Trump Gets a Participation Trophy: Election Updates

Per the Associated Press, the company said it agreed to, but wasn’t involved in staging Trump’s Sunday photo op:

In a message to employees obtained Monday by The Associated Press, McDonald’s said the owner-operator of the location, Derek Giacomantonio, reached out after he learned of Trump’s desire to visit a Pennsylvania restaurant. McDonald’s agreed to the event.

“Upon learning of the former president’s request, we approached it through the lens of one of our core values: we open our doors to everyone,” the company said. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next president. We are not red or blue – we are golden.”

The New York Times collected performance reviews of Trump from some McDonald’s workers in New York:

As he watched a video of former President Donald J. Trump taking a turn at the fryer on Sunday at a McDonald’s in Bucks County, Pa., [David Ye] spotted a clear sign that Mr. Trump was out of his element. “The box is, like, backwards,” Mr. Ye said with some bewilderment, as Mr. Trump shoveled a scoopful of fries the wrong way into the iconic red carton. “He doesn’t seem to know how to do it.” …

For a veteran of a reality TV show about business savvy, he committed what appeared to be a number of health code violations, several workers said. Mr. Trump did not opt for a hairnet or gloves. As he filled a box of fries cautiously, he quipped that the food “never touched the human hand.”

“Supposing we want some extra salt, can I do it like that?” Mr. Trump asked a worker. Without waiting for an answer, he added several vigorous shakes over a fresh batch of fries. Then, he tossed a handful of salt over his left shoulder, because, he said, he’s superstitious. That did not go over well with some of the half-dozen workers who watched the video.

“You don’t throw salt like that,” said Kishia, a McDonald’s manager in Flatbush, Brooklyn, who asked that her full name not be used because she was on the clock. “Somebody could have been behind him, you know?”

A cashier at a McDonald’s in Astoria, Queens, said the campaign stop minimized the hard work that she and her colleagues put into the job.

NBC News notes that according to an analysis from Trump’s alma mater, his policies would provide less benefit to the workers:

Lower-wage workers would benefit more under plans put forward by Harris than those offered by Trump, according to an analysis of the policies the two candidates have provided by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. …

The lowest-earning 20% of households could receive an average of $2,300 in various federal incentives under Harris’ plan, compared to around $350 under Trump’s plan, said [Wharton business professor Kent Smetters]. The incentives under Harris include an increase to the child tax credit, health care subsidies and assistance for first-time homebuyers. 

But some of those gains by lower-wage workers under Harris would be offset by slightly slower wage growth as a result of a higher corporate tax rate that Harris is also proposing, compared with Trump, said Smetters. When factoring in that slower wage growth, lower-wage workers would see a benefit of around $1,750 more per year under Harris than Trump, he said.

At another campaign event with Liz Cheney on Monday, Harris was asked how’s she’s sleeping, two weeks from the election:

I wake up in the middle of the night usually these days, just to be honest with you. … I work out. I try to eat well, you know. I love my family, and I make sure that I talk to the kids and my husband every day. These days, my family keeps me grounded in every way.

The self-styled MAGA master of the universe is due to get out of prison on October 29, after his legal team failed to secure his early release, CNN reports:

The Bureau of Prisons said in a letter to Bannon on Monday that his release date will remain October 29, as originally set. That means he will serve his full 120-day sentence behind bars.

Since learning in recent days he may be eligible to move to home confinement, Bannon has accused the BOP of political interference, and his attorneys have been advocating both in court and to prison officials for leniency.

The acting warden of the low-security Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to Bannon’s lawyers on Monday that there wasn’t enough time to arrange for Bannon to move to home confinement in Washington, DC. Home confinement was a possibility for the former top White House adviser because of a provision for some first-time federal offenders under the Trump-era First Step Act.

I just weighed in on the early vote totals thus far, and what we can and can’t discern from them:

Reports about which party (or presidential candidate) is doing well in early voting should come with a number of huge asterisks. Only 23 states report early voting numbers according to voters’ party registration status. Among those (roughly half of early votes cast so far), according to Election Lab, registered Democrats represent 46.5 percent of early voters and registered Republicans represent 32.5 percent with the rest (20.9 percent) being unaffiliated.

Should the Kamala Harris camp be enthused about this (heavy asterisks!) “lead”? Maybe. Votes already cast are “banked” votes, which allows the campaign to focus on undecided or unmobilized voters. But almost everywhere, early voters are very likely to be people who would have voted in any circumstances, so a given party’s heavy early vote share doesn’t necessarily mean a heavy overall vote. It’s also worth remembering that early-voting breakdowns in non-battleground states may affect the national popular vote but won’t determine the election winner. And the patterns in battleground states are more complicated than the national numbers indicate.

Read the rest here.

Because Abraham Lincoln was worse at border security, you see:

Thanks to heightened security and logistical hurdles for both candidates, per NBC News:

Officials with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s camps say they’ve pulled back on “off-the-record” stops — when a candidate breaks from larger-scale events to drop into a diner, ice cream shop or barber — because of more burdensome security requirements. There’s an element of surprise to many of these stops, which is what can create local buzz about the candidate.  …

Each of the campaigns say Secret Service safety demands have created new challenges to booking the stops, in some cases requiring 48-hour advance notice and often far more detailed plans than they had in the past. Planning the local stops now can be as labor-intensive for campaign staff as putting on a full event, the sources said.  

One of the more alarming features of the final stage of this fraught presidential election has been the escalating threats by Donald Trump to use every bit of power he can muster as president to settle grudges with his many, many enemies. Most recently, he’s taken a shine to the McCarthyite term “the enemy within” to suggest that domestic opponents of His Highness are as dangerous (and as appropriate an object for U.S. military action) as foreign adversaries.

Now comes Trump’s running-mate J.D. Vance to explain that Trump didn’t really mean what it sure sounded like he meant, as the Daily Beast reports:

JD Vance attempted to defend Donald Trump‘s threat to use the military to quash “the enemy within” by claiming Monday that it came from “the heart.”

“He’s not just running on slogans,” Vance told Fox News during a Monday appearance on America’s Newsroom. “When people ask him questions, he speaks from the heart sometimes that means he is going to talk about issues that the mainstream media isn’t focused on.”

“We do have people on the left, not most people on the left to be clear, but some people on the left who are encouraging violent responses to what we believe is going to be a Donald Trump victory,” the Ohio senator continued.

While Vance acknowledged “very important enemies to focus on overseas,” he claimed “if people are burning down our cities then of course we have a police response to that basic violation of our right to public security.

