also used as a KKK slogan in the 1920s.)

There was Tucker Carlson, the far-right former Fox News anchor, warning about a “leadership class” that “despises” Trump supporters’ “values and their history and their culture and their customs, [and] really hates them to the point that it’s trying to replace them.”

And there was Donald Trump Jr. claiming that the Democrats, “rather than cater to Americans,” think “it would just be easier to replace them with people who will be reliable voters.”

These remarks don’t just echo the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory — they update the GOP’s stolen election narrative with a new villain. While in 2020 it was “urban” voters who were coded as the primary perpetrators of voter fraud, in 2024 it’s immigrants and noncitizens who are the avatars for fraud and would be blamed for another Trump loss.

Trump has made that claim for years (blaming his 2016 loss of the popular vote and 2020 loss in Arizona on noncitizens voting). But this time, it seems, those claims are much more mainstream.

Back in September, during the first and only presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump made plain who he would blame for an electoral loss in November. “Our elections are bad,” he said. “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English, they don’t know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

The deep underpinnings of the MAGA movement’s ugly voter fraud rhetoric

An array of Republican members of Congress, GOP activists, and state officials espouse similar beliefs about voter fraud to those promulgated on stage Sunday night, as do a significant proportion of voters — some 85 percent of Trump supporters are concerned about noncitizen voting. Those beliefs, research and polling suggest, correlate with a sense of racial resentment and fearmongering about a quickly diversifying country that tends to over-index among Trump voters.

In studies and research conducted this summer by the Brennan Center for Justice’s Kevin T. Morris and Tennessee State University’s Ian Shapiro, the authors found a strong correlation between belief and talk of voter fraud in the 2020 election and racialized rhetoric. They found that predominantly Black cities were the focal point of right-wing voter fraud discourse in 2020, as opposed to multicultural or majority white cities; that electoral confidence declined the most among “racially resentful whites” after 2020; and that these “racially resentful white Americans” were especially likely to believe in voter fraud now.

They argue that dynamic exists because these racialized accusations of fraud serve a function for these Americans: They allow them to preserve their sense of superiority over nonwhite Americans and continue to support democracy in theory, while still rejecting electoral outcomes that they don’t agree with. In this way, racialized talk of voter fraud serves a purpose for elites as well.

“By focusing accusations of election fraud on Black individuals and municipalities, elites made their claims more believable to a white audience,” Morris and Shapiro write. “White Americans were more susceptible to these narratives precisely because they leveraged manufactured associations between electoral malfeasance and race.”

In other words, racialized talk of voter fraud exploits white anxiety and fear of change, while reinforcing a political position that boosts the conservative elites who make these accusations.

Under this theory, the arguments that Trump and his allies are making this year make a lot more sense. Per polling out of Michigan State University, Trump voters in this cycle, at least in Michigan, are much more likely to say that the country is “changing too fast, undermining traditional values” than they were in 2016, when researchers first found a strong correlation between aversion to social change and a vote for Trump.

That dividing line is growing even clearer now, with voters who told pollsters that “by accepting diverse cultures and lifestyles, our country is steadily improving” aligning sharply in favor of Harris.

That schism poses a threat to a multiracial, multicultural, pluralistic society.

“At a time when America’s multiracial democracy appears fragile, groups poised to lose power draw on rote narratives linking race and criminality to legitimize their own denial of free and fair elections,” Morris and Shapiro argue.

And on Sunday night, Trump yet again reminded the world he thinks this divide is beneficial.

“For the past nine years, we have been fighting against the most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth,” he bellowed. “With your vote in this election, you could show them once and for all that this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. It belongs to you.”

theodp writes: "Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election," argues Jeff Bezos in The Hard Truth: Americans Don't Trust the News Media, a WaPo op-ed defense of his decision as owner of The Washington Post to end the newspaper's tradition of endorsing candidates for president. "No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, 'I'm going with Newspaper A's endorsement.' None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it's a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the more puzzling, albeit obscure, subplots in the final weeks of this campaign season has been Donald Trump’s thunderingly incompetent effort to court Mormon voters.

Earlier this month, the former president’s campaign launched Latter-day Saints for Trump, one of several “coalition” groups designed to coordinate outreach to specific subsections of the electorate. (See also: Catholics for Trump, Jewish Voices for Trump, and Latino Americans for Trump.) The campaign’s special attention to the LDS vote makes sense. Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, once the most reliably Republican religious group in the country, have been considerably less loyal to the party in the Trump era. And enough of them live in the closely divided battleground states of Arizona and Nevada to make a difference.

But almost immediately, Latter-day Saints for Trump devolved into a Veep-like comedy of errors. The official website went live on October 7 with a photo of Russell M. Nelson, the president of the Church and a man considered by its members to be a prophet of God. When a reporter for the Church-owned Deseret News asked whether the campaign had gotten permission to feature the image, given the Church’s neutrality in partisan politics, the campaign quickly scrubbed the photo from its homepage.

