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When MAGA Came to Manhattan
On Sunday, the MAGA crowd arrived in midtown Manhattan.
Their destination? Madison Square Garden, where Trump is holding a Sunday night rally featuring an army of his most loyal acolytes—including his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio); X owner Elon Musk, who has been pulling out all the stops to help reelect Trump; ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson; Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice; and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, among others.
When I arrived outside the arena just before 11 a.m.—six hours before Trump was to take the stage inside, and an hour before doors opened—the line of MAGA hat-wearing supporters wrapped around the block.
The choice of New York as the location for a massive Trump rally, just over a week from Election Day, is confounding: In 2020, President Joe Biden won 87 percent of votes cast in Manhattan. And just a few miles south of the midtown block where the crowd gathered Sunday are the courthouses where, earlier this year, Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in his hush-money case and ordered to pay $355 million in a civil fraud case brought by state Attorney General Letitia James. Add to that that New York has not voted to elect a Republican president since 1984, when Ronald Reagan, the incumbent, beat Walter Mondale.
But the ex-president—who was born and raised in Queens—has never been deterred by facts. “We are going to win New York,” he has said on the campaign trail. His supporters who showed up Sunday were similarly defiant. “I’m voting for the felon,” yelled one man standing near the line, “and I can’t wait.”
That man, who gave his name as George D. and said he lives on Long Island and works in Manhattan, was holding a flag with Trump’s mugshot emblazoned over the Stars and Stripes. He was one of several supporters who told me he thinks Trump will win the election, despite his apparent tie with Vice President Kamala Harris in the polls. (A new ABC News/Ipsos poll out Sunday shows Harris restoring a lead, polling at 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent.)
“Neck and neck means Trump’s ahead,” George said. “I wear this MAGA hat every day, and I feel the pulse in the streets,” he added. “I went from getting middle fingers to getting thumbs up.”
Like several supporters I spoke to, George preferred Trumpian talking points to my fact-checks, and characterized his candidate as unfairly persecuted by the left. The “lamestream media,” he claimed, is “building a lie” about Trump’s chances of winning. “The only way to beat him is to lock him up or try to assassinate him,” he said, adding that he thinks the attempted assassinations of Trump were “an inside job.” (Trump, Vance, and Trump’s sons have also falsely claimed, without evidence, that Democrats were behind the assassination attempts; threat assessment experts have told my colleague Mark Follman that this could fuel more retaliatory violence.)
The shootings were on his fans’ minds. When I asked a woman in line named Dana about Trump’s shot at winning, a man behind her cut in: “Don’t say ‘shot’!” The group laughed. Dana turned back to respond to my question about whether Trump could win: “100 percent,” she said, unblinking.
She knew, though, that she was something of an oddity in an election that has arguably become as much about gender as about policy: The most recent ABC/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 14-point advantage among women voters, while Trump has a 6-point advantage among men. Dana, who is from New Jersey, was wearing a pink “Women for Trump” hat. She pointed to it: “I can’t wear this hat when I drop my kids off at school.”
Dana believes women are flocking to Harris due to reproductive rights (fact check: true), but she doesn’t believe Trump actually decimated those rights—he left them to the states. And she doesn’t think he’ll sign a national abortion ban, despite the fact that Trump twice refused to commit to not doing so during the debate (earlier this month, he said in a social media post he would veto it if Congress passed it). “I vote on policy,” Dana said, adding that she was voting for Trump due to his stances on immigration, the economy, and inflation. Under Biden, someone nearby claimed, bacon now costs $12. “I want to eat more bacon!” Dana exclaimed.
A bit behind Dana and her friends, I met a Dutch woman named Gabriëlle Kok who showed up not because she supports Trump, but because she wanted to see who does. The only thing she seemed to have in common with Dana was believing Trump has a shot at reelection. “I think he’s a very dangerous man—for everybody, but especially for women,” Kok said. The Netherlands recently installed its first far-right government, whose leader, Geert Wilders, is known as the ‘Dutch Donald Trump.’ “I think they look up at Trump and Trumpism,” Kok said of the Netherlands’ new government. “There’s inspiration to be gotten for them.”
