I was standing in line for early voting this morning, and a friend asked, “Did you hear the great speeches in Kalamazoo yesterday by Michelle and Kamala?” I had not. When I got home, after voting for Kamala, I listened to both women.
I hope you watch and listen.
The enthusiasm of the crowd was amazing! They will, as Michelle said, “Do something!”
They referred to their city as Kamalazoo. Good one!
Arab-Americans, Muslims, and some young people are threatening not to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas and Hezbollah in Gaza and Lebanon.
This would be a mistake. Kamala has said she would press vigorously for a ceasefire and for a two-state solution.
Trump has made clear repeatedly that he stands with Netanyahu. He has said nothing about a ceasefire or a two-state goal. He has pledged to impose a Muslim ban as he tried to do when he was first elected.
He made his firm position clear recently.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed support for Israel’s offensives against Hamas and Hezbollah in a recent call with the country’s prime minister — a position that could complicate his campaign’s outreach to Arab Americans claiming he opposes the war.
Trump told Benjamin Netanyahu in one call this month, “Do what you have to do,” according to six people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive and confidential information. Trump has said publicly that the two have spoken at least twice in October, with one call as recently as Oct. 19.
“He didn’t tell him what to do militarily, but he expressed that he was impressed by the pagers,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who was on a call this month with Trump and Netanyahu, referring to the Israeli operation that killed Hezbollah leaders with explosive batteries inside pagers. “He expressed his awe for their military operations and what they have done.”
Graham added: “He told them, do what you have to do to defend yourself, but we’re openly talking about a new Mideast. Trump understands that very much there has to be change with the corrupt Palestinian state.”
Trump had a town hall for Republican women to address women’s issues. He sought to reassure his audience that he would protect them. This is the town hall in Georgia where he claimed that he was “the father of IVF.” No one asked him to define IVF. I wonder if he could.
Jill Filipovic wrote for Slate about Trump’s efforts to calm women voters. He needs their votes.
What, most politicians ask themselves, do women want? American women vote in larger numbers than men. Issues that affect our lives are routinely diminished as “women’s issues,” even as we make up more than half the population. Both parties, but Republicans much more than Democrats, have a male dominance problem. There has never been a female president.
So, what do women want? Last week, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump took a shot at answering that question when he sat down with Fox News host Harris Faulkner and a female-only audience for a town hall event that aired on Wednesday. Trump’s answer to the age-old question? Bizarre ramblings about safety, nonsensical talking points about reproductive rights, and strongman promises to just fix things, democratic processes be damned. What was clear, though, was how Trump and his team approach women: As dependents in need of protection, and as a special interest group that doesn’t particularly interest him outside of the fact that he needs them to win.
If you’ve watched a Trump debate or a Trump rally, very little of what he said on The Faulkner Focus will come as a surprise. His talking points are well-established, if they tend to come out in streams of gibberish and have little relationship to reality. He had the best border; Biden had the worst border. He had the best economy; Biden had the worst economy. This time, he added a few newer ones: He had the best child tax credit, although, he said, it was mostly his daughter’s idea, and Biden turned it into the worst tax credit. (In reality: Joe Biden expanded the child tax credit; Republicans, aided by Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, then refused to renew it; and this summer Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have expanded it.) Trump’s Republican Party is also the best on IVF, he said, better than Democrats—and in fact, he, Trump, is the “father of IVF,” an absurd claim he boasted three separate times.
Setting aside how offensive and stomach-roiling it is to hear that phrase out of Trump’s mouth, the claim that Republicans are good on IVF couldn’t be more false. Republicans have opposed Democratic efforts to protect IVF nationally and have introduced bills that could ban it nationwide. But it’s really clear that Trump knows how bad Republicans look on this—and he credited the “fantastically attractive” Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama with teaching him so this year after the Alabama Supreme Court effectively made it illegal in that state.
How he learned what IVF was this year and still became IVF’s father was left a mystery. But this Big Daddy posturing was his central theme.
It was clear from the start that Trump’s team had told him to emphasize safety—that the pro-Trump women in the audience (and they were almost all pro-Trump) wanted to hear about how Trump would protect them. Faulkner kicked off the conversation by complaining about Democratic “prebuttals” to the town hall, playing footage of Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock telling voters to get out and cast their ballots because Trump is a threat to democracy. Trump responded by bragging about his endorsements from the Border Patrol and the Fraternal Order of Police—not exactly organizations with tons of women in their ranks—and continued, “So when you talk about safety …” (Faulkner had not talked about safety). But Trump did want to talk about safety or, to put a finer point on it, to convince suburban Georgia women that they are imperiled by undocumented immigrants and criminals, and that Trump is the only one who can save them.
Trump also played the protector when asked about the child tax credit, which has become far less generous thanks largely to Republicans. Always careful to maintain a macho posture, the former president actually gave someone else credit for once—his daughter Ivanka, who he said begged him to do something to support struggling families. He suggested he didn’t have any great desire to take on the issue, but, well, his daughter demanded it, and Daddy wasn’t going to say no.
