The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

April 26, 2026

My fellow Americans,

It’s four weeks since the passing of President Donald Trump, our dear leader. He sacrificed so much for us, working day and night, every day of the week, to make America great again…and then again. If he had one fault—and I’m not saying he did—it was that he cared too much for us and not enough for himself. The jackals in the media who remain at large keep demanding an explanation for his death. But we will not insult his memory by releasing irrelevant and private records. I can tell you this: He died for us. Who will ever forget that day we said goodbye to our president? The full military parade. Tanks on Pennsylvania as far as the eye could see. The F-35 fighter jets in the sky. More than 100,000 troops in the nation’s capital. A new generation of generals snapping their salutes to their fallen commander-in-chief. The biggest crowd ever on the National Mall. And the journey from the White House to Trump Arlington Cemetery.

But now it is time to end our federally imposed Month of National Mourning and return to the job he started and that we inherit: restoring our national greatness. After we saved the nation from the 2024 election, under the guidance of his majestic hands, we once again became a great nation. But as he told us in his State of the Presidency speech, “Our greatness can be greater. We will achieve what I call greater-ness.” Indeed, we will. As his humble servant—as we have all been his humble servants—it is up to us to carry forth the glorious programs he bequeathed us.

The military will continue its Subversion Suppression exercises, as well as maintain the Intrusion Zero Program at the border, where we routed enemy troops to create the Zone of Safety.

We will continue to expand the construction of Departure Camps, as our Criminal Migrant Collection/Expulsion Program expands. The military will continue its Subversion Suppression exercises, as well as maintain the Intrusion Zero Program at the border, where we routed enemy troops to create the Zone of Safety. The roll-out of the across-the-board Trump Tariffs will proceed, and we will continue to root out the bureaucrats in government agencies who are disseminating fake numbers on inflation, unemployment, and wages, seeking to dispirit the nation. We will maintain the Keep America Growing program that removes anti-business ideologues who promote fake science from government positions in which they use their power to stymie energy production and other business development. The White House Make America Healthy Again working group will continue developing a health care plan to replace the failed programs of the past, and it’s expected to release its findings sometime in the future.

I am pleased to report that on June 14, the birthday of President Trump, the MAGA Loyalty Oath—which was declared constitutional by seven Supreme Court justices—will go into effect for all federal workers and members of the military. We encourage states to follow suit. That day will also become a national holiday. And I will fly to Moscow next month, as President Trump planned to do himself, to meet with President Putin and attend the ceremony marking the end of the fighting in Ukraine and the peaceful addition of the new territories to Russia. I will not attend the upcoming NATO summit, but we will maintain our observer status. I have instructed the Justice Department to continue its Enemies Within investigation and prosecutions.

But as we proceed and carry the torch that will forever bear his flame, I will be adding to President Trump’s historic and magnificent agenda. This week, we will be unveiling a national program to encourage women under the age of 40 to give birth. This will include tax incentives for businesses that encourage female employees to leave the workforce to have children. We will also send to Congress our Make American Families Great Again Act, which will end quick-and-easy divorces for couples with children or that include wives of child-bearing age. Divorce is a serious matter. And family, along with a belief in an almighty God, is the foundation of society. Families or potential families should not be allowed to be disbanded by just one of the parties involved.

For any school district that receives federal education assistance, Bible instruction will become mandatory—now that seven justices of the Supreme Court have ruled this program fully constitutional.

We will launch our Bibles for All program. For any school district that receives federal education assistance, Bible instruction will become mandatory—now that seven justices of the Supreme Court have ruled this program fully constitutional. In addition, a new White House Task Force on American Values will oversee the formation of action plans at every federal agency and department to combat the twin nightmares of DEI and secularism. All federal contractors will have to certify they are free of any race- or gender-conscious policies. The US Mint will be producing a special “Merry Christmas” $10 coin that will feature images of Donald Trump and a manger. I expect to have an announcement about Mount Rushmore in the coming weeks.

There’s more. Today I am announcing the formation of a Post-Democracy Commission, which will study whether there are more effective ways of governing than our current system. The world is changing fast. We need to ensure that our government keeps up with the creative disruption that has become an essential tool for the heroic and visionary business leaders who work to keep our economy strong and prosperous. This commission will be chaired by Elon Musk, who has just finished his task of eliminating unnecessary, business-strangling regulations in 23 different federal agencies and departments; Peter Thiel, an accomplished entrepreneur and impressive political philosopher; and Tulsi Gabbard. In this age of technological advancement, do we really need the bloated and inefficient government interfering with our health care and retirement?

We will continue to explore ending Medicaid and Medicare payments to states where abortion remains legal. I look forward to the pending Supreme Court decision on this.

And I will be sending to Congress a proposed constitutional amendment to make voting family-friendly. Under this amendment, all people, regardless of age, will be granted the right to vote. But for anyone under the age of 18, their parents will be given a proxy to cast their vote. Not since the Civil War has there been such an expansion of voting rights. We will expand our Family Protection Program to include the criminalization of puberty-blockers and gender-changing surgeries for children that allow misguided and malevolent doctors to play God. This expansion will also include the monitoring of abortions at the state level to ensure that pro-family state laws are honored and the evil of “infanticide tourism” is ended. We will continue to explore ending Medicaid and Medicare payments to states where abortion remains legal. I look forward to the pending Supreme Court decision on this.

I am also today announcing the formation of Project 2028. This will be a gathering of respected policy experts who will draft a comprehensive plan for government action across a wide array of issues—including energy development, social policy, education, and criminal enforcement—that can be implemented by 2028.

The first year of the Trump Restoration was marked by peace and prosperity. We have returned to a nation of values and strength. Hard-working Americans, forgotten and dismissed by elites serving the destructive forces of wokeness, are now no longer forgotten or dismissed. We will not heed the naysayers who spread disinformation about our economic progress to sow discord and chaos. Troublemakers who threaten societal order are being taken care of. Criminals who poison the lifeblood of the nation are being removed. Enemies of the family are being neutralized. We are winning. As President Trump liked to say, “So much winning, so much winning.” He showed us the way. Now it’s our turn.

On Sunday afternoon, when Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, comedian and podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe opened the big show with a string of racist jokes. He referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean,” made a crude remark about Latinos and sex, and joked about carving watermelons with a Black person for Halloween. Some in the packed arena laughed. It was the start of hours of MAGA extremism that included a speaker who called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and one who described Harris’ advisers as “pimp handlers.” The shindig culminated in one of Trump’s most inflammatory speeches.

Throughout the hours-long program, no one on the line-up—including Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance, Eric Trump, Lara Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Melania Trump, Dr. Phil, and Tucker Carlson—called out Hinchcliffe.

Nor did Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

When it was his turn on the stage, the former Democrat, who this year ran an unsuccessful independent campaign for president, praised Trump to the hilt, claiming that Trump, if elected, would “restore the moral authority” of the United States, “protect” the Constitution and free speech, and “rebuild the middle class.” He also proclaimed that Trump would “stop dividing this country along racial lines.”

Kennedy’s silence about Hinchcliffe’s foul racism was more significant than that of his fellow Trumpers, for he once had a strong bond with Puerto Rico.

In 2001, he was arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison for trespassing as a participant in a series of protests that aimed to stop the US Navy bombing exercises on Vieques island. The protesters contended the bombing was damaging the island’s environment and harming its 9,100 residents. The arrested demonstrators included actor Edward James Olmos, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Kennedy ended up serving a short stint in prison. He was so emotionally invested in this protest that he gave the middle name Vieques to one of his children.

So what did Kennedy make of Hinchcliffe’s racist gags?

On Monday morning, I reached Kennedy on his cell phone and asked why he hadn’t said anything at the rally about those comments. Kennedy requested we go off the record. Really? He would have to go off the record to discuss this? I replied that I preferred for this conversation to be on the record. He assented and said, “I was unaware of Tony Hinchcliffe’s, uh, uh, statement when I spoke or I would have addressed it.” He stopped talking, as if that was enough of a response.

“Well, what do you think of it now?” I asked.

“I think it was unfortunate,” he said. He paused and then added, “And that’s all I’ve got to say.”

Merely unfortunate? Nothing stronger?

I tried to press Kennedy for more, but he hung up.

His response was far weaker than the statement the Trump campaign had issued when it realized Hinchcliffe’s disastrous performance had tainted Trump’s campaign finale: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign.”

Other Republicans were more outspoken. Florida Sen. Rick Scott tweeted, “This joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true. Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans!” Recently imprisoned Trump adviser Peter Navarro called Hinchcliffe “the biggest, stupidest asshole that ever came down the comedy pike.” 

Hinchcliffe’s comments quickly drew harsh criticism from the Harris campaign, and, at the same time, prominent Puerto Ricans, including Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez, and Ricky Martin expressed their support for Harris. Within hours of Hinchcliffe’s Madison Square Garden appearance, Harris’ team released a video and social media posts assailing his racist cracks and promoting the veep’s plans for Puerto Rico.

In a 1963 speech as attorney general, Robert Kennedy, declared that one of the “overriding moral drives” of the nation was to combat racism and “to do everything possible to eliminate racial discrimination.” And during his speech at the Trump event, RFK Jr. hailed his father and his uncle, President John Kennedy, for having led a party that was committed to civil rights. Yet by hooking up with Trump, who has a long record of racism, Kennedy has not lived up to that standard his father called for. (He has also promoted racist and antisemitic conspiracy theories.) His unwillingness to sharply criticize the brazen racism present at the Trump rally where he was a headliner suggests Kennedy is a politician driven more by opportunism than his family’s legacy.

Billionaire-troll Elon Musk is dumping untold millions of his $240 billion fortune into helping Donald Trump regain the White House. In the final sprint of the campaign, he’s doling out (perhaps illegally) $1 million checks to registered voters in swing states who have signed a petition sponsored by America PAC, which he created and funded with at least $75 million. It’s possible he’s contributed additional millions through untraceable donations to pro-Trump dark money groups (which he has done in the past). And there’s another way Musk is boosting Trump: He’s essentially providing him tens of millions of dollars’ worth of social media posts for free.

Every day, Musk, who tweets and retweets dozens of posts on X, the social media site he bought two years ago for $44 billion. (It’s now estimated to be worth $9.4 billion). In recent weeks, many of his X posts have been about the 2024 election and have avidly promoted pro-Trump messages. With Musk’s 202 million followers (more than twice the number of Trump’s followers on X) and with an algorithm Musk asked to be rigged to boost his own tweets, these posts have racked up a large number of impressions—the number of times a tweet is seen by a user on the platform. Each of his posts can draw tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions impressions. That’s a lot of reach.

I examined Musk’s timeline for several days this month (October 19, 21, and 22) and focused on tweets that explicitly advocated the election of Trump or that advanced pro-Trump themes—and that each drew at least 1 million impressions. These were posts that could have served as Trump campaign ads. This group totaled 54 tweets.

The posts in this subset covered various aspects of the election. Musk reposted a tweet that declared that if the Democrats win in 2024, there will be no “meaningful elections in the future” (17 million impressions). Another featured video of him saying the media was manipulating the government to help the Biden-Harris administration (23 million impressions). In one, Musk called for people to put up Trump yard signs and wear MAGA merchandise (38 million impressions). He retweeted former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard proclaiming a Kamala Harris victory will be “the end of democracy in the United States” (53 million impressions). One post exclaimed, “Kamala hates Christians” and amplified the baseless claim that she had disparaged rally attendees because these disrupters shouted “Jesus is Lord” (43 million impressions). Another featured video of Musk at one of his pro-Trump events in Pennsylvania (28 million impressions). A post spread the false assertion that Michigan had more registered voters than eligible voters (32 million impressions). In another, Musk shared a meme stating that the Republican platform included multiple issues—such as free enterprise, secure borders, honest elections, real journalism, and moral standards—and the Democratic platform had only one: “Hate Trump” (79 million impressions).

One popular Musk post featured an AI image of Donald Trump as a beefed-up Pittsburgh Steeler (83 million impressions). He retweeted a meme showing a Venn diagram for “[Jeffrey] Epstein’s Guest List” and “Diddy Guest List,” with the overlap labelled as “All the celebrities coming out to support Kamala Harris” (97 million impressions). He put up a photo of him, Trump, and a Tesla race car (75 million). He boosted a post with a chart predicting a Trump win (65 million impressions). In one post, Musk urged people to vote early (25 million impressions). He retweeted a post that assailed Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (18 million impressions) and one claiming the Democratic criticisms of Trump are “all basically lies” (24 million impressions).

The 1.2 billion impressions Musk’s posts gathered over those three days were worth about $6 million. Assuming these were normal days for Musk, he’s putting up about $2 million worth of posts a day to help elect Trump.

During these days, Musk also posted regularly about about many contentious issues and subjects—government spending and regulation, abortion, woke-ism, censorship, the media, vaccine skepticism, and transgenderism—in a manner that would bolster the case for Trump. As Bloomberg reported recently, Musk is now X’s “biggest promoter of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories” and “debunked theories of undocumented voters swaying the US election.”

What might be the financial value of all Musk’s tweeting for Trump?

Let’s start with the impressions Musk received for his posts. The 54 election-related tweets that each collected over a million impressions during these three days—and there were many other posts concerning the election that drew fewer impressions—totaled 1.273 billion impressions.

How much would it cost someone to obtain so many impressions? There are two ways for an X user to buy impressions. You can purchase ads or you can pay X to promote a post.

Ad rates may vary, depending on the customer and the nature and size of the advertising campaign. But there is a good point of comparison, and it involves Musk’s own PAC.

From early July through October 1, America PAC purchased 59 ads on X targeting swing states for more than $166,000, according to the social media platform’s political ad disclosure data. These ads yielded 32,058,424 impressions. Based on these figures, one can calculate that it costs about $5,000 to score a million impressions with a political ad. (Impressions will also be affected by how many users repost or engage with them.) This, of course, is a rough estimate. It’s possible that Musk’s super PAC got a family-and-friends discount or, on the other hand, that X charged it top dollar in order to transfer funds into the financially-challenged company.

There’s another way to calculate the cost of a million impressions. X offers users the opportunity to boost the reach of an individual post. You may have seen the “Promote” button that is attached to some tweets. When I recently clicked on it, I was informed that for $5,000 that particular post—which had political content—could be zapped to between 55,000 to 1.3 million people over the course of one day. That’s quite a spread, and the fine print read, “Estimated reach is approximate. Actual reach can’t be guaranteed.” But it seems that if I wanted to come close to placing my tweet in front of a million pairs of eyeballs, I’d have to part with $5,000. (Per the caveat, I might end up with far less.)

With these two calculations, it appears X views the monetary value of 1 million impressions as about five thousand smackers. X, which no longer responds to requests from journalists, did not reply to an email inquiring about this and Musk’s posts.

If that figure is approximately correct, the 1.2 billion impressions Musk’s posts gathered over those three days were worth about $6 million. Assuming these were normal days for Musk the tweeting-maniac, he’s putting up about $2 million worth of posts a day to help elect Trump. (That number would be much higher if you factored in the posts on the election that didn’t exceed a million impressions and the posts related to issues that are a boon for Trump.) Add this up over the entire election—Musk endorsed Trump in July—and the value of Musk’s pro-Trump tweets could top $100 million. It might even reach double that and approach a quarter of a billion dollars.

