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.

— NPR (@npr.org) 2024-11-15T19:28:48.033Z

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this shindig, Taibbi slammed Kerry:

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

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

Let’s look at what Kerry did say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this shindig, Taibbi slammed Kerry:

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

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

Let’s look at what Kerry did say:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vance has taken point on this mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vance has taken point on this mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

By now, you probably don’t need any more mastication about the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. This was an event that required little after-the-fact explication. Harris deftly maneuvered Trump into displaying his worse qualities and unfitness for office. If you want to see how I weighed in, you can check this out. But it was troubling that two polls taken following the debate that captured the obvious—a majority believed Harris had won—showed that about a third of the viewers said Trump had triumphed. (CNN put the number at 37 percent for debate watchers; YouGov placed it at 31 percent for registered voters.) This gives us a good idea of how many Americans are either part of the Trump cult or susceptible to its pull. It’s not a majority or a plurality, but it’s a large slice.

Looking at these numbers, I thought of a recent New York Times column by David French, a Never Trumper conservative who has had to bear particularly cruel attacks from far-righters for his anti-Trump views. He reported that on a recent trip to Chicago he passed by the Trump tower there, and this triggered a thought:

I was reminded once again that Donald Trump is a singular figure in American politics. There is no one like him, and that means that no one can replace him. While it’s always perilous to make predictions about American politics—or anything else—here’s one that I’m almost certain is correct: If Trump loses in 2024, MAGA will fade. He is the irreplaceable key to its success.

French pointed out to his readers that after a recent column in which he said he was voting for Harris in order “to save conservatism from MAGA,” the MAGA response “was, in essence: You’re fooling yourself. Trump or no Trump, we own the party now.” No, he retorted in this offering: “If Trump loses, MAGA will fade. It will not go away, of course. Reactionary populism is a permanent fixture of American politics, but don’t believe MAGA’s hype. Its national success depends on one man.”

Of course, it is premature to ponder the fate of the GOP and the radical right should Trump lose the election (even after this week’s thrashing). But columnists have to column-ize. (Ditto for newsletter-ists.) And it struck me that French was, in a way, peering through the wrong end of the telescope.

You cannot have selling without buying. You cannot have a con without a mark who wants to believe the con.

Indeed, Trump is an unparallelled politician: a celebrity reality TV star and billionaire full of braggadocio and personality disorders who somehow convinced tens of millions of angry Americans he is their hero. He does possess unique characteristics—including malignant narcissism and profound dishonesty—that have helped him trounce all GOP rivals and seize control of the party and the MAGA movement, as he has tossed the bloodiest of red meat to our Republican neighbors. Yet at issue here is not supply but demand.

I explained this in my recent book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. You cannot have selling without buying. You cannot have a con without a mark who wants to believe the con. Since Trump became a political figure on the right with his championship of the racist birther conspiracy theory, he has been a carnival barker peddling grievance, culture war, hate, bigotry, and paranoia—the same way he has pitched luxury apartments, steaks, vodkas, ties, tea, books (about himself), a board game (about himself), Trump University (a fraud), casinos (that failed), an airline (that failed), a social media platform (that is failing), and, more recently, sneakers, Bibles, pieces of his clothing, NFTs, trading cards, and, yes, crypto.

He has usually found an audience for his junk and his bunk. As I pointed out in American Psychosis, before he entered politics, the conservative movement and the GOP base had been radicalized for decades by an assortment of its leaders and outfits, from Joe McCarthy to Barry Goldwater to Richard Nixon to the New Right and the Religious Right to Ronald Reagan to Pat Robertson to Sarah Palin to the tea party. Repeatedly, significant figures on the right made common cause with extremists to push the crass politics of hate and othering. The basic message has been that liberals, Democrats, progressive activists, civil rights and social justice advocates, feminists, environmentalists, academics, the media, and that entire ilk are all godless commies conspiring to destroy the real America—and they must be annihilated.

Republican voters had long been encouraged to cultivate a taste for demonization. Trump saw how easy it was to feed this beast and ride it to glory.

Over recent decades, conservatives with big megaphones—think Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and subsequently much of Fox News—have pressed increasingly harsh and divisive rhetoric. Bill and Hillary Clinton were murderers. Barack Obama was a secret, born-in-Kenya socialist with a plot to destroy the economy so he could take over as a dictator. A feedback loop was established. Conservative thought leaders dished out the swill, riled up voters, were rewarded with lucrative gigs or votes, and, subsequently, intensified the poison. The impulse to exploit and boost the worst fears of right-leaning voters was incentivized and rewarded.