You’d think if Trump meant to threaten “people burning down our cities” he could have said so, even while speaking “from the heart.” It does make you wonder, though: if Trump becomes the 47th president, will Vance spend four years explaining what The Boss really means when he says something that sounds crazy? And if he does perform that useful function, how will Trump feel about it?

Here’s what Detroit Free Press political editor Emily Lawler told our own Benjamin Hart in a new interview:

There’s about 300,000 Arab American people in Michigan. I think it’s incorrect to view them as a monolith. Some are Republicans, some are Democrats. That’s not 300,000 people who are definitely going to vote for Democrats, and now definitely aren’t. I think there’s a really broad variety of viewpoints in that community.

And it’s also not that Trump is necessarily winning a lot of these votes, it’s more apathy — not voting or voting for Jill Stein or whatever, which could be a significant factor. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by just under 11,000 votes. Jill Stein got 51,000 votes.

Read the rest of the interview, which is about the state of the race in Michigan, here.

Here are the top ads from both political parties over the last week, which you may or may not watch on an iPad while standing:

And the top ads from the two campaigns:

The pair are having “moderated discussions” at campaign events in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin on Monday. Here’s some of what they said at the first event in Chester County, Pennsylvania.

Harris’s said that her administration “will not be a continuation of the Biden administration”:

I bring to it my own ideas, my own experiences, but it is also about moving past what, frankly, I think, has been the last decade of the American discourse being influenced by Donald Trump, in a way that has had the effect of suggesting we as Americans should point the finger at one another in a way that has been using the power of the presidency to demean and divide us.

Liz Cheney warned that she’s seen democracies come apart fast abroad:

I spent time working overseas before I was elected to Congress, and I have spent time working in countries where people aren’t free and where people are struggling for their freedom. And I know how quickly democracies can unravel … that is what’s on the ballot.

Cheney also spoke about how she could support Harris even though they don’t agree about the right to an abortion:

There are many of us around the country who have been pro-life but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need. In places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing to get access to women’s medical records. That’s not sustainable for us as a country, and it has to change.

Congressman (and McDonald’s franchise owner) Chuck Edwards awarded a participation trophy to Trump at his event in North Carolina:

He also repeated his false claims about FEMA spending:

He also said he was impressed with the early vote totals so far, and said he hadn’t seen any evidence of fraud yet:

Trump is holding a press conference in Helene-devastated Swannanoa, North Carolina (about 10 miles west of Asheville):

What the drive in looked like:

According to the new Washington Post–Schlar School poll, the largest demographic of uncommitted registered voters in battleground states is people 25 and younger:

In addition to swing-state voters overall, the Post-Schar School survey focuses on a sizable group of registered voters who have not been firmly committed to any candidate and whose voting record leaves open whether they will cast ballots this fall. With another part of the electorate locked down for a candidate for many months, this group of “Deciders” could make the difference in an election where the battleground states could be won or lost by the narrowest of margins.

The new results show changes among this group of voters compared with the first survey conducted last spring. About three-quarters of battleground-state voters say they will definitely vote for Harris or Trump (74 percent). That’s up from 58 percent who were committed to Biden or Trump this spring. The percentage who are uncommitted has dropped from 42 percent to 26 percent over the past five months. Among likely voters, the latest poll finds that a smaller 21 percent say they are not fully committed to Harris or Trump.

Younger registered voters are more likely to be uncommitted: 43 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds are uncommitted, a larger share than any other age group. Non-White voters are more likely to be uncommitted than White voters, 34 percent vs. 23 percent.

Novel vehicle meets novel inflatable:

That’s the term the Harris campaign is using to grade swing-state voters, per the the New York Times new report on the two campaigns’ fight for the ever-shrinking pool of undecideds:

Inside the Delaware headquarters of Ms. Harris’s campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a “contactability score” from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach — and who is best to deliver her closing message.

The results are guiding Ms. Harris’s media and travel schedule, as well as campaign stops by brand-name supporters. …

At Mr. Trump’s headquarters, in South Florida, his team recently refreshed its model of the battleground electorate and found that just 5 percent of voters were still undecided, half as many as in August. The Trump team calls them the “target persuadables” — younger, more racially diverse people with lower incomes who tend to use streaming services and social media. Mr. Trump has made appearance after appearance on those platforms, including on podcasts aimed at young men.

Also:

The Harris campaign considers its audience of winnable swing voters to be up to 10 percent of voters in battleground states, slightly larger than what the Trump operation sees for itself or the Times polling indicates.

Read the rest here.

CBS reports on the preliminary findings from the bipartisan task force probing how a gunman came within inches of killing Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13:

Among the panel’s findings, the report found “inadequate planning and coordination” before the rally in Butler, noting that no meeting occurred between federal and local law enforcement on the day of the event, and alleging that responsibilities were not “effectively” verified by the Secret Service. The panel also noted that there wasn’t a “unified command post” for communication between the Secret Service and state and local partners. And witnesses who participated in a walkthrough of the area days before the assassination attempt called it disorganized. 

The lawmakers outline that “fragmented lines of communication” allowed the gunman to “evade law enforcement,” climbing onto the roof of a nearby building and firing eight shots. And the report notes that “federal, state, and local law enforcement officers could have engaged Thomas Matthew Crooks at several pivotal moments.”

Additionally, the report outlines how areas outside of the secure perimeter “were recognized as security risks,” pointing to the building from which Crooks gained access to the roof. And despite the proximity to the road and sight of the stage, the report notes, the crowd that gathered near the building was not screened by Secret Service and other law enforcement. 

Campaign finance and election law experts have been weighing in on Musk’s new plan to hold a daily lottery in which he awards a $1 million to a random registered swing-state voter who signs a petition from his pro-Trump super-PAC (which is handling much of the Trump team’s GOTV efforts).

NBC News spoke to law professor Rick Hasen, who thinks the scheme is clearly illegal:

Hasen told NBC News on Sunday that Musk’s PAC is only offering the payments to registered voters, not the general public at large, which is what could make the scheme illegal.

“Essentially what you’re doing is you are creating a lottery. You’re creating a lottery where the only people eligible to participate in the lottery are people who register to vote, or are registered to vote, and that’s illegal,” Hasen said.

He noted that the general intent behind election laws prohibiting bribery is to prevent people from buying votes, but “you don’t have to say you have to vote for a particular candidate in order to be breaking this law. … It can be to either incentivize people to register or vote, or it can be to reward them,” Hasen told NBC News on Sunday.

Another expert who spoke with CNN agreed:

“This isn’t a particularly close case — this is exactly what the statute was designed to criminalize,” said David Becker, a former Justice Department official handling voting rights cases and founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Becker said the fact that the prize is available only to registered voters “in one of seven swing states that could affect the outcome of the presidential election” is strong evidence of Musk’s intent to influence the race, which could be legally problematic. “This offer was made in the last days before some registration deadlines,” Becker said, bolstering the appearance that the cash prizes are designed to drive up registration.

