This is a really weird way to begin an article about politics in the middle of an October during a presidential election year, but here’s the thing: I don’t really have anything to say.
Actually, I have plenty to say, but I’m not sure what purpose it would serve if I said it.
Some of that’s the political scientist in me speaking. By now, nearly every American has made up their mind about who they’re going to vote for. Even if they say they still might change their mind, they probably won’t. We’re not really in a persuasive moment anymore. At this point, it’s more about campaigns getting out the vote (as well as attempting to dampen enthusiasm for their opponent.)
Sure, the election is close enough that the <5% of voters who have yet to make up their minds could make a difference, but those voters are also very hard for campaigns to reach with conventional appeals. They probably haven’t been paying much attention to politics, lack a framework through which they can process information about the election, or prioritize issues neither candidate is talking about. Some of these voters will vote for whichever candidate has the momentum going into Election Day, but otherwise the distribution of their votes (if they vote at all) is likely to appear random.
So it seems the race is pretty much set. That will likely dismay Democrats who are tracking the polls, as Harris and Trump remain neck-and-neck both nationally and in the battleground states. But I still think Harris is in a good spot, and here’s why.
First of all, if the polls are off this year (and one way or the other, they usually are to some extent) my gut tells me they’re most likely overestimating Trump’s support. That may be surprising, because the polls in the past two presidential elections have underestimated Trump’s support, but that’s actually what leads me to my counterintuitive thesis. If I ran a polling firm and my final polls predicted an easy Clinton victory in 2016 and a Biden blowout in 2020, I would definitely want to correct for those misses. A business that bases its credibility on accuracy can’t screw up three elections in a row, definitely can’t screw up three elections in a row in the same direction, and can’t claim to provide an accurate snapshot of the American people if the full scope of the MAGAverse isn’t included in their family portrait. I’m not arguing the polling firms are padding their numbers, but it may be they are using models designed to account for otherwise underrepresented MAGA voters (i.e., by making sure the share of white, rural, non-college-educated male voters in the sample is close to the share of white, rural, non-college-educated males from the 2020 electorate.)
Anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics can intuit the problem with such an approach: It’s not a truly random sample. But a survey that does not reach everyone in the population it claims to measure is flawed as well. That’s a potential problem with many a survey, and polling firms work hard to account for that (i.e., by making sure not to exclude non-English speakers, or not relying exclusively on either landlines or cellphones.) And it makes sense for polling firms to review their samples to make sure they actually look like the population they’re surveying. For example, that didn’t happen in 2004, when exit polls on Election Day had John Kerry beating George W. Bush. The Bush campaign was pretty despondent on their flight back to DC that evening until Karl Rove dug into the exit polls and found women were way overrepresented in the sample. Once he unskewed the results to account for that, the exit poll’s numbers were much closer to the actual totals.
To do this correctly, however, one has to have a pretty good sense for the composition of the electorate. The easiest way for polling firms to do that is to simply assume the 2024 electorate will resemble the 2020 electorate. That’s a fair assumption—it’s unlikely the electorate changes significantly from election to election—but it also means polling firms are less likely to pick up on changes that are occurring (i.e., a surge in college voters or female voters.) For those reasons, my guess is the polls have either pinpointed Trump’s level of support or overestimated it.
(On a related note, I’ve also wondered lately if the 2020 polls actually were accurate but turned out inaccurate because they measured intent rather than the actual act of voting. If you remember, Democrats urged their voters to vote by mail in 2020. It was assumed that gave Democrats a huge advantage over Republicans [who did not emphasize vote by mail] as Democrats were able to turn-out their voters at a time when people may have been reluctant to vote in person due to the pandemic. But what about those who did vote on Election Day? What if Republicans [many of whom by that point had had it with social distancing] actually did max-out their turnout while Democrats [who took social distancing and the threat of the virus more seriously] didn’t? Perhaps some Democrats who never got around to requesting an absentee ballot or who always intended to vote in person noticed an uptick in COVID cases and at the last minute chose not to risk an infection instead, particularly since they were confident Biden had a solid lead. And perhaps this slice of voters—enough to turn a 4-point Biden victory into, say, a 6-or-7-point Biden win—went unaccounted for due to what was still a massive Democratic turnout. It’s just a theory.)
Secondly, it appears that Harris (but not Trump) can still improve on her numbers. Reporting suggests there are few undecided voters out there, and those who are undecided aren’t for the most part choosing between Harris and Trump but between Harris and not voting at all. Harris needs to find a way to win over these hard-to-get voters, but the fact they’ve already expressed an inclination to vote for her if they do vote is a good sign. I suspect these voters won’t make the decision to head to the polls to vote for Harris until Election Day, so I doubt most will ever show up as Harris voters in the polling.
Finally, there are several other signals I see that suggest Harris is (maybe) in better shape than the polls indicate. It sounds like Harris’s get-out-the-vote operation is running circles around Trump’s untested operation. It also seems that the many former Republican leaders who have refused to support Trump and in some cases have endorsed Harris have created space for Republican voters to defect from Trump. Prognosticators have speculated that Democrats’ disadvantage in the Electoral College has narrowed somewhat due to a bump in Trump’s support in solidly Democratic states, suggesting Harris needs to only win by 2-3 points in the popular vote rather than around 4 points. I also have a hard time believing Trump’s recent turn to using more explicitly fascist rhetoric (as well as his unhinged remarks) helps him; if anything, it reminds voters of what they don’t like about him and pushes away those who were going to vote for him while holding their noses.