Trump saw this market opportunity and rushed in with his wares of rage and all his lies. Republican voters had long been encouraged to cultivate a taste for demonization. Trump saw how easy it was to feed this beast and ride it to glory. That is, self-glory. Canny as he can be, he realized there was a demand for Trumpism.

What happens to this demand should he lose? Part of that might depend on what occurs after such a defeat. Will he again generate chaos, chicanery, conflict, and violence? Let’s assume that he does go (somewhat) quietly—granted, a huge assumption. What becomes of MAGA? Without the pitchman, French believes, it withers. He notes that there is “no ready heir to his MAGA crown,” observes that MAGA candidates, such as Kari Lake in Arizona, have not fared well in recent elections, and says MAGA is generally a hot mess of weirdness and scandal (see JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Marjorie Taylor Greene).

Will the craving for Trump’s politics of cruelty, carnage, conspiracy, and contempt evaporate? There may be no obvious successor. Yet with Trump gone, the radicalized base of the GOP will still be here. Certainly, there might be disruptive battles within the party among those who desire to claim the throne and no quick and clear resolution. (Tom Cotton versus Ted Cruz!) But the 30 percent or so of Republicans who believe the QAnon conspiracy theory that the government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation—a bonkers idea that Trump has legitimized and amplified—are not going away. Nor are the more than half of Republicans who still buy Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 election. And their yearning for that red meat of hate and demonization may well remain.

MAGA was not a break from the GOP’s past; it was an evolution. Many anti-Trump right-wingers can’t come to terms with that.

I understand why French and other anti-Trump conservatives want to view MAGA as an anomaly and tie its dominance on the right to the machinations and success of just one extraordinary man. Get rid of that guy and the GOP has a shot at becoming once more a normal party. This absolves French and other lifelong conservatives of having spent decades within a party as its base was guided by GOP leaders and influencers into its extremism of today. MAGA was not a break from the GOP’s past; it was an evolution. Many anti-Trump right-wingers can’t come to terms with that. (One who has is Stuart Stevens, formerly Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, who acknowledged his own role in the GOP’s devolution in his book, It Was All a Lie.)

Trump is not the cause of the disease that ails French and the rest of us. He sussed out how to capitalize on dangerous sentiments that have been brewing and nurtured for years. He is just the symptom. It’s pretty to think that one election can rid the body politic of this virus. Preventing Trump from returning to power is a first step, but stronger and longer treatment will likely be necessary to cleanse this system of Trumpism.

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.

“I hate saying, ‘I told you so.’” That is one of the biggest lies. I, for one, enjoy saying it. That is, on the right occasions. And I’d like to point out that in recent months I have repeatedly warned that Russian tyrant and war criminal Vladmir Putin intended to mess with the US election to help Donald Trump once again. (See here, here, and here.) This week, in a pair of actions, the Justice Department outlined elaborate schemes mounted by covert Moscow operators to influence the 2024 campaign. But in each instance, the feds declined to explicitly state the obvious: The Kremlin efforts have been designed and mounted to aid Trump’s bid to regain power.

In one case, the Justice Department seized 32 internet domains used in a Russian operation called “Doppelganger” to spread disinformation in the United States. These sites mimicked legitimate American news sites. (One example: washingtonpost.pm—as opposed to washingtonpost.com.) The Russians, the DOJ noted, “used these domains, among others, to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections.” The sites often posted legitimate stories but would include a false piece that would aim to undermine US support of Ukraine. (One fake Washington Post article claimed the paper had obtained secret video showing that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was scheming with Washington regarding dangerous biolabs.)

In a released statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said of this covert project: “As alleged in our court filings, President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle…directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a campaign to influence the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. An internal planning document created by the Kremlin states that a goal of the campaign is to secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.” But Garland did not specify Moscow’s preference.

In the other action, the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT, the Russian state-controlled media operation, for allegedly secretly funneling $10 million to an American right-wing media outfit. The goal, as Garland put it, was to “create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” The indictment did not name the firm. But as soon as the indictment was released on Wednesday, I and other journalists quickly found one big fat clue: The document noted that the unnamed media outlet identified itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.” That’s how Tenet Media, an operation created last year featuring the work of right-wing and libertarian firebrands such as Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, describes itself. It was easy to Google the phrase and discover that only Tenet popped up. (Meanwhile, the Justice Department also indicted Dimitri Simes, a Soviet-born American citizen, longtime foreign policy think-tanker, and Trump campaign adviser in 2016, for making more than $1 million by working for a sanctioned Russian television channel.)