A few days later, users on X discovered a page on the Trump-campaign website selling Mormon-branded merch—including Latter-day Saints for Trump coffee mugs ($25) and koozies (two for $15). When people pointed out that Mormons somewhat famously don’t drink coffee or alcohol, the campaign hastily rebranded the merch, and a social-media pile-on ensued. (“Next: Jews for Trump pork chops.”)

[From the January/February 2021 issue: The most American religion]

Meanwhile, Mormon-targeted campaign events have been scheduled with an odd indifference to Latter-day Saint religious practice. A canvassing event in Nevada, for example, was held the same weekend as General Conference, a semiannual series of Church broadcasts in which senior leaders deliver sermons and spiritual counsel. (The timing was a “challenge,” admitted the Utah GOP chair, who helped organize the event.) And when Trump held a rally in Prescott, Arizona, with an array of MAGA-Mormon luminaries—including Senator Mike Lee of Utah and the right-wing media personality Glenn Beck—it took place on a Sunday, which Latter-day Saints traditionally set apart for worship, service, and rest, not political events. (Perhaps to address this dissonance, the post-rally Latter-day Saints for Trump Zoom call was advertised as a “virtual fireside,” a reference to evening religious meetings held by Mormons.)

The latest hitch in Trump’s Mormon outreach came yesterday, when the Deseret News reported that Doug Quezada, a founding co-chair of Latter-day Saints for Trump, is being sued for fraud over an alleged scheme involving a cannabis company. (Quezada told the paper the lawsuit was a “shakedown” and denied wrongdoing; in July, a judge denied a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.) Such allegations may be somewhat commonplace in the Republican nominee’s orbit, but the words cannabis company and fraud will not reassure Trump-skeptical Mormons.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not respond to my request for an interview about the rollout of Latter-day Saints for Trump. But Rob Taber, the national director of Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz, a grassroots group that works closely with the Democratic campaign, was happy to talk. Taber told me he’s been surprised by the “sheer incompetence” of Trump’s efforts, and chalked up the missteps to a lack of practice. “They’re used to being able to count on the LDS vote to be the door-knockers and the foot soldiers of the Republican Party,” Taber told me. “Actually having to engage in persuasion is a little bit new to them.”  

For most Mormon voters, these political faux pas won’t be deal-breakers on their own. But the Trump campaign’s clumsiness is revealing. Taber has a point: There’s a reason professional Republicans are so bad at pandering to Latter-day Saints—before Trump came along, they never had to. In the modern political era, a typical GOP presidential nominee would receive the support of 70 to 80 percent of LDS voters in the United States. In 2016, Trump—with his “locker-room talk” and fondness for adultery, his rank xenophobia and religious illiteracy—barely managed to pull half of the national Mormon vote, and won deep-red Utah with a meager plurality. (Evan McMullin, a Mormon independent candidate, drew more than 20 percent of the vote.)

For most of 2016, Trump’s campaign seemed to take the Mormon vote for granted—even as Democrats saw an opening. That August, Hillary Clinton wrote an op-ed for the Deseret News touting her record of support for religious minorities around the world as secretary of state, and contrasting it with Trump’s proposed Muslim ban, which the Church had condemned. Intent on showing that she’d done her homework, Clinton even cited several historical LDS leaders by name. When Trump responded with his own Deseret News op-ed a few days later, it comprised a hodgepodge of generic GOP talking points, plus a tin-eared pledge to protect pastors who endorse political candidates from the pulpit (a practice that, though common in evangelicalism, is forbidden in LDS services).

Four years later, Trump and his allies seemed more attuned to their Mormon problem. The campaign repeatedly dispatched Donald Trump Jr. to Utah, and enlisted the help of Mormon surrogates. But they still struggled to connect. The most famous blunder came late in the 2020 campaign, when Lee gave a speech in Arizona ham-fistedly comparing Trump to a character from the Book of Mormon.

[Read: Why Mormons don’t like Trump]

“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends, think of him as Captain Moroni,” Lee said, pointing to Trump. “He seeks not power, but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the well-being and the peace of the American people.”

Many Mormons, including some Trump supporters, found the comparison blasphemous. Captain Moroni is a beloved scriptural figure, the personification of bravery and selflessness, and seeing him invoked at a MAGA rally was jarring. Lee quickly walked back the comments, but the incident illustrated just how uncomfortable many Mormons are with their newfound status as a voter bloc to be fought over. To court them effectively in a presidential campaign requires both a strong grasp of LDS culture and a certain amount of delicacy.

Rob Taber told me that this is where Mormon Democrats like him have an edge. People with left-of-center views in the Church spend their lives learning how to lay out their view gently and persuasively, he said: “You just get used to explaining things.”

There’s little doubt that most LDS voters will support Trump this year. Conservative attitudes on abortion and other cultural issues guarantee a certain degree of partisan loyalty. But younger Latter-day Saints, who came of age in the Trump era, are significantly less conservative than previous generations. And in the past eight years, some anti-Trump Mormons have gotten more comfortable voting for Democrats instead of third-party protest candidates.

