In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump.
Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon.
The QAnon theory, which arose in 2017, holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump. This evil band supposedly includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and other notables. Those who believe this bunk see Trump as a hero who is secretly battling this conspiracy in a titanic, behind-the-scenes struggle. It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence.
Yet Patel repeatedlyhas hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging. As Media Mattersreported: “Patel’s catering to the QAnon community has also gone beyond the @Q account. In July, he posted an image featuring a flaming Q on Truth Social and starting in at least April, he went on numerous QAnon-supporting showstopromoteTruthSocial—urgingviewers to join the platform, praising hosts for being on the platform, and promising to promote the hosts there.” On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.”
“There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” Patel said of QAnon, which he called a “movement.”
On another show, Patel acknowledged he was courting the QAnon crowd for Truth Social: “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.” He praised QAnon, saying, “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” and he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel praised Q for starting a “movement.”
Appearing on Grace Time TV in Septmeber 2022, Patel said of the QAnon community, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” He added, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”
When Patel was promoting a children’s book he wrote—about a King Donald who is persecuted by his political enemies—he offered ten copies in which he signed the books and added a special message: “WWG1WGA!”” That’s the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.” He hyped this special offer on Truth Social using the hashtag “#WWG1WGA.”
“Let’s have fun with the truth,” Patel said.
Appearing on the MatrixxxGrove Show, Patel defended his use of the QAnon motto: “People keep asking me about all this Q stuff. I’m like, what does it matter? What I’m telling you is there is truth in a lot of things that many people say, and what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way?” He added, “Let’s have fun with the truth.” He also characterized the QAnon movement as being a vital part of the national debate: “Basically, the bottom line is—and I get attacked for calling out some of the stuff that quote-unquote Q says and whatnot. I’m like, what’s the problem with that? It’s social discourse.”
Patel is a purveyor of far-right conspiracism in other ways that overlap with QAnon. He claims a nefarious Deep State controls the US government and is arrayed against Trump and conservatives. He encourages paranoia and calls for revenge. Talking to MAGA strategist Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whither its criminally or civilly.”
Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."
Seeking retribution, spreading conspiracy theories, backing an attempt to overthrow a presidential election, supporting J6 rioters, echoing Moscow talking points—none of this is what one would see in a responsible choice for FBI director. But Patel’s cozying up to QAnon is especially troubling. Among many vital duties, the FBI director oversees the federal government’s efforts to combat violent crime—an area where QAnon remains a concern. Patel’s relationship with QAnon shows either that he has a severely distorted view of reality or that he will recklessly exploit dangerous, misguided, and false ideas for political benefit. Neither is an approach suitable for the most powerful and important law enforcement agency in the land.
In the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday stretch, Donald Trump announced what might be his most extreme and controversial appointment yet: Kash Patel for FBI director. There are many reasons why this decision is outrageous. Patel is a MAGA combatant who has fiercely advocated Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and who has championed January 6 rioters as patriots and unfairly persecuted political prisoners. (The still ongoing January 6 case, including scores of prosecutions for assaults on police, is one of the FBI’s largest and most successful criminal investigations ever.) Patel is also a fervent promoter of conspiracy theories. At the end of Trump’s first presidency, when he was a Pentagon official, he spread the bonkers idea that Italian military satellites had been employed to turn Trump votes to Joe Biden votes in the 2020 election. And he has falsely claimed that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax cooked up by the FBI and so-called Deep State to sabotage Trump.
Moreover, Patel has been supportive of the most loony conspiracy theory in MAGA land: QAnon.
The QAnon theory, which arose in 2017, holds that an intelligence operative known only as Q has revealed through cryptic messages that a cabal of global, Satanic, cannibalistic elitists and pedophiles is operating a child sex trafficking operation as it vies for world domination and conspires against Trump. This evil band supposedly includes Democratic politicians, Hollywood celebrities, business tycoons, and other notables. Those who believe this bunk see Trump as a hero who is secretly battling this conspiracy in a titanic, behind-the-scenes struggle. It is pure nuttery. Worse than that, QAnon has sparked multiple acts of violence.
Yet Patel repeatedlyhas hailed QAnoners and promoted this conspiracy theory. In early 2022, when he sat on the board of Trump’s social media company, Truth Social, Patel amplified an account called @Q that pushed out QAnon messaging. As Media Mattersreported: “Patel’s catering to the QAnon community has also gone beyond the @Q account. In July, he posted an image featuring a flaming Q on Truth Social and starting in at least April, he went on numerous QAnon-supporting showstopromoteTruthSocial—urgingviewers to join the platform, praising hosts for being on the platform, and promising to promote the hosts there.” On one show, Patel declared, “Whether it’s the Qs of the world, who I agree with some of what he does and I disagree with some of what he does, if it allows people to gather and focus on the truth and the facts, I’m all for it.”
“There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” Patel said of QAnon, which he called a “movement.”
On another show, Patel acknowledged he was courting the QAnon crowd for Truth Social: “We try to incorporate it into our overall messaging scheme to capture audiences because whoever that person is has certainly captured a widespread breath of the MAGA and the America First movement. And so what I try to do is—what I try to do with anything, Q or otherwise, is you can’t ignore that group of people that has such a strong dominant following.” He praised QAnon, saying, “There’s a lot of good to a lot of it,” and he agreed with a host who said Q had “been so right on so many things.” Patel praised Q for starting a “movement.”
Appearing on Grace Time TV in Septmeber 2022, Patel said of the QAnon community, “We’re just blown away at the amount of acumen some of these people have.” He added, “If it’s Q or whatever movement that’s getting that information out, I am all for it, every day of the week.”
When Patel was promoting a children’s book he wrote—about a King Donald who is persecuted by his political enemies—he offered ten copies in which he signed the books and added a special message: “WWG1WGA!”” That’s the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.” He hyped this special offer on Truth Social using the hashtag “#WWG1WGA.”
“Let’s have fun with the truth,” Patel said.
Appearing on the MatrixxxGrove Show, Patel defended his use of the QAnon motto: “People keep asking me about all this Q stuff. I’m like, what does it matter? What I’m telling you is there is truth in a lot of things that many people say, and what I’m putting out there is the truth. And how about we have some fun along the way?” He added, “Let’s have fun with the truth.” He also characterized the QAnon movement as being a vital part of the national debate: “Basically, the bottom line is—and I get attacked for calling out some of the stuff that quote-unquote Q says and whatnot. I’m like, what’s the problem with that? It’s social discourse.”
Patel is a purveyor of far-right conspiracism in other ways that overlap with QAnon. He claims a nefarious Deep State controls the US government and is arrayed against Trump and conservatives. He encourages paranoia and calls for revenge. Talking to MAGA strategist Steve Bannon on Bannon’s podcast last year, Patel proclaimed, “We will go and find the conspirators—not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens to help Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whither its criminally or civilly.”
Here is Trump’s nominee for FBI Director Kash Patel calling for “offensive operations” to jail Americans who they consider “the enemy.”“We will go out and find the conspirators… Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media."
Seeking retribution, spreading conspiracy theories, backing an attempt to overthrow a presidential election, supporting J6 rioters, echoing Moscow talking points—none of this is what one would see in a responsible choice for FBI director. But Patel’s cozying up to QAnon is especially troubling. Among many vital duties, the FBI director oversees the federal government’s efforts to combat violent crime—an area where QAnon remains a concern. Patel’s relationship with QAnon shows either that he has a severely distorted view of reality or that he will recklessly exploit dangerous, misguided, and false ideas for political benefit. Neither is an approach suitable for the most powerful and important law enforcement agency in the land.
In March 2024, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and failed presidential candidate whom Donald Trump has tapped to be director of national intelligence, created a political action committee called Defend Freedom, Inc. The group posted a bare-bones website featuring photos of Gabbard and declared it “was organized to elect patriots who will fight to defend America’s Peace, Security, Prosperity, and Freedom.” It asked for donations of up to $5,000 to “make an impact across America.” Tens of thousands of people contributed to Gabbard’s PAC. Through mid-October it raised $1.9 million, including a $16,552 transfer from another Gabbard PAC called Team Tulsi.
Of all the money it pulled in, Defend Freedom, Inc. devoted only $20,000 to contributions for a small number of candidates, all far-right MAGA-ish Republicans: US Senate candidates Kari Lake and Tim Sheehy, and US House contenders Joe Kent, Brian Jack, and Mayra Flores. (Before running for a congressional seat in 2022, Flores published social media posts promoting QAnon.) Where did all the money go? Gabbard’s outfit spent $1.3 million on operating expenses—at least $1 million on fundraising and direct mail, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission. Like many PACs, it acted mainly as a money-churning machine that generated donations that mostly profited vendors and consultants.
“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes. The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”
Defend Freedom, Inc. is one of a network of organizations Gabbard has assembled in recent years, and they warrant a thorough review as part of her Senate confirmation process.
Gabbard is a highly unconventional candidate for the DNI job, which entails overseeing all 18 agencies in the US intelligence community (including the CIA and the NSA). She has espoused fringe views often in sync with Moscow talking points. She provided a preemptive defense of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and afterward boosted the conspiracy theory advanced by Russia that the United States had been collaborating with Ukraine to develop biological weapons to deploy against Russia. Her fondness for Putin has earned her favorable coverage from Russia’s propaganda outlets, and her appointment, if she is confirmed, will likely spook intelligence services throughout the world and make them hesitant to collaborate with US intelligence. She also has no experience managing or holding a senior position within a large organization, let alone an agency with the task of safeguarding the nation. Consequently, an extensive vetting of Gabbard ought to focus on her own political operation.
In February, Gabbard established a Super PAC called For Love of Country, Inc. Its name echoed the title of a book she would release in April with the subtitle “Leave the Democrat Party Behind.” Gabbard had quit the Democratic Party in 2022, proclaiming herself an independent, and she went on to become a highly partisan commentator, hurling harsh rhetoric at her former party. The promotional material for this book claimed that the Democrats were now “controlled by an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by woke ideology and racializing everything.” It slammed the Democratic Party as “a clear and present threat to the God‑given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.”
Around the time of the book’s publication—at a point when Gabbard’s bizarre political journey had taken her from a Democratic presidential bid to appearing on the short list of Trump’s potential running-mates—her For Love of Country, Inc. PAC banked hefty checks from several big-money Republican funders. The biggest amount came from a donor named David Flory, who sent Gabbard’s PAC a whopping $100,000. On the PAC’s FEC filing, it neglected to note—as it is compelled to do—Flory’s occupation and employer.