Media tycoons have always been able to assist their preferred candidates with endorsements and favorable coverage. (See Murdoch, Rupert.) What Musk is doing is of a different nature. He’s posting multiple endorsements a day and promoting disinformation that bolsters Trump on a site that claims to have no editorial or political position. While he once proclaimed Twitter should be politically neutral, his excessive, nonstop rah-rahing for Trump has tilted its playing field. Musk has also permitted prominent extremists, conspiracy theorists, and purveyors of disinformation once bounced from Twitter to return to the site, and this band of posters skews dramatically pro-Trump.

Musk’s posts are not technically ads or campaign donations. Nor are the millions of election-related posts tweeted by X’s users (myself included), which depending on their salience or creativity, might garner many impressions. And neither are the commentaries of cable news hosts or newspaper columnists who may favor or oppose a particular candidate. But Musk’s relentless posting for Trump—amplified by the algorithm of the platform he controls—functions as an ad campaign. In a way, he has turned X into his personal plaything, and he has been using it to influence the presidential race to benefit Trump, who has vowed to put Musk in charge of government cost-cutting and regulatory review if he wins the White House. This is oligarchy in action.

Musk is a fortunate fellow. He has the bucks that have allowed him to become one of the biggest donors of the 2024 campaign. The money he has poured into America PAC is financing what are supposed to be extensive get-out-the-vote operations for Trump in swing states. And there’s no telling whether Musk—a major government contractor who yearns for a federal government that will eviscerate regulations that affect his companies—is also slipping big amounts of dark money to other pro-Trump endeavors. Meanwhile, Musk is acting like Trump’s running-mate, leaping about at rallies and holding his own campaign events, as if he were on the ticket. He has broken new ground in American politics, for he has shown us what it might be like for a political candidate (or the backer of one) to control an entire social media platform. (Trump, with his flailing Truth Social site, doesn’t count.) In doing so, Musk has supplied Trump tens of millions of dollars—maybe much more—in free messaging. It might well be one of the biggest gifts in the history of US politics. Or is it more of a payment for future services?

During an appearance last week at the Economic Club of Chicago, Donald Trump refused to say whether he had talked with Russian leader Vladimir Putin since his presidency ended almost four years ago. The issue arose because in his new book, journalist Bob Woodward, citing a single source, reported that Trump had chatted with Putin up to seven times following his departure from the White House. Asked about this revelation, Trump said he doesn’t disclose his conversations with foreign leaders—though he recently boasted he had spoken with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—but he added, “If I did, it’s a smart thing.”

Then the news cycle and the world moved on. Once again, Trump escaped scrutiny of his bizarre and troubling relationship with Putin. But this remains a significant question, as does the larger issue of Trumpworld interactions with Russia, as well as Moscow’s never-ending covert interventions in US elections to benefit Trump.

The Kremlin is once again attempting to subvert an American presidential contest. Throughout this year, US intelligence officials have been warning that Moscow is clandestinely interfering in the 2024 election to help Trump. Last month, a senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence briefed reporters that Russia is using “authentic U.S. voices” to “launder” Russian government propaganda and disseminate false narratives through social media and sham websites, targeting swing states and using artificial intelligence to create fake content that boosts Trump.

One online Russian network, according to the Washington Post, has been “touting a parade of lies about Harris, including that she is showing signs of Alzheimer’s and that her family has secret ties to ‘Big Pharma’ and so would push puberty-blocking drugs.” One Russia-based disinformation campaign, according to Microsoft, pushed the false story that Kamala Harris had been involved in a hit-and-run accident that left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed. This week, US intelligence officials disclosed that a Russian operation used a deepfake video to spread a wild and baseless claim that Minnesota governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz engaged in sexual misconduct. The intelligence officials also noted Moscow is weighing actions to encourage protests and perhaps violence over the election results. (Iran and China also have run operations aimed at the US election.)

Multiple reports and statements from the US intelligence community, the House and Senate intelligence committees, special counsel Robert Mueller, the Treasury Department, and private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the basic narrative of Trump’s betrayal: Through three elections, Putin has attacked American democracy to aid Trump’s bids to win the White House.

A former senior US intelligence official tells me that the consensus in the intelligence community is that the Russian efforts have become more sophisticated and tougher to uncover. In September, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment alleging that Moscow had clandestinely funneled $10 million to a group of conservative and pro-Trump influencers in the United States. That same month, the feds seized 32 internet domains used by the Russian government to spread disinformation targeting US voters. The American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that tracks disinformation, recently published a report noting it had found what it calls a “Sleeper Agents” bot network—a decade-old, global network of nearly 1,200 likely-automated social media accounts that exist to amplify Russian propaganda and other divisive content—and that “the Kremlin is ramping up its old brute-force methods of influence in advance of the 2024 election.”

The former intelligence official makes the obvious point: With his horrific war in Ukraine, Putin has more at stake in the current American election than ever before. Trump and his running mate JD Vance have expressed skepticism, if not outright hostility, regarding the Biden-Harris administration’s support of Ukraine, at times even echoing Kremlin talking points. Their election could signal a death knell for American military aid to Ukraine, which would be a huge victory for Moscow. Last week, Trump, amplifying Putin’s propaganda, blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy for helping to start the war.

With Putin waging information warfare against the United States for Trump’s benefit and with the US having spent (so far) $175 billion to back Ukraine as it battles against the Russian army, voters ought to know whether Trump is in contact with Putin and, if so, what the two are discussing.

Putin is not just any foreign leader. He’s an adversary of the United States and a war criminal looking to conquer an American ally. What might Trump be discussing with him? Is he telling Putin to cease his meddling in US politics or thanking him? Is he demanding Putin withdraw from Ukraine or is he encouraging Putin to hold tight until Trump possibly wins the White House and can lean on Ukraine to cut a deal that favors Moscow?

These are vital question. Trump’s refusal to address them should spark a campaign controversy, even within the clutter of all his outrageous remarks and actions.

But there’s history. The political-media world has never totally come to terms with the Trump-Russia scandal. For years, Trump has screamed that it’s a hoax cooked up by the “fake news.” And with his cries of “Russia, Russia, Russia”—meant to demean the investigations of the Kremlin’s attempted subversion of American elections and the ties between the Trump crowd and Moscow—Trump has largely succeeded in delegitimizing inquiries about him and Russia.

Look at what he’s gotten away with on this front.

In 2016, Russian cyber-operatives stole Democratic emails and files and used WikiLeaks to release them publicly to harm Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. The material, leaked almost daily in the last month of the campaign, did much to impede the Clinton campaign; this was a factor in her defeat. Trump and his minions aided and abetted that Russian effort by insisting throughout the race (and afterward) that there was no Russian intervention. He covered for Putin. And during the 2016 campaign, we know now, top Trump aides, including his son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and campaign chair Paul Manafort secretly met with a Russian emissary who they believed was bearing dirt on Clinton, after they were told the Kremlin was scheming to assist Trump. This meeting signaled to Moscow the Trump campaign was not opposed to Putin’s undercover efforts to sway the election toward Trump.

This was not the only direct connection between the Trump campaign and Russia. The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 released a lengthy bipartisan report that revealed that during the 2016 election Manafort regularly met with a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer and who “may have been connected to the [Russian] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” Manafort shared internal campaign data with this Russian operative, and the committee disclosed it had found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was tied “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Manafort, according to the committee, also explored with this Russian asset using his own access to Trump to advance a pro-Russia “peace plan” for Ukraine that would offer a “backdoor means” for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.

Despite all this—Trump’s complicity in Moscow’s attack and his campaign chairman’s conniving with a Russian agent—Trump managed to maintain his it’s-a-hoax crusade. As president, he yukked it up with senior Russian officials who visited him in the Oval Office and revealed highly classified information to them that endangered a critical source for US intelligence. At a summit meeting in Helsinki with Putin in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian tyrant—over his own intelligence agencies—when Putin insisted that Russia had not assaulted the American election.

The Kremlin’s pro-Trump skullduggery did not end in 2016. During the 2020 campaign, Rudy Giuliani, on behalf of Trump, was trying to whip up a phony scandal, claiming falsely that Joe Biden, when he was vice president, had pressured Ukrainian officials to kill an investigation of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma because his son Hunter sat on its board. Material for this smear campaign came from Russian agents, most notably a Ukrainian parliamentarian named Andriy Derkach—the son of a former KGB official. Derkach had staged press conferences in Kyiv and played secretly recorded tapes of Biden speaking by phone with former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Derkach insisted the recordings backed up Giuliani’s allegations about Biden. Yet the tapes revealed no misconduct. This was a disinformation stunt. Ukrainians critical of Russia speculated that the tapes originated with Russian intelligence. Giuliani repeatedly met with Derkach and called him “very helpful.”

Derkach, it soon turned out, was a Russian agent. In August 2020, William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said Derkach was assisting a clandestine Russian effort to “denigrate” Biden. The following month, Derkach was sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department, which called him “an active Russian agent for over a decade” and declared he was one of a group of “Russia-linked election interference actors” and had “directly or indirectly engaged in, sponsored, concealed, or otherwise been complicit in foreign interference in an attempt to undermine the upcoming 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

Giuliani’s endeavor to brand Biden corrupt—aided by Fox News, other right-wing media, Steve Bannon, and assorted Trump operatives—was a made-in-Russia operation. Trump again was accepting the Kremlin’s help, with his personal attorney in cahoots with a Russian agent. This time it did not work. Trump lost the election. But once more, Trump was not tarred for partnering up with Putin to smear Biden. Trump continued promoting his Russia hoax charade. (Trump was impeached in 2019 but not convicted for pressuring the new Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to concoct an investigation of Biden to bolster the Russian smear operation.)

No matter how much evidence emerges that the Kremlin has been seeking to unsettle American politics to assist Trump, he sticks to his disinformation campaign insisting all talk of Russian interference is fraudulent. When the Justice Department last month announced its indictments alleging secret payments to pro-Trump influencers in the United States, he brayed that this was part of an effort by the Justice Department “to interfere in and suppress the Election in favor of the Democrats by resurrecting the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and trying to say that Russia is trying to help me, which is absolutely FALSE.” On Fox News this past weekend, Trump proclaimed, “The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax was all made up, and now it’s acknowledged that it was made up.”

There has been no such acknowledgement.

Multiple reports and statements from the US intelligence community, the House and Senate intelligence committees, special counsel Robert Mueller, the Treasury Department, and private cybersecurity experts have confirmed the basic narrative of Trump’s betrayal: Through three elections, Putin has attacked American democracy to aid Trump’s bids to win the White House, and Trump, who called on Russia to meddle in 2016, has insisted none of this has occurred, essentially assisting and protecting a US enemy. (In 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin, then a close Putin ally who oversaw the Russian social media operation that targeted the 2016 campaign, said, “We have interfered [in U.S. elections], we are interfering, and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do.”) According to Mueller’s report, Trump even engaged in possible obstruction of justice to thwart a full accounting of what occurred during the 2016 campaign.

There’s an undeniable pattern. In the 2016 election, Trump’s campaign chairman colluded with a Russian intelligence officer. In the 2020 election, Trump’s personal lawyer conspired with a Russian intelligence agent. The only hoax is Trump’s assertion that he’s the victim of a hoax.

Now Trump won’t say whether he is talking privately with a brutal foreign adversary who has killed, kidnapped, and injured tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and who is yet again messing with an American election.

For over a decade, Trump has been weirdly enamored with Putin. In 2013, when he announced he would hold his Miss Universe pageant in Moscow—after teaming up with a Putin-friendly Russian oligarch who would help Trump pocket millions of dollars in Russia—Trump asked in a tweet whether the repressive Putin will “become my new best friend.” And when Trump later that year visited Moscow for the event, he was obsessed with meeting Putin, repeatedly asking his aides and Russian contacts if such a confab would happen. It did not. But a bond between Trump and Putin was forged. Trump has frequently praised the dictator and basically provided alibis for his attacks on US elections.

To some, talk of Trump and Putin may seem like old news. And that’s what Trump wants people to think: This is a discredited story from years past. Thanks to the deflections, distractions, and false denials of Trump and the GOP, the peculiar and disturbing Trump-Russia ties have never fully registered in the national discourse. Trump has successfully sidestepped this scandal, even as it continues to this day with the ongoing Russian operations and with Trump refusing to disclose whether he has been in contact with Putin. The vexing connection between Trump and Russia is not a leftover issue from previous elections. With the autocratic Putin seeking to crush Ukraine and Trump looking to score an electoral victory that could lead to the implementation of authoritarian measures in the United States, this strange and alarming relationship may matter more than ever.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Walking my dog. On the Metro. In line at a sandwich shop. People keep coming up and asking me about “the polls.” What do the numbers mean? Should they be worried about the election? If a set of swing state polls is released, the odds are by the end of the day I will have been asked by a friend, a relative, a neighbor, or a stranger, or several, “Did you see that poll in Nevada? Why was there a shift of three points since the last one? How could Pennsylvania be going in a different direction? And North Carolina, really? Do you think that’s accurate?” If they start referencing Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, or any of the other pollster celebs…I want to scream.

Polls, to be hyperbolic about it, have ruined American politics. Okay, a lot has ruined American politics. But polls have certainly made American politics less enjoyable. Many of those who follow politics—and not enough citizens do—have become slaves of polling, overly obsessed with these surveys and palpitating over the slightest changes. I’m not unsympathetic. This election is prompting more anxiety than most. The oft-repeated mantra that the 2024 race could determine whether the United States remains an imperfect democracy or slips toward a more authoritarian form of governance is true. Thus, every iota of data related to the face-off between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appears loaded with relevance and consequence. Still, the hyperfixation on polls is unwarranted and distracts us from other important aspects of this most important election.

Polls don’t matter. Or maybe they do. It depends on your definition of “matters.” By all measurements, this is a close race. What else do you need to know? The candidates are within a few points of each other in the national polls and the swing state polls. But the difference is usually within the reported margin of error. That means the poll that has just caused you heartburn may not have any value in terms of telling us what will happen on Election Day.

And get this: That margin of error may not even be accurate.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.”

While doing a little (but not much) research for this rant, I came across a useful article from the Pew Research Center, which does a lot of polling. It was published this summer and called “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” The piece made the usual points. In 2016 and 2020, polling underestimated Trump’s performance. (Polls on average overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength by 1.3 percent and Joe Biden’s by 3.9 percent.) The 2022 nonpartisan polls—meaning those taken by the media and research centers and not by campaigns and political groups—were more accurate than people may have assumed after the mythical “red wave” did not materialize. Polling methodologies have shifted to keep current with changes (such as the decrease in the use of landlines and a low response rate). Pollsters have improved how they weigh demographic variables to obtain representative samplings.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.” What? Read that again. Double the margin of error. “A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people,” Pew tells us, “has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points.” That’s usually the number you see associated with a poll. Three percent. That doesn’t seem so bad.

But there are other errors. If you must know, they are called noncoverage error, nonresponse error, and measurement error. I’m not going to go into the technical details here. But this is the bottom line from Pew: “The problem is that sampling error is not the only kind of error that affects a poll. Those other kinds of error, in fact, can be as large or larger than sampling error. Consequently, the reported margin of error can lead people to think that polls are more accurate than they really are…Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.”

So are you really going to pull your hair out over a poll with a margin of error of 6 points? C’mon. Get a grip.

“Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic,” wrote historian Jill Lepore.