The margins could matter. In a survey conducted shortly before the 2020 election, Quin Monson, a pollster and political-science professor at Brigham Young University, found that Joe Biden doubled Clinton’s share of the Mormon vote in Arizona—a state with a large Mormon population that Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes. For the Harris campaign, holding on to those voters this year could be the difference between losing Arizona and cracking open a celebratory beverage on Election Night. I know a website where they might be able to get some koozies on sale.

On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit handed down an astoundingly poorly reasoned opinion claiming it is illegal for a state to count a ballot mailed before Election Day but that arrives for counting afterward. Eighteen states, plus the District of Columbia, currently count at least some late-arriving ballots.

The opinion in Republican National Committee v. Wetzel is difficult to parse. Important sections of it appear to be missing several paragraphs, as the decision makes logical leaps without explaining key concepts. It reaches some of its central conclusions without citing a legal authority — whether statute, case law, or otherwise — to support those conclusions. If this opinion were submitted as part of a law school exam, the student would risk a failing grade.

Any decision that would toss out lawfully cast ballots is worrisome, especially in a nation that tends to hold very close presidential elections, as the 2024 election seems on track to be. Because Democrats are expected to cast mail-in ballots more often than Republicans this year, if the Fifth Circuit’s decision were in effect, it could hand states that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris won to Republican Donald Trump.

That said, the one good thing about the Wetzel opinion is that the Fifth Circuit didn’t give it immediate effect, so it is very unlikely to impact the current election. Still, there are two good reasons to be troubled that a federal appeals court handed down such a cocamamie decision.

One, is that Wetzel is emblematic of the many bad election decisions we can expect to be handed down in the coming days. Elections always bring litigation, as the two parties jockey for legal advantage in state and federal court. This time around, however, the federal courts are controlled by Republicans — some of whom, including the judges on the Wetzel case — have a strong reputation for partisanship.

And that brings us to the second reason to worry about Wetzel. The three judges involved in the case, Kyle Duncan, James Ho, and Andy Oldham, are widely viewed as potential Supreme Court nominees if Trump becomes president again — certainly, the three of them have all auditioned very hard for such a promotion. 

So, while it’s unlikely that the current Supreme Court will endorse Oldham’s majority opinion in Wetzel, his work is representative of the type of legal reasoning that could come from the Court if Trump were to fill it with MAGA loyalists who will sign onto virtually anything the Republican Party wants.

The Fifth Circuit has a well-deserved reputation for handing down outlandishly reasoned opinions that reach far-right conclusions, and that are frequently reversed even by the current GOP-controlled Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit has become a popular place for far-right lawyers who lose at trial to appeal their cases. The Fifth Circuit hears nearly all federal appeals that originate from Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas, and MAGA-aligned judges like Duncan, Ho, and Oldham control a majority of the court’s active judgeships.

Of course, there’s always some risk that this Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, could affirm even the worst decisions from the Fifth Circuit. This is, after all, the same Supreme Court that recently held that Trump was allowed to commit crimes while in office. But Oldham’s Wetzel’s opinion is so poorly reasoned, and the Fifth Circuit’s record before the Supreme Court is so abysmal, it’s hard to imagine more than three of the current justices endorsing Oldham’s crusade against late-arriving ballots.

Every presidential election brings a wave of lawsuits, and some of them are potentially quite worrying. For example, I’m keeping a close eye on a case seeking to disenfranchise several thousand voters in the key swing state of Pennsylvania. 

But for every case that’s worth stressing over, there are likely to be several decisions like Wetzel, which are unlikely to amount to anything unless Trump gets to start filling Supreme Court seats with judges like Oldham. If one were to worry about every single pro-Republican court decision that we are likely to see in the next several weeks, it would be easy to drive yourself mad — and for no good reason.

The Wetzel opinion is really, really, really, bad

Oldham’s Wetzel opinion is only 22 pages, but it reads like it is much longer because it is so disjointed — switching topics so frequently it’s hard to keep track of his argument. 

That said, the crux of his opinion is that an 1872 law providing that federal elections shall take place on “the Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year” prohibits states from counting any ballots that arrive after this day — and that somehow no one noticed this fact for the last 152 years.

Oldham’s analysis on several key parts of his argument is quite brief. At one point, he cites a Supreme Court opinion stating that an election cannot take place without some kind of action by government officials. He then argues it somehow follows that a ballot is not officially “cast” until it arrives at the state election office. Here is the extent of Oldham’s argument on this point:

The State’s problem is that it thinks a ballot can be “cast” before it is received. What if a State changes its law to allow voters to mark their ballots. and place them in a drawer? Or what if a State allowed a voter to mark a ballot and then post a picture on social media? The hypotheticals are obviously absurd. But it should be equally obvious that a ballot is “cast” when the State takes custody of it. 

As I said, the opinion is difficult to parse, but Oldham appears to be arguing that states cannot give any legal significance to the fact that a voter mailed their ballot before Election Day because, if states were allowed to do that, they may also allow voters to “cast” a ballot by stuffing it in the voter’s own dresser drawer.

