Even Liz Cheney is for the people, for crying out loud.
They're rolling out a Trump ad in Seattle and around the Pacific Northwest, presumably:
Harris as "Border Czar" is letting in drug dealers, rapists, and murderous foreign born scary looking gangbangers, enabling "illegals" (to GOP all POC are "illegals," see Springfield, OH) immigrants to escape justice. And then adding insult to injury, when these violent criminals are finally captured by our men in blue and put in jail Harris is helping them get sex change operations. Crazy liberals! Trump and his campaign-- says the violent fascists targeting and smearing immigrants and Trans people in the scary alarmist video-- is for "you."
True Trumpers, "you," screams the ad like Howard Beale in Network (1976), would rather watch Trump round up all of the immigrants, POC, Trans, LGBTQ+, and crazy liberals and force them into concentration camps and deport them, if not shoot them for target practice. Even if he probably can't totally get away with any or all of this, this is his basic campaign plea. And it's a message, apparently, popular with a sizable segment of the macho bigot population.
Trump, of course, didn't invent fake news, what the Russians call "political technology," but he is the first to take over a political party with it via social media, weaponized against women, immigrants, sexual minorities, whatever is agitating and galvanizing the hateful bigots most.
The punching down cruelty in MAGA isn't entirely new in American history, either. Historian Richard Hofstadter chronicles the paranoid style, racist anti-communist wacko conservatism in American politics, all the way back to the Civil War. But it'd be curious what he'd make of MAGA? In the early 1960s, in his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter was convinced there was a solid middle of the American democratic electorate, established, security conscious, against willy-nilly change, a centrist majority that rejects the violent bigot extremes in American politics, like Goldwater in 1964 (who thought Eisenhower was a communist and wanted to Nuke the Chinese in Korea). And like MAGA, basically, batshit crazy violent malevolence.
Now, over sixty years later, violent bigot extremes have taken over the Republican party and have already attempted one failed coup attempt to overthrow democracy and the rule of law. Trumpers are sure, they do their research (Fox or worse), Trump gets a raw deal, Russia, Russia, Russia, Covid shutdown, gold-digger women, persecuted for perfect phone calls, being besties with Putin, liberals are out to get our man, Stop the Steal! Presented as a dramatic TV series prior to 2016 this stuff would be dismissed by critics as hysterical and over the top. Unbelievable. But MAGA regularly threatens violence against immigrants and the police and judges and public health officials and election workers or anybody who opposes them. It's in Project 2025. They attacked congress, violently, on the day the legislative body of of the government was formally recognizing the peaceful transfer of power as a fundamental traditional hallmark of democracy and the rule of law. And then Trump skipped the inauguration, and now they're giving him another chance-- because he cheats and still loses every election but insists he's being cheated so three strikes you're out?!
Trump is a real-life Frankenstein caricature of the 1980s neoliberal economic model, as if scripted for an over-the-top apocalyptic remake of Robo Cop. His ridiculously self-dealing "greed is good" monopoly capitalism, his branding and celebrity popularity, and his big-government-is-the-problem austerity economics is like a cartoon caricature drawn by Grover Norquist. It's a loser project, kicked to the curb over and over statistically, by mainstream economic measures, but thrives as zombie economics boosted by free marketeers right and left. More tax cuts for the rich (which they turn into stock buy backs and stiff workers), burn baby burn, and then trash government, public infrastructure, public goods as ineffective, and which they consistently prove whenever in office.
(Mainstream economists love to trash Stephanie Kelton, the deficit myth economics professor, but there is a simple observation in her work that is undeniable: why do both parties compete to outspend each other on the military, never calling such spending deficit spending, even though it is quite obviously every bit as much deficit spending as any social spending on health care, public education, environmental protections, etc? And where Dems fret about how we can pay for it and Repugs condemn it as reckless, wasteful deficit spending? That the rich and corporations do not pay a tax sufficient to generously and prosperously support basic public infrastructure that makes possible their wealth accumulation; housing, health care, public education, full employment, public safety, roads and bridges, food safety, environmental protections, etc. Sure, it's a lot but actually probably some very manageable progressive tax margins, a hard 15%, would cover it but the rich have resisted this kind of democratic reform, frequently violently, and relentlessly, since the Roman Republic. It's fundamental orientation of political economy in world history, the rich insisting on margins that enrich them and impoverish labor.)
And this astonishingly self-destructive national movement, Trump (the most litigated, and first felon, candidate for potus in American history)and his MAGA republican party, has a big following, like Elon Musk, meaning the biggest media platform, one only a small handful of celebrities in popular media can achieve. The craven effort to buy the election in the name of Trump's bigot fascism and hustler's market capitalism is a terrifying prospect. But they do a slightly more benign version of something like this in Seattle all the time; i.e., local corporate interests buying elections. So, I dunno. It could happen! And I find it hard not to hyperventilate about the peril the country and the world and environment and freedom and peace loving peoples everywhere face in Trump's candidacy.