But Luis Rodriguez, who I met towards the end of the line, feels differently: He sees Trump as a bulwark against the socialism of Cuba, which he emigrated from in 1961, just after Fidel Castro came to power, he said. “I’m much more aware of how fragile democracy is,” Rodriguez, who lives in Manhattan, told me, adding that he’s a registered independent who voted for Obama in 2008.
He had just voted early, before showing up to the rally, he added. “I always get emotional when I vote,” Rodriguez said. “It’s like going to church.” (Trump and his acolytes, of course, still refuse to admit he lost the 2020 election, and are preemptively sowing doubt about this year’s race.)
Rodriguez thinks 2020 was a “troubled election,” he said, and finds the comparisons of Trump to Hitler and other fascists absurd. “Hitler is the cheapest trope you can throw out at someone to shut them up,” he said, adding that the Democrats’ messaging has “become ‘abortion’ and ‘Trump is Hitler.'” He was exasperated. “I’m a Hispanic, immigrant, and I’m gay. I get told I’m supporting a racist, a xenophobe, and an anti-gay bigot.”
His friend Gary Mirkin, of Long Island, was wearing an “I’m Voting For the Felon” t-shirt. He chimed in: “I’m conservative and Jewish, and people tell me I’m voting for Hitler.” Just then, someone in a MAGA cap walked by with a bullhorn, chanting, “F Joe Biden” and “Let’s Go Brandon!”
But these were the theatrics Rodriguez appeared tired of. “Can we discuss the policy?” he asked. Like Dana, Rodriguez said he was voting for Trump based on issues around immigration and the economy. (The ABC/Ipsos poll shows Trump leading Harris on both of those issues, by 12 points and 8 points, respectively.)
More than once during our conversation, Rodriguez claimed that the Biden administration had lost 300,000 migrant children—a Trump-endorsed talking point that experts say is misleading, and refers to unaccompanied migrant children who did not get notices to appear in court, not children who are lost, trafficked or dead. What did Rodriguez make of the separations of immigrant families under Trump, I asked, given that the Trump campaign has not ruled out doing it again? Rodriguez said something that Vance has: Children are separated every day in the US when their parents are arrested.
He also added that the Obama administration built cages to detain immigrant children—which is true, though it did not maintain a policy of systemically separating families, as the Trump administration did. That policy has, as of earlier this year, still left more than 1,300 kids separated from their parents, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.
Regardless, Rodriguez trusts Trump: “I think he’s the only one that has the grit and wherewithal” to confront the “corrupt establishment,” he said. So what happens if Harris wins? “Obama will pull her strings,” Mirkin said, adding that he had signed up to be a poll watcher. (The GOP has recruited 200,000 poll watchers to “establish the battlefield” to challenge the results of the election, should Trump lose.)
But he and Rodriguez weren’t too worried. “Tied,” Mirkin said, “means he’s winning.”
How Donald Trump Weaponized the 2007 Murder of My Fellow Journalist, Chauncey Bailey
The text came from a fellow journalist. I was driving and glanced at it at a red light. It was a forward of an X post by @realDonadTrump. “You see this!?” my friend had written.
As I glanced at it, I saw the back of a police car and what looked like two legs covered in white. There were black shoes, the toes pointing skyward.
Memory jarred me seconds later. That was a 17-year-old photo of murdered journalist Chauncey Bailey lying dead in the street. From Trump? What the hell? I pulled over and discovered that what I had thought was a photo was the opening image of a video. I hit play.
“This is a journalist named Chauncey Bailey,” a disembodied voice said. “We can’t show you his face. It was blown away by this man’s .12-gauge shotgun,” the narration continued as a photo of a dark-eyed young man came on the screen with the caption “Repeat criminal D. Broussard.” It was followed by a re-creation of Bailey’s 2007 killing, an actor playing a masked gunman firing a shotgun twice.
