#john micklethwait

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nikki McCann Ramírez and Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone:

Donald Trump continued his pre-election economic event tour on Tuesday with a lengthy interview with Bloomberg at the Economic Club of Chicago. It was a total mess.  Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he’s running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies. Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews. Micklethwait didn’t weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump’s total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased.

Trump gets schooled on tariffs

The central pillar of Trump’s economic plan is widespread tariffs on all imported goods, with penalties appearing to increase depending on how much he dislikes the country. Economists have warned that such a policy could have devastating effects on American consumers, who would be saddled with increased costs for all imported goods.  [...]

Trump gets frustrated and bashes the interviewer

Micklethwait’s attempts to keep Trump on topic earned him no grace from the former president, who hates few things more than being contradicted.  When Micklethwait asked Trump to address a report by The Wall Street Journal estimating that his economic proposals would raise the national debt by upwards of $7 trillion, the former president fell back on his standard playbook: bashing the interviewer.  “What does The Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything, and so have you by the way, you’ve been wrong,” Trump replied, crossing his arms and curling into his seat.  [...]

Trump claims his rambling is strategic

At one point, after Trump spent minutes meandering through multiple trains of thought in response to a question about the American dollar’s status as an international reserve currency, Micklethwait attempted to interject into his rambling. Trump wasn’t happy. “You have got to be able to finish a thought because it is very important,” Trump said.  “You’ve gone from the dollar to [Emmanuel Macron],” Micklethwait countered.  The former president claimed that his speaking style was “called the weave” and that “it’s all these different things happening.”  OK then.

Today in front of The Economic Club of Chicago, Dementia DonOld revealed that he isn’t up to the task for the Presidency for a 2nd time should he get elected, as he was constantly pressed by Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait on how he would enact his economic agenda and ludicrously defending his ramblings as “the weave.”

Three weeks from now (if they haven’t voted already), Americans need to reject this cognitively-challenged fascist dementia patient at the ballot box and vote for Kamala Harris, who is sane and has actual cognitive skills to do the job.

See Also:

Daily Kos: Another public appearance confirms that Trump is an unstable mess

HuffPost: Trump Says Experts Are All 'Wrong' For Telling Him His Tariff Proposals Won't Work

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

M.Wuerker

* * * *

"WE SHALL NOBLY SAVE, OR MEANLY LOSE, THE LAST BEST HOPE OF EARTH"

TCinLA

Oct 16, 2024

In what is now a little less than three weeks, the world’s oldest democracy will conclude a referendum on whether democracy will be maintained or be replaced by fascism.

I wish to hell I could write something more subtle. But there’s nothing subtle to write.

160 years ago, President Lincoln posed the choice the country face in the election of 1864 - held in the midst of the Civil War - thus: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

That choice is before us again.

And this time it is even more stark.

The media continues to struggle - at the infrequent times they deign to even try - to use language that clarifies all this; with rare exception, the best they can do is to call the situation “extraordinary,” “unusual,” and “unprecedented.” Or at least they consider the possibility of using those words on the few occasions where they aren’t putting all their effort into telling us “Nothing to see here, folks, move along,” that it’s just another of those every-four-year competitions between two candidates who each love America and only want the best for us.

On Monday, both Trump and Kamala Harris held campaign events.

Trump’s town hall devolved into one of the most bizarre political events of the campaign, as he stopped taking questions (that he didn’t answer when they were asked), and stood dazed and confused on the stage for 39 long minutes, listening to music as he “danced” by himself while his staff played music from his personal Spotify list and the governor of South Dakota acted like a children’s show host, clapping along to the music as if everything was completely normal.

At about the same time, Kamala Harris held an energetic and positive rally; it was well- organized, inspirational, with accompanying music from artists who personally approved use of their songs by the candidate.

