Reich Track, Wrong Track

As Trump lusts for dictatorial authority, John Kelly speaks out in a way that could matter.

Kamala Harris may be facing headwinds among Arab voters, but she just got a shot in the arm among another key Michigan constituency: the Juggalos.

Insane Clown Posse frontman Violent J endorsed Harris in a recent interview with The Daily Show: “I want her to win because she’s a Democrat and I love my mom.”

There you have it, folks—might as well call the race right now. Happy Wednesday.

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John Kelly, pictured on January 31, 2017 in Washington, DC.  (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)

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Witness for the Prosecution

by Bill Kristol

John Kelly has stepped up.

The retired Marine general, and Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, has amplified his previous warnings about Trump’s unfitness for the presidency. In new, recorded interviews with the New York Times, as well as in a discussion with the Atlantic, Kelly provides some of his most wide-ranging comments yet about Trump’s dictatorial aspirations (“He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government”) and the ex-president’s utter contempt not just for military service but for the Constitution and the rule of law.

As a former senior military officer, Kelly explained he was not endorsing any candidate. But he also said “it’s a very dangerous thing to have the wrong person elected to high office.” He has certainly made it clear that Trump is that wrong person.

Do read—and listen to—the whole thing.

Will Kelly’s new comments make a difference? Given that half the American public has been stubbornly resistant for years to facing up to Trump’s manifest unfitness for office, maybe not.

On the other hand, Kelly might very well make a difference. Here’s why.

The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters: 

Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.

This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.

What did move the needle was this message:

Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.”

As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.

I think the takeaway here is pretty obvious: Voters have become inured to many shocking things about Trump, but maybe the one thing that can shake them out of that torpor is people who knew or worked with Trump stepping up to make the case from their own experience.

The messenger matters as much as the message.

And Kelly is a unique messenger. He chose to join the Trump administration, first as homeland security secretary, then as chief of staff. He worked as closely with Trump as president as anyone. As he says, he agreed with some of Trump’s policies. He is a highly respected retired military officer.

I doubt there’s a more convincing messenger to those still uncertain of their vote. I don’t believe there’s a better closing witness against Trump. I hope the Harris campaign puts real effort and money behind amplifying Kelly’s statement as much as possible, including in paid media.

Kamala Harris was a prosecutor. She knows that a prosecutor can assemble evidence and make assertions. But she also knows that a witness can testify to things he’s seen with his own eyes. And she knows that some witnesses have more credibility and impact than others. She knows that you want your closing witness to be your strongest.

As this campaign draws to a close, Kelly is now the strongest witness for the prosecution.

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‘It’s Helping Me Rationalize My Trump Vote’

by Andrew Egger

When the topic of abortion policy comes up on the trail, Donald Trump always hits the same message: Mission Accomplished. In his telling, a broad bipartisan consensus had spent decades pining for the Supreme Court to stamp out Roe v. Wade and return control of abortion policy to the states. “It’s being solved at the state level,” he told CBS News this summer, “and people are very happy about it.”

You have to wonder which people he’s thinking of. After all, right now it seems the only American satisfied with America’s new national abortion policy regime is Trump.

The political backlash from the end of Roe has been enormous. Every state that has put an abortion question directly before its voters, from the deepest red to the brightest blue, has voted in favor of increased access by wide margins. And Democrats see this as their most politically potent issue as they try to stave off Trump’s return to office.

But anti-abortion activists are hardly happier with the new status quo. They spent the Republican presidential primary trying and failing to extract promises from Trump to crack down on abortion at the national level—particularly the distribution of abortion pills through the mail, an increasingly common practice that makes it easy to circumvent state-level restrictions.

National anti-abortion groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America are gritting their teeth through election season with a single mantra: The Democrats would be worse. The “Life on the Ballot” page on SBA’s website is full of attacks on Kamala Harris and other prominent Democrats; Trump isn’t mentioned at all.

But as time goes on and abortion rates continue to tick back up, some anti-abortion activists wonder: How much progress have we even made?