“Unfortunately, the murderer never should have been there. He should have been in jail,” the narrator continued. “Broussard was previously convicted of brutal assault. San Francisco’s liberal DA Kamala Harris”—the narrator, like Trump, mispronounces Harris’ first name as a photo of her is shown—“put him back on the street instead of in jail. Now, Harris has blood on her hands.”
Then, an all too familiar voice: “I am Donald J. Trump and I approved this message.” A photo of Broussard also appears in a second Trump ad over which a narrator says, “As San Francisco DA liberal Kamala Harris let killers go free.”
The ads were designed by a Trump-controlled Super PAC, Maga Inc. that’s painting Harris as a pro-criminal leftist radical who’s soft on crime. It has spent at least $75 million in swing states, including Georgia and Pennsylvania, according to published reports and Federal Election Commission records. Neither campaign responded to questions about the ads.
As first reported by the non-profit news site The Oaklandside, the ad that shows Bailey’s corpse is as rank with Trump’s utter hypocrisy as it is factually inaccurate in claiming Harris is somehow responsible for his death.
From his mocking of disabled Wall Street Journal reporter Serge Kovaleski in 2015 to his repeated use of the Stalinesque “enemies of the people” in his attacks on the media, to urging crowds at his rallies to undertake physical aggression against reporters, Trump’s seemingly endless contempt for a free press is ubiquitous. Campaigning this year, he’s said if elected he would jail reporters who refused to reveal sources, in his words making them go “bye-bye.” He’s repeatedly called for overturning the landmark unanimous Supreme Court decision on libel in Times vs. Sullivan and probably would also support overturning the court’s ruling on prior restraint in the Pentagon Papers case.
Trump’s contempt for journalists long predates his time in national politics. As a newspaper reporter in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in the 1990s, I frequently encountered Trump. He owned three casinos at the time and often attacked my reporting on his long casino-development war with rival Steve Wynn, calling me “a fucking twerp,” “a moron,” “an asshole,” and other names. But Atlantic City was a small stage, and most of those remarks were in phone calls and interviews. And all that was years before Bailey’s murder, which shocked and scared journalists in California and nationally.
Within days I was assigned to cover the killing full time, working with others on what became known as the “Chancey Bailey Project.” It was an assignment that lasted nearly five years involving daily stories, as well as deeply reported investigative stories showing the depths of the Bey’s cult, and police indifference and incompetence. The work culminated in a book I wrote in 2012 with the overarching message that you can’t kill a story by killing a journalist. And there also was an element of self-preservation. As the great investigative reporter Robert W. Greene of Newsday noted, when he led a similar effort following the 1976 car-bombing death of reporter Don Bolles, such work is like “buying life insurance” for journalists. The response must be to create more journalism about the matter that the killer was trying to censor than the target ever could have achieved alone.
Trump’s new, horrid misappropriation of a journalist being gunned down in the street is blatantly public. The facts of Bailey’s death are straightforward. The Trump campaign ad claims are not.
Bailey, 57, was shot dead on August 2, 2007, as he walked to work at the Oakland Post, a weekly paper that serves Oakland’s large Black community. He was a lifelong newspaperman having previously worked for The Hartford Courant, The Detroit News, and had recently left the Oakland Tribune for the Post.
It was publication day. He was hurrying to his office to get the paper out, stopping only to buy an unhoused man a cup of coffee. Among the stories Bailey was wrestling with was one he’d written himself about an Oakland business called Your Black Muslim Bakery, which had become a front for wide-ranging criminal enterprises. It had fallen into the hands of its late founder’s 20-year-old son, Yusuf Bey IV and had recently filed for bankruptcy. Baily had a source telling him of a string of violent and financial crimes being committed by young Bey’s cult-like followers. Bailey wanted to publish ASAP, perhaps as soon as that afternoon.
Just then a tall, skinny man, dressed in all black with a ski mask over his face and carrying a pistol-grip .12-gauge shotgun ran up on him. The gunman fired twice into Bailey’s torso at point-blank range. Bailey fell, dead almost instantly. The killer started to run to a waiting white mini-van, then remembered his orders to shoot three times to ensure Bailey’s death. He turned back, leaned over the prone body, a load of buckshot ripping into Bailey’s face.
