Author: A.T.

Take Heart

PART I – Why We Lost

I’ve previously linked to the David Brooks and Bret Stephens columns that I think explain much of it — must reads, if you missed them.

To those let me add:

Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?

It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer:

. . . the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media—Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more—sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

. . . billionaires on the right have invested far more heavily in media in the last two decades than their counterparts on the left . . .

This is the year in which it became obvious that the right-wing media has more power than the mainstream media. It’s not just that it’s bigger. It’s that it speaks with one voice, and that voice says Democrats and liberals are treasonous elitists who hate you, and Republicans and conservatives love God and country and are your last line of defense against your son coming home from school your daughter.

And that is why Donald Trump won . . .

Liberals must wake up and understand this and do something about it before it’s too late, which it almost is.

Worth reading in full.

(And, of course, the right-wing media has this huge advantage: they don’t care if something’s true.  If it’s eye-catching — Haitians eating pets — they run with it.  It’s the National Enquirer brand of “journalism” — Supreme Court Justice Scalia Murdered By A Hooker! — that grabs eyeballs and has helped Trump every step of the way.)

Of interest, too, if you have time:

Our Mistake Was to Think We Live in a Better Country Than We Do

. . . The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem. . . .

PART II – Now What?

Start with The Borowitz Report:

If history’s any guide, some nasty surprises await Donald Trump.

And Joyce Vance:

Whatever the next days and weeks hold, the most important thing is not to let Donald Trump take away your sense of power as an American. Do not, as Tim Snyder says, obey in advance. We did not quit during Trump’s first four years in office and we are not going to quit now. We will pick our priorities and marshal our resources to do what must be done. Make sure you take the time now to nurture yourself for what is ahead. There will be a role for each of us.

And Jamie Raskin’s email to supporters [abridged]:

My Dear Friends:

The last few days have been a blur of grief, disbelief and denial, regret, despair, resignation, estrangement and loss, heartbreak, and maybe, just maybe, the first stirrings of acceptance and renewed resolve.

If you want to start to feel better, think about this:

We’ve expressed our disappointment civilly and our hopes for the future honestly.

We’re not telling sinister judicially-debunked lies about who won the election to divide America. We’re not concocting disinformation and propaganda about imaginary election fraud in the states.

We’re not committing fraud by trying to get state election officials to fabricate thousands of nonexistent votes to change the results. Nor are we preparing counterfeit electoral college slates.

We’re not summoning mobs and violent extremist groups to attack police officers and destroy the peaceful transfer of power.

We’re not out inciting mob violence against Capitol police officers, Montgomery County and D.C. police officers, federal law enforcement officers, Members of Congress, the Vice-President or anyone else in order to overthrow the election and block the peaceful transfer of power.

We are modeling true democratic citizenship without jettisoning our principles and values.

As Democrats we undoubtedly made strategic and tactical mistakes in this campaign. We need a rigorous analysis of what worked and what did not work against the dreadfully effective tactics of our homegrown authoritarians and oligarchs.

But our values have never been a mistake. We have defended constitutional democracy against right-wing coups and violent insurrection. We have defended the freedom and health care of women against theocrats. We have fought for children and opportunity against the defenders of inequality and the promoters of chaos who vow to destroy Head Start and the Department of Education.

We have championed the right to health care and cheaper prescription drug prices, Social Security and Medicare, the work of climate scientists. We have defended libraries against book-banners, the right to vote against vote suppressors and fair elections against the lords of gerrymandering. We have insisted upon a foreign policy based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law.

During my travels across Maryland and America this campaign season, I’ve met wonderful people hungry to address the real problems of our day—the mounting calamities of climate change, the omnipresent peril of gun violence and the deepening of inequalities between tens of millions of working people who live below the poverty level and the billionaire class increasingly usurping government power.

For as long as I am alive, I am going to honor and participate in this urgent fight for strong democracy, freedom and progress for all.  I will never back down to the bullies and the oligarchs, the autocrats and the theocrats, the extremists and Russian bots.

This is our country and I’m going to fight alongside you to defend it every day.

With total solidarity and immense gratitude,

Jamie

P.S.   “Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.” – E.B. White

As always, Heather Cox Richardson provides perspective.

BONUS

Trump Could Bring a More Peaceful Middle East

This is the opinion of foremost Mid-East expert Dennis Ross and others and . . . should it come to pass . . . wouldn’t that be a wonderful silver lining to an otherwise horrible election that has put into jeopardy the very democracy so many of our veterans, whom we honor today, fought and died to protect.