There was something odd about this contribution. The name David Flory matches that of a Miami investor and former Washington, DC, lobbyist who in recent years has donated millions to Republican candidates and committees, including the Trump campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the PAC run by John Bolton, a GOP hawk. But the David Flory recorded on the PAC’s filing listed a different address than the one used by the David Flory who made all those other contributions. The address on the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC filing was for a modest-looking apartment building on the western edge of Miami—a residence unlikely to be the home of a $100,000 donor. The Flory with the record of big-bucks donations lives in a Miami Beach apartment worth an estimated $4.1 million.
According to public records, there is no David Flory who resides at that apartment building in western Miami. But a fellow named David Flor once lived there. He died in 2013.
Looking to talk to the David Flory of Miami Beach, a Mother Jones reporter reached his wife, Julie Flory on her cell phone, and asked if she was familiar with the Miami address associated with the $100,000 donation to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC. She said did not know it. She then conferenced her husband David into the call. Asked about the $100,000 contribution to Gabbard’s PAC and the address tied to it, he said, “Doesn’t sound familiar,” and he tried to end the conversation. Pressed as to whether he had made a donation to Gabbard, he said, “I’m not interested in talking to you about it.” Sounding irritated, he addressed his wife, “Julie, don’t take these calls. Just hang up on them.” He then left the call.
Another early major donor to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC was John Calnan, the head of a Massachusetts construction company, who kicked in $25,000. He gave $200,000 to the Trump campaign this year. A few months later—shortly after Gabbard endorsed Trump—disgraced Las Vegas mogul, Steve Wynn, a close pal of Trump, cut this PAC a $60,000 check.
All told, from February through mid-October, For Love of Country, Inc. raised $280,000. It only spent $49,000. Ten thousand dollars of those expenditures paid for an event in Las Vegas. Almost all the rest covered payments to Gabbard’s political staff and advisers.
The PAC described itself as “Tulsi’s vehicle for messaging in the 2024 election, including a national ad campaign to communicate with middle-of-the-road voters, disenfranchised Democrats, and undecided Independents.” It claimed, “For Love of Country PAC will use traditional and disruptive methods to blend the tried-and-true approach with innovation to reach otherwise unlikely voting demographics.” Its expenditures through mid-October do not indicate there was much of an effort of that sort made by Gabbard’s PAC. It looks as if this PAC funded by pro-Trump Republican money-bags mostly existed to cover the costs of Gabbard’s political team.
Gabbard controls yet another PAC, Our Freedom, Our Future, which was launched in 2023. Its mission, according to its website, is “to protect our freedoms and support leaders who share her commitment to uphold and protect our God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution.” It declared, “Our founders envisioned a government that is of, by, and for the people—not of, by, and for the powerful elite. We need to elect leaders who are committed to the same.” From mid-2023 until October, it raised only $45,000, with the lion’s share of that money going to pay Gabbard’s spokesperson and another adviser. It made a $1,000 contribution to a Republican candidate in Ohio who lost a congressional primary contest.
“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes,” says Sarah Bryner, a political scientist and campaign finance expert. “The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”
Gabbard also created a nonprofit called We Must Protect. In its tax filing, the group stated its mission was to “engage in research and public education for the benefit of those vulnerable populations in our community that deserve to be honored and cared for.” It drew only $2,500 in funding in 2022. After the horrendous wildfires on Maui last year, We Must Protect tried to raise money to aid the victims and promised “every dollar” contributed will “help people affected by the devastating fires.” The nonprofit’s 2023 tax filing is not yet available. So its fundraising and relief efforts related to the fires cannot be publicly evaluated. Nor are its donors publicly disclosed. In October, Gabbard said that We Must Protect had raised $331,000 to aid survivors of Hurricane Helene.
Last week, Mother Jones sent Tulsi Gabbard a long list of questions regarding her PACs and We Must Protect, which shares a phone number with Gabbard’s office and her Defend Freedom, Inc. PAC. We requested We Must Protect’s 2023 tax filing and information about its donors and its work regarding the Maui fires. The list included queries about the PACs’ spending and whether they did the work they claimed to do, about their high spending on fundraising, and about the $100,000 contribution attributed to David Flory.
Gabbard declined to respond to any of the questions or provide any information on We Must Protect’s donors and activities. Erika Tsuji, her spokeswoman, forwarded the list to the Trump transition office. Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for the transition, replied with a statement that did not address any of the queries. She only offered praise for We Must Protect and claimed Gabbard’s Defend Freedom PAC and For Love of Country PAC “enabled her to engage millions of Americans…encouraging them back pragmatic GOP candidates nationwide, including electing Donald. J. Trump.”
One Gabbard PAC did recently encounter trouble with the FEC. On November 4, the commission sent a letter to Thomas Datwyler, the treasurer of the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC, notifying the outfit that it had apparently placed $151,000 of its donations into the wrong account and setting a December 9 deadline for a response.
Datwyler, a longtime financial consultant for GOP candidates, is also the treasurer for Defend Freedom, Inc.; Our Freedom, Our Future; and Team Tulsi. Last year, he was caught up in the George Santos scandal. In the midst of the controversy over the then-GOP congressman’s false claims about his campaign finances—among his many lies about his background and career—paperwork filed with the FEC indicated that Datwyler had replaced the original treasurer for several of Santos’ campaign committees. But Datwyler’s attorney quickly informed the FEC that Datwyler had not agreed to become treasurer for the Santos entities. This added yet another level of mystery to the Santos scandal.
Months later, there was another twist to this story: Datwyler’s attorney wrote the FEC to withdraw his previous statement that denied Datwyler had become the treasurer for those Santos committees. He noted that “public reporting has caused me to lose confidence in the accuracy and veracity of the information provided by Mr. Datwyler at the time I submitted those communications on his behalf.” The Daily Beast had reported that that “Datwyler had in reality operated as a shadow treasurer for Santos—despite disavowing that role to the public, to the FEC, and apparently even his own lawyer.”
Datwyler did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the Santos episode and Gabbard’s PACs. Gabbard, too, did not respond to questions about Datwyler.
If Gabbard reaches a Senate confirmation hearing, there will be much for the senators to grill her on, especially her sympathetic views regarding Putin and Russia and her support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as well as her efforts to help Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who each exposed top-secret information that caused damage for the intelligence community. A key question will be whether someone as excessively partisan as Gabbard can be a fair-minded and even-handed overseer of the intelligence agencies, the intelligence they produce, and the covert actions they mount. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators should be sure to examine the network of organizations she has built and the flow of money in and out of her nonprofit. There are few jobs in the federal government as important as managing the sprawling US intelligence community. With no direct intelligence experience, Gabbard deserves scrutiny of all matters that can shed light on her fitness for this post.
In March 2024, Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and failed presidential candidate whom Donald Trump has tapped to be director of national intelligence, created a political action committee called Defend Freedom, Inc. The group posted a bare-bones website featuring photos of Gabbard and declared it “was organized to elect patriots who will fight to defend America’s Peace, Security, Prosperity, and Freedom.” It asked for donations of up to $5,000 to “make an impact across America.” Tens of thousands of people contributed to Gabbard’s PAC. Through mid-October it raised $1.9 million, including a $16,552 transfer from another Gabbard PAC called Team Tulsi.
Of all the money it pulled in, Defend Freedom, Inc. devoted only $20,000 to contributions for a small number of candidates, all far-right MAGA-ish Republicans: US Senate candidates Kari Lake and Tim Sheehy, and US House contenders Joe Kent, Brian Jack, and Mayra Flores. (Before running for a congressional seat in 2022, Flores published social media posts promoting QAnon.) Where did all the money go? Gabbard’s outfit spent $1.3 million on operating expenses—at least $1 million on fundraising and direct mail, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission. Like many PACs, it acted mainly as a money-churning machine that generated donations that mostly profited vendors and consultants.
“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes. The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”
Defend Freedom, Inc. is one of a network of organizations Gabbard has assembled in recent years, and they warrant a thorough review as part of her Senate confirmation process.
Gabbard is a highly unconventional candidate for the DNI job, which entails overseeing all 18 agencies in the US intelligence community (including the CIA and the NSA). She has espoused fringe views often in sync with Moscow talking points. She provided a preemptive defense of Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and afterward boosted the conspiracy theory advanced by Russia that the United States had been collaborating with Ukraine to develop biological weapons to deploy against Russia. Her fondness for Putin has earned her favorable coverage from Russia’s propaganda outlets, and her appointment, if she is confirmed, will likely spook intelligence services throughout the world and make them hesitant to collaborate with US intelligence. She also has no experience managing or holding a senior position within a large organization, let alone an agency with the task of safeguarding the nation. Consequently, an extensive vetting of Gabbard ought to focus on her own political operation.
In February, Gabbard established a Super PAC called For Love of Country, Inc. Its name echoed the title of a book she would release in April with the subtitle “Leave the Democrat Party Behind.” Gabbard had quit the Democratic Party in 2022, proclaiming herself an independent, and she went on to become a highly partisan commentator, hurling harsh rhetoric at her former party. The promotional material for this book claimed that the Democrats were now “controlled by an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by woke ideology and racializing everything.” It slammed the Democratic Party as “a clear and present threat to the God‑given freedoms enshrined in the Constitution.”
Around the time of the book’s publication—at a point when Gabbard’s bizarre political journey had taken her from a Democratic presidential bid to appearing on the short list of Trump’s potential running-mates—her For Love of Country, Inc. PAC banked hefty checks from several big-money Republican funders. The biggest amount came from a donor named David Flory, who sent Gabbard’s PAC a whopping $100,000. On the PAC’s FEC filing, it neglected to note—as it is compelled to do—Flory’s occupation and employer.
There was something odd about this contribution. The name David Flory matches that of a Miami investor and former Washington, DC, lobbyist who in recent years has donated millions to Republican candidates and committees, including the Trump campaign, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the PAC run by John Bolton, a GOP hawk. But the David Flory recorded on the PAC’s filing listed a different address than the one used by the David Flory who made all those other contributions. The address on the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC filing was for a modest-looking apartment building on the western edge of Miami—a residence unlikely to be the home of a $100,000 donor. The Flory with the record of big-bucks donations lives in a Miami Beach apartment worth an estimated $4.1 million.
According to public records, there is no David Flory who resides at that apartment building in western Miami. But a fellow named David Flor once lived there. He died in 2013.
Looking to talk to the David Flory of Miami Beach, a Mother Jones reporter reached his wife, Julie Flory on her cell phone, and asked if she was familiar with the Miami address associated with the $100,000 donation to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC. She said did not know it. She then conferenced her husband David into the call. Asked about the $100,000 contribution to Gabbard’s PAC and the address tied to it, he said, “Doesn’t sound familiar,” and he tried to end the conversation. Pressed as to whether he had made a donation to Gabbard, he said, “I’m not interested in talking to you about it.” Sounding irritated, he addressed his wife, “Julie, don’t take these calls. Just hang up on them.” He then left the call.