The gunman, Devaughndre Broussard, 19, who weeks earlier had also killed another man with an assault rifle, jumped into a tattered white mini-van, where wheelman Antoine Mackey waited. They sped off. As they tore through Oakland streets, Mackey grabbed his cell phone and dialed their shot caller. The day before Bey had told the young men, “We gotta take him out before he writes that story.” Now Mackey told him they had.
Harris comes into the story because Broussard was from San Francisco, where she was District Attorney from 2002 to 2011. Trump’s ad stems from Broussard’s arrest for an assault that happened on Halloween night in 2005. He and two friends beat and robbed an art student on the San Francisco subway, taking $60, and an iPod.
With the victim lying on the car floor bleeding as the train lurched into a station, Broussard looked up, directly into the lens of a security camera. He had a magic marker in his pocket and used it to try to color over the lens. It didn’t help. Police arrested him two weeks later for assault with a deadly weapon, battery, and robbery. Broussard’s two friends were also arrested. Both were 17. Their cases were assigned to juvenile court; the outcomes were sealed.
Given his life story, eventually facing incarceration seemed inevitable for Broussard. He barely knew his father. His mother, Audra Dixon, “had an anguished life,” a lawyer representing her in one of her many criminal cases during her son’s childhood once told a judge. Broussard ended up in a home for emotionally troubled youth, where he developed a bad stutter that plagued him into adulthood.
With Dixon in prison, Broussard lived for a while across San Francisco Bay in the city of Richmond with a man who’d fathered a daughter with Dixon. The man became the boy’s Foster parent. Broussard called him dad. At Richmond High School, Broussard did well enough that a teacher helped get him into a summer camp at UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business, where he designed a mock investment scheme that won him a $100 Savings Bond. Then Dixon got out of prison and wanted Broussard back.
She and her mother were running a drug house in San Francisco, both selling and providing users with a place to fix. But the older woman had AIDS and needed money for care. Dixon told Broussard to quit school and get a job. But he disappeared for days, eventually getting arrested as a juvenile in a city south of San Francisco. Dixon’s drug house was soon raided by police. Days later, on October 11, 2005, Broussard turned 18. His next interaction with the law would be as an adult.
He had no hope of making bail for the assault and robbery on the train. As the wheels of justice inched along, at least he had food and a roof over his head.
Eventually, his court-appointed lawyer began talks with the district attorney’s office about the inevitable plea deal. “This certainly wasn’t the kind of case that would have gotten the attention of the elected district attorney,” said Stanford University Law School Professor Robert Weisberg, a leading authority on criminal procedure. Weisberg said he didn’t like the phrase “run of the mill,” but said that’s what the case was.
Under California law, the Probation Department in a county where the crime in question occurred makes a sentencing recommendation to the judge. Such documents are considered confidential and sealed by the court, but in 2007, the Chauncey Bailey Project, a consortium of journalists, including me, who worked together to report on and investigate Bailey’s killing, won a motion to have Broussard’s report unsealed.
Broussard’s “participation in the present offense is deserving of a stiff consequence. The senseless act of violence is totally unacceptable and concerns the undersigned officer greatly,” Probation Officer Germaine McCoy wrote in the report.
McCoy added that a prison sentence was contemplated, but “due to the defendant’s young age, probation will be recommended in hopes that the defendant will use the opportunity to turn his life around.”
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Charlene Mitchell, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, sentenced Broussard on February 24, 2006, after he pleaded guilty to assault, court records show.
Mitchell followed McCoy’s exact recommendations. She gave Broussard three years in state prison, but immediately suspended that sentence in favor of three years of supervised probation. She ordered Broussard to serve the first year of probation in county jail, giving him credit for 103 days he’d been locked up since his arrest. Assistant DA Gregory Mendez, didn’t object to the sentence, records show. Mendez, now in private practice, declined to discuss the case. There is no indication in court papers that Harris had any role in it. Court records do not indicate the victim gave a statement at sentencing or was present in court.