The same theme showed up in Trump’s answer to a question about transgender girls playing sports. The solution, Trump said, was simply to ban it. How would he prevent trans girls from playing sports, Faulkner asked? He would just ban it, Trump said. That’s it—he’ll be the president, after all. Just ban it.
The audience cheered.
On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris has rightly been emphasizing the threat Trump poses to democracy (it is actually Democrats, Trump said in this town hall, who are the real threats to democracy). And many voters are certainly persuaded that democracy is worth defending, and that Trump imperils it. But for Trump’s loyalists, his authoritarian tendencies are part of the draw. He won’t mess around with the separation of powers or slow process of democratic lawmaking. He’ll be the president—if he doesn’t like something, he’ll just ban it. Like the women in the Fox audience, his supporters love it. And if women are good to Daddy, maybe he’ll take their problems into consideration, too.
Women are more than half of the population. There is no one thing we all want. Except, I suspect, the right to bodily autonomy when our lives or health are threatened by a situation out of our control. Trump’s pitch to women is that they won’t need autonomy. They can just trust in the man who promises to bend the country in their favor, even if he winds up breaking it.
Last night, I read the hundreds of letters to the editor of the Washington Post about Bezos’ decision not to endorse. By now, there are probably thousands. Almost all of them said: I have canceled my subscription.”
Good for them.
I am NOT canceling my subscription.
I enjoy reading Dana Milbank, Jennifer Rubin, Eugene Robinson, Alexander Petri, and other columnists.
I applaud them for dissenting from Bezos’ mandate.
They will vent their rage for the next 10 days. At Bezos and especially at Trump.
And of course there will continue to be hard-hitting investigations.
I want to read what they write.
On the same day that the Washington Post announced that it would not endorse a Presidential candidate, the following article appeared, written by Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey. Actually, I saw the article on the Post website Friday morning but by Friday night it had disappeared from the website. I searched for it at 1 am early Saturday morning and could not find it. It was posted again this morning with yesterday’s date. It’s a long article, but well worth the read.
It reads like a rebuttal to Jeff Bezos’ decision not to endorse a candidate, not to choose between an experienced, sensible woman of color and a nutty, egotistical ex-President who thinks he won the last election.
The article appeared before the editorial decision. It reads like a rebuttal.
It begins:
Donald Trump debuted a name for his idiosyncratic, digressive speaking style this summer: “the weave.”
The Republican presidential nominee, now 78, was frustrated with news coverage describing his speeches as rambling and speculating about cognitive decline, according to people who have talked with him, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump decided to brand his habit of going off on wide-ranging tangents as the mark of a vibrant and sophisticated mind, they said — trying to turn what many voters, and some of his advisers, saw as a weakness into a strength.
I call it ‘the weave.’ And some people think it’s so genius. But the bad people, what they say is, ‘You know, he was rambling.’ That’s not a ramble. There’s no rambling. This is a weave. I call it the weave. You need an extraordinary memory because you have to come back to where you started.
Oct. 9 interview with Andrew Schulz on the “Flagrant” podcast
Trump’s recent public appearances have been strikingly erratic, coarse and often confusing, even for a politician with a history of ad-libbing in three consecutive presidential runs, a Washington Post review of dozens of speeches, interviews and other public appearances shows. His speeches have gotten longer and more repetitive compared with those of past campaigns. He promotes falsehoods and theories that are so far removed from reality or appear wholly made up that they are often baffling to anyone not steeped in MAGA media or internet memes.
He jumps more abruptly between subjects and from his script to improvising, sometimes offering what sound like non sequiturs. He occasionally mixes up words or names, and some of his sentences are meaningless or nonsensical. As he has delivered more speeches in October, he has made multiple slip-ups per day. He has become more profane in public.
Many of Trump’s supporters say they enjoy his off-the-cuff commentary, favorably contrasting his speeches with what they usually hear from politicians.
“Just because you don’t like how somebody talks doesn’t mean that you don’t listen to what’s in their head,” said Deanna Borracci, 52, who wore a hat reading “Re-elect that motherf—er” to Trump’s rally in Juneau, Wisconsin, on Oct. 6.
“It doesn’t bother me,” she said of his long speeches and off-the-cuff remarks. “He’s being himself.”
With less than two weeks of campaigning left, Vice President Kamala Harris is increasingly trying to use Trump’s words against him. At rallies, she has started playing clips of him speaking and calling him “unstable and unhinged.”
“He has called it ‘the weave,’” Harris said at a rally on Oct. 19. “But I think we here will call it nonsense.”
Trump’s unusual delivery has inspired comedy routines and armchair diagnoses for years. Long, meandering stemwinders, provocations, brazen falsehoods and blunt language, jokes and insults have distinguished his speeches since he launched his candidacy in 2015 calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” He has frequently posted all-caps outbursts on social media in the middle of the night, critiqued live television, picked fights with celebrities, and veered off poll-tested political messages in favor of petty, personal grievances. His unscripted appearances generate widespread attention, accomplishing his goal of dominating headlines.