Elsewhere in the opinion, Oldham points to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Foster v. Love (1997), which held that Louisiana could not effectively hold its congressional election in October. Early voting, absentee ballots, and other mechanisms that allow a voter to cast a ballot in October are allowed. But the final result of an election, according to Foster, “may not be consummated prior to federal election day.”

Fair enough, but Oldham’s opinion then leaps to the conclusion that an election is “consummated” when election officials know the specific number of ballots that will need to be counted to determine the winner, and that this consummation cannot occur after congressionally defined Election Day. He cites no legal sources whatsoever to support this proposition. Nor does he explain where this idea comes from. Oldham appears to have made it up.

I could go on, but what’s the point? Oldham’s opinion is so thinly reasoned on many of its essential points that I fear that, merely by trying to explain his reasoning, I’m placing far more flesh on the Fifth Circuit’s bare-bones argument than the opinion actually does. 

That said, there is exactly one part of the Wetzel opinion that fans of the rule of law can look upon with relief. At the end of the opinion, the Fifth Circuit decides not to issue an immediate injunction preventing states from counting late-arriving ballots (and even if it did issue such an order, it would only apply in Mississippi, which is the sole state before the Fifth Circuit in this case). Instead, Oldham sends the case back down to a trial court “for further proceedings to fashion appropriate relief.”

As a practical matter, that means that this decision will almost certainly have no impact on the 2024 election. It could hypothetically be affirmed by the Supreme Court, and thus would govern all future elections in all 50 states, but that seems unlikely unless someone is actually able to come up with a legal argument that supports Oldham’s conclusion.

Still, while it’s hard to imagine even this Supreme Court embracing Oldham’s swiss-cheese-like reasoning, the case does carry a warning about the 2024 election. Duncan, Ho, and Oldham are all widely considered to be part of Trump’s short list of potential Supreme Court nominees, and all three of them have certainly auditioned for the part.

If Trump wins, in other words, weakly reasoned opinions tossing out ballots for no particular reason could easily become the norm.

Conservatives can’t do comedy because what they find funny—picking on the weak and defenseless—doesn’t amuse normal people. Usually, that doesn’t matter at political rallies, which are designed to rev up the faithful. 

But it matters if the target is a key voting demographic … for the other side. 

At Sunday’s Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe did everything possible to help Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign. 

“There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” this joker said. Literally calling Puerto Ricans garbage. And … why? Because they think racism is funny. 

What shouldn’t be funny for the Trump campaign is that 3.8% of Pennsylvania’s population—467,000 people—is Puerto Rican. President Joe Biden won the state by only 80,555 votes in 2020. 

That’s not all: 1.15 million live in Florida, where Democrats are hoping for an upset Senate win. 

Another 230,000 live in Texas, home of yet another competitive Senate race. 

North Carolina has 115,000 Puerto Ricans, where Trump won by only 74,483 votes in 2020.

Georgia has 109,000 Puerto Ricans, a state Trump lost by just 11,779 votes in 2020.

Wisconsin has 65,084 Puerto Ricans, which Trump lost by 20,682 votes in 2020. 

The stupidity of this “joke” cannot be understated, yet it serves as a stark reminder of just how much these people hate anyone that isn’t white men like them. 

But the rest of us Latinos shouldn’t feel left out. He hates us too. 

Those evangelicals who sold their souls in service of Trump? Congrats, now they’re on the team making ejaculation jokes at big political rallies. 

And heck, if you’re going to go all-out racist, why hold back? 

Looking to volunteer to help get out the vote? Click here to view multiple ways you can help reach voters—textbanking, phonebanking, letters, postcards, parties, canvassing. We’ve got you covered!

A cartoon by Pedro Molina.

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Three things are true about the current, Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

The first is that, in 2020, when outgoing President Donald Trump was pushing his fellow partisans on the Court to overturn his loss in that year’s presidential race, the Republican justices didn’t do it. Despite everything this Court has done before and since to undermine democracy and write Republican policy proposals into the law, even these justices balked at joining a coup. Joe Biden won by a sufficiently clear margin that even this Court didn’t question his victory.

The second truth is that, in 2000, when the election was much closer and turned on the outcome in a single state, the Court did hand Republican George W. Bush the presidency in Bush v. Gore. All five of the justices who typically voted for outcomes favored by the GOP were in the majority in Bush, and all four of the justices who typically favored the Democratic Party’s goals were in dissent. The majority’s reasoning was widely mocked, in no small part because it seemed to abandon longstanding conservative principles in order to achieve a partisan end.

And then there’s a third reality about this Court: In the past year, the Court has gone out of its way to protect Trump from the legal consequences of his behavior.

Last March, after the Colorado Supreme Court ordered Trump removed from the ballot based on a very persuasive argument that, by inciting the January 6 insurrection, Trump violated the 14th Amendment’s ban on high officials who “have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States, five Republican justices effectively neutralized this provision of the Constitution for the duration of the 2024 election.