The case fell “within a fairly regular pattern by which cases get processed in the American judicial system, especially for a first-time offender,” Weisberg said. “These things are not the result of long, deliberated, adjudication because the system does not have the resources to allow for that.”
Later, when Broussard was charged with killing Bailey, the assault victim’s father, an attorney, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “Blame Kamala Harris.” Broussard “should have gone to state prison,” he said. “My kid suffered blurred vision and a fractured nose.”
In her office’s only public statement on the case after Bailey’s death, Harris’ Chief Assistant DA Russ Giuntini said prosecutors agreed to Broussard’s plea because it was unclear which of the three assailants committed exactly what injuries to the victim.
The father’s claim Broussard should have been in prison and Trump’s echo of it now is “something which the system could never tolerate,” Weisberg said. It would be “long-term preventive detention based on imagining the most extremely severe, unlikely things that anybody could do if he’s not incarcerated for a long, long time,” he said.
The victim’s father did not respond to a request for an interview
A journalism advocacy group ripped the Trump ad. “Chauncey Bailey died for his journalism,” The Northern California Chapter of The Society of Professional Journalists (full disclosure, I am a member) said in a statement.“ His memory deserves better than to be twisted into self- serving political lies.”
When Broussard’s jail sentence ended, he hit the streets with something he had never before borne in his life—thousands of dollars of debt. He’d been ordered to reimburse the victim for his medical bills, plus an additional 10 percent in administrative costs. Then there were court fees and booking fees. He had to pay for the probation department’s report to the judge. He had to pay $50 monthly to the county probation department.
He had no high school diploma and no job skills. His stutter remained a drawback. Police soon saw him in areas of San Francisco known for street-level drug dealing. He told his probation officer he was living on the street.
A friend had made vague references to a bakery in Oakland known for hiring young Black men in circumstances like his. He gave Broussard Yusuf Bey IV’s phone number.
Your Black Muslim Bakery was a strange place. There were long sessions of military-like close-order drills. Lots of guns. Mandatory religious training where Bey would give sermons based on the original dogma of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam: Whites were devils, created 6,000 years ago by a scientist called “Big Headed Yakub” in “grafting” experiments that went awry. That god orbited the earth in a giant “mother plane” planning Armageddon, which would elevate Blacks to control of the world. (Bey was not officially affiliated with The Nation of Islam).
But Broussard had food to eat and a bed to sleep in. He left once, skeptical of Bey, but returned when he found nothing else. When he was later charged with Bailey’s murder, he was described as a handyman. But he told police he was “a soldier.” Last year, he told a state parole board that he went to the bakery with an understanding he would be “a hitter” and “a kind of enforcer,” according to hearing transcripts.
In earlier statements to authorities, he said the incentive was purely financial. Bey promised to school him in the ways of financial fraud using fake and stolen identifications and forged documents to get rich. Broussard could even get a house, Bey told him.
“I grew up with a lack of fear,” Broussard told the parole board. With it, came a willingness “to do whatever you need to do to get some money. If it is selling drugs, you sell drugs. If it is stealing, you steal.” Broussard, who is on a prisoner fire-fighting team in the high Sierra, was denied early release by the board largely because he had been recently been caught with a cell phone.
The day of his arrest, Broussard first admitted to killing Bailey after Bey promised to pay for a lawyer who would get him acquitted. But when no lawyer from the Beys materialized, he recanted.
He eventually flipped, telling a Grand Jury that Bey ordered the shooting to stop the story Bailey was working on about the bakery. “Mr. Broussard is coming clean. He’s been living in hell,” his lawyer said.
He also admitted to the killing of another man who was the uncle of a gunman who killed Bey’s brother Antar at a gas station. Prosecutors, under intense media pressure to get to the bottom of Bailey’s killing, gave Broussard a 25-year determinate sentence in exchange for his testimony. With good-behavior credits, he could be discharged next year.
Bey and Mackey were convicted at the end of a long trial in 2011 in which Broussard was the star witness, and each was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Bey was also convicted of ordering two other men killed, including the man Broussard shot with an assault rifle. Mackey was convicted of the other killing Bey ordered—a man they saw walking alone late at night. Broussard testified they bragged of killing the man because he was white.