Another early major donor to the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC was John Calnan, the head of a Massachusetts construction company, who kicked in $25,000. He gave $200,000 to the Trump campaign this year. A few months later—shortly after Gabbard endorsed Trump—disgraced Las Vegas mogul, Steve Wynn, a close pal of Trump, cut this PAC a $60,000 check.
All told, from February through mid-October, For Love of Country, Inc. raised $280,000. It only spent $49,000. Ten thousand dollars of those expenditures paid for an event in Las Vegas. Almost all the rest covered payments to Gabbard’s political staff and advisers.
The PAC described itself as “Tulsi’s vehicle for messaging in the 2024 election, including a national ad campaign to communicate with middle-of-the-road voters, disenfranchised Democrats, and undecided Independents.” It claimed, “For Love of Country PAC will use traditional and disruptive methods to blend the tried-and-true approach with innovation to reach otherwise unlikely voting demographics.” Its expenditures through mid-October do not indicate there was much of an effort of that sort made by Gabbard’s PAC. It looks as if this PAC funded by pro-Trump Republican money-bags mostly existed to cover the costs of Gabbard’s political team.
Gabbard controls yet another PAC, Our Freedom, Our Future, which was launched in 2023. Its mission, according to its website, is “to protect our freedoms and support leaders who share her commitment to uphold and protect our God-given rights enshrined in the Constitution.” It declared, “Our founders envisioned a government that is of, by, and for the people—not of, by, and for the powerful elite. We need to elect leaders who are committed to the same.” From mid-2023 until October, it raised only $45,000, with the lion’s share of that money going to pay Gabbard’s spokesperson and another adviser. It made a $1,000 contribution to a Republican candidate in Ohio who lost a congressional primary contest.
“It’s uncommon for a politician to have three or four separate PACs, though they can be used for different purposes,” says Sarah Bryner, a political scientist and campaign finance expert. “The most common number is one. Generally the more you have is because of obfuscation. It confuses people.”
Gabbard also created a nonprofit called We Must Protect. In its tax filing, the group stated its mission was to “engage in research and public education for the benefit of those vulnerable populations in our community that deserve to be honored and cared for.” It drew only $2,500 in funding in 2022. After the horrendous wildfires on Maui last year, We Must Protect tried to raise money to aid the victims and promised “every dollar” contributed will “help people affected by the devastating fires.” The nonprofit’s 2023 tax filing is not yet available. So its fundraising and relief efforts related to the fires cannot be publicly evaluated. Nor are its donors publicly disclosed. In October, Gabbard said that We Must Protect had raised $331,000 to aid survivors of Hurricane Helene.
Last week, Mother Jones sent Tulsi Gabbard a long list of questions regarding her PACs and We Must Protect, which shares a phone number with Gabbard’s office and her Defend Freedom, Inc. PAC. We requested We Must Protect’s 2023 tax filing and information about its donors and its work regarding the Maui fires. The list included queries about the PACs’ spending and whether they did the work they claimed to do, about their high spending on fundraising, and about the $100,000 contribution attributed to David Flory.
Gabbard declined to respond to any of the questions or provide any information on We Must Protect’s donors and activities. Erika Tsuji, her spokeswoman, forwarded the list to the Trump transition office. Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for the transition, replied with a statement that did not address any of the queries. She only offered praise for We Must Protect and claimed Gabbard’s Defend Freedom PAC and For Love of Country PAC “enabled her to engage millions of Americans…encouraging them back pragmatic GOP candidates nationwide, including electing Donald. J. Trump.”
One Gabbard PAC did recently encounter trouble with the FEC. On November 4, the commission sent a letter to Thomas Datwyler, the treasurer of the For Love of Country, Inc. PAC, notifying the outfit that it had apparently placed $151,000 of its donations into the wrong account and setting a December 9 deadline for a response.
Datwyler, a longtime financial consultant for GOP candidates, is also the treasurer for Defend Freedom, Inc.; Our Freedom, Our Future; and Team Tulsi. Last year, he was caught up in the George Santos scandal. In the midst of the controversy over the then-GOP congressman’s false claims about his campaign finances—among his many lies about his background and career—paperwork filed with the FEC indicated that Datwyler had replaced the original treasurer for several of Santos’ campaign committees. But Datwyler’s attorney quickly informed the FEC that Datwyler had not agreed to become treasurer for the Santos entities. This added yet another level of mystery to the Santos scandal.
Months later, there was another twist to this story: Datwyler’s attorney wrote the FEC to withdraw his previous statement that denied Datwyler had become the treasurer for those Santos committees. He noted that “public reporting has caused me to lose confidence in the accuracy and veracity of the information provided by Mr. Datwyler at the time I submitted those communications on his behalf.” The Daily Beast had reported that that “Datwyler had in reality operated as a shadow treasurer for Santos—despite disavowing that role to the public, to the FEC, and apparently even his own lawyer.”
Datwyler did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the Santos episode and Gabbard’s PACs. Gabbard, too, did not respond to questions about Datwyler.
If Gabbard reaches a Senate confirmation hearing, there will be much for the senators to grill her on, especially her sympathetic views regarding Putin and Russia and her support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, as well as her efforts to help Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who each exposed top-secret information that caused damage for the intelligence community. A key question will be whether someone as excessively partisan as Gabbard can be a fair-minded and even-handed overseer of the intelligence agencies, the intelligence they produce, and the covert actions they mount. Senate Intelligence Committee investigators should be sure to examine the network of organizations she has built and the flow of money in and out of her nonprofit. There are few jobs in the federal government as important as managing the sprawling US intelligence community. With no direct intelligence experience, Gabbard deserves scrutiny of all matters that can shed light on her fitness for this post.
UPDATE: After this story was published, Gabbard’s office sent Mother Jones a copy of the 2023 990 tax form filed by We Must Protect, the charity started by Gabbard. According to the document, the nonprofit brought in $127,913 that year, as it raised money for assisting the survivors of the Maui fires and vowed “every dollar” contributed would go to this relief work. The document noted that We Must Protect directly spent $43,425 on this effort. This included a $25,000 grant to a foundation run by professional surfer Kai Lenny and $18,425 to purchase relief supplies. At the end of 2023, We Must Protect had $60,345 in the bank—almost half what it had raised that year.
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.
Shortly after Donald Trump narrowly beat Kamala Harris, Politico, the all-politics-all-the-time news outlet, invited readers to participate in a contest: Predict Trump’s cabinet appointees. Whoever did best would walk away with assorted Politico swag. A convicted felon and deceitful demagogue who four years ago incited an attack on the Capitol and tried to overthrow American democracy—a man described as a “fascist” by retired generals who worked with him—is returning to power and bringing with him to the White House a fistful of threats, including vows to suppress the media. But we can have fun, right? Pin the tail on the Trump appointees and win prizes!
This was a stupid and small move that received scant public attention. But it symbolizes a shift in the media, as news outfits figure out how to contend with the new order. Too many, I’m afraid, will either purposefully choose or drift toward an accommodationist stance. I recently heard about the leaders of one online site that previously published hard-hitting stories on Trump and his allies informing their staff that it must pivot with Trump back in the White House. And it’s long been true that mainstream news organizations, particularly network television, have had to reach a modus vivendi with a White House to get the exclusive interviews and video footage they crave. That can be expected once again.
My hunch is that a line will form across the media landscape between those entities that cover the Trump crowd in a relatively normal fashion—What is the president thinking? What are his advisers telling him? What is happening between the White House and Congress? What’s the latest palace intrigue? Who’s invited to the state dinner? What do the polls say?—and those who view as the overarching story the profound threat of authoritarianism posed by Trump and his henchmen and henchwomen. Do the usual political stories matter as much if Trump moves ahead with plans to deport millions and to place in power assorted extremists? Or if he moves to undermine democracy?
Within days of Trump’s announcement that he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services—one of his most absurd and dangerous picks—legacy media were downplaying the peril of a Kennedy appointment. On social media NPR reported, “RFK Jr. wants to tackle chronic disease. Despite controversial views on vaccines, his focus on healthy food and taking on special interests may find broad support—and face political headwinds.”
RFK Jr. wants to tackle chronic disease. Despite controversial views on vaccines, his focus on healthy food and taking on special interests may find broad support — and face political headwinds.
The New York Times repeatedly referred to Kennedy as merely a “vaccine skeptic.” As did CNN. Controversial views? Skepticism? Describing Kennedy as a vaccine skeptic with unconventional views is a form of sanewashing. That’s rather value neutral and, more important, highly inaccurate. Kennedy is a promoter of debunked conspiracy theories that are bonkers. (Here’s one I examined.) And he is not a skeptic of vaccines; he is an anti-vaxxer who has said no vaccine is safe or effective. Not one. This fellow has declared he wants to place all new drug development on hold for eight years. That means no new medications for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, heart disease, and everything else. He is a radical, and if he’s allowed to turn his “controversial views” into policy, millions of Americans could suffer.
One media trait is an aversion to repetition. News is what’s new, right? We already reported that.
This somewhat respectful treatment of Kennedy is but one example. Look at how the New York Times characterized several of Trump’s other bizarre appointments: “Trump Takes on the Pillars of the ‘Deep State.’” The paper reported, “The Justice Department, Pentagon and intelligence agencies were the three areas of government that proved to be the most stubborn obstacles to Mr. Trump in his first term.” This presentation gives weight to Trump’s conspiratorial claim there’s a diabolical Deep State that has been arrayed against him. Worse, it portrays government agencies that tried to hold Trump accountable for alleged wrongdoing as obstructionist. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is holding a 2024 Global Women’s Summit featuring Kellyanne Conway, a Trump adviser, and Lara Trump, the GOP co-chair and Trump daughter-in-law—two women who are part of Trump’s inner circle. I assume that Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is hoping to financially profit from this conference—being conducted in partnership with Tina Brown Media—and figure it needs Trump and Conway to help them succeed. Does democracy die at fancy confabs that celebrate enablers of autocracy?
Trump’s thin victory in 2024 ought not wipe the slate clean. He remains a thug who refused to accept election results not in his favor, encouraged political violence, amplified foul conspiracy theories of various stripes, lied nonstop to spread fear, hatred, and paranoia, demonized his foes as “the enemy within,” expressed admiration for Hitler’s generals, and proposed terminating the Constitution, placing critics in front of military tribunals, prosecuting his detractors, and even executing one of them. One media trait is an aversion to repetition. News is what’s new, right? We already reported that. But if Trump’s far-reaching offenses are not repeatedly centered in media coverage of him, the press will be accomplices to Trump’s perilous perversion of American politics.