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco characterized this clandestine operation as an attempt “to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences” and “to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.”

The RT-Tenet story was quite a bombshell: A clutch of far-right and generally pro-Trump commentators influential on social media, particularly among younger people, has allegedly been covertly subsidized by Moscow. One of the founders of the company, Lauren Chen, a right-wing influencer, has been associated with Turning Point USA, the rabidly pro-Trump outfit run by Charlie Kirk, and with Blaze Media, the outlet founded by conservative wild man and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco characterized this clandestine operation as an attempt “to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences” and “to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.” The statement released by the Justice Department to announce this indictment did not mention the 2024 election.

The Justice Department was avoiding saying that these covert Russian ops were attempting to get Trump back in the White House. But it’s not hard to add two and two here. If you’d looked at the YouTube channel for Tenet Media, you would have found one video after another bashing Kamala Harris. While months ago, Tenet was posting all sorts of provocative right-wing material on the US-Mexico border, Ukraine, Black history month, culture wars, and other hot-button issues, while denigrating President Joe Biden—Pool has decried Ukraine as the United States’ greatest enemy and exclaimed, “We should apologize to Russia!”—it has in recent weeks become largely focused on assailing Harris.

Moreover, the affidavit in support of the seizure of those 32 domains includes as attachments internal documents from the Doppelganger operation that state the program’s intent. Where an American presidential candidate or political party was mentioned, the Justice Department redacted their identities and referred to them as “Candidate A” or “Candidate B” and “Political Party A” and “Political Party B.” But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to suss out that “A” represents Trump and the Republicans and “B,” Biden and the Democrats. Thus, the meaning is clear when one of these quasi-redacted documents states, “It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that [Political Party A] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Candidate A supporters) wins over the US public opinion.” (Bold in the original.) This Russian document cites the operation’s goal as to “secure victory” for the GOP candidate. It lists as targets swing state voters, American Jews, Latinos, and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and [messaging] boards, such as 4chan (the ‘backbone’ of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet).”

The Doppelganger project, according to these documents, has been bent on exploiting all the various social media platforms and amplifying media persons on YouTube and elsewhere to exacerbate political conflict within the United States and spread an assortment of talking points: The United States is a country in decline, US support of Ukraine is bankrupting the United States, the Democrats are corrupt and dishonest losers. A list of “campaign topics” in one planning document included “record inflation…risk of job loss for white Americans, privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled…threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants.” Memes, social media posts, comments on social networks and in group chats, and video content (“including news stories in the Fox News style”) promoting all of this were to be directed at Republican voters, Trump supporters, “supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The alleged operation to finance Tenet Media would be in sync with these overarching aims.

Earlier this year, according to the indictment, the Russians allegedly running the Tenet Media operation succeeded in encouraging Tenet to promote video of Tucker Carlson gushing about a Moscow supermarket during a visit to Russia to interview Putin—a visit for which Carlson was rightfully and mightily mocked.

The affidavit and the indictment are chock-full of fascinating details illuminating the ins and outs of this clandestine Russian campaign. Earlier this year, according to the indictment, the Russians allegedly running the Tenet Media operation succeeded in encouraging Tenet to promote video of Tucker Carlson gushing about a Moscow supermarket during a visit to Russia to interview Putin—a visit for which Carlson was rightfully and mightily mocked. (Two years ago, I revealed Kremlin memos showing that Putin’s regime pressured Russian media outlets to feature Carlson in their propaganda reports on the war in Ukraine.) One Russian document attached to the affidavit spells out a social media plan to make Mexico seem like a threat to the United States to help Trump’s candidacy.

As they have done for eight years, Trumpers rushed to declare all of this no big deal and nothing but a Biden administration/Deep State effort to smother the speech of right-wingers. David Sacks, the Silicon Valley bigwig who’s raising money for Trump, huffed, “Even by the standards of Russia, Russia, Russia hoaxes, the Tenet Media/Lauren Chen case makes no sense…As far as Red Scares go, this one seems pretty lame and people are seeing through it. Hopefully this means we’re at the end of Russiagate hoaxes.”

On Fox, host Laura Ingraham, not surprisingly, dismissed the seriousness of the alleged Russian intervention: “The DOJ seems to be back to Russia, Russia, Russia because they announced indictments against Russians for alleged election interference…Are they laying the groundwork for more censorship?” Her guest, failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, embraced the Russia denialism that has infected the Republican Party for eight years: “The reality is that they already did this in 2016. So they have a historical practice. When they are afraid of Donald Trump coming back to office, they invent every figment of imagination of Russia or somebody else putting him there without actually paying attention to the threats coming from our administrative state to free and fair elections in the United States.”

