Donald Trump continues to spew a litany of lies without every showing proof for his fake news and evil accusations

On the long playlist of Donald Trump’s self-pitying complaints, one tune has blared louder than any other: Elections are rigged — against Republicans generally and him specifically.

The Most Laughable of Trump’s Many Lies

Echo opinion by Frank Bruni published in The New York Times

In 2016, he sang that song in advance of the actual voting, to discredit the Hillary Clinton victory that most polls and pundits predicted. In 2018, he sang it with an extra note of fear, no doubt realizing that Democrats’ takeover of the House meant trouble — which soon came in the form of two impeachments. 

In 2020, he sang it operatically, a Pavarotti of paranoia, and it served as the menacing soundtrack for the unconscionable violence of Jan. 6, 2021.

He has never given it a rest, and with the midterms almost upon us, it has been roaring from speakers here, there and everywhere. Although the Supreme Court stymied him, Donald Trump sought to limit mail-in voting, claiming that it wasn’t a vehicle for broader participation in elections but a scheme by which Democrats stole them. 

Trump's evil administration sued states for their voter rolls. His sycophantic F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, suggested a potential need for federal agents at polling sites to ensure “election security.”

What nonsense. And our saturation familiarity with it often numbs us to the revealing perversity of it. As much as anything else that Trump says or does, his insistence on corrupted elections reflects his dedication to fiction; his discipline and stamina in the service of a self-promoting lie; the willful gullibility of many of his supporters; and the inability of logic or evidence to pierce the armor of his and their delusions.

Go back to 2016, when it looked as if Hillary Clinton would defeat him. Trump keened that nothing about the election had been fair and nothing about its results could be trusted. Then something miraculous happened. He won. And what do you know? That outcome could be trusted.

Well, not exactly: Clinton’s advantage of nearly three million ballots in the popular vote was bogus, fraudulent, the rotten fruit of illegal voting and Democratic chicanery. But a party crooked and potent enough to tilt that tally that far in her favor somehow failed to master the more important math of the Electoral College, in which Trump’s victory was of course legitimate and righteous.

Got it. Makes exquisite sense.

Trump didn’t merely spout gibberish; he convened a panel to validate it. Anyone remember the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, better known as the “voter fraud commission”❓ Kris Kobach, then the Kansas secretary of state, took the wheel and proceeded to steer the effort absolutely nowhere. It never found the proof of fraud that it promised, and it sputtered to a stop less than a year after it theatrically revved its engine.

Evidence (or the lack thereof) is no match for Trump’s and his supporters’ persecution complexes. The astonishing sum of 💲787.5 million that Fox (Fake❗) News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems in 2023, to settle a defamation lawsuit was tantamount to an admission that the networks’ anchors and executives knew or suspected the bogusness of the stolen-election conspiracy theories, such as the corruption of Dominion’s machines, that (Fake❗) Fox promoted after Joe Biden’s 2020, victory. But did that quiet Trump’s protestations that he’d beaten Biden❓ Nope. Nor did his supporters seem any less receptive to being told that they’d been wronged.

They know what they know: The establishment is out to get them. And they never bother to explain how that establishment is at once so insidious and so inept. They never address the now-you-rig-it, now-you-don’t inconstancy of Democrats, who apparently steal certain elections but nap through others. 

Instead, the Republicans retained or won majorities in both chambers of Congress in 2016, one chamber in 2018, one in 2022, and both in 2024, when of course Trump also prevailed, beating Vice President Kamala Harris in the popular vote and the Electoral College.

I’d have to ask Donald Trump: How and why did Democrats and the Deep State let that happen❓ And, if voter rolls are a mess, voting sites are poorly monitored and mail-in voting (which you use) is thievery’s handmaiden, isn’t your victory in 2024, every bit as suspicious as Biden’s in 2020❓ Or, will you tell me it’s not, because you and your fellow Republicans are so much more ethical than Democrats❓

Readers, feel free to take a pause to control your laughter.

Laughable is what all of this would be if it weren’t such an ugly reflection of the state of American politics. Trump’s persistence in attacking the voting process and all his related hooey, such as calling January 6 a “day of love,” suggest the extent to which truth now matters less than the ardor, creativity and endless repetition of lies🤥🤥🤥. Say something consistently enough, with a thick enough air of conviction, and it will sound true to those inclined to receive it that way.

That’s partly because more and more Americans choose to believe whatever the leaders of their tribe tell them and whatever justifies their prejudices or bolsters their sense of victimization or entitlement. Such convenient credulity is especially pronounced in the MAGA movement, where any drubbing Republicans take in these midterms will almost certainly be dismissed as a hoax.

That leaves us in a dangerous place. ⚠ Partisanship with blinders this thick threatens the health of a society, which depends on a measure of grace in losing and on voters as invested in democratic processes as in getting exactly what they want. Trump’s chorus of “rigged” and “fraud” pulls them in the opposite direction. 

And the volume of that wretched music will only increase between now and the first Tuesday in November. #VoteBlue❕

Donald Trump is making dangerous decisions without the advice of any expert advisors: Vice President Vance was a Marine corporal!