No doubt, there will be the occasional wonderful exposé of Trump’s perfidy in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. But the big media institutions—mostly for-profit corporations with eyes keenly trained on the bottom line—will look to play ball with the Trump crew or, at least, cover it in business-as-usual fashion, even as Trump pummels them as the “enemy of the people.” The billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who caused a fuss by blocking the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, this past week said that he wants to redo the “entire” paper to make sure “voices from all sides” are heard and the news is “just the facts.” He didn’t say much more to indicate whether this means a kinder approach to Trump and the land of MAGA. Yet that seemed the message.
The gravitational pull within this business encourages normalizing politicians and officials and eschewing evaluation and rendering judgments.
There are other media-related concerns as we approach Trump 2.0. As demonstrated in the past fortnight, Trump’s style is to wield a firehose of multiple outrages, realizing that it’s tough to track each and every one of his transgressions in such a blitz. I fear as he mounts his assault on good government and decency during his presidency, there will be too many misdeeds to follow. There won’t be enough journalists to cover all his villainy and its consequences—neither at the local nor the national levels. The media industry has been decimated in the past two decades, with a sharp decline in news reporters on the beat. Having fewer watchdogs allows grifters, miscreants, and outright crooks to get away with more wrongdoing. CNN reportedly intends to impose wide-ranging staff cuts, including dumping producers who work with reporters and correspondents. If this happens, the network will diminish its capacity for reporting. And Comcast is reportedly considering spinning off MSNBC, which would disconnect it from NBC News and perhaps weaken the network. (Interest declared: I am an MSNBC commentator.)
After the 2024 election—during which Trump was too frequently treated as a regular candidate by the press and his endless deployment of false narratives often not highlighted—I’m not confident that the American media is up to the task of covering a second Trump administration and all the potential damage it can cause. The gravitational pull within this business encourages normalizing politicians and officials and eschewing evaluation and rendering judgments. Trump is a disinformation machine and a threat to democracy. But will these be the central narratives of the mainstream coverage of his second presidency? Can the media maintain the main plot: Trump presents a danger? Already I sense a degree of acquiescence within certain media quarters that signals an acceptance of Trump to the public.
The powerhouse news outfits should not declare themselves a wing of the resistance to Trump. That is not their job. As Marty Baron, the former Washington Post editor once said, “We’re not at war with the [Trump] administration, we’re at work.” But in the Trump era, the press ought to think hard about what that work entails and not apply routine White House coverage to Trump and his gang, especially as Trump looks to limit press freedoms and continues his war on democratic norms and protections. Here’s my suggestion: not resistance, but not acceptance. The public needs constant reminders and reports on the Trump crowd’s authoritarian plans, extremist policies, and grifting schemes. These are not conventional times; they require unconventional coverage. The weeks, months, and years ahead will test all of us—voters, opposition politicians, and thought leaders—and the press, perhaps more so than most. If the media rolls over for Trump and his troops, that will make it far easier for Trump to roll over American democracy.
For eight years, an article of faith within Trumpworld and the right-wing media cosmos has been that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax, a canard cooked up by nefarious Deep State actors and bolstered by their co-conspirators in the press and the Democratic Party to sabotage and destroy Donald Trump. Trump himself continues to rail in shorthand about “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He has pointed to this “witch hunt” as evidence of extensive corruption within the intelligence and law enforcement communities of the federal government and called for the criminal prosecution of those whom he accuses of orchestrating this diabolical plot against him.
How then to explain his decision to tap for top national security slots in his Cabinet two Republican legislators with access to top-secret information who have previously confirmed that Vladimir Putin in 2016 attacked the US election to help elect Trump president and that Trump failed as an American leader to acknowledge and condemn this devious assault on the republic? One of these lawmakers even oversaw an investigation that concluded the most senior Trump campaign aide in 2016 had colluded with a Russian intelligence officer while the Kremlin was mounting its information warfare against America.
“I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign,” Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick as UN ambassador, said in 2018.
The pair are Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whom Trump has picked to be UN ambassador, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Flas), whom Trump has selected to be secretary of state. Each is a veteran member of the intelligence committee of the chamber in which they serve and privy to the most sensitive secrets of US intelligence.
After the 2016 contest, Trump tried to con the public about the Russian attack—which included a hack-and-leak operation that disseminated stolen Democratic emails and materials to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and a covert social media scheme to spread messages, memes, and disinformation to sow discord and benefit Trump. The intelligence community and cybersecurity firms had concluded the Kremlin had waged this secret campaign against the United States to boost Trump, but Trump claimed no such thing happened. He dismissed all talk of the multiple contacts between the Trump camp and Russian representatives during the 2016 contest. He also covered up his own secret business dealings with Russian developers and Putin’s office during the campaign, as well as a hush-hush meeting held between his senior campaign advisers and a Moscow intermediary.
Stefanik didn’t buy Trump’s subterfuge. In an interview with the Watertown Daily Times in March 2018, she said, “Russia meddled in our electoral process.” And she noted the Kremlin skullduggery was designed to benefit Trump: “We’ve seen evidence that Russia tried to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign.” Moreover, she fretted about the curious Trump-Russia contacts: “I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign.”
A year later, with Trump still pushing his phony “Russia hoax” claim, Stefanik, at a town hall meeting, disagreed with the Trump line that the Moscow assault was no big deal. It was, she said, “much more systemic, much more targeted, with very sophisticated hacking efforts, disinformation efforts targeted to specific campaigns.” Stefanik added that the Trump administration needed to be pressed “to take the threat from Russia very seriously.” She criticized the Trump campaign for holding that covert meeting with the Moscow go-between.
There was no Russia witch-hunt, Stefanik contended. According to her view, Trump was peddling a self-serving and false narrative about an important issue of national security: an attack by a foreign adversary on the United States.
Rubio went much further than this.
As chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Rubio, in August 2020, released a massive 966-page report on the Russian assault. In a press release, he noted, “Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive.” And he stated the committee “found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”
That is, no hoax.
The detailed report confirmed what other investigations had concluded: “Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information [via WikiLeaks] damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.”
Worse for Trump, the report pointed out that he and his campaign had tried to exploit the Russian assault and had aided and abetted it by denying the Russians were engaged in such activity, thus helping Moscow cover up its effort to subvert an American election: “The Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”
A large chunk focused on Paul Manafort, who was a senior Trump campaign official in 2016. The committee noted that Manafort, who was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering (and pardoned by Trump in 2020), posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his Russian connections. The report detailed his extensive dealings during the campaign with a onetime business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the committee described as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Throughout the election, according to the report, Manafort “directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik,” Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.
When the report was released, Rubio declared in a press release that the committee had uncovered “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.” Yet that was misleading. The report stated, “The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence service’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That meant Trump’s campaign manager was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer possibly tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign. The committee also revealed it had found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Perhaps there was some collusion. But the report’s discussion of that information was redacted.
Rubio’s report was a slam-dunk counter to the Trump-Russia deniers on the right who had strived mightily to turn this serious matter into nothing but a left-wing fantasy, and to Trump himself. It declared that Trump’s campaign was run by a counterintelligence threat who had covertly huddled with a Russian intelligence officer and that Trump and his lieutenants assisted the Kremlin’s attack on the United States by echoing Putin’s denials.
The report was proof Trump had betrayed the nation. This is a truth that he and his enablers within the GOP and the conservative movement have attempted to smother for years. To do so, they concocted the notion of a Deep State conspiracy and relentlessly derided Democrats, liberals, journalists, and anyone else who voiced concern about or interest in Russian interference and Trump’s acquiescence to Moscow.
Now Trump has embraced two senior Republican lawmakers who challenged Trump’s claim of a hoax and who affirmed the reality of the Trump-Russia scandal and Trump’s role in it. Were they part of that Deep State scheme against Trump? Neither have renounced their previous statements. Rubio has not disavowed the report he once proudly hailed. As the denizens of MAGA World—and Trump himself—should see it, Rubio and Stefanik were part of the traitorous cabal that pushed disinformation to demolish Trump. In their eyes, Rubio even produced a nearly 1000-page-long report to advance this treasonous con job.
Their appointments show the absurdity of Trump’s Russia-denying endeavors—though these efforts succeeded. Now Trump has included in his new administrations two prominent Republicans who know that he has been lying all along about Russia. While both Stefanik and Rubio were once critics of Trump, they have, like most within the GOP, bent the knee, and they don’t mind serving a fellow who provided cover for Putin and who cared more for his own political interests than the country’s security. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile for Democrats to question Stefanik and Rubio on this matter during their Senate confirmation hearings. They ought to be asked about their previous statements and Rubio’s report. This will probably yield a fair amount of squirming. More important, it will serve as a reminder that Trump has gotten away with a foul deed that has profoundly shaped the nation.
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.
Prices went up during a post-pandemic recovery, and American voters elected a convicted felon and fascist who incited political violence as president. Okay, that may be a bit glib. But it’s clear that Donald Trump’s election is a giant step toward authoritarianism in the USA. He and his crew have openly talked about consolidating power in the Oval Office and targeting political foes with investigations and prosecutions. Trump aims to turn much of the federal bureaucracy into a corps of loyalists who pledge fealty to him, and he has raised the possibility of deploying the military against protesters and taking action against news outlets that expose his wrongdoing. And if he implements his plan for the mass deportation of 11 million or so undocumented immigrants, that will likely require police-state-like tactics. It’s a grim moment as the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding.
Four years ago, when it appeared that Trump had a good chance of reelection, I wondered whether there were examples of other countries sliding toward authoritarianism but recovering before it was too late. There is a tremendous amount of research devoted to democracies descending into autocracies. The decline of democracy in Nazi Germany, of course, has been deeply studied. But have there been nations heading in that dark direction that put on the brakes and reversed course?
I found that two years earlier, University of Chicago professors Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq had had examined this question. In an article for the Journal of Democracy, they chronicled occasions when democracies suffered “substantial yet ‘non-fatal’ deterioration in the quality of democratic institutions and then experience[d] a rebound.” These “near misses,” they noted, “have received little or no attention in the new wave of scholarship on why democracies die (or survive).”
Ginsburg and Huq looked at three historical episodes not well known within the United States: Finland in 1930, Colombia during the 2000s, and, more recently, Sri Lanka.
Their article looked at three historical episodes not well known within the United States. The first was Finland in 1930, when the right-wing mass Lapua movement that partly modeled itself on Mussolini’s movement gained influence and was welcomed by the conservative president and the ruling party, which then banned communist newspapers. This fascistic camp—which kidnapped political opponents—fueled the election of a former prime minister. “Finland appeared to be on the cusp of the sort of democratic erosion that was to engulf Germany and Austria soon thereafter,” Ginsburg and Huq wrote. “Yet Finnish democracy prevailed.” Key military officials did not join the Lapua movement, and judges issued tough verdicts in response to its use of violence. Other political parties banded together across ideological lines to oppose the Lapua movement, and some conservative politicians kept their distance from it. Come March 1937, a center-left coalition was in secure control of the government.