The New York Times notes that Musk may have some legal wiggle room:

Federal law says it is a crime for someone who “pays or offers to pay or accepts payment either for registration to vote or for voting.” Guidance from the Justice Department says that includes “anything having monetary value, including cash, liquor, lottery chances, and welfare benefits such as food stamps.”

But some benefits to help people vote are legal and common: Groups can offer voters rides to the polls, for instance, and companies often offer paid leave to allow Americans the time to vote, according to the guidance. And, crucially, Mr. Musk’s allies have argued that because Mr. Musk is not directly paying for voter registration — but rather for a petition signature that happens to be open only to registered voters — it is not illegal.

Former FEC chairman Brad Smith agreed with that. “He’s paying them to sign a petition — and he wants only people who are registered to vote to sign the petition. So I think he comes out okay here,” he told the Times.

Musk himself stressed the lack of strings on Sunday without mentioning the registration requirement:

The New York Times’ Theodore Schleifer has the numbers:

 Harris’s campaign both out-raised and out-spent Donald Trump’s campaign by about a 3.5-to-1 margin in September, according to new filings on Sunday night. Harris raised $221.8 million, compared with Trump’s $62.7 million. She out-spent Trump by the same proportion: $269.8 million versus $77.6 million. Entering October, Harris had a narrower cash-on-hand advantage, by about a 1.5-to-1 margin: $187.5 million versus $119.7 million.

The state’s Board of Elections says that more than 1 million people have voted in the first four days of early voting, per CNN:

“As of 4 p.m. Sunday, the fourth day of in-person early voting in North Carolina, more than 1 million voters had cast ballots in the 2024 general election, according to preliminary State Board of Elections data,” the board said in a press release.

Of the 1,008,123 ballots cast, over 900,00 were from early in-person voting, the elections board said. “The ballots cast number represents a statewide turnout of about 13% of North Carolina’s nearly 7.8 million registered voters,” the board said.

One of Trump’s senior comms advisers, Alex Bruesewitz, tells Semafor’s Shelby Talcott that the campaign’s approach to podcasts is being misunderstood:

I think the bias and the toxicity of the traditional press, the mainstream media, has pushed a lot of the viewers away and they’re finding their news now in some of these more fun, different paced podcasts. …

Something that the mainstream media is getting wrong when we’re talking about our podcast approach is: We haven’t necessarily gone to these podcasts to just target young men. We are targeting people who have been disaffected by the mainstream media, independents who are relatively apolitical. These have provided a really unique medium and venue for us to get our message across. There’s a direct correlation between the bias and the toxicity of the mainstream media that’s disaffected the millions and millions of independent voters and viewers, and now they find their news in these alternative platforms.

A Trump supporter in Michigan tells the Associated Press it’s not, or at least not when it comes to the presidential race:

The lawn of Nick Hannawa’s suburban Detroit home is lined with political signs backing candidates for prosecutor, supervisor and local trustee. But Hannawa isn’t promoting his presidential pick.

He says he doesn’t want the headaches in an polarized election year. In this part of swing state Michigan, many of Hannawa’s neighbors in upper-middle class and affluent neighborhoods have a similar attitude about a public display on behalf of their preferred presidential candidate. It’s easier, they say, to opt out of this once-typical show of support outside their house.

“Some people love Donald Trump. Some people hate Donald Trump,” said Hannawa, 37. “I voted for Donald Trump. I’m going to vote for Donald Trump again. If I put that sign in my yard again, is it really going to make a difference or is someone not going to like me?” …

Many neighbors “have stated they’re afraid to put signs in their front lawns,” Edward Shehab, another Bloomfield Township resident, said. “People are kind of like ‘I know who I’m going to vote for, and I don’t need to tell people what we’re going to do.’”

The state’s top election official says that the early votes and early absentee votes will be reported before in-person votes are on Election Day:

Trump on Sunday “worked” at a closed McDonald’s, preparing unordered fries and then handing bags of unordered food through the drive-thru window to pre-screened supporters whose cars had been staged at the location in advance.

NBC News reports:

The franchise in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, was closed for normal business during Sunday’s visit … In a statement, the location’s owner and operator, Derek Giacomantonio, said that he decided to participate in the Trump campaign event because “it is a fundamental value of my organization that we proudly open our doors to everyone who visits the Feasterville community.”

The Washington Post adds that “No one ordered food. Instead, the attendees received whatever Trump gave them.” The pretend customers were picked by the franchise and local Trump campaign staff.

Local reporter Tom Sofield shared some photos of a drive-thru rehearsal before Trump arrived:

So in an effort to highlight his claim that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s, Trump pretended to work at a closed McDonald’s where he served pretend orders to supporters pretending to be customers. Hopefully the fries weren’t cold.

Trump didn’t cancel his interview with the state-owned Saudi media outlet Al Arabiya:

Former Obama campaign manager Jim Messina spoke with Gabriel Debenedetti this weekend and explained why he still thinks the issue can make a decisive difference:

The Republicans are out there saying that in smaller turnout elections, in referendums, in 2022, [abortion-rights] played bigger but that in a general election it won’t play as big. I don’t think that’s true, for one really big reason. Right now, women voters are going for Harris over Trump by 16 points, and this race really depends on how much Harris wins women by. Specifically, white women and working-class white women without a college degree could be the decisive voter group. White women make up about 36 percent of the overall electorate. Traditionally, Republicans win these voters — these are the voters who broke Hillary Clinton’s heart. Mitt Romney beat us with white women by 9 points, Trump won them by 6 points in 2016 and 7 points in 2020. Right now, it’s deadlocked. That’s just a massive swing. Harris is polling better with white women than any Democratic presidential candidate this century. So if she can keep white women close, that puts her in a very strong position.

Does that mean you don’t need to focus on African American men and Latino men and the bedrock of the Democratic Party, which is Black women? Of course it doesn’t. You can walk and chew gum. You can do two things. There’s this absolutely fucking stupid argument in my party that says you either turn your voters out or you persuade. The campaigns that win at the presidential level do both, and that is the campaign that Kamala Harris has built. She has the biggest field operation on the ground that we’ve ever seen to turn her vote out and to focus on some of the groups we’ve talked about: African Americans, Latinos, young people. And then she has a persuasion machine for these women. Now, these women are the same women who walked away from Hillary at the end after the Comey report, and she lost a very close election. So I agree that you can never stop talking about the abortion issue, and I think the Harris campaign knows this. It’s now the single most important issue to women under 30, with 4 in 10 saying it’s their top issue.

