In Which Ian Miles Cheong Understands Trump’s Campaign Better than NYT
The second I saw video of Vice President Harris rolling up to a hangar at Detroit’s airport on Air Force Two, then alighting with Tim Walz in front of cheering crowds, I knew it would break Donald Trump’s brain.
This is the kind of spectacle Donald Trump excels at creating.
This is the kind of spectacle on which Trump has built slavering loyalty from millions of MAGAts who see power in such spectacle.
And a Black woman created it.
Or rather, a Black woman and her campaign team, a campaign team which has already demonstrated they know exactly how to trigger Donald Trump, created it.
And sure enough, it did melt his brain.
Yesterday, he adopted the hysterical claims of some of his followers, posting that Vice President Harris was cheating because (he falsely claimed) she had used AI to sub in a crowd of people who weren’t there.
In fact, some of Trump’s followers were the ones who had used AI, sometimes marked as fake, sometimes not. to give the appearance this crowd didn’t exist.
Trump’s claims are so obviously false that even right wing trolls like Ian Miles Cheong are criticizing him for it.
And Cheong is not the only right wing troll complaining that Trump is hurting the movement, their movement, with his unhinged response to Vice President Harris’ rally. At a time when some prominent right wing trolls are showing RFK-curiosity, they’re also questioning the campaign, in significant part because of Trump’s public meltdown over this arrival.
And that’s where things start to get weird.
Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim.
But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.
In a piece on Saturday, WaPo claimed that Democrats were obsessing over crowd size in their own right, citing Tim Walz’ boast about crowd size in a Friday rally in Phoenix, even while (in the penultimate paragraph) quoting a Harris spox mocking Trump for the meltdowns he has in response.
Then the vice-presidential pick beamed out at the audience in suburban Phoenix — more than 15,000 people, Democrats said — and delivered the punchline with a big grin.
“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Walz said.
For years Trump, the GOP nominee for president, has been the one boasting about how many people he could pack into a venue. Now Democrats are eager to play the crowd game, too. With enthusiasm surging for their new presidential ticket, they have spent the week needling Trump on a topic he famously obsesses over.
[snip]
Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said Trump has been “rage-Truthing about our grassroots enthusiasm and melting down publicly, both online and in front of cameras” while Harris and Walz hit battleground states.
After Trump’s unhinged post yesterday, WaPo and NYT observed that Harris’ campaign has begun to mock Trump for complaining about coverage of her crowds. WaPo’s version links back to the earlier piece treating this primarily as mere boasting.
Trump’s focus on crowd size also has become something that the Harris campaign has used to poke fun at Trump about — while at the same time bragging about their own crowds.
But they’re suggesting it only started in Phoenix on Friday, after the Trump presser.
That is, they’re misunderstanding the timeline, and therefore the full effect of it.
Both cite Trump’s conflated boast, given in his unhinged presser on Thursday, that his January 6 crowds were bigger than Martin Luther King Jr’s (this is the NYT; note, logically Trump must also be conflating January 6 and his inauguration, which is the only event where he occupied the same real estate MLK did).
Mr. Trump did not hold any events in a swing state last week. Instead, he held a rally in Montana, where there is a crucial Senate race, and a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida.
Mr. Trump showed frustration with Ms. Harris’s crowds at that event, too, and even boasted about the crowd at his rally in Washington D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, that preceded the riot at the Capitol, saying it was larger than the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump claimed.
But they’re missing that the presser and the wildly inflated claims about crowd size took place the day after Kamala’s iconic arrival in Detroit. They’re missing that Trump’s first attempt to dismiss the Vice President’s crowd size came in that presser.
Trump announced the presser first thing in the morning on Thursday, to take place in conjunction with a briefing, purporting to inform reporters about the state of Trump’s campaign, already scheduled that day. So the presser would have come together in the period when Trump was seeing — and responding to — that imagery.
Trump called the presser when his brain was breaking after seeing this image.
And many people, including NYT’s weird write-up of the presser as if it were sound campaign strategy, did not report that in addition to inflating his own crowd sizes, Trump was falsely claiming that Kamala’s crowds were an order of magnitude smaller than they were.
Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.
Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump assailed the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House — which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters — as a “peaceful” transfer of power.
Mr. Trump also flashed frustration when asked about the size of Ms. Harris’s crowds while boasting about the attendance at his own rally on Jan. 6, 2021, and insisted that the group of hundreds that stormed the Capitol was relatively small. But he fixated on the size of the crowd that he initially gathered on the national mall, making comparisons to — and declaring it was larger than — the one drawn by Martin Luther King Jr. for his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” Mr. Trump said. “If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours — same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not — we had more.”
The Trump team has been looking for ways to interrupt Ms. Harris’s momentum as she has quickly consolidated the Democratic Party behind her and risen in the polls. The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.
On top of describing many of Trump’s false claims — that Kamala is stupid, that the economy is in poor shape, that Kamala was border czar and has let other countries unload prisons into the US, that the legal system was unfair to him, that crime is up — without correcting them, NYT only mentioned Trump’s false comparisons of his own rallies (again, without correction), not his claim that Harris had been getting 1,500 rally-goers, as opposed to 15,000.
Oh give me a break.
Listen. I had 107,000 people in New Jersey. You didn’t report it.
I’m so glad you asked. What did she have yesterday? 2,000 people?
If I ever had 2,000 people you’d say my campaign is finished. It’s so dishonest, the press. And here’s a great example.