It’s easy to be a polling Grinch. If you want to dive into such territory, I commend two well-researched articles. In 2015, historian Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy and fascinating piece in the New Yorker on the history of polling that took a dim view of this practice and decried its impact on US politics. She explored the decades-old debate among social scientists as to whether there really is such a thing as “public opinion,” questioning whether polling measures it or creates it. George Gallup, who helped invent the polling industry, believed it did exist and could be quantified for edification and profit. But Lepore offered the case that whoever was correct about this, polling and the media addiction to it is not beneficial for democracy. After citing the Gallup Poll’s former managing editor David Moore’s remark that “media polls give us distorted readings of the electoral climate, manufacture a false public consensus on policy issues, and in the process undermine American democracy,” Lepore added her own observation: “Polls don’t take the pulse of democracy; they raise it.”

Referencing Trump’s 2016 campaign, she concluded, “Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.”

Lepore might have been unduly pessimistic about pollsters meeting the technical challenges of the day, but on the Big Idea she was prescient. Picking up where she left off is Samuel Earle, a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School, who published a long essay on polling in the recent issue of the New York Review of Books. (His piece is ostensibly a review of Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliot Morris, the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, its polling review outlet.) Earle, too, wonders about the nature of public opinion and the ability to capture it. He presents a harsh history of the polling biz, noting that Gallup once said of polling, “If it works for toothpaste, why not for politics?” And he applies the Heisenberg observer effect to polling:

[E]very attempt to study how people think and act has the potential to influence how they think and act, thus changing what is being recorded, either in self-fulfilling or self-negating ways. The results of any poll on a particular issue are liable to change how people think about that issue, just as any poll showing a candidate’s popularity is liable to influence that candidate’s popularity. 

Polls are shortcuts to understanding a rather complicated matter: how millions of Americans, each operating on different levels of engagement with different levels of information, will make a specific decision. In a way, polls may be comforting, providing the fantasy of certainty (or possible certainty) in a sea of unknowing. But they can enhance anxiety and smother more substantive discussions of an election. They definitely are useful for campaigns, as the political professionals strive to find the best messages and plot out how most effectively to use their resources. Which states should we spend money on? Where should we send the candidate? What themes and ideas seem to be resonating? Let’s look at the numbers.

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture.

Earle acknowledges the benefits of polling for the pros. But he’s right when he observes, “[P]olls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces.”

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture. Here’s one crude analogy. For many years, only Hollywood insiders pored over the opening-weekend box office returns for movies. But at some point—I can’t recall when—seemingly everyone began talking about that first weekend take. The question was no longer, Is this movie good? It became, How did it do?

I’m sure we can chart how polls came to dominate political coverage. In the mid-1970s, according to Lepore, media outlets, which had previously relied on Gallup’s firm and other polling outfits, began conducting their own polls. “[W]e’ve been off to the races ever since,” she wrote. And now coverage of polls crowds out other elements of the race. When someone (like me) complains about horse-race political journalism, this is often what they have in mind.

Here’s a recent example. When Harris earlier this month proposed expanding Medicare to include home health care, the New York Times placed its story on this plan on page A12. On the front page, the top story was a report on the new swing state polls the newspaper had conducted with Siena College. The Times was promoting its own polling and—with other outlets picking up these findings—creating a news cycle. Yet Harris’ proposal could affect millions of Americans. It was arguably more consequential than the polls of the moment. Adhering to its basic precepts of politics coverage, the editors of the Times deemed those surveys more important.

There’s plenty more to say about polls. Political pros and amateurs love debating which ones are more accurate and how they are used or abused. (Some libs have recently been complaining that Republicans are producing junk polling that shows Trump in a better position in order to rig the national averages of polls in his favor.) Politicos assess how to recalibrate this year’s surveys according to various factors. (What if the current polls are wrong in the way the 2020 polls were wrong? What if they are wrong in the way some of the 2022 polls were wrong?) Polling is a cottage industry. Dissecting polls is one as well. Or perhaps a hobby. Like fantasy football. (At least in fantasy football you pick and manage your team and possess some agency.)

You will note that I’ve managed to get through this diatribe without declaring that a poll is just a snapshot in time and that the only poll that counts is on Election Day. More to the point, polls are the sugar high and empty calories of politics. And they make for lazy—or, at least, easy—journalism. I’d rather see reporters dig into other stuff. The ties between right-wing extremism and the GOP, the dirty deeds being perpetuated by billionaire-funded super-PACs, the role of dark money and disinformation in this campaign, the how-this-affects-you implications of the candidates’ positions. I bet that if you asked voters and news consumers, a majority would agree. Let’s poll that.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Walking my dog. On the Metro. In line at a sandwich shop. People keep coming up and asking me about “the polls.” What do the numbers mean? Should they be worried about the election? If a set of swing state polls is released, the odds are by the end of the day I will have been asked by a friend, a relative, a neighbor, or a stranger, or several, “Did you see that poll in Nevada? Why was there a shift of three points since the last one? How could Pennsylvania be going in a different direction? And North Carolina, really? Do you think that’s accurate?” If they start referencing Nate Silver, Nate Cohn, or any of the other pollster celebs…I want to scream.

Polls, to be hyperbolic about it, have ruined American politics. Okay, a lot has ruined American politics. But polls have certainly made American politics less enjoyable. Many of those who follow politics—and not enough citizens do—have become slaves of polling, overly obsessed with these surveys and palpitating over the slightest changes. I’m not unsympathetic. This election is prompting more anxiety than most. The oft-repeated mantra that the 2024 race could determine whether the United States remains an imperfect democracy or slips toward a more authoritarian form of governance is true. Thus, every iota of data related to the face-off between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris appears loaded with relevance and consequence. Still, the hyperfixation on polls is unwarranted and distracts us from other important aspects of this most important election.

Polls don’t matter. Or maybe they do. It depends on your definition of “matters.” By all measurements, this is a close race. What else do you need to know? The candidates are within a few points of each other in the national polls and the swing state polls. But the difference is usually within the reported margin of error. That means the poll that has just caused you heartburn may not have any value in terms of telling us what will happen on Election Day.

And get this: That margin of error may not even be accurate.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.”

While doing a little (but not much) research for this rant, I came across a useful article from the Pew Research Center, which does a lot of polling. It was published this summer and called “Key things to know about U.S. election polling in 2024.” The piece made the usual points. In 2016 and 2020, polling underestimated Trump’s performance. (Polls on average overestimated Hillary Clinton’s strength by 1.3 percent and Joe Biden’s by 3.9 percent.) The 2022 nonpartisan polls—meaning those taken by the media and research centers and not by campaigns and political groups—were more accurate than people may have assumed after the mythical “red wave” did not materialize. Polling methodologies have shifted to keep current with changes (such as the decrease in the use of landlines and a low response rate). Pollsters have improved how they weigh demographic variables to obtain representative samplings.

What was most interesting in this article, though, was what it said about the margin of error: “The real margin of error is often about double the one reported.” What? Read that again. Double the margin of error. “A typical election poll sample of about 1,000 people,” Pew tells us, “has a margin of sampling error that’s about plus or minus 3 percentage points.” That’s usually the number you see associated with a poll. Three percent. That doesn’t seem so bad.

But there are other errors. If you must know, they are called noncoverage error, nonresponse error, and measurement error. I’m not going to go into the technical details here. But this is the bottom line from Pew: “The problem is that sampling error is not the only kind of error that affects a poll. Those other kinds of error, in fact, can be as large or larger than sampling error. Consequently, the reported margin of error can lead people to think that polls are more accurate than they really are…Several recent studies show that the average total error in a poll estimate may be closer to twice as large as that implied by a typical margin of sampling error. This hidden error underscores the fact that polls may not be precise enough to call the winner in a close election.”

So are you really going to pull your hair out over a poll with a margin of error of 6 points? C’mon. Get a grip.

“Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic,” wrote historian Jill Lepore.

It’s easy to be a polling Grinch. If you want to dive into such territory, I commend two well-researched articles. In 2015, historian Jill Lepore wrote a lengthy and fascinating piece in the New Yorker on the history of polling that took a dim view of this practice and decried its impact on US politics. She explored the decades-old debate among social scientists as to whether there really is such a thing as “public opinion,” questioning whether polling measures it or creates it. George Gallup, who helped invent the polling industry, believed it did exist and could be quantified for edification and profit. But Lepore offered the case that whoever was correct about this, polling and the media addiction to it is not beneficial for democracy. After citing the Gallup Poll’s former managing editor David Moore’s remark that “media polls give us distorted readings of the electoral climate, manufacture a false public consensus on policy issues, and in the process undermine American democracy,” Lepore added her own observation: “Polls don’t take the pulse of democracy; they raise it.”

Referencing Trump’s 2016 campaign, she concluded, “Donald Trump is a creature of the polls. He is his numbers. But he is only a sign of the times. Turning the press into pollsters has made American political culture Trumpian: frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic.”

Lepore might have been unduly pessimistic about pollsters meeting the technical challenges of the day, but on the Big Idea she was prescient. Picking up where she left off is Samuel Earle, a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School, who published a long essay on polling in the recent issue of the New York Review of Books. (His piece is ostensibly a review of Strength in Numbers: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them by G. Elliot Morris, the editorial director of data analytics at ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, its polling review outlet.) Earle, too, wonders about the nature of public opinion and the ability to capture it. He presents a harsh history of the polling biz, noting that Gallup once said of polling, “If it works for toothpaste, why not for politics?” And he applies the Heisenberg observer effect to polling:

[E]very attempt to study how people think and act has the potential to influence how they think and act, thus changing what is being recorded, either in self-fulfilling or self-negating ways. The results of any poll on a particular issue are liable to change how people think about that issue, just as any poll showing a candidate’s popularity is liable to influence that candidate’s popularity. 

Polls are shortcuts to understanding a rather complicated matter: how millions of Americans, each operating on different levels of engagement with different levels of information, will make a specific decision. In a way, polls may be comforting, providing the fantasy of certainty (or possible certainty) in a sea of unknowing. But they can enhance anxiety and smother more substantive discussions of an election. They definitely are useful for campaigns, as the political professionals strive to find the best messages and plot out how most effectively to use their resources. Which states should we spend money on? Where should we send the candidate? What themes and ideas seem to be resonating? Let’s look at the numbers.

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture.

Earle acknowledges the benefits of polling for the pros. But he’s right when he observes, “[P]olls saturate election coverage, turn politics into a spectator sport, and provide an illusion of control over complex, unpredictable, and fundamentally fickle social forces.”

The fascination with polls also reflects the data-fication of society and popular culture. Here’s one crude analogy. For many years, only Hollywood insiders pored over the opening-weekend box office returns for movies. But at some point—I can’t recall when—seemingly everyone began talking about that first weekend take. The question was no longer, Is this movie good? It became, How did it do?

I’m sure we can chart how polls came to dominate political coverage. In the mid-1970s, according to Lepore, media outlets, which had previously relied on Gallup’s firm and other polling outfits, began conducting their own polls. “[W]e’ve been off to the races ever since,” she wrote. And now coverage of polls crowds out other elements of the race. When someone (like me) complains about horse-race political journalism, this is often what they have in mind.

Here’s a recent example. When Harris earlier this month proposed expanding Medicare to include home health care, the New York Times placed its story on this plan on page A12. On the front page, the top story was a report on the new swing state polls the newspaper had conducted with Siena College. The Times was promoting its own polling and—with other outlets picking up these findings—creating a news cycle. Yet Harris’ proposal could affect millions of Americans. It was arguably more consequential than the polls of the moment. Adhering to its basic precepts of politics coverage, the editors of the Times deemed those surveys more important.

There’s plenty more to say about polls. Political pros and amateurs love debating which ones are more accurate and how they are used or abused. (Some libs have recently been complaining that Republicans are producing junk polling that shows Trump in a better position in order to rig the national averages of polls in his favor.) Politicos assess how to recalibrate this year’s surveys according to various factors. (What if the current polls are wrong in the way the 2020 polls were wrong? What if they are wrong in the way some of the 2022 polls were wrong?) Polling is a cottage industry. Dissecting polls is one as well. Or perhaps a hobby. Like fantasy football. (At least in fantasy football you pick and manage your team and possess some agency.)

You will note that I’ve managed to get through this diatribe without declaring that a poll is just a snapshot in time and that the only poll that counts is on Election Day. More to the point, polls are the sugar high and empty calories of politics. And they make for lazy—or, at least, easy—journalism. I’d rather see reporters dig into other stuff. The ties between right-wing extremism and the GOP, the dirty deeds being perpetuated by billionaire-funded super-PACs, the role of dark money and disinformation in this campaign, the how-this-affects-you implications of the candidates’ positions. I bet that if you asked voters and news consumers, a majority would agree. Let’s poll that.

Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.

The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.

There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”

And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”

Trump’s refusal to compensate workers and contractors has been widely documented. In 2016, USA Today reported that Trump’s companies had been “cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.” In 2019, the Washington Post broke the story that employees at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briar­cliff Manor, New York, were forced to work without pay after they clocked out. It was called “side work.” The Trump Organization denied this happened.

In addition to the misleading substance of the ad, the spot features slow-mo, heroic-ish imagery of supposedly American workers. But in several instances, these are not Americans but overseas workers. A photo of a welder comes from a stock image taken by a photographer in the Netherlands and available (at a low price) on a Portuguese site. Footage of a delivery man on a bicycle traces back to a stock image company in Thailand and was also available on the Portuguese site. Video of a woman dressed in surgical garb—she’s a doctor or a nurse—was produced by a Ukrainian company. And a clip of a chef in a kitchen is from a video made by a Spanish production company.

The creators of the Right for America spot could not be bothered to find real Americans for the ad.

Right for America is funded by a small group of billionaires who are pals with Trump. Its biggest backers are Ike Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who together have kicked in at least $20 million. He’s a former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and has a reputation as an eccentric tycoon who eschews being photographed. Other major donors include venture capitalist Douglas Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital; Robert Book, a co-vice chair of the board of Axxes Capital; and trash hauling magnate Anthony Lomangino. The Perlmutters and Lomangino are members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club. The PAC is run by Sergio Gor, a friend of the Trump family once nicknamed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago.”

Right for America is just one of several billionaire-funded PACs that in the final weeks of the election are flooding TV, radio, and social media in swing states with ads to help Trump. According to Axios, it has booked about $40 million in ads through Election Day. And the New York Times reported that it has spent $500,000 to run this spot in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and $360,000 to air a Spanish-language version, mostly in Arizona.

This ad, which shows video of Trump returning to his feet after a gunman fired at him at a campaign rally in July, claims that “for too long no one in Washington has been looking out for” overtime workers and declares Trump is the one man who will. It’s rich that billionaires are spending so much money to convince voters that Trump is an advocate for hard-working toilers when he has shafted them as a businessman and as a president. Their pitch is as phony as the stock footage used to sell it.

Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.

The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.

There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”

And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”

Trump’s refusal to compensate workers and contractors has been widely documented. In 2016, USA Today reported that Trump’s companies had been “cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.” In 2019, the Washington Post broke the story that employees at the Trump National Golf Club Westchester in Briar­cliff Manor, New York, were forced to work without pay after they clocked out. It was called “side work.” The Trump Organization denied this happened.

In addition to the misleading substance of the ad, the spot features slow-mo, heroic-ish imagery of supposedly American workers. But in several instances, these are not Americans but overseas workers. A photo of a welder comes from a stock image taken by a photographer in the Netherlands and available (at a low price) on a Portuguese site. Footage of a delivery man on a bicycle traces back to a stock image company in Thailand and was also available on the Portuguese site. Video of a woman dressed in surgical garb—she’s a doctor or a nurse—was produced by a Ukrainian company. And a clip of a chef in a kitchen is from a video made by a Spanish production company.