The Republican nominee has scoffed at questions about his age and fitness and challenged Harris’s intelligence.
“I have no cognitive,” he said at a town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 20. “She may have a cognitive problem, but, but there’s no cognitive problem.”
He has regularly mocked Harris for meandering answers she has sometimes given and questioned her intelligence in sometimes sexist ways, people who have been with him privately say. He also accused the press of cherry-picking occasional slip-ups.
For weeks and weeks, I’m up here ranting and raving. Last night, 100,000 people, flawless. Ranting and raving. I’m ranting and raving. Not a mistake. And then I’ll be at a little thing, and I’ll say something, a little bit like ‘the,’ I’ll say, ‘dah,’ they’ll say, ‘He’s cognitively impaired.’ No. I’ll let you know when I will be. I will be someday. We all will be someday, but I’ll be the first to let you know.
Oct. 13 rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona
Trump’s Truth Social posts don’t have anywhere near the reach he once got on Twitter and his rallies are not covered wall-to-wall on live TV, meaning his comments don’t get the traction they once might have. Privately, some of his advisers see this as a positive development. Harris, for her part, has urged people to watch Trump’s rallies for themselves.
Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president. He has never released his medical records or submitted to independent evaluation. The most detailed account of his health came in a January 2019 briefing from White House physician Ronny Jackson, who later resigned under allegations he drank on the job and mistreated subordinates; he now represents a Texas district in Congress. His successor, Sean Conley, gave public accounts of Trump’s health that were rosier than reality when the then-president contracted covid-19 shortly before the 2020 election.
Fifty-one percent of Americans said Trump was too old to work in government in a September Reuters-Ipsos national poll, an identical number as in the same survey in July.
Trump’s advisers reject the notion that Trump has lost a step. He has dramatically increased the pace of campaigning since Labor Day, with multiple events on some days, leaving him appearing more tired and irritable. He has had to suspend his usual golf routine both because of the demands of the campaign and because of security concerns from two assassination attempts and ongoing threats from Iran, according to advisers. He has shown flashes of frustration with those dangers, as well as with his busy schedule, and with having to run against Harris after an aging President Joe Biden withdrew from the race.
Some of his puzzling statements arise from how he gets his own information. In the years since leaving the White House, Trump’s sources of news have grown increasingly insular and self-reinforcing, according to people who talk with him. He both validates and thrives on an alternative ecosystem that selects and amplifies stories to suit him, and he summarily dismisses any other reports as fake. Aides who contradict him or bring him bad news quickly lose his favor and access. Much of the information he gets these days comes from Natalie Harp, a junior but highly influential aide who often trails Trump no matter where he is, printing out supportive articles and social media posts for his review, according to advisers.
For several weeks this fall, campaign advisers tried to persuade him to shorten his speeches. Talk about the economy. Don’t attack people. People would stop leaving, they argued, if his speeches were shorter.
“Going down the stretch, a little discipline would help,” one adviser said.
Trump has dismissed the advice. “People want a show,” he said in Pennsylvania in August, according to a person who heard his comments.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung in an email praised the Republican nominee’s rhetoric: “President Trump is the greatest orator in political history and his patented Weave is a brilliant method to convey important stories and explain policies that will help everyday Americans turn the page from the last four years of Kamala Harris’s failures. The media is too stupid and ignorant to understand or comprehend what is happening in the country and, therefore, is unable to accurately report on President Trump’s achievements while in office and the pro-America agenda he will implement in his second term.”
He repeats falsehoods that are far removed from reality
And then they have the apps, right? How about the apps? Where they have an app so that the gangs, the people, the cartels, the heads of ’em, they can call the app. They call the second-most resettled population. Nobody’s ever seen. They call up the app and they ask, ‘Where do we drop the illegals?’ And people are on the other side, and they left that. She actually created an app, a phone system, where they can call up. I mean, she’s a criminal. She’s a criminal. She really is. If you think about it.
Oct. 11 rally in Aurora, Colorado
Trump’s tendency to boast and exaggerate is well documented, including in more than 30,000 false claims during his presidency, tallied by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker. Typical fact checks compare the data Trump is referencing with his characterization. But some of his falsehoods are so fantastical it can be hard to tell what he is referring to.
He accused Harris of speaking “about teddy bears,” which have never come up in any of her interviews. He claimed she was known as “the tax queen” as San Francisco district attorney even though prosecutors have no power over taxation. He falsely claims banning cows and windows are part of Democrats’ plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even accusing them of trying to raze Manhattan. He sometimes vividly describes nonexistent crime sprees.
You go to a lot of cities and they rob a department store and guys are walking out with refrigerators. They have it on their back with two front and air conditioning and everything, and they literally are stripping. And the police are standing outside and they’re shaking out of anger because they really want to do something, but they’re told to stand down, stand down, and they’re watching these criminals walk out.