That said, the one (or at least the biggest) thing that keeps me up at night concerning this election is Trump’s efforts to turn out infrequent and low information voters. Admittedly, these voters are almost by definition hard to get to the polls, so banking one’s margin of victory on them is a big gamble, but Trump seems to know how to connect with them. In fact, I think his fascist, racist, misogynistic, and just plain outrageous rhetoric isn’t just a case of Trump getting high on his own social media supply but designed to bring these otherwise disengaged voters out of the shadows. I don’t know how many of these voters are out there, but I doubt they show up in polls, so they seem like a major x-factor.
But back to my main point, I don’t know what purpose it serves to have said all of what I just said. Minds are pretty much set, and it’s up to campaigns now to get their people to the polls. Everything I’ve just written about current polling is just speculation about the state of the race. It just reminds me how much of this is out of my hands, an insight your average American (but perhaps not your average political scientist or politico) is already well-aware of.
But that’s only half of what I mean when I say I don’t really have anything to say. In truth, I have plenty to say, but I feel I’ve said it over and over again and with increasing intensity for the past 9+ years. I don’t know what reminding people one more time that Donald Trump is a threat to American democracy will do at this point. There’s no more important issue than that, and you either get it or you don’t.
It should be obvious by now. Trump fomented an insurrection. He speaks like a fascist. He openly longs to act as a dictator. There’s no place for that in America. That was the whole point of your high school civics class! Yet here we are as a democracy deciding whether such a nation should long endure.
What more by now can be said or done in the defense of democracy? What are the magic words that would break the spell Trump has placed on his followers? Figuring that out would seem to be a simple task, but it’s turned out to be the opposite. Should we moderate our views to lure his supporters to our side or move to the left to offer a starker contrast and maximize the power of our base? Should we appeal to voters by emphasizing the threat Trump poses to democracy or by changing the subject to other issues that resonate more with voters? Should we make rational or emotional arguments, positive or negative arguments? Should we mock them, shame them, call them weird, or does that only inflame them? Should we go high or low, prove to others that we have higher standards or beat them at their own game? Should we ignore their transgressions to deprive them of publicity or engage and challenge them every step of the way?
We end up criticizing our allies when we feel someone’s use of one of these tactics isn’t working. It reveals we possess a sense of agency, the feeling that we have it within our own power to shape our political destiny, that there is a way to get this right and win the day. Yet here we are, a little over two weeks to go until Election Day, and the pollsters tell us it’s a coin flip election. Because of that sense of agency, we look inward once again and try to figure out what it is we’re doing wrong, but that only obscures the fact that those who are really in the wrong in this country are the tens of millions of Americans who still support Donald Trump despite his open disdain for democracy. Whatever the flaws of the Democratic Party may be, this isn’t a coin flip election because the Democrats just can’t get their act together; it’s fundamentally a coin flip election because the Republican Party—whose members, like Democrats, also possess agency—has consciously embraced an autocratic leader.
The frustrating thing is that there is little by now we can do about this. It seems there is no evidence or argument, no appeal to reason or morality, that could pull these voters away from Trump. Perhaps what we’re learning is that there is no tried-and-true way to repel fascism. As a political philosophy that repudiates politics, fascism insulates itself and its followers from the moderating influence of politics. After all this time, there’s little any of us could say that might convince them to renounce Trump and re-embrace democratic values. The passions have been let loose upon the land. All we can really do is just work like hell to make sure we outnumber them on Election Day.
Signals and Noise
Less than twelve hours after I had published last week’s article, in which I wrote, “Fortunately, the real-world consequences of Trump’s hurricane edition clown show appear to have had a limited effect on relief efforts,” the Washington Post published a story about how hurricane relief officials in North Carolina pulled emergency response personnel out of Rutherford County because of concerns an armed militia was threatening government workers there. FEMA workers returned to the county on Sunday afternoon. Authorities arrested a man accused of making threats against the government. MORE: “Meteorologists Face Harassment and Death Threats Amid Hurricane Disinformation” by Kate Selig of the New York Times (“A meteorologist based in Washington, D.C., was accused of helping the government cover up manipulating a hurricane. In Houston, a forecaster was repeatedly told to ‘do research’ into the weather’s supposed nefarious origins. And a meteorologist for a television station in Lansing, Mich., said she had received death threats. ‘Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes,’ wrote the forecaster in Michigan, Katie Nickolaou, in a social media post. ‘I can’t believe I just had to type that.’”)
Democracy Watch
🚨🚨🚨 “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people that have come in and destroying our country, by the way, totally destroying our country. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the—and it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”—Don Trump, during an interview with FOX News, threatening to send the military after American citizens who disagree with him. 🚨🚨🚨
By Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic: “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini”
Heather Cox Richardson writes about Don Trump’s increasingly fascistic and authoritarian rhetoric.
“In point of fact, Webster’s defines fascism the following way. ‘Quote, a populist political philosophy, movement…that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition,’ unquote. You can be the judge as to whether General Milley’s characterization sounds like what Mr. Trump is proposing out there on the stump, live for everyone to hear.”—Jake Tapper
“Just a former president suggesting he’ll use the military against his fellow citizens for exercising their freedom of speech. Nothing to worry about, folks. Seriously, when is he gonna grow that little mustache already? Because there’s only three weeks left!”—Jimmy Kimmel
“Donald Trump is a no-joke authoritarian psycho.”—Matt Labash, in his Substack.
“This is not Dukakis versus Bush. This is not Republican versus Democrat.
