Veteran newsman Dan Rather described his reaction to the fiasco in the Oval Office, when Trump and Vance berated our ally, Volodymyr Zelensky, while praising Vladimir Putin.
You must watch the video of the encounter, which is linked at the end. I cringed as I watched. Trump and Vance bullied Zelensky. They pounded him with attacks and questions but never let him respond.
When you watch it, you see that they came into the meeting intending to humiliate Zelensky.
Trump even talked about how Putin had suffered alongside him because of the allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. A bipartisan Senate committee, led by Republicans, concluded that Putin did interfere in that election, specifically to help Trump.
Here is Dan Rather:
We try not to react to every White House event involving the new president, as we like to take a little time to digest what has happened and provide thoughtful analysis. But there’s not much to analyze about the president’s shocking behavior on Friday.
It was a new low for American diplomacy in my lifetime. There are few words that are family-friendly enough to describe what happened. Embarrassing. Horrifying. Mortifying.
People who witnessed or have watched Trump and JD Vance’s behavior toward a visiting head of state have said it made them everything from appalled to nauseous.
Here’s what happened: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was scheduled to meet with Trump and Vance at the White House before a joint news conference and then a signing ceremony for a minerals-for-money deal. It never got past a one-sided shouting match in the Oval Office.
In what looked like a rehearsed and choreographed tag-team effort, Trump berated and lectured Zelenskyy while Vance egged him on. In front of cameras, Trump harangued Zelenskyy for supposedly not being grateful for U.S. aid and not acceding to American demands to end the war.
According to CNN’s fact checkers, Zelenskyy has thanked presidents Biden and Trump, and the American people, 33 times since the war began three years ago.
The whole thing today appeared to be a setup, a trap sprung on a wounded ally. Whatever it was, it will remain, through history, a stain on America’s reputation.
This reporter has covered hundreds of photo opportunities in the Oval Office over many administrations. Such are almost always dignified occasions. Today this tradition was sullied for the benefit of the MAGA faithful and the Kremlin.
Peter Baker of The New York Times described the meeting in shocked terms. “I have covered the White House since 1996. There has never been an Oval Office meeting in front of cameras like this one in all that time. Never has an American president lectured the leader of an ally in public like this, much less a leader that is fighting off invaders.”
If the point was for Trump’s friends in Russia to see his performance, message received. Cheers erupted in Moscow. A former Russian president praised Trump for his treatment of Zelenskyy.
At one point, Trump openly threatened the Ukrainian president. “You’re either going to make a deal or you’re out,” Trump yelled. A short time later, Zelenskyy left the White House.
The absurdity of the moment concluded with Trump, a former reality TV actor, saying, “This is going to make great television.”
To think the world’s security rests on this man’s judgment.
Even if you’ve seen the exchange or pieces of it, you may want to watch it again. And ponder anew what kind of country we are becoming.
Paul Cobaugh spent his career in the military, where he worked in intelligence. In his blog “Truth against Threats,” he expressed his horror and shame about what Trump and Vance did today to betray our country. For another view, consider Senator Lindsey Graham’s craven response; he called on Zelensky to resign, in a tweet. Loyalty above country; loyalty above democracy.
He wrote:
I’m still catching my breath after a long road trip, but wanted to share my most succinct thoughts about the White House, Trump fiasco today, with President Zelenskyy, of Ukraine.
This is somber and I would ask, that you please consider the heartfelt nature of the following words. No cartoons, no graphics. This is simply, a plea, from the innermost part of my heart.
My friends and family,
My heart could hardly be heavier, from a professional perspective. What I am about to say, has absolutely nothing to do with anyone’s political party affiliation. It is simply a matter of being an American, loyal to my nation, its founding principles and our esteemed history, as a bastion of democracy and morality. Yes, it is true that we have erred, often in our history, but always as MLK said, and I paraphrase, “moved the arc of history, towards justice.”
The fiasco today in the White House, represented a treasonous sellout of American values and our own national security. Please, hear what I am saying. The vicious and utterly dishonest attack on President Zelenskiy, by President Trump and VP Vance, with support from others, was the single most disgraceful act I have witnessed in my lifetime. That says something since I have lived through President Nixon’s resignation and President Clinton’s impeachment.
President Zelenskiy of Ukraine has been doggedly leading his nation in their desperate defense, against a genocidal Putin for the last three years. Ukraine’s fight has always been our fight. They have been ours and NATO’s first line of defense against the world’s most dangerous adversary, Vladimir Putin. Putