Letters from an American - September 26, 2024

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

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September 26th, 2024. Today, President Joe Biden signed the continuing resolution Congress passed yesterday to fund the government until December 20th. The measure has none of the poison pills Trump and MAGA Republicans wanted, but it does add $231 million to the budget for the Secret Service to enhance its ability to protect presidential candidates. This is a good outcome for the country. There will be no shutdown because finally, at the end of the day, our Republican colleagues in the House decided to work with us, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, said.

Congress will recess tomorrow as members head back home to campaign. Members will not return to Washington, D.C. until after the November 5th election. Trump demanded that Republicans shut down the government unless the continuing resolution contained a measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. It is already illegal for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, and the measure was widely seen as an attempt to suppress voting. Trump was unable to command Republican loyalty on this issue, as he did earlier this year when he insisted Republicans kill the bipartisan border bill. That recognition of his slipping power might have been behind his hastily announced press conference this afternoon at Trump Tower in New York, a press conference best described

as the September 10th presidential debate 2.0. Trump reiterated his vision of the United States as a hellscape. He insisted that the nation's booming economy is actually hemorrhaging jobs, that the FBI statistics showing crime falling are all lies, and that inflation, which has fallen close enough to the target of 2% that the Fed recently began to lower interest rates, is at an all-time high. Trump reserved his greatest rage for the ABC debate moderators, who, he complained, fact-checked him after agreeing not to. I want an apology, he said, and for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. To her, he attributed what he insists is a flood of undocumented immigrants drowning states in a welter of crime, although we know immigrants

commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans. In words that sounded quite a bit like his advisor Stephen Miller, he recounted in some detail a number of horrific rapes he claimed were committed by immigrants. He did so apparently with no self-consciousness about his own liability for sexual assault that the presiding judge said would commonly be understood as rape. Although his focus on rape could have been an attempt to push back on the recent spate of ads by conservative lawyer George Conway's anti-psychopath pack featuring women who claim Trump sexually assaulted them. Trump had a number of reasons to melt down today. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed with U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan his detailed

report on the evidence he will use to prove that Trump broke the law when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Trump lawyers tried unsuccessfully to put this filing date off until after the election. The filing is sealed and includes previously unseen material, including interview and grand jury transcripts. Trump's team can respond. Its answer is due October 17th. The filing is clearly on Trump's mind. This morning, he posted on social media

that deep state subversives had ignored his orders to prevent unrest on January 6th, 2021. Then in his press conference, Trump bizarrely suggested that he was not at fault for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The person to blame, he said, was then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat of California, whom he also accused of stock fraud. In his press conference, Trump again took Russian President Vladimir Putin's side, as he did yesterday in North Carolina, deploring the mounting deaths and the terrible destruction in Ukraine, without mentioning that it is the Russian invasion that is causing that death and destruction. He claimed to be on the side of humanity in his desire to end the war, as he has suggested he would do as soon as he takes office in a second

term by permitting Putin to keep the land he wants. This recalled Trump's 2016 Russia if you're listening statement, asking Putin to hack Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's emails. We now know that Russian operatives helped Trump's campaign in 2016, in part because of what Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort knew as the Mariupol plan, which called for Trump to look the other way as Putin installed puppets in the oblasts of eastern Ukraine, permitting him to take through political manipulations the land that he ended up in February 2022 trying to take by force. Trump might also be concerned about money. After recently putting commemorative coins on the market, today he advertised Trump watches at prices from $499 to $100,000, although the fine print specified that the watches in the ad might not be an exact representation of the

final product. The Commerce Department reported today that the country's economic growth from April to June was a strong 3.1%, making the rate under Biden-Harris 3.2%, higher than the rate of economic growth the country enjoyed under Trump before the pandemic. Today, on the stock market, the S&P 500 hit another record high. But stock in Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of his true social, has been falling and is now about 82% less valuable than it was in March when it debuted. Today, a new regulatory filing showed that one of the biggest investors in the company has sold more than 7.5 million shares,

or about 4% of the company's outstanding shares. Trump owns about 60%. Trump might want Russian help again because he is worried about losing the election. When reporters asked him today about whether he would continue to support the Republican North Carolina gubernatorial candidate, Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson,

whose recently revealed postings on a pornographic site included his declaration that he is a black Nazi, Trump answered, I don't know the situation. And this time around, it might be harder to find people in media outlets willing to lie about the election's outcome. The highest court in Washington, D.C. disbarred Trump's former ally Rudy Giuliani today because of his efforts to help Trump try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. the 2020 presidential election. Also today, the voting machine company Smartmatic settled its defamation case against Newsmax over the media company's lies after that election. The trial was set to begin Monday. The terms of the settlement are not public. But there was one

bright spot for Trump today. For all MAGA Republicans have tried to convince people that individual Americans engage in voter fraud, there is the much bigger game of election fraud afoot. North Carolina's State Board of Elections announced in a press release that over the past 20 months, they have removed 747,000 voters from the state's list of registered voters. Officials said these voters either had moved or were inactive because they had not voted in the past two federal elections. The state has 7.7 million registered voters. Trump must win North Carolina to have a plausible chance at victory in 2024, but the Robinson scandal will hurt Republican turnout. In 2020, Trump won the state by about 75,000 votes. American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts.

Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.