Oct. 20 town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Trump’s riffs about Hannibal Lecter roughly coincided with false right-wing internet rumors about cannibals from Haiti. He and his campaign have never provided any basis for Trump’s frequent claim that foreign countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions to send people to the United States.
As Trump emphasizes immigration in the closing stretch of the campaign, his speeches routinely feature the false allegation that Harris created a phone app for cartels to coordinate human smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico border. The false claim stems from a mobile application developed and released by Customs and Border Protection during the Trump administration to facilitate trade. In 2023, the agency expanded the app to add appointment scheduling for asylum applications.
Most prominently, Trump promoted unfounded, racist allegations against Haitian refugees settled in Springfield, Ohio, during the Sept. 10 debate with Harris. False internet rumors accused people of eating geese and cats, and Trump, without any basis, added dogs.
He occasionally mixes up words and names
In June, Trump accidentally called his former doctor, Ronny Jackson, Ronny Johnson — ironically in the same breath that he was attacking Biden’s cognitive health and boasting about his own.
At an Oct. 1 news conference in Milwaukee, Trump complained that the Secret Service was busy protecting the U.N. General Assembly, including “the president of North Korea, who’s basically trying to kill me,” apparently meaning Iran.
At the same appearance, Trump mistook Afghan attacks on coalition forces, known in NATO as “green on blue,” for “blue on brown and brown on blue.”
At a rally in Prescott Valley, Arizona, on Oct. 13, Trump struggled to pronounce the word “Assyrians,” sounding like “Azurasians.”
At an Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Trump appeared to struggle to summon the name of Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, while also falsely claiming that Harris helped start the “defund the police” movement.
She was one of the founders of ‘defund the police.’ And she still believes that. By the way, I don’t know how anybody could, but she still believes that. And if she ever had a chance, there’s a good possibility you should go back to it. Can you imagine, somebody’s robbing our house? ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ That’s what they had. They say, there’s not — you know, they tried it. And you know where they tried it? In Minnesota, with our … vice president. And it wasn’t working out too well. It was working out very well for the robbers and the criminals. That’s the only one it was working out well for.
Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania
This isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon where they want it to land or he gets the engines back. That was the first I really saw. I said, ‘Who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three or four years ago. These things were coming. Cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean, someplace with a circle. Boom. Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles and he couldn’t fill them up. But then I heard he beat us with the popular vote. I don’t know, I don’t know, couldn’t fill up the circles. I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful. That was so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person that did them, that was the best thing about his — the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the press stand in those circles because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost. ‘Oh, we lost.’ No, we’re never going to let that happen again. But we’ve been abused by other countries. We’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries. I can’t blame them. We’ve been abused by people that represent us in this country, some of them stupid, some of them naive, and some of them crooked, frankly.
Oct. 10 speech to the Detroit Economic Club
In an Oct. 7 interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump claimed he had visited Gaza. There is no evidence he has ever been to the territory, and a campaign official later clarified he was referring to Israel, which does not encompass Gaza.
During a town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 14, Trump incorrectly named Election Day as Jan. 5 instead of Nov. 5. (Back in February, he misstated the date of Michigan’s primary as Nov. 27 instead of Feb. 27.) The Oaks town hall ended with 39 minutes of Trump swaying and dancing to music after two people fainted and he decided to stop taking questions.
In an Oct. 21 news conference in Asheville, North Carolina, Trump answered a question about climate change using the French term “double entendre,” which means a phrase with a second meaning, usually sexual. He appeared to mean “double standard.”
We weren’t losing jobs. We weren’t in terms of climate change. Because when you look at the rest of the world and you look at China and you look at the fact that they spent no money on climate change — I mean, John Kerry goes over and speaks to President Xi and they say ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ him. And they laugh at him as he leaves and they do what they’re doing. We spend a lot of money in this country. You know, we have a — it’s a double, it’s a double entendre.
Oct. 21 news conference in Asheville, North Carolina
Trump’s rallies often include a shout-out to the superfans who frequently camp out to be first in line for his rallies, known as the “Front Row Joes.” On Oct. 22 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Trump mistakenly called them the “Front Row Jacks.” He repeated “Front Row Jacks,” then seemed to catch himself by adding, “and Joes.”
Trump repeatedly interrupted that speech to point to someone in the crowd, asking if he was someone he had met yesterday. The man shouted back, “No, you haven’t met me, but I LOVE you, man!”
Almost two hours into the Greensboro rally, Trump struggled to summon the word “fryer” two days after visiting a McDonald’s restaurant in Pennsylvania.
“Those french fries were good,” he said. “They were good. They were right out of the uh, they were right out of whatever the hell they make them out of.”
He transitions abruptly, verging on non sequiturs
During an Oct. 10 speech at the Detroit Economic Club, Trump described watching a SpaceX landing and said it reminded him of “the Biden circles that he used to have.” Trump was alluding to small-scale campaign events that Biden held during the pandemic to accommodate social distancing, with people seated in spaced-out circles painted on a parking lot — claiming that was evidence that Biden could not have beaten him in the election. The reference would not be obvious based on Trump’s description alone, without already being familiar with the image from four years ago.