This is not left versus right. We are talking about the possibility of the return to power of a convicted felon, a rapey seditionist who threatens to undo the constitutional order. There is nothing conservative about that.”—Charlie Sykes
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic ripped Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin for trying to gloss over Trump’s comment about using the military to go after his political enemies during an interview with Jake Tapper of CNN. (“But today’s Republican leaders are cowards, and some are even worse: They are complicit, as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin proved today in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. At least cowards run away. The GOP elected officials who cross the street against the light just to get away from the reporters are at least showing a tiny, molecular awareness of shame. Youngkin, however, smiled and dissembled and excused Trump’s hideousness with a kind of folksy shamelessness that made cowardice seem noble by comparison.”)
“My question is: When did that become okay? I’m not looking for applause right now. I want to ask Republicans out there, people who are conservative, who didn’t vote for me, who didn’t agree with me. I had friends who disagreed with me on every issue. When did that become okay? Why would we go along with that? If your coworkers acted like that, they wouldn’t be your coworkers very long. If you’re in business and somebody you’re doing business with just outright lies and manipulates you, you stop doing business with them. Even if you had a family member who acted like that, you might still love them, but you’d tell them you got a problem and you wouldn’t put them in charge of anything. And yet, when Donald Trump lies, cheats, or shows utter disregard for our Constitution, when he calls POWs ‘losers,’ or fellow citizens ‘vermin,’ people make excuses for it. They think it’s okay. They think, well, at least he’s owning the libs. He’s really sticking it to ‘em. It’s okay as long as our side wins.”—President Obama (Brian Beutler has a good article about these comments.)
“There were no guns down there; we didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns.”—Don Trump speaking about the January 6 insurrection during a townhall hosted by Univision. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post points out that the most significant thing to come out of that statement isn’t the falsehood that the insurrectionists didn’t have guns (some did) but that Trump used the pronoun “we” to describe them (and in turn painted the police who defended the Capitol that day as the “others.”) You can see the moment here, which begins with a questioner telling Trump he’s giving the ex-president the opportunity to win back his vote, but it’s worth watching the question and Trump’s answer all the way through to see how the people in attendance react to him, particularly when he describes 1/6 as “a day of love.” After the event, the questioner confirmed he would not vote for Trump. MORE: In a legal filing, special prosecutor Jack Smith asserted Trump was responsible for instigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
The New York Times observes that Trump is trying to rewrite the history of January 6 during the final days of the 2024 campaign. His most outrageous claim: That the 1/6 insurrectionists are being treated as poorly as the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.
Steve Bannon is claiming the Biden administration is holding him illegally in prison by refusing to grant him an early release.
Brian Bennett of Time writes about the “Doomsday Book”, a stack of papers locked away in the White House containing ready-made orders for the president to use in the event of a major national catastrophe that would vastly expand the powers of the president and that some former Trump administration officials are terrified will be used in far-from-extraordinary circumstances should Trump return to the White House.
By David Corn of Mother Jones: “Trump Is Running a Disinformation Campaign, Not a Political Campaign” (“The rough and tumble of American politics often includes false statements and lies—what once was called spin. Unfortunately, there has always been a degree of tolerance for campaign dissembling….Yet Trump’s dishonesty goes further than the usual campaign lying. He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities. His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties that Trump can then exploit to collect votes. And the political media world has yet to come to terms with the fact that Trump is heading a disinformation crusade more likely to be found in an authoritarian state than a vibrant democracy. This is unlike other presidential campaigns in modern American history—other than his own previous efforts.”)
Rolling Stone reports the Trump campaign is preparing to declare on Election Night that the election is being stolen from him.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has claimed Dominion voting machines in Georgia are switching votes from Republican candidates to Democratic candidates.
Rick Hasen writes that Elon Musk’s Pennsylvania speaking tour, which people can attend by proving they have voted, is probably illegal. UPDATE: On Saturday night, this story took a wild turn when Musk said he would be awarding $1 million a day to registered Pennsylvanian voters who signed his petition and handed out the first reward. According to Hasen, this is very clearly illegal.
“These people are already up to no good, so we gotta win first. We win, and then Katie Bar the door. Believe me, the gates of hell, my hell will be unleashed.”—Former Trump National Security Adviser and retired general Michael Flynn, when asked at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival if he would “sit at the head of a military tribunal to not only drain the swamp, but imprison the swamp, and on a few occasions, execute the swamp.”
Brian Faler of Politico notes neither Trump nor JD Vance have released their tax returns, something every major party presidential candidate since the 1970s with the exception of Gerald Ford and, of course, Trump have done. This year, however, it’s not an issue, as Trump’s refusal to do so in the passed has defused the issue (Democrats have come to expect no less from Trump, while Republicans could care less.) Of all presidential candidates, however, the public would likely benefit from seeing Trump’s returns, since there’s good reason to believe he stands to benefit financially from the fiscal policies he advocates for. (Trump’s tax returns were leaked in 2020, revealing he had paid $750 in income tax in 2017.)
The chair of the Georgia State Election Board says his Republican colleagues have gone too far in passing new rules since Trump praised them at a political rally. “Our job is to clarify law, not create new law,” John Fervier, an appointee of Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. MORE: Judges in Georgia have knocked down multiple election rules created by the Trump-aligned election board, including one requiring the hand-counting of ballots.
Shawn McCreesh of the New York Times writes about the Trump voters who, despite evidence to the contrary, do not believe he will do many of the things he says he is going to do.
The 2024 Presidential Election
David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times looks at three electoral issues the Supreme Court may need to settle in the weeks after the election, including one involving a rule in Pennsylvania that invalidates mail-in ballots that are not personally dated and signed by the voter. A judge in Pennsylvania questioned the validity of a lawsuit Trump’s lawyers filed concerning overseas ballots.
