Letters from an American - September 12, 2024

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

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September 12, 2024. Today, Trump backed out of another debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. He tried to spin his fear as a sign of strength, claiming that polls clearly show that I won the debate, and so there was no reason to debate again. But boy, is that going to be a hard sell. First of all, as journalist Ahmed Baba points out, this man has never in his life denied a stage with millions of viewers. Trump's post-debate internal polls must be brutal. Second, he hardly looks dominant as TikTok is overflowing with memes making fun of his they're eating the dogs moment. And as Vice President Harris made fun of his concepts of a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act to a packed 17,000 seat stadium in Greedsboro, North Carolina.

Tim Miller of the Bulwark wrote, impotent Trump was too intimidated to even look Kamala's direction at the debate, and now he wusses out of the rematch. Cannot recall a more dramatic demonstration of beta weakness in a campaign setting. Harris posted on social media that we owe it to the voters to have another debate and reiterated that sentiment to her cheering supporters in Greensboro. In a speech to about 550 people in Tucson, Arizona, Trump insisted he had scored a monumental victory in the debate, referred to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as the vice president, slurred his words and appeared to be having trouble reading off the teleprompters. CNN Tonight compared one of Trump's 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton

to his performance on Tuesday, and the difference was stark. Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman wrote in The Atlantic today that Trump is showing signs of cognitive decline. His tangents and inability to get a point across show a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process. If a patient presented to me with that verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness, he wrote. Trump continues to try to dominate the political debate by refusing to back off any of his assertions, doubling down on the lies about immigrants eating pets and teachers giving students sex change operations. He called

Harris a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist, clearly just stringing words together. Meanwhile, he's giving off vibes of desperation. This afternoon, he announced he would launch his crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, on X Spaces on September 16th, hardly the sign of a presidential candidate convinced he's about to regain his position as the leader of the free world. It has been notable for a while that Trump's wife, Melania, is nowhere to be seen, and Trump has begun to cling to provocateur Laura Loomer, who has vowed utter loyalty to Trump and is evidently quite happy to be seen with him. This is a problem for the Republican Party because of her history of

conspiracy theories and open racism. As Joe Perticone and Mark Caputo of The Bulwark note, Loomer has referred to Vice President Harris as a drug-using prostitute, for example, and suggested she has not given birth to children because she's had so many abortions that she's damaged her uterus. Loomer's extremism has made other Trump supporters urge him to keep her at a distance, sparking an embarrassing public fight. Two of those trying to get Trump to isolate Loomer are Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia. Their chilliness prompted Loomer to fight back on

social media, questioning Graham's sexual identity and calling attention to Greene's extramarital affair and comparing her to a hooker. The public fight between Loomer and Trump's more restrained supporters, and who would have thought Greene would fall Trump's more restrained supporters and who would have thought Greene would fall in the more restrained category illustrates something Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today. Marshall noted that the Republicans are essentially running two campaigns for president in 2024. One is run by Trump himself, and it's based on Trump's personal grievances and stories from his rallies that have little relationship to reality. In 2016, Trump blew up the American political scene with his idiosyncrasies, and his unique style led him to the White House.

But 2024 is a different moment. The campaign is faltering as Trump appears increasingly unhinged, afraid to be on a stage with Harris, and seemingly unable to distinguish fact from fiction. The other campaign is being run by Trump's campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who quietly recognize that Trump is in decline and are trying to run a much more traditional campaign. Like Lindsey Graham when he drew Loomer's Wrath, they keep urging Trump to talk about the economy and to dial back the craziness to avoid driving off voters interested in stability. While they are unable to contain Trump, they are trying to win the election by hammering away at swing state voters with ads attacking Harris and trying to make her look radical. If Trump were to win under these circumstances, it seems likely that he would

not be the driving force in his own administration. The power of the office would then be wielded by Vice President J.D. Vance, a reality we should confront in the few weeks before the election. Vance is a religious extremist, of course, whose recent willingness to smear Haitian immigrants with a lie so long as it might enhance the Republicans' chance of winning was despicable. Aside from the Christian nationalism and the lies, Vance recently said he sees American history as a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons,

where whichever side the hillbillies are on wins. The Northern Yankees in the late 19th century stood for protecting the right of all men to equality before the law, while the Southern Bourbons, probably named originally for Bourbon County, Kentucky, before the name came to represent those who supported the idea of royalty, wanted to get rid of the 14th Amendment that protected black rights and the 15th Amendment that established the right of black men to vote. Vance said today's Northern Yankees are what he calls hyper-woke coastal elites, the ones trying to protect equal rights. The Southern Bourbons are sort of the same old-school Southern folks that have been around

and influential in this country for 200 years, Vance said. Or, as people understood it in the late 19th century, they were former Confederates who opposed black rights. And it's like the hillbillies have really started to migrate toward the southern Bourbons instead of the northern woke people, he concluded, in an evident hope that they would control the American future. Extremist Republicans used to hide that sentiment. Now the man who could become the acting president is openly embracing it. At the same time MAGA leaders are trying to turn out their base, they are also working to make it harder for Democrats to vote.

Yesterday, the Republican-controlled North Carolina Supreme Court decided to permit independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to have his name taken off the ballot in that state. Kennedy Jr. to have his name taken off the ballot in that state. Although, as Mark Joseph Stern reported in Slate, he did not ask to be removed until four days after he withdrew from the race, which was five days after the deadline for withdrawing. By the time he withdrew, county election boards were already printing ballots, and the court's decision will require nearly three million ballots to be destroyed and new ones designed and printed. According to North Carolina's state election director, this will take 18 to 23 days and will cut into early voting. North Carolina law requires state officials to mail ballots to Americans living abroad and to service members

by September 21st, the day that early voting was supposed to start. As Stern points out, Trump and Harris are effectively tied in North Carolina, and early voters there skew Democratic. Last night, musician Taylor Swift won seven awards at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, mostly for awards surrounding her song Fortnite. In her acceptance speech for Video of the Year, she said, The fact that this is a fan-voted award and you voted for this, I appreciate it so much. And if you are over 18, please register to vote for something else that's very important coming up, the 2024 presidential election, Swift said, although she

could hardly be heard over the roar from the crowd at her call for them to vote. Pollster Tom Bonnier has been following registration numbers and said that there has been a massive increase in voter registrations after Swift's endorsement of Harris. This intensity and enthusiasm is really unprecedented at this point. It's even bigger than what we saw after the Dobbs decision in 2022. Today, Republicans in North Carolina sued to overturn the decision of the state election board that students and employees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill can use state-approved digital IDs as identification for voting. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Denham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.