Another near-miss: In Colombia, during the 2000s, President Álvaro Uribe tried to seize greater power for himself. He pushed for government reforms that would afford him more control and influence over the legislature and the courts. His regime waged a campaign of harassment against journalists. Ultimately, a court blocked his attempt to gain a third term as president. Uribe’s hand-picked successor, his defense minister, broke with him and restored the institutional status quo.
In Sri Lanka, Ginsburg and Huq pointed out, democracy was imperiled by the rise of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who won the presidency in 2005. As they put it, his “rule was marked by nepotism, corruption, and a degradation of rule-of-law institutions such as courts, prosecutors, and the police.” He appointed his three brothers to cabinet posts and developed a cult of personality. Journalists were imprisoned and murdered. He amended the constitution so he could run for a third term in 2015. “Sri Lanka seemed on the brink of seeing its democracy totally degraded,” Ginsburg and Huq observed. But a former minister of health in Rajapaksa’s government entered the presidential race to challenge him and quickly built a coalition that triumphed. Rajapaksa considered annulling the vote, but the army and police said no, as did the attorney general. Democracy was not upended.
In each of these close calls, elite players were instrumental in thwarting a move toward authoritarianism.
Since then, democracy in Sri Lanka has remained in a precarious state. Rajapaksa’s brother, Gotabaya, was elected president in 2019, but he was forced to resign by anti-government protests in 2022 that demanded economic and democratic reforms. He was succeeded by Ranil Wickremesinghe, whose administration cracked down on dissent and civil liberties. In September, Wickremesinghe lost his reelection bid to Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Marxist politician and third-party candidate who had scored only 3 percent of the vote when he ran for president in 2019.
In each of these close calls, Ginsburg and Huq wrote, elite players were instrumental in thwarting a move toward authoritarianism: “Paradoxically, the experiences of democratic near misses that we have explored underscore the role of political elites and nonelected institutions—courts, military commanders, and election administrators—in decisively repudiating authoritarian leaders bent on democratic erosion.”
In an article published in 2020, Larry Diamond, a Stanford professor who studies democracy, and Aurel Croissant, a professor at Heidelberg University, examined “democratic backsliding” in Asia. They contended that the recent wave of “democratic recessions” around the world stood out from democratic reversals of the past: Today, democratic downturns tend to “unfold gradually” and don’t “necessarily lead to full-fledged autocracy.” They often are caused not by military coups, revolutions, or foreign intervention but by “those elected to lead a democracy,” and the assault on “political rights and civil liberties is typically related to social polarization and the mobilization of identity politics.” (Sound familiar?) Croissant and Diamond noted that there had been at least 14 episodes of democratic decline in 10 Asian democracies since the early 2000s. In half of these, “democratic forces managed to contain the process before democracy broke down.” (This included Sri Lanka.)
Sri Lanka in the 2010s, Colombia in the 2000s, and Finland in the 1930s might not be good examples for the United States. There’s also Poland more recently. In its 2019 parliamentary elections, a right-wing coalition led by strongman Jarosław Kaczyński won overwhelmingly. But after it tried to create a commission that could block candidates from running for office, there were massive protests. In the 2023 election, with voter turnout hitting a record 74 percent, a collection of opposition parties earned a majority of the seats in the Sejm. Turnout for younger voters increased by 50 percent, and within this bloc, support for the far-right party fell by half. The kids threw out the anti-democrats.
“There has never been a democracy nearly as long-established and liberal as the United States experiencing such a deep and potentially existential crisis of democracy.”
What does this mean for the United States, now that an autocrat wannabe has won the White House? Diamond told me several years ago, “I am cautious about reasoning by comparison because the circumstances of a long-institutionalized and wealthy democracy like the United States are very different from India, for example. The plain and sobering fact of the matter is that there has never been a democracy nearly as long-established and liberal as the United States experiencing such a deep and potentially existential crisis of democracy.”
The circumstances here are indeed quite different from other countries, and the expansion of disinformation and the fracturing of the information ecosystem have made it easier for authoritarians to wage war on democracy. But it is encouraging that other nations have reached the brink and stepped back. Doing so is not easy. Ginsburg and Huq noted, “There is no single ‘magic institution’ that can be adopted to prevent democratic backsliding or to arrest it once it has begun…Sustained antidemocratic mobilization is hard to defeat.” In some instances, a small group of officials safeguarded a democracy by openly resisting the machinations of a would-be autocrat and his henchmen. Other times, people power fueled democracy-defending defiance.
In assessing the experiences in Asia, Croissant and Diamond observed that for democratic resilience and resistance to triumph, “a sufficient number of citizens must still prefer a democratic form of government and have some degree of trust in democratic institutions.” Throughout his presidential campaigns and presidency, Trump exploited widespread dissatisfaction with establishment institutions, and during the 2024 race he banked on the calculation that his cult of personality could overpower concerns about his trashing of democratic values and practices. His assault on democracy can be repelled, but only if there are enough citizens who give a damn.
Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.
This article has been revised to reflect the latest election results.
Every election is a Judgment Day, but this one more so than any other in the history of the nation.
Never before has a major party run a nominee described by retired military leaders who worked with him as a “fascist” and a serious threat to American democracy. Never before has the electorate been provided the choice of a nominee who previously refused to accept vote tallies, falsely declared victory, covertly schemed to overturn an election, and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to stay in power, as well as one whose mismanagement of a pandemic caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Never before have Americans been asked to return to office a politician who waged a massive disinformation operation fueled by the most vicious vitriol to exploit hatred, racism, misogyny, and ignorance.
Is America a nation that accepts and embraces all that? The answer is yes.
Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—more than half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe autocrat to lead the nation once again. Trumpism triumphed, and the godhead of this cult has become both the first fascist and the first convicted felon to win an American presidential election.
Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, Vice President Kamala Harris, a latecomer to the race, ran a conventional campaign. She touted the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, presented a compelling personal story, offered a host of generally realistic policy proposals, and critiqued her opponent—doing all of this mostly accurately. Her last-minute elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket raised the question of whether the United States could elect a Black woman president. Counterpoised was another question: Can a criminal awaiting sentencing (found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to keep secret his supposed extramarital affair with a porn star) who has been indicted for other alleged crimes, and who has called for the termination of the Constitution (so he could be reinstalled as president), be elected commander in chief and the nation’s top defender of the Constitution?
The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites.
There was nothing subtle about the 2024 election. It pit the political extremism Trump has embraced and fomented to drive his red-meat base to the polls against Harris’ effort to expand her pool of voters by forging an alliance of progressives and independents, centrists, and Republicans concerned about the danger Trump poses to democracy. More so than in his previous campaigns, Trump endeavored to demonize his opponents. He peddled the false claim that the United States has descended into a hellscape with an economy in a “depression” and gangs of criminal migrants armed with military-style weapons conquering towns and cities across the land. Looking to stoke grievance, resentment, and bigotry, he asserted that “evil” Democrats, assisted by a subversive media, have purposefully conspired to destroy the country. He essentially QAnonized American politics. He dismissed Harris as “low IQ” and not truly Black. He called her supporters “scum.”
Trump debased the national discourse further than he had in the years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015. That included violent talk of retribution, which included suggesting deploying the US military against “radical left lunatics,” putting Liz Cheney on trial for treason before a military tribunal and placing her before a line of guns, and executing retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For years, Trump has forced American politics into a downward spiral of unprecedented indecencies and anti-democratic impulses. And this year, more than 71 million Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris campaigned not only to implement a host of left-leaning policies related to such fundamental matters as health care, women’s freedom, and middle-class economics, but to prevent a would-be autocrat from gaining control of the US government. That’s a heavy lift for any one candidate.
The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites. At Trump rallies, the former reality TV celebrity staged his own version of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell envisioned in 1984. He decried his rivals—“the enemy within”—for sabotaging America and directed his followers to vent tribalistic fury at these targets, exploiting their rage and, yes, ignorance.
At one of his final rallies—held in a half-empty arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday—when Trump called Harris dumb, he was met by approving and angry shouts from the crowd: “She’s an idiot.” “She’s a moron.” “She’s a puppet.” “Lock her up.” One Trump supporter there told me Harris was too stupid to make a decision about anything and former President Barack Obama was calling all the shots. Another Trump devotee wore a sweatshirt that declared, “Say No to the Hoe.” (Racism and misogyny in a single slur.) One of the most anticipated moments of Trump’s rambling and repetitive speech occurred when he assailed the press. As soon as he started his now-familiar anti-media screed, many in the audience pivoted to face the journalists and TV crews on the riser toward the rear of the arena, shook their fists at them, and screamed profanities. This seemed to be fun for them.
Attendees I spoke with echoed Trump’s talking points, insisting that gangs of thugs from overseas are terrorizing American cities, that the nation is a crime-ridden disaster, that US government funds are being siphoned from a host of programs and handed to immigrants, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One fellow said he was for Trump because his 401(k) retirement fund was strong when Trump was president and now was in the dumps. When I explained that’s virtually impossible, given the Dow Jones average is now more than 44 percent higher than its best mark during the Trump years, he just shrugged and insisted President Joe Biden and Harris were to blame.
Some were unaware that retired Gens. John Kelly and Milley had called Trump a “fascist.” Those in the know dismissed these remarks as comments uttered by traitorous men envious of Trump or being paid by dark forces to undermine the Republican nominee. Many in the audience were wearing hats and T-shirts proclaiming Jesus backed Trump, and the ones I asked about this said that since Jesus had chosen Trump to be the victor in this race, only cheating could defy God’s will. (Apparently, God and Jesus can’t stop the steal.) Indeed, most of the Trump people I encountered said they would not accept a Harris win as legitimate, and a few remarked that there would be violence if Trump were declared the loser. They were fundamentalists: The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.
It’s not a radical observation that Trump tried to win through hate. Harris, as was much commented upon when she became the presidential nominee, talked up joy. At her rallies, she highlighted the rhetoric and values of community, noting that Americans can work together to address challenges. She repeatedly promised to listen to those who oppose her views and consider Republicans for posts in her administration if she were to prevail. That might have been just nice talk. But it was better than fueling division and, as Trump did, vowing to use the power of the presidency to investigate and prosecute critics and opponents and to root out of the federal government civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. Certainly, there was anger on the Democratic side: over the Dobbs decision and those politicians enacting or advocating severe restrictions on women, over the lack of action on climate change, over the horrific war in Gaza. But at Harris events, she did not seek to channel that into paranoid and dehumanizing assaults against Americans on the other side. Her stance—at least, rhetorically—was that all Americans count. Trump’s position: Trump uber alles, all others are “vermin” and the “enemy.”
