Campaign Trail 2024: Looney Tunes and Unhinged Behavior

Don’t Wait for the Little Mustache to Call Trump a Fascist

A big part of former president Trump’s image is the projection of strength. His believers are convinced they and their kind will be protected. They’re willing to put aside or overlook his outrageous behavior, conduct, and rancid personality in exchange for promises of safety from the things they fear.

The campaign looks for staging to highlight that element of his character, hence the late-stage rallies in Coachella and Madison Square Garden aiming to showcase Trump in unexpected settings. (Those darned Never-Trump Republicans are ordering up batches of reserved seats for the New York event that they don’t intend to use.)

I suppose one could say that Trump’s escalatory rhetoric is part of a campaign strategy aimed at keeping his presence on the national stage as election day approaches. He certainly is cranking up ye olde fear mongering. 

The campaign and the candidate have made missteps recently. The desert rally wasn’t held on the site of the famed festival; it was at Calhoun Ranch, a former manure farm nearby. An estimated fifteen thousand fans were bussed in from parking lots five miles away. 

A man was arrested at a security checkpoint outside the venue, said to be carrying a shotgun, a loaded handgun, ammunition, and several fake passports. This was immediately reported as an aborted assassination attempt, except that it wasn’t. The suspect was a survivalist nut who followed the campaign around, sort of like a Grateful Dead fan. He’s now promising to sue for false arrest.

The crowd size was inflated from the stage to one hundred thousand, making everybody involved feel like their trek in 100° weather was worthwhile. The candidate railed against California, vowing to withhold aid if Governor Gavin Newsom didn’t comply with demands to upend water conservation in the state. 

Then came the bad news: the promised buses for returning attendees to the cars weren’t available. There was one bus and one angry crowd, left to muddle about in the dark with no facilities. Word on the internet was that the campaign hadn’t paid the bus company, or that there were logistical problems with fuel. 

I have yet to find any proof for those suppositions, and initially suspected a disinformation effort. While there are major media stories about the rally crowd having difficulties, none of them name the bus company, how the stranded attendees eventually got to their vehicles, nor interviews with the people who were inconvenienced (outside of the social media posters). 

It’s just another murky story about a campaign that gets murkier by the minute, as Monday night’s town hall Oak, Pennsylvania showed. It was another situation where attendees sweltered, this time in a hall with closed doors, which featured South Dakota Gov. Kristi Neom as moderator, and questions from prescreened audience members.

The candidate reminded his audience to vote on “January 5th,” and rambled for a bit about fictional character Hannibal Lector.

Trump got through four questions, offering his usual weaving narrative/ non-answers. After a pause prompted by a medical emergency, he asked (some say jokingly) if “anybody else would like to faint, please raise your hand. Let’s do it now.”

Then….From the Washington Post:

• “Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music. Let’s make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?” he said.

• For 39 minutes, Trump swayed, bopped — sometimes stopping to speak — as he turned the event into almost a living-room listening session of his favorite songs from his self-curated rally playlist.

• He played nine tracks. He danced. He shook hands with people onstage. He pointed to the crowd. Noem stood beside him, nodding with her hands clasped. Trump stayed in place onstage, slowly moving back and forth. He was done answering questions for the night.

From the Daily Mail’s Rob Crilly: 

• “First came Ave Marie, Schubert's masterpiece that is a favorite at weddings and funerals, as Trump stood center stage looking out into the middle distance. Then came Pavarotti and James Brown. And finally, inevitably, the Village People singing 'Y.M.C.A.'”

Said Rob later on social media: 

• “I was at Trump's golden escalator launch, flew out of Washington with him in 2020 and have probably been to 100 rallies, give or take. Have never seen anything like tonight.”

Now, if Vice President Kamala Harris or her running mate stood on stage bopping along for 39 minutes, page one of major newspapers would have included accounts calling their mental fitness into question. Hell, if then-candidate Joe Biden gave such a performance, one of the major media press might have mounted the stage, offering assistance.   