When an American president makes an especially weighty decision, there’s some small comfort in knowing that seasoned, steady aides were in the mix, complementing the commander in chief’s instincts with their expertise. Echo essay by Frank Bruni published in The New York Times. 

Donald Trump dropped 15-ton bombs on uranium enrichment sites in Iran with Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence and Pete Hegseth as his defense secretary. (As a matter of fact, Trumpzi Diva Tulsi was even bold enough to tell Trump the truth about Iran's uranium enrichment program, in other words, there was no nuclear bomb in Iran.)

I, for one, am not comforted. None of us should believe that Donald Trump is being well served. Rather, his demand for fealty from his advisors is putting the world in danger.  

By some reports, Hegseth wasn’t consulted all that much — which, I suppose, is its own perverse solace. Trump apparently learned his lesson when Hegseth decided that a Signal group chat was the proper venue for an emoji-laden pep rally about imminent military strikes against the Houthis; clue Hegseth in on the Iran plan, and he might wind up divulging it in the form of charades on “Fox (Fake❗ ) & Friends.”

And Gabbard❓ 🙄Her relationship with Trump is strained, to say the least; he told reporters on Air Force One to pay no heed to her statement several months ago that Iran wasn’t close to or all that focused on developing a nuclear weapon.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump blurted. Apart from how warm and fuzzy that brushoff must have made Gabbard feel, it spoke volumes about the limits of Trump’s confidence in — and use for — her.

So why did he give her such a crucial job? And how did Hegseth land an even bigger one❓

Because, Donald Trump wasn’t judging prospective senior administration officials on their demonstrated fitness for their positions. Any old president can do that. Shock artists like him want to show how far outside the lines they’re willing to color. The kookier the crayon, the better.

And would-be despots make sure that the people just below them really and truly owe them. Gabbard; Hegseth; the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel; so many of Trump’s other flunkies — if not for him, they’d never enjoy the titles, the offices, the attention, the entourages they do. That primes their loyalty. It greases their sycophancy.

But while it was one thing to mull the lunacy of many of Trump’s personnel choices as they strutted through Senate confirmation hearings, it’s quite another to confront their inappropriateness when an impulsive, mercurial president takes a risk this enormous, commencing the kind of military intervention he long railed against, in a combustible region that he previously expressed such wariness about.

I found myself transfixed by the tableau late Saturday night when, in nationally televised remarks from the White House, Trump announced that the United States had attacked Iran. 

Like robots, 🤖Vice President JD Vance (a former Marine corporal❗), Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Fox (Fake❗) News, part time weekend commentator, Pete Hegseth all stood around him with such strenuously blank expressions, such erect postures, it was as if they’d been turned into automatons and feared that any tiny twitch might be interpreted as doubt or disagreement.

If you’ve any doubts about the culture of flattery cultivated by Trump, I direct you to that recent text that he got from Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel, the ally pressing hard for America’s help in defanging Iran. It’s astonishing that Trump posted the text on social media — that he’s so eager to exhibit his acolytes’ praise, so insecure. But it’s no less astounding than the amplitude of Huckabee’s adoration. An evangelical Christian pastor, Huckabee wasn’t offering Trump diplomatic counsel. He was giving him an ecclesiastical massage.

Huckabee wrote that God had saved Trump from an assassination attempt “to be the most consequential President in a century — maybe ever.” “The decisions on your shoulders I would not want to be made by anyone else,” he continued, in the best prose equivalent of genuflection that I’ve ever read. He added: “I am your appointed servant in this land and am available for you but I do not try to get in your presence often because I trust your instincts. No president in my lifetime has been in a position like yours. Not since Truman in 1945.” What a mammoth broom it must take to sweep that much history under the rug.

Concerns about who’s advising a president and how well they’re doing that certainly predate Trump. Most presidents seek affirmation, most have no trouble getting it, and all are pliable because all are human. Vice President Dick Cheney infamously egged on President George W. Bush. President Joe Biden’s protectors shielded him from the truth of his declining health and falling polls.

And the advisers with Trump’s ear right now include people of greater acumen than Gabbard and Hegseth. I’d put Vance and Marco Rubio in that group.

But from the moment they pledged their fealty to Trump, they grew less serious by the week. To track their time with him is to notice ever more performative demonstrations that they share his grudges and will act on his grievances. 

Vance (a self described "Catholic convert!) berates Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in the Oval Office- because he was scripted by Trump to create an echo chamber.

Rubio channels Trump’s xenophobia and animus toward elite universities with a puffed-up panic over international students. 

But what Donald Trump and the world needs at a juncture like this are confident confidants who can play devil’s advocate, not a coterie of toadies 🐸 who whisper sweet nothings in his ear — or have nothing valuable to whisper at all.

Hurricane Helene victims and survivors need truth served with abundant help- North Carolina Strong

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Frank Bruni*:

Over the past week, many Americans have turned their gazes toward North Carolina to behold gutting scenes of the damage and despair wrought by Hurricane Helene. They should keep looking, but for an additional reason: My state is a cautionary tale of what happens when no corner of our lives is cordoned off from partisan exploitation and we lose our tether to the truth.