Read the rest of Gabe’s interview with Messina here.

Trump is did some quick math at his town hall event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on Sunday evening:

Politico’s Steven Shepard sounds an alarm:

The weekend is passing without a single high-quality public poll — nationally or in any of the battleground states — released on either Saturday or Sunday. Nothing from The New York Times and its high-profile partnership with Siena College. Crickets from all five broadcast and cable news networks’ Sunday shows.

It’s a striking lack of data in the third-to-last weekend before Election Day.

Polling has become markedly more expensive over the past two decades, while media outlets’ budgets are increasingly strained. So it’s not surprising that the polls that typically populate the Sunday morning public-affairs shows or the Sunday papers have become rarer.

Still, the dearth of public polling is especially acute in the swing states. It’s Oct. 20, and there are only three polls conducted entirely this month with rigorous methodology in the most critical state, Pennsylvania. In Wisconsin, it’s only one high-quality poll this month. There are only two in Michigan. There’s no doubt that there are fewer polls conducted with the rigor needed to capture harder-to-reach voters — and with the corresponding high price tag.

As of this liveblog post, it’s excluded. There’s been some back-and-forth among the page’s editors:

Nate Silver has a put together a list of 24 reasons the election is not Kamala Harris’s to lose. Here are four of them:

13. Harris also got a late start to her race, inheriting most of the staff from the poorly-run Biden campaign. She’s proven to be a good candidate in many respects, but it’s always a big leap when the understudy is suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

14. Harris is seeking to become the first woman president. In the only previous attempt, undecideds broke heavily against Hillary Clinton, and she underperformed her polls.

15. Trust in media continues to fall to abysmal levels. One can debate how to attribute blame for this between longstanding conservative efforts to discredit the media, a secular decline in trust in institutions, and various overreaching and hypocrisy in the press. But it’s hard for even legitimate Trump critiques to penetrate the mass public. Trump’s conviction on a series of felony charges hardly made any difference, for instance.

16. Trump has traits of a classic con man, but con artistry is often effective, and Trump is skilled at convincing voters that he’s on their side even if his election would not be in their best interest. Furthermore, Trump presents Democrats with a Three Stooges Syndrome problem: a range of plausible attacks so vast that they tend to cancel one another out. 

Read the other 20 here.

Silver has also shared a helpful chart showing how various outcomes in the seven most likely tipping-point swing states would or wouldn’t deliver a Harris victory:

Jon Ralson offers his latest update:

The Clark mail has posted: Dems won under 2-to-1, about 30,000-18,000. (I’ll round in the narrative part up here to make it easier to read, details in chart below.) Dems have about an 1,800-voter lead statewide (this will change slightly with signature cures, but not by a lot). That is a huge difference from 2020, when the Dem lead statewide was 40,000 after one day.

If, as expected, there is a 5-point or so R turnout edge after Election Day, that means Dems (Kamala Harris) will have to win indies by somewhere around 5 points to win the state, all other things being equal. And they may not be: If each side does not hold 90 percent or so of the base votes – more Rs go for Harris than Ds go for Trump or vice-versa – the entire calculus changes. (Regular reminder: Biden won indies here by 6 in 2020, according to exit polls. But that was then; this is now.)

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson is pushing back on Musk’s disinformation regarding the number of registered voters in the state:

Benson also said Sunday that she expects Michigan’s election results to be certified within 24 hours of Election Day, and that one million people have already voted in the state. Two million voters have requested absentee ballots.

Yes, at least in public. There are “currently no plans for Vice President Kamala Harris to appear on the trail with President Joe Biden before Election Day, according to three Harris campaign officials and three White House officials,” NBC News reported Sunday:

Instead, Biden plans to try to help Harris this week by privately leveraging some of his longtime political relationships, specifically with labor leaders, and holding official White House events that highlight his administration’s record, officials said. His schedule in the final week before the election has not yet been determined, they said. The strategy was crafted with coordination between Harris and Biden aides, who believe at this time that “the most important role he can play is doing his job as president,” said one of the White House officials[.]

His Trump 2024/McDonald’s crossover event happened Sunday afternoon at the Street Road McDonald’s in Feasterville, Pennsylvania — which was closed to the public. Trump donned an apron and spent about an hour at the restaurant, serving food to apparently pre-selected supporters.

And at the drive-thru:

A lot of Trump fans showed up outside, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports:

Thousands of Trump supporters lined Street Road hours before his scheduled arrival, stretching almost to the Taco Bell. They sang “God Bless America” and blasted Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and the Doors’ “L.A. Woman” from speakers. Vehicles honked and revved their engines in support. Harris supporters were booed or met with obscenities

Today’s the day Trump ‘works’ at McDonald’s. The campaign stunt, planned before Trump’s town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, is supposed to highlight the Trump team’s allegation that Kamala Harris lied when she said she worked at the fast food chain back when she was in college. Trump has offered no evidence for the claim she didn’t work there. Instead he’s “going to stand over that french fry” to prove he can. Since he’s arguably the world’s most famous McDonald’s fan, the campaign stop probably doubles as a kind of wish fulfillment for the former president.

Here’s Trump’s rambling answer to Fox News Media Buzz host Howard Kurtz after being asked about his “Day of Love” comment:

Also:

Kurtz also fact-checked a few of Trump’s statements, including the rigged election claims, after the interview (which the Harris campaign quickly highlighted).

Might as well jump. Photo: Ryan Collerd/AFP via Getty Images

At the Atlantic, Franklin Foer argues that behind all the newly MAGA billionaire’s hijinks and bluster, there’s just naked greed and self-ambition:

Musk has only begun to tap the pecuniary potential of the government, and Trump is the dream. He rewards loyalists, whether they are foreign leaders who genuflect before him or supplicants who host events at his resorts. Where other presidents might be restrained by norms, Trump shrugs. During his first term, he discovered that his party was never going to punish him for his transgressions.

In the evolving topography of Trumpland, none of his supporters or cronies will have chits to compare with Musk’s. If Trump wins, it will likely be by a narrow margin that can be attributed to turnout. Musk can tout himself as the single variable of success.

It’s not hard to imagine how the mogul will exploit this alliance. Trump has already announced that he will place him in charge of a government-efficiency commission. Or, in the Trumpian vernacular, Musk will be the “secretary of cost-cutting.” SpaceX is the implied template: Musk will advocate for privatizing the government, outsourcing the affairs of state to nimble entrepreneurs and adroit technologists. That means there will be even more opportunities for his companies to score gargantuan contracts. So when Trump brags that Musk will send a rocket to Mars during his administration, he’s not imagining a reprise of the Apollo program. He’s envisioning cutting SpaceX one of the largest checks that the U.S. government has ever written. He’s talking about making the richest man in the world even richer.