I had, in Michigan recently, 25,000 people, and 25,000 people we just couldn’t get them in. We had, in Harrisburg, 20, 25,000 people? And 20,000 people couldn’t get in. We had so many — nobody ever mentions that!
When she gets 1,500 people — and I saw it yesterday on ABC, which they said, “oh, the crowd was so big,” — I have 10 times, 20 times, 30 times the crowd size, and they never say the crowd was big.
That’s why I’m always saying, “turn around the cameras.”
I’m so glad you asked that.
I think it’s so terrible, when you say, “she has 1,500 people, 1,000 people,” and they talk about, “oh, the enthusiasm.” Let me tell you. We have the enthusiasm. The Republican Party — and me, as a candidate — but the Republican Party has the enthusiasm, because people want to see crime stopped, they want to see a country that’s respected.
Trump’s false claims about this Detroit rally started when the wound was still fresh. Trump’s false claims started last Thursday, but few mentioned them as false claims until he went wildly unhinged on his social media site.
And understand: Harris’ campaign is intentionally goading him, intentionally causing these psychic wounds, and they were even before the Detroit rally.
I have no reason to believe that Harris’ campaign had the event in the airport hangar to prepare that spectacle (I think they had to move there once they overfilled their first venue), but holy hell it was great advance work. That said, their rapid response has been deliberately needling the former President with crowd size comparisons, going back a week now, days before Walz was even selected.
After both Georgia,
And Philly,
Kamala HQ posted side-by-side comparisons and, in the latter case, posted it to Truth Social. And Trump invited these comparisons when he booked a rally in the same Georgia auditorium as Kamala chose to do her rally. Trump made excuses for his paltry turnout in real time.
Trump invited this comparison, then failed to match up.
And the Kamala HQ account’s first take on Trump’s unhinged presser captioned it, “A feeble Trump holds a press conference to lie and yell about his noticeably smaller rally crowd sizes.”
Harris’ own campaign is not the only outlet that understood what was going on. Rolling Stone focused on Trump’s obsession about Harris’ crowd size on August 8, not long after the presser, which the KamalaHQ account noted and @ed Trump on.
According to one Republican source who’s spoken to the former president in recent days, Trump is “unhappy with the narrative” forming that Vice President Kamala Harris has been attracting high, enthusiastic attendance at the 2024 rallies she’s held since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
In private, Trump has recently taken to griping about the media attention the Harris 2024 (now Harris-Walz 2024) rally sizes have been receiving, and at times insisting a number the Harris campaign has put out must be “fake,” the source and another person familiar with the matter say.
And NYT hasn’t been entirely missing this. On August 9, they updated a story posted on August 4 about Trump’s excuses for his thin Georgia turnout.
Still, Mr. Trump couldn’t help but focus on those who weren’t piling in. He claimed that Georgia State University officials in charge of the arena prevented him from letting in more people. “We have beautiful cameras set up for the overflow crowds,” he said. A massive screen flashed to a live video feed of his red-capped supporters milling around outside in the 90-degree heat.
In Mr. Trump’s telling, this wasn’t a safety protocol but a conspiracy to humiliate him, perpetrated by the university and other nefarious forces. It all connects, in his estimation, to the biggest numbers game he has ever lost. “If they’re going to stand in the way of admitting people to our rally, just imagine what they’re going to do on Election Day,” he said.
This goes to the core of Mr. Trump’s crowd-size fixation. He seems to believe that a full arena is a predictor of his ultimate victory — as if the voters in that arena were representative of the country at large.
[snip]
[A]n hour into his speech, the Atlanta crowd had emptied out more than usual.
This is a known trigger for Trump. It has been, going back to his own meager inauguration turnout. It has been racialized since that point too, Trump’s insecurities knowing that a Black president could be more popular than he was.
Further, brags about crowd size are a known building block of Trump’s own false claims about elections. In 2020, for example, he argued it was impossible that Biden beat him because he never left his basement. There are still millions of people who believe Trump’s 2020 Big Lie because they believe his claim that crowd size directly translates to votes.
This time around, Trump is giving pressers in the equivalent of his own basement, arguing that so many people voted for him in Alabama and South Carolina in 2020, he must have won Georgia, even while he inflates his own crowd sizes by an order of magnitude and deflates the Vice President’s by the same margin.
The stakes, for Trump, have to do with his Big Lie, his ability to sustain the belief of his mob that he really is that much more popular than his opponent. He can’t have them see that Kamala can do crowds better even than he can.
Beyond triggering Trump, beyond goading him into melting down in front of campaign journalists, that’s actually not how the Harris campaign views it (nor should it be, in a competent campaign): The WaPo’s description of Trump’s false claims describe Harris boasting of new volunteers being recruited.
And at a fundraising event in San Francisco on Sunday, Harris appeared to address Trump’s social media accusations indirectly.
The energy around the country is “undeniable,” Harris said, adding, “The press and our opponents like to focus on our crowd size, and yes the crowds are large.” But even better, she said, attendees are signing up for volunteer shifts by the thousands.
This is actually the purpose rallies are supposed to serve at this point of a campaign, even one launched a mere three weeks ago. These crowds are important not (just) because they lead Trump to melt down, but because they’re a necessary way to catch up on volunteer recruitment Biden hadn’t been doing. This is why Walz, especially, makes an ask at every one of these rallies. This is why Kamala always talks about the hard work ahead.
This is about recruiting bodies to do voter identification, persuasion, and ultimately GOTV. This is about basic campaign work.
Trump, meanwhile, has sent JD out to speak to empty parking lots.