 

Why We Lost

David Brooks, I think, nails it:

Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

Every Democrat should read this.

Bret Stephens nails it as well:

. . . The dismissiveness with which liberals treated these concerns was part of something else: dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes. Concerned about gender transitions for children or about biological males playing on girls’ sports teams? You’re a transphobe. Dismayed by tedious, mandatory and frequently counterproductive D.E.I. seminars that treat white skin as almost inherently problematic? You’re racist. Irritated by new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive but feels as if it’s borrowing a page from “1984”? That’s doubleplusungood.

The Democratic Party at its best stands for fairness and freedom. But the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity. It also, increasingly, stands for the forcible imposition of bizarre cultural norms on hundreds of millions of Americans who want to live and let live but don’t like being told how to speak or what to think. Too many liberals forgot this, which explains how a figure like Trump, with his boisterous and transgressive disdain for liberal pieties, could be re-elected to the presidency.

BONUSES

Trump has already remade America in his own image.  “His overwhelming, toxic influence makes him one of the most successful presidents of the last century.  And the country may never fully recover.”

And if you have time this Veterans Day weekend . . .

. . . don’t miss Sam Harris and Mark Cuban in discussion a few days before the election.  Cuban is a practical, honorable, highly successful celebrity billionaire (you may have seen him on Shark Tank or cheering for his Dallas Mavericks).  If only it had been he who’d come down that escalator nine years ago.

 

I Have A Few Things To Say

First, my heartfelt thanks:

> To two of you who gave millions of dollars to this effort (you know who you are).

> To those whose crucial $25 or $250 or $2,500 helped create an even larger flood of money.

> To so many of you who wrote post cards, sent texts, called friends, and knocked on doors.

> To all of you who voted “the right way,” as I see it.

> To Joe Biden for a competent, dignified, scandal-free administration that gave jobs to almost everyone who wanted one . . . who against all predictions managed to tame terrible COVID-caused inflation without a recession . . . who began the revitalization of America’s infrastructure — including rural broadband — that so many prior presidents had tried and failed to do . . . who walked a picket line and brought manufacturing jobs back to America . . . who brought health insurance to more people than ever and capped the cost of prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 a year starting just weeks from now . . . who made a historic investment in confronting the climate crisis while, of short-term necessity, allowing for the production of more oil and gas than any country in the history of the world . . . who strengthened our Atlantic and Pacific alliances while standing up to Russia’s journalist-murdering dictator (now aided by North Korea’s murderous dictator).  And for passing the torch.

> To Kamala Harris and her team for running a near perfect campaign, heart and soul.

Second, my hope that he will not, in fact, be a dictator on day one — or any other day.  Heck, with the Senate, possibly the House, and the Supreme Court in his pocket, it will be close enough to unchecked dictatorship even without his having to flout the law.

My hope that he will not impose broad tariffs that will spike inflation and interest rates . . . that he will not cut taxes on the rich and corporations that will spike the deficit and inflation and start a trade war . . . that he will sign the bipartisan border bill he killed, or something close to it, but not pull millions of productive tax-paying workers off the job and into deportation camps, which, apart from the human suffering, would cause economic disruption and inflation.

Trump left office the first time with a historically low 34% approval rating.  His economic record was . . . mixed.  For the sake of the country, let’s hope he leaves office this time with a much higher approval rating, surprising on the upside.

Or that, at the very least, he actually leaves.  

Third, my thanks, as always, for your feedback, two examples of which I offer here.

> Tim L. writes:

I am reminded today of a quote that I have used for over 20 years on Day 1 when I teach science classes, written by the so-prescient Carl Sagan in 1995, and truer today than ever before:

<< Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technical powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995) >>

(Less eloquent was a graphic one of you sent showing a map of the United States labeled, simply, “Dumbfuckistan.”)

Tim concluded: “May the great Flying Spaghetti Monster help us all.”

I had never heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster; but clicking that link, I descended into an enjoyable rabbit hole.  It turns out, Pastafarianism is a real thing.  Tim is a member.  He’s even attended a wedding.  It began two decades ago with this letter.

> Lew T. writes:

I knew the Democrats were in deep trouble a few weeks ago. My highly educated son said “Dad I’m voting for Kamala but frankly I’m voting against my best interests. It won’t bother me if Trump wins because it will be financially better for me.”

The Democrats have become the giveaway, redistribution, preachy, culturally overbearing, high-tax and anti-national-defense party.