Ironically, law-enforcement incompetence did contribute to Bailey’s death, but it wasn’t in San Francisco. It occurred in Oakland, didn’t involve Harris, and it seems extremely unlikely to ever become election fodder.
It turned out that police had been investigating the bakery for several months before Bailey’s death. They had accumulated evidence of multiple serious felonies and had planned to raid the building in the early morning hours of Aug. 1, 2007. It was a massive operation, involving more than 100 officers. Police trained for days. Snipers were to be deployed on neighboring rooftops. Ambulances were staged nearby in case of casualties. A judge signed search warrants. All the lights were green. Then they weren’t.
At the last minute, Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker learned that two SWAT commanders were on vacation. He wouldn’t go without them, ordering a 48-hour stand down. Cops balked, claiming the delay was unneeded. But Tucker, a former administrative officer at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office who street cops sometimes called “granny,” didn’t budge.
So, on August 2, 2007, Broussard and Mackey slipped away around 6:00 a.m. to hunt down their prey. The delay cost Bailey his life. When other journalists and I reported Tucker’s decision a year later, relying on whistleblowers and internal police documents, Tucker at first dug in, but resigned after City Council members scheduled a no-confidence vote on him.
Bailey’s sister, Lorelei Waqia was incredulous that the raid that would have saved her brother’s life was botched. Oakland “police just fumbled everything,” she said. “They caused the death, really. If they had moved on it, my brother would still be alive.” Now, she said, seeing the Trump ad was “devastating.” She lives in Georgia where it has appeared on TV. “[It] took the murder out of context by taking bits and pieces and forming a lie,” she added. “How dare they use my brother’s death to benefit them?”
Harris and Trump Are Blowing Up the Case for the Electoral College
With a little more than a week to go before Election Day, the presidential race is expected to come down to just seven states—Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina. But the two biggest campaign events this weekend weren’t scheduled for any of them. On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris rallied with Willie Nelson and Beyonce in Houston, where early voting is already underway. And on Sunday, former president Donald Trump is set to appear at Madison Square Garden with his disbarred attorney and a long list of the weirdest people you know.
Trump is on a bit of a blue-state swing. He appeared at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in September promising to win New York. Earlier this month, he went to Coachella, in Southern California, where he introduced supporters to the vital concert-festival experience of “waiting for shuttle buses that never show up.” Last week he went to a barber shop in the Bronx.
None of these visits lack immediate value. Both New York and Texas have big races that matter a lot to the national parties—six races in New York could determine control of the House; Texas’ Senate race could determine control of the Senate, and the state is close enough on paper that it may well be a part of Democrats’ presidential strategy sooner rather than later. Meanwhile, Trump’s visit to reliably blue California could affect the down-ballot races that could swing the House. Getting control of Congress is half the battle; the candidates for president want to actually be able to do things as president, after all.
And to both Trump and Harris, these dips into enemy territory serve their larger messages: Texas, on the one hand, and New York and California, on the other, represent the sort of outcomes they’re promising to steer the nation away from. The Houston event was organized around the theme of protecting reproductive rights, using as its backdrop a state that has—thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court justices—now criminalized abortion with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. If you want to see what Trump’s policies get you, just take a look at a state where, according to a study released in January, 26,000 women who have been impregnated by a rapist since the Dobbs decision have been left without access to care that was once their right. For his part, Trump uses his blue-state hosts to paint a picture of American Carnage 2.0—buildings taken over by Venezuelan gangs; rampant homelessness; crime crime crime.
But in doing so, Trump in particular has made clear something that should be obvious but which a lot of observers on both sides often don’t acknowledge: He has a ton of supporters in these places, albeit almost certainly not enough to win either state. Still, he received more votes in NYC alone than he did in 16 states in 2020—eight of which he won—and his popularity has, according to the polls, ticked upwards over the last few years. A New York Times poll this week showed a 14-point shift in the city since the last presidential election. He got more votes in the five boroughs than he did in the entire swing state of Nevada, while more California voters supported him than in any other state. One of the reasons the national popular vote appears to be so close this year is that Trump is more popular in the places that aren’t nominally competitive.