Candidate Kamala Harris was also campaigning in Pennsylvania, and her rally attracted attention because she did a ”roll the clip” move, prompting a montage of Donald Trump promises to wreak vengeance on Americans.

Via The Associated Press:

• She argued that Trump’s comments in a Fox News “Sunday Morning Futures” interview are the latest example of threatening rhetoric from the former president that should concern Americans about what a potential second Trump term could look like.

• Trump made the comment in response to a question about “outside agitators” potentially disrupting Election Day, pivoting to what he said is a foe closer to home.

• “I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” Trump said. He added: “We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

The video montage was a power move, coinciding with accounts suggesting the Republican candidate is experiencing what Harris called “unstable and unhinged behavior.”

Dean Obeidallah’s analysis:

• And as the NY Times reported ten days ago in an article on Trump’s cognitive decline, “Trump has seemed confused, forgetful, incoherent or disconnected from reality lately.”  They added, “He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought — some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical.”

• Just look at Trump’s conduct in the past week that provides more jarring examples. At an event at the Detroit Economic Club when he was supposed to address economic issues, he literally began to speak of Elon Musk’s missiles landing, “Biden circles” that were “beautiful” but Biden “couldn’t fill them up” to “we’ve been abused by other countries, we’ve been abused by our own politicians”–all in the same incoherent answer.  I played that clip for (psychologist & author of Duty to Warn) Dr. Gartner who commented that it makes “you realize how completely lost Trump is.”

• In addition, Trump while appearing on a podcast last week literally delivered a 12 minute (yes, 12 minute) meandering answer that was so incoherent it caused the hosts to joke that Trump was not rambling, he was “weaving.” One host added that they “don’t even want to know the answer anymore,” they just want more “weaving.” They were humoring Trump who was not making sense.

Reporter Bob Woodward’s book entitled “War” was officially released today. It’s an insider’s view (and biases) on the mechanisms and the humans involved in US foreign policy in the Biden White House and is already at the top of Amazon’s best seller chart. 

Woodward’s received criticism in the past for holding on to nuggets of information for later publication in book form, and his newest book contains an account of a former Trump official’s warning:

Via Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources:

• But with the book coming out during an election year, the reporting about Donald Trump stands out, particularly the scene with Trump's former Joint Chiefs chair Mark Milley calling Trump "the most dangerous person ever" and "fascist to the core." 

• The quote comes on page 179, and dates back to March 2023, when Milley and Woodward spoke at a Cohen Group reception in DC. Milley repeated the word "fascist" more than once. He exclaimed, "We have got to stop him! You have got to stop him!" Woodward says "by 'you' he meant the press broadly."  

• "I will never forget the intensity of his worry," Woodward concludes.

We humans not afflicted with MAGA madness have to get voters to the polls first. Then here are four things to worry about (and discuss and organize around) in addition to probable fascist rule:

1. Project 2025. Don’t let the statements disassociating the Trump campaign from the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for an authoritarian state fool ya. This Associated Press story looks at the overlaps with the campaign’s Agenda 47, and there are plenty.

2. Is Trump fit to lead this country? What was good for the goose (Biden) is good for the gander, and Donald Trump’s giving us plenty to worry about. Kamala Harris is right, maybe it’s time to look closer (with a bucket nearby) at what he’s saying in public.

3. Election day madness. No matter what the results turn out to be, the Trump campaign has a legal strategy to stall or disrupt the transition of power. Unless he wins, of course. Then they expect riots in the streets, and when they don’t get them, they’ll make it up. Democrats do have lawyers standing by to fight the good fight.

4. The firehouse of lies. You can’t stop them at this point, but the most egregious efforts at misleading the public  – like the Red Wave polls – need not dictate actions.

Mark Jacob in Trump will keep lying as long as journalists enable it at the Stop the Presses Substack concludes:

• It’s probably too close to the election for the media to enact the proper countermeasures against Trump even if they wanted to. But the lying is ingrained in the entire Republican Party now and will be a toxic threat long after he’s gone. Lying is how you get into the MAGA cult and stay in the cult. The younger Republican liars are competing to succeed Trump as chief liar. There’s no sense of guilt or regret – just ambition. Sometimes they even admit lying, as if it’s just good politics.

