Grading Trump on the 2016 Curve
Plus: Swing-state voters tend to think Trump, not Harris, is ‘too extreme.’
One thing’s for sure: Kamala Harris won’t lose for lack of scratch.
The Harris campaign and Democratic Party raked in a combined $361 million in August, the campaign said this morning. The haul leaves Harris with $404 million to spend down the home stretch, compared to “just” $295 million in Trump and the GOP’s coffers. (These things are getting expensive! Make American Elections Non-Existential Again!)
In a statement, the campaign called its August “the best grassroots fundraising month in presidential history,” saying that 1.3 million people have given their first donation of the cycle and that three quarters of those made no contributions during the last presidential election. Happy Friday.
Stupid Ideas, Stupidly Expressed
—Andrew Egger
If elected, what specific legislation would Donald Trump seek to pass to lower childcare costs in America? Boy, is he glad you asked.
Trump was asked this question at an Economic Club of New York event yesterday. Come on the journey of his answer with us:
Well, I would do that. And we’re sitting down—you know, I was—somebody we had, Sen. Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, childcare is childcare, it couldn’t—you know, there’s something—you have to have it. In this country you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare. But those numbers are small, relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth—but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about.
We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you.
Reminder: It’s Kamala Harris who’s supposedly this race’s word-salad candidate.
Trump routinely gets a pass on this sort of thing because the media curve for grading the comprehensibility of what he says is still basically where it was when he was a political novice in 2016. But the idea that this pablum is the best we can expect from a guy who has been running for or serving as president for nearly a decade now is insane. Trump has picked up plenty of new knowledge in that time—his brain is swimming with esoterica about the various times he felt badly treated by his enemies in Washington or the media—but in basic matters of policy he’s still just out there winging it.
If you spelunk for it, there is a policy thought to be found in the submerged cavern of Trump’s childcare answer. Unfortunately, the cleaned-up thought is just another kind of total nonsense.
Why does Trump instantly launch from a question about childcare into a ramble about tariffs? Because Trump’s vision of economic policy has always been founded on the simplistic, ridiculous notion of tariffs as mercantile cheat codes. As I wrote back in June:
Economic policy, as a rule, is about managing tradeoffs. But Trump has never believed tariffs involve tradeoffs. In his mind, tariffs are simple: the more the United States slaps on other countries, the better we perform economically. It’s literally just free money, and the only reason not to push the pedal to the metal is out of some goody-two-shoes sense of global noblesse oblige. But nice try, global leaders: Trump is too smart to get suckered by that sort of argument! America First!
Childcare is important, so we won’t forget to pay for it when the tariff windfall kicks in. That’s the mental gibberish buried in the verbal gibberish of Trump’s answer.
Join the good fight against gibberish of all kinds: Subscribe to Bulwark+ today!
Voters Against Extremism
—William Kristol
A CNN poll of swing state voters earlier this week seemed at first another unsurprising drop in the overflowing polling bucket. The survey showed Kamala Harris with a modest lead in Michigan and Wisconsin, Donald Trump with a similar small edge in Arizona, and the states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada effectively dead even.
In other words: It was just another poll showing it’s a very close race.
But below the toplines were more interesting numbers. I’ll let the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake explain:
The swing-state polling asked about whether voters viewed the candidates as “too extreme.” But then it took things a step further and asked people who agreed with the statement that a candidate was “too extreme” whether that candidate was also “so extreme that they pose a threat to the country.”
Across six key swing states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—an average of 54 percent of registered voters said Trump was “too extreme,” with 48 percent also saying that he threatens the country. In each state, at least half of voters said Trump was “too extreme,” and at least 46 percent said he was a threat to the country.
Harris’s numbers were significantly lower: An average of 44 percent said she was “too extreme,” and just 39 percent regarded her perceived extremeness as a threat to the country. In no state did a majority regard her as too extreme; most voters instead regarded her as “generally mainstream.”
Elections are about liking the candidate you’re voting for. But they’re also about voting against a candidate you find unacceptable.
The fact that a majority of swing state voters think Trump is “too extreme”—as they do in this poll—suggests he is beatable. The fact that Harris has an edge of ten percentage points in not being “too extreme”—suggests that she can beat him.
Or if you want to focus on the core vote for each candidate: If voters vote against the person they perceive as “so extreme that they pose a threat to the country,” Harris starts off with 46 percent of the vote, Trump with 39 percent.
So as Blake summarizes it: “To the extent this election is about Americans worrying about the candidates harming the country, it seems Harris has a real advantage.”
But to make this potential advantage real, the question of extremism has to be front of mind when people vote.
Fortunately, MAGA world seems committed to helping make this happen.
This week, for example, Tucker Carlson hosted on his podcast someone named Darryl Cooper. Carlson said he considers Cooper perhaps “the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.” And Cooper promptly did his thing, as he’s done before, which is to excuse Hitler and minimize the Holocaust.
And—surprise!—it turns out that the Republican candidate for vice president, JD Vance, is also a Cooper fan.
Of course, Trump and Vance are even bigger fans of Carlson, who had a major speaking role at their convention, and with whom Vance is scheduled to appear later this month.
The willing embrace of Carlson-Cooper Holocaust denial and Hitler apologetics? That seems like extremism. No, that is extremism. It’s the kind of thing that could and should hurt Trump and Vance.
But it’s up to the anti-extremist and pro-democracy coalition supporting Harris to make sure that voters do know about this, as they need to see to it that voters are aware of so many other instances of Trump-Vance extremism. From election denial to vaccine denial to Holocaust denial, the examples pile up. And if voters aren’t allowed to ignore the evidence of extremism, I don’t believe Trump and Vance will be able to avoid a fitting judgment in November.
Quick Hits
THE FACTS OF LIFE: A JD Vance comment about school shootings yesterday kicked up a firestorm—and became a Rorschach test. “I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said of such mass shootings. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets and we have got to bolster security at our schools.”
Vance’s suggestion that such shootings are simply a “fact of life” quickly went viral, with many Democrats comparing it to the old headline from the Onion: “No Way to Prevent This, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Republicans complained that Vance had been taken out of context: Hadn’t he been clear he doesn’t like that these shootings have become a “fact of life”? Didn’t he offer a policy solution?
But of course the policy solution Vance offers—armed security at every school in the nation—is the sort of solution that does treat “the nation will always been so awash in guns that troubled teens will often have little trouble getting their hands on enough materiel to kill dozens of people” as a baseline that’s not going to change. Some would argue that whether that will remain a “fact of life” is the whole question.
THROWING IN THE TOWEL: Hunter Biden’s California tax evasion trial, which was just gearing up to start, is suddenly and unexpectedly over: Biden said yesterday he would plead guilty to all nine charges. In a statement, Biden said he was trying to save his family “more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment. . . . For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this.” How the plea will affect his sentencing remains to be seen: The plea involved no deal with prosecutors, who were blindsided by the move, so the president’s son may still face up to 17 years in prison.
Cheap Shots
At least the Republicans are finally being honest about school shootings. They are a fact of life because the Republicans refuse to work with Democrats on any meaningful policy Solutions around gun rights.
The other thing that annoys me is that Vance said we need more security at schools. Ok, whatever. I would rather tackle the gun issue but I’ll play his game. How did security do at Parkland? Or at Uvalde? The guys at Uvalde were trained SWAT officers and they didn’t do shit for an hour. More security at schools is just hot air. One it doesn’t work, two Republicans would never fund the additional money it would cost to add security to thousands of schools.
I have to confess, the more I watch Trump's mind turn to mush, the angrier I get as this country.
What more can the man do to prove that he is unfit before people will actually start to believe him?