Trump often delivers speeches in conversation with his own text, ad-libbing asides and reacting in real time to his own statements as he reads them. Sometimes he switches back and forth between improvising and reading the script or teleprompter without warning, leading to abrupt or jarring transitions.
At an Oct. 1 news conference in Milwaukee billed as a speech about education policy, Trump jumped off from that topic to compare the United States’ performance to other countries, compare states, complain about transgender athletes and immigration, return to other countries and states, attack California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), misrepresent a California law preventing localities from imposing stricter voter ID requirements than the state, and accuse Democrats without evidence of cheating in elections. He then returned to his script about schools without any verbal signal or change in his affect.
Five days later, in Juneau, Wisconsin, Trump swerved off topic based on two distinct meanings of the word “mandate.”
The only way to avoid this miserable fate for America is if Wisconsin and the entire Midwest turn, and I mean turn out in record numbers. We need — and I hate to use this word, ’cause they should have never done it with respect to covid, they should have never done it. But for this, we need a mandate. They shouldn’t have done it with covid. Everybody that did it should be ashamed of themselves what they did. But we need a mandate in the vote, and we’re going to get it.
Oct. 6 rally in Juneau, Wisconsin
In an Oct. 15 Bloomberg News interview, editor John Micklethwait asked whether the Justice Department should break up Google as a monopoly. Trump, appearing to react to the mention of the Justice Department, responded by complaining about a new lawsuit to prevent systematic voting roll purges within 90 days of an election.
“The question is about Google, President Trump,” Micklethwait said.
That night, at a rally in Atlanta, Trump dwelled on the word “kickback” to toggle between making fun of Harris for reading a teleprompter and accusing the administration of corruption. (A week later, at a rally in Greensboro, Trump called the same phenomenon with teleprompters a “snap back.”)
She was talking about 32 days, Mr. Congressman. 32. She goes, ‘And the election will be in 32 days. Thirty-two days.’ The teleprompter crashed. Thirty-two — she kept going. I would have loved to — you know, it kicked back in. It’s called a kickback. Like some people know a lot about a kickback. It’s called a kickback. They know in this administration. But no, it’s a kickback, it kicks back in. And it did kick back in just in time because she was about ready to eat the guy.
Oct. 15 rally in Atlanta
He has started routinely comparing his various tax proposals to the invention of the paper clip. During an Oct. 21 rally, he made the comparison while talking about exempting car loan interest from taxes.
Sounds simple, right? But it’s not so simple. I always say it’s like the paper clip. You know, some guy 129 years ago, he came up, he took a little piece of stuff, and he went like all of a sudden, the paper clip. He made a fortune. People look at it, they say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ This is the same thing.
Oct. 21 rally in Greenville, North Carolina
Some of Trump’s speeches can be hard to follow for anyone not already familiar with listening to him, because he uses shorthand for topics as he rapidly jumps through them rather than fully explaining his references. In one answer at the Lancaster town hall, he said “what happened in Afghanistan” to mean the killing of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in 2021, and “Russia Russia Russia” to mean special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Our country is really, it’s a failing nation. I don’t care what you say. I mean, we’re not — we’re laughed at all over the world by other leaders four years ago. We were respected by everybody. China, Russia. Russia would have never gone into Ukraine. Israel would have never been attacked on October 7th. We would have never had the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, which is you saw what happened in Afghanistan, the Taliban. We would have never had — think of it. We would have never had Afghanistan. We were getting out, but we were going to get out with dignity and strength, and we were going to keep the big air base, Bagram, because it’s one hour away, spent billions and billions of dollars, just about the biggest, most powerful, longest runways in the world. We gave it to China. They gave it to China. The Chinese now operate it. We were one hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons. We gave it up. Would have never happened. All of these things. We wouldn’t have had inflation because our energy was so good. Energy caused inflation. What they did with energy. But I said to myself, you know, sometimes I think I see, you know, I get hit with all these lunatics that we have with the radical left lunatics where they make up stories about Russia, Russia, Russia. In the end, I wouldn’t change what we’ve done for anything. We’re going to make America great again, greater than ever before.
Oct. 20 town hall in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Some phrases and answers are nonsensical
I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s — couldn’t — you know, it’s something — you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. And those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care.
Sept. 5 speech at the Economic Club of New York
Some of Trump’s answers in recent interviews and town halls have been particularly obscure. A discussion of his plan for child care included phrases such as “child care is child care,” and there was little more clarity to be found in the answer taken as a whole.
His intent was similarly unclear when he jumped from discussing the border to his support among women during an Oct. 9 rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Four years ago, we had the best border in our country’s history, and that included human trafficking, mostly in women, by the way. That includes — so, when women say, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I like Trump. I was the one — that is the most heinous thing. Human trafficking, mostly in women. Gee, I wonder what that’s all about, right? And then they say, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m going to’ — Kamala is not going to protect anyone. They’ve allowed this country to be poisoned at our border. And, you know, a lot of people say — and this is not part of the deal, but I’d like to go off the teleprompter, if you don’t mind. I actually haven’t — I don’t think I’ve been on it, shit. I haven’t — they’re waiting for me.