On Friday, Trump referred to the indictment and the seizures of the domains as a “scam.”

For their part, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson maintained they were unaware they were receiving Moscow gold and depicted themselves as victims. They did not publicly reflect on why the Kremlin wanted to prop up them and their comrades with millions of dollars.

With Trump and his political allies either dubious about or opposed to US assistance to Ukraine, Putin has more motivation than ever to try to aid his longtime admirer.

This is the third American presidential election in a row in which Putin has waged covert information warfare against the United States to help Trump. In 2016, he ordered a hack-and-leak operation and a clandestine social media campaign to hinder Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. Four years later, Ukraine officials tied to Russian intelligence spread disinformation designed to smear Joe Biden. He’s one for two and back for the rubber match. With Trump and his political allies either dubious about or opposed to US assistance to Ukraine, Putin has more motivation than ever to try to aid his longtime admirer.

In its public statements, the Justice Department avoided a simple declaration: Russia is secretly screwing with the American information ecosystem to assist Trump. Garland wants to keep these cases from appearing political. But they are deeply political. Russia is conniving to put a lying, misogynistic, chaotic, narcissistic, right-wing authoritarian into the White House—and Trump World is once again denying this reality and, thus, abetting a foreign adversary’s attack on the United States. There should be immediate congressional investigations and hearings. This ought to be front-page news for weeks and fundamentally shape the final leg of the campaign. But if the past is any guide, it won’t. That means Putin has a shot at winning. Even exposure of his plot by the Justice Department might not be enough to thwart it. If Moscow succeeds, it will be not because of any Russian brilliance but due to American decline and weakness.

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

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

“I hate saying, ‘I told you so.’” That is one of the biggest lies. I, for one, enjoy saying it. That is, on the right occasions. And I’d like to point out that in recent months I have repeatedly warned that Russian tyrant and war criminal Vladmir Putin intended to mess with the US election to help Donald Trump once again. (See here, here, and here.) This week, in a pair of actions, the Justice Department outlined elaborate schemes mounted by covert Moscow operators to influence the 2024 campaign. But in each instance, the feds declined to explicitly state the obvious: The Kremlin efforts have been designed and mounted to aid Trump’s bid to regain power.

In one case, the Justice Department seized 32 internet domains used in a Russian operation called “Doppelganger” to spread disinformation in the United States. These sites mimicked legitimate American news sites. (One example: washingtonpost.pm—as opposed to washingtonpost.com.) The Russians, the DOJ noted, “used these domains, among others, to covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections.” The sites often posted legitimate stories but would include a false piece that would aim to undermine US support of Ukraine. (One fake Washington Post article claimed the paper had obtained secret video showing that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was scheming with Washington regarding dangerous biolabs.)

In a released statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said of this covert project: “As alleged in our court filings, President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle…directed Russian public relations companies to promote disinformation and state-sponsored narratives as part of a campaign to influence the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. An internal planning document created by the Kremlin states that a goal of the campaign is to secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election.” But Garland did not specify Moscow’s preference.

In the other action, the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT, the Russian state-controlled media operation, for allegedly secretly funneling $10 million to an American right-wing media outfit. The goal, as Garland put it, was to “create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” The indictment did not name the firm. But as soon as the indictment was released on Wednesday, I and other journalists quickly found one big fat clue: The document noted that the unnamed media outlet identified itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.” That’s how Tenet Media, an operation created last year featuring the work of right-wing and libertarian firebrands such as Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson, describes itself. It was easy to Google the phrase and discover that only Tenet popped up. (Meanwhile, the Justice Department also indicted Dimitri Simes, a Soviet-born American citizen, longtime foreign policy think-tanker, and Trump campaign adviser in 2016, for making more than $1 million by working for a sanctioned Russian television channel.)

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco characterized this clandestine operation as an attempt “to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences” and “to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.”

The RT-Tenet story was quite a bombshell: A clutch of far-right and generally pro-Trump commentators influential on social media, particularly among younger people, has allegedly been covertly subsidized by Moscow. One of the founders of the company, Lauren Chen, a right-wing influencer, has been associated with Turning Point USA, the rabidly pro-Trump outfit run by Charlie Kirk, and with Blaze Media, the outlet founded by conservative wild man and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco characterized this clandestine operation as an attempt “to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences” and “to illegally manipulate American public opinion by sowing discord and division.” The statement released by the Justice Department to announce this indictment did not mention the 2024 election.