Pro-Trump trolls like Cheong see this. But full time campaign journalists are slow to catch on. They’re slow to understand that Trump’s own insecurities can be — and were, deliberately — triggered, with predictable results.
Especially when someone can mobilize the kind of spectacle that Trump himself relies on.
I cannot wait to vote for Kamala Harris & Tim Walz.
If your state has early voting, vote in person on Day One. New reports of a huge enthusiastic crowd voting for Kamala & Tim will help to drive turnout as well as banking the votes that she (we!) will need.
It’s the end of the world. Maybe the Democratic Party will save us. I’m a sucker for always believing it, but here we go again! I’m excited to vote for Kamala Harris too. But what about Gaza? I’m not following the news. At the street level, people’s lives, the Biden years have been terrible for Atlanta. It’s a real disaster what’s happening the poor and middle class because housing has been cornered by real estate investment trusts. The unhoused are brutalized mercilessly everywhere inside the perimeter. The roads of Atlanta used to be cordial but now everyone honks and bullies each other. Atlanta as a city no longer gives shelter to its people or their children but extracts rent on the grid as if that is our function. The police are no better than a gang.
Maybe it’s better elsewhere, but I don’t see any politics for reversing descent into fascism as the structure of American life. Just three months ago masked Atlanta police were filmed for the news having the Chair of the Emory Philosophy Dept. in a submission hold forcing her to walk forward, unable to stop and speak to a student about what was happening. I’m excited to vote for Kamala, but I confess it’s like voting for a tribute sacrifice in a world ruled by dragons.
“But what about Gaza? I’m not following the news.”
If you’re not following the news, do NOT sky rat in here and demand to know what’s going on.
You also mention Atlanta four times in 220 words. Perhaps problem is NOT federal but state and local. And maybe if you weren’t checked out of the news you’d understand not every problem is federal but state and local, ex. Atlanta police abusing their powers is a fucking state and local problem.
Federal problems also require a cooperative Congress willing to legislate action, and you’re not complaining about Congress but about the “Biden years” and the local police.
Furthermore, dropping in here and whining you’re not seeing whatever you expect in politics is a recipe for getting your butt kicked out the door. I’m not going to put up with commenters dumping demoralizatsiya while derailing a thread. Go find something constructive to do like touch some grass.
Just a name check: Jennifer Arcuri, whose account is listed on the image with crowd removed: That’s the “computer expert” that had an affair with Boris Johnson then received favourable treatment for her business from the Greater London Authority when Boris was the Lord Mayor. (GLA is the ‘city council’ for the Greater London area, rather than the City of London which is just the famous square mile in the centre of London).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/nov/13/how-johnson-pledged-help-for-my-business-to-win-my-love
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/jan/29/fresh-revelations-about-jennifer-arcuri-affair-threaten-to-damage-boris-johnson
So, that Jennifer Arcuri. Ha-ha-ha-ha…
TY. A number of people pushed this meme. But yeah–I picked her bc she’s a dope.
#Sounfair
You beat me to it but no Boris was not Lord Mayor. That is the purely ceremonial head of the City of London. Boris was just plain mayor.
One square mile. Not exactly the whole of London that votes for its mayor.
To be clear, as a long-standing Londoner, the ‘Square Mile’ is the City of London – where all the bankers & traders do their deals &c – and that has a fancy-dress mayor for whom I did not, nor cannot vote. The Other Guy is 3 time Mayor Sadiq Khan, for whom I most decidedly DID vote along with 1,088,224 other Londoners. How’s that for crowd size?
[Welcome back to emptywheel. SECOND REQUEST: Please use the SAME USERNAME and email address each time you comment so that community members get to know you. “Jon KNOWLES” is not the same as “Jon Knowles” or “Jonathan Knowles” — letter case matters. Future comments may not clear due to mismatches. /~Rayne]
Reply to Jon Knowles
August 12, 2024 at 12:40 pm
How many eligible voters reside in the GLA? Because that vote total for Khan indicates a voter turnout rate that is almost positively American in its lack of voters given London’s size. /s
Just Some Guy
August 12, 2024 at 3:24 pm
https://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/election-results/results-2024/verification-and-turnout-data
Electorate 6,162,428 votes cast 2,495,621 turn out 40.50%
Thanks for playing. Come repeatedly. But a lot of people here know the difference between the City and Greater London.
Reply to SteveBev
August 12, 2024 at 3:24 pm
Yes, I read about the last election, which is why I mentioned the turnout being “positively American.”
Also please note the “/s.”
Apologies for that slip. Here in Australia, the mayors of our state capitals are ‘Lord Mayors’ and do a job.
“Both WaPo and NYT reported overnight on Trump’s unhinged claim. But they’re both missing a bit of what’s going on, and they’re missing it, in my opinion, because they’re still seeing this race from Trump’s perspective.”
Reporters and editors on the politics beat have been doing a parallel exercise with the endless diner safaris where they’ve claimed to prove the tautology that Trump’s supporters remain supporters, no matter what scandal hits him.
They’ve helped manufacture the myth that Trump’s base is impossibly solid, and they can’t grasp the idea that someone refusing to vote for a Democrat doesn’t translate into them willing to turn out for Trump.
It neatly parallels the PR claims of GOP political consultants, and it happens in large part because so much of the political press has shrunken its key source network. The people who get to pitch story ideas to the press and who are used to validate claims lean heavily to the right.