Coverage of the two events was mind-boggling, as the corporate media either completely ignored Trump’s behavior, or sanewashed it by calling it “a concert,” or otherwise acted like the two events were the same. There was no mention at all that the oldest candidate to campaign for president had “sundowned” in front of his supporters for close to three-quarters of an hour. The Guardian - which should definitely know better! - and the WaPo, which one would hope might know better, both called it a “dance party.” CBS and ABC described it as an “impromptu concert.” Surprisingly, the New York Times actually called it “odd,” while NBC used the word “surreal,” to describe the event. Trump was so far gone that when he “came around” at the end, he told his supporters to be sure to “vote on January 5.”

Clearly, there is nothing Trump can do that will get the media to tell their audiences the truth about what is happening to him.

But yesterday, the receipts were there for anyone who cared to look. Trump did a live interview at an event put on by Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. It was another train wreck.

The entire sorry show began with Trump showing up an hour late. Moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, proceeded to ask real questions regarding Trump’s economic plans, which the former “dumbest fucking student who ever walked in my classroom” (in the words of a Wharton professor whose class young Donald was allowed to AUDIT because he failed to qualify for acceptance into Wharton) answered with rants and slogans. Micklethwait - a Brit who obviously does not suffer fools easily or at all - repeatedly corrected Trump and redirected him to the actual questions. Trump doesn’t like being publicly schooled or questioned, and the interview quickly grew angry and combative. On being corrected by Micklethwait for misunderstanding how tariffs work, Trump replied (in front of an audience of people who do understand how tariffs work): “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” When Mickelthwait pointed out that an analysis by the Wall Street Journal stated his plans would explode the national debt, Trump wrapped his arms around himself like a petulant 10 year old being corrected and replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

As Micklethwait continued to conduct journalism with Trump, the response was more and more outlandish statements: that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.

Despite the claims by Trump press spokesman Fu Manchu, er, I mean Steven Cheung, that his candidate had “won” - as if the interview was a debate - $22 Million Man Chris LaCivita decided Trump would not do another economic policy event with CNBC.

David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio hit the nail on the head: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”

That’s why it was so bracing this week to find that General Mark Milley, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, clarified remarks he had made previously to Bob Woodward for his book “War,” (which is an excellent account of how Joe Biden is the best president of the past 60 years) stating clearly:

"He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he's a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country, he’s a fascist to the core.”

The media was stuck. They had to talk about that. High ranking American military officers do not go around saying things like that. Ever.

In 1956, then-president Dwight D. Eisenhower - the last Republican president who didn’t either commit or knowingly benefit from treason to win his elections - spoke to a group of Republican women about the state of politics in America. He said:

“If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.”

Here we are, 68 years later, confronted by the fact we are not opposed by a political party, but by “a conspiracy to seize power.”

And it is up to each of us to “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”

Looking at the first day of early voting yesterday in Georgia - which exceeded the previous record in 2020 by 184% - and listening to interviews with voters who had stood in line resolutely through all the early morning glitches to be sure they voted tell reporters that they were there “to save democracy” in the words of several, “to be true to my mother and grandmother and her grandmother” in the words of one woman, I think we have a shot at doing it.

In the words of Willie Brown, the smartest politician I ever knew, “Ignore the polls and run like you’re ten points down till the real polls close, then celebrate.”

[misfitwashere]

October 15, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

OCT 16

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fairarticle, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

—

[ravenkings]

The news business is in upheaval. A presidential election is barreling down the pike. Facing financial challenges and political division, several of America’s largest news organizations have turned over the reins to editors who prize relentless reporting on a budget. And they all happen to be British. Will Lewis, a veteran of London’s Daily Telegraph and News UK, is now the chief executive of The Washington Post, where reporters have raised questions about his Fleet Street ethics. He recently ousted the paper’s American editor and replaced her with a former colleague from The Telegraph, dumbfounding American reporters who had never heard of him. Emma Tucker (formerly of The Sunday Times) took over The Wall Street Journal last year, shortly after Mark Thompson (formerly of the BBC) became chairman of CNN, where he has ordered an American remake of the long-running BBC comedy quiz show “Have I Got News for You.”