The New York Times, in a big report on the many ways Musk’s businesses are entangled with the federal government, notes the role could also give Musk the opportunity to deregulate himself:

[The power to recommend wide-ranging cuts at federal agencies and changes to federal rules] would essentially give the world’s richest man and a major government contractor the power to regulate the regulators who hold sway over his companies, amounting to a potentially enormous conflict of interest.

Through a review of court filings, regulatory dockets and government contracting data, The New York Times has compiled an accounting of Mr. Musk’s multipronged business arrangements with the federal government, as well as the violations, fines, consent decrees and other inquiries federal agencies have ordered against his companies. Together, they show a deep web of relationships: Instead of entering this new role as a neutral observer, Mr. Musk would be passing judgment on his own customers and regulators.

The Wall Street Journal’s report on Arizona’s Election Day prep reads like war journalism:

“You’d have to be a psychopath to say you enjoy this,” said Maricopa County’s top election official for voting by mail, Stephen Richer, a Republican. The building has added metal detectors and armed guards. On Election Day, as workers tabulate ballots behind new fencing and concrete barriers, drones will patrol the skies overhead, police snipers will perch on rooftops and mounted patrols will stand ready.

Across the state, election workers have gone through active-shooter drills and learned to barricade themselves or wield fire hoses to repel armed mobs. At the ready are trauma kits containing tourniquets and bandages designed to pack chest wounds and stanch serious bleeding. …

“We’ve had to change procedures to make sure temporary [poll] workers feel safe, which hasn’t happened before,” said Richer’s executive assistant, Joshua Heywood. “Nobody 10 years ago was taking pictures of temporary workers and their license plates as they were leaving the building.” 

And Arizona is definitely not alone:

In Colorado, death threats from election deniers have led some county clerks and election officials to have bulletproof vests on hand. Nationwide, many election offices are stockpiling Narcan, a drug used to reverse opioid overdose, after some received ballot envelopes last November containing white powder with traces of fentanyl.  …

Nationally, nearly 40% of local election officials reported experiencing threats, harassment or abuse due to their jobs, according to a survey released in May by the Brennan Center, a nonprofit voter rights group. Death threats and other forms of intimidation, including suspicious packages and bomb threats, have risen “meteorically” since 2020, the group reported.

The now 60-year-old vice president attended services this morning at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia. The congregation sang to her:

New York contributor Sam Adler-Bell writes about Trump’s weird Music Hall:

Trumpism has always been a disorienting fusion of buffoonery and menace: too dangerous to be purely comic, not serious enough to live up to our fears. We expect our would-be tyrants to command a certain gravitas, to be earnest, play it straight. But Donald Trump almost never does. He’s always smirking, acting coy, camp, or just plain bizarre. The effect can be deflating, confusing, bathetic. Can a man this ridiculous really pose an existential threat to our democracy?

He argues Trump’s soundtrack choices are indicative:

“Let’s not do any more questions. Let’s just listen to music.” It’s an economical distillation of Trump’s appeal, one that — all these years later — can still be difficult for liberals to grasp. Most of his words aren’t important. Neither are the details or facts. The main thing is the music, the melodrama, the feelings of longing and betrayal that Trump, in all his self-sorry arrogance, evokes. The people who show up for Trump rallies want to hear the song. They want to feel the highs and lows together in the presence of their leader. Joy, maybe. Or indignation. Probably, hope. It’s important to remember, too, that the contempt liberals feel for Trump is part of the appeal. Some people like Trump the way other people like Cats: They don’t care if it’s not good. One person’s kitschy junk is another person’s treasure. It’s a mistake to assume schmaltz and menace can’t go hand in hand. Sometimes, the banality is the point.

Read the rest here.

While mostly sticking to canned campaign talking points when asked about Trump Palmer prowess remarks, the Speaker of the House this morning seemed alarmed that CNN State of the Union host Jake Tapper kept pointing out what Trump said:

First off, this will probably come as no surprise, but:

Fox Sports, however, published a story titled “Trump says he overpowered an older Arnold Palmer in golf and reveals how golfers reacted to Palmer in shower” — so it’s on the Fox News website somewhere, at least.

Meanwhile, when it came to referring to Arnold’s Palmer, most publications’ headlines took the vague road:

Some other headlines on the rally:

• Trump asks Pennsylvania crowd, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ (Fox News)

• ‘With all due respect’: Trump references golf legend’s anatomy during rally (CNN)

• Donald Trump talks fracking, Arnold Palmer and Charleroi as Latrobe rallygoers lean into religion (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

• Donald Trump targets steelworkers, riffs on golfer’s anatomy at Pennsylvania rally (USA Today)

• At Latrobe, Trump Calls Harris ‘Threat to Democracy’ (Newsmax)

• Trump implies legendary golfer Arnold Palmer was well endowed at campaign rally in Latrobe, Pa.: ‘Oh my God’ (New York Post)

• Trump’s restless week on the trail ends with a rally riff about Arnold Palmer’s manhood (NPR)

• Trump makes crude remark about golfing immortal: ‘I had to say it’ (NJ.com)

The cold open referenced the Fox News interview, Trump’s rambling and gay anthem dancing, and brought back Dana Carvey as Biden again:

Weekend Update compared Harris and Trump’s closing messages:

In addition to championing the golfer’s manhood at the beginning of his speech in Latrobe, he brought up Palmer again while admiring his well-armed security personnel, per the AP:

They give you a little extra security nowadays, you notice? … I got more machine guns than I’ve ever seen — look at these guys. We’ve got more guys, and every one of them is like central casting too, holy shit.

They look like Arnold. Can’t look better than Arnold.

Here’s part of what Mark Cuban said at a Harris campaign event in Arizona on Saturday (without any cash giveaways):

If this isn’t already illegal, it probably should be:

Here’s one election law expert’s response, for what it’s worth:

I have to admit I was wondering whether or how the campaign would respond to the opposing candidate celebrating Arnold Palmer’s penis size. Welcome to 2024, folks:

Here’s what she told Thomas Hauser at the Sporting News back in 2018:

As for Trump, Peg [Palmer] recalled, “My dad had dealings with him over the years at some charity fundraisers and a few other events that had to do with Trump’s golf courses. My dad cherished golf and he appreciated Trump’s support for the game. Trump looked up to my dad, so I suspect he was on his best behavior when they were together. But in the campaign, my dad saw a different side of him.”