The Justice Department was avoiding saying that these covert Russian ops were attempting to get Trump back in the White House. But it’s not hard to add two and two here. If you’d looked at the YouTube channel for Tenet Media, you would have found one video after another bashing Kamala Harris. While months ago, Tenet was posting all sorts of provocative right-wing material on the US-Mexico border, Ukraine, Black history month, culture wars, and other hot-button issues, while denigrating President Joe Biden—Pool has decried Ukraine as the United States’ greatest enemy and exclaimed, “We should apologize to Russia!”—it has in recent weeks become largely focused on assailing Harris.

Moreover, the affidavit in support of the seizure of those 32 domains includes as attachments internal documents from the Doppelganger operation that state the program’s intent. Where an American presidential candidate or political party was mentioned, the Justice Department redacted their identities and referred to them as “Candidate A” or “Candidate B” and “Political Party A” and “Political Party B.” But one need not be Sherlock Holmes to suss out that “A” represents Trump and the Republicans and “B,” Biden and the Democrats. Thus, the meaning is clear when one of these quasi-redacted documents states, “It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that [Political Party A] point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Candidate A supporters) wins over the US public opinion.” (Bold in the original.) This Russian document cites the operation’s goal as to “secure victory” for the GOP candidate. It lists as targets swing state voters, American Jews, Latinos, and the “community of American gamers, users of Reddit and [messaging] boards, such as 4chan (the ‘backbone’ of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet).”

The Doppelganger project, according to these documents, has been bent on exploiting all the various social media platforms and amplifying media persons on YouTube and elsewhere to exacerbate political conflict within the United States and spread an assortment of talking points: The United States is a country in decline, US support of Ukraine is bankrupting the United States, the Democrats are corrupt and dishonest losers. A list of “campaign topics” in one planning document included “record inflation…risk of job loss for white Americans, privileges for people of color, perverts, and disabled…threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants.” Memes, social media posts, comments on social networks and in group chats, and video content (“including news stories in the Fox News style”) promoting all of this were to be directed at Republican voters, Trump supporters, “supporters of traditional family values,” and “White Americans representing the lower-middle and middle class.” The alleged operation to finance Tenet Media would be in sync with these overarching aims.

Earlier this year, according to the indictment, the Russians allegedly running the Tenet Media operation succeeded in encouraging Tenet to promote video of Tucker Carlson gushing about a Moscow supermarket during a visit to Russia to interview Putin—a visit for which Carlson was rightfully and mightily mocked.

The affidavit and the indictment are chock-full of fascinating details illuminating the ins and outs of this clandestine Russian campaign. Earlier this year, according to the indictment, the Russians allegedly running the Tenet Media operation succeeded in encouraging Tenet to promote video of Tucker Carlson gushing about a Moscow supermarket during a visit to Russia to interview Putin—a visit for which Carlson was rightfully and mightily mocked. (Two years ago, I revealed Kremlin memos showing that Putin’s regime pressured Russian media outlets to feature Carlson in their propaganda reports on the war in Ukraine.) One Russian document attached to the affidavit spells out a social media plan to make Mexico seem like a threat to the United States to help Trump’s candidacy.

As they have done for eight years, Trumpers rushed to declare all of this no big deal and nothing but a Biden administration/Deep State effort to smother the speech of right-wingers. David Sacks, the Silicon Valley bigwig who’s raising money for Trump, huffed, “Even by the standards of Russia, Russia, Russia hoaxes, the Tenet Media/Lauren Chen case makes no sense…As far as Red Scares go, this one seems pretty lame and people are seeing through it. Hopefully this means we’re at the end of Russiagate hoaxes.”

On Fox, host Laura Ingraham, not surprisingly, dismissed the seriousness of the alleged Russian intervention: “The DOJ seems to be back to Russia, Russia, Russia because they announced indictments against Russians for alleged election interference…Are they laying the groundwork for more censorship?” Her guest, failed GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, embraced the Russia denialism that has infected the Republican Party for eight years: “The reality is that they already did this in 2016. So they have a historical practice. When they are afraid of Donald Trump coming back to office, they invent every figment of imagination of Russia or somebody else putting him there without actually paying attention to the threats coming from our administrative state to free and fair elections in the United States.”

On Friday, Trump referred to the indictment and the seizures of the domains as a “scam.”

For their part, Tim Pool and Benny Johnson maintained they were unaware they were receiving Moscow gold and depicted themselves as victims. They did not publicly reflect on why the Kremlin wanted to prop up them and their comrades with millions of dollars.