Trump admitted during a FOX News interview that he just makes up numbers when talking about his tariff policy. (“Until now I’ve said 200 percent… I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”)
Trump completely bombed an interview about his economic policies during a forum with the Economic Club of Chicago, at one point drawing audible groans from the business-minded crowd. Reflecting on the event, David A. Graham of The Atlantic wrote, “[V]oters consistently say they trust Trump more to handle the economy than they do Kamala Harris. Why? Perhaps because, when Trump speaks about the economy, he sounds like a child. Yes, he has a reputation as a businessman, and voters consistently trust Republicans more on the issue (even though the economy fares better under Democrats). But Trump’s reductionism may be the real source of his appeal when it comes to the economy and other policy areas.” During that forum, Trump refused to comment on whether he had talked with Vladimir Putin since leaving office, but added “I will tell you that, if I did it, it’s a smart thing.”
How far back in time does Trump want to go to Make America Great Again? Jeff Stein and David J. Lynch of the Washington Post argue in their article about the far-ranging effects of Trump’s economic agenda that the answer is the 1890s, when the US economy was largely isolated from the rest of the world. The authors even note Trump said the US was never richer than it was in the 1890s (which it wasn’t.)
Bill Barrow of AP compared Project 2025 to the Trump campaign’s Agenda 47 platform and detected plenty of overlap on the biggest issues.
Conservative David French of the New York Times: “Let’s Take the Republican Policy Challenge” (“If you take Trump’s words seriously [and we should take every presidential candidate’s words seriously], his proposed policies mean more inflation, worse debt, greater international instability, incompetent or corrupt appointees, disruptive mass deportations and the deployment of military force against domestic opponents. That is not a formula for peace, prosperity or stability. It’s a formula for precisely the economic and international chaos that Republicans say they want to avoid….For traditional Republicans to feel at home in Trump’s G.O.P., they have to make a leap of faith. They have to assume that Trump is lying to his base. They have to assume that he’s running on a fake platform. But knowing what we know now, their faith is misplaced. Trump’s tweets are his policies, and there is no one left in the Republican Party to stand in his way.”)
Andrew Prokop of Vox considers whether progressives will continue to have the influence in a Harris administration that they’ve had during the Biden presidency.
Harris tried out a new reason for not saying what she would do differently as president than President Biden: It’s not the vice president’s place to speak critically of the president they serve.
Glenn Thrush of the New York Times points out that US prisons offered gender-affirming care during the Trump administration. Trump has been blanketing the airwaves with commercials blasting Harris for her past support of gender-affirming care in prisons.
The New York Times reports that in an extremely close race, the two presidential campaigns are running very different get-out-the-vote operations, writing “Ms. Harris’s team is running an expansive version of the type of field operation that has dominated politics for decades, deploying flotillas of paid staff members to organize and turn out every vote they can find. Mr. Trump’s campaign is going after a smaller universe of less frequent voters while relying on well-funded but inexperienced outside groups to reach a broader swath.” Rolling Stone reports Republican operatives have told the Trump campaign that Elon Musk’s GOTV operation, which is the biggest operation connected to Trump and employees a team connected to Ron DeSantis’s failed 2024 presidential run, is blowing it. Reuters reports the same.
By Franklin Foer for The Atlantic: “What Elon Musk Really Wants” (“Many other titans of Silicon Valley have tethered themselves to Trump. But Musk is the one poised to live out the ultimate techno-authoritarian fantasy. With his influence, he stands to capture the state, not just to enrich himself. His entanglement with Trump will be an Ayn Rand novel sprung to life, because Trump has explicitly invited Musk into the government to play the role of the master engineer, who redesigns the American state—and therefore American life—in his own image.”) MORE: From the New York Times: “How Tech Billionaires Became the G.O.P.’s New Donor Class”
The New York Times examines Harris’s struggles with Latino voters.
Eric Levitz of Vox looks at how Harris is struggling with union voters despite Biden’s historically pro-union policies.
From Gallup: “Majority of Americans Feel Worse Off Than Four Years Ago”
HOWEVER: By Seth Masket: “Whatever’s Driving Presidential Popularity Ain’t the Economy”
Kenneth P. Vogel and Eric Lipton of the New York Times found a seventh person who was granted clemency by Trump has been charged with new crimes after being given a second chance. The latest individual was arrested on a domestic violence charge.
According to a new biography of Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate Minority Leader called Trump “stupid [and] ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist” following the 2020 election (but before the January 6 insurrection.) In other words, McConnell is supporting a stupid, ill-tempered, narcistic, and despicable human being for president in the 2024 election.
John D. Miller, the former head of marketing at NBC, issued an apology for portraying Trump as a successful businessman on The Apprentice. (“To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was. In fact, Trump declared business bankruptcy four times before the show went into production, and at least twice more during his 14 seasons hosting. The imposing board room where he famously fired contestants was a set, because his real boardroom was too old and shabby for TV. Trump may have been the perfect choice to be the boss of this show, because more successful CEOs were too busy to get involved in reality TV and didn’t want to hire random game show winners onto their executive teams. Trump had no such concerns. He had plenty of time for filming, he loved the attention and it painted a positive picture of him that wasn’t true.”)
This Week in “Trump Losing His Marbles”
By Zach Beauchamp of Vox: “The Increasingly Bizarre—and Ominous—Home Stretch of Trump’s 2024 Campaign” (“Throughout these events, Trump has come off as (alternately) a buffoon and a would-be dictator. One minute, you’re laughing at his campy dance moves and Hindenburg car rants, the next you’re worrying that he really might try to send troops after American citizens. Yet the two Trumps, the clown and the menace, are intimately tied together: The absurdity helps normalize his dangerousness….Put differently: the dancing is a kind of alchemy that takes his terrifying ideas, like deploying the military against ‘the enemy within,’ and turns them into just another day in American politics.”)