They joined a slew of Brits already ensconced in the American media establishment. Michael Bloomberg, a noted Anglophile, hired John Micklethwait (former editor of the London-based Economist) in 2015 to run Bloomberg News. Rupert Murdoch tapped Keith Poole (The Sun and The Daily Mail) to edit The New York Post in 2021, the same year that The Associated Press named an Englishwoman, Daisy Veerasingham, as its chief executive. “We are the ultimate trophies for American billionaires,” joked Joanna Coles, the English-born editor who in April became head of The Daily Beast, the online news outlet itself named after a newspaper in an Evelyn Waugh novel. Ms. Coles has not hesitated to recruit more of her compatriots, installing a Scot as editor in chief and a Guardian reporter as Washington bureau chief. “We are loading up on Brits,” she said in an interview. [...] But while British journalists are used to intense competition, their journalistic rule book is not always in line with American standards. At The Washington Post, the home of Woodward and Bernstein, some of Mr. Lewis’s behavior has unsettled the newsroom. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Mr. Lewis had urged The Post’s former editor, Sally Buzbee, to not cover a court decision concerning his involvement in Rupert Murdoch’s phone-hacking scandal in Britain. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Lewis has said that account of the conversation was inaccurate.) An NPR reporter then disclosed that Mr. Lewis had offered an exclusive interview if the reporter agreed to drop an article about the scandal. (The spokeswoman said that Mr. Lewis had spoken with NPR before joining The Post, and that after he joined The Post interview requests were “through the normal corporate communication channels.”) This kind of behavior may be acceptable at some London papers, where proprietors are less hesitant to fiddle with coverage. In American newsrooms, it’s verboten — as is the practice of paying for information. At The Telegraph, Mr. Lewis spent 110,000 pounds for documents that fueled a damaging exposé of parliamentary corruption. (His rivals at The Sun and The Times of London balked at a similar deal.) The Telegraph reporter who secured the documents, Robert Winnett, is set to become The Post’s editor later this year. As for the view across the pond? “We are all greeting this with a mix of amusement and indignation,” said one Fleet Street editor, who requested anonymity to avoid the ire of any overly sensitive superiors. (In keeping with the spirit of British tabloids, the request was granted.) “Amusement that these fancy high priests of American journalism are being monstered by good old-fashioned, tough-guy British editors; indignation that they find it so extraordinary that they might have something to learn from across the pond,” the editor said. “Yes, our standards are a bit lower, but we’re extremely competitive and intense and no-nonsense, and that’s probably helpful given how the industry is going.”

the fact that a lot of american billionaires seem to be spearheading this makes me wonder how much of it has to do with these journalists coming from a country where they have to work with notoriously wack libel laws and an extremely rigid class structure (and a monarchy which they kiss the ass of tbh) thus presumably making them more willing to kowtow to authority.............🤔🧐

[antidrumpfs]

His response to the question tells you everything you need to know...

Trump was pressed on his communication with Russian president Putin in an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago. Bob Woodward reported in his book "War" that Trump has had as many as seven private phone calls with Putin since leaving the White House and had secretly sent the Russian president COVID-19 test machines during the height of the pandemic.

A Trump campaign spokesperson previously denied the report. During the interview, Micklethwait posed the question to Trump directly: "Can you say yes or no whether you have talked to Vladimir Putin since you stopped being president?

"I don't comment on that," Trump responded. "But I will tell you that if I did, it's a smart thing. If I'm friendly with people, if I can have a relationship with people, that's a good thing and not a bad thing in terms of a country."

Trump said that Putin, who invaded neighboring Ukraine, is well respected in Russia and touted his relationship with him, as well as the authoritarian leaders of North Korea and China.

"Look, I had a very good relationship with President Xi and a very good relationship with Putin, and a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un," he said. Of Putin, he later added, "Russia has never had a president that they respect so much.

[meret118]

A Boston Globe reporter shamed those who downplayed Donald Trump's decision to stop answering questions from his fans and instead play music and dance.Kimberly Atkins Stohr suggested the world could be witnessing the "live sundowning" of a presidential candidate.