With Trump and his political allies either dubious about or opposed to US assistance to Ukraine, Putin has more motivation than ever to try to aid his longtime admirer.

This is the third American presidential election in a row in which Putin has waged covert information warfare against the United States to help Trump. In 2016, he ordered a hack-and-leak operation and a clandestine social media campaign to hinder Hillary Clinton and boost Trump. Four years later, Ukraine officials tied to Russian intelligence spread disinformation designed to smear Joe Biden. He’s one for two and back for the rubber match. With Trump and his political allies either dubious about or opposed to US assistance to Ukraine, Putin has more motivation than ever to try to aid his longtime admirer.

In its public statements, the Justice Department avoided a simple declaration: Russia is secretly screwing with the American information ecosystem to assist Trump. Garland wants to keep these cases from appearing political. But they are deeply political. Russia is conniving to put a lying, misogynistic, chaotic, narcissistic, right-wing authoritarian into the White House—and Trump World is once again denying this reality and, thus, abetting a foreign adversary’s attack on the United States. There should be immediate congressional investigations and hearings. This ought to be front-page news for weeks and fundamentally shape the final leg of the campaign. But if the past is any guide, it won’t. That means Putin has a shot at winning. Even exposure of his plot by the Justice Department might not be enough to thwart it. If Moscow succeeds, it will be not because of any Russian brilliance but due to American decline and weakness.

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

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

Back in the Before Times—when Joe Biden was the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee—I had some advice for the fella for his debate with Donald Trump: Employ strategic derision. Here’s how I put it:

Like most bullies, Trump cannot bear humiliation. His whole act is an act. He pretends to be strong and the best in everything—with the “best words” that come from a “very, very large brain.” But his malignant narcissism is clearly interlaced with deep insecurity. Real stable geniuses don’t have to brag about being stable geniuses. Trump might best be attacked not with frontal assaults about his lies, shortcomings, and misdeeds but with mockery. One goal Biden ought to have during the debate and afterward is to provoke Trump into the most erratic Trumpish behavior so voters are reminded of the perils of placing this guy in charge again. Ridicule can be quite useful in this regard.

Biden, as we all know, was not up to this task when he faced off against Trump in June. It takes a certain sass and a talk-show-host facility to pull off such a maneuver. And it’s best done with a smile or a twinkle in the eye—preferably both. But during the Democrats’ convention, I felt seen—or listened to. Trump was routinely treated with mocking scorn that aimed to portray him as small, weak, and, yes, weird. Yet at the same time, convention speakers effectively highlighted the multiple threats he poses. When it came to balancing the dissing and the warning, the Dems got the mix pitch-perfect.

At their Chicago convention, the Democrats embraced a more positive overarching theme than democracy-could-die. That was freedom—as defined in a progressive manner.

As a candidate for reelection, Biden proclaimed that a Trump restoration could mean the end of American democracy. He noted that this election would determine the United States’ future as a constitutional republic. This was entirely accurate—Trump did try to mount a coup and incited insurrectionist violence—but it was also dark and heavy. And polls showed that Biden’s we-must-fight-for-democracy message that cast Trump as a Voldemort-like character was not resonating. It was not boosting his campaign.

At their Chicago convention, the Democrats embraced a more positive overarching theme than democracy-could-die. That was freedom—as defined in a progressive manner: freedom from government intervention in your most private decisions, freedom to love who you want, freedom from fear of gun violence, freedom to pursue opportunity within a fair economic system. There was overlap with democracy protection. But freedom is a positive and uplifting notion, while focusing thematically on a threat can be a downer. And when it came to the threat Trump presents, speakers deftly executed a one-two punch that combined put-downs of him with alerts regarding the dangers of Trump 2.0.

New York Rep. Hakim Jeffries, the top Democrat in the House, offered a good example with this snarky poke: “Donald Trump is like an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won’t go away. He has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason.” Then Jeffries went on to cite the damage Trump did as president: “Trump was the mastermind of the GOP tax scam, where 83 percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1 percent in America. Trump failed our country during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trump is a chaos agent who is focused on himself, not the American people. Trump tried to destroy our democracy by lying about the election and inciting a violent mob to attack the Capitol. Trump put three extreme justices on the Supreme Court who destroyed Roe v. Wade.”

Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz dismissed Trump as a person less mature than the student body presidents he once taught: “Those teenagers could teach Donald Trump a hell of a lot about what a leader is. Leaders don’t spend all day insulting people and blaming others.” But the Minnesota governor also pointed out that Trump and his crew in recent years have threatened to repeal the Affordable Care Act and weaken Social Security and Medicare, and he raised the prospect of abortion bans across the country.