Oct. 9 rally in Scranton, Pennsylvania
At a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19, Trump said Chinese factories in Mexico would sell cars to the U.S. by going “around the little horn.”
Asked on Oct. 7 how he would advise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Iran, Trump repeatedly interrupted himself without finishing or explaining his thoughts. He also referred ambiguously to “the nuclear people.”
No, I said don’t hit the nuclear. Did you ever hear of anyone say don’t hit, he says don’t hit the nuclear. They asked him the other day would you hit, well, I don’t think you should hit the nuclear. I thought it was the opposite, okay? I sort of thought it was the opposite. The nuclear is the biggest single problem the world has. Not global warming, where the ocean will rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 500 years. You know, these people are crazy. The biggest problem we have is nuclear warming, not global warming. And the nuclear people can’t have the nuclear. The nuclear is the power.
Oct. 7 interview with Hugh Hewitt
Sabrina Rodriguez, Marianne LeVine and Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.
It’s clear that billionaire Jeff Bezos told the editorial board not to publish its editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. The editorial was already written, and Bezos stopped it. The order came down through Will Lewis, whom Bezos hired away from Rupert Murdoch’s rightwing publishing empire.
No one knows Bezos’s reason or reasons. He has said nothing. Lewis released a statement pretending that the censorship of the editorial board by the owner was an act of high principle. As editor Ruth Marcus wrote, had the decision been announced a year ago, it would have had at least the patina of principle. Coming as it did only days before the election, the decision seems craven and unethical.
This is what 17 of the Post’s opinion writers said in response.
The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020. There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs. That has never been more true than in the current campaign. An independent newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.
Karen Attiah
Perry Bacon Jr.
Matt Bai
Max Boot
Kate Cohen
E.J. Dionne Jr.
Lee Hockstader
David Ignatius
Heather Long
Ruth Marcus
Dana Milbank
Alexandra Petri
Catherine Rampell
Eugene Robinson
Jennifer Rubin
Karen Tumulty
Erik Wemple
Ruth Marcus has been a writer for The Washington Post for forty years. Yesterday, she wrote a principled dissent to the decision of Jeff Bezos, the billionaire who owns the newspaper, to stop the editorial board from publishing its endorsement of Kamala Harris. In addition, 16 opinion writers published a statement criticizing the decision.
She wrote:
I love The Washington Post, deep in my bones. Last month marked my 40th year of proud work for the institution, in the newsroom and in the Opinions section. I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today, with the tragically flawed decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential race.
At a moment when The Post should have been stepping forward to sound the clarion call about the multiple dangers that Donald Trump poses to the nation and the world, it has chosen instead to pull back. That is the wrong choice at the worst possible time.
I write — I dissent — from the perspective of someone who spent two decades as a member of The Post’s editorial board. (I stepped away last year.) From that experience, I can say: you win some and lose some. No one, perhaps not even the editorial page editor, agrees with every position the board takes. At bottom, the owner of the newspaper is entitled to have an editorial page that reflects the owner’s point of view.
In addition, let’s not overestimate the significance of presidential endorsements. As much as we might like to believe otherwise, they have limited persuasive value for the vanishingly small number of undecided voters. They are distinct from endorsements for local office, involving issues and personalities about which voters might have scant knowledge; in these circumstances, editorial boards can serve as useful, trusted proxies. A presidential endorsement serves a different purpose: to reflect the soul and underlying values of the institution.
A vibrant newspaper can survive and even flourish without making presidential endorsements; The Post itself declined to make endorsements for many years before it began doing so regularly in 1976, as publisher and chief executive officer William Lewis pointed out in his explanation for the decision to halt the practice.
If The Post had announced after this election that it would stop endorsing presidential candidates, I might have disagreed with that decision, but I would not consider it out of bounds. The practice of endorsements comes with some costs. The newsroom and the Opinions section maintain rigorous separation, but it is difficult to make that case to an official aggrieved by the failure to secure an endorsement.
This is not the time to make such a shift. It is the time to speak out, as loudly and convincingly as possible, to make the case that we made in 2016 and again in 2020: that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold the highest office in the land.
This was The Post on Oct. 13, 2016: “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump,” the editorial board wrote in endorsing Hillary Clinton. Trump, it — we because I was a member of the board then — said, “has shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world.”
Every word of that proved sadly true.
This was The Post on Sept. 28, 2020: It — we — called Trump “the worst president of modern times,” in endorsing Joe Biden “Democracy is at risk, at home and around the world,” the editorial warned. “The nation desperately needs a president who will respect its public servants; stand up for the rule of law; acknowledge Congress’s constitutional role; and work for the public good, not his private benefit.”