In a bizarre scene that occurred after two attendees required medical attention, Don Trump ended a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania hosted by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem only to stay on stage for the next 39 minutes as the event’s DJ played music from Trump’s personally curated playlist. After asking if “anybody else would like to faint” before telling the DJ to turn the event into a “musical fest,” Trump swayed and occasionally moved his hands (although he didn’t seem to know the moves to “YMCA”) while attendees hung out.
Eventually the crowd began to disperse. For the record, the playlist was as follows:
“Ave Maria” (instrumental)
“Ave Maria” by Luciano Pavarotti
“Time to Say Goodbye” by Andrea Bocelli
“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” by James Brown
“YMCA” by the Village People (Trump has called this song the “Gay National Anthem.” Does he have any idea what this song is actually about?)
“Hallelujah” by Rufus Wainwright
“Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinead O’Connor
“An American Trilogy” by Elvis Presley
“Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony
“November Rain” by Guns N’ Roses
“Memory” from Cats
Wow, that setlist was a real banger. And why does he dance the same way to each song? What is wrong with this guy?
By Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post: “Songs and Dance Moves from Trump’s Weird Rally, Reviewed” (“…an extremely Cats evening — a series of songs not connected by anything resembling human logic, seemingly intended for people in the 1980s with access to controlled substances you lack, with the expectation that you just sit there and hum along. Is this really our Jellicle choice?”)
Trump described himself as the “father of IVF” during a townhall event focused on women’s issues. He also said Republicans “want fertilization.” (Congressional Republicans have voted twice in the past four months to block a bill that would protect IVF.) Trump said he was persuaded on IVF by a “a young, just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama,” Republican Senator Katie Britt.
An exchange from Trump’s interview with John Micklethwait hosted by the Economic Club of Chicago:
MICKLETHWAIT: The U.S. Justice Department is thinking about breaking up Alphabet, as Google likes to be known now. Should Google be broken up?
TRUMP: [heavy sigh] I just haven’t gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday, where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes. And the Justice Department sued them that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So I haven’t, I haven’t gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that. They can’t even believe it.
MICKLETHWAIT: But the question is about Google, President Trump.
Trump told FOX News he would give all police officers immunity and punish the bad apples.
When confronted about the contradiction, Trump said he would not give immunity to the officers who have been “terrible.”
Trump doubled-down yet again on his pet-eating immigrant claim, telling an attendee at a Univision townhall meeting, “"I was just saying what was reported that’s been reported and eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”
Trump told a Pennsylvania rally that their hometown hero Arnold Palmer had a large, um…well, let’s just say he basically said Palmer swung a big club. (“When he took the showers with other pros, they came out of there. They said, ‘Oh my God. That’s unbelievable.’ I had to say. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold as a man.”)
Trump said Kamala Harris was a “shit vice president” but he also felt that way about his own vice president, so big deal.
Trump remarked he was surprised to see how much blowback Harvey Weinstein received after he was accused by dozens of women of rape and sexual harassment. (“I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlongged, he got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of king of the woke, right? And yet he got hit.”)
After Kamala Harris released her medical records, Trump described her listed medical conditions (hives and allergies) as “deeply serious conditions that clearly impact her functioning.” Trump has not released his medical records, which has led Harris to wonder what the 78-year-old man is hiding.
Reports are Trump is feeling “exhausted,” which Marc A. Caputo of Politico notes is note surprising given his schedule but runs counter to Trump’s image as a fit, tireless man.
When answering a question from a ten-year-old kid on Fox and Friends about his favorite president, Trump cited Lincoln but wondered why he hadn’t “settled” the Civil War.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a story that Trump is a great speaker. I hear about great speakers like Churchill. I hear about a lot of good stuff, but I’ve never heard that Trump is a great — ah, oh, I’m in trouble because you know what they’re going to do. ‘He’s comparing himself to Winston Churchill.’ No, that’s what they’ll do, Andy, right. That’s what they’ll do. They’ll say, he’s comparing himself, he was angry about.”—Trump, comparing himself to Winston Churchill before complaining the media will say he was comparing himself to Winston Churchill.
Rachel Maddow of MSNBC reports Trump is again offering Stormy Daniels hush money.
This Week in “WTF is Wrong with JD Vance?”
Asked about the validity of the 2020 election by a reporter during a rally in Pennsylvania, JD Vance replied, “Did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”
Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark “Minisoldr” Robinson has admitted in a lawsuit against CNN that he frequented a pornography store to “bring over free pizza” and “socialize.” I’m sure he only reads it for the articles, too.
“No one in the United States is like ‘Oh my gosh, I will die if I don’t have health care.’”—Republican Virginia Senate candidate Hung Cao
A federal judge ruled the administration of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis must stop threatening television stations with criminal prosecution if they air advertisements supporting the state’s ballot initiative that would enshrine abortion protections in Florida. Wrote the judge, “The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is ‘false.’ To keep it simple for the state of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”
The Biden administration canceled $4.5 billion in student loans for 60,000 public service workers.
The Washington Post profiles the people who live in the area of Texas—five times the size of Manhattan—that lies north of the Rio Grande but south of the border wall.
The Wall Street Journal reports a fleet of unidentified drones recently swarmed a military base in Virginia.
International News
Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, during a chance encounter inside Gaza.
The United States is deploying about 100 troops to Israel to man an anti-ballistic missile system there.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he has received intelligence indicating North Korea is deploying 10,000 soldiers to assist Russia in its war against Ukraine.
The far-right government of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni passed an anti-surrogacy law that effectively prevents same-sex couples from becoming parents.