As you will recall, the Obamas went to town on Trump. With several sharp jabs, Michelle Obama depicted him as a narrow-minded bigot.

His limited narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hard-working, highly educated, successful people who happen to be Black. I want to know—I want to know—who’s going to tell him, who’s going to tell him, that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs? It’s his same old con. His same old con. Doubling down on ugly, misogynistic, racist lies as a substitute for real ideas and solutions that will actually make people’s lives better.

And her husband slapped Trump hard.

Here’s a 78-year-old billionaire who hasn’t stopped whining about his problems since he rode down his golden escalator nine years ago. It’s been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that’s actually been getting worse now that he’s afraid of losing to Kamala. There’s the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes. It just goes on and on and on. The other day, I heard someone compare Trump to the neighbor who keeps running his leaf blower outside your window every minute of every day. From a neighbor, that’s exhausting. From a president, it’s just dangerous.

When Obama mentioned Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes, his hand motions indicated this might apply to another size issue for Trump. Yes, an off-color reference from a former president.

When it was her turn, Harris neatly summed up this two-fold approach: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.” That is, he’s a clown but one who could do real damage. She demeaned him an agent of “chaos and calamity.” Noting that Trump “tried to throw away your votes” and “sent an armed mob to the to the US Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers,” she outlined the possible perils of a Trump return to power: efforts to shower the wealthy with more tax cuts, to gut the Affordable Care Act, to deploy the Justice Department and the US military against Trump’s domestic foes and critics, and to further restrict women’s reproductive rights. In a bit of a schoolyard diss, Harris said, “Get this. He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions. Simply put, they are out of their minds.” And she told her audience, “Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”

Democrats simultaneously mocked Project 2025 and repeatedly cited the plan as cause to vote against Trump.

Unserious—for a person seeking the most powerful job in the world, that’s quite the insult. The message from all the speeches was that though Trump is a buffoonish egotist who warrants disdain, he nurtures the evil intent of a supervillain.

This strategy of scoff-and-concern was also applied to Project 2025, the far-right and extremist blueprint for a second Trump presidency compiled by the Heritage Foundation and other conservative outfits. Democrats simultaneously mocked it and repeatedly cited the plan as cause to vote against Trump. One night, Saturday Night Live cast member Kenan Thompson appeared onstage—with an oversized edition of the 900-plus-page report—and simultaneously spoofed and skewered it: “You ever seen a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time?”

All of this prevented the convention from becoming an orgy of gloom and doom. One of the themes was joy, and depicting Trump over and over as an all-powerful threat to be feared would have been a buzzkill. Yet the Ds got the tone right by melding humor and concern in the correct amounts.

For years, some Trump antagonists, including the Lincoln Project and George Conway, the onetime Republican and conservative advocate, have pursued the strategy of ridiculing and taunting Trump, believing such actions get under the skin of the failed casino owner and compel him to be even more erratic and nasty. And I’ve thought that Trump is definitely the sort of jerk whose overinflated sense of self—a selling point for some voters—could be punctured with the right jabs. As former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) zinged the former reality TV celebrity, “Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

Exposing that with cheek could be the best way to deflate Trump. The convention did seem to rattle him. On Friday, among the many social media posts he spewed was one that proclaimed, “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” Uh, no. He’s already made parts of the United States a hellscape for women. And this post, undoubtedly, would upset his religious right allies who passionately oppose the concept of reproductive rights. Yet something moved him to push back against the weeklong onslaught.

After the Democrats smoothly orchestrated the Biden-to-Harris transition, they mounted a convention that hit almost all the right notes. (Preventing a Palestinian American state representative from Georgia, who was a Harris supporter, from giving a short speech highlighting the plight of civilians in Gaza was a misstep.) And they succeeded in portraying Trump as both a whiny loser and a real threat to the nation. Still, as we are constantly reminded, there are 10 weeks until the election, and—you know the drill—anything can happen. (Particularly this year.)

The next big event on the schedule is the Harris-Trump debate on September 10 to be held by ABC News. I would offer the same advice to Harris as I did to Biden: deride, deride, deride. But it looks as if she got the memo. She’s a former prosecutor who seems to know how to handle this current felon. After watching the Democrats demean and disparage Trump during the Chicago shindig, Trump and MAGA ought to fret about him going mano-a-mano with Harris, who seems to have his number. If Harris follows the example of the convention, American voters might witness quite a spectacle.

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 of Our Land here.

When JD Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Milwaukee, he lauded the people of eastern Kentucky, his family’s ancestral home. Though it’s one of the poorest regions in the United States, he said, its residents are “very hardworking” and “good” people: “They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat.” He then added, “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.”