The creators of the Right for America spot could not be bothered to find real Americans for the ad.

Right for America is funded by a small group of billionaires who are pals with Trump. Its biggest backers are Ike Perlmutter and his wife Laura, who together have kicked in at least $20 million. He’s a former CEO of Marvel Entertainment and has a reputation as an eccentric tycoon who eschews being photographed. Other major donors include venture capitalist Douglas Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital; Robert Book, a co-vice chair of the board of Axxes Capital; and trash hauling magnate Anthony Lomangino. The Perlmutters and Lomangino are members of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club. The PAC is run by Sergio Gor, a friend of the Trump family once nicknamed the “Mayor of Mar-a-Lago.”

Right for America is just one of several billionaire-funded PACs that in the final weeks of the election are flooding TV, radio, and social media in swing states with ads to help Trump. According to Axios, it has booked about $40 million in ads through Election Day. And the New York Times reported that it has spent $500,000 to run this spot in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and $360,000 to air a Spanish-language version, mostly in Arizona.

This ad, which shows video of Trump returning to his feet after a gunman fired at him at a campaign rally in July, claims that “for too long no one in Washington has been looking out for” overtime workers and declares Trump is the one man who will. It’s rich that billionaires are spending so much money to convince voters that Trump is an advocate for hard-working toilers when he has shafted them as a businessman and as a president. Their pitch is as phony as the stock footage used to sell it.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Is it racist, misogynist, or misogynoirist for Donald Trump to refer to Vice President Kamala Harris as “retarded,” as he recently did during a dinner at Trump Tower with his fat-cat billionaire donors, according to the New York Times? His routine disparagement of her as “dumb” and “mentally disabled” comes across as bigotry. Now you—or someone—might say, this isn’t Trump being biased; he treats all his political foes that way and engages in equal-opportunity slander. But there’s something sharper here than his usual immature and false taunts. At a rally last month, he remarked, “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way”—setting her apart in his fusillade of demeaning insults.

Slamming this accomplished Black woman with a long history of public service as a person born mentally inferior—see the recent Our Land issue on Trump and genes—seems a racist and/or misogynist act. Especially when it comes from a man with a lengthy and undeniable record of racism and misogyny. While such campaign rhetoric would have once been considered a campaign scandal—in 1980 when President Jimmy Carter accurately noted that the Ku Klux Klan had endorsed Ronald Reagan, the political press attacked him for being mean—these Trump comments cause Trump no political discomfort. They barely trigger any controversy.

Trump appears to have created a permission structure for bias-driven assaults on Harris.

In fact, Trump appears to have created a permission structure for bias-driven assaults on Harris. In right-wing media, commentators are having a field day. Writing for the American Spectator, a fellow named Scott McKay declared “Kamala Harris hates men” and “doesn’t seem to associate with any men worth respecting.” Referring to 55,000 American men who died in Vietnam—don’t ask why he even brought this up—he wrote,

Kamala Harris doesn’t give a damn about any of those 55,000 dead Americans. 

She doesn’t give much of a damn about the 330 million current live Americans. And she certainly doesn’t give a damn about the male subset of that population.

How could she? Nothing in Kamala Harris’ political background shows that she has any respect for, or appreciation of, masculinity.

The article raised crude speculations about her personal life and blasted Harris for having an affair with California politician Willie Brown while he was married. And McKay demanded to know if she ever had an abortion. Has the American Spectator treated Trump in similar fashion, branded him as dishonorable for his dalliances and requested he state whether he ever paid for or arranged for an abortion? (By the way, Harris dated Brown years after he separated from his wife.) McKay also insisted that Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, is “no male that any real man would respect,” citing his extramarital affair that ended his first marriage. (Apparently, Trump’s affairs are weighed differently.) And McKay ended by asserting, “We can see from [Harris’] rhetoric and her actions she has little to no respect for men.”

The American Spectator was trying very hard here. When it comes to not respecting an entire gender, does its editorial staff no longer remember this Trump ditty: “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there…And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything”? (And since we’re talking about masculinity, here’s a pop quiz: Who wears more makeup?)

The double-standardizing is staggering. But it is open season on Harris for being a woman. On the far-right Front Page website, Mark Tapson—under the headline “Why Men Won’t Vote For Kamala. Hint: It’s Not Misogyny”—wrote that Harris has been unable to “garner the support of male voters.” And this is the reason why: “To be clear: no one, male or female, truly likes Kamala Harris, because as a politician she is unlikeable.” And he added, “She is not a leader.”

The managing editor of the far-right Federalist, Kylee Griswold, growled that Harris is “too stupid to be president.”

If this is not misogyny, Tapson was certainly judging her differently than Trump. No one likes Harris? In some polls, she’s ahead of Trump by a bit, but the race is essentially a toss-up at this moment. Someone must like her. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 51 percent of male registered voters backed Trump, and 43 percent favored Harris. That’s a significant gender gap. But look at women: 52 percent of female registered voters support Harris, and 43 percent support Trump. Her deficit with men is basically the same as Trump’s with women. Would Tapson cite Trump’s problem with women as a sign he’s not likable and is not regarded by voters as a leader?

At the Federalist, the hate is also boiling over. The far-right online publication’s managing editor, Kylee Griswold, growled that Harris is “too stupid to be president.” Asserting that “her whole personality is the color of her skin,” she maintained that Harris is “not smart, articulate, or likable…Democrats have fallen in line behind geriatric and mentally impaired candidates before. They’ll gladly fall in line behind a stupid one now.” Maybe this is not misogyny or racism (though I’m not certain what the reference to the “color of her skin” meant), but with this rant—which claimed Harris was dumb and inarticulate when it comes to discussing policy—Griswold was judging Harris on a scale the Federalist crew does not apply to the man in the race.

Conservatives have plenty of reason to criticize Harris for her assorted policy preferences. Yet right-wingers who worship at the altar of Donald Trump—and embrace him despite his lies, demagoguery, ignorance, racism, misogyny, violent and fascist rhetoric, mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, and incitement of the January 6 riot—feel compelled to follow Dear Leader in brutally debasing the first Black woman to become the presidential nominee of a major party. It sure smells of racial bigotry and gender prejudice—a stink that Trump has emanated for years. 

In Arizona, older people recently received a mailer declaring Medicare had been cancelled. It had a big red stamp that proclaimed, “Medicare Cancellation Notice.” Also emblazoned on its front was this: “Warning: Rates are going up & plans are being cancelled. Details enclosed.” Its return address was the “Department of Medicare Cancellation, Kamala Harris Administration.”

That return address should have been a tip-off that this was not an official notification—along with a scrawled add-on in cursive: “I hope you can afford to lose your insurance! — Kamala Harris XOXO.”

It’s hard to know whether any recipient saw this and received a shock, fearing their Medicare was being cut off. But the group that sent out this official-looking piece of campaign literature, Make America Great Again, Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, was spreading false and misleading information about Medicare and about Harris.

The backside of the notice claimed that Harris is “destroying Medicare.” It said that due to Harris, Medicare premiums were skyrocketing and that she “has a new plan that would completely liquidate Medicare funds,” adding, “All the money you’ve paid into Medicare will be gone.” It dramatically asserted, “Your care [will be] cancelled.”

None of this is true. Medicare premiums are not skyrocketing. For instance, the standard monthly Part B premium went from $164.90 in 2023 to $174.70 this year. Harris has no “new” plan to “completely liquidate Medicare funds.” She recently proposed expanding Medicare to cover long-term, in-home health care and said the program would be paid for by negotiating lower drug prices. She also called for widening Medicare to include hearing and vision benefits.

The MAGA, Inc. mailer contained footnotes seemingly to back up its outlandish accusation. But they were vague and misleading. They appeared to point to references from years ago when Harris was a supporter of Medicare for All, which is no longer part of her policy agenda.

MAGA, Inc. is the top pro-Trump super PAC. It has raised over $300 million during the 2024 campaign, most of it from Republican billionaires, including Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald; Paul Singer, a hedge fund manager; Charles Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner and real estate magnate who went to jail for tax evasion and for retaliating against a federal witness (and whom Trump pardoned); and Timothy Mellon, the reclusive heir to the Mellon banking fortune, who has pumped in over $150 million. (Mellon also gave $25 million to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s failed presidential campaign.) MAGA, Inc., according to a memo it released this summer, aims to spend at least $100 million in ads to portray Harris as “the most radical liberal ever to run for President.”

MAGA, Inc., since its founding in 2022, has been a critical player in Trumpworld. Its first executive director was Taylor Budowich, a former Trump White House aide, who refused to cooperate with the House January 6 committee and who testified to the grand jury that investigated Trump’s alleged swiping of classified documents. He joined the Trump campaign in August. Other staffers have included Steve Cheung, now the Trump campaign’s combative spokesperson, and Chris LaCivita, co-manager of Trump’s current presidential bid.

Medicare is frequently a hot issue during a presidential campaign, in particular because seniors tend to vote at high rates. Harris’ campaign cites her accomplishments regarding Medicare, pointing out that the Biden-Harris administration capped out-of-pocket spending for Medicare beneficiaries and limited the cost of insulin for recipients at $35 a month. It also provided Medicare the authority to negotiate lower prescription drug costs. And Medicare solvency improved during the Biden years.

Repeatedly during the 2024 campaign, Trump has vowed not to cut Social Security or Medicare, though in March he did say in an interview, “There is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting.” (When he was president, Trump did propose Medicare cuts.) Tax experts have noted that Trump’s proposal to exempt taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare receiving $1.6 trillion less in revenue in the next ten years and push each into insolvency sooner. (Project 2025—which Trump has tried to distance himself from—calls for changes in Medicare that would move more recipients into Medicare Advantage plans that are run by private insurance companies, and, according to Fortune, this could increase the financial pressure on Medicare.) 

Mother Jones contacted MAGA, Inc. and asked if the super PAC intended for the mailer to look like an official notice and if it was concerned a recipient might at first be scared, believing his or her Medicare had been cancelled. It did not respond.

Mailers often convey the most scurrilous political attacks. Yet they tend to receive little media attention and routinely escape fact-checking and rebuttal. (As I reported recently, in Michigan, Jewish Republicans mailed out campaign literature accusing Harris, whose husband is Jewish, of being bad for Jews.) So it’s unlikely that the seniors who saw this faux notice exclaiming Medicare has been shut down will subsequently receive a counter explaining that Medicare was not cancelled and is not being destroyed by Harris.

Political campaigns can be sleazy affairs. But there is something particularly odious about billionaires attempting to frighten Medicare recipients with phony messaging in order to persuade them to vote for a guy who has proposed Medicare cuts and who will shower the wealthy with large tax breaks. But to them, this must seem a solid investment.

In Michigan, a key swing state, Republicans are mounting multiple smears against Vice President Kamala Harris. Most notably, they’re falsely accusing her of not caring about antisemitism, being soft on terrorism, and planning to confiscate guns and arrest gun-owners, if she becomes president.

These accusations are being hurled in a medium that often is off the national political radar screen and that frequently escapes fact-checking and rebuttal: mailers. In presidential contests, these pieces of campaign literature delivered by the US Postal Service are usually targeted to specific groups of voters and mainly deployed in swing states. Voters elsewhere can collect their mail without being barraged by this crap. With less scrutiny applied to these assaults, political operators often feel more empowered to resort to lies and extremist rhetoric within these communications.

A Michigander—who happens to be Jewish—sent me several mailers received by his household. The first, sent out by the RJC Victory Fund, a super PAC associated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, depicts Harris laughing at the threats of “antisemitism at home” and at “terrorism abroad.” It declares she “does nothing” when there are “attacks on the Jewish people.” It adds that she appeases “antisemitic protestors” and is “weak” and “incompetent” when it comes to protecting Israel. The message: She is bad for Jews.

These are misleading and insulting attacks. They are also absurd. Harris has been part of an administration that has supported the Israeli government, as it has conducted extensive and brutal warfare in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians, in response to the horrific Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The Biden-Harris White House has also not publicly objected to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration last year created the first-ever US National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. One of the leaders of this initiative is Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, who is Jewish. To suggest that Harris doesn’t care about antisemitism is silly and defamatory. Yet that’s the claim these Republican Jews are making. They are weaponizing antisemitism against the spouse of a Jew who is a leader in the fight against antisemitism.

The RJC Victory Fund did not respond to an email inquiring whether it is fair to characterize Harris as unconcerned about antisemitism given that her husband is a leader of a Biden-Harris administration program to counter antisemitism.

The Michigan Republican Party—which last year came under the control of MAGA extremists—waged a similar attack to portray Harris as trouble for Jews. A mailer it zapped out suggests that in response to October 7—during which 1,200 people “including Americans” were murdered, raped, and kidnapped—Harris said, “We must have to courage to object when they use that term—radical Islamic terrorism—which ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror.”

Harris, however, did not say that regarding October 7. It was a remark she made during an Eid-al-Fitr service at the Islamic Center of Southern California in 2016, as she called for opposing Islamophobia. She was criticizing the use of a phrase that demeans an entire religion. Following the October 7 attack, Harris did not hesitate to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” and declared “terrorists will not be permitted to continue to threaten Israel.” The mailer does not mention that.

On the backside of this mailer, the Michigan Republicans assert that Donald Trump has been “outspoken against anti-Semitism,” though he famously supped with notorious antisemites (rapper Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes) and has made statements criticized as antisemitic. Last month, he said that American Jews would be to blame if he loses the 2024 election. The American Jewish Committee fiercely responded: “Setting up anyone to say ‘we lost because of the Jews’ is outrageous and dangerous. Thousands of years of history have shown that scapegoating Jews can lead to antisemitic hate and violence.” Trump has also refused to acknowledge antisemitism on the right and within the Republican Party.

A separate mailer produced by the Michigan Republicans screams in all-caps that Harris will “EMBOLDEN ANTI-SEMITES.” What’s the proof of this? The mailer quotes a newspaper story that reported that Harris rebuked Israel regarding the “humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”—as if expressing concern for the Palestinian civilians killed and injured during the ongoing war is antisemitic.

The Michigan GOP also sent out a mailer repeating one of the right’s big lies: Harris is coming for your guns—all of them. This mailer proclaims, “Own a gun? Kamala Harris will take them or arrest you.”

On the flip side, the mailer spells out this case: She promised to “enact gun confiscation” through a buy-back program, favors using “lists of gun owners to send police door-to-door to seize firearms,” and has argued a “total handgun ban is constitutional.” There are even footnotes that cite articles to substantiate the accusations.

But the citations do not support these broad allegations.

During the 2020 campaign, Harris said it was a “good idea” to revive the assault weapon ban and supported a “buy-back ” program for these weapons. (She did not advocate the confiscation of all guns.) In 2019, she noted that when she was California attorney general she permitted police to “knock on the doors of people” on a list maintained by the state of prohibited gun owners and people considered a danger to themselves or others. “We sent law enforcement out to take those guns,” she said, “because we have to deal with this on all levels.” (In this instance, Harris targeted only a small set of gun owners and did not authorize cops to seize firearms willy-nilly.) And in 2008, as San Francisco district attorney, she signed on to an amicus brief filed in a key Supreme Court case that supported the Washington, DC, ban on handguns. (The Supreme Court would overturn this law.) A libertarian law professor a dozen years later wrote, “Harris’s view in that case was that the Second Amendment doesn’t preclude total bans on handgun possession.” The stance he described—slightly different than the one presented by the mailer—was a mainstream position and supported by four of the nine justices. It was not a sign that Harris endorses a national ban on handguns or intends to arrest all gun owners.

