Letters from an American - August 12, 2024

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

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August 12th, 2024. The 2024 election is shaping up to be bizarre on the Republican side. The party's presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, has largely stayed home and posted on social media, while his vice presidential running mate, J.D. Vance, has been trying to cover the campaigning for the team. Indeed, Vance's offer on Wednesday, during a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to debate Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, suggests that Vance is not unwilling to be seen as the face, if not the leader, of the Republican ticket.

The actual presidential nominee appears even more unstable than usual, and it certainly appears that his handlers are trying to keep him off stage. As Tom Nichols of The Atlantic noted yesterday, when Trump is on TV a lot, his approval goes down. When he's in hiding and his surrogates are rearranging his bonkers, crazy pants, word salads into something like real thoughts, his approval goes up. Observers, including Jackie Combs of the Los Angeles Times, have been clear that Donald Trump's state of mind should be under debate. Trump's fire hose of cray-cray has inured Americans to his outrages, comms wrote today. But now that President Biden, a normal and empathetic man, has been pushed out

of the 2024 race over concerns about his age and mental acuity, Trump's more manifest unfitness for office should be ignored no longer by the media, former advisors and military leaders who remain silent, and, yes, Republicans. Trump held a surprise press conference on Thursday, where according to a team of reporters and editors at NPR, he misstated things, NPR, he misstated things, exaggerated, or lied outright at least 162 times in 64 minutes, a rate of more than two times a minute. He said that the United States is in the most dangerous position it's ever been in from an economic standpoint and warned we could end up in another depression like the Great Depression of the 1930s. In fact, the economy is strong and growing at a faster rate than it did in three of the four years of Trump's presidency.

He warned of a national crime wave, although crime has been plummeting after a surge in 2020 during Trump's term, and said that we are very close to a world war, which illustrates that Trump's main lever to turn out voters is fear. With the successes of the Biden-Harris administration having neutralized the economic fears that worked in the past, and with the goals of anti-abortion activists achieved in 2022 with the Dobbs versus Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Trump is apparently going for broke with the threat of World War III. Altogether, the event did Trump no favors. Poll numbers for Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have climbed since President Joe Biden announced on July 21st he would not accept the Democratic nomination.

And observers have reported that Trump's anger is leading him into unforced errors, picking fights with allies, and seemingly unable to let go of his focus on the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, a focus that his advisors warn is turning off voters. Trump has repeatedly seemed to fantasize that Biden will return to the head of the Democratic ticket. And on Sunday, seemingly frantic about Harris's huge rallies while he can no longer attract big crowds, released a rant accusing Vice President Harris of using AI to create fake footage showing large groups of supporters greeting her airplane. Faking crowds with AI is a technique we know Trump uses, but there's no

evidence Harris does. Immediately, people who attended her events released their own videos proving the size of the crowds, and political pundits openly questioned Trump's mental health. and political pundits openly questioned Trump's mental health. Then, this morning, Trump posted on his social media channel, I'm doing really well in the presidential race, leading in almost all of the real polls, and this despite the Democrats unprecedentedly changing their primary winning candidate, sleepy Joe Biden, midstream. He went on until his closing. We are going to win big and take our country back from the radical left losers, fascists,

and communists. We will, very quickly, make America great again. This afternoon, 538 showed Harris up 2.7 points in the national polling average. Trump's advisors are pleading with him to stop name calling and to stay on message. His campaign began today to run ads on X that look like his tweets, but are much more like standard political ads. Tonight, ex-owner Elon Musk planned to interview Trump, although it seemed pretty clear the event was intended simply to be a long advertisement for him. European Union Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wrote an open letter to Musk warning about EU laws against amplifying harmful content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation. Bretton warned that his team