American politics has always contained an us-versus-them element, and the battle can be fierce. But Trump turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he lied, he insulted, he appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He waged war on reality, seeking to lead millions into a cosmos of fakery and false narratives that boosts an ultra-Manichean view of the world. He saw his path to power as exacerbating the divisions within American society. He has been an accelerationist for tribalistic discord, explicitly threatening the norms and values of democratic governance. His answer to what ails the United States is strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior. Harris ran as a feisty Democrat who wants to work with Congress to tackle assorted problems.
These were profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to choose which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash in values for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, voters were forced to pick a side, to render a verdict on Trump’s war on truth, democracy, and decency and Harris’ traditional embrace of pluralism and established norms.
At this fork in the road, Americans made a decision on what sort of country the United States will be. A judgment has been reached: This is a nation to be ruled by Trump’s politics of hate. It can happen here, and it has.
This article has been revised to reflect the latest election results.
Every election is a Judgment Day, but this one more so than any other in the history of the nation.
Never before has a major party run a nominee described by retired military leaders who worked with him as a “fascist” and a serious threat to American democracy. Never before has the electorate been provided the choice of a nominee who previously refused to accept vote tallies, falsely declared victory, covertly schemed to overturn an election, and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to stay in power, as well as one whose mismanagement of a pandemic caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Never before have Americans been asked to return to office a politician who waged a massive disinformation operation fueled by the most vicious vitriol to exploit hatred, racism, misogyny, and ignorance.
Is America a nation that accepts and embraces all that? The answer is yes.
Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—more than half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe autocrat to lead the nation once again. Trumpism triumphed, and the godhead of this cult has become both the first fascist and the first convicted felon to win an American presidential election.
Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, Vice President Kamala Harris, a latecomer to the race, ran a conventional campaign. She touted the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, presented a compelling personal story, offered a host of generally realistic policy proposals, and critiqued her opponent—doing all of this mostly accurately. Her last-minute elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket raised the question of whether the United States could elect a Black woman president. Counterpoised was another question: Can a criminal awaiting sentencing (found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to keep secret his supposed extramarital affair with a porn star) who has been indicted for other alleged crimes, and who has called for the termination of the Constitution (so he could be reinstalled as president), be elected commander in chief and the nation’s top defender of the Constitution?
The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites.
There was nothing subtle about the 2024 election. It pit the political extremism Trump has embraced and fomented to drive his red-meat base to the polls against Harris’ effort to expand her pool of voters by forging an alliance of progressives and independents, centrists, and Republicans concerned about the danger Trump poses to democracy. More so than in his previous campaigns, Trump endeavored to demonize his opponents. He peddled the false claim that the United States has descended into a hellscape with an economy in a “depression” and gangs of criminal migrants armed with military-style weapons conquering towns and cities across the land. Looking to stoke grievance, resentment, and bigotry, he asserted that “evil” Democrats, assisted by a subversive media, have purposefully conspired to destroy the country. He essentially QAnonized American politics. He dismissed Harris as “low IQ” and not truly Black. He called her supporters “scum.”
Trump debased the national discourse further than he had in the years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015. That included violent talk of retribution, which included suggesting deploying the US military against “radical left lunatics,” putting Liz Cheney on trial for treason before a military tribunal and placing her before a line of guns, and executing retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For years, Trump has forced American politics into a downward spiral of unprecedented indecencies and anti-democratic impulses. And this year, more than 71 million Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris campaigned not only to implement a host of left-leaning policies related to such fundamental matters as health care, women’s freedom, and middle-class economics, but to prevent a would-be autocrat from gaining control of the US government. That’s a heavy lift for any one candidate.
The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites. At Trump rallies, the former reality TV celebrity staged his own version of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell envisioned in 1984. He decried his rivals—“the enemy within”—for sabotaging America and directed his followers to vent tribalistic fury at these targets, exploiting their rage and, yes, ignorance.
At one of his final rallies—held in a half-empty arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday—when Trump called Harris dumb, he was met by approving and angry shouts from the crowd: “She’s an idiot.” “She’s a moron.” “She’s a puppet.” “Lock her up.” One Trump supporter there told me Harris was too stupid to make a decision about anything and former President Barack Obama was calling all the shots. Another Trump devotee wore a sweatshirt that declared, “Say No to the Hoe.” (Racism and misogyny in a single slur.) One of the most anticipated moments of Trump’s rambling and repetitive speech occurred when he assailed the press. As soon as he started his now-familiar anti-media screed, many in the audience pivoted to face the journalists and TV crews on the riser toward the rear of the arena, shook their fists at them, and screamed profanities. This seemed to be fun for them.
Attendees I spoke with echoed Trump’s talking points, insisting that gangs of thugs from overseas are terrorizing American cities, that the nation is a crime-ridden disaster, that US government funds are being siphoned from a host of programs and handed to immigrants, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One fellow said he was for Trump because his 401(k) retirement fund was strong when Trump was president and now was in the dumps. When I explained that’s virtually impossible, given the Dow Jones average is now more than 44 percent higher than its best mark during the Trump years, he just shrugged and insisted President Joe Biden and Harris were to blame.
Some were unaware that retired Gens. John Kelly and Milley had called Trump a “fascist.” Those in the know dismissed these remarks as comments uttered by traitorous men envious of Trump or being paid by dark forces to undermine the Republican nominee. Many in the audience were wearing hats and T-shirts proclaiming Jesus backed Trump, and the ones I asked about this said that since Jesus had chosen Trump to be the victor in this race, only cheating could defy God’s will. (Apparently, God and Jesus can’t stop the steal.) Indeed, most of the Trump people I encountered said they would not accept a Harris win as legitimate, and a few remarked that there would be violence if Trump were declared the loser. They were fundamentalists: The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.
It’s not a radical observation that Trump tried to win through hate. Harris, as was much commented upon when she became the presidential nominee, talked up joy. At her rallies, she highlighted the rhetoric and values of community, noting that Americans can work together to address challenges. She repeatedly promised to listen to those who oppose her views and consider Republicans for posts in her administration if she were to prevail. That might have been just nice talk. But it was better than fueling division and, as Trump did, vowing to use the power of the presidency to investigate and prosecute critics and opponents and to root out of the federal government civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. Certainly, there was anger on the Democratic side: over the Dobbs decision and those politicians enacting or advocating severe restrictions on women, over the lack of action on climate change, over the horrific war in Gaza. But at Harris events, she did not seek to channel that into paranoid and dehumanizing assaults against Americans on the other side. Her stance—at least, rhetorically—was that all Americans count. Trump’s position: Trump uber alles, all others are “vermin” and the “enemy.”
American politics has always contained an us-versus-them element, and the battle can be fierce. But Trump turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he lied, he insulted, he appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He waged war on reality, seeking to lead millions into a cosmos of fakery and false narratives that boosts an ultra-Manichean view of the world. He saw his path to power as exacerbating the divisions within American society. He has been an accelerationist for tribalistic discord, explicitly threatening the norms and values of democratic governance. His answer to what ails the United States is strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior. Harris ran as a feisty Democrat who wants to work with Congress to tackle assorted problems.
These were profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to choose which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash in values for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, voters were forced to pick a side, to render a verdict on Trump’s war on truth, democracy, and decency and Harris’ traditional embrace of pluralism and established norms.
At this fork in the road, Americans made a decision on what sort of country the United States will be. A judgment has been reached: This is a nation to be ruled by Trump’s politics of hate. It can happen here, and it has.
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.
For almost a decade, our world has been shaped and distorted by the lies of Donald Trump. He slithered his way into the White House eight years ago and was expelled four years later by popular demand. Yet like a monster in a horror film, he was not dispatched for good. He defied norms and the Constitution and attacked American democracy. He failed in his underhanded effort to overturn the election, but he succeeded in persuading millions of our fellow citizens to believe the baseless conspiracy theory that he had been swindled out of victory by a nefarious cabal of Deep State actors, the Democrats, the media, and other evildoers. That was quite the accomplishment. During his presidency, according to the Washington Post, Trump had made at least 30,573 false or misleading statements. (And the newspaper did not fact-check all of his utterances.) Yet he still maintained the trust of a large chunk of Americans.
Trump is unparalleled in the annals of deception. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies authoritarianism, recently told me, “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.”
As we approach yet another judgment day for Trump, like many of you, I remained puzzled by Trump’s ability to maintain his standing as a champion for so many Americans, despite his obvious lies and profoundly low and mean-spirited character. He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect (including his consequential lies about the pandemic and the assault on the US Capitol he incited). The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?
He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect. The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?
As we approach yet another judgment day for Trump, like many of you, I remained puzzled by Trump’s ability to maintain his standing as a champion for so many Americans, despite his obvious lies and profoundly low and mean-spirited character. He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect (including his consequential lies about the pandemic and the assault on the US Capitol he incited). The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?
Not long ago, I came across an academic study that sought to answer this question. In 2018, Oliver Hahl of the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business and Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan of the MIT Sloan School of Management published an article in the American Sociological Review titled “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illegitimacy.” As they put it, they were looking to explain “a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election…[H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing’ (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?” In short, how to understand Trump’s popular support.
This trio noted that during the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton “was harmed by the perception that she was inauthentic.” Fairly or not, many voters saw her as motivated by self-interest and not honest. But, they write, Trump was “perceived by his supporters as appealingly authentic despite abundant evidence that (1) he was at least as sensitive to private self-interest as Clinton, with no corresponding record of public service; (2) he was considerably more prone to falsehood than Clinton; and (3) he deliberately flouted many norms that had been taken for granted for many years and were widely endorsed.”
After reviewing existing literature on populist demagogues and conducting a couple of studies, these three academics derived an explanation. Here it is (without the citations):
We argue that a particular set of social and political conditions must be in place for the lying demagogue to appear authentically appealing to his constituency. In short, if that constituency feels its interests are not being served by a political establishment that purports to represent it fairly, a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests. As first noted by [political scientist Seymour Martin] Lipset, such a “crisis of legitimacy” can emerge under at least two conditions: (1) when one or more social groups are experiencing what we call a “representation crisis” because the political establishment does not appear to govern on its behalf; and (2) when an incumbent group is experiencing a “power-devaluation crisis” because the political establishment is favoring new social groups over established groups. These scenarios broadly reflect the basis for populist ideologies that promote a “politics of resentment,” whereby the aggrieved constituency comes to believe that the establishment’s claim to represent the interests of the “real people” belies an ulterior agenda they feel powerless to stop. As such, a candidate who engages in lying demagoguery can be perceived as bravely speaking a deep and otherwise suppressed truth. By flagrantly violating norms on which the establishment insists, and thereby earning the opprobrium of this establishment, the candidate appears highly committed to the interests of her constituency. By contrast, an earnest opposition candidate seems less authentic.
I would shorten their conclusion to this: Trump voters like the lying. Or, the lying is the point.