No doubt, other mailers are flying around in Michigan and other swing states that cast ridiculous lies at Harris. This is an effective way to vilify a candidate. There is little opportunity for fact-checking, and it’s unlikely the target will spend the money for a counter-mailer that reaches the same recipients. It’s a wide-open avenue for peddling swill and disinformation. In this case, the Michigan Republicans and the Jewish Republican Coalition Victory Fund can falsely portray Harris as an enemy of Jews (though she’s married to one) and a gun-grabber (though she says she owns a Glock) and expect few, if any, consequences for disseminating their junk mail.

In Michigan, a key swing state, Republicans are mounting multiple smears against Vice President Kamala Harris. Most notably, they’re falsely accusing her of not caring about antisemitism, being soft on terrorism, and planning to confiscate guns and arrest gun-owners, if she becomes president.

These accusations are being hurled in a medium that often is off the national political radar screen and that frequently escapes fact-checking and rebuttal: mailers. In presidential contests, these pieces of campaign literature delivered by the US Postal Service are usually targeted to specific groups of voters and mainly deployed in swing states. Voters elsewhere can collect their mail without being barraged by this crap. With less scrutiny applied to these assaults, political operators often feel more empowered to resort to lies and extremist rhetoric within these communications.

A Michigander—who happens to be Jewish—sent me several mailers received by his household. The first, sent out by the RJC Victory Fund, a super PAC associated with the Republican Jewish Coalition, depicts Harris laughing at the threats of “antisemitism at home” and at “terrorism abroad.” It declares she “does nothing” when there are “attacks on the Jewish people.” It adds that she appeases “antisemitic protestors” and is “weak” and “incompetent” when it comes to protecting Israel. The message: She is bad for Jews.

These are misleading and insulting attacks. They are also absurd. Harris has been part of an administration that has supported the Israeli government, as it has conducted extensive and brutal warfare in Gaza, killing tens of thousands of civilians, in response to the horrific Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The Biden-Harris White House has also not publicly objected to Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.

Moreover, the Biden-Harris administration last year created the first-ever US National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. One of the leaders of this initiative is Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Harris’ husband, who is Jewish. To suggest that Harris doesn’t care about antisemitism is silly and defamatory. Yet that’s the claim these Republican Jews are making. They are weaponizing antisemitism against the spouse of a Jew who is a leader in the fight against antisemitism.

The RJC Victory Fund did not respond to an email inquiring whether it is fair to characterize Harris as unconcerned about antisemitism given that her husband is a leader of a Biden-Harris administration program to counter antisemitism.

The Michigan Republican Party—which last year came under the control of MAGA extremists—waged a similar attack to portray Harris as trouble for Jews. A mailer it zapped out suggests that in response to October 7—during which 1,200 people “including Americans” were murdered, raped, and kidnapped—Harris said, “We must have to courage to object when they use that term—radical Islamic terrorism—which ignores how Muslims have overwhelmingly been the greatest victims of terror.”

Harris, however, did not say that regarding October 7. It was a remark she made during an Eid-al-Fitr service at the Islamic Center of Southern California in 2016, as she called for opposing Islamophobia. She was criticizing the use of a phrase that demeans an entire religion. Following the October 7 attack, Harris did not hesitate to refer to Hamas as “terrorists” and declared “terrorists will not be permitted to continue to threaten Israel.” The mailer does not mention that.

On the backside of this mailer, the Michigan Republicans assert that Donald Trump has been “outspoken against anti-Semitism,” though he famously supped with notorious antisemites (rapper Kanye West and white supremacist Nick Fuentes) and has made statements criticized as antisemitic. Last month, he said that American Jews would be to blame if he loses the 2024 election. The American Jewish Committee fiercely responded: “Setting up anyone to say ‘we lost because of the Jews’ is outrageous and dangerous. Thousands of years of history have shown that scapegoating Jews can lead to antisemitic hate and violence.” Trump has also refused to acknowledge antisemitism on the right and within the Republican Party.

A separate mailer produced by the Michigan Republicans screams in all-caps that Harris will “EMBOLDEN ANTI-SEMITES.” What’s the proof of this? The mailer quotes a newspaper story that reported that Harris rebuked Israel regarding the “humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza”—as if expressing concern for the Palestinian civilians killed and injured during the ongoing war is antisemitic.

The Michigan GOP also sent out a mailer repeating one of the right’s big lies: Harris is coming for your guns—all of them. This mailer proclaims, “Own a gun? Kamala Harris will take them or arrest you.”

On the flip side, the mailer spells out this case: She promised to “enact gun confiscation” through a buy-back program, favors using “lists of gun owners to send police door-to-door to seize firearms,” and has argued a “total handgun ban is constitutional.” There are even footnotes that cite articles to substantiate the accusations.

But the citations do not support these broad allegations.

During the 2020 campaign, Harris said it was a “good idea” to revive the assault weapon ban and supported a “buy-back ” program for these weapons. (She did not advocate the confiscation of all guns.) In 2019, she noted that when she was California attorney general she permitted police to “knock on the doors of people” on a list maintained by the state of prohibited gun owners and people considered a danger to themselves or others. “We sent law enforcement out to take those guns,” she said, “because we have to deal with this on all levels.” (In this instance, Harris targeted only a small set of gun owners and did not authorize cops to seize firearms willy-nilly.) And in 2008, as San Francisco district attorney, she signed on to an amicus brief filed in a key Supreme Court case that supported the Washington, DC, ban on handguns. (The Supreme Court would overturn this law.) A libertarian law professor a dozen years later wrote, “Harris’s view in that case was that the Second Amendment doesn’t preclude total bans on handgun possession.” The stance he described—slightly different than the one presented by the mailer—was a mainstream position and supported by four of the nine justices. It was not a sign that Harris endorses a national ban on handguns or intends to arrest all gun owners.

No doubt, other mailers are flying around in Michigan and other swing states that cast ridiculous lies at Harris. This is an effective way to vilify a candidate. There is little opportunity for fact-checking, and it’s unlikely the target will spend the money for a counter-mailer that reaches the same recipients. It’s a wide-open avenue for peddling swill and disinformation. In this case, the Michigan Republicans and the Jewish Republican Coalition Victory Fund can falsely portray Harris as an enemy of Jews (though she’s married to one) and a gun-grabber (though she says she owns a Glock) and expect few, if any, consequences for disseminating their junk mail.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Every once in a while, it’s good to take a hard look at a particular lie of the many spewed by a narcissistic, dangerous, demagogic, and hate-feeding billionaire who has tremendous influence over the national political discussion. Of course, I’m talking about Elon Musk.

Musk literally jumped the shark this past weekend (see above) when he appeared with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the July assassination attempt on the GOP nominee. Musk leaped about like a jester and fear-mongered when he got his time at the microphone. He falsely proclaimed of the Democrats, “The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote, effectively.” And he darkly warned that if Trump doesn’t win, “this will be the last election.”

Over the past year, Musk has slipped increasingly into the fever swamp of MAGAland and become a record-setting purveyor of disinformation (while also amplifying racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic posts). It’s even possible that he’s responsible for more false messages on social media than Trump. (Musk has zapped out numerous posts on X claiming Democrats are bringing illegal immigrants into the United States so these migrants can vote for the Ds—a baseless conspiracy theory.) A study conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in the first seven months of 2024, Musk’s false or misleading claims about the US election generated 1.2 billion views. “Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust,” said Imran Ahmed, the center’s CEO. (In March, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Musk had brought against the center that blamed it for the loss of tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue after the center reported on the rise of hate speech and misinformation on X.) Last week, the New York Times reported that of 171 posts Musk put up on X in a recent five-day period, almost a third were false or misleading. These phony-baloney posts were viewed more than 800 million times.

I believe it remains important to explore how Musk concocts his lies, and one just happened to catch my attention a few days ago. I decided to dig in.

With all the lies and crap that Musk hurls at X users—and that the site’s algorithm seems to highlight—how can one pick a single falsehood to examine? And why even bother? Well, I believe it remains important to explore how Musk concocts his lies, and one just happened to catch my attention a few days ago. I decided to dig in.

On September 30, Musk tweeted that John Kerry, the former US senator and secretary of state, “wants to violate the Constitution.” Within a week, this post had received 19.2 million views. It included a clip of Kerry, who until this year served as a special climate change envoy for President Joe Biden, speaking recently at a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum. John Kerry explicitly saying he aims to undermine the US Constitution? Really? How so?

I recalled I had recently seen that Matt Taibbi, the once Musk-friendly, lefty-turned-right journalist, had mounted a similar attack on Kerry. The day before Musk threw up this tweet, Taibbi had appeared as a speaker at the so-called “Rescue the Republic Rally” in Washington, DC, which featured a roster of fringe-ish dead-enders, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand (the onetime actor who has been accused of sexual assault—charges he has denied), Jordan Peterson (a manosphere influencer), and former Saturday Night Live not-so-funny-man Rob Schneider. The Wall Street Journal called it the “Coalition of the Weird.”

At this shindig, Taibbi slammed Kerry:

Disagreement is seen as threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices…Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told Forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.” What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment.

I don’t know how much attention Musk pays to Taibbi these days—Taibbi, at Musk’s behest, produced the misleading Twitter Files falsely asserting government censorship yet then had a falling out with the boy-billionaire—but Musk picked up on this point with his tweet slamming Kerry as a foe of the Constitution. Several days later, Musk went further, tweeting, “The Democratic Party is openly stating that they want to change the Constitution to end free speech!” In this post, he referenced an article from the Daily Wire, the far-right site run by Ben Shapiro. That piece claimed Kerry had said that if Democrats win the 2024 election, they will change the First Amendment to fight disinformation.

Let’s look at what Kerry did say:

The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growning and growing and growing. It’s part of our problem, particularly in our democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we use to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have been eviscerated to a certain degree. People self-select where they go for their news and for their information. And then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this. There’s a lot of discussion now about how do you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But, look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

So what we need is to win the ground with the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes so you’re free to be able to implement change. Now obviously there are some people in our country prepared to implement change in other ways…I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they could move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges we are facing. And to me that is what part of this race, this election, is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?

It’s nuts for Musk, Taibbi, or anyone else to claim that Kerry was calling for killing the First Amendment.

Read that again. Is this a call from Kerry to undo the First Amendment? He clearly was bemoaning the fact that disinformation on climate change from many sources poisons the discourse on how to meet this challenge. (At the recent vice presidential debate, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, indicated he had no problem with Trump declaring climate change a “hoax.”) In fact, Kerry acknowledged that the First Amendment prevents the government from hammering disinformation “out of existence.” The only course of action, he said, was to win politically and achieve enough of a majority that will allow the government to take decisive action on this front (say, capturing the White House and large majorities in the House and Senate). His goal, obviously, was to change policies related to climate change, not to change the First Amendment.

It’s nuts for Musk, Taibbi, or anyone else to claim that Kerry was calling for killing the First Amendment. Yet they did so anyway. And several other conservative sites—including the National Review and Real Clear Politics—ran articles pushing the line that Kerry was down on the First Amendment. Sputnik, the Russian propaganda outlet, posted a story highlighting Musk’s claim that Democrats intend to “destroy” the Constitution. Musk had provided fuel for Moscow’s disinformation operation.

Musk and Taibbi were lying about Kerry. It was easy to fact-check them on this. But I don’t think they care about being caught mangling reality for political purposes. They both are driven by the need to push false narratives that demonize Democrats and progressives to make the topsy-turvy case that the Ds and the libs, not Trump (who refused to accept the election results in 2020, schemed to overturn them, and incited an insurrectionist riot at the Capitol), are the true threats to American democracy.

This one lie about Kerry—one of many falsehoods Musk, Taibbi, and their comrades peddle—shows how desperate they are to portray Democrats as censorious foes of the republic. (Remember Vance at the debate last week trying to change the subject from January 6 to Democrats smothering free speech?) They have little, if any, evidence of this, so they make stuff up. (Meanwhile, they have not much to say about Republicans banning books.) Like Trump, Musk imperils democracy by aiming a firehose of vicious lies at voters. These statements are readily debunked. Yet through his ownership of X, Musk creates a mighty flood of disinformation that perverts the national debate. He shows that the threat to the nation doesn’t come from those he (wrongly) claims to be enemies of free speech but from those who use their free speech privileges to purposefully spread false information to advance their own interests and a dangerous political agenda.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Every once in a while, it’s good to take a hard look at a particular lie of the many spewed by a narcissistic, dangerous, demagogic, and hate-feeding billionaire who has tremendous influence over the national political discussion. Of course, I’m talking about Elon Musk.

Musk literally jumped the shark this past weekend (see above) when he appeared with Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the site of the July assassination attempt on the GOP nominee. Musk leaped about like a jester and fear-mongered when he got his time at the microphone. He falsely proclaimed of the Democrats, “The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. They want to take away your right to bear arms. They want to take away your right to vote, effectively.” And he darkly warned that if Trump doesn’t win, “this will be the last election.”

Over the past year, Musk has slipped increasingly into the fever swamp of MAGAland and become a record-setting purveyor of disinformation (while also amplifying racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic posts). It’s even possible that he’s responsible for more false messages on social media than Trump. (Musk has zapped out numerous posts on X claiming Democrats are bringing illegal immigrants into the United States so these migrants can vote for the Ds—a baseless conspiracy theory.) A study conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that in the first seven months of 2024, Musk’s false or misleading claims about the US election generated 1.2 billion views. “Elon Musk is abusing his privileged position as owner of a small, but politically influential, social media platform to sow disinformation that generates discord and distrust,” said Imran Ahmed, the center’s CEO. (In March, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit Musk had brought against the center that blamed it for the loss of tens of millions of dollars in ad revenue after the center reported on the rise of hate speech and misinformation on X.) Last week, the New York Times reported that of 171 posts Musk put up on X in a recent five-day period, almost a third were false or misleading. These phony-baloney posts were viewed more than 800 million times.

I believe it remains important to explore how Musk concocts his lies, and one just happened to catch my attention a few days ago. I decided to dig in.

With all the lies and crap that Musk hurls at X users—and that the site’s algorithm seems to highlight—how can one pick a single falsehood to examine? And why even bother? Well, I believe it remains important to explore how Musk concocts his lies, and one just happened to catch my attention a few days ago. I decided to dig in.

On September 30, Musk tweeted that John Kerry, the former US senator and secretary of state, “wants to violate the Constitution.” Within a week, this post had received 19.2 million views. It included a clip of Kerry, who until this year served as a special climate change envoy for President Joe Biden, speaking recently at a panel on climate change at the World Economic Forum. John Kerry explicitly saying he aims to undermine the US Constitution? Really? How so?

I recalled I had recently seen that Matt Taibbi, the once Musk-friendly, lefty-turned-right journalist, had mounted a similar attack on Kerry. The day before Musk threw up this tweet, Taibbi had appeared as a speaker at the so-called “Rescue the Republic Rally” in Washington, DC, which featured a roster of fringe-ish dead-enders, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Brand (the onetime actor who has been accused of sexual assault—charges he has denied), Jordan Peterson (a manosphere influencer), and former Saturday Night Live not-so-funny-man Rob Schneider. The Wall Street Journal called it the “Coalition of the Weird.”

At this shindig, Taibbi slammed Kerry:

Disagreement is seen as threat, and according to John Kerry, must be “hammered out of existence.” The former presidential candidate just complained at a World Economic Forum meeting that “it’s really hard to govern” and “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to the important work of hammering out unhealthy choices…Kerry added that it’s “really hard to build consensus,” and told Forum members they need to “win the right to govern” and “be free to implement change.” What do they need to be free of? The First Amendment.