Similarly, the Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States (2024) gave Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution for crimes he committed while in office. The most astonishing part of the Trump immunity case held that, if he is returned to office, Trump may give any order he desires to the Department of Justice — even if he orders federal law enforcement to act “for an improper purpose” — and Trump would be immune from criminal consequences for giving these orders.

Meanwhile, Trump is openly campaigning on having his political rivals arrested. He even suggested that critics of the Republican Supreme Court “should be put in jail.”

Right now, polls show the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris to be more or less a coin flip. On Election Day, the country could easily find itself in another Bush v. Gore situation. And, if Trump loses, his behavior after his 2020 loss suggests that he will eagerly petition a GOP-controlled Supreme Court to undo the will of the voters. 

The only uncertain question is whether these justices would join him in a second effort to overthrow the results of a presidential election.

A coup is much more likely if the election is very close

In retrospect, the result in Bush v. Gore was not surprising. Once all the other states’ votes were counted in 2000, the winner of the presidential election turned entirely on who won Florida. And initial tallies in that state showed Bush leading by 1,784 votes (that lead eventually shrunk to 537 votes). 

The justices who wanted Bush to be president didn’t actually need to do much to ensure his victory. All they had to do was maintain the status quo, and prevent Florida from recounting the votes to potentially place Gore in the lead. And the five justices in the majority did just that, ordering the state to halt a recount that might have revealed that Gore, and not Bush, was the real winner of the election.

Of course, the Court’s decision was hard to defend on its legal merits. It was unusually radical, faulting Florida for failing to apply “uniform rules” to the ballot recount, and suggesting that any state that applies slightly different procedures in one county than it does in another violates the Constitution. 

Were this rule applied universally, Democrats could have wielded it to make American election law much more egalitarian and progressive. But the five justices in the majority made sure this would not happen, ruling that “our consideration is limited to the present circumstances.” Bush was a one-time-only decision, breaking out a radical theory of equality for exactly as long as it took to install a Republican in the White House, then immediately placing that theory back on the highest shelf. 

But the cynical nature of the Court’s decision did not change the fact that, once five justices committed to making Bush president, it was very easy for them to find a way to do so. Again, all they had to do was keep everything the same in one state until Bush was officially declared the winner of the election.

Compare this result to the multiple election disputes that arose out of the 2020 election. While several states were nail-bitingly close, Biden won a 306-232 victory in the Electoral College. To change the result, Trump’s lawyers needed to convince the justices to toss out about 43,000 Biden votes in three different states. 

That means the justices would have needed to reach the implausible conclusion that, in one presidential election, three states somehow violated either the Constitution or federal law so severely that they declared the wrong candidate the winner. The likelihood that such a cascade of errors would independently occur in multiple states is, to put it mildly, very small. And the justices probably realized that if they tried to convince the American people that such an implausible series of events had occurred, large numbers of Biden’s more than 81 million voters would have taken to the streets and refused to accept the Court’s ruling.

Thus, the more that the 2024 election looks like 2000, with the outcome turning on a single state, the more likely it is that the Republican justices will intervene to ensure a Trump victory. The more that Harris can run up the score, the more likely it is that the Court allows her victory to stand.

The Court has already laid the doctrinal framework for a decision overturning the 2024 election 

So what would a Supreme Court decision overthrowing the 2024 election look like? Most likely, it would look like a 2020 court dispute out of Pennsylvania.

During the pandemic, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that certain ballots mailed before Election Day would be counted even if they did not arrive at an election office until up to three days after Election Day. Though the US Supreme Court has the final word on questions of federal law, each state’s highest court has the last word on questions of state law. So the Pennsylvania court’s decision should have been final because it was rooted in that court’s interpretation of Pennsylvania state law.

Nevertheless, the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to reverse the Pennsylvania court’s decision and order these ballots tossed out, and several Republican justices urged their Court to do so. Ultimately, the Court dismissed the case as moot — Biden won Pennsylvania by a large enough margin that it wouldn’t have mattered what happened to these ballots.

Since then, the Court handed down its decision in Moore v. Harper (2023), a case in which the justices claimed a new power to overrule a state supreme court’s interpretation of the state’s own election law. Though Moore was largely viewed as a victory for voting rights because it rejected a very aggressive attempt to eliminate voter protections enshrined in state constitutions, the Court’s opinion includes an ominous line stating that the US Supreme Court may overrule a state’s highest court’s decision impacting a federal election if the state decision “exceed[s] the bounds of ordinary judicial review.” 

The Court did not define this phrase — it just left it dangling out there as a warning that the justices may exercise a new and unprecedented power to swing elections at some point in the future.

In any election, there will be some disputes about which ballots are counted, whether certain polling places should be kept open late, and other routine legal disagreements that are typically resolved by state courts without too much drama. Now, however, a Republican-controlled Supreme Court claims the power to overrule any of these decisions, and potentially to rewrite a state’s own election law.

If the justices decide to overturn the 2024 presidential election, in other words, they have given themselves a powerful new tool that they can use to find reasons to do so.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said he is investigating Google, claiming that the tech giant censors conservative speech and manipulated search results about Donald Trump.