The term sundowning describes when an older adult begins having different behaviors in the late afternoon or early evening. The Alzheimer's Society said that the person can become " intensely distressed, agitated and have hallucinations or delusions."

MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell laughed about the incident, calling it, "a break for 30 minutes" that reminded her of "American Bandstand." The incident was twice as long, with Trump dancing and calling out songs to play for 57 minutes total.

[darkmaga-returns]

The EU is bracing for a massive trade war with Donald Trump if he wins the US presidential race in November and erects new barriers to commerce with Europe, Politico reported on Monday, citing senior diplomats and EU officials.

Concerns are mounting in EU capitals since the former US president has pledged to target the bloc with a slew of new punitive trade measures in a bid to address what he says are serious imbalances in imports and exports, the outlet said.

Washington and Brussels have been at odds over the issue since Trump imposed 25% tariffs on imports of European steel and 10% on aluminum in 2018 in his first term as president, arguing EU competition was endangering US national security.

The EU retaliated, imposing duties on companies including motorcycles produced by Harley-Davidson Inc. and Levi Strauss & Co jeans. Trump went even further however, and threatened to impose tariffs on EU car exports. Although the threatened duties never took effect, Brussels “was shocked” by Trump’s willingness to overhaul supply chains.

“Last time we didn’t believe how far Trump would actually go,” one of the diplomats told Politico. “This time we’ve had time to prepare. Europe has changed a lot, and we will be ready to act.”

Trump has previously said that as president, he may also introduce counter-measures against EU digital services taxes that implicitly target US technology leaders.

“Our allies have taken advantage of us. More so than our enemies,” Trump said last week in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “Our allies are the European Union. We have a trade deficit of $300 billion with the European Union.”

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

By Michael C. Bender

In the final weeks of the 2020 election, President Donald J. Trump’s campaign surveyed likely voters in swing states about what political messages stuck with them.

Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s message, these voters said, centered on how Mr. Trump mishandled the coronavirus pandemic and was unfit for office. But for Mr. Trump, those surveyed echoed more than a dozen different messages, including his false claims about the virus, his third Supreme Court nomination and complaints that he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. Just 3 percent of the voters recalled something specific Mr. Trump had said about Mr. Biden.

Now, some Trump advisers and allies say privately they are concerned that the dynamic may be repeating itself four years later. They worry that Mr. Trump’s impetuousness and scattershot style on the campaign trail needlessly risk victory in battleground states where the margin for error is increasingly narrow.

At a time when his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, has stepped up her attacks on him as “unstable,” Mr. Trump has struggled to publicly hone his message by veering off script and ramping up personal attacks on Ms. Harris that allies have urged him to rein in.

“When he’s good, he’s great, and when he’s off message, he’s not so great,” said David Urban, a Trump adviser. “I don’t think anyone is really changing their mind at this point, but when he distracts from his biggest, broadest messaging, it’s counterproductive because the Harris campaign uses it to turn out their voters.”

During a speech on Saturday in California, he described mail-in ballots as “so corrupt,” reviving one of his false attacks on the 2020 election results, and did a play-by-play of his internal thoughts when he watched SpaceX, Elon Musk’s spaceflight company, fly a rocket back onto its launch site.

On Sunday, in response to a question on Fox News about the possibility of foreign adversaries’ meddling in the election, he reverted to autocratic language by saying “the bigger problem is the enemy from within.” On Monday, he halted a town-hall event in suburban Philadelphia after five questions when two people in the crowd needed medical attention. He spent roughly the next half-hour playing D.J., swaying and grooving in front of his crowd to a playlist he curated from the stage. “Let’s just listen to music,” he said.

Last week, he canceled a CBS interview on “60 Minutes,” in which he and Ms. Harris were both scheduled to appear — and has not stopped talking about it. He complained about it during events in Detroit and Reno, Nev., and again on Monday in a social media post at 1:12 a.m.

At the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, he answered a question about whether he would break up Google by complaining about a Justice Department lawsuit against Virginia election officials. When he was reminded the question was about Google, he said he “called the head of Google the other day” to grouse about the difficulty of finding positive news stories about his campaign on the company’s search page.