will be extremely vigilant about protecting EU citizens from serious harm. Musk responded with a meme that said, take a big step back and literally F your own face. Last month, the European Union charged X with failing to respect its social media law by letting disinformation and illegal content run rampant. X faces fines of up to several million euros. rampant. X-Faces fines of up to several million euros. In the end, technical difficulties delayed the start of the X-Faces event. Instead, wrote BBC journalist Cheyenne Sartorizadeh, who specializes in exposing disinformation, a deepfake live stream of the Trump-Musk interview was playing on a fake Tesla channel on YouTube with 200,000 people watching. Sartorizade noted that the channel was running a crypto scam and YouTube finally suspended it. When the real X channel finally began to function,

it showed Musk and Trump heaping praise on each other. But Trump was slurring his words, and when HuffPost White House journalist Esfidate asked the campaign about his inability to articulate, it answered, must be your shitty hearing. Get your ears checked out. Trump went to Montana on Friday in support of Republican candidate Tim Sheehy, who is running to unseat popular Democrat Jon Tester. But otherwise, he said he is not planning to hit the road until after the Democratic National Convention concludes next week. An odd lack of campaigning at this point in a presidential contest. He seems to be trying to regain control of the political narrative through tweets and social media. Today, he said he is suing the government over the raid on Mar-a-Lago that recovered hundreds of classified national security documents, but this is almost certainly posturing to try to

make him look strong. He would never be willing to undergo the discovery phase of such a lawsuit. In the midst of Trump's frenzy, J.D. Vance has been doing the usual appearances of a campaign. Although unable to generate rally crowds himself, he has been reduced to following Harrison walls to theirs and trying to grab headlines there. On Sunday, he did the rounds of the morning talk shows, where on CNN, he complained that Democrats are bullying him by calling the MAGA Republicans weird. Ron DeSanctimonious, Birdbrain Nikki Haley, Old Crow McDonald, Gavin Newscum, Pencilneck Schiff, Pocahontas, Cryin' Chuck, and Kamabla would all like a word. Republicans have made punching down a key part of their rhetoric since at least the 1980s, and Vance's frustration that the tables have turned feels a bit as if someone is finally standing up to the schoolyard bully.

feels a bit as if someone is finally standing up to the schoolyard bully. Outside of the MAGA frenzy, Harrison Walls last week held big, joyous rallies in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada, contrasting their happy campaign with the MAGA Republicans' drumbeat of carnage and revenge. A cover article from Time Magazine today by Charlotte Alter described the scene of one of her rallies as a mashup of a Beyonce concert, Taylor Swift's Heiress Tour, and the early days of Barack Obama, a kind of reception a Democratic presidential candidate hasn't gotten in years. Fans packed into overflow spaces, waving homemade signs made of glitter and glue as drumlines roared. When Harris introduced her new running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the cheering lasted more than a minute.

At the same time, the grave issues that are propelling the Democrats continue to gain traction. The Associated Press today reported that in the wake of the 2022 Dobbs decision, more than 100 pregnant women have been treated negligently or turned away from emergency rooms despite federal law. Two women, each of whom lost a fallopian tube to an undertreated ectopic pregnancy, one also lost 75% of one of her ovaries and the other nearly bled to death, have asked the federal government to investigate whether the hospitals that sent them home to miscarry without medical assistance violated federal law. On Saturday, Trump's campaign said it had also received some of that information and said it believed the information to be that referred to in an August 9th warning from Microsoft that Iran was engaged in an influence campaign. Today, the New York Times also said it had received the information.

And this afternoon, the FBI said it is investigating attempted hacking against both the Trump Vance and Harris Walls campaigns. CNN national security and justice reporter Zachary Cohen reported tonight that the hackers apparently were able to access the campaign by compromising the personal email account of Trump operative Roger Stone. the personal email account of Trump operative Roger Stone. Buckle up, Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, wrote on X. Someone is running the 2016 playbook. Expect continued efforts to stoke fires in society and go after election systems. 95% votes on paper ballots is a strong resilience measure combined with audits. But the chaos is the point. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.