Of course, we don’t have a national popular vote, as much as Tim Walz might wish otherwise. But Trump’s tactic exposes the absurdity of the Electoral College, and it does so in so flagrant a manner that perhaps even the people who have benefited from that system might start to notice. It was one thing when candidates only focused on the key Electoral College states, where every vote counts. But he is spending the last days of the campaign, speaking to people whose votes mean very little to the Electoral College, in the hopes that it might redound to his benefit somewhere else. Once you accept that the people in these states matter—or at least some of the people in these states—and that you’re going to be campaigning there anyway, it’s harder to argue that their votes shouldn’t.
Swing States of Anxiety
After Joe Biden’s debate debacle and Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the 2024 election looked like it could be a GOP blowout. Then Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris stepped up, the Democrats raised $1 billion-plus, the Republicans went full fascist … And here we are, a week before what feels like (another) Most Momentous Election of Our Lifetimes, and—if you believe the polls—no one has a clue who will win.
Much depends on the outcome of the vote in seven states—the same ones that mattered in 2016 and 2020. This week on Reveal, my Mother Jones colleagues turn their attention to two of the swingest states of this election cycle, while I dig through my reporting archives to unearth a never-before-broadcast interview from 2013 that provides an intriguing glimpse into what makes Harris tick.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.First, national correspondent Tim Murphy goes to Arizona, where flag-waving, gun-toting protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center in 2020, insisting the election had been stolen from Trump. Since then, dozens of court cases across the US have found those claims to be a big fat lie. Yet threats and harassment against Arizona election workers continue to be so common, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, told Tim, that top election officials in the state “have been turning over at the rate of a lunch shift at Taco Bell.”
Richer, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, has spent much of the past four years trying to dispel the election lies Trump helped create. To see how it’s going, Murphy visits the recently fortified Maricopa County election center, where Richer’s staff are on a mission to demonstrate to voters that the election process is free and fair and deserving of their trust.
Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Trump and his minions have been indicted for their attempts to find enough votes (11,780, to be exact) to undo Biden’s victory in 2020, new MAGA-friendly members of the State Election Board have been trying to rewrite the rules to favor the former president this time around. Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman explains the fight to control election results in this crucial 2024 battleground and how it mirrors similar efforts in other swing states.
For the show’s final segment, I travel back almost 12 years, to when Harris was California’s attorney general—the first woman and first African American ever elected to that job—and I was an editor and reporter covering San Francisco. By then, Harris was a rising star in national Democratic politics, and editors at New York-based DuJour magazine wanted their readers to understand why. I jumped at the assignment.
I’d written about Harris a couple of times before; I’d even interviewed her mother. So when we reconnected in 2013, Harris was comfortable in my presence—far more so than with some of the journalists who’ve interviewed her in recent years. We spent about an hour together—an unimaginably generous amount of time in the current political climate—talking about many of the same substantive issues (the housing crisis, gun control, prosecuting sex crimes, and tech privacy and regulation) at the center of her campaign today. After my profile was published, I stored the audio on my laptop’s hard drive and forgot about it—until Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and reporters started complaining about how few interviews she was granting.
Listening back to our conversation, I’m struck by the similarities between Harris then and now—and not just when it comes to policy priorities. When she ran for AG in 2010, very few people—even in her own circle—thought she could win. Her Republican opponent Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, was extremely popular with the tough-on-crime types who had long dominated California criminal justice circles, not to mention he was older and white. “A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen,” Harris told me then. “What motivated me was I really wanted the job. I felt that I could do it well.” She campaigned hard in communities that were not her obvious constituencies. “I never foreclosed any group or constituency as being off limits,” she explained. “Everything and everybody is on the table, and I’m not going to accept that that door is not open to me.” On Election Night, Cooley declared victory—and many Harris supporters assumed she would concede. But she didn’t.