“My dad didn’t like people who act like they’re better than other people,” Peg continued. “He didn’t like it when people were nasty and rude. He didn’t like it when someone was disrespectful to someone else. My dad had no patience for people who demean other people in public. He had no patience for people who are dishonest and cheat. My dad was disciplined. He wanted to be a good role model. He was appalled by Trump’s lack of civility and what he began to see as Trump’s lack of character.”

“One moment stands out in my mind,” Peg recounted. “My dad and I were at home in Latrobe. He died in September, so this was before the election. The television was on. Trump was talking. And my dad made a sound of disgust — like ‘uck’ or ‘ugg’ — like he couldn’t believe the arrogance and crudeness of this man who was the nominee of the political party that he believed in. Then he said, ‘He’s not as smart as we thought he was,’ ” and walked out of the room. What would my dad think of Donald Trump today? I think he’d cringe.”

Harris mocked Trump’s weave:

The former president is letting it all fly tonight in Latrobe:

Trump began his speech in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night with a more than 11-minute celebration of golfing legend Arnold Palmer (who was from Latrobe, and the rally was held at Arnold Palmer Regional Airport).

Towards the end of his comments, Trump noted how the “all man” Palmer was a legend in the shower, too:

Someone in Florida has too much disposable income:

Oops:

Anecdotal, but still:

That’s what she said to reporters on Saturday regarding her use of Trump video clips during her speeches at campaign events:

He’s becoming increasingly unstable and unhinged, and it requires a response.

I think the American people are seeing it, witnessing it in real time. And we must take note of the fact that this is an individual who wants to be president of the United States. And I think the American people deserve better than someone who actually seems to be unstable.

Friday night’s Trump rally featured a banner saying “Make Detroit Great Again” — but the a little over a week ago, he insulted the city to its face, warning that if Harris wins the election, “our whole country will end up being like Detroit.” The Wall Street Journal reports on how Trump’s derision has played out in the city:

People involved with Trump’s Michigan operation argue that the former president’s earlier assessment of Detroit—he likened the city to a developing nation—was blunt but honest. And they say that even if Trump’s comments hurt his ability to win over voters in a city that is nearly 80% Black, his Detroit bashing could resonate with his supporters, especially white, working-class voters in rural and suburban areas in the battleground state.

The Trump remarks have been the talk of Detroit’s business community, in some cases angering or baffling civic and corporate leaders. …

Barry Altman, a Republican running as an underdog for a state legislative seat representing part of Detroit, was in a newly opened Trump campaign office in Hamtramck, Mich., after Trump’s comments. The campaign had been excited about the momentum for the former president in the ethnically diverse area, but after Trump’s remarks, Altman said: “Every person that walked in there asked me to explain that.”

Later, Altman added: “I get the analogy, I get that, but in real application, he just shouldn’t have used Detroit.”

Harris wore a “Detroit vs. Everbody” shirt at her event in the city on Saturday:

CNN offers a check-in, based on data from the ad tracking firm AdImpact:

In the first two weeks of October, Donald Trump and his allies directed about a third of all their spending on broadcast TV advertisements to ads about transgender health care, a significant increase reflecting a major tactical shift from previous months’ ad expenditures.

On the other side, Kamala Harris and her allies continued to put money into ads focused on taxes, character and health care, while lowering their investment in spots about abortion rights. Democrats have also abandoned an earlier emphasis on immigration and crime when Harris and her allies sought to blunt sustained GOP attacks in the weeks after she took over the ticket.

Another 200,000 people have early voted in the state since midday Friday. Captions the Washington Post’s Amy Gardner in an X thread:

Anyone wondering about voter enthusiasm this year should take a look at Georgia. After four days of early voting, more than 1.2 million people have cast ballots — roughly one-fourth of the TOTAL who voted in 2020.

About 27 percent or so of those who voted so far are Black — a little below the overall Black share of registered voters. Nearly 54 percent are women. Pretty much the same as 2020, when turnout data showed about 55 percent.

Notes the Washington Post:

Kamala Harris will participate in moderated conversations with Republican former congresswoman Liz Cheney on Monday, seeking to capitalize on discontent with Donald Trump in suburban areas of swing states.

Anti-Trump Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative political commentator Charlie Sykes will moderate the events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, according to a senior Harris campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss unannounced campaign activity. The conversations will take place in Chester County, Pa., Oakland County, Mich., and Waukesha County, Wis. — counties where Trump lost support between 2016 and 2020 and where former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley won more than 10 percent of the Republican primary vote against Trump in primary contests this year.

In-person early voting began Saturday in the swing states of Michigan and Nevada, as well as in Massachusetts.

They are highlighting a moment from one of Trump’s events on Friday when he briefly seemed a little sleepy:

Reuters reports that there have already been a few internal calls for alarm about the canvassing operation being run by the Musk-funded America PAC:

The difficulties, in pivotal battleground states including Wisconsin and Nevada, come as the group, America PAC, races to enlist voters behind the Republican candidate in the final two weeks before the Nov. 5 election. Four people involved in the group’s outreach told Reuters that managers warned canvassers they are missing targets and needed to raise the number of would-be voters they contact.

Alysia McMillan, who canvassed for the PAC in Wisconsin, said field organizers recently told campaigners there they weren’t reaching daily objectives and were on track to miss an ultimate goal of contacting 450,000 voters by Election Day. In one meeting with canvassers, recorded by McMillan and reviewed by Reuters, a manager warned of the shortfall. …

One canvassing manager in Arizona said leaders there had issued similar warnings. Three other people familiar with the outreach told Reuters that Chris Young, a Musk aide and longtime Republican operative, had recently traveled to Nevada to audit whether doorknocking tallies there had been inflated by some of the workers hired by contractors. Another person briefed on the matter said America PAC was struggling to find sufficient people to conduct audits in other states.

Read the rest of the Reuters report here.

Trump continued to raise the specter of the “enemy within” this week after suggesting in a Fox News interview last weekend that the military should be used against his political enemies. In his new interview with the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he tried to walk the military threat back:

Columnist Peggy Noonan, a longtime and sometimes severe critic of Mr. Trump, asks him to clarify: “If you were to reach the presidency again, would you of course rule out using the military to move against your enemies? That is, yours would not be a fascist-style government that would use its agencies, entities or military to move against your political foes because they have opposed you—is that correct?”

“Yeah,” Mr. Trump says, “but I never said I would. . . . First of all, Biden, who doesn’t know he is alive—Biden said that he expects there to be a lot of trouble if I win the election. That’s a very bad statement for him to make. He said that. That’s where this came from.” Mr. Trump digresses into his poll numbers and has to be brought back on topic.