I don’t know how much attention Musk pays to Taibbi these days—Taibbi, at Musk’s behest, produced the misleading Twitter Files falsely asserting government censorship yet then had a falling out with the boy-billionaire—but Musk picked up on this point with his tweet slamming Kerry as a foe of the Constitution. Several days later, Musk went further, tweeting, “The Democratic Party is openly stating that they want to change the Constitution to end free speech!” In this post, he referenced an article from the Daily Wire, the far-right site run by Ben Shapiro. That piece claimed Kerry had said that if Democrats win the 2024 election, they will change the First Amendment to fight disinformation.

Let’s look at what Kerry did say:

The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growning and growing and growing. It’s part of our problem, particularly in our democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue. It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we use to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have been eviscerated to a certain degree. People self-select where they go for their news and for their information. And then you just get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today than at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this. There’s a lot of discussion now about how do you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But, look, if people go to only one source and the source they go to is sick and has an agenda and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.

So what we need is to win the ground with the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes so you’re free to be able to implement change. Now obviously there are some people in our country prepared to implement change in other ways…I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they could move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges we are facing. And to me that is what part of this race, this election, is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?

It’s nuts for Musk, Taibbi, or anyone else to claim that Kerry was calling for killing the First Amendment.

Read that again. Is this a call from Kerry to undo the First Amendment? He clearly was bemoaning the fact that disinformation on climate change from many sources poisons the discourse on how to meet this challenge. (At the recent vice presidential debate, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, indicated he had no problem with Trump declaring climate change a “hoax.”) In fact, Kerry acknowledged that the First Amendment prevents the government from hammering disinformation “out of existence.” The only course of action, he said, was to win politically and achieve enough of a majority that will allow the government to take decisive action on this front (say, capturing the White House and large majorities in the House and Senate). His goal, obviously, was to change policies related to climate change, not to change the First Amendment.

It’s nuts for Musk, Taibbi, or anyone else to claim that Kerry was calling for killing the First Amendment. Yet they did so anyway. And several other conservative sites—including the National Review and Real Clear Politics—ran articles pushing the line that Kerry was down on the First Amendment. Sputnik, the Russian propaganda outlet, posted a story highlighting Musk’s claim that Democrats intend to “destroy” the Constitution. Musk had provided fuel for Moscow’s disinformation operation.

Musk and Taibbi were lying about Kerry. It was easy to fact-check them on this. But I don’t think they care about being caught mangling reality for political purposes. They both are driven by the need to push false narratives that demonize Democrats and progressives to make the topsy-turvy case that the Ds and the libs, not Trump (who refused to accept the election results in 2020, schemed to overturn them, and incited an insurrectionist riot at the Capitol), are the true threats to American democracy.

This one lie about Kerry—one of many falsehoods Musk, Taibbi, and their comrades peddle—shows how desperate they are to portray Democrats as censorious foes of the republic. (Remember Vance at the debate last week trying to change the subject from January 6 to Democrats smothering free speech?) They have little, if any, evidence of this, so they make stuff up. (Meanwhile, they have not much to say about Republicans banning books.) Like Trump, Musk imperils democracy by aiming a firehose of vicious lies at voters. These statements are readily debunked. Yet through his ownership of X, Musk creates a mighty flood of disinformation that perverts the national debate. He shows that the threat to the nation doesn’t come from those he (wrongly) claims to be enemies of free speech but from those who use their free speech privileges to purposefully spread false information to advance their own interests and a dangerous political agenda.

As Donald Trump attempts to return to the White House, he is not operating a political campaign as much as mounting a disinformation 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. Trump is no stranger to this mundane practice. He freely tosses falsehoods at the electorate. The economy when he was president was the best ever. He did a great job on Covid. The current rate of inflation is the worst in US history. The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe. Every Democrat and legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. He was the smartest and most accomplished president the country has ever seen. And so on. It’s absurd braggadocio and a firehose of supposed but untrue facts—spewed to a degree far beyond what previous presidential candidates attempted to get away with.

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.

Throughout the 2024 campaign and those earlier presidential bids, Trump has pitched numerous overlapping phony narratives. His false claim about Springfield, Ohio, has been the most obvious one in recent weeks. He has repeatedly said that this small city has been taken over by illegal migrants. He asserted that “20,000 Haitian immigrants have descended upon the town of 58,000 people, destroying their entire way of life. This was a beautiful community and now it’s horrible.” And, he asserted, these migrants are stealing and eating pets.

“Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”

This absurd and false allegation about legal immigrants—debunked by the Republican mayor and the state’s Republican governor—dovetailed with Trump’s false meta-narrative: The US is being overrun by criminals from abroad who are making the nation unsafe and life a nightmare for citizens across the land.

During his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump said that millions of these thugs are pouring into the United States every month—a vast exaggeration. (Illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border have dramatically decreased this year.) And he has repeatedly depicted this flood of immigrants as coming from prisons and “insane asylums,” which he described as “a mental institution on steroids.” Using racist imagery, he recently declared, “They come from the Congo in Africa. Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they come out of jails in the Congo.” As numerous media fact-checks have established, there is no proof that migrants are convicts let loose from prisons; the Trump campaign has not been able to supply reporters evidence to back up this Trump contention. Most recently, Trump maintained that the Biden administration “stole” disaster relief funds and handed the money to illegal migrants rather than use it to assist the victims of Hurricane Helene. Another fabrication.

Not merely peddling a series of lies, Trump is knitting together a full story that is utterly bogus, trying to convince tens of millions of a reality that does not exist: They’re living in a dangerous hellhole in which they’re imperiled by barbarians, who happen to be people of color. And Trump then accuses Harris and President Joe Biden of purposefully orchestrating this purportedly deadly situation and the collapse of America. At a recent campaign stop, Trump presented a nutty conspiracy theory: “I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants…It’s not even believable.” It’s not true.

The overarching goal of Trump’s disinformation efforts is to persuade voters that they should live in fear—and that only he can save them. At a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump said of migrants, “They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.” And elsewhere he brayed, “They’re conquering your communities.” He pointed to Aurora, Colorado, “where they’re taking over with AK-47s.” In another campaign speech, he warned it will get worse: “They’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado. They’re going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish. Unless I become president.” This was another phony story. Crime in Aurora is not driven by migrant gangs. On a different occasion, Trump maintained these beasts were on the rampage across Middle America: “You see how bad it’s getting when you look at what’s going on with migrants attacking villages and cities throughout the Midwest.”

Trump has been depicting all of America as a place of tremendous peril: “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be and you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it.” Yet crime rates across the nation are down this year, including for murder.

Trump’s effort to manipulate reality encompasses more than fear-mongering on immigration and crime. He regularly portrays America as in economic free fall: “A lot of great things would have happened, but now you have millions and millions of dead people. And you have people dying financially, because they can’t buy bacon; they can’t buy food; they can’t buy groceries; they can’t do anything. And they’re living horribly in our country right now.” While poverty remains an issue, as it always has, and prices for certain goods and services are high, traditional economic indicators show the US economy growing at a healthy clip and stronger than the economies of other Western nations. Still, Trump preaches doom-and-gloom: “Our country is a failing nation. This is a failing nation…We’re failing at everything we’re doing.”

A critical piece of his disinformation strategy is to present Democrats as perverse extremists—and baby-killers. At rallies, he lies to his supporters and says that in states run by Democrats it is okay to kill infants after they are born. There are no states where that is legal. He says that Harris “wants to legalize fentanyl.” No she doesn’t. He claims that schools are conducting gender-affirming medical operations on students without the consent of parents: “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” With this especially bizarre and crazy charge, Trump is striving to spark a moral panic: They are coming for your children and surgically altering their genders! There is no known instance of this, and schools don’t even perform such procedures with the consent of parents.

Trump throws many other baseless charges at Harris, some from the worn-out far-right playbook, others fresher. Trump claims that she plans to confiscate all guns if she becomes president and that she “wants to bring back the draft and draft your child and put them in a war.” And there’s the constant barrage of unfounded name-calling. She’s “mentally disabled.” She’s “a communist.” She’s “a fascist.” She is “a radical left person at a level that nobody’s seen.” Trump circulated an AI-generated meme of Harris addressing a communist event. And he exclaimed, “She destroyed San Francisco. She destroyed California as the A.G…She destroyed the state of California.” Fact-check: She did not destroy California.

It’s one bullshit story after another, with the malicious intent of dehumanizing and demonizing his political rivals and large groups of people. When Trump denounced legal migrants at one rally, the audience chanted, “Send them back!” It was a real-life version of the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984. All told, Trump is relentlessly presenting a dark and spurious view of America—even darker and more spurious than previous iterations of the American Carnage message he has hawked—and proclaiming himself the only available savior. He is perpetuating a fraud. His electoral success is dependent on his ability to poison the national discourse and turn his fictions into reality for tens of millions of voters. And he is enthusiastically aided by a right-wing media ecosystem, a conservative movement, and a GOP that all work together to echo and affirm Trump’s deceptions, for that is how residents of MAGA-land attain influence, power, and profit. They must endorse Trump’s deceit or face being excommunicated.

“We live in a world now in which, because of social media and foreign interventions, the truth is always under assault, and that’s bound to seep into political campaigns,” says Larry Diamond, a professor of sociology and political science at Stanford who specializes in studying democracy around the world. “But to have a presidential campaign doing it on this scale—we’ve never seen anything like it. But this is not new for Trump. It’s his persona and mode of operation. In this campaign, it’s getting more chronic and extreme.”

Diamond, author of Ill Winds: Saving Democracy From Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency, points out that politicians routinely attempt to frame races and opponents. The Democrats in 2012 cast Republican Mitt Romney as a corporate raider who only wanted to fire people. The Republicans in 1988 depicted Democrat Michael Dukakis as a soft-on-crime weakling. What Trump does, Diamond notes, is different: “It’s more comprehensive. It’s more systemic. It’s more outrageous. Most of the stuff pulled by previous candidates had some relationship to a real thing. He’s completely making stuff up. It’s not just one or two lies or the twisting of the truth. This is, like that film, everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Trump’s extreme reality-distorting tactics—which he has deployed since he decried “Mexican rapists” when he announced his first presidential campaign in 2015 and which he applied to his 2020 loss and the subsequent insurrectionist riot on January 6—may be relatively new to American politics, but they have obvious comparisons. Benjamin Carter Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, notes that “the individual components” of Trump’s disinformation campaign “are things we have seen before.” He explains: “After Hitler and Stalin, there wasn’t much more to add about the forms of political disinformation, and there is a recognizable lineage to a lot of what Trump and his running mate JD Vance say. I am not the first to note that the eating-the-cats-and-dogs thing is not far from the ‘blood libel,’ and of course saying that if I lose, it will be the Jews’ fault is a hardy perennial. Calling Democrats Communists or Marxists is at least as old as FDR (and very similar to Hitler’s rhetoric as well). It may be that the scale of this is different—the sheer volume of this garbage—and a free media can’t seem to root it out and put a stop to it.”

“Trump is running a disinformation campaign,” confirms Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University history professor who studies authoritarianism. “I also have long sustained that he is running a radicalization campaign, using his rallies since 2015 to change the way people perceive violence, to build his leader cult. It’s unprecedented even among most autocrats on the rise. People like Rodrigo Duterte, the former president of the Philippines, would tell lies about some things or target some subjects, but Trump lies about everything, on the model of the Kremlin (big surprise).”

The author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ben-Ghiat adds, “Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”

Trump is not merely heading a campaign fueled by the routine lies of politics. He is endeavoring to use these and other lies to create an alternative reality for millions so they will vote on the basis of a false understanding of the world. “I get asked all the time how to counteract it,” Hett notes, “and I wish I had a better answer than ‘come with the truth and try to teach critical reading skills where and when you can.'” Diamond says, “What frustrates me is that I don’t know how to counter this. If you point out every single lie, it’s all you’ll be reporting. And still people will believe this.”

Trump’s disinformation con, boosted and abetted by a political party, an expansive media infrastructure, and an entire political movement, is a challenge for the United States and a test. Can his all-out war on the truth prevail? That depends on whether other media accurately portrays it, on how the rest of the political system responds to it, and on whether enough voters resist its pull. Trump has gotten far with this campaign, proving that disinformation delivered by the right carnival barker can be highly effective within America. The final vote count—and perhaps what happens afterward—will show if this nation can resolve its political divisions and differences within the realm of reason and rationality.

Larry Hogan, the former governor of Maryland, has a tough task. As he now runs for the US Senate, he claims to be a reasonable, non-Trump Republican, hoping to win over Democrats and independents in a state Joe Biden won by 33 points in 2020. He repeatedly insists he is a “straight shooter” who eschews “performative politics” and asserts he is “fed up” with politicians who are “more interested in attacking one another than actually getting anything done.” Yet while he casts himself as a sensible moderate who rejects attack-politics-as-usual, Hogan has mounted fierce negative assaults on his Democratic opponent, Angela Alsobrooks, the county executive of Prince Georges County. Moreover, he has pulled a giant flip-flop, assailing her performance in office as disastrous, even though Hogan had, prior to this campaign, praised her as a “great” leader and a highly accomplished county executive.

This summer, Hogan’s campaign launched a spoof website with the URL angelaalsobrooks.org that looked like her official site but slammed her on multiple fronts. The site was headlined, “Meet Angela Alsobrooks: Another partisan politician who doesn’t deliver.” It claimed she has failed “to deliver on even the most basic of government functions”—quite a harsh accusation. Echoing a dominant theme of Donald Trump’s campaign, the Hogan-backed site declared that crime in Prince Georges County has “increased to out-of-control levels.” (That was an exaggeration. Overall crime in the county was down as of this summer, though violent crime had ticked up, mainly due to a rise in assaults not involving a weapon and an increase in domestic violence. Carjackings were occurring at a lower pace than the previous year.)

The site also blasted Alsobrooks for “a lack of funding for police and firefighters,” though the budget the county passed on her watch contained an additional $200,000 to help the police fill vacancies and covered the creation of another 50 firefighting positions.

When asked about the misleading or inaccurate information on the site, Hogan said, “I would say that it’s—the whole purpose of the thing was to put out factual information, and it’s facts and nothing but the facts. There’s nothing misleading about it.”

It’s not only through this site that Hogan has bashed Alsobrooks. While campaigning, he has repeatedly lambasted her on crime, declaring that ever since she became county executive “it’s skyrocketed out of control.” Resorting to a routine political attack, he has accused her of being “very soft on crime.”

Yet not so long ago, Hogan was praising Alsobrooks. In an interview in March with Axios, Hogan was asked whether, when he was governor, he had a “warm working relationship” with Alsobrooks. He replied, “I do.” Queried about running against her, he said, “I think well, hopefully, it’ll be, you know, maybe something that’s missing in politics these days, where instead of just—you know, you can passionately disagree about issues without being disagreeable, or you can talk about your positions on issues without attacking the person. But I’ve, I’ve had a good relationship with her for a long time. I think she’s been a good county executive.”

Two years earlier, Hogan was even more of a fanboy for Alsobrooks. In April 2022, as governor, Hogan signed into law a measure to fund a major commercial development project in Prince George’s County. The next day he held a joint press event with Alsobrooks to celebrate, and he gushed about her: “I want to just thank the County Executive for her incredible leadership. This really is her vision that brings us all together here today… I want to sincerely thank you, Madam County Executive, for the incredible partnership that we’ve had through the entire time that you’ve been county executive. I want to say you’re doing a great job… I want to say the County Executive, Angela Alsobrooks, is also super bad.” He hailed this project, which she had championed, for bringing “more jobs and more economic development to the neighborhoods right here where I grew up.”