The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan and the huge budget deficits have defined the Democrats for better or worse. And the immigration fiasco which Biden finally shut down after it was too late clearly cost the Democrats the election.

So, at age eighty, I’m registering as an independent. I won’t use the word “we” any more when I talk about the Democrats. I won’t donate any more unless the party changes dramatically. What a mess!

“What a mess, for sure,” I responded. 

But pushed back some:

The huge budget deficits began with Reagan and have been made much worse (as a percentage of GDP) under Bush 43 and Trump than under Clinton, Obama, and Biden.  And Goldman Sachs notes that the deficits — and inflation — will be worse under Trump’s announced policies than they would have been under Harris’s.

The Afghanistan pull-out was Trump’s deal with the Taliban.  Biden delayed it 4 months but (wrongly, with hindsight) honored it.  Tragic that we lost those 13 soldiers and what’s happened to Afghanistan since.  But this was Trump’s deal; and had we not honored it, the war would have reignited, costing us yet more money and lives, as it had been costing us for 20 years.

Immigration took forever to get through Congress – but once it did, the problem would finally have been fixed — if Trump hadn’t killed it.  Hard for me to blame Democrats for that.  I just wish we had been able to drive home more forcefully what a horrible, selfish, anti-American thing Trump did by killing it.

Much else above with which I’d quibble.  We’re the “high tax” party only if you make more than $400,000 a year (and really only if you make a heck of a lot more than that).  Most Americans favor giveaways and redistribution — Social Security, for example . . . the progressive income tax, for another . . . unemployment insurance and Medicare.  And ironically, red states get more federal aid than they contribute in taxes; blue states, less.

But I think it’s the preach, culturally overbearing piece where your criticism is spot on.  For sure, in recent years, our extreme left has sometimes gone too far.  Either on substance (e.g., if anyone literally wanted to defund the police, as almost no elected Democrat ever did) or, just as politically damaging, in allowing that perception to take hold.

Another example is pronouns.  Maybe just because I’m old, but at least for the next decade or two, if only for practical political purposes, I’d have liked to see our side say: “Hey!  Not everybody identifies as a he or she!  So whenever we see someone add ‘preferred pronouns’ to their signature line, we like to respect their wishes.”

Instead, by making it the politically correct thing for everyone to specify their pronouns — not just the 2% who may wish to be called they/them/theirs (or the transitioning Chris or Pat who may rightly feel we need guidance on what to call them) — we seem crazy.  Or preachy.  Or culturally overbearing.  Or, at the very least, out of touch with average Americans in the heartland.

I so wish Joe and/or Kamala had had one or more Sister Souljah moments as regards woke, because our leadership and almost all our electeds (and voters) are NOT extreme left.

“If by woke you mean trying to treat everyone fairly and respecting the feelings of others, I’m all in — and I think most Americans are, too.   But if by woke you mean extreme positions that make everybody walk on eggshells . . . that stifle free speech and cancel people . . . that disparage friends and neighbors simply because their values are more traditional than yours . . . well, that gets into very sticky territory most Democrats don’t endorse.”

Etc.

It would be a longer speech than that, but you get the gist.  It’s a speech we should have made long ago . . . often and in various ways . . . and still should.

I concluded by telling Lew I think his registering as an Independent is fine!  In a perfect world, everyone would come to every election with an open mind, untethered to party.  The Founders, you will recall, hoped there would BE no parties!

But they also hoped there would be no demagogues.

Thanks, all, for your readership.

I still have the happy gene.

Every day is a gift.

Together — and with the help of lots of good people who, for various reasons, voted “the wrong way” — we’ll get through this.

I hope.

 

Bill O’Reilly Needs An Editor

My one-time PARADE fellow contributing editor endorsed Trump Friday:

Vice President Harris looks like a nice person. Don’t know her or anyone who does.  So, I can’t bring any personal perspective to her candidacy.

I have known Donald Trump for more than 30 years. That’s both good and bad. I tend to overlook many of his controversial statements because I understand much of that is attention-getting theatre. I am solely focused on how he governed and what I believe he’ll do going forward. The rhetoric, to me, is a silly sideshow. Maybe I’m wrong about that.

Back to Kamala. Her strident belief in late-term abortion is disturbing. It’s not about a woman’s body solely – there’s another body that should be considered: the unborn but viable child.

To totally dismiss that fact, as Ms. Harris does, is cruel. I’m not wrong about this.