There are good reasons to believe reporters are even getting their quotes from Trump supporters who are plants from GOP consultants – it would explain the weird phenomenon of supposed former Democrats who turn out to be GOP activists, including the embarassing case of the woman convicted of fraud for planting a human finger in a bowl of Wendy’s chili.
I’m afraid that winning the election will be only the first hurdle, that with a pro-Trump, pro-theocracy Supreme Court, non-certification of the electors could throw the decision into the House, and that is a much larger undertaking to ensure victory than just Trump alone.
Yep. It’s not about just edging a win in swing states. Trump needs to be thoroughly defeated everywhere he can be. Walz looks more and more like a good choice to help make this happen.
Non-certification of electors doesn’t trigger a contingent election in the house.
Article II, clauses 2&3 state the state shall *appoint* electors in the manner the legislature chooses, and that the candidate who wins the majority of *appointed* electors becomes president.
If a state doesn’t certify election results, then it fails to *appoint* electors, which reduces the total number of *appointed* electors, and thus the number of electors required to achieve a majority.
Everyone who talks about this assumes 270 is the required number, frozen in granite.
IMO, based on my reading of the constitution, it is not.
The fact is, previous contingent elections were triggered when every state sent electors, but because 3-4 candidates won electoral votes, nobody had a majority of EV’s.
On top of this, none of the TV lawyers, not even Laurence Tribe, have been discussing the revised Electoral Count Act, and the three judge panels who can assume a state’s authority to determine its slate of electors.
The post-election day period leading to the safe harbor date is likely to be uncharted waters.
(Rayne- sorry if this post is too long- thought this was important food for thought)
192 words, you did just fine. :-)
That’s why it is important to hold the Senate and regain the House. In the count certification, they and only they, decide what is valid (certified or not), or how to handle a situation where the 538 total is not reached. If I interpret correctly, it only goes to the House in the event of a tie of all electoral votes submitted.
Interesting, thanks.
It was my understanding that most of Laurence H. Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut’s suggestions* were incorporated into the omnibus spending bill via a section reforming the Electoral Count Act. **
*Opinion The Electoral Count Act must be fixed. A new proposal doesn’t go far enough.
Laurence H. Tribe, Erwin Chemerinsky and Dennis Aftergut
Washington Post
August 1, 2022 at 5:40 p.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/01/electoral-count-reform-act-suggested-changes/
**Congress passes election reform designed to ward off another Jan. 6
Miles Parks
NPR
December 23, 2023
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/22/1139951463/electoral-count-act-reform-passes
If they do that in swing states, though, it reduces the number of electors who might vote in favor of Harris.
Depends on the state. Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan are under Democratic executive control. We really have to see how the election goes at all levels. If it’s a blue wave (or tsunami) that will blunt any pushback from the right,
There are six Justices on the Supreme Court who will be happy to hand Trmp the Presidency whatever the voter or Electoral College count if they can see any excuse to do so. We need a landslide for the Presidential ticket, to increase the majority in the Senate, and to elect a new majority in the House as well as take back as many state governments as possible.
Still all that may not be enough if the Supremes want to do what they did in the 2000 election, be the only voters who can decide the winner.
May some very smart lawyers be working now to make this as unlikely as possible. Talking about it now, I believe, helps to forestall it.
Timothy Snyder talked about this ~2 weeks ago in a zoom call with an expat group called Democrats Abroad.
One of his points is that Trump supporters are likely going to try various illegal stuff to steal this election for Trump, but they will be much less likely to go out on a limb legally if (1) there is a blue wave and they think they are going to be unsuccessful, and (2) they think they are being watched for illegal behavior.
The whole stream was quite interesting.
“they’re misunderstanding the timeline”
This happens so often at the WaPo and NYT on their coverage of large ongoing stories (the campaign, Russian election meddling investigations, etc.) that it’s hard to chalk it up to a simple mistake.
Possibly. Though I gotta say being able to access my own archives is a REALLY big help for me in reconstructing timelines, whether last week or 10 years ago. And last week was particularly confusing.
As I said on Xitter, one of the few things that has helped is that VP Harris wore a different colored suit every day.
If it’s lilac, it must be Saturday, I found myself thinking over the weekend.
LOL! Timeline by Fashion Choice!
this is great to know as I did that as well, ahhh, that’s what she wore in Detroit and then telling AZ and NV apart, also thank you for your work!
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We have adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is far too short and too common it will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. Thanks. /~Rayne]
Then when it comes to foreign diplomacy, “If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium”
name of a silly movie about packaged tourism from the 70s that my parents enjoyed.
Sometimes I think it’s directly ideological. I also think a lot if it is that their source networks are hopelessly limited, and their framings and evidence are overwhelmingly contributed to them by Republicans or conservative-leaning centrists.
I think another issue is the large majority have deeply dull minds. They can’t see the rut they’re in, and even if they could, lack the ability see why they’re thre or imagine a way out.
I think a lot of this contributes to their indignation over being called Trump advocates. Technically they’re not, but they’re like sardines which are completely unable to understand the ocean and currents they’re swimming in.
“…they’re like sardines which are completely unable to understand the ocean and currents they’re swimming in.”
Perfect!!
Literary Digest Syndrome, in part.
They mocked Bush I for not knowing how grocery checkouts work, but they shop at Dean & Deluca. Not one of them has ever been in a Big Lots.
This is true of my experience with small city government too. Not only do the sardines not understand the currents and ocean they’re swimming in but their entire lives are so entrenched with the other sardines that they knowingly and willfully hold their knowledge down to the groupthink inside the can.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The fallacy lies in “adequately explained.” In Trump’s case, he does both equally well.