During the same event, Mr. Trump suggested his digressions were part of a communication strategy when his interviewer tried to focus on a question.

“You’ve got to be able to finish a thought because it’s very important,” Mr. Trump told the interviewer, John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News. “This is big stuff we’re talking about. You can’t go that quickly.”

Mr. Micklethwait pointed out that Mr. Trump had started talking about reserve currency and then moved to a story about President Emmanuel Macron of France, among other digressions. “It’s called ‘the weave,’” Mr. Trump said, using a phrase he often uses to describe his speaking style, as he waved his hand in front of him to suggest he was connecting various dots.

Ms. Harris and her campaign have gone on the offensive by using Mr. Trump’s rambling against him, attacking him in ads, in speeches on the campaign trail and in interviews.

Internal Harris campaign research showed that one of the most effective ways to persuade voters to support the vice president was by portraying Mr. Trump as unstable and Ms. Harris as a steady leader who would strengthen America’s security, according to two Harris officials who insisted on anonymity to describe private data.

In the past two weeks, the Harris campaign has flooded the airwaves in battleground states with a pair of television ads to underscore these themes. One spot features warnings from Mr. Trump’s former top defense officials to paint him as “too big of a risk.” Another features endorsements for Ms. Harris from a bipartisan group of national security officials.

“Even former Trump administration officials agree there’s only one candidate fit to lead our nation — and that’s Kamala Harris,” the narrator says.

The Harris campaign criticized Mr. Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of Chicago, saying he displayed “unstable behavior” and was “angry and unfocused as he rambled on and on.”

“No one has ever been more dangerous to this country than Donald Trump,” Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, said on Monday at a campaign event in Wisconsin.

Ms. Harris said the former president was “quite unstable and unfit” during an interview on Monday with The Shade Room, a digital entertainment publication. In a second interview that day with the independent Black journalist Roland Martin, Ms. Harris pointed to Mr. Trump’s false claims that Haitian migrants were eating their neighbors’ pets.

“This man is dangerous,” she said.

Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, which is supporting the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump’s “message is clear and consistent: President Trump’s agenda for America’s working men and women will fix our broken economy to lower costs and secure the border to make our communities safe.” 

In Prescott Valley, Ariz., on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s scripted remarks hewed tightly to the anti-immigration message that has become central to his campaign. He stayed on track for the first half-hour of the event before taking a more scenic route to the finish.

After about 25 minutes, he told the crowd he wanted to tell “one quick story” about a friend with a car plant in Mexico.

But he never finished his tale. Instead, he lost the thread one minute later as he complained that if he mispronounced one word he would be accused of being “cognitively impaired.” Then, he botched the phrase by saying President Biden was the one who was “cognitively repaired” and referred to the election as three and a half months away, not three and a half weeks.

About 20 minutes later, Mr. Trump seemed ready to wrap up his speech. He promised the crowd would see him again soon and said he was thinking about residents on the East Coast suffering after the recent storms.

“So in closing,” Mr. Trump continued, “I just want to say Kamala Harris is a radical left Marxist rated even worse than Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas.”

He proceeded to speak for 17 more minutes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/us/politics/trump-rally-speeches.html

[rebeleden]

Eric Trump's Claim About Dad's 'On Point' Interview Is Leaving People Dumbfounded

CC MORON LIAR THIEF DNA

STOP NAZI VANILLA ISIS

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Aaron Rupar at Public Notice:

MAGA-friendly CNBC host Joe Kernen dropped an interesting nugget right as Squawk Box went to commercial break on Tuesday. “Well, Trump canceled, and he was going to come on,” Kernen said. Not only did Trump once love going on CNBC, but Kernen’s revelation comes on the heels of Trump declining or canceling a number of other high-profile opportunities to make a pitch to voters on mainstream TV. Trump refused to debate Kamala Harris a second time, which would’ve aired on CNN. Trump then refused CNN’s offer to host a town hall. And Trump of course also recently backed out of a 60 Minutes interview. The explanation for all this is not that Trump has suddenly become camera shy. It’s that his campaign undoubtedly realizes his rapidly degrading condition doesn’t play well with audiences beyond the MAGA cult. As a result, they’re retreating to the safer terrain of nonstop rallies and fawning Fox hits.