Ms. Noonan: “But you would never do that?”

Mr. Trump: “Of course I wouldn’t. But now, if you’re talking about you’re going to have riots on the street, you would certainly bring the National Guard in. … So I’m only talking about in cases like that where you need help. You can’t say, ‘I’ll never bring in everything,’ as the entire country is disappearing in bedlam. But certainly not against my opponents—it’s against civil unrest.”

In an interview with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, Trump leaned back into the bro-or-madman pose he likes to use when waving off threats from foreign strongmen:

Mr. Gigot asks how Mr. Trump would persuade Xi Jinping to stand down from a blockade of Taiwan.

“Oh, very easy,” the former president says. “I had a very strong relationship with him. He was actually a really good, I don’t want to say friend—I don’t want to act foolish, ‘he was my friend’—but I got along with him great. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago with me, so we got to know each other great. He’s a very fierce person.”…

Mr. Trump returns to Mr. Gigot’s question: “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you”—meaning impose tariffs—“at 150% to 200%.” He might even shut down trade altogether.

Mr. Gigot: “Would you use military force against a blockade on Taiwan?”

Mr. Trump: “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy.”

Trump also sort of demonstrated how crazy he was with a quick Putin story:

“I said to Putin, ‘Vladimir, we have a great relationship.’ I got along with him great. He’s a different kind of a character, I will tell you, much different than anybody under—I knew him very well. I said, ‘Vladimir, if you go after Ukraine, I am going to hit you so hard, you’re not even going to believe it. I’m going to hit you right in the middle of fricking Moscow.’ I said, ‘We’re friends. I don’t want to do it, but I have no choice.’ He goes, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘Way.’ I said, ‘You’re going to be hit so hard, and I’m going to take those f— domes right off your head.’ Because, you know, he lives under the domes.”

Get your fat husband off the couch. Get that — get that fat pig off the couch. Tell him to go and vote for Trump, he’s going to save our country. Get that guy the hell off are … Get em up. Slap him around. Get em up!

Axios notes some new ads from embattled Senate candidates:

Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) and Bob Casey (D-Penn.) both released ads on Friday that include images of Trump — and not to bash him, according to an Axios analysis of ads in AdImpact.

• “Casey bucked Biden to protect fracking and he sided with Trump to end NAFTA and put tariffs on China to stop them from cheating,” the Casey campaign ad states.”

• Tammy Baldwin got President Trump to sign her Made in America bill,” says the narrator in Baldwin’s ad.

• Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) campaign for Senate also spent more than a $1 million starting mid-August on an ad saying she “wrote a law signed by President Trump forcing drug companies to show their actual prices,” according to AdImpact.

There was an almost 20-minute sound system outage after Trump’s mic cut out a few minutes into his speech:

When they got the sound system working again, Trump restarted his speech with a knock on the A/V vendor:

He spoke Friday at a Harris campaign rally in Tucson:

In her speech at the UAW Union Hall in Lansing, she once again incorporated Trump video clips, including Trump’s recent remark about how a child could assemble cars:

404 Media reports:

An Elon Musk-funded group called Future Coalition PAC is targeting Muslim voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania with diametrically opposed political advertisements about Kamala Harris. In areas of Michigan with relatively large Muslim populations, the Super PAC is painting Harris as a close friend of Israel and is suggesting that she is beholden to the beliefs of her Jewish husband Doug Emhoff; in parts of Pennsylvania with relatively large Jewish populations, the advertisements call Harris antisemitic and say she “support[s] denying Israel the weapons needed to defeat the Hamas terrorists who massacred thousands.” 

NPR reports on how some of the state’s traditional voting locations like schools have now opted out — or fortified up — citing security concerns:

Barbed wire. Six-foot, barred gates. Badge-access doors. Those are the elements around one Phoenix-area voting location. It’s a public school district office and the superintendent there said those precautions are why he is comfortable making it a polling location at all. The superintendent spoke to NPR last week on condition of anonymity out of concern for increased threats. He said his school district used to provide 17 polling locations. That number is now one, with only his highly secure district office as an option. …

Other schools are also pulling away from serving as polling locations, and other election-related offices are also seeing threats. Just last week, Arizona Democrats opted to close a field office in Tempe after a third vandalism incident involving firearms. Arizona is among states where the FBI has reported unusual levels of threats to election workers.

At the same time, NPR reports some of the sites have shifted to additional ones hosted by organizations like the Arizona LDS Church and Maricopa Community College.

Harris on Friday reiterated her position that the demise of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar should be a tipping point for ending the conflict, telling reporters:

We have got to end this war and I think that what has happened now is the killing of Sinwar creates an opportunity for us to end this war and bring the hostages home.

Trump on Friday agreed that Sinwar’s death made peace easier, but otherwise indicated he was pro-war — that it was “going good” and Biden should be pushing Netanyahu forward rather than “trying to hold him back”:

Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seems to be renewing a debunked conspiracy theory on voter fraud, telling Alex Jones on his podcast that voting machines in her home state are “switching votes” from Trump to other candidates. Greene is pointing the finger at Dominion Voting Services, the company that was at the center of false claims of voter fraud made by Trump allies in 2020. Her evidence? A social-media post from a professed Republican voter in the state who said they submitted their ballot into the machine only for it to change their selections.

“And so when this voter printed their ballot and they looked, it had changed. It was not Donald Trump, it was not me, and it was not the other ones they had voted for. It had switched,” Greene said. “And so they went up to one of the election workers and they said, ‘Here’s the problem, the machine switched it and my printed ballot — I did not vote for these people.’ So they had to start over and it went through it several times and it kept on making the same error.”

Greene said her office will continue to look into these claims, adding, “It sounds similar to what we heard in 2020.” This is not the first time that Dominion’s name has reemerged in the 2024 election. Elon Musk also floated the falsehood about the company during his town hall in Pennsylvania on Thursday, raising doubts about its machines.

After getting caught flat-footed last week, she listed some things she’d have done differently on Friday, but first stipulated that VPs “are not critical of their presidents”:

The Harris campaign, which has spent recent days highlighting Trump’s recent interview cancellations, immediately ran with the new Politico report that Trump is “exhausted” and quickly rolled it into their general messaging. Harris herself raised the subject to reporters during a Friday stop in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

“Look, being president of the United States is one of the hardest jobs in the world. We really do need to ask the question: If he’s exhausted being on the campaign trail, is he fit to do the job?” she said.

Trump then hit back at the claim while speaking with reporters, calling Harris a loser and saying that she “doesn’t have the energy of a rabbit.”