I’ve seen politicking off human tragedy before, but seldom on this scale or with this stench. Donald Trump and many of his MAGA minions have used the historic flooding to drown their followers in self-serving lies:

About a profoundly incompetent and wholly uncaring federal government that used up all its disaster-relief money on migrants who entered the country illegally. About emergency vehicles left idling and emergency supplies blocked by Democratic politicians who don’t want to help Republican voters. About unidentified bureaucrats who somehow control the weather and wield it as a weapon.

That last fantasy? Its purveyors include a Republican member of Congress, one Marjorie Taylor Greene 😟😢. But it’s not just the likes of Trump and Greene peddling such paranoia. As the fake claims and faked pictures spreading across social media make clear, many thousands if not millions of Americans have chosen fiction over fact — because it serves their political goals, profits them financially or validates their tribal fury.

They seem not to realize or care that they’re complicating honest-to-goodness efforts to assist actual victims, as government officials’ duties expand from assisting people devastated by the storm to battling opportunists whose accusations invite distrust and meddling.

The website of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a section devoted to “Hurricane Helene: Rumor Response,” and “Hurricane Helene: Fact vs. Rumor” is the title of a similar page on the North Carolina Department of Public Safety’s site.

Those agencies are run by Democrats, but a North Carolina Republican, State Senator Kevin Corbin, beseeched his Facebook followers to “help STOP🛑❗ this conspiracy theory junk” about government inaction. He assured them that both federal and state officials were on the scene and on the job. “PLEASE help stop this junk,” he repeated. He seemed desperate.

Aptly so. The need in North Carolina is real. Gaudy falsehoods aren’t going to meet it. And none of our problems will be solved if we forgive or reward merchants of grievance for whom nothing — not even suffering like my state’s — is off-limits.

*Author Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. 

North Carolina Mark Johnson is an idiot! Holocaust denier and all around crazy

 Ah, the double edge of a Donald Trump endorsement. 

Crazy loopy North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson

Opinion published in the New York Times by Frank Bruni:

On the one hand, the dangerous MAGA chieftain has commanded his cult tribe to vote for you, and that can be enough to propel a candidate into the winner’s circle. 

Trumpziism cult hat

On the other hand, you’re stuck with whatever loopy language and loopier logic he used.

In endorsing (the Trump idiot doplganger!) Mark Robinson for governor of my home state, in North Carolina, Trump called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

Mark Robinson is a dangerous Trump doppleganger

Trump didn’t leave it at that. “I think you’re better than Martin Luther King,” he told Robinson at a rally in Greensboro, N.C., last weekend. “I think you are Martin Luther King times two.”

I think that there are better mathematicians and more trustworthy historians of the civil rights movement than Trump, but I also think that his remarks are kind of perfect. They exemplify how far the MAGA brigade travels from reality into gaudy, even grotesque, hyperbole.

This is one riveting and profoundly consequential governor’s race. The March Super Tuesday primaries in North Carolina made it official: Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, is the Republican nominee and would be the state’s first Black governor, while the Democratic nominee is the state attorney general, Josh Stein, who would be the state’s first Jewish governor.

But, the contest isn’t really about milestones, nor will it hinge on them. It will instead be a moment-defining referendum on the virtues of theatrically (and sometimes hypocritically) mouthing off against the system (Robinson) versus dutifully working within it (Stein), on seat-of-the-pants amateurishness versus extensive government experience, on sensationalism versus seriousness, on dark conspiratorial fantasies versus unentertaining realities.

Does that sound like any other race you know, and does Robinson sound like any other populist you’ve met? He’s Trump on steroids, Trump times two. 

If you’re an arsonist, Robinson is your guy. If you’re an institutionalist, you’re a Stein stan.

Robinson had no real public profile when, at a meeting of the Greensboro City Council in 2018, he made an impassioned speech in favor of gun rights that went viral and made him an instant darling of the right. 

In 2020, he ran for lieutenant governor and won. Ever since, concerned Democrats and even many aghast Republicans have taken a more careful look at him.

And they have found florid homophobia, shocking antisemitism and an alarming contempt for science — all of which I described in this newsletter early last year. But that’s just his ideological bent, which also extends to a stated desire to outlaw abortion or at least get as close to that as possible.

His life outside politics contradicts his rants against what he sees as excessive government charity and his styling of himself as a poster boy for gumption and resilience. As a devastating article by Jeffrey Billman in the North Carolina publication The Assembly detailed in January, Robinson has been delinquent on taxes and repeatedly filed for bankruptcy, and his wife, Yolanda Hill, has prospered from the acquisition — and then forgiveness — of Covid-era Paycheck Protection Program loans from the federal government.

Those loans were first reported by The Daily Haymaker, a conservative website, with information provided by Don Carrington. The editor of The Haymaker, Brant Clifton, asked Billman: “How do you go around claiming to be Mr. Conservative, or the King of Conservatism, when your family business is solely based on keeping the trains running on the welfare state?”