Garbage Time: A 2024-25 NBA Preview
(Garbage Time theme song here)
The 2024-25 NBA season tips-off on Tuesday. It’s an era of competitive parity in the Association, with six different champions over the past six seasons, which hasn’t happened since the late 1970s. A large number of teams have legit championship aspirations. Can the Celtics repeat as champions? Or will Giannis Antetokounmpo or Nikola Jokić slip on their second ring? Or will we see an unprecedented seventh new team in seven years get to hang a banner? Let’s dive in to what the upcoming season has in store for us, as we go team-by-team asking the perennial question: Can this team make it to the Finals?
Eastern Conference
ATLANTIC DIVISION
Boston Celtics: You mean the defending world champion Boston Celtics, whose star players are holding massive grudges after Jaylen Brown was snubbed for the US Olympic team in favor of Celtics fifth- or sixth-man Derrick White and Jayson Tatum was relegated to DNP status for some of Team USA’s biggest games? Yes, with a bullet.
Brooklyn Nets: Depth chart says Ben Simmons is the back-up point guard to Dennis Schroder. Both players peaked in 2018. No.
New York Knicks: For a while there, these nutcases were going to see if you could win an NBA championship with the star players off Villanova’s championship teams from the 2010s, but then they went and traded Donte (that’s not how you spell Donte) DiVincenzo to the Timberwolves for Karl-Anthony Townes and we were all like, “Damnit, I was really looking forward to watching Villanova on the Hudson” until we realized they also sent Julius “The Piece That Doesn’t Fit” Randle to Minnesota, too, and suddenly the Knicks and Jalen Brunson look a lot more dynamic than they did last season, when they finished with the second-best record in the East. Spike Lee can rejoice! Yes, the Knicks are back, baby, and even with the addition of Townes (himself a Kentucky Wildcat) we can still give them a cool Villanova-inspired nickname: The WildKATs!
No, no, not those guys. OK, bad nickname (I coined it first just in case).
Philadelphia 76ers: This is it, right? Process complete. The Sixers have one of the league’s dominant, championship-caliber players in Joel Embiid, and they’re pairing him now with future HOFer Paul George. If there are worries over George’s age (he’s 34) Philadelphia doesn’t need prime PG-13 (actually, he’s wearing #8 this season out of deference to a former Sixer named, let me check…yes, someone named Wilt Chamberlain); Embiid is option #1, and Tyrese Maxey is also there to pick up the slack. They’ve got 2, 3-years-max to win a title before Embiid and George age-out. Yes, they can make the Finals and anything less is a bust.
Toronto Raptors: Five years after Kawhi Leonard left town after bringing Toronto a title, Masai Ujiri has finally decided the Raptors aren’t running it back. Nope. But keep an eye on Scottie Barnes, who is poised to have a breakout year.
SOUTHEAST DIVISION
Atlanta Hawks: It’s the end of an era in Atlanta. This is (barring legal intervention) the last year Inside the NBA featuring Ernie Johnson, Kenny Smith, Charles Barkley, and Shaquille O’Neal will air, as TNT loses its broadcast rights to NBC and Amazon Prime at the end of the season. Mileage may vary, but the Inside Guys were at least entertaining and infinitely more watchable than the paint-by-numbers pre-game shows ESPN produces. And speaking of mileage, I would just point you to the segment that starts at around the 2:00 mark in the clip package below:
Sorry, was I supposed to be writing about the Hawks? Yeah, they’re terrible and won’t be making the Finals.
Charlotte Hornets: No. Not even sure if they’re still an NBA team.
Miami Heat: After the Celtics sent the Heat to Cancun in the first round of the playoffs last season, franchise player Jimmy Butler (who didn’t play in the series due to injury) went on a radio show and said Miami would have beaten Boston (and New York) if he had been able to play. That drew a public response from legendary Heat GM Pat Riley, who said, “If you’re not on the court playing against Boston or on the court playing against the New York Knicks, you should keep your mouth shut.” NBA insiders said that comment wasn’t so much a “Heat Culture” defense of good sportsmanship as it was a swipe at Butler’s tendency to miss games (26% over the past five years) due to injury. Riley also said he wasn’t ready yet to talk extension with Butler but wasn’t going to trade him, which sounds to me like Riley would actually like to hear offers. He probably should, because the Heat are past their sell-by date and won’t make the Finals as currently constructed. Bam Adebayo is a great player but he’s more of a Robin-style superstar. Riley needs to flip Butler for a Batman. Could Giannis fit on this team? Would Devin Booker make sense? The clock is ticking on both this team and Riley, who, at 79 years old, probably wants another ring before Heat ownership gives him the Pelosi treatment.
Orlando Magic: The Magic surprised a lot of people last year by winning 47 games and landing the five-seed in the East. Keep an eye on Paolo Banchero, who is on a superstar trajectory. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: There’s still a lot of room for improvement. This could be a young and exciting team, or it could experience growing pains. Either way, they won’t make it out of the second round of the playoffs. It’s a no.
Washington Wizards: Imagine the marketing opportunities if the NBA team in our nation’s capital was able to use their number one pick in the draft to select Cooper Flagg. Given the sorry state of the Wizards’ franchise, however, that would probably count instead as desecration. Just to clarify, any team in the running to get the #1 pick is not going to make the playoffs.
CENTRAL DIVISION
Chicago Bulls: How did we end up here?
That look in Torrey Craig’s eyes sums up the Bulls’ looming season. Not gonna happen.