Three weeks later, in one of the closest elections in California history, Cooley was the one to finally concede, and Harris became the new attorney general.
The big unknown, of course, is whether she can do it again—this time against a Republican opponent who refuses to believe that he will lose and a disinformation machine intent on making sure he doesn’t. Here’s what Harris told me then: “I’m an eternal optimist. I really am. I’m a realist and an optimist. I think that those two can coexist, and they do in me.”
- Variety
- Beyoncé Endorses Kamala Harris With Unifying Speech at Houston Rally: ‘It’s Time to Sing a New Song’
Beyoncé Endorses Kamala Harris With Unifying Speech at Houston Rally: ‘It’s Time to Sing a New Song’
- Variety
- Leonardo DiCaprio Endorses Kamala Harris and Bashes Trump for Ignoring Climate Change: ‘He Continues to Deny the Science’
Leonardo DiCaprio Endorses Kamala Harris and Bashes Trump for Ignoring Climate Change: ‘He Continues to Deny the Science’
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Hundreds of Doctors Are Demanding Trump’s Health Records
After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.
The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.
It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”
As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”
“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.
The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”
“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.
The signatories are both Democrats and Republicans and represent 37 states, including several swing states, according to Dr. Alice Chen, a volunteer organizer with Doctors for Harris. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.
Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with more information about the signatories of the letter.
Hundreds of Doctors Are Demanding Trump’s Health Records
After former President Donald Trump’s very weird week, more than 400 doctors and health professionals are questioning his mental and physical fitness to serve, and calling for him to release his medical records.
The development—which Mother Jones is the first to report—comes about a week after the group Doctors for Harris first released the letter, with a little more than half the 448 signatures it has now. Since then, another 200-plus medical professionals have signed on, following a slate of unhinged episodes and nonsensical—even profane—comments from Trump over the past week. As I reported yesterday, highlights included swaying on stage for a half-hour to “Ave Maria,” “Hallelujah,” and “YMCA”; calling himself the “father of IVF”; falsely claiming “nobody died” on January 6 other than Ashli Babbitt and that “there were no guns” among the insurrectionists; and making lewd comments about both his opponent and the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia.
It’s no wonder, then, that as of Monday afternoon, 448 health professionals have voiced concerns about his fitness for office. “With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances,” their letter states. “And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity.”
As the letter points out, Trump is 78 years old—though it’s unclear if he realizes that, given that he said he’s “not that close to 80” during a town hall Sunday. His age, the writers argue, makes it all the more necessary he come clean about his state of health. (Biden, after all, is 81.) Trump said in August he would “gladly” release his records, but has yet to do so. The most recent insight we have is a three-paragraph letter he posted to Truth Social in which his personal physician claimed he had lost weight and was in “excellent health.”
“While many older adults are highly functional, age can also come with cognitive changes that affect our ability to function well in complex settings,” the letter says. “We are seeing that from Trump, as he uses his rallies and appearances to ramble, meander, and crudely lash out at his many perceived grievances. He also is notably refusing to give the public the ability to properly vet or scrutinize his capacities.” Earlier this month, Trump dropped out of a scheduled 60 Minutes interview. He has also refused to debate Vice President Kamala Harris a second time.
The doctors portray him as akin to a disgruntled grandpa who says things that embarrass his relatives and needs a check-up: “As we saw in the first presidential debate, Trump is displaying irrationality and irritability. Notably, he ranted about migrants eating people’s cats and dogs. This was widely debunked as untrue.”
“Given his advancing age—if elected again, he would be the oldest president in history by the end of his term—his refusal to disclose even basic health information is a disservice to the American people,” the letter concludes.
The signatories are both Democrats and Republicans and represent 37 states, including several swing states, according to Dr. Alice Chen, a volunteer organizer with Doctors for Harris. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Vice President Kamala Harris released her medical records earlier this month, as my colleague Abby Vesoulis covered. The results were “unremarkable,” the physician said—which is to say, normal. Trump cannot relate.
Update, Oct. 22: This post was updated with more information about the signatories of the letter.
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