How, indeed? But that’s what makes Robinson, a fiery orator who’s all smoke and mirrors, such an apt emblem of the MAGA movement. He’s not about accountability. He’s about ire. He’s not selling something sensible. He’s an instrument for inchoate rage.

He’s gratuitously cruel and divisive, as when he suggested last month that the best bathroom option for people who “are confused” about their gender was to “find a corner outside somewhere to go.” He’s proudly inept, as when, two years ago, he shrugged off his tax woes — he had failed to pay many years of vehicle taxes and federal taxes — by saying: “When you start talking about taxes, if I’m the guy doing them, somebody’s going to jail. I’m not very good at math.”

He excels instead at provocation, at grievance, at promoting himself as a dauntless warrior against all those lefties out to wreck civilization. He’s a far, far cry from King. But, he’s all dangerous 💥🚨❗MAGA king. (And he is also a certifiable lunatic!)

Democratic grass roots success playbook lesson 101

The New York Times opinion column by Frank Bruni:

When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania got an emergency call about I-95 last June, his first thought turned to semantics. “When you say ‘collapse,’ do you really mean collapse?” he recalled wondering. Highways don’t typically do that, but then tractor-trailers don’t typically flip over and catch fire, which had happened on an elevated section of the road in Philadelphia.

On June 11, 2023, a tanker truck carrying gasoline lost control as it was attempting to exit the highway and caught fire under the overpass carrying Interstate 95 (I-95) at the Pennsylvania Route 73 (PA 73, Cottman Avenue) interchange in the Tacony neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia.

Shapiro’s second, third and fourth thoughts were that he and other government officials needed to do the fastest repair imaginable.

“My job was: Every time someone said, ‘Give me a few days, and I’ll get back to you,’ to say, ‘OK, you’ve got 30 minutes,’” he told me recently. He knew how disruptive and costly the road’s closure would be and how frustrated Pennsylvanians would get.

But he knew something else, too: that if you’re trying to impress a broad range of voters, including those who aren’t predisposed to like you, you’re best served not by joining the culture wars or indulging in political gamesmanship but by addressing tangible, measurable problems.👦😎

In less than two weeks, the road reopened.

Today, Shapiro enjoys approval ratings markedly higher than other Pennsylvania Democrats’ and President Biden’s. He belongs to an intriguing breed of enterprising Democratic governors who’ve had success where it’s by no means guaranteed, assembled a diverse coalition of supporters and are models of a winning approach for Democrats everywhere. Just look at the fact that when Shapiro was elected in 2022, it was with a much higher percentage of votes than Biden received from Pennsylvanians two years earlier. Shapiro won with support among rural voters that significantly exceeded other Democrats’ and with the backing of 14 percent of Donald Trump’s voters, according to a CNN exit poll that November.

Biden’s fate this November, Democratic control of Congress and the party’s future beyond 2024, could turn, in part, on heeding Shapiro’s and like-minded Democratic leaders’ lessons about reclaiming the sorts of voters the party has lost.

Across the country, there are Democrats who have outperformed expectations and had political success in places that aren’t reliably blue. Look at Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, who won a second term last year, even though Trump took that state by 26 points in 2020. Trump took Kansas by almost 15 points, but its Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, secured her second term in 2022. In North Carolina, where I live, the Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, won election and then re-election in years when North Carolinians simultaneously delivered the state to Trump. Obviously, some of Trump’s supporters also voted for Governor Cooper.

Cooper, Kelly, Beshear and Shapiro might have benefited from flawed opponents, propitious circumstances, other lucky breaks. But, many Democratic officeholders in red and purple states also have instructive qualities in common, starting with what Shapiro’s attention to I-95 reflected. They focus intently on the practical instead of the philosophical, emphasizing issues of broad relevance and not venturing needlessly onto the most divisive terrain.

“When people wake up in the morning, they don’t think about their party,” Beshear told me. “They think about their jobs. They think about the schools their children are going to. They think about the roads and bridges they’re traveling on and whether they’re safe.” The first of Gretchen Whitmer’s two successful campaigns for governor of Michigan is perhaps remembered best for her pledge to “fix the damn roads,” which was not only a concrete promise but also a kind of branding: She was more invested in results than theatrics. She cared less about preening than about potholes. She was blunt to the point of cursing.

Governors, admittedly, have advantages. They and other politicians operating at the state and local levels often aren’t expected to tackle — and don’t receive blame for — some of the especially big, tough issues by which presidents are judged.

Inflation is Biden’s problem, not theirs. Immigration, too. While state-level politicians do adopt (or fail to adopt) plans to combat climate change, federal officials are often in the foreground of those debates.