"BREAKING: I am launching an investigation into Google—the biggest search engine in America—for censoring conservative speech during the most consequential election in our nation's history. Google is waging war on the democratic process. It's time to fight back," Bailey wrote on X, the social network owned by notable Trump supporter Elon Musk.

The New York Post quoted a Bailey spokesperson saying that "evidence has come to light that Google is deemphasizing conservative speech or content—such as putting conservative reporting on Page 11 rather than Page 1—by manipulating search results." The spokesperson said Google "has an obligation to consumers to utilize fair business practice" and that "we will be subpoenaing information on Google's algorithms and other systems to determine whether they are censoring conservative speech."

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In the early 17th century, the English jurist Edward Coke laid out a fundamental principle of any constitutional order: No man can be the judge in his own case. Donald Trump thinks he has found a work-around.

The Republican presidential candidate yesterday confirmed what many observers have long expected: If he is elected president in two weeks, he will fire Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel investigating him, right away. No man can be his own judge—but if he can dismiss the prosecutors, he doesn’t need to be.

“So you’re going to have a very tough choice the day after you take the oath of office, or maybe even the day that you take the oath of office,” the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, a Trump critic turned toady, asked him. “You’re either going to have to pardon yourself, or you’re going to have to fire Jack Smith. Which one will you do?”

“It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said. “He’ll be one of the first things addressed.”

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: a guide]

Smith has charged Trump with felonies in two cases: one related to attempts to subvert the 2020 election, and the other related to his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Although Trump claims to have many substantive policy goals for his second term, his comments about firing Smith reveal where his true priorities lie. Trump frequently dissembles, but this is a case of him speaking quite plainly about what he will do if he is elected. One major theme of his campaign has been the need to rescue himself from criminal accountability (or, in his view, persecution). Another has been the promise to exact retribution against his adversaries. Sacking Smith would serve both objectives. In another interview yesterday, Trump said that Smith “should be thrown out of the country.”

The scholarly consensus is that Trump has the legal right to fire Smith, and also that such a firing would be a deeply disturbing violation of the traditional semi-independence of the Justice Department. It would also be a scandalous affront to the idea that no citizen, including the president, is above the law. Even if it could be proved that Trump fired Smith with the express purpose of covering up his own crimes, Trump would almost certainly face no immediate repercussions. The Supreme Court this summer ruled that a president has criminal immunity for any official act, and firing Smith would surely qualify.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Supreme Court’s effort to save Trump is already working]

During the radio interview, Hewitt warned that removing Smith could get Trump impeached. It’s possible. Control of the House is up for grabs in November, and the Democrats might be slight favorites to prevail. But Trump’s first two impeachments made perfectly clear that Senate Republicans, whose votes would be required to convict, have no interest in constraining him. Some of them have already taken the public stance that the prosecutions against Trump are improper—even though no one questions that Trump took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after he left office, no one has made a coherent defense that he had a right to possess them, and the details of Trump’s election subversion are well known and unchallenged.

These facts will be irrelevant if Trump can simply fire Smith. That’s the power he’s asking voters to grant him.

Montana Republican Senate nominee Tim Sheehy appears to have been caught in yet another lie about his military service.

NBC News reported on Thursday that despite Sheehy claiming to have been discharged from his service in the military because he was declared medically unfit to serve, his discharge records say Sheehy voluntarily resigned and did not cite any medical conditions. 

From NBC News:

Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL running for the Senate in Montana, has said he was discharged from the military for medical reasons because of injuries he sustained on duty, but his discharge paperwork tells a different story.

The heavily redacted, two-page document obtained by NBC News indicates that Sheehy voluntarily resigned his commission and does not list any medical condition that forced him out of uniform, according to a review of the document and a current and former U.S. official familiar with the details of his separation.

This is the latest false claim Sheehy appears to have made about his time as a Navy SEAL, service he has touted on the campaign trail in his quest to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester.

In April, The Washington Post reported a discrepancy in a story Sheehy told about being shot in the arm. On the campaign trail, Sheehy said he was shot in the arm while serving in Afghanistan in 2012.

However, in October 2015, Sheehy went to the emergency room after a trip to Glacier National Park, where he reported having a gunshot wound in his arm. He told a park ranger that he had shot himself in the arm in the park by accident, and was fined $525 for illegally discharging a weapon in a national park.

He later said he purposefully lied to the ranger about the gunshot wound because he hadn’t reported being shot in the arm to the military. He said he didn’t report it to the military at the time because the wound may have been from friendly fire and he didn’t want anyone in his unit to get in trouble.

Yet a former Navy SEAL Sheehy worked with told The New York Times that Sheehy had never told him about being shot in Afghanistan, even though it almost certainly would have come up in conversations about their deployments. And Kim Peach, the park ranger who Sheehy told what happened that day in a Montana emergency room, told the Times, “I am 100 percent sure he shot himself that day.”