Trump’s boldly false proclamations—about himself, about his rivals and critics, about the world—are not a bug. They’re a feature. They demonstrate he is sticking it to the other side. To the elites, the media, the establishment, the government, academia, Hollywood, the libs, the woke crowd, the minorities, the…whoever it is his supporters resent, despise, or disregard. So if he lies about legal migrants eating pets, or about Kamala Harris being “low IQ,” not really Black, and a communist, or about schools performing gender-affirming operations on kids without their parents’ consent, or about doctors in Democratic states killing babies after they’re born, or about criminal gangs of foreign thugs conquering cities and towns across the Midwest, or about the US economy being a hellscape, or about his majestic accomplishments as president, or about evil Democrats purposefully bringing undocumented people (and criminals) into the United States to destroy the nation, or that you can’t cross the street these days without being mugged, raped, or killed, it doesn’t matter.
Certainly, some of Trump’s supporters buy his bunk. But I suspect many don’t care whether it’s true or not. For them, it’s truthy, in that it corresponds to what they feel and what they think may be true.
Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy.
His wild assertions, narcissistic boasts, and offensive insults need not be factual. Trump’s ability to say whatever the hell he wants is not for his cultish followers only telling it like it is. It is a sign of strength. It’s his way of giving the finger to them. Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy. That’s the same reason they are not put off by—or even embrace—his crudeness, mean-spiritedness, bigotry, misogyny, and racism.
Trump’s lying and indecency are evidence to them that he will do whatever it takes to be their hero. And some Trumpers probably envy his ability to say whatever he wishes and escape the usual consequences. Trump can pull all this off because millions want him to be able to pull it off. His lies are not merely a personal flaw. His manifold deceits and their acceptance by tens of millions are a sign that our politics, maybe our nation, is broken. How broken will be determined by what happens on Tuesday and in the days and weeks afterward.
After all shouting and debating, all the billions in ads, and all the fury, the 2024 election will determine whether this nation remains committed to its imperfect democracy or slides toward fascism, whether the politics of hate, grievance, paranoia, fear, and racism triumphs or those of community and inclusion, whether women’s freedoms are curtailed or protected, whether climate change is ignored or addressed, whether the privilege of plutocrats is enhanced or challenged, whether millions of Americans are deported or granted a path forward. But the election will also determine whether Americans live in a world of facts or one of false narratives. It will tell us if America is reality-based.
Donald Trump, as a politician, is a creature of reality television. And reality TV is not real. It is designed to convey the impression of verisimilitude. But the story lines are concocted. The editing is manipulative. The goal is to orchestrate human interactions that can then be turned into compelling, don’t-touch-that-dial stories. They need not be true; they often aren’t. The trick is to fool the viewer into believing they are—or at least to persuade the audience go along with the ruse.
That’s what happened with Trump and The Apprentice, the NBC show he starred in for 14 years. Prior to its appearance, Trump was in a slump as a businessman, having gone bust in Atlantic City as a casino owner and moving from the development of large real estate projects to licensing his name as a brand. The show created a new reality for Trump, depicting him as a hyper-successful billionaire with razor-sharp intuition.
John Miller, a former marketing executive for NBC, recently noted that the network forged a “false narrative for Donald Trump as a big businessman.” Explaining this, he said, “Clearly we had to make something bigger than it was.” That something was Trump. He added, “If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”
As Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of The Apprentice, pointed out earlier this year, deceit is at the heart of reality TV: “What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop… Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program. The producers and editors are ostensibly con artists, distracting you with grand notions while we steal from you your precious time.” Think of Trump pretending to work at a McDonald’s.
Trump entered the political world as this reality TV monster-celebrity. Millions of Americans saw him as the Trump of that show. The lesson for Trump, who had for decades devoted much energy and conniving to cultivating his image as a successful developer and glamorous playboy, was obvious: He could present a false personal tale and keenly exploit it.
Trump’s deep faith in hornswoggling was also enhanced by the close association he developed with professional wrestling. In the mid-2000s, he became a WWE fixture, and he and Vince McMahon, the WWE cofounder, cooked up a phony rivalry that they played out at high-profile wrestling matches. Trump enthusiastically adhered to what’s known in professional wrestling as kayfabe: the maintenance of a false reality in which staged events and rivalries are presented as genuine. Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.
Ever since he descended the golden escalator in 2015—surrounded by extras who he had paid to show up and act like supporters—and announced his presidential candidacy, Trump has relied on deceit. He has inaccurately touted his own assets while lying about his opponents. As president, he declared that he knew how to deliver a better and cheaper healthcare system and sparkling infrastructure. That was a fraud. His claim that he was handling the Covid pandemic magnificently—another fraud. And he pitched a bogus story about his political foes in 2020: They were Marxists and communists in league with antifa, BLM, and other radicals in a plot to destroy America. Then came the Big Lie that he had won the election but it had been stolen from him.
“If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”
Trump was always pushing disinformation, going back to years before he entered presidential politics, when he promoted the racist birther theory about Barack Obama and insisted his so-called investigators had unearthed evidence the 44th president had been born in Kenya. (Narrator: They had not.) But in this election, Trump turned the volume of his disinformation up to 11. His campaign to regain the White House—nearly four years after he incited the insurrectionist mob that attacked the US Capitol—has been largely based on utterly untrue narratives designed to exploit voters’ fears, anxieties, and prejudices.
In stump speeches, Trump has sought to portray the United States as a crime-infested hellscape on the verge of collapse where migrant gangs run amok and terrorize good-hearted and law-abiding Americans. And you, dear viewers, ought to be afraid, very afraid.
He and his partner-in-slime, JD Vance, have pushed baseless and dangerous allegations about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. Trump has asserted over and over that foreign thugs armed with military weapons have taken over Aurora, Colorado, and conquered other parts of the Midwest. He has claimed that America is being flooded with immigrants released from prisons and “insane asylums” in “the Congo” and elsewhere—and that the Biden-Harris administration has purposefully allowed these brutes to enter the country in order to ruin it. He charged that President Joe Biden “stole” disaster relief funds and handed the money to illegal migrants rather than use it to assist the victims of the recent Hurricane Helene. He has ranted that it is impossible to cross the street to buy milk without getting violently assaulted or raped. And Trump insists the Democrats are evil “scum” who allow the executions of infants after they’re born and who permit schools to conduct gender-affirming medical operations on students without the consent of parents.
None of this is true. These lies go far beyond his usual falsehoods: The economy during his presidency was the best ever, the current economy is the worst ever, the rest of the world is laughing at the United States, Kamala Harris is “low IQ,” a “communist,” “mentally disabled,” and so on. These falsehoods are designed to convey a fake reality—a catastrophe that only can be remedied by the election of Donald Trump. He is trying to create a reality TV horror show.
Simultaneously, Trump advances happy-ever-after magical thinking, often a selling point of reality TV. (Winners of The Apprentice got to work for Trump for a year—supposedly a ticket to success and the high life.) He proclaims that he can bring about prosperity by introducing extreme tariffs, deporting millions, decreasing taxes on the wealthy (and workers who collect tips, Social Security recipients, and overtime employees), and placing Elon Musk in charge of cutting the federal budget. (Musk absurdly says he can cut $2 trillion from the federal budget of $6.75 trillion.) Many economists point out that Trump’s plans will lead to inflation and a much larger national debt. He also boasts he will develop visionary infrastructure projects, such as whole new cities and airports of the future. (He couldn’t even pull off a single Infrastructure Week when he was president.) Trump’s grandiose ideas tend to be general, lacking specifics. The thrust of his pitch is what he said at the Republican convention in 2016: I alone can fix it. He’s not championing policy details. (To call his policy platform bare-boned is generous.) He’s presenting himself as the answer. It’s all reminiscent of the PR campaign for The Apprentice.
Trump’s characterization of present-day America is a false narrative. His sales pitch for himself is a false narrative. His demonization of Harris as a mentally deficient radical leftist and enemy of the United States is a false narrative. He has led the tens of millions of Americans who buy his bunk into a false universe.
This is how reality TV works. Fake good guys. Fake bad guys. Fake plots. As Pruitt described it, “We scammed. We swindled.” Trump is also a peddler of fake science and fake history. He insists climate change is a hoax. And, of late, he’s been falsely citing the 1890s as a time of plenty when “our nation was probably…the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” Yet during this era, when robber barons ruled, there was a severe economic depression that’s widely attributed to the harsh protective tariffs implemented. His history lesson is another fairy tale unmoored to the actual facts.
As Election Day approaches, Trump has been endeavoring to construct a new false narrative—or the extension of an old one. He has started issuing claims of Democratic electoral cheating before votes are tallied. Without evidence, he and his crew began flinging unsubstantiated charges that an election was again being rigged against Trump. The ploy was obvious: to establish a foundation for Trump to once more declare himself the victor regardless of the vote count. His goal is to redefine reality to his benefit and for a second straight election beset the nation with turmoil and chaos as part of a brazen and anti-democratic power grab.
In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind, writing about the George W. Bush White House, recalled a conversation he had two years earlier with a senior adviser to the president. This unnamed aide dismissed what he called “the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” He told Suskind, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This squib prompted a ruckus within the politerati, with much harrumphing about a hubristic gang that believed it was above facts and did not have to abide by truth and facts. Two decades later, such outrage seems quaint.
Trump has been engineering his own counterfeit reality for years. The media and the political system have each collectively failed to thwart him and prevent him from convincing millions across the country of the uber-fakery about himself and the world in which we live. He has turned the entire nation into a reality TV show with (so far) three acts: His initial surprise victory in 2016, his expulsion from the White House (due to the worst-ever chicanery waged by assorted miscreants and nefarious forces) in 2020, and his gallant effort at restoration and redemption in 2024. The results of this election will establish whether the biggest con in American history continues and whether an electoral majority resides in Trump’s fantasy cosmos or a universe of facts and authenticity. Much is at risk, including the future of America democracy and reality itself.
After all shouting and debating, all the billions in ads, and all the fury, the 2024 election will determine whether this nation remains committed to its imperfect democracy or slides toward fascism, whether the politics of hate, grievance, paranoia, fear, and racism triumphs or those of community and inclusion, whether women’s freedoms are curtailed or protected, whether climate change is ignored or addressed, whether the privilege of plutocrats is enhanced or challenged, whether millions of Americans are deported or granted a path forward. But the election will also determine whether Americans live in a world of facts or one of false narratives. It will tell us if America is reality-based.
Donald Trump, as a politician, is a creature of reality television. And reality TV is not real. It is designed to convey the impression of verisimilitude. But the story lines are concocted. The editing is manipulative. The goal is to orchestrate human interactions that can then be turned into compelling, don’t-touch-that-dial stories. They need not be true; they often aren’t. The trick is to fool the viewer into believing they are—or at least to persuade the audience go along with the ruse.