Whitmer tailgates at football games, visits sports bars and has a pronounced Michigan accent. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat in purple Wisconsin, has an uncloaked weakness for McDonald’s Egg McMuffins and speaks in a fashion so folksy that Wisconsinites can buy T-shirts emblazoned with one of his trademark phrases: “Holy mackerel!” Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat who is seeking a fourth term representing the deep red state of Montana, and Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat elected in purple Arizona in 2020, have careers well outside any Democratic mold. Tester was (and is) a farmer. Kelly, the son of two police officers, was a naval aviator and then an astronaut.

In Shapiro’s first full day in office, he sent a clear message to working-class voters by signing an executive order that dispensed with the requirement of a four-year college degree for 92 percent of positions in state government, meaning roughly 65,000 jobs. He stresses the dual imperatives of holding college up as a possibility for anyone interested in it and of respecting people without college degrees and supporting careers that don’t call for one.

Cooper frequently visits farming areas and small towns, not just because he grew up in rural North Carolina and is comfortable there but also because he wants to be seen in “places where many Democratic leaders don’t go,” he told me. It sets the right tone. “I’ve spent time listening to people in rural areas about their hospital being on the brink, needing more economic development, needing high-speed internet,” he said. And he has been able to explain to them how his agenda recognizes and addresses those very issues.

North Carolina elected a Democratic Governor Roy Cooper 

While Laura Kelly’s 2018, and 2022, victories in Kansas relied heavily on Democratic voters in urban strongholds, she pays careful attention to rural precincts, too. When we spoke recently — she placed the call, without any intermediary telling me to hold for the governor, and introduced herself simply as “Laura Kelly” — she shared a memory: Decades ago, when she was running for the State Senate, one of her chief advisers told her to ignore the rural part of the district because “there weren’t enough votes to make a difference,” she said.

The framing of issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.

I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.

He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”

“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”

“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.

“That didn’t feel right to me,” she continued. “So I spent an inordinate amount of time there.” She ended up winning by fewer than 100 votes. “If I had not knocked on all those doors, I wouldn’t have been in the State Senate, and I wouldn’t be governor.”

State and local politicians also have relationships with voters unlike the ones forged by Washington lawmakers, who swim (or, really, splash around noisily) in the media-roiled, shark-infested waters of the nation’s capital. Voters largely regard their governors and mayors as administrators and service providers, so governors and mayors can prioritize administration and service in a manner that makes their efforts more visible and palpable to voters.

But in my recent examination of and conversations with Democratic governors, other Democratic officials and political experts in red and purple states, I was struck by the priorities they articulate and by how they articulate them. They take pains to rebut the accusations of elitism that Republicans direct at Democrats, or they have biographies and backgrounds that make those charges laughable. They also find ways in which to establish some separation from their party, and that’s not simply and solely a matter of necessity, given their states’ political leanings. It’s also an assertion of independence and authenticity in an era of profound political cynicism. Even Democrats in the bluest and safest of states can learn from that.

Shapiro proudly displays his deep Jewish faith, and while that puts him in a religious minority, it also distinguishes him from Democrats who often play down religion. He and his advisers have found that it’s a bridge to voters of all creeds, who relate to, and respect, his devotion.

He also indulges his tendency to speak in sports metaphors. The first words of a video that he released in tandem with the announcement of his campaign for governor: “Each of us has a responsibility in life — to get off the sidelines, get in the game.” He tells Pennsylvanians that his goal as governor is “to put points on the board.”

She has created an Office of Rural Prosperity within the Kansas Commerce Department. Just before our conversation, I read a transcript of the State of the State remarks that she delivered a few weeks earlier. It focused largely on jobs, and the word “rural” showed up 43 times, including in the characterization of “rural Kansas” as “fundamental to our identity.” The word “abortion” showed up precisely zero times, which I noticed mainly because the issue was front and center in Kansas just a year and a half earlier, when voters there rejected a measure to remove the right to abortion from the state’s Constitution.

I mentioned that omission.

“Not an accident,” she said. “I am and always have been a pro-choice human being,” she continued, but she determined over the years that raising such “a very divisive issue” with constituents when she wasn’t absolutely compelled to didn’t make sense. “It wasn’t a way that they were going to hear me any better, and it wasn’t a way to find common ground,” she said.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the defense of legal abortion has unquestionably given Democrats an advantage over Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers in red and purple states don’t shrink from it. But “since the Supreme Court overturned” is crucial, because only then did some Americans fully realize that the abortion debate wasn’t an abstract, ideological one: It concerned a fundamental freedom for women. It affected critical medical care.

“The prospect of Republicans banning abortion was not a big winner for Democrats until Republicans actually started banning abortions,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “Voters are used to hearing about how apocalyptic the other side is. You have to have actual evidence.” The Roe reversal — and cases like those of Kate Cox, who was carrying a fetus with a deadly chromosomal abnormality and had to leave Texas to end her pregnancy — enables Democrats to discuss abortion rights in blunt, concrete, visceral terms.

“For too long, we’ve made politics too flashy, too Hollywood,” Austin Davis, Pennsylvania’s Democratic lieutenant governor, told me. He was on the ticket with Shapiro, and he explained that their formula for victory was not to be “wrapped up in what’s going on on MSNBC, on CNN, in some local coffee shop that’s 90 percent Democratic. Most people don’t live in those echo chambers.”

