At the End, Never Trump

The way to close the election is to illuminate Trump's unique threat.

Wild times we live in: The Bulwark’s publisher, Sarah Longwell, will be moderating an event in Pennsylvania this morning with Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney, as Harris makes her closing-days pitch to the Never Trump contingent. Our old pal Charlie Sykes will moderate a similar event in Wisconsin later today. (Imagine traveling back to 2015 and trying to convince anybody how this was all going to shake out!)

You’ll be able to stream the Pennsylvania event here starting at 11:15 eastern time.

Two weeks and change to go. Happy Monday.

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Vice President Kamala Harris, left, greets former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney during a campaign event at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, on Thursday, October 3, 2024. (Photo by Joel Angel Juarez for the Washington Post via Getty Images.)

The Closing Message Harris Should Make

by William Kristol

After the Mets were eliminated by the Dodgers last night, an old friend and fellow New Yorker texted me: “Well, plenty of reasons to be optimistic for 2025. Spring training starts in 100 days.”

What a good attitude! No complaining about the 13 runners the Mets left on base. No criticism of the players. No lamenting the baseball fates. No earnest invocation of John Greenleaf Whittier: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”

One great thing about sports is that you can quickly move on from “it might have been” to “next year, it could be.”

And in a time of political calm and civic health, you can adopt a similar attitude: Well, we fell short in this election, but we’ll win next time.

But there are also times of crisis, when the stakes are too high to permit resignation or equanimity. At such a time, you can’t confidently look over the immediate horizon to the possibilities and hope of the next election cycle. This is such a time.

At present, we have two weeks left to avert what would surely be the most damaging election result in our lifetimes. The bad news is that the odds of success are right now only about 50-50.

The good news is that the Harris campaign seems to be closing with the right message. That message, not to put too fine a point on it, is: Never Trump.

It made sense for the Harris campaign to stress first its positive message about Kamala Harris, to spend time introducing her to the American public and making her case. They did this well, and it took them from the deficit they inherited from Joe Biden to an even race. But now they need to close by reminding the public just how dangerous and disastrous a Trump second term would be.

And one way to do that is by highlighting the Republicans supporting Harris. Harris did that at Washington Crossing on Thursday. Today, the vice president is appearing with Liz Cheney in three swing states. And not only with Liz Cheney—but also with Sarah Longwell in Pennsylvania and Charlie Sykes in Wisconsin.

Why the prominence of Never Trump Republicans in these closing days? Because it’s Never Trump Republicans who’ve been particularly alert to the threat of Donald Trump to our democracy, to our liberties, to our constitutional order, and to the liberal international order. That’s after all why we broke with our party.

Of course many Democrats have also been equally alert to the dangers of Trump. But voters can figure that Democrats always oppose Republicans, and often do so with heated rhetoric. And voters seem surprisingly resistant to giving Democrats the credit they deserve for not being the party that has produced a presidential candidate who is a fundamental threat to the constitutional order.

Why that may be is a topic for another day. But it is the case that Republican opposition to Trump can bring home the extraordinary risk of Trump and the threat of Trumpism in a way that Democratic opposition can’t.

And sounding that alarm loud and clear is what’s needed to win this race. The veteran Democratic strategist and former AFL-CIO political director, Michael Podhorzer, makes this point in his most recent newsletter.

Based on a detailed analysis of voting from 2016 on, Podhorzer shows that Democrats have been winning elections due to an anti-MAGA majority that has formed thanks to a “higher turnout of less partisan voters who are voting against Trump and MAGA Republicans, not necessarily for Democrats.”

In 2020, Biden won the key Electoral College states because enough of those who were not enthusiastic about voting for Biden were sufficiently motivated by the prospects of a second Trump term to vote against Trump.

But, Podhrzer warns, “Right now, evidence suggests that many of these same voters are less alarmed than they could be about the consequences of a second Trump term.” Podhorzer marshals a good deal of evidence that loosely affiliated voters in swing states won’t be moved to vote for Harris unless they are alarmed that Trump will follow through in a damaging way on his agenda in areas which they care about. And as of now, not enough of them are sufficiently convinced that will happen.

Liz Cheney and other Republican validators can help Harris sound that alarm.

Intelligent Trump supporters know this is an effective case against him. That’s why Lindsey Graham was shouting yesterday on Meet the Press: “To every Republican supporting [Kamala Harris]: What the hell are you doing? You’re supporting the most radical nominee in the history of American politics.”

The truth is that Trump is clearly the most radical nominee in modern American political history. He and his supporters boast about this! But Lindsey knows that the Republican voices against Trump and for Harris could have a disproportionate political impact.

And it’s why JD Vance bitterly attacked Cheney yesterday. “She’s not motivated by a love of this country. She’s a resentful, petty, small person,” he said, adding that she’s motivated “by an obsessive hatred of the people who cost her Wyoming congressional seat.” This is of course ludicrous. It was Cheney’s love of country that led her knowingly to risk her congressional seat. The idea that the loss of that seat in 2022 is what has been motivating her efforts since January 6, 2021, is risible.

Graham and Vance were once Never Trumpers. They know, deep down, the truth and the power of the Never Trump argument. They may be particularly sensitive to the political effect it can have.

This is the time to have that effect. This is the time to sound the alarm, and not to let any of our fellow Americans be lulled into complacency about Trump.