Privileged? Who refers to the low-income families of Appalachia as privileged? Vance did not explain and moved on to talk about “American greatness.” But this sentence was something of a dog whistle and a callback to a demagogic rhetoric that Vance has been slinging for years.

During his convention speech, Vance repeated the message that has led the political press to label him a populist: The ruling elites have screwed over Middle America by pushing economic policies that benefit the well-off and harm working-class families. (His support for Donald Trump, who implemented a tax cut that heavily favored the wealthy, has not undercut his standing as a populist.) But Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.

Vance’s populism has a dark underside that has largely gone unnoticed: racism.

Vance has blended working-class resentment and white racial grievance. In various venues, he has charged that plutocrats (whom he doesn’t name) are conspiring with the woke crowd (whoever they are) to silence Middle America. According to Vance, these powerful interests deploy false accusations of racism to prevent people—white people, that is—from complaining about the economic hardships they face. This is how Vance put it in a 2021 interview with conservative talk show host Bill Cunningham:  

Here’s what the elites do. When they say that those people are white privileged, they shut them up. Look, you’re unhappy about your job being shipped overseas? You’re worried that a lawless southern border is going to cause the same poison that killed your daughter to also affect your grandbaby? Don’t you dare complain about that stuff. You are white privileged. You suffer from white rage…What they do is use it as a power play so they can get us to shut up. So they can get us to stop complaining about our own country. And they get to run things without any control, without any pushback from the real people.

As I noted over a year ago, this is deft demagoguery. Vance conflates legitimate concerns about economic power with racist paranoia. It’s much more sophisticated than the usual GOP playing of the race card. Instead, Vance fuses toxic culture wars to bread-and-butter issues. Look at how he weaved all this together when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, last year and sparked a chemical fire. Vance blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his Department of Transportation’s racial equity initiatives for the catastrophe: “I’ve got to say, the Secretary of Transportation…talking about how we have too many white male construction workers instead of the fact that our trains are crashing…This guy needs to do his job.” So the good (white) folk of East Palestine were victimized supposedly because Buttigieg was spending too much time trying to help Black people.

This is what Vance meant when he groused about the media calling his people “privileged.” It was code for “white privileged.” And he was insinuating that such labeling—a.k.a. wokeness—is used to repress these working-class Americans.

This is what Vance meant when he groused about the media calling his people “privileged.” It was code for “white privileged.”

In Milwaukee, Vance did not spell out his racism-shaped populism. He hinted at it, and there’s no telling whether he’s going to be more explicit as he campaigns as Trump’s running mate. But Vance—who only a few years ago was a Never Trumper who compared Trump to Adolf Hitler and who then appeared to be positioning himself as a public intellectual with center-right politics—has demonstrated that he is willing to ally himself with the extremism that has thoroughly infected Trump’s GOP. As I reported last week, Vance recently endorsed a book co-written by an alt-right extremist (who promoted the crazy Pizzagate conspiracy theory) that contends that progressives are part of a group of “unhumans” who for centuries have been trying to destroy civilization. The book says that conservatives must not abide by the rules in countering the left and describes January 6 rioters as “patriots.”

Moreover, Vance has promoted a paranoid and Manichean view of American politics. Here’s what he said at a conservative conference in 2021:

We have lost every single major cultural institution in this country—Big Finance, Big Tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media, and the government. There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control. But there’s one of them, just one that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future, and that’s the constitutional republic that our founders gave us. We are never going to take Facebook, Amazon, Apple and turn them into conservative institutions. We are never going take the universities and turn them into conservative institutions…We might just be able to control the democratic institutions in this country…This is a raw fact of cynical politics. If we’re not willing to use the power given to us in the American constitutional republic, we’re going to lose this country.

In his convention speech, Vance praised Trump’s call for national unity. But that was camouflage. He is not aiming for unity. He has enthusiastically adopted the stance of a far-right culture warrior and has shown he’s willing to exploit racism to advance his form of populism.

Vance got into hot water recently when a video emerged of him referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as one of a group of “childless cat ladies.” And Democrats have taken to calling him and Trump “weird” to cast the Republican ticket as outside the norms of American life. I’m not sure that label will stick and hurt Trump and Vance. But it’s clear that Vance deserves to be tagged as extreme. Throughout his short political career, he has been a chameleon, changing his colors to match his ambitions—that includes aligning with radical conservatives. This offers Democrats much material to show voters that Vance is not a champion of the heartland but a friend of the fringe right.

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