• Top Trump campaign official Corey Lewandowski was caught lying about the Mueller investigation and said at a congressional hearing in 2019: “I have no obligation to be honest with the media.” Vice presidential candidate JD Vance was called out on his lies about Haitian immigrants and declared: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m gonna do.”

• Without shared truths, democracy is impossible. MAGA Republicans are lying because they want democracy to be impossible.

***

Tuesday’s Other News to Think About

***

The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs by Gil Duran at The New Republic: (Eds note: “Weird” might not be the best word choice; anti-Democracy would be better.)

• When it comes to personal investing, cryptocurrencies are casinos at best and Ponzi schemes at worst: The FBI’s latest Cryptocurrency Fraud Report estimates that crypto scammers stole $5.6 billion from Americans in 2023. The most famous crypto scammer of all time, of course, is Sam Bankman-Fried, who alone stole $8 billion from customers of his now-defunct crypto exchange, FTX. Federal authorities say he illegally poured $100 million of those funds into political campaigns before his 2022 arrest. He’s now serving a quarter-century in prison.

• But this only scratches the surface of the damage wrought by cryptocurrencies. Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, in February tallied the illicit flow of $24.2 billion in cryptocurrency worldwide in 2023, the majority occurring in sanctioned “entities and jurisdictions.” Translation: Terrorist groups like Hezbollah and pariah nations like North Korea are big fans of crypto. Pyongyang’s crypto scammers have stolen over $3 billion since 2017. “Most experts agree the North Korean government is using these stolen assets to fund its nuclear weapons programs,” Chainalysis told CNBC. Meanwhile in Russia, where crypto is banned, Vladimir Putin has embraced its limited use in an effort to evade international sanctions.

• The industry is also a plague on the environment. Cryptocurrencies famously burn through massive amounts of energy, thus driving up greenhouse gas emissions: A 2022 White House report warned that crypto’s use of dirty energy could “hinder the ability of the United States” to meet its Paris Agreement commitments and “to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.” But the industry also devours water, which is used in cooling systems in crypto data centers; a study last year found that a single bitcoin transaction can use enough water to fill a small swimming pool.

***

Union Elections Surge In A Hopeful Sign For Labor by Dave Jamieson at HuffPost:

• More U.S. workers appear to be turning to unions in hopes of improving their jobs.

• On Tuesday, federal officials reported a 29% jump in union election petitions during the most recent fiscal year, rising from 2,593 in 2023 to 3,286 in 2024. The increase is part of a yearslong trend at the National Labor Relations Board, the agency that oversees private sector union elections and enforces collective bargaining rights.

• The NLRB said the number of petitions it’s received has more than doubled since 2021, when the board was reshaped following President Joe Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump.

***

Column: Can Stanford tell the difference between scientific fact and fiction? Its pandemic conference raises doubts by Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times 

• Some presenters uttered evident misinformation. Consider Scott Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a former COVID advisor to the Trump administration, who attacked pandemic lockdowns and their advocates because lockdowns “failed to stop the dying, they failed to stop the spread — that’s the data.”

• But this is a flagrant category error. No one argued that the lockdowns would stop the spread of COVID or “stop the dying.” They were consistently portrayed as policies to slow the spread and consequently mortality in order to relieve the crushing pressure on healthcare facilities and personnel long enough to enable them to get a handle on the pandemic — “flattening the curve” was the watchword. And over time, they succeeded in doing just that.

• Then there’s Marty Makary, a prominent surgeon at Johns Hopkins University who made a name for himself during the pandemic by repeatedly predicting that the pandemic was on the verge of ending due to natural immunity, and was consistently confounded by the appearance of successive new waves of deadly COVID variants.

***

Here are the links for my 2024 Voting Guides

• Candidates

• Propositions and Measures