Delusional and desperation of Trump.
For MLK’s 1964 rally, the speakers were on the front steps of the Lincoln Memorial, whereas Presidential Inaugurations are conducted on the front steps of the Capital, at the other end of the Mall. Trump’s January 6 speech was on the Ellipse by the White House, I believe.
True, but both are ON THE MALL — and Obama’s inauguration filled most of the Mall.
Trump’s Jan6 speech filled the space in the Ellipse and some of the Washington Monument. There are tons of videos of the Mall showing isolated crowds of people heading to the Capitol.
Really appreciate how you pointed out the timeline!
Saw Vivek in a podcast interview with Mark Cuban a few days ago. Cuban was prepared with facts to confront the lies. Vivek tried to brand Trump’s bad behavior, fraud activity and lies as:
“…let’s talk about the good things he has done before we go down into personal attack rabbit holes…” And before saying that got Cuban to agree that we all have character flaws and every politician has character flaws so lets not talk about character.
I’ve tried to find the whole interview on YouTube but the Trump campaign has posted so many snips of it, bookending it with political ads, attempting to appear as though Cuban endorses him.
This article from the not great source, The Independent has the podcast embedded toward the end of the article.
Anyway, this will be the new side-step to fact checking, “…personal attack rabbit holes.”
Mark Cuban laughed at him and corrected him, “…these are not rabbit holes OR personal attacks.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cuban-trump-election-harris-vivek-b2593390.html
Best word-play of the day: MAGAt’s.
[Welcome back to emptywheel. SECOND REQUEST: Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We have adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short it has been temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. You will note the temporary username matches your first username and not “audreyf” under which you attempted to publish this comment; your email address on this comment also did not match your original address. Please use the same username and email address on all future comments. /~Rayne]
And, like maggots, they live, eat, and grow off of decaying, dead, and rotting flesh. In MAGA’s case it is the flesh of democracy. Maybe that explains their leaders focus on destroying all things democracy. Trump especially. Creating a larger MAGAt breeding ground.
I get the appeal, but dehumanizing others has had some disastrous consequences on the side of evil through history (“vermin” etc. )
Yes, it does.
After tfg made that comment, the bassist named our band, *The Vermen*.
OT, I know, but hopefully amusing inna lemonade-from-lemons sorta fashion.
@vvv: that’s an interesting twist, an artistic choice rather than a rhetorical device. Plus, the Mermen was already taken.
I live in a small town south of Reno, Nevada, in the eastern Sierra Nevada foothills. Reno is purple, and along with blue Clark County pushed Nevada into the Biden win column in 2020. My little county is pretty red. In 2020 it was littered with Trump signs all over town, many months before November. This cycle the Trump/Vance signs have yet to appear. I’m hopeful that people are just plain old tired of him and his schtick. Nevada may well still be a tight one but I think we’ll deliver for Kamala and Tim.
Similar situation in Carroll County, Md., which is so red that Democrats don’t even field candidates for local offices, although in ntyional elections the vote breaks more like 60/40.
thank you for posting such a thorough and well reasoned blog post. I knew about the goading but completely missed the recruitment drive aspect of the Harris campaign. How did we all miss Biden not getting volunteers out there? Appreciate your insight
Did Arcuri and all the retweeters not see the big “SATIRE” emblem? It’s still up on her page like it’s real!
That’s why I’m always saying, “turn around the cameras”
As a matter of fact all camera’s must be pointed at tfg’s podium while he speaks and those who take shots of the crowd are asked to leave.
Mmm, electronic MAGA rally hygiene. Reminder of ‘Do not adjust the vertical…Do not adjust the horizontal’
Well said. “Trump’s own insecurities can be — and were, deliberately — triggered.” I believe they will continue to be deliberately triggered. It appears to me that the Harris/Walz campaign is being well-advised on his particular “interpersonal” dynamics. Harris’s ongoing non-response to any of Trump’s tantrums is just as devastating to his inner sense of shame and insufficiency. It’s no longer the same 2020 Big Lie, strategically formed, tactically used to achieve his desired goal. This is Trump beginning to frantically grasp for basic ego survival.
I’m not one to make bold predictions, but I know spiraling narcissistic collapse when I see it. If Harris approaches the debate with sound “disarming the narcissist” tactics and a well timed goading or two….he will absolutely and irreversibly shatter. If you think he’s being unhinged now….buckle up.
Outrage – is what Trump and his ilk want, they feed on it.
Ridicule – is far more effective. :-)
Well observed (yet far too often overlooked).
Mockery can sink a campaign faster than a boatload of policies and facts.
It’s human nature. Resonates especially with apolitical voters who normally have better things to do with their lives than assiduously track politics.
One of your best posts, take a bow.
One of the purposes of the rallies is to move the campaign off the 24/7 news channels and into popular culture. Even MSNBC is noting the change. Popular culture is youth culture and VP Harris has a huge advantage compared to Trump in reaching that youth culture.
Next up: Is Fox building a road away from Trump with the story first floated in the NY Post, that the Trump/Vance misogyny will be the cause of a historic Democratic win?
Indeed, as one Youtube video claimed using the Bonnie Raitt song, people are talking.
I have a different take on what is going on here. Where others see Trump as unhinged and ego-bruised I see someone calculating and nefarious.
Remember what he was saying in the months leading up to the 2020 election. There were many speeches about how he could only lose if “they cheated”. He would win unless there was voter fraud. He was priming the pump for the eventual arguments and chaos he would create after his loss.