At this press conference, Hogan, whose father was the Prince George’s county executive from 1978 to 1982, laid it on thick: “I shouldn’t say this, because I’ll get in trouble, but my dad is a former county executive, and one of my best friends for many years was [county executive] Wayne Curry. And I’ll say, I can’t remember a better county executive than Angela Alsobrooks. Thank you so much for your leadership.”

That was quite an endorsement: better than dad.

During his gubernatorial stint, Hogan complimented Alsobrooks on other occasions. In a television interview in December 2022, he said, “She’s a friend. She’s a great leader.” The following month, he even commended her for her handling of crime: “Some people are taking it more seriously than others. In Prince George’s County, they’ve got a crime issue, but the county executive, Angela Alsobrooks, is taking dramatic action. She’s instituting curfews. She’s keeping kids off the streets so they’re not committing crimes, and seems to be supporting police in their efforts to break up some of these criminal gang activities.”

Hogan’s current attacks on Alsobrooks are the usual stuff of politics, nothing surprising. The problem is that Hogan has been selling himself as a different kind of Republican—he says he will be a “pro-choice” senator, though as governor he vetoed a bill in 2022 that would have expanded abortion access in the state—and a different kind of politician, one who who opts out of the “polarization” of the Trump era. (He vows not to vote for Trump, who endorsed him.) Yet Hogan has no trouble firing misleading charges and harsh rhetoric at a woman he recently lauded as the best Prince Georges county executive in decades. This flip-flop shows Hogan is nothing but the sort of politician he claims to despise.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Hypocrisy is the fuel of MAGA. It decries “crooked” politicians, but its leader is a lying cheater and convicted felon who has flouted numerous ethics guidelines and been found to have engaged in fraud. It relies on the political support of conservative Christians who profess family values, but it worships a narcissist who has engaged in immoral and crass conduct (including sexual assault) that violates the core tenets of Christianity and who has demonstrated no sincere allegiance to faith. It claims to be a movement for hard-working, middle-class Americans, yet it embraces a politician and party that has provided whopping tax cuts for the wealthy elite and threatened to eliminate health care coverage for millions of Americans. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged neck-deep into the muck of hypocrisy, as they exploit the two recent attempted assassinations of Trump to accuse the Democrats of debasing the public discourse with harsh rhetoric that casts Trump as a threat to democracy and of encouraging political violence.

This is particularly rich after Trump and Vance whipped up the phony and racist claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were purloining pets and turning them into meals. Their baseless demagoguery—in which the pair demonized legal migrants as illegal—led to bomb threats against schools and government agencies in that town. Yet, as I noted a while back, Trump, like any autocrat-wannabe, is a master of rubber-and-glue tactics. So now his line is: I’m not a threat to democracy. The people calling me a threat to democracy are the real threat to democracy. He knows that he doesn’t need to win this argument to defuse this line of criticism. Trump only has to muddy the waters and create a debate over who’s a danger in order to undercut this fundamental argument against his restoration. Debating this may seem absurd. After all, if a fellow who refused to accept legitimate election tallies, secretly schemed to overturn the results, and with his lies incited an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power isn’t a threat to democracy, who is? But this I’m-not/you-are bullshit could work, especially with low-engaged voters who might absorb the impression that there’s a fight to be had on this front.

Vance has taken point on this mission.

In a very long social media post, he slammed Democrats for degrading the national discourse by depicting Trump as a menace and blamed them for the assassination attempts: “The rhetoric is out of control…It nearly got Donald Trump killed twice…Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump…For years, Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates have said things like ‘Trump has to be eliminated.’” And in the same breath, Vance defended his assaults on the Haitians and his circulation of the “the infamous pet stories—which, again, multiple people have spoken about (either on video or to me or my staff),” ignoring that these stories have repeatedly been proved false. He even had the chutzpah to suggest that criticism of his dissemination of this disinformation was the equivalent of censorship.

In a speech, he continued to try to claim the higher ground: “I do think that we should take this opportunity to call for a reduction in the ridiculous and inflammatory political rhetoric coming from too many corners of our politics…We can disagree with one another; we can debate one another. But you cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he’s elected it is going to be the end of American democracy.” (In response, CNN aired video of Trump on repeated instances decrying Harris as a “fascist” and a “communist.”)

For years—long before his campaign to vilify the legal immigrants of Springfield—Vance has eagerly engaged in culture warring that involved dehumanizing and delegitimizing his fellow citizens.

And in another venue, Vance proclaimed, “We need to remember above and beyond that we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated…We must love our God and let it motivate us in how we enact public policy.”

Vance doesn’t believe this. For years—long before his campaign to vilify the legal immigrants of Springfield—he has eagerly engaged in culture warring that involved dehumanizing and delegitimizing his fellow citizens. You’re familiar, no doubt, with his condescending disparagement of childless women who own cats. But that’s mild stuff for him.  

I’ve reported on instances when Vance has adopted harsh rhetoric and characterized the neighbors he doesn’t like as evildoers bent on destroying the United States. In September 2021, Vance, then a Senate candidate in Ohio, appeared on a podcast hosted by a fellow named Jack Murphy who ran a secretive men’s organization that claimed all major American institutions—universities, the media, the government, unions, professional organizations, nonprofits, and corporations—have been “infiltrated, corrupted, demoralized” and aim to “control you forever.” Murphy also once declared, “Feminists need rape.”

During this interview, Vance excoriated “elite culture” as corrupt and maintained that his success as an author and his stint as a venture capitalist had landed him in the middle of a “garbage liberal elite culture” that teaches citizens to hate America and that is dominated by wokeism, globalism, and social progressivism—the enemies of “traditional American culture.” He contended that the entire elite stratum of the United States was a subversive and malignant entity that plots to undermine the nation. His prescription: “Rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion, some sense of shared values.”

Vance called for a purge, and he had a plan: “One model is what happened to Germany after the Nazis lost or what happened to the Iraqis after Saddam Hussein, after we threw Saddam Hussein out. De-Nazification, de-Baathification.” Vance was comparing his political foes to the Nazis of Germany and the Baathists of Iraq—and the right had to go to war against them: “We need like a de-Baathification program but like a de-woke-ification program in the United States.” He even told Murphy that if Trump returned to the White House, Trump should ignore and contravene the law to mount an illegal effort to cleanse the civil service of anyone who was not loyal to the Trump cause: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country…and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.” Vance cited Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán as a role model for a second Trump presidency. 

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Vance was not toning anything down. His message to Murphy was that desperate times require desperate measures: “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” This was no call for a reasonable debate over policy. It was a demand for vilification and vengeance.

This summer, as I reported, Vance went further. He endorsed a new book that dubbed progressives “unhumans” and claimed they are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization. The volume, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), co-written by Jack Posobiec, a well-known alt-right agitator and conservative media personality who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory, urged a crusade to wipe out the “unhumans.” The book termed them “people of anti-civilization” who are “ugly liars who hate and kill.”

This was hyper-othering of political rivals and rhetoric that certainly could provoke violence. The “unhumans,” the book maintained, were behind the Black Lives Matter movement, in charge of academia, and controlling corporations, the media, and even churches. “They just want an excuse to destroy everything,” Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote. “They want an excuse to destroy you.”

Vance gave a thumbs-up to this hateful paranoia reminiscent of McCarthyism and provided a blurb that Posobiec and Lisec have used to peddle the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Repeating many of the assertions of the tinfoil-hat crowd, Posobiec (who was part of the fraudulent Stop the Steal movement) and Lisec insisted that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They maintained all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” They wrote, “It was all a trap” and the “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life.” The rioters were “well-meaning patriots.”

Ponder this: The Republican nominee for vice president commended a book that praised violent dictators and held them up as role models for the American right.

The pair argued that the right must be vicious and adopt extreme and underhanded measures to defeat the “unhumans”: “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” As examples of those who successfully fought against “unhumans,” they cited Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, and Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s fascist dictator. These two men they championed each waged brutal political violence. The Spanish government estimated that 114,000 Spanish civilians disappeared and were presumably killed by Franco forces during the Spanish civil war and his dictatorship. Pinochet disappeared and killed thousands. The book described Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany, as “a great man of history.” And it justified the violence of Pinochet’s regime: “The story of tossing communists out of helicopter hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Ponder this: the Republican nominee for vice president commended a book that praised violent dictators and held them up as role models for the American right. By the way, this book was also extolled by Donald Trump Jr. (“teaches us how…to save the West”), Michael Flynn (“exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win”), and Tucker Carlson (“Jack Posobiec sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it.”)

Now Vance, who works for Trump, has the audacity to lecture others on the excesses of political rhetoric? He has demonized and demeaned his foes. He has called for purges. He has acclaimed a book that literally dehumanizes liberals and celebrates fascists who deployed horrific political violence. And there’s this: Not long ago, he told fellow conservatives, “The thing we have to take away from the last 10 years is that we really need be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

With his calls for illegal and ruthless action, his backing of Trump’s lies about 2020, and his support for right-wingers who hail political violence and condemn progressives as “unhumans,” Vance is himself a threat to democracy. Which is why he, like Trump, huffs that the actual threat is posed by those who point out how he and Trump endanger the republic. This hypocrisy is a crucial element of a con concocted to conceal their extremism. Trump and Vance are claiming the mantle of champions of democracy so they can attain the power to subvert democracy. And if the media doesn’t cover this adequately—and if not enough voters see through their cynical ruse—they may get the chance to do so.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in an expanded paperback edition.

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Hypocrisy is the fuel of MAGA. It decries “crooked” politicians, but its leader is a lying cheater and convicted felon who has flouted numerous ethics guidelines and been found to have engaged in fraud. It relies on the political support of conservative Christians who profess family values, but it worships a narcissist who has engaged in immoral and crass conduct (including sexual assault) that violates the core tenets of Christianity and who has demonstrated no sincere allegiance to faith. It claims to be a movement for hard-working, middle-class Americans, yet it embraces a politician and party that has provided whopping tax cuts for the wealthy elite and threatened to eliminate health care coverage for millions of Americans. Consequently, it’s no surprise that Donald Trump and JD Vance have plunged neck-deep into the muck of hypocrisy, as they exploit the two recent attempted assassinations of Trump to accuse the Democrats of debasing the public discourse with harsh rhetoric that casts Trump as a threat to democracy and of encouraging political violence.

This is particularly rich after Trump and Vance whipped up the phony and racist claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were purloining pets and turning them into meals. Their baseless demagoguery—in which the pair demonized legal migrants as illegal—led to bomb threats against schools and government agencies in that town. Yet, as I noted a while back, Trump, like any autocrat-wannabe, is a master of rubber-and-glue tactics. So now his line is: I’m not a threat to democracy. The people calling me a threat to democracy are the real threat to democracy. He knows that he doesn’t need to win this argument to defuse this line of criticism. Trump only has to muddy the waters and create a debate over who’s a danger in order to undercut this fundamental argument against his restoration. Debating this may seem absurd. After all, if a fellow who refused to accept legitimate election tallies, secretly schemed to overturn the results, and with his lies incited an insurrectionist mob to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power isn’t a threat to democracy, who is? But this I’m-not/you-are bullshit could work, especially with low-engaged voters who might absorb the impression that there’s a fight to be had on this front.

Vance has taken point on this mission.

In a very long social media post, he slammed Democrats for degrading the national discourse by depicting Trump as a menace and blamed them for the assassination attempts: “The rhetoric is out of control…It nearly got Donald Trump killed twice…Kamala Harris has said that ‘Democracy is on the line’ in her race against President Trump…For years, Kamala Harris’s campaign surrogates have said things like ‘Trump has to be eliminated.’” And in the same breath, Vance defended his assaults on the Haitians and his circulation of the “the infamous pet stories—which, again, multiple people have spoken about (either on video or to me or my staff),” ignoring that these stories have repeatedly been proved false. He even had the chutzpah to suggest that criticism of his dissemination of this disinformation was the equivalent of censorship.

In a speech, he continued to try to claim the higher ground: “I do think that we should take this opportunity to call for a reduction in the ridiculous and inflammatory political rhetoric coming from too many corners of our politics…We can disagree with one another; we can debate one another. But you cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist and if he’s elected it is going to be the end of American democracy.” (In response, CNN aired video of Trump on repeated instances decrying Harris as a “fascist” and a “communist.”)

For years—long before his campaign to vilify the legal immigrants of Springfield—Vance has eagerly engaged in culture warring that involved dehumanizing and delegitimizing his fellow citizens.

And in another venue, Vance proclaimed, “We need to remember above and beyond that we must love our neighbors, that we must treat other people as we hope to be treated…We must love our God and let it motivate us in how we enact public policy.”

Vance doesn’t believe this. For years—long before his campaign to vilify the legal immigrants of Springfield—he has eagerly engaged in culture warring that involved dehumanizing and delegitimizing his fellow citizens. You’re familiar, no doubt, with his condescending disparagement of childless women who own cats. But that’s mild stuff for him.  

I’ve reported on instances when Vance has adopted harsh rhetoric and characterized the neighbors he doesn’t like as evildoers bent on destroying the United States. In September 2021, Vance, then a Senate candidate in Ohio, appeared on a podcast hosted by a fellow named Jack Murphy who ran a secretive men’s organization that claimed all major American institutions—universities, the media, the government, unions, professional organizations, nonprofits, and corporations—have been “infiltrated, corrupted, demoralized” and aim to “control you forever.” Murphy also once declared, “Feminists need rape.”

During this interview, Vance excoriated “elite culture” as corrupt and maintained that his success as an author and his stint as a venture capitalist had landed him in the middle of a “garbage liberal elite culture” that teaches citizens to hate America and that is dominated by wokeism, globalism, and social progressivism—the enemies of “traditional American culture.” He contended that the entire elite stratum of the United States was a subversive and malignant entity that plots to undermine the nation. His prescription: “Rip out like a tumor the current American leadership class and then reinstall some sense of American political religion, some sense of shared values.”

Vance called for a purge, and he had a plan: “One model is what happened to Germany after the Nazis lost or what happened to the Iraqis after Saddam Hussein, after we threw Saddam Hussein out. De-Nazification, de-Baathification.” Vance was comparing his political foes to the Nazis of Germany and the Baathists of Iraq—and the right had to go to war against them: “We need like a de-Baathification program but like a de-woke-ification program in the United States.” He even told Murphy that if Trump returned to the White House, Trump should ignore and contravene the law to mount an illegal effort to cleanse the civil service of anyone who was not loyal to the Trump cause: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country…and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.” Vance cited Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán as a role model for a second Trump presidency. 

“If we’re going to push back against it, we’re have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Vance was not toning anything down. His message to Murphy was that desperate times require desperate measures: “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re have to get pretty wild, pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.” This was no call for a reasonable debate over policy. It was a demand for vilification and vengeance.

This summer, as I reported, Vance went further. He endorsed a new book that dubbed progressives “unhumans” and claimed they are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” to annihilate American civilization. The volume, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), co-written by Jack Posobiec, a well-known alt-right agitator and conservative media personality who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory, urged a crusade to wipe out the “unhumans.” The book termed them “people of anti-civilization” who are “ugly liars who hate and kill.”