Many Democrats believe Trump’s strenuous attempts to moderate on abortion have been merely an election-season ruse. Many in the anti-abortion movement are at least hoping that’s the case—or that Trump will prove somewhat re-persuadable later if they keep their heads down and remain good team players now.

“The Trump administration has pledged to address the weaponized federal agencies that have manipulated regulations and policy for their own political ends,” Kristi Hamrick of Students for Life Action told The Bulwark. “Chemical abortion pills,” she argued, should absolutely be part of Trump’s federal anti-weaponization agenda: “We believe that an administration concerned about agency overreach will examine the problems with these deadly pills.”

Many activists aren’t holding their breath, however.

“If Trump wins this election, one of the big reasons is it’s gonna be that he found a way to mitigate the abortion attacks,” one pro-life activist told The Bulwark this week. “And so the Republican conventional wisdom from this is gonna be, okay, so we need to not do anything on abortion, we should be pro-choice.”

For some in the movement, like Live Action’s Lila Rose, this danger is acute enough to recommend that anti-abortion voters pull their support from Trump altogether. Others take a more nihilistic view.

“It’s helping me to rationalize my Trump vote, if I’m being honest,” the activist said. “Like, if there’s nothing we can do on the issue, then it is in a way temporarily settled—well, then I can vote on other issues, right? Where if I think Trump is the killer of the pro-life movement, and if he doesn’t get elected pro-life will survive—if I thought that was true, I’d really wrestle with this vote a bit more. I don’t want to support the guy who’s going to kill it. But if it’s already dead?”

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Quick Hits 

PROBABLY JUST A COINCIDENCE: If Donald Trump wins next month, he’ll need a new attorney general, and his team’s got just the patriot to do it. ABC News reports that one person on the campaign’s shortlist is Aileen Cannon, the federal judge who threw out Trump’s classified-documents case on ridiculously spurious grounds earlier this year.

It’s an amazing testament to how Trump views a judge who was supposed to be a neutral arbiter in his case. Trump has made very clear for years what he sees as the chief responsibility of the attorney general: ensuring the Justice Department serves as his own personal law firm. He’s never forgiven his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for failing to shut down the Russia probe, or his second, William Barr, for refusing to help him steal the 2020 election.

And you wonder: Gosh, where did he get the idea Aileen Cannon might be a more pleasantly pliable pick for the job?

The only shock is that she’s on Trump’s AG shortlist and not the fast track for SCOTUS. But plenty of time for that, should another position open up.

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TULSI THE RINO: What a long, strange journey former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s been on! In 2016 she was appearing on the stump for Bernie Sanders. Five years ago, as a Democratic candidate for president, her most notable moment was when she attacked Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor from the drug-decriminalization left. Then she became an increasingly Trump-curious independent. Then she became an official honorary co-chair of his campaign. And last night, at a North Carolina rally, she announced she was joining the GOP, which she called “the party of the people and the party of peace.”

Since Cannon has the inside track for the AG spot, we imagine DOD or DHS is in Gabbard’s future.

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NOT GREAT, BOB: Trump is going on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast Friday, making his closing pitch to the disaffected young men who are Rogan’s primary listeners. He’ll be preaching to the choir, but that doesn’t mean it won’t help him. Young men are highly unreliable voters; if he can convince some small portion of listeners who might have stayed in otherwise to actually turn out, it’ll provide him a significant boost.

There’ve been suggestions in the press that Harris is considering a Rogan appearance too, but more than a week after those reports first appeared we’ve heard little more about it.

We’ll keep saying it until we’re blue in the face: Not doing Rogan would be a major mistake from Team Harris. Rogan’s an agreeable interviewer, not a skilled ambush artist like Bret Baier. And the goal wouldn’t be to win a bunch of people over—just to inject enough “well, maybe she’s not so bad” vibes to convince that critical mass of Trump-curious Roganites to spend their election day with their butts firmly planted on the couch.

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