Now he is attributing extensive use of AI to the Harris campaign. He is laying the groundwork to claim AI stole the election should he lose. He has an innate ability to manipulate perceptions among his supporters and is planting the idea for that argument. Space lasers are out, AI is in. I fully expect AI attributions to the Democrats to increase in the coming months.
Calculating and nefarious, yes. Watched the entire Thursday presser for signs, and all I saw was a competent bullshitter, on message, comfortable and relaxed.
DARVO: trump/trump campaign always accuses others of what they are doing themselves.
i did not know the term previously. Rayne here schools commenters frequently on DARVO and its use by warped entities. We should all become more adept at IDing it, especially when AI makes much political debate, imagery, and coverage murky.
The RVO portion of DARVO — reversal of victim and oppressor — is key. I think Fly by Night is correct in what Trump is trying to do, reversing who is the victim/oppressor by claiming Harris-Walz campaign is cheating.
Trump’s TruthSocial post uses a variant of “cheat” four times in the same post as well as “fake.” This is what he’s demanding his base believes about the opposition. We should expect his supporters to pick up on this given how intensely he’s emphasizing this. It’s a redirection away from what he has done/is likely to do because he’s reversing victim/oppressor. IOW, watch for the Trump campaign’s cheating/fakery.
Black culture would say, “Stay woke.” It’s no wonder why fascist Team Trump wants to squash woke.
ref: https://youtu.be/xWSnt4avYZw?si=MhWVkM26VncNDxDw&t=120
Who knew John Carpenter’s work had such legs? Glad most of us here don’t need the sunglasses.
“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”
Porque no los dos?
There’s an apparatus of right-wing neo-monarchists that surround Trump who are more than capable of undermining elections even while their nominee is a living, breathing, slow-motion train wreck.
The Grateful Dead out-drew them both.
What I really don’t get in the “reporting” that goes on here is that the crowd at either a Harris rollup or rally, or a Trump rally, or for that matter any large event these days will be covered not by one or two shots but literally hundreds if not thousands images from smart phone cameras. Some of them will not be too jinky to be used as corroboration.
Isn’t that true for the 1/6 investigations? The prosecutors had so many images to work with and not just security cameras. Had they not, many convictions would never have happened.
So why on this “story” do I only see one supposedly photoshopped image, one actually photoshopped image at the major news outlets? You can find a lot on social media, why not reach out to those sources?
Go to https://newsroom.ap.org/ and search for either “kamala harris” or “donald trump” depending on the subject and scroll or search for a desired event/day. Plenty of images being used by news outlets, though the editors’ choice of which photos are used is subjective.
The question I asked a few days ago wrt to photos of Vance: have AP and other photographers been throttled — not allowed to take photos from certain angles? We don’t see crowd photos from several Vance events, just him with others behind him. If there’s any manipulation going on this is a possibility and it’s not Harris-Walz coverage being manipulated like this.
As for using social media: how do you suggest a news organization vets the photo source? It’s one thing for news outlets to reach out to a storm chaser but quite another to reach out to just any old phone user when there’s no trust relationship (and no radar to confirm the validity of the event on camera like a tornado). January 6 investigation also had the clout of law enforcement — there’s a downside to providing altered images to prosecutors. Not so to news outlets which are under the gun to meet deadlines for print in some cases and sometimes poorly resourced.
That is interesting. It is possible that the news photographers have been restricted but if they have why the hell isn’t that news in itself?
I just searched the nytimes for an article on this and they had one small photo from behind Harris in the arena venue. The Times has the ability to provide beautiful high-res storyline photo articles that pack a lot of visuals in an easy-to-read way. The excuse of having a deadline seems lame to me.
NYT still has a print deadline. If it happens before 9:00 pm it will make the print edition. Pooh-pooh it if you wish but that’s the facts.
Photographers and journalists alike have to deal with access issues. If you’re assigned to a beat and the only photos you’ll get are full frontal, are you going to not cover the candidate and event? Should it be a story? It depends — as an example, AP could be frozen out if it does become a story and then what? Who provides photos after that and should the public trust them?
It’s on us the news consuming public to put the pressure on *both* the campaigns and the media to provide 360-degree coverage, otherwise campaigns will get away with skewing coverage through access and media won’t have leverage to use on campaigns.
The Tony Micheals podcast # 707at [00:57:50 – 00:59:00] https://www.youtube.com/live/RYjtRN6shPc
Include clips compiled by TikTok er @randybluedad from sources in the crowd at the hangar
As part of a longer segment debunking various MAGA claims about Harris campaign misusing AI
Ars Technica notes multiple image source validation: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/08/the-many-many-signs-that-kamala-harris-rally-crowds-arent-ai-creations/
Trump does this crowd size game so he doesn’t have to talk about the important things like the economy and geopolitics etc. The so-called political journalists that follow him love it because it’s easy to report and fill their columns. It’s just worthless twaddle.
Trump doesn’t seem to have even explained away Harris’s crowd sizes because she’s speaking to people of color, or some other veiled racist description. For him, that’s a missed opportunity.
Trump would go just as apeshit, if JD Vance attracted crowds as big or bigger than Harris, while he holes up at MAL. That would be another direct threat to his ego.
I hope Trump’s repeated meltdowns persuade more voters to think that this guy isn’t right, he’s weird, and he should be nowhere near the Oval Office, no matter how much they want a Supreme Court where Sam Alito is its most left wing member.