Sheehy has never released the medical records from that day that would have said whether the bullet wound was fresh. 

Military veterans in Montana held an event on Oct. 22 in which they slammed Sheehy as an "egregious” and “serial liar" who can't be trusted because of the discrepancy in his story about the gunshot wound.

“In some circles, we veterans call this stolen valor,” Michael Jarnevic, who was in the military for more than 40 years and at the event on Tuesday said, according to a report in the Daily Montanan. “And it’s one of the most horrific things you can do as a veteran.”

Questions about his military service are not the only scandal Sheehy has faced during the election. Sheehy was hit by a lawsuit in April from former employees of his aerial firefighting company of defrauding them out of millions of dollars. 

Sheehy has also been slammed by Native American groups in the state after he used racist stereotypes in talking about the Native population in the state. At a fundraiser in November 2023, Sheehy talked about going cattle branding on Montana’s Crow Reservation, and said it’s “a great way to bond with all the Indians out there while they’re drunk at 8 AM.”

Polls show Sheehy, a multimillionaire Minnesota transplant, leading Tester in the race, which could determine control of the Senate. Tester has an uphill battle to overcome the likely double-digit win former President Donald Trump will pull off in the state, which would require Tester to win over a number of GOP voters.

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The third and final season of Good Omens, Prime Video's fantasy series adapted from the classic 1990 novel by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, will not be a full season after all, Deadline Hollywood reports. In the wake of allegations of sexual assault against Gaiman this summer, the streaming platform has decided that rather than a full slate of episodes, the series finale will be a single 90-minute episode—the equivalent of a TV movie.

(Major spoilers for the S2 finale of Good Omens below.)

As reported previously, the series is based on the original 1990 novel by Gaiman and the late Pratchett. Good Omens is the story of an angel, Aziraphale (Michael Sheen), and a demon, Crowley (David Tennant), who gradually become friends over the millennia and team up to avert Armageddon. Gaiman's obvious deep-down, fierce love for this project—and the powerful chemistry between its stars—made the first season a sheer joy to watch. Apart from a few minor quibbles, it was pretty much everything book fans could have hoped for in a TV adaptation of Good Omens.

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Recent reports have raised alarming questions about the rhetoric and beliefs of Donald Trump and those within the Republican Party. 

A recent article from The Atlantic alleges that Trump expressed a desire for the type of generals of Adolf Hitler, a statement that echoes disturbing historical comparisons. John Kelly, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, has reportedly confirmed to The New York Times that Trump praised Hitler, claiming the leader of Germany’s Nazi party who was responsible for the Holocaust “did some good things.” 

When asked by a reporter if he thought Trump was a fascist, Kelly replied, "Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It's a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy," he said. He added: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators—he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure."

The latest news about such statements evokes not only concerns about historical amnesia but also about the normalization of extremist views within political discourse. Recent data from the Public Religion Research Institute paints a chilling picture of public sentiment regarding immigration policy, which adds to the gravity of these comments. 

The survey indicates that a staggering eight in 10 Republicans believe it is acceptable, or even preferable, to place undocumented immigrants in military encampments. 

This aligns with broader public opinion, where Americans are deeply divided on the issue of “rounding up and deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally,” even if it necessitates the establishment of encampments guarded by U.S. military forces.

Specifically, the data reveals that 47% of Americans support deportation efforts under such conditions, while 50% oppose them. The partisan divide is stark: nearly 79% of Republicans favor the use of encampments for undocumented immigrants, contrasting sharply with only 47% of independents and a mere 22% of Democrats.

Overall, the country as a whole has moved right on the issue of curbing immigration, the highest it’s been since 2001.

This unsettling sentiment comes in the wake of Trump’s first administration, which was notorious for implementing draconian immigration policies. The Trump administration’s approach included the widely condemned practice of family separation at the border, leading to children being forcibly removed from their parents. 

Reports emerged of toddlers being forced to stand trial alone in immigration courts, highlighting the inhumane conditions faced by many migrants still felt today. These policies have led to significant suffering and raised ethical questions about Trump and the GOP’s treatment of vulnerable populations.

What’s unclear is whether or not the latest reports will change MAGA supporters’ minds about Trump. But it’s doubtful, as an insurrection did not. Nor did being found guilty in a criminal court case or saying he grabs women by their genitalia without consent. And it seems, eerily, that most Republican supporters agree with what Hitler represented—horrific encampments sponsored by the government.

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Podcaster Tim Pool is part of a new generation of young conservative media personalities effectively radicalizing their cohorts. 

On Tuesday, just two weeks before the election, he strongly hinted that he’s calling it quits. 

In his surprise announcement, Pool claimed that he needs to focus on his family (which doesn’t yet exist), and it’s all the fault of his shitty staff members who were stealing from him anyway.

He also lays blame on his crew:

• “It’s not a financial thing. We make a lot of money.”

• “The structure [of the business] becomes bigger and bigger and bigger until it becomes impossible to manage.”

• “Compounding [employee] laziness that builds up over time which adds more workload for me.” 