(Also precisely what Grump's minions like best: Owning the Libs.)
Trump should have been disqualified for Jan 6 alone and many times over for a variety of other high crimes and misdemeanors; treason, election interference, financial fraud, promoting violence, sexually harassing women, etc. Hopefully there is some law and Deep State left that can get in the way and block his worst humanitarian crimes and his catastrophic crony capitalism, but the polling experts are saying the election is a tossup. Which, alone, feels like an astonishingly huge fail for the country, no matter the outcome of the election.
Consider the run-up to this election. Failed coup attempt on Jan 6, 2021. The Supreme Court 1) helps Trump evade prosecution for Jan 6, 2) helps him get away with stealing top secret national security documents (that serious national security people say endangers America and Americans), and 3) ignores his blatant cheating in the 2020 election. In the latter case, Roberts wouldn't even show up for the impeachment proceedings in congress, already betraying SCOTUS's complicity in Trump's failed coup attempt. And the legal system-- with Barr, just like Iran Contra in the early '90s, right?-- ultimately helps hide Trump's traitorous collusion in 2016, spearheading Putin's first and ongoing attacks on our democratic elections. Make no mistake, ratification of-- or a total slam-dunk rejection of-- all this fake news fascism is on the ballot.
And make no mistake, even if down to the wire the NY Times and WaPo would like to obscure, normalize, and "sane-wash" the matter, the election is right/wrong, up/down clear: a vote for the Dems is a vote for democracy, workers, a sustainable and democratic future, and a vote for Trump and the Repugs is a vote for dictatorship, corruption, violence, environmental destruction, and stupid bigotry.
And, shamefully, and damning proof the economic wisdom of Billionaires isn't what it's cracked up to be, Big Tech Bros are sponsoring his candidacy and the fake news about pet-eating immigrants and other anti-immigrant/LGBTQ rage porn on social media and the internet and now in commercials on local TV broadcasts around Seattle. This is the so-called wisdom or smart money of corporate rule: flagrant fake news disinformation, even explicitly Nazi bigot stuff; see X, Fox, Sinclair, etc.
Even if Trump loses, and he likely will and certainly must, his constituents are hoping for an electoral college steal. How could he win a majority, really? People cannot be that stupid and self-destructive can they? He is an active national security threat; his first campaign manager was a Putin asset. Anyway, we'll be living down the violent reaction and criminal corruption of the Trump era for a long time.
“Trump has a habit of assuming other politicians act in the same way as he would,” Glenn Kessler wrote in WaPo. So he looked into why Trump would have accused Biden “of raiding the FEMA disaster fund to handle undocumented migrants. It turns out that’s because he did this.”
In the middle of hurricane season in 2019, Kessler explains, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and redirected it to pay for detention space and temporary hearing locations for immigrants seeking asylum. “No, Biden didn’t take FEMA relief money to use on migrants,” the article title reads, “but Trump did.”
And they withheld PPE funding in the pandemic because they thought it would mostly be going to blue cities. I mean, really, you can't make up how bad this sick fuck was. It's kleptocracy straight up and some people go for it because they like the Trump scenery-chewing spectacle of violence and abuse against their perceived enemies.
Letters from an American Historian
"Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control."
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Not equal in height or strength or wealth and intelligence but equal in "certain unalienable rights," individual rights, the essence of our personal freedoms, including "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
"Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles."
Kamala Harris in Wisconsin: “The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”
"In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump."
Letters from an American Historian
Yeah, but, as the saying goes, what if the "depraved cruelty" is the point? Along with owning the libs, ritual acts of violence, mass deportations, and state violence against targeted groups are more or less precisely what people who got off on Trump's first term and his immigrant family separation policy really want most, right? The Purge. Like some guy at a town meeting asking when he gets to start shooting liberals.
And we, the people, the liberals, the 99%, we're hoping, wishing, preying, by contrast, that while way too many go for this Reality TV sadistic dumpster-fire, deaths-of-despair, and violent fascist politics, an overwhelming majority of Americans, Us, will say No to more Trump lies and treason, No to more MAGA bigot hate and misogyny and gun violence, and Hell No to Billionaire crony capitalist rich-get-richer-poor-get-poorer economics.
(We're for free enterprise and opposed to corporate rule. Figure it out.)
"Today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement."
Trump won't grow the economy. And he won't help make life more affordable for workers and regular families. And, most preposterously, he won't make America stronger in the world or safer at home. Trump will grow violence and corruption and insecurity. We know this. Unless you only watch Fox News, we all saw it on TV 2017 to 2020. And we don't want to watch the rerun. It'll only be worse. Trust me.