That’s what happened with Trump and The Apprentice, the NBC show he starred in for 14 years. Prior to its appearance, Trump was in a slump as a businessman, having gone bust in Atlantic City as a casino owner and moving from the development of large real estate projects to licensing his name as a brand. The show created a new reality for Trump, depicting him as a hyper-successful billionaire with razor-sharp intuition.
John Miller, a former marketing executive for NBC, recently noted that the network forged a “false narrative for Donald Trump as a big businessman.” Explaining this, he said, “Clearly we had to make something bigger than it was.” That something was Trump. He added, “If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”
As Bill Pruitt, one of the producers of The Apprentice, pointed out earlier this year, deceit is at the heart of reality TV: “What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop… Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program. The producers and editors are ostensibly con artists, distracting you with grand notions while we steal from you your precious time.” Think of Trump pretending to work at a McDonald’s.
Trump entered the political world as this reality TV monster-celebrity. Millions of Americans saw him as the Trump of that show. The lesson for Trump, who had for decades devoted much energy and conniving to cultivating his image as a successful developer and glamorous playboy, was obvious: He could present a false personal tale and keenly exploit it.
Trump’s deep faith in hornswoggling was also enhanced by the close association he developed with professional wrestling. In the mid-2000s, he became a WWE fixture, and he and Vince McMahon, the WWE cofounder, cooked up a phony rivalry that they played out at high-profile wrestling matches. Trump enthusiastically adhered to what’s known in professional wrestling as kayfabe: the maintenance of a false reality in which staged events and rivalries are presented as genuine. Trump was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013.
Ever since he descended the golden escalator in 2015—surrounded by extras who he had paid to show up and act like supporters—and announced his presidential candidacy, Trump has relied on deceit. He has inaccurately touted his own assets while lying about his opponents. As president, he declared that he knew how to deliver a better and cheaper healthcare system and sparkling infrastructure. That was a fraud. His claim that he was handling the Covid pandemic magnificently—another fraud. And he pitched a bogus story about his political foes in 2020: They were Marxists and communists in league with antifa, BLM, and other radicals in a plot to destroy America. Then came the Big Lie that he had won the election but it had been stolen from him.
“If people think that he’s the person [to best handle the economy] because he was a great businessman, that is a false narrative. We did it for the show. But it became very dangerous now for the country.”
Trump was always pushing disinformation, going back to years before he entered presidential politics, when he promoted the racist birther theory about Barack Obama and insisted his so-called investigators had unearthed evidence the 44th president had been born in Kenya. (Narrator: They had not.) But in this election, Trump turned the volume of his disinformation up to 11. His campaign to regain the White House—nearly four years after he incited the insurrectionist mob that attacked the US Capitol—has been largely based on utterly untrue narratives designed to exploit voters’ fears, anxieties, and prejudices.
In stump speeches, Trump has sought to portray the United States as a crime-infested hellscape on the verge of collapse where migrant gangs run amok and terrorize good-hearted and law-abiding Americans. And you, dear viewers, ought to be afraid, very afraid.
He and his partner-in-slime, JD Vance, have pushed baseless and dangerous allegations about legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets. Trump has asserted over and over that foreign thugs armed with military weapons have taken over Aurora, Colorado, and conquered other parts of the Midwest. He has claimed that America is being flooded with immigrants released from prisons and “insane asylums” in “the Congo” and elsewhere—and that the Biden-Harris administration has purposefully allowed these brutes to enter the country in order to ruin it. He charged that President Joe Biden “stole” disaster relief funds and handed the money to illegal migrants rather than use it to assist the victims of the recent Hurricane Helene. He has ranted that it is impossible to cross the street to buy milk without getting violently assaulted or raped. And Trump insists the Democrats are evil “scum” who allow the executions of infants after they’re born and who permit schools to conduct gender-affirming medical operations on students without the consent of parents.
None of this is true. These lies go far beyond his usual falsehoods: The economy during his presidency was the best ever, the current economy is the worst ever, the rest of the world is laughing at the United States, Kamala Harris is “low IQ,” a “communist,” “mentally disabled,” and so on. These falsehoods are designed to convey a fake reality—a catastrophe that only can be remedied by the election of Donald Trump. He is trying to create a reality TV horror show.
Simultaneously, Trump advances happy-ever-after magical thinking, often a selling point of reality TV. (Winners of The Apprentice got to work for Trump for a year—supposedly a ticket to success and the high life.) He proclaims that he can bring about prosperity by introducing extreme tariffs, deporting millions, decreasing taxes on the wealthy (and workers who collect tips, Social Security recipients, and overtime employees), and placing Elon Musk in charge of cutting the federal budget. (Musk absurdly says he can cut $2 trillion from the federal budget of $6.75 trillion.) Many economists point out that Trump’s plans will lead to inflation and a much larger national debt. He also boasts he will develop visionary infrastructure projects, such as whole new cities and airports of the future. (He couldn’t even pull off a single Infrastructure Week when he was president.) Trump’s grandiose ideas tend to be general, lacking specifics. The thrust of his pitch is what he said at the Republican convention in 2016: I alone can fix it. He’s not championing policy details. (To call his policy platform bare-boned is generous.) He’s presenting himself as the answer. It’s all reminiscent of the PR campaign for The Apprentice.
Trump’s characterization of present-day America is a false narrative. His sales pitch for himself is a false narrative. His demonization of Harris as a mentally deficient radical leftist and enemy of the United States is a false narrative. He has led the tens of millions of Americans who buy his bunk into a false universe.
This is how reality TV works. Fake good guys. Fake bad guys. Fake plots. As Pruitt described it, “We scammed. We swindled.” Trump is also a peddler of fake science and fake history. He insists climate change is a hoax. And, of late, he’s been falsely citing the 1890s as a time of plenty when “our nation was probably…the wealthiest it ever was because it was a system of tariffs.” Yet during this era, when robber barons ruled, there was a severe economic depression that’s widely attributed to the harsh protective tariffs implemented. His history lesson is another fairy tale unmoored to the actual facts.
As Election Day approaches, Trump has been endeavoring to construct a new false narrative—or the extension of an old one. He has started issuing claims of Democratic electoral cheating before votes are tallied. Without evidence, he and his crew began flinging unsubstantiated charges that an election was again being rigged against Trump. The ploy was obvious: to establish a foundation for Trump to once more declare himself the victor regardless of the vote count. His goal is to redefine reality to his benefit and for a second straight election beset the nation with turmoil and chaos as part of a brazen and anti-democratic power grab.
In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind, writing about the George W. Bush White House, recalled a conversation he had two years earlier with a senior adviser to the president. This unnamed aide dismissed what he called “the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” He told Suskind, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This squib prompted a ruckus within the politerati, with much harrumphing about a hubristic gang that believed it was above facts and did not have to abide by truth and facts. Two decades later, such outrage seems quaint.
Trump has been engineering his own counterfeit reality for years. The media and the political system have each collectively failed to thwart him and prevent him from convincing millions across the country of the uber-fakery about himself and the world in which we live. He has turned the entire nation into a reality TV show with (so far) three acts: His initial surprise victory in 2016, his expulsion from the White House (due to the worst-ever chicanery waged by assorted miscreants and nefarious forces) in 2020, and his gallant effort at restoration and redemption in 2024. The results of this election will establish whether the biggest con in American history continues and whether an electoral majority resides in Trump’s fantasy cosmos or a universe of facts and authenticity. Much is at risk, including the future of America democracy and reality itself.
On May 10, 2017, President Donald Trump hosted two special guests in the Oval Office: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The meeting was curious. It was closed to American media. No American journalists were allowed to witness it or take photos or video of the meeting. But a Russian photographer was permitted to shoot a few pics, and the Russian government posted them.
There was much else odd about this get-together. Only a few months earlier, the US intelligence community had released a report confirming that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had mounted a covert operation against the United States to help Trump win the 2016 election. The Kremlin’s clandestine warfare had included the cyber-swiping and dissemination, via WikiLeaks, of Democratic emails and documents and a secret social media campaign that sought to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump’s chances of claiming the White House. The hack-and-leak op fomented conflict at the Democrats’ convention and then, in the final month of the race, impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign by releasing, nearly on a daily basis, internal documents that prompted negative news stories about her and the Democrats. Throughout all this, Trump and his top aides denied Russia was intervening, essentially aiding and abetting Putin by providing cover for him.
Though there were numerous factors that contributed to Clinton’s defeat, the Russian operation was clearly one of them.
After the election, the Kremlin’s intervention and the ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow were the subjects of a federal investigation and congressional inquiries. Trump, though, kept denying Russia had meddled in the race and repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax and a witch hunt. (At the time, it was not yet publicly known that during the campaign his top aides met with a Russian emissary who was introduced to them as a participant in a secret Kremlin project to help Trump win or that Paul Manafort, the chair of the Trump campaign, regularly huddled with a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer and shared internal campaign data with him.) Irate about the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, Trump, on May 9, 2017, fired the bureau’s director, James Comey.
The following day—with the Comey dismissal dominating the news—Trump warmly greeted the two Russians at the White House. The photo that the Russians released showed the three of them yukking it up. Here was Trump with representatives of a foreign adversary that had attacked an American election, and they appeared to be having a jolly time. And the public wasn’t told what they discussed.
A few days later, the Washington Postreported that during the meeting Trump had revealed highly classified information about a possible Islamic State plot and jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on this terrorist group. According to the newspaper:
The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.
The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.
One intelligence official noted that Trump had “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.” Intelligence officials were shocked by this breach.
More about this meeting continued to come out. The New York Times soon reported that Trump had told the Russians that by dismissing Comey he had gotten himself out of a jam: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” The Times noted how bizarre this was: “The comments represented an extraordinary moment in the investigation, which centers in part on the administration’s contacts with Russian officials: A day after firing the man leading that inquiry, Mr. Trump disparaged him—to Russian officials.”
But there was even more to the meeting that the public wouldn’t learn about for more than two years. In September 2019, the Washington Postrevealed that Trump had told Lavrov and Kislyak that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s intervention in the 2016 election and that this assertion had caused alarmed White House officials to limit access to the memo chronicling the conversation.
The Trump White House had fretted about this part of the discussion becoming public. According to the newspaper, the “memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly…White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him.”
By the time this part of the conversation was disclosed, Trump was mired in his first impeachment for having pressured the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and to find information discrediting the Trump-Russia scandal. And this revelation, like so many about Trump, quickly faded from the national discourse.
It had taken over two years for Americans to learn that Trump had told the Russians he didn’t care about their efforts to subvert a US election. But it was obvious assoonas that original photo was released that Trump had no interest in holding Putin accountable for messing with the election—and for helping him reach the White House.
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.
Login