Cleveland Cavaliers: The Cavs have the pieces that can get a team deep into the playoffs, but I just don’t think an undersized shooting guard like Donovan Mitchell is the superstar a team aiming for the Finals should be built around. Cleveland got hit hard by the injury bug last year (including a fractured jaw that kept all-star Darius Garland from eating solid food for a month) so this team is a tough out if they’re healthy. They won’t reach the Finals, though, especially given the caliber of teams they’d have to play to get there
Detroit Pistons: The Pistons hired Monty Williams to coach their team at the start of last season, lost a league-record 28 games in a row at one point, and then fired Williams this summer with five years and $65 million left on his contract. This franchise has no idea what it’s doing. Hell no.
Indiana Pacers: No one cares. Caitlin Clark and the Fever resume play in May.
Milwaukee Bucks: So far, I’ve only said three Eastern Conference teams can make the playoffs, so Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Bucks have to be the fourth team, right? Right?
Or probably not? The Bucks fired coach Adrian Griffin midseason last year when he had a 30-13 record and replaced him with Doc Rivers, who finished the season 17-19. It’s not clear the Damian Lillard-Giannis Antetokounmpo pairing is going to work, Khris Middleton seems like a flash-in-the-pan, and this team just feels solved. I think it’s more likely Giannis demands a trade out of Milwaukee than we see Milwaukee in the Finals again, but the contender that takes him (and Giannis would only want to go to a contender, although Houston could be tempting) would need to figure out very quickly how to integrate a ball-dominant player into their offense if they hope to win it all this year.
Western Conference
NORTHWEST DIVISION
Denver Nuggets: Any team with Nikola Jokić on it can get to the NBA Finals. Consider this: In a semifinal men’s basketball game at the Paris Olympics, Team USA started these five players
Jrue Holiday (Boston Celtics)
Stephen Curry (Golden State Warriors)
Devin Booker (Phoenix Suns)
LeBron James (Los Angeles Lakers)
Joel Embiid (Philadelphia 76ers)
**Kevin Durant (Phoenix Suns) subbed for Holiday down the stretch
against these five players from the Serbian National Team
Aleksa Avramović (Partizan Belgrade)
Ognjen Dobrić (Virtus Bologna)
Bogdan Bogdanović (Atlanta Hawks)
Nikola Jokić (Denver Nuggets)
Filip Petrušev (Olympiacos B.C.)
and Serbia had the US beat until Jokić picked up his fourth foul with 7:19 remaining in the fourth quarter. The US only went ahead with 2:24 left and ended up winning 95-91. (Man, I watched the hell out of that game. It’s probably still available on Peacock if you haven’t seen it; the 4th quarter heroics of Team USA were unbelievable. So intense.) In total, Team USA had twelve NBA players; Serbia had four. I would say this is relevant to what’s going on in Denver this season because the Nuggets are not getting better as a team. They’ve lost their entire bench, which was a strength when they won the title in 2023, and are now trying to make do with Old Man Westbrook. The obvious solution is for GM Calvin Booth to fire everyone but Jokić and sign/trade for the entire Serbian National Team. And remember, in the NBA, you get six fouls rather than five, which probably would have meant all the difference in the world as Jokić battled the combined might of LeBron, Steph, and KD.
Minnesota Timberwolves: This is how the Timberwolves’ offseason went, if the T-Wolves were actual dogs:
Stupid dog. What makes it funny is that it’s not like cats are geniuses, either, but the Knicks still managed to pull one on Minnesota by convincing them to take Julius Randle in exchange for Karl-Anthony Townes, the greatest three-point shooting center in league history. I’m sure it went like this:
NY: Hey Minnesota, we hear you’re looking to part ways with one of your two centers. How ‘bout we swap your two-time all-NBA (3rd team) player Karl-Anthony Townes for our two-time all-NBA (3rd team AND 2nd team!) player Julius Randle?
MN: I don’t know. Does Randle stretch the floor?
NY: Well then, how about we throw in Donte DiVin—
MN: Deal!
Now superstar-in-waiting Anthony Edwards is left running the pick-and-roll in the Twin Cities with Rudy Gobert, who will get switched off of all night long, and if Edwards eludes Gobert’s defender, there’s Randle and his defender clogging up the lane. The T-Wolves just littered the runway for a guy who does this on the regular:
If Randle doesn’t fit alongside Jalen Brunson, why would he fit alongside Edwards? And while Gobert may have been the NBA Defensive Player of the Year, did anyone notice the T-Wolves subbed him out on defense during the playoffs because he’s hopeless against guards? Minnesota finished a game back for the best record in the West last year and made it to the conference finals. They just took a step back. No Finals for Minnesota.
Oklahoma City Thunder: Maybe the best team no one’s paying attention to even though they finished tied with Denver for the best record in the West last season. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander finished as the runner-up for MVP. Chet Holmgren would have been Rookie of the Year if not for Victor Wembanyama. SGA and Holmgren make terrible commercials together, but on the court they’re a solid Big Two with a lot of room for growth. By adding Isaiah Hartenstein and Alex Caruso, they’re also one of the few teams in the West that actually got better in the offseason. Maybe they scan young—you’d think Jokić would clown them in a seven-game series—but they’re on the cusp. It’s not inconceivable at all for the Thunder to make the Finals.
Portland Trail Blazers: No. Next.
Utah Jazz: There are more interesting teams to get to. No. Next.