“Trump would go just as apeshit”
I suspect ketchup is flying over the Time Magazine cover today.
https://time.com/7009317/reintroduction-of-kamala-harris/
JD Vance is the only one who can draw smaller crowds than Trump.
Trump’s niece gave a possible explanation for his obsession with crowd size, ratings, poll numbers, etc. Though she has a PhD in clinical psychology, I also consider how her personal relations may effect her opinion/judgement (she is still human) so I’m taking it with a grain of salt. She said that because his mother became ill when he was a toddler, and he was thrust into the care of his father (who was unfit). This is when the foundations are constructed in things like self identity protection. As he grew older he continually had to seek reenforcement of personal worth (that he never received in that formative phase) to the point that now it’s 24/7. It’s a black hole and no matter how much he gets, it immediately disappears whenever it changes to a negative. Then he has to seek something else to fill the hole while also immediately denying the changing landscape. That’s why crowd size or poll results (before, it was ratings) are so important to him.
I get it, Mary Trump relies on her education and professional background to explain Trump.
But we are making it a lot more difficult to frame Trump than it is. He may be a dementia-addled malignant narcissist but his obsession with crowd size is a very simple thing.
Crowd size is a proxy for dick size and Trump is furious a Black Asian woman has a bigger dick than he has. It’s that simple, and he’s desperate to explain away her massive chick dick.
I totally want that on a T-shirt, with a picture of Kamala.
LOL
While I appreciate the efforts and the results to expose Trump’s ridiculous claims about crowd size, I am so weary of following every petty thing he says and magnifying it with genuinely intellectual and, in some cases, psychological insights. I just want it all to be over with a genuine win by Harris by a wide enough margin that no protest will have enough weight to bear in opposition to the result. Our politics has degenerated into a middle school equivalent of pettiness. Our democracy is at stake here!
Whatever it takes, the weight of truth should be the goal of everybody who cares. Let’s get out of the cat fight and back into the discussion of what is Constitutional and what is anti-Constitutional about the Republican Party and its candidate. Those who are hypnotized by the mutterings of a madman won’t be convinced by the Truth, but reasonably intelligent people certainly will become fed up enough to either stay home on voting day, or grudgingly, vote for a Democrat.
“I am so weary of following every petty thing he says”
Then spend less time consuming content about it and more time doing something constructive about GOTV.
I only “consume” his pettiness analyzed on this website, and through headlines I cannot avoid elsewhere. As for working to help Kamala Harris’s campaign by voting, I can prove over 63 years of voting in local, state and national elections. I’m just saying, we need to focus more intently and drill down on the specifics of what Trump wants to do to Democracy if he “wins,” because that is what will really scare undecided voters.
Let me be more blunt: I need you to not police what contributors write at this site.
Another great piece that reflects your outstanding organizational, research and analytical acumen.
A.G. Sulzberger and Jeff Bezos continue to flail away at trying to make their NY Times and WAPO, respectively, a relevant multiyear profitable online newspaper.
Both owners and their executives realize a presidential election year is the best year for their respective papers to make a profit. If they fail to make significant profits in a presidential election year, they stand to operate in the red until the next presidential election four years later, or until they can create high interest in an upcoming midterm election year.
Just like Musk has reduced the value of the Twitter/X business and brand since he purchased it, Bezos has also reduced the value of the WAPO business and brand since he purchased the WAPO.
I believe Musk and Bezos would sell X and WAPO, respectively, after this year’s presidential election if their egos would allow them to sell. Both brands are stale and beginning to smell like death.
As for A.G. Sulzberger, his business and brand will continue to tread water and float with the political and financial tides using his well established family relationships with politicians and billionaires worldwide that he and his family have known for decades to procure exclusive access and story scoops for publication. Those Sulzberger family relationships give Maggie Haberman something to do everyday.
“Trump claims in Wildwood his crowds are bigger than ‘wacko’ Bruce Springsteen crowds”:
https://www.app.com/story/entertainment/music/2024/05/12/donald-trump-bruce-springsteen-crowds-wildwood-wacko/73661440007/
Springsteen has concerts in Pittsburgh August 15 & 18 and Philadelphia August 21 & 23. Be nice if The Boss trolled Trump about crowd size from the stage.
I engaged a Trumpie over on Twitter (I don’t care what Elmo says, to me it will be Twitter) about that claim. First I told him that there would have been reports of traffic jams, as that large crowd hit the roads after it was over. There were none. The town is on a barrier island (it shares with two other towns) and access to the mainland is by three narrow bridges. I know. I live in the area. Finally I had to inform him the town walked the claim of up to 100,000 back, saying it included those people watching from bars, hotel rooms and even private homes. Or the whole town as this article points out.
https://www.insidernj.com/trumps-wildwood-mirage/
His narcissism is defeating the reality of his appearances – he’s in smaller venues now. (Bozeman is a city of 25000, and he couldn’t fill that one.)
That’s funny, because Montana State @ Bozeman has about 17000 students on top of that.
17k students… when it’s a normal fall semester, which I’m willing to say hasn’t started yet.
The stadium capacity is listed as 8,455 IIRC. Not only couldn’t he fill it, lots of people started leaving early
(probably not to beat the traffic, it’s not exactly Dodger Stadium)
I wonder how much that rally actually helped Tim Sheehy? Will anyone want Trump at a rally in the future?
I think the easiest way to stop people insisting that Trump won because of his crowd sizes is like this:
Do you also believe that whichever team has the loudest tailgate party wins the Super Bowl? Nothing to do with the teams, strategy, coaching, just whoever has the loudest tailgate party wins?