“All they do is put out sound bites. Tell me when you’ve seen me take even a little bit of a rest,” Trump said. “I’m not even tired. I’m really exhilarated and you know why? We’re killing her in the polls.”

Harris is set to receive some high-profile company out on the campaign trail. Former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama are slated to join Harris at campaign rallies in key battleground states last week. The former president will be in Georgia on October 24 while the former First Lady will travel to Michigan on October 28. This will be Michelle’s first campaign event on Harris’s behalf since delivering a memorable speech at the Democratic National Convention earlier this summer.

He’s been canceling interviews this week. My colleague Margaret Hartmann examines the new reported claim that Trump is too exhausted to do them:

There are two possible explanations for an adviser offering up the “exhaustion” excuse, and neither is flattering for Trump.

First, he may actually be incredibly tired. Trump is old and seems to have poor sleep habits, as evidenced by him regularly posting to Truth Social after midnight and falling asleep repeatedly in his criminal trial this past spring. A presidential campaign is a grueling ordeal for anyone, and Trump has seemed especially “low energy” at some recent events, from last weekend’s town hall turned listening party to Tuesday night’s rally in Atlanta, where the “strangely muted” former president remarked, “I’ve been doing this for 42 days straight without a rest[.”]

But it’s also possible that “exhausted” was just an excuse the adviser came up with on the fly for why the campaign is calling off interviews where they think Trump is more likely to go off the rails. As Playbook noted, the canceled interviews were all with “neutral media outlets”; in recent weeks he’s backed out of sit-downs with 60 Minutes, CNBC’s Squawk Box, and NBC in Philadelphia. Trump has been doing lots of interviews recently, appearing on various “bro podcasts” and Fox News programs. The one challenging interview he did this week, with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, turned into a bit of a fiasco, and Trump later claimed he “got hoodwinked to go on that.”

Read the rest of Margaret’s post here.

Trump has suggested wielding the the Alien Enemies Act — the law the government used to hold 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II — against migrants in the present day. On Friday, Trump likened Japanese Americans’ internment experience to that of his own supporters convicted and imprisoned for storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Per the Associated Press:

“Why are they still being held? Nobody’s ever been treated like this,” he said in an interview with conservative commentator Dan Bongino. “Maybe the Japanese during Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.”

On Thursday evening, Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a town hall in Bucks County, Pennsylvania as part of his push to help Trump make inroads in the key crucial battleground state. I wrote about how Musk presented a dark image of America to the crowd, comparing the nation to dystopian fiction like Mad Max and World War Z:

Musk played up his local connection to the state by highlighting his time attending the University of Pennsylvania. “I lived in the city for three years, I went to school here,” he said. “I know the state — I’m not some just-arrived situation.”

He used that moment to transition into a claim that crime around his former school had gotten worse in comparison to his time there in the 1990s. (Philadelphia has reported a major decline in homicides throughout the city in 2024, per the Philadelphia Inquirer.) “If you don’t put hardened criminals in jail, they will kill people. That’s what it comes down to. And, unfortunately the situation we have here is that the Democratic Party will not put hardened criminals in prison,” he said. “So, they roam free and they prey upon you and your kids and your family and your friends.”

Read the rest of the post here.

Or pop stars, rather:

At The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum tries to put Trump and his allies’ increasingly dehumanizing language in historical context:

With less than three weeks left to go, most candidates would be fighting for the middle ground, for the swing voters. Trump is doing the exact opposite. Why? There can be only one answer: because he and his campaign team believe that by using the tactics of the 1930s, they can win. The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the “bloodbath” that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics. Several generations of American politicians have assumed that American voters, most of whom learned to pledge allegiance to the flag in school, grew up with the rule of law, and have never experienced occupation or invasion, would be resistant to this kind of language and imagery. Trump is gambling—knowingly and cynically—that we are not.

Read the rest of Anne’s post here.

The state surpassed 1 million early votes just before midday Friday. (Yes, that’s a record.) One thing to remember in tracking early voting is that some states can give you voting by party registration, but others (like Georgia) that don’t have party registration track racial patterns as part of Voting Rights Act compliance. So we know that as of now 59 percent of early votes in Georgia were cast by white voters, and 28 percent by Black voters. That’s pretty close to the racial makeup of the electorate as a whole.

Trump spent his Friday morning on Fox & Friends, joining his favorite Fox News program in-studio rather than calling in as he typically does. The former president was in town after speaking at the annual Al Smith charity dinner in Manhattan Thursday evening.

Trump’s appearance was typically all over the place, with the former president talking about defunding the Department of Education, expressing an openness to campaigning with Nikki Haley, and even knocking Fox News for airing negative ads against him.

When one host complimented Trump’s jokes at the Al Smith dinner and asked who wrote them, the former president said he had a surprising answer. “I had a lot of people helping, a lot of people. A couple of people from Fox. Actually, I shouldn’t say that, but they wrote some jokes. And, for the most part, I didn’t like any of them,” he said.

A spokesman for Fox News denied Trump’s claim in a statement to CNN. “FOX News confirmed that no employee or freelancer wrote the jokes,” it read.

There was also a moment when Trump claimed that cows would cease to exist under a Harris presidency.

Trump ended the interview by saying he was planning to pay a visit to Rupert Murdoch. “I’m gonna tell him very simple because I can’t talk to anyone else about it. Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days,” he said, referring to the span of time before Election Day. “And don’t put on their horrible people that come and lie. I’m gonna say, ‘Rupert, please, do it this way,’ and then we’re gonna have a victory.”

Simon van Zuylen-Wood profiles Christopher Rufo:

Rufo employs the martial, often grandiose language of a tactician. “The man who can discover, shape, and distribute information has an enormous amount of power,” he has written, in one typical koan that partially explains his fixation on higher education and the media. And it is power he wants. “My intention is obvious, I’m open about it. I want to abolish DEI, I want the FBI to dismantle violent, left-wing networks, and I want to rein in illegal immigration,” he says, laying out his current top priorities. He hopes to do this by building up a “conservative counter-elite” to fill the ranks of universities and federal bureaucracies currently populated by the left.

But Rufo isn’t a wizard of the political dark arts, despite many a profile that has painted him in that sinister light. Mostly what he’s doing, as with his Harris scoop or any number of humiliating gotchas, is reporting. Only he’s reporting on maximally explosive topics that liberal-leaning outlets are either not interested in or uncomfortable covering, which makes it easier for him to dominate headlines in national media. Just as Vance is a slicker, nimbler vehicle for Trumpism than Trump, Rufo is an upgrade on the prank-activism of O’Keefe and the freewheeling incitements of Bannon — himself a manifestation of the conservative counter-elite that he is trying to bring into being.

Read the rest of the post here.