What has changed since then? Trump’s behavior has only gotten worse — and we have learned only more disturbing things about him. Most significantly, he disputed the results of a fair election that he lost and sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. He encouraged an insurrection that threatened the life of his own vice president — leading to his second impeachment — and then defended the insurrectionists as “hostages.” He will not accept the reality of his 2020 loss or pledge to respect the results of next month’s voting, unless it concludes in his favor.
He has threatened to “terminate” the Constitution. He has demeaned his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, as “mentally impaired.” He has vowed to fire the special counsel who brought two criminal cases against him and “go after” his political enemies. He wants to use the military to pursue domestic opponents — “radical left lunatics” like former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) or Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) — and rout out “the enemy from within.”
I could keep going but you know all this, and you get my point: What self-respecting news organization could abandon its entrenched practice of making presidential endorsements in the face of all this?
Lewis, in his publisher’s note, called this move “consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” It was, he added, “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.”
But asserting that doesn’t make it so. Withholding judgment does not serve our readers — it disrespects them. And expressing our institutional bottom line on Trump would not undermine our independence any more than our choices did in 1976, 1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 or 2020. We were an independent newspaper then and, I hope, remain one today.
Many friends and readers have reached out today, saying they planned to cancel their subscriptions or had already done so. I understand, and share, your anger. I think the best answer, for you and for me, may be embodied in this column: You are reading it, on the same platform, in the same newspaper, that has so gravely disappointed you.
On October 7, The Orlando Sentinel published the following editorial. Note that the newspaper is owned by Alden Global Capital, which has bought up many other newspapers and gutted their newsrooms.
The Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel will no longer endorse candidates in races for governor, Senate or president, including this year’s races.
This is a company-wide decision and very limited in scope. It applies only to endorsements in these two races. All other endorsements remain entirely within each newspaper’s discretion, and we are working hard on our endorsements for U.S. House, the Legislature, city and county commissioners and mayors and school board races.
Any public officials who are popping champagne at this announcement might want to re-cork their celebrations. Tribune Publishing’s two Florida papers, the Orlando Sentinel and Sun Sentinel, will continue our tradition of robust, well-researched editorials that hold Florida’s leaders responsible for their actions. When those decisions are not in the state’s best interests or driven by partisan ulterior motives, we will continue to say so.
This restriction is in line with corporate-level dictates in other media companies, some of which have eliminated endorsements entirely. It’s well within the long-standing tradition of American editorial pages, which leaves the final say on endorsements to each paper’s publisher.
Since Alden Global Capital took over Tribune Publishing in May 2021, its leaders have made it clear that they support robust, local editorial pages. This is the first time they have asserted their traditional role, but this discussion of which races to endorse in occurs at newspapers every day in the run-up to an election. Company leaders acted out of concern that contests for president, U.S. Senate and governor are becoming more national in character, and that our editorial advocacy is strongest locally.
Corporate leaders also worry that common ground is being lost to culture wars. We’ve all seen society become more polarized. Look at what’s happened since Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial election. Could we have imagined that we would be so deeply divided over how to handle the pandemic that we would see shrieking parents dragged out of school board meetings? Or that partisan voices on both sides of the divide would take turns decrying law enforcement and medical professionals as villains or heroes?
But we aren’t going to cede that common ground on the eve of a high profile, surprisingly competitive Senate race and a contest for governor widely seen as a prelude to the 2024 presidential election (with another likely player in his Palm Beach mansion).
Florida’s tradition of spirited journalistic debate is often shaped by editorials, but also informed by readers’ letters to the editor and columns by us, readers and public officials. They are the heartbeat of our opinion pages, and in the great Florida tradition, our readers are not shy about telling us when they think we’ve gotten it wrong.
We’ll continue our work of endorsing many candidates for local, regional and state office, judgeships, Congress, ballot questions and constitutional amendments. We’ll celebrate fact and expose fiction. And to quote Tom Petty, we won’t back down. Nor are we expected to.
Our corporate leadership has made that crystal clear. We know our readers will have plenty to say about this decision. You’ll find our letter guidelines at the bottom of this editorial.
At the end of the day, we suspect even our toughest critics will agree: We all love Florida at the top of our lungs, con mucho gusto. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t.
The Washington Post announced that it will not endorse a candidate for president in the 2024 election. The Post is one of the most liberal newspapers in the nation. It was purchased in 2018 by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Bezos hired Will Lewis from the Rupert Murdoch news empire to lead the paper.
In a choice between the Democratic candidate, who respects the rule of law, and the former President, who incited an insurrection, The Washington Post will not render an endorsement.
This is the will of the billionaire who owns the paper. I extend my deepest sympathies to the members of the editorial board for the loss of their voice and editorial independence.
CNN wrote:
New York—
For the first time in decades, The Washington Post will not endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election, the newspaper’s publisher announced Friday.
“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Will Lewis said in a published statement. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The Post has endorsed a presidential candidate in every election since the 1980s. In his statement, Lewis referred to the Editorial Board’s past decisions to not endorse a candidate, noting that it is a right “we are going back to.”