Cooper’s long campaign to garner enough Republican support to pass Medicaid expansion in North Carolina — which was finally accomplished three months ago — didn’t hinge on partisan name-calling. But it did involve extensive meetings with law enforcement officials to persuade them that they’d be helped if the mentally ill people who commit some crimes had the treatment options that Medicaid expansion would provide. Toward the end, he said, “we would have some tough-on-crime Republican officials come into the legislature and say these people need health care, not handcuffs.”

The specificity and detail with which state-level Democrats, working on a smaller canvas, can portray problems, sketch solutions and describe successes make me wonder if Democrats would be wise to pitch more of their policies and concentrate more of their energies outside Washington. They often find better traction and make readier connections that way.

I think of Shapiro’s livestreaming of the fleet work on I-95. I think of many key lines from Beshear’s State of the Commonwealth remarks in January, when he advanced measures regarding climate change, economic development and job creation without dwelling on clinical phrases like “climate change,” “economic development” and “job creation.” He gave shout-outs to several companies “building the two largest electric vehicle battery plants on planet Earth, in Glendale, Ky.” He noted that “approximately 400 Kentuckians” had been hired. This was no fancy policy seminar. It was a straightforward report card.

That’s what Mallory McMorrow is always urging. Too many Democrats sound as though “they’re giving a lecture at a university rather than talking like a normal person,” she told me. She is the Democratic state senator in Michigan who captured national attention with a speech denouncing Republicans’ characterization of Democrats who support gay rights as “groomers,” and she has demonstrated a flair for getting a point across. “No matter what issue you’re talking about or how complicated it is, talk about it like you would talk to your friend in a bar, and if you can’t do that, you need to keep trying,” she said.

McMorrow presides over the Michigan Senate’s Economic and Community Development Committee, and she said that when arguing for crucial investments, she tells stories, like the one about Michigan missing out on a second Amazon headquarters because Maryland had better transit and education options for the company’s workers. Michiganders felt that loss, she said. They don’t feel statistics about where the state ranks in per capita spending on infrastructure.

Framing the issues can be everything, at least if the goal is the building of consensus rather than the stoking of passions. The latter may help with fund-raising, but the former is a better governing strategy. In many and possibly most places, it’s a better campaign strategy, too.

I keep flashing on something that the Iowa state auditor, Rob Sand, told me. He is currently the only Democrat who holds statewide office in Iowa, but he said that his party has an opportunity to change that, provided that it doesn’t talk down to voters, doesn’t hit them with unfamiliar buzzwords and exotic-sounding ideas, doesn’t prejudge them.

He described canvassing for an Iowa Democrat in a local race in which the school bathrooms used by transgender students had become an issue; Republicans were trying to use it against the Democrat. At one house, a man who seemed to be in his 60s answered the door and brought it up, saying: “Are there really people who don’t know what they are?”

“He didn’t say it with scorn,” Sand recalled. “He wasn’t contemptuous. He just asked a question.” So Sand, who’s a hunter and sensed that the man might be familiar with hunting, too, gave him an answer: “You know how every once in a while, a deer hunter shoots what he thinks is a buck because it has antlers, but it’s a doe? If there are deer like that out there, there are probably people, and it may be a tough way to go through life. We ought not to make it any harder for them.”

“Sounds right,” the man answered, to the best of Sand’s memory. The man had his ballot with him, and he voted right then and there. For the Democrat.

When will the real Ron DeSantis show up? Florida governor is running one freaky and unsettling presidential campaign.

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Frank Bruni:

The version of most politicians that we need to worry about is the one that they don’t want us to see. That’s why campaign reporters dog them; they’re waiting for the veil to slip.

But the version of Ron DeSantis that we need to worry about is the one that he proudly shows us. He embraces his meanness. He luxuriates in his darkness. Let other politicians peddle the pablum of inspiration. He prefers to ooze the toxin of contempt.

That’s one of the morals of a provocative anti-gay, anti-trans video that the DeSantis campaign shared late last week. The campaign’s promotion of it prompted accusations of homophobia even from some Republicans, and justly so: In an attempt to smear Donald Trump, the video doesn’t just accuse him of coddling L.G.B.T.Q. Americans. It revels in DeSantis’s vilification of them.

Initially distributed by a Twitter account called Proud Elephant, it presents a bizarre montage that’s superficially an anti-woke battle cry, pitting a truculent DeSantis against a scourge of degenerates. But while his viciousness comes through precisely as planned, so does something unintended: an undercurrent of homoerotic kink. 

Up pops a shirtless hunk with a ripped chest. Here’s a glowering Brad Pitt in his “Troy” drag. Are honchos with a Homer fetish some new thing? I need to get out more.

But the perversely purposed beefcake is less striking than the way in which the video exultantly spotlights DeSantis’s biggest critics and celebrates their harshest criticism, treating the words with which they’ve described him and his initiatives as the best measures of his mettle. “Most extreme” becomes a trophy, “horrifying” a crown and “evil” a sash.