This was hyper-othering of political rivals and rhetoric that certainly could provoke violence. The “unhumans,” the book maintained, were behind the Black Lives Matter movement, in charge of academia, and controlling corporations, the media, and even churches. “They just want an excuse to destroy everything,” Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote. “They want an excuse to destroy you.”

Vance gave a thumbs-up to this hateful paranoia reminiscent of McCarthyism and provided a blurb that Posobiec and Lisec have used to peddle the book:

In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.

Repeating many of the assertions of the tinfoil-hat crowd, Posobiec (who was part of the fraudulent Stop the Steal movement) and Lisec insisted that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They maintained all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” They wrote, “It was all a trap” and the “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life.” The rioters were “well-meaning patriots.”

Ponder this: The Republican nominee for vice president commended a book that praised violent dictators and held them up as role models for the American right.

The pair argued that the right must be vicious and adopt extreme and underhanded measures to defeat the “unhumans”: “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” As examples of those who successfully fought against “unhumans,” they cited Francisco Franco, Spain’s fascist dictator, and Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s fascist dictator. These two men they championed each waged brutal political violence. The Spanish government estimated that 114,000 Spanish civilians disappeared and were presumably killed by Franco forces during the Spanish civil war and his dictatorship. Pinochet disappeared and killed thousands. The book described Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany, as “a great man of history.” And it justified the violence of Pinochet’s regime: “The story of tossing communists out of helicopter hails from Pinochet’s elimination of communism during the mid to late 1970s. Wherever Pinochet was, there was no communism.”

Ponder this: the Republican nominee for vice president commended a book that praised violent dictators and held them up as role models for the American right. By the way, this book was also extolled by Donald Trump Jr. (“teaches us how…to save the West”), Michael Flynn (“exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win”), and Tucker Carlson (“Jack Posobiec sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it.”)

Now Vance, who works for Trump, has the audacity to lecture others on the excesses of political rhetoric? He has demonized and demeaned his foes. He has called for purges. He has acclaimed a book that literally dehumanizes liberals and celebrates fascists who deployed horrific political violence. And there’s this: Not long ago, he told fellow conservatives, “The thing we have to take away from the last 10 years is that we really need be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power.”

With his calls for illegal and ruthless action, his backing of Trump’s lies about 2020, and his support for right-wingers who hail political violence and condemn progressives as “unhumans,” Vance is himself a threat to democracy. Which is why he, like Trump, huffs that the actual threat is posed by those who point out how he and Trump endanger the republic. This hypocrisy is a crucial element of a con concocted to conceal their extremism. Trump and Vance are claiming the mantle of champions of democracy so they can attain the power to subvert democracy. And if the media doesn’t cover this adequately—and if not enough voters see through their cynical ruse—they may get the chance to do so.

David Corn’s American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times bestseller, is available in an expanded paperback edition.

As the 2024 election hits the final stretch, the Republican Party has been touting its “Young Guns,” a group of 30 non-incumbent candidates in competitive House districts. The party presents this bunch as hot prospects who will help the GOP not just protect its slim House majority but expand it. But anyone who scrutinizes the list will find an assortment of extremists, conspiracy theory-mongers, underfunded aspirants, and oddball contenders who might more accurately be labeled potential duds.

The Young Guns program has a mixed legacy. In 2010, the Republican Party concocted this sassy branding exercise to promote a supposedly new and different generation of House leaders, with an emphasis on three of them: Kevin McCarthy, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan. This trio even produced a bestselling book with the title Young Guns, and the promotional copy proclaimed these conservatives, more middled-aged than youthful, were “changing the face of the Republican party and giving us a new road map back to the American dream.” But the fate of the original Young Guns ended up more a nightmare for each. Four years later, Cantor was defeated in a GOP primary by a far-right tea partier. After an unsuccessful vice presidential run in 2012, Ryan reluctantly became House speaker, only to be essentially hounded out of that position by extremist Republicans in his caucus. And half-a-decade later, McCarthy managed to hold on to the speakership for only nine months before a mutiny waged by radical Republicans booted him.

Yet despite the sad tale of these three, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the GOP outfit in charge of House races, has continued to use the “Young Guns” label to promote candidates. This summer it released a list of the contenders in its Young Gun program, with Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), the chair of the NRCC, declaring the Republicans will boost their majority in the House because “we’ve got really good candidates…really quality candidates.” Yet this roster of GOP House nominees is full of politicians weighed down by extremist baggage, fundraising challenges, and flip-flops.

Here’s a look at some of the Young Guns.

Caroleene Dobson. Running for an open seat in Alabama’s newly-drawn 2nd congressional district, Dobson is up against Shomari Figures, a former deputy chief of staff for Attorney General Merrick Garland. Dobson attended what’s known as a “segregation academy”—private schools established in Alabama that allowed white families to opt out of integrated schools—and she’s has been a fierce advocate of a generous school choice measure that critics say will divert public funds from majority Black public schools. An ardent foe of abortion who now says she supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, Dobson in April commended a draconian Alabama anti-abortion law that contains no exceptions. When asked by the Christian Coalition if she backed any exemptions, she did not express support for them. A poll in August showed Figures ahead by 12 points.

Scott Baugh. Competing for the seat in California’s 47th congressional district left open when Democratic Rep. Katie Porter ran (unsuccessfully) for the Senate, Baugh is a returning contender who lost to Porter by 3.4 points in 2022. In the 1990s, according to the Los Angeles Times, Baugh, then a state assembly member and an Orange County Republican, “was charged with four felonies, including falsifying campaign reports and persuading another person to commit perjury. He also was charged with 18 misdemeanors for allegedly concealing the source of campaign money.” He eventually paid a civil fine of $47,900 to resolve the case. In a speech to the International Christian Ambassadors Association last year, he decried so-called wokeism as the “greatest threat” to the United States in its history: “We were born in the Revolutionary War. We survived civil wars, World War II, World War I, a lot of wars, 9/11. None of those were that threatening to our country compared to the war that we’re fighting now. That war is about wokeism and the lack of common sense.” His Democratic opponent is state senator Dave Min.

Gabe Evans. In Colorado’s recently created 8th congressional district and up against Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo, the state’s first Latina House member, Evans failed to obtain the state party’s endorsement. The GOP’s pooh-bahs believed he was not a strong candidate. Still, he won its primary contest. During a July interview, Evans, an abortion opponent, curiously said he could not recall how he voted on a 2020 state ballot initiative that would have partially banned abortion. He also oddly said that his wife, who had experienced eight miscarriages, has tried to explain to him the “nuances to that female reproductive care stuff” that she learns about at her “doctors visits” but that he doesn’t attend those visits because “I don’t got the right parts.” In fundraising, Evans has so far been smoked by Caraveo. According to the latest Federal Election Commission filings, she raised $4.5 million and had $3.4 million cash on hand. Evans had collected $1 million and had $532,000 left to spend.

Joe Teirab. In Minnesota’s 2nd congressional district, Teirab, a US Marine vet and former prosector, is facing Democratic Rep. Angie Craig, who has won the past three contests. Teirab is another one of these Republicans who has had a tough time handling the abortion issue. As a student and Republican activist at Cornell University in 2009, he remarked to a reporter for the school newspaper that “the unborn have a right to life too, regardless of the conception.” As a candidate, he told an anti-abortion group that he recognized “a federal role in protecting unborn children.” And he serves on the board of a group that operates “pregnancy centers” that promote “abortion pill reversal”—a procedure the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has declared “unproved and unethical.” Yet he now insists that he supports exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother and says abortion “is a state issue, not a federal issue,” contradicting his previous stance. Craig has nearly outraised Teirab four-to-one and, per the most recent FEC records, swamping him $4.1 million to $535,000.

Yvette Herrell. In 2022, during what was supposed to be a “red wave” election, Herrell, then the one-term incumbent, lost to Democrat Gabe Vasquez in New Mexico’s 2nd congressional district by about 1,300 votes. She’s back for a rematch. In 2018, Associated Press reported that she “failed to disclose that her real estate company earned nearly a half-million dollars in contracts with two state agencies over five years” and noted this “could put Herrell at odds with state ethics officials.” And she, too, has been struggling to calibrate her position on abortion. In 2020, she said at a candidate’s forum, “I wish we could have eliminated all abortion in the state.” In Congress, she co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act that aimed to define “human being” as beginning with “the moment of fertilization,” with no exceptions for in vitro fertilization. Now, as HuffPost reports, “Herrell has cut all references to abortion from her website and campaign materials. Her campaign has emphasized that she believes abortion rights decisions should be left to the states.” A poll this month had Vasquez up by a whopping 9 points, while he has maintained a two-to-one advantage in cash on hand.

John Lee. In Nevada’s 4th congressional district, Lee, who served as North Las Vegas mayor from 2013 to 2022 and who was an anti-abortion Democrat until becoming a Republican in 2021, is challenging Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus. At 69, Lee hardly fits the image of a Young Gun, but this NRCC program doesn’t mind a touch of false advertising. What’s odd about his campaign so far is money. As of the most recent campaign filings, covering the period up until the end of June, Horsford had raised $4 million and his campaign treasury had $2.2 million in it. Lee had pulled in $919,000 and was left with a measly $39,000 cash on hand. It’s true that Lee didn’t win the GOP primary until the beginning of June and spent all his money on that race. But unless he pulled in a big haul in the last two months, he will likely not be competitive. This week, the Nevada-based Daily Indy reported that the NRCC has not spent any money to help Lee—a sign it isn’t too hopeful about him. With help from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Horsford has booked over $1 million in television ads. And a Democratic super PAC is kicking in millions more to help him and two other Nevada Democratic House members.

Alison Esposito. A former New York City cop, Esposito is running in New York’s 18th congressional district against Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, who won the seat in 2022 by 1.3 points. She is touting her career in law enforcement as a top selling point for her candidacy. But as a cop she was sued twice for wrongful arrests—and New York City taxpayers had to dole out over $100,000 to resolve these cases. In a 2005 episode, three Black women sued her and other NYPD officers for allegedly wrongfully arresting them on suspicion of shoplifting. The city paid $95,000 to settle that case. In 2017, she was sued for allegedly arresting and assaulting an “infant.” (In some legal proceedings in New York State, “infant” can mean a minor.) Settling that case cost the city $25,000. Her campaign lawyer has denied the allegations.

Orlando Sonza. In Ohio’s 1st congressional district, Sonza is taking on Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman, who in 2022 defeated Republican Steve Chabot, a 13-term incumbent. In his early 30s, Sonza, a lawyer, Army veteran, and son of Filipino immigrants, is gunning to become the youngest Republican House member. He, too, has a past as an anti-abortion absolutist. Last year, he told the Daily Mail that the United States “should be a place where there’s no abortion.” When he ran for a state senate seat unsuccessfully in 2022—he lost by 45 points—Sonza filled out a candidate questionnaire in which he declared he would support “federal and state legislation to ban abortion-on-demand from fertilization to birth.” He also said there should be no legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Last year, Ohio passed a state constitutional amendment enshrining reproductive rights that restored Roe v. Wade-era access to abortion. It pass with 57 percent of the vote. As of mid-summer, Landsman had $1.9 million available to Sonza’s $246,000

Derek Merrin. In Ohio’s 9th congressional district, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, now serving in her 21st term, is one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the House. The district twice voted for Donald Trump, and state representative Merrin, 38 years old, should have a good shot at bouncing her. But he is also an anti-abortion extremist. In 2019, he backed a measure to impose a total ban on abortion that would create “the capital offense of aggravated abortion murder and the offense of abortion murder.” Under this proposed law, a woman who sought an abortion, including someone as young as 13, or a health care provider who performed an abortion could be prosecuted, with the ultimate penalty being the death sentence. He also supported a six-week abortion ban that did not include exceptions for rape and incest that eventually passed. Last year, Merrin was deemed too extreme by 22 of his fellow GOP state representatives. They bolted the Republican caucus and cut a deal with the Democratic minority to elect a more moderate Republican speaker of the house instead of Merrin. In June, US House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has hailed Merrin as “an extraordinary candidate,” praised him for being a “runner-up” in that race for leader of the state legislature. As of the end of June, Merrin’s campaign had $408,000 in the bank, compared to Kaptur’s $2.6 million.

Mayra Flores. In Texas’ 34th congressional district, it’s another rematch. Flores, who won a special election in June 2022, served only a few months before being defeated that fall by 8.5 points by Democratic Rep. Vincente Gonzalez, a congressman in a neighboring district. Flores’ initial win was surprising, given she was a far-right extremist, climate denier, and conspiracy theorist. She was a passionate proponent of Trump’s big lie, tweeting that President Joe Biden should be “impeached immediately.” She supported the conspiracy theory that the January 6 riot was a setup (presumably orchestrated by the Deep State) and spurred by antifa. She has also hobnobbed with the loony QAnon movement, which claims a global cabal of satanic and cannibalistic pedophiles and sex traffickers (which includes billionaires, Hollywood elites, and, of course, prominent Democrats) is scheming to control the entire world. Business Insider reported that Flores has “openly affiliated” with QAnon. Media Matters noted that she has “repeatedly posted the QAnon hashtag and ‘#Q’ on Twitter and on Facebook, including in a Facebook ad. On Instagram, she repeatedly posted the QAnon slogan.” (She told the San Antonio Express-News that she has “never been supportive” of QAnon.) In May, her campaign sent out a fundraising solicitation that claimed the left was waging “disgusting attacks on Christian Americans” and forcing them to “worship in the shadows.” It included a poll with two choices: “Yes, I love God!” and “No, I am a Democrat.” And then there’s “Grubgate”—earlier this year Flores was caught swiping from the internet photos of delicious food offerings and posting them as her own concoctions. In this race, the fundraising has been close. Flores ] brought in $4.2 million through June, and Gonzalez $2 million, but as of that point, Gonzalez had more cash on hand with $1.7 million to Flores’ $1.1 million.

Joe Kent. In 2022, Kent ran against Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington’s 3rd congressional district and lost by less than 1 percent, and he’s returned to challenge her. Kent has been an anti-abortion extremist and a purveyor of various conspiracy theories. In the 2022 GOP primary, with the backing of libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, Kent, who had attended a rally to support January 6 rioters, knocked out one of the 10 Republicans who had voted to impeach Trump after the assault on the Capitol. Kent’s campaign that year was hindered by news stories on its ties to the Proud Boys and other white identity extremists. He has long supported a national abortion ban, calling the procedure “absolutely evil” and comparing it to slavery. Now he is softening his stance, saying that abortion is a “state issue” and that he will not support such a national prohibition. This year he called for pardoning January 6 marauders convicted of crimes. He claimed the Biden administration has been purposefully bringing undocumented immigrants into the United States to expand the Democratic voting base. And he has echoed Vladmir Putin’s false talking points about the Ukraine war. In July, Kent, who has often railed against the Deep State and urged defunding the FBI, suggested that Secret Service agents may have been “in on” the assassination attempt against Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. As of mid-July, Gluesenkamp Perez had $3.8 million in cash on hand, and Kent, as of late August, only had $585,000.

Though some of the GOP’s Young Guns may prevail—several of these races are tight—overall this is not an impressive band of candidates. Many of them are shape-shifters on abortion, running from their previous hard-core positions and vulnerable to accusations of flip-flopping on this top issue. Several champion the most noxious conspiracy theories. Polls and fundraising numbers raise questions about others. After eight years of Trump dominating the Republican Party, the best it has to offer as House candidates includes extremists and paranoia pushers with spotty records. But in what could well be a tight race for control of the House, any one of them could make a difference.