Yes, Bill; you are — as Pete Buttigieg explains so beautifully in just over a minute, here.

In addition, I see a sense of entitlement from the Vice President. She obviously believes she has no obligation to answer direct questions.  Based upon her time in the Senate, I see no problem-solving ability whatsoever.  Trump is a deal-maker. Harris is an artful dodger.

There are worse things. But I am wary. History can repeat itself. In 1920, Republican Warren Harding refused to answer questions but got elected anyway.

He was a disaster in the White House.

I know Kamala is not Harding, but I don’t know much else about her.  If elected, the odds are she will continue the Biden debacle.

That’s enough for me to pull the lever for Trump.

By “the Biden debacle,” Bill presumably does not mean our economy, the “envy of the world.”

Or our “astonishingly strong” Indo-Pacific and NATO alliances.

Or the record number of Americans with health insurance.

Or the steady decline in violent crime.

Or the taming of inflation with a “soft landing” few thought possible (“US inflation may soon undershoot Fed’s 2% target“).

Or our finally having begun to revitalize our crumbling infrastructure.

So to what debacle, exactly, does Bill refer?

The border?

Biden was days away from signing a bi-partisan border bill that would have fixed that problem, but Trump killed it.  That’s how brazenly he puts his own self-interest over the good of the nation.

PARADE had fact checkers and editors to keep writers like Bill and me on the straight and narrow.

“The Biden debacle” would never have made it into print.

Meanwhile . . .

Kamala makes him think of . . . Warren Harding?  

That’s odd, but okay.

Trump makes the world think of Mussolini and Putin and the guy whose book of speeches he kept by his bedside!

Hmmm.  Warren Harding . . . Mussolini . . .

Tough choice.

Though Harding died in office widely popular while Trump left with only 34% approval.  (Mussolini was executed by anti-fascists.)

Bill says, “I know Kamala is not Harding, but I don’t know much else about her.”

Really?

Well, then, perhaps before issuing his endorsement — in an election the whole world watches with bated breath — Bill could have taken 15 minutes to read her story.  And 15 more to see how her policies contrast with those of Project 2025.

It’s not too late to make calls for Kamala!

 

WHY We’re Going To Win

A lot of you liked Jimmy Kimmel’s message to Republicans.

If you missed it — watch!

This clip, just 56 seconds long, takes a more cathartic (though less likely to be effective) approach.

We’re going to win because look at all the groups who will skew heavily blue:

By my calculations, that adds up to 378% of the electorate.

Even so, given the stakes, we can’t let up.

It’s not too late to volunteer.

THANK YOU.

 

Jimmy Kimmel Brings It Home

For some reason, the embedded HTML code works just fine on the website — look! — but doesn’t come through in the email.

Which is a shame, because this is a must-watch /must-share video.

We’re gonna win.

 

Elon Musk’s Plan For Your Suffering When Trump Wins

Here’s the PRKR write-up that likely accounts for its recent sextuple.  To me, at least, the author’s case for this speculation is compelling.

Jeff Bezos’s response to the non-endorsement.  But at the end of the day — although I’m not one of those who’ve canceled their subscriptions — I think it’s clear he should have waited until a week after the election to institute this new policy.  That would have made all the difference.

Trump’s former Communications Director explains why she endorses Kamala Harris.  A beautiful plea for decency and honesty.

We led some of America’s largest companies. Here’s why we are voting for Harris.

As recent CEOs, mostly of large, publicly traded companies, we have more discretion to speak out. Each of us stays engaged with active CEOs on a regular basis, so we are confident we are capturing the sentiment of the majority of our peers in the business community. . . .

Elon Musk’s plan for your suffering when Trump wins.  It is insane.

Speaking at Trump’s New York City rally over the weekend, Musk said he thinks he’d be able to cut about 30% of the federal budget.

For the record, this plan would match cuts implemented by Argentina’s far-right, pro-Trump president, Javier Milei, who has developed a cult following in today’s GOP. And if that’s Musk’s model, Americans have a lot to fear.

Those policies have helped skyrocket Argentina’s poverty rate to over 50% in the first six months of Milei’s presidency. The hardship Musk is predicting sounds quite hard, indeed. Between Trump repeatedly praising the Gilded Age and Musk priming everyday Americans for “hardship” if MAGA retakes the White House, it seems quite obvious that a vote for Trump is a vote for extreme wealth inequality and all the suffering that comes with it.

BONUS

The speech.

Did you see it?

We’re gonna win.