Unlike baseball, this is no time to look ahead to spring training. It’s no time to wait ‘till next year. It’s no time to leave any runners on base. It’s time to bring every possible pro-democracy voter home.

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Attendees get excited prior to the start of Republican presidential candidate, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley's rally on March 4, 2024 in Fort Worth, Texas.  (Photo by Emil Lippe / Getty Images.)

Please, Mr. Trump: Keep Spurning Nikki Haley

by Andrew Egger

At this late date, two groups of theoretically undecided voters still matter. There’s the vast pile of disaffected, disinterested folks who’ve paid the election little attention, whom Trump and Harris are trying to track down through appearances on offbeat podcasts and a monsoon of paid advertising.

Then there’s the much smaller group: The Republican or Republican-leaning voters who don’t like Donald Trump but still can’t decide if they can make themselves vote for Kamala Harris. This group is represented by those who kept voting for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, long after it was plain those votes no longer mattered.

In theory, Trump wants the Haley Republican vote. Happily for him, he has a very useful surrogate in his corner: Haley herself, who endorsed him and spoke at the GOP convention back in June.

Last Thursday, at the Bulwark event in Philadelphia, I noted how encouraging it was that Trump, in his arrogance, was declining to seek his former bitter opponent’s help. When I got back to my hotel afterward and saw Marc Caputo’s fresh reporting that Haley was in talks with Trump world to get out on the trail on his behalf, it felt like sign that he was actually being shrewd.

But then Trump went on Fox & Friends Friday morning.

Brian Kilmeade asked if Trump would he be asking Haley out onto the trail in the race’s closing days. Trump instantly bristled.

“I’ll do what I have to do,” he scoffed. “Let me just tell you—Nikki Haley and I fought, and I beat her by 50, 60, 90 points. I beat her in her own state by numbers that nobody’s ever been beaten by.”

What’s going on here is clear. Trump’s advisers desperately want him to campaign with Haley down the stretch. They recognize it would be just the signal they need to those fence-sitting Republicans—and the women among them in particular—looking for any reason to feel comfortable with a Trump vote.

But Trump correctly perceives that his team wants this because they believe him to be weak with that group of voters. And Trump, driven as ever by his ego, can’t admit that this might be true—either to himself or to others. After all, isn’t he already doing plenty of high-quality outreach to women himself?

“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger,” Trump said, addressing women, at a Pennsylvania event last month. “You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”

That’s the secret sauce, baby, he thinks to himself. I’d like to see Nikki Haley top that.

Up at the site today, A.B. Stoddard has a great piece running down the many, many ways in which Trump is crash-landing into November—“canceling events, less carefully blending his BBQ-sauce-tinted bronzer, admiring Arnold Palmer’s pecker, empathizing with Harvey Weinstein, cursing before Catholic priests, lamenting a fictional loss of cows, and going full fascist.” It’s painfully obvious, watching him, that he’s older, more exhausted, crankier, loopier, and less emotionally regulated than ever before.

But if he loses next month, having once again spurned both Haley and her likely, still-gettable voters, the tragic flaw that cost him the election may have been the one he’s had all along: His superhuman levels of awe-inspiring hubris.

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Quick Hits

MITCH, PLEASE: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell may have endorsed Donald Trump, but that apparently doesn’t mean he doesn’t think Trump should be in jail. “If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know who has,” McConnell told journalist Michael Tackett shortly after special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump with federal crimes last year. “There’s no doubt who inspired [January 6th],” McConnell added, “and I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it.”

The quotes come from Tackett’s forthcoming biography of McConnell, The Price of Power, which comes out later this month. In a statement to Axios, McConnell didn’t deny he’d been quoted accurately: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”

And hey, there may be no “I” in “team”—but there’s also no “convicted felon” either.

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A LONG TALL TALE: You’d have a hard time finding a single better illustration of the shambolic closing act to Trump’s 2024 campaign than his Saturday rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. That rally kicked off with an extended riff on the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitals: “This is a guy that was all man . . . when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.’” A little later, Trump referred to Kamala Harris as “a shit vice president.”

Ahead of Trump on stage was former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown, known for his years of hall-of-fame caliber production for the Pittsburgh Steelers and his true lunatic behavior at the end of his career and in the years since. “I love you guys,” he told the MAGA crowd. “I make all you guys the crackers of the days today. Make some noise for yourself.”

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JILL THE PILL: A New York Times profile of Jill Stein to boil the blood up this morning:

“The goal is to punish the vice president,” Hassan Abdel Salam, a founder of Abandon Harris, a group dedicated to her defeat, said this month at a rally in Dearborn, Mich., headlined by Ms. Stein. The group has since endorsed her.

“We are not in a position to win the White House,” another speaker, Kshama Sawant, a former member of the Seattle City Council, told a crowd of about 100 inside an Arab American cultural center. “But we do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan.”

In the interview, Ms. Stein said she had “kind of a divergent point of view” of her candidacy, with an emphasis on the “kind of.”

“I myself do not speak in terms of defeating one candidate,” she said. “But I really understand—for the communities that are being savaged by Kamala Harris right now and Biden—I totally understand why their prime directive right now is to clarify that this comes with a price to pay.”

Read the whole thing.

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