• “There aren’t enough people to make the studio operate. I’m Sisyphus.”

That $100,000 per week is equal to $5.2 million in lost annual revenue. Given his staff of 30, it makes sense that he couldn’t keep things going without all those rubles. 

Pool likely won’t disappear completely. He’s got a massive platform, and he’ll continue finding ways to milk the rubes in his audience. But it sure was easier for him when hostile foreign powers were funding his toxic rhetoric.

The answer to all of this is: hire better people, of course—particularly if money is no problem. But that’s where he’s likely lying. 

Remember, just a few weeks ago, his Putin gravy train dried up. It turns out Pool was being paid $100,000 per week by Russia for his propaganda. 

In fact, the Department of Justice indictment itself shows that the right-wing commentators couldn’t survive without the Russian subsidy. “Founder-1” is Lauren Chen, founder of the company Tenet that funneled the Russian cash to the right-wingers. “Persona-I” was her Russian contact/funder. “Commentator-1” is Dave Rubin and “Commentator-2” is Pool. We can deduce this because on page 2 of the indictment it lists their YouTube subscribers and we can match them up (2.4 million and 1.3 million, respectively). 

Founder-I cautioned that "from a profitability standpoint, it would be very hard for Viewpoint [i.e., the initial public-facing name of the new venture] to recoup the costs for the likes of [Commentator-I] and [Commentator-2] based on ad revenue from web traffic or sponsors alone." Despite Founder-1's warning that Commentator-I and Commentator-2 would not be profitable to employ, on or about February 14, 2023, Persona-I informed Founder-I that "[w]e would love to move forward with [Commentator-I and Commentator-2]."

Kamala Harris spoke from the steps of the vice president’s residence on Wednesday about the disturbing report concerning Donald Trump’s praise of Adolf Hitler and his desire for a Nazi army. 

"He said he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler had,” Harris remarked. “Donald Trump said that because he does not want a military that is loyal to the United States Constitution,” she said, referring to recent interviews with Trump’s White House chief of staff John Kelly.

“[Trump] wants a military who will be loyal to him personally, one that will obey his orders even when he tells them to break the law or abandon their oath to the Constitution of the United States,” the vice president said.

Harris also spoke about the numerous instances where Trump has commented on fellow Americans being the “enemy within”—threatening to use the military against his perceived opponents. 

“Anyone who refuses to bend a knee or dares to criticize him would qualify in his mind as the enemy within,” Harris explained.

"This is a window into who Donald Trump really is,” Harris said, reminding Americans that multiple former Trump administration officials have publicly spoken out against Trump’s pursuit of a second term in office. 

"Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guard rails against his propensities and his actions,” Harris warned. “Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there, and no longer be there to rein him in.” 

“So the bottom line is this: We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power,” Harris said. “The question in 13 days will be, what do the American people want?"

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Donald Trump's favorite morning show beclowned itself once again on Wednesday morning, when "Fox & Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade defended Trump for reportedly saying that he needed "the kind of generals that Hitler had."

In his embarrassing screed, Kilmeade said Trump was righteously angry that some of his generals refused to carry out his will—even though some of the things Trump wanted them to do were insane and illegal, such as using the military to shoot protesters at the White House in 2020. 

That lamentation led up to the pièce de résistance, in which Kilmeade said, "I could absolutely see [Trump] go, ‘Now you know what, it would be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do’—knowing that's a third—maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis and whatever."

It goes without saying that probably everyone is cognizant of the fact that Adolf Hitler and his generals were bad. Together, they helped carry out one of the worst genocides in history in their effort to ethnically cleanse the world of Jews, LGBTQ+ people, other ethnic minorities, and anyone who disagreed with their goal.

To even make the assertion that Trump maybe didn’t know Hitler and his generals were bad is absurd enough. But Kilmeade’s defense that maybe Trump wasn’t speaking about Hitler’s generals per se is just false.

John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff who went public on Tuesday about Trump’s fascist behavior and praise of Hitler, said that Trump specifically wanted to have generals like Hitler.

The Atlantic:

This week, I asked Kelly about their exchange. He told me that when Trump raised the subject of “German generals,” Kelly responded by asking, “‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.

Remarkably, this also wasn’t the only time Trump praised Hitler’s leadership.

Kelly also told media outlets that Trump said Hitler “did some good things.” (This was first reported by CNN’s Jim Sciutto, in March.)

“I said, ‘Sir, you can never say anything good about the guy. Nothing,’” Kelly recalled telling Trump.

Trying to put Trump’s disgusting comments into context in an effort to sanitize them and erase their shock value is par for the course for Trump’s nihilistic defenders.

They don’t want voters to internalize the warnings from multiple former Trump aides, like Kelly, who are warning how dangerous a second Trump term in office may be.

But even some Republicans have had enough.

“This… is insane. Hitler’s generals carried out GENOCIDE,” wrote Republican strategist Sarah Matthews, who has endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. “Republicans: STOP defending this. This is not normal. There is no way to spin this.”

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