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We have adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short and common it will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. Thanks. /~Rayne]
Best headline of the morning (and there are some real doozies out there): “Crazy Man Seeks Presidency.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a61852653/trump-ai-crowds/
Charlie Pierce is a national treasure and required daily read.
The news that ALL the press missed about this is that last Thursday the FEC decided NOT to regulate deepfakes ahead of the election!
Here is the story https://www.commondreams.org/news/deepfakes-2668931880
Public Citizen called for the FEC to ban it, they didn’t.
While the press is running around correcting Trump’s lies, they should also ask for the Trump camp’s proposal to ban AI in ads. (They won’t, and Team Trump doesn’t have one, so they should ask Harris/Walz about it which COULD bring up the lack of a ban from the FEC AND the failure of Musk to enforce his own TOS.)
“Trump melted down after seeing Kamala Harris’ spectacular Detroit rally immediately”
Who writes these things? Clearly it’s not Dr Marcy, whose English is impeccable.
Yes Earl, we ‘understand’ what was intended, but it does grate. Really!
Sorry Rayne, I know you hate these comments. But lets be clear, everything else content-wise is!
Marcy on top at Memeorandum as I write!
A guy on my basketball Twitter who is decidedly apolitical (outside of putting the Mayor of New Orleans repeatedly on blast) has begun retweeting Marcy. It’s a little disconcerting but I’ll take it!
Also, that plane has the traditional colors. Trump “rebranded” Air Force One into a very loud flag montage. Seeing the traditional Air Force One livery on Air Force Two probably is another irritant to Trump. It doesn’t take much to set him off.
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We have adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short it will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. Thanks. /~Rayne]
The press still pretends that Jerry Falwell and progeny are moral and Christian religious leaders, 50 years on. It’s pretty hard not to when several hundred million people say so. If you want to appeal to and be in the market, in the mainstream. I guess race hustling and grifting could or should seriously be considered as a broad segment of American Christianity. It doesn’t need mention or defense because it’s built into the culture.
So Trump will continue to get the benefit of the doubt when there is no doubt. So it goes.
Back in the early ’80s when I was a freelance word processor worker bee, I had a 2-week gig with some wacko evangelical Christian organization whose grift consisted of selling/sending monthly prayers in the mail to subscribers all over the country, and sending out weekly Christian-themed sermons from the rev at the top of this organization.
My job? To transcribe and cut-and-paste existing Oral Roberts sermons in a designated paragraph order which, when finished, the rev took out any attribution to Oral Roberts and printed his own name at the top of the sermon, again mailed out to thousands of subscribers.
They had a 10-foot high stuffed grizzly bear at the entrance door to the lobby of their offices. They also had a garage-full of classic and immaculately-restored 1950s vehicles parked there – the rev’s passion, I guess. The staff consisted of infighting family members aiming to climb the small hierarchy there toward greater power. One of the strangest jobs I ever had. (This was in Los Angeles btw)
“If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.”
–Christopher Hitchens reaction to Falwell’s death
See Christopher Hitchens on Hannity & Colmes about Rev. Falwell’s Death
on youtube. So satisfying to see Hitchens put Hannity in his place.
Trump: “Turn around the cameras.”
Me: “Show us your taxes and NDAs.”
100 million voters
It’s less than 1/3 of all Americans.
Women make up 50%-51% of us.
If every woman over 18 voted for Harris-Walz, they would receive more than the 100 million votes I believe are the minimum we need to counter GOP claims of fraud.
Note to all American women: Put all other policies aside. A vote for any GOP, up and down the ballot, is a vote for you to have all your rights to bodily autonomy taken away. Your right to divorce a man that abuses you and/or your children will be taken away by the same politicians who will force you to give birth, and if you manage to survive, refuse to help you feed, clothe, provide health care or educate children you were forced to mother. Why the hell would you support that?
[Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We have adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is far too short it will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. Thanks. /~Rayne]
You’re brand-squeaky new here so perhaps you’re not familiar with this site.
Please don’t waste your time and ours with exhortations like this because you’re preaching to the choir. Go work on proselytizing to the independent women and work on getting out the vote, especially the Millennial-GenZ crowd who are leaning hard to the left but may have challenges getting registered and voting.
Welcome to emptywheel.
p.s. Focus on white women. Seriously.
After ignoring politics for several years, I closely followed Obama’s campaign in 2008. In a McCain HQ in Ohio, there was a phone bank of 20 phones and only two people manning them. The Obama campaign was trying how to deal with more volunteers than they were prepared for.
Based on the enthusiasm advantage, I predicted that Obama would win every state where he was ahead in the polls or less than 2% behind. It worked for every state except for Missouri which Obama lost by 10,000 votes. I now see that energy and enthusiasm in the Harris campaign. Her crowd sizes, money raised, and the 200,000 volunteers in three weeks reminds me of Obama energy, but a bit more.
Trump is disintegrating and the debate, assuming he shows up, will bring attention to this. The Sept 18 sentencing is coming at a bad time for him as well, less than two months before Election Day. I think a bunch of states are now in play and by October 1st, some of the Lean R states (GA, NC) will be in Harris’ camp.
watched the Nate Silver, poker prognosticator extraordinaire, and he says Kamala is a 54-46 !
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nEhAW398vk
By God, I think we win this thing!
.. however being an old man, gotta caution my exuberance, but
“never been a sinner
never sinned
gotta have a friend in Jesus”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onlqMsgRfmo