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis continued. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
Ahead of the announcement, The Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, told staffers that Lewis would be publishing a public note with the decision.
“The news is significant – and I know there will be strong reactions across the department,” Shipley wrote in a memo obtained by CNN.
The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Newspaper owners typically play a role in their publication’s endorsements and sign off on the editorials which reflect their views.
Marty Baron, a former executive editor of The Post, sharply criticized the decision Friday.
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner Bezos (and others),” Baron wrote in a social media post. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
The decision comes just days after The Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, leading to resignations from three editorial board members.
Two additional members of the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times resigned to protest the newspaper owner’s decision not to endorse either candidate.
It’s shameful that two major newspapers have been prevented from expressing the views of their editorial boards by the fist of their billionaire owners.
I sadly add the names of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times –Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos– to the blog’s Wall of Shame. They won’t know or care. But I do. It’s my small gesture of support for sanity and editorial independence .
In a news story about the WaPo’s decision not to endorse, this was reported:
An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.
Margaret Sullivan was the ombudsman for The New York Times. She now writes a blog called American Crisis.
With less than two weeks until the most consequential presidential election of the modern era, this is my evaluation of how the media has done — along with an 11th hour plea.
There are, after all, still a lot of undecided or at least uncommitted voters, hard as that may be to believe. And the media, while it won’t determine the outcome, can make a difference.
I’ll grant, up front, that the national news media — Big Journalism — has done some good work. The reporting on Project 2025, while not pervasive enough, has been excellent, and some of the best of that has been in the New York Times. Daniel Dale at CNN has done great, helpful fact-checking. ABC News did a good job with the single presidential debate. The Guardian has been publishing a fine series and a newsletter called The Stakes. (I contributed a piece about what would happen to press rights.) The New York Times just launched a link to its extensive coverage of what a Trump presidency would mean, tagged “What’s At Stake.”
Some columnists have made sense of the nightmare for us, like Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, who consistently nails what’s happening, providing reporting and big-picture context; and Jill Lawrence at the Los Angeles Times, whose most recent column was terrifyingly headlined: “Get Ready for President Vance.” And I see improvement from the Washington Post, as Parker Molloy noted in a New Republic piece about Trump’s town-hall dance party titled “The Washington Post Covered that Bizarro Trump Rally the Right Way.”
But fundamentally, the media coverage writ large has fallen far short of what was needed to get the true stakes across to an entire nation of voters. And that’s been true not just recently, but for more than nine years, since Trump declared his candidacy in 2015. Too often, the coverage of Trump has been an embarrassing failure — sanewashing his lunacy, falsely equating him to his traditional rivals, or treating him as some sort of amusing sideshow.
The economist Dean Baker, posting on X the other day, expressed it perfectly: “It says everything you need to know about the U.S. media that Trump’s clown show at the McDonald’s gets more attention than his former defense secretary and chair of the Joint Chief of Staff warning that Trump is a dangerous fascist with no respect for democracy.”
Exactly. And that is true of the mainstream, supposedly independent media! Now add in Fox News, the beating heart of the right-wing propaganda monster.
Donald Trump talks to reporters after handing out food at a McDonald’s in a campaign stunt in Pennsylvania on Oct. 20 / Getty Images
New research from Media Matters notes that “Fox News gave nearly 500 times more coverage to McDonald’s stunt than Trump’s threats to Social Security.” (That’s two hours and four minutes for the stunt; 15 seconds for a report from a nonpartisan group showing that Trump’s policies would make the Social Security Trust Fund insolvent years before expected; Kamala Harris’s policy would not change the expected trajectory.) Bret Baier’s showily combative interview with Kamala Harris was one more example.
There are some — including prominent commentators — who are in dreamland, handing out helpings of false equivalency like Milky Way bars on Halloween. Here was the top piece in the New York Times opinion newsletter from Tuesday: “Keep calm and look at the polling averages.” The point of this piece from Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Andersen was that you can reduce your stress by realizing that polls shift and change all the time. “The ups and downs that can come from seeing your preferred candidate pingpong back and forth, from day to day, became less stressful when placed into context.”
Believe me, it’s not the shifting polls that are stressing me out; it’s the knowledge that if Trump is elected, American democracy may well be over. Her take reminded me of the infamous column from Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post on Nov. 4, 2016: “Calm down. We’ll be fine no matter who wins.”
Readers, we weren’t.
And we won’t be, if Trump wins. Those are the stakes.
So over the next two weeks — though it’s arguably too late — every media outlet should be trying to correct its long-term errors. It should be trying to get across to those mysterious individuals known as undecided voters that this really matters, and why. That Trump is a danger, declining by the day, and that the prospect of a radical, but much younger, President Vance is very real.
I’ll be keeping track here, and I deeply appreciate your joining me. Please let me know — in the comments or on social media — what you’re seeing in the media that strikes you as admirable or objectionable.
Getting it right in the last two weeks is probably too little, too late. But, in a very tight election, any improvement just might be enough to matter
Diane Ravitch's blog 