The Florida governor is running one freaky and unsettling presidential campaign. He’s more focused on putting certain Americans in their places than on lifting others to new heights. He’s defined by the scores he pledges to settle instead of the victories he promises to achieve. He casts himself as someone to fear rather than revere. That video actually flashes an image of Christian Bale in “American Psycho” as a flattering DeSantis analogue.

Vote DeSantis: He’s a monster, but he’s your monster.

Someone with that pitch cannot possibly bring together and lead an entire diverse country! If DeSantis gets that chance, what does it say about the United States today that he has come this far? 

Have we put tolerance, grand ideals and optimism so fully to rest? I remember “morning in America.” I guess it’s now midnight.

To read deeply and widely about DeSantis is to learn that his cruel politics match a cold personality. He seems to trust almost no one other than his wife, who’s his twin in unalloyed ambition. 

He’s a collector of slights. 

DeSantis gets an A+ in grudge holding and an F in humility, and he’s taking etiquette pass/fail. He has resting disdain face.

When I find pictures of him laughing, his expression is a bad stage actor’s — it’s a labored and spurious guffaw — as if a campaign aide intent on warming him up had just pulled hard on some string embedded in DeSantis’s back. Only his rants have a genuine air. He looked perfectly comfortable on Fox News recently saying that anyone who cut through a border wall between Mexico and the United States to traffic fentanyl would “end up stone cold dead.” He’s out to out-Trump Trump, who reportedly wondered aloud about a water-filled border trench stocked with snakes and alligators. I’m counting the minutes until DeSantis’s proposal for a moat stocked with great white sharks.

Raising questions about illegal immigration and border security is necessary and just. But what’s served by doing so with such bloodthirstiness?

Establishing guidelines for the age at which it’s appropriate for children in public schools to discuss sexual orientation and gender identity is legitimate. But what’s gained by inviting the word “groomers” into the conversation and casting yourself as a pulchritudinous gladiator who will teach them a pitiless lesson?

DeSantis mistakes spite for spiritedness, bullying for strength. I hope voters don’t do likewise.

Chris Christie "broken clock" moment in time: Tells right wing Republicans the truth about the former guy Trump

Win or Lose, Chris Christie Is Running the Best Campaign Against Trump:  Not only is Chris Christie the only Republican who understands he is running against the former guy Trump, but he’s the only candidate who comes close to matching him as an entertainer.

Former Governor Christie of New Jersey fits the political posture of a broken clock being "right twice a day". 

Echo opinion essay published in The Daily Beast by Matt Lewis:

Don’t look now, but Chris Christie is having a moment. Calling on his experience as a federal prosecutor, he is now prosecuting a case against Donald Trump.

While Donald Trump is clearly the prohibitive front-runner for the Republican nomination, there is no denying that Christie is the most interesting of the growing Republican field of candidates clamoring for that coveted spot. Consider just a few of Christie’s recent greatest hits.

When Trump mocked Christie’s weight, Christie, appearing on Fox News’ “MediaBuzz,” responded, “Oh what, like he’s some Adonis?” When asked about Trump diverting campaign money to pay for his legal expenses, Christie called him “the cheapest S.O.B. I’ve ever met in my life.” And regarding the GOP’s performances in 2018, 2020, and 2022, Christie called the former president a “three-time loser.” For better or worse, when it comes to throwing elbows, at least, he kind of sounds like…Trump.

"Chris Christie is telling the unvarnished truth about Trump", Frank Bruni in The New York Times.

Christie is also not above dinging other Republicans for their cowardice towards Trump.

For example, after Ron DeSantis tried to dodge a question about Januaray 6th, by saying he wasn’t in Washington at the time, Christie mocked him, saying, “Did he have a TV? Was he alive that day? Did he see what was going on? I mean, that’s one of the most ridiculous answers I’ve heard in this race so far.” Vinny Gambini in My Cousin Vinny couldn’t have put it any better.

I don’t want to go too far out on a brittle limb here. Christie is still polling at under 3 percent.

Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if (unlike many of his GOP competitors) Christie’s trajectory is still on the rise. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, Christie is the only contender who actually realizes the 2024, election is about one question and one question only: Trump or not Trump.

This is to say, the 2024 GOP primary is not about who has the best 10-point policy plan or who is the most anti-woke. It’s simply about whether or not Republicans want Trump again.

Christie is the only candidate whose strategy and message suggest he accepts this reality—and is acting accordingly.

What this means is that Christie can get on TV at any time he wants because Trump is always in the news.

Will this allow him to gradually consolidate a larger chunk of the GOP primary and get to double digits, possibly even blowing everyone’s mind by becoming Trump’s main rival? That’s the unanswerable question.

But what I do know is that Christie is the only Republican opponent who has the correct interpretation of what the primary is about. And that is a huge advantage.

This also brings us to the second reason Christie has a chance to gain traction. He’s the only non-Trump candidate who is not only tough, but also funny and entertaining.