PACIFIC DIVISION
Golden State Warriors: I’m still high on the fumes from this. (Sorry, NBC Sports won’t let me embed that clip.) Those four threes were insane. The definition of excellence. Even Kevin Durant, who played with Curry for three years in Golden State, can’t believe what he’s witnessing. But alas, the Games are over and we’re back to the NBA regular season. So the big move the Warriors made this season was swapping out Splash Brother Klay Thompson for Buddy Hield, who has actually sunk the most three-pointers in the NBA since the 2017-18 season. That means the two most prolific three-point shooters of the era will be on the same team. Will that get the Warriors over the hump and back into the Finals this year? They’ll need Andrew Wiggins back full-time, a non-suspended near-prime Draymond Green, and a huge leap forward from Jonathan Kuminga. Golden State was one of the best second-half teams last season. My heart says yes, they can do this, but my mind tells me no, that they lack the spark those vintage Warriors teams possessed.
Los Angeles Clippers: Hey, new logo!
Just ignore the fact that logo looks more like a large yacht spotted within the periscope of a submarine than it does a clipper ship. But whatever. And hey, new arena, too! Ladies and gentlemen, the Intuit Dome! It has 1,100 toilets (triple the number of johns you find in the average NBA venue!) Its halo-shaped scoreboard includes t-shirt cannons that can target every section of the arena! And then there’s the Wall, 51 imposing uninterrupted rows of seating reserved exclusively for diehard Clippers fans!
As for the team? James Harden is still ballin’, Kawhi Leonard is probably still hurt (oh, he’s definitely hurt and indefinitely out) and Paul George left L.A. to play basketball in the winter in Philadelphia. I don’t see this team making the Finals.
Los Angeles Lakers: LeBron James turns 40 at the end of December and he’s still a top ten NBA player. Everyone seems to think he’ll ask out of L.A. to join the Cavs or Golden State or the Heat to chase a fifth ring. That would leave his son Bronny high and dry, but I don’t think Bronny’s long for the NBA regardless. (Those nights off on the road sure are going to be awkward for Dad and Son, don’t you think?) Frankly, I don’t think James is all that interested in rings anymore. Maybe he wants to pad stats or just get paid, I don’t know. The Finals aren’t in their future.
Phoenix Suns: What a weird team. They’ve got 40% of the US Olympic team’s Death Lineup in Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, a gimpy Bradley Beal who looks like he’s lost all his mojo, and not much else. Don’t see this team in the Finals either.
Sacramento Kings: The Kings basically flipped Harrison Barnes for King of the Mid-Range DeMar DeRozan, a prolific scorer who still doesn’t feel like a huge difference maker. The Kings took a step backward last season, going from a 3-seed to getting bounced in the 9- vs. 10-seed play-in game. They’re going to score a ton of points, but I still maintain they’re not going to get far with a team built around undersized big man Domantas Sabonis, so no.
SOUTHWEST DIVISION
Dallas Mavericks: The Mavs made the Finals last season but felt miles away from truly contending. In addition to bringing in Spencer Dinwiddie, they also signed Klay Thompson this year, but that feels like an overreaction to poor three-point shooting in the Finals. It’s a massive gamble, too, as I think it’s legitimate to wonder if the 34-year-old Thompson is anything more than a spot-up shooter at this point in his career. Maybe that’s all they need him to be? Also: All we heard all spring was how the Dallas backcourt of Luka Dončić and Kyrie Irving was one of the greatest backcourts of all-time, so not sure what problem Thompson is solving there. I’ll say they can make the Finals again, but it should also be noted Dončić’s lack of interest in defense and constant complaining to refs is keeping him from realizing his full potential. All of which is to say I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up on the wrong end of the play-in either.
Houston Rockets: Getting better—their young core could lead them to a +.500 record this year—but not better enough. It’s an easy no. But keep an eye on them, because they have a lot of assets to barter with. If Houston wanted to, they could put together a playoff team by the trade deadline.
Memphis Grizzlies: The biggest question mark in the NBA. Ja Morant is back, teamed up again with Desmond Bane and Jaren Jackson Jr. Marcus Smart is here to bring some accountability to the team. It looks like Zach Edey is going to start? Didn’t see that coming. Surely an exciting team, but my sense is they’re using this season to regroup. They could make a deep playoff run, but not to the Finals.
New Orleans Pelicans: New Orleans added Dejounte Murray, they have an expiring contract in Brandon Ingram that they could use in a trade to plug holes in their roster, and if Zion Williamson can stay healthy, he’s a tough match-up. This team has a riverboat-load of potential. But I have to actually see New Orleans play like a top team before I say they can crack the Finals. But I’m gonna stop writing about New Orleans here because I have more to say about the Western Conference in general. Looking back at what I’ve just written, I’ve argued only 3-4 teams in the West have a legit shot at making the Finals, but I think I’ve got that wrong. The West is full of good but not really great teams. Every team but Houston, Portland, San Antonio, and Utah thinks if they click, they can end up playing for a title next June, and Houston knows they have the assets to build a contender and San Antonio knows they have a player who could replace LeBron James as the league’s transcendent star. Yet some of those teams won’t even make the playoffs. So here’s what I think:
There are 11 teams in the West who could ride a better-than-expected season or a hot spring to the Finals.
If any one of those teams can upgrade their line-up between now and the trade deadline, they would become a favorite to win the West.
Eventually, some of those teams’ GMs should realize their best isn’t good enough, and rather than hold on to the hope that their club can gel come April (and then lose in the first round) they’ll decide it’s time for a rebuild and start shopping their players around.
So just wait. While there’s a lot of high-level parity right now in the West, I don’t think there’s much incentive for teams to try to ride it out through the playoffs with their current line-ups. A team that gets off to a slow start could set it all into motion.
San Antonio Spurs: Not yet, but soon… (With their luck, they’ll win the draft lottery and pair Wembanyama with Cooper Flagg.)
Season Predictions
NBA MVP: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
NBA Champion: Boston Celtics over Oklahoma City