Losing a step or three

The reason Trump’s campaign isn’t keen to get him in front of swing voters on mainstream platforms was on stark display Tuesday when Trump did a rare event that wasn’t a festival of sycophancy. By any objective standard, Trump’s Economic Club of Chicago interview was a disaster. He came out of the gates with an asinine proposal for 2,000 percent tariffs on imported cars, then was quickly reduced to insulting the moderator, Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait, when Micklethwait rightly pointed out that his his economic proposals are an inflationary disaster. 

Trump repeatedly refused to answer questions Micklethwait asked him, instead going on self-absorbed rants about how Google is unfair to him or about how he could do a better job as Federal Reserve chairman than Jerome Powell. By the end of the event, Trump had veered into making an impassioned defense of the big lie and his coup attempt, bragging about his crowd size on January 6 and absurdly claiming the events of that day were just “love and peace.” 

While Trump’s devoted fans might applaud him for starting fights with moderators and trying to own the libs, most everyone else can see that his policies are bad and his presentation is worse. Micklethwait’s pointed questioning helped expose those realities. And that’s why Trump is intent to do everything he can to avoid more settings like that until election day.

[...] These rallies may energize his base, but beyond that they mostly end up providing fodder for damaging video clips like the ones above. Trump, however, reliably gets help from a mainstream press that too often sanewashes his speeches for readers and viewers who aren’t watching them live and may not spend a lot of time on social media. The New York Times, for instance, described Trump as “swaying soberly” during his musical “detour” in Pennsylvania, adding that he’s known “for improvisational departures.” The WSJ’s headline about the event read “Trump’s Pennsylvania Town Hall Ends in Concert,” as though the plan all along was to have Trump behave like a maniac. ABC News’ TV report on the bizarre spectacle was even worse, with a reporter praising the “almost intimate” atmosphere and noting “people were having a good time. It did not seem out of the ordinary.” (It was very much out of the ordinary.)

But it’s harder to spin something that hundreds of thousands or millions of people are watching, like the debate in which Kamala Harris dominated Trump so thoroughly that MAGAs are still spreading conspiracy theories to try to explain it away. And so the Trump campaign is circling the wagons.

[...] Tellingly, instead of taking CNN up on its town hall offer, Trump opted to do a prerecorded “town hall” with sycophantic Fox News host Harris Faulkner that will air later today. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is doing a Fox News hit of her own tonight, and she’s also reportedly in negotiations to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. She’s out there trying to make a case to voters who aren’t already part of her coalition while Trump ensconces himself in safe spaces.

Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice post today highlights why Donald Trump’s campaign is stowing him away in safe spaces where he won’t be facing real challenges, as when he does veer out of the right-wing bubble like with John Micklethwait of Bloomberg this week in Chicago, Trump crumbles for the world to see.

Recently, he has backed out of appearing on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the proposed Trump v. Harris CNN debate (that have since been repurposed as town halls… at least for Harris), and CNBC’s Squawk Box (a place where he repeatedly loved to go on).

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 15, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 16, 2024

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck. 

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell. 

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.” 

And therein lies the rub. 

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” 

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day. 

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office. 

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign. 

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference. 

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.  

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality. 

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. 

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said. 

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote. 

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden. 

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1 and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[darkmaga-returns]

Bloomberg’s Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait has blasted Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris for refusing to sit down for an interview with the outlet.

Micklethwait revealed that Bloomberg has been requesting an interview with the vice president to discuss “her economic plans.”

However, Micklethwait said Harris “has declined so far.”

The top journalist made the comment at the beginning of an interview with President Donald Trump at the Economic Club of Chicago.

“Just for the record and those people watching on television, the Economic Club of Chicago and Bloomberg both invited Vice President Harris to a similar interview about her economic plans — she has declined so far,” Micklethwait said.