Perhaps it’s a commentary on our culture, but this is vitally important. In fact, I would say that Trump’s entertainment value is a wildly underrated political attribute.

A recent column in the Financial Times notes that in a 2016 paper, “...three anthropologists from the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Texas at Austin argued it was the fact that Trump was so entertaining, above all else, that won him the Republican nomination that year.”

Jemima Kelly, the FT columnist, goes on to note that “If there’s one thing the former president does have, it’s personality. It’s not that he’s likeable. No, Trump has a much rarer gift: he’s funny.”

I get that “funny” is a weird description for a guy who tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power, but let’s be honest, Trump is at least partly a stand-up comedian.

And while it might be convenient to assume that to his fans, the cruelty is the point, at least some of his fans think entertainment is the point. To them, Trump is an authentic class clown in a world full of boring rule-followers who spew scripted talking points.

This brings us back to Christie. Not only is he the only Republican who understands he is running against Trump, he’s the only candidate who comes close to matching him as an entertainer.

It might not be enough to sway Republican primary voters, but that’s on their collective conscience. Christie can’t control how voters will respond to his message. What he can control is how he delivers it.

And on that count, he’s hitting it out of the park.

Calling for a "NOT WANTED" community bulletin - Donald Trump poster

Donald Trump is the world’s most powerful reject

He’s not wanted. A Frank Bruni point of view:

Not at funerals, although the Bush family, to show class and respect for tradition, held their noses and made an exception.

Not in England, where they turned him into a big, hideous blimp.

Not by moderate Republicans, or at least the shrinking club with a tenuous claim to that label, who pushed him away during the midterms as they fought for their survival and clung to their last shreds of self-respect.

And not by a 36-year-old Republican operative who is by most accounts the apotheosis of vanity and ambition — and who just turned down one of the most powerful roles in any administration, a job that welds you to the president’s side and gives you nearly unrivaled access to his thoughts.

Nick Ayers didn’t see enough upside to the welding. He could do without those thoughts. He said no to becoming Trump’s next chief of staff, and this wasn’t just the latest twist in “As The White House Turns.”

It was, really, the whole story — of a president who burns quickly through whatever goodwill he has, a president who represents infinitely more peril than promise, a president toward whom a shockingly small and diminishing number of people in Washington feel any real affection, a president more tolerated than respected, though even the tolerance wanes.

He’s forever fixated on how wanted he is (“My crowds!” “My ratings!”), but what’s more striking is how unwanted he is. And that’s not merely a function of the crests and dips that every president encounters. It’s not really about popularity at all.

It’s about how he behaves — and the predictable harvest of all that nastiness. While other presidents sought to hone the art of persuasion, he revels in his talent for repulsion: how many people he attacks (he styles this as boldness); how many people he offends (he pretties this up as authenticity); how many people he sends into exile. Trump's administration doesn’t have alumni so much as refugees. H.R. McMaster, Gary Cohn and Reince Priebus are a dumbfounded diaspora all their own.

Careerists who would normally pine for top jobs with a president assess his temper, behold his tweets, recall the mortifications of Jeff Sessions and Rex Tillerson, and run for the hills. 

Trump might be sitting at the most coveted desk in the world, but almost no one wants to pull up a chair.
What happened with Ayers, who is finishing a stint as Mike Pence’s chief of staff, speaks pointedly to the president’s diminished state. Bear in mind that Trump had already started telling people that Ayers would succeed John Kelly as chief of staff, so Ayers’ decision was doubly humiliating. Bear in mind who Ayers is: not just any political climber but someone whose every breath is focused on his enhanced glory, a trait frequently mentioned by Republicans who have watched his rise (and who sense in him more than a bit of Trump).

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump counted on Ayers’ interest and connived to shove Kelly out — he’ll leave by year’s end — so that they could shimmy Ayers in. They counted wrong. Ever clueless and oh so useless, they didn’t adequately factor in Trump’s toxicity, and the president now looks every bit as isolated as he is.

“Trump was left at the altar,” wrote The Washington Post’s White House team. In his search for takers, maybe it’s time for Tinder.

Administration officials like Steven Mnuchin and Mick Mulvaney practically put out news releases to make clear that Trump shouldn’t ask them to be chief of staff. He has no Plan B, just B-list options like Matt Whitaker, the acting attorney general.

It’s fitting. As leaders go, he has never been much of a magnet. He unequivocally romped in the Republican primaries, but since then? He got nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton did, a gap so remarkable that he had to claim a conspiracy of illegal voting to console himself. When he firstfilled his Cabinet, he hardly had his pick of the litter.

When Barbara Bush died in April, it was clear to Trump that he shouldn’t travel to Texas to pay his respects. When John McCain died in August, Trump was told to skip the funeral.

The heads of countries that share America’s purported values (pre-Trump, at least) reproach and recoil from him. 

MaineWriter- Americans are accustomed to seeing "WANTED" posters in post office bulletin boards and law enforcement bulletins. But, there may be another request for a board where "NOT WANTED" is displayed. Donald Trump would theoretically be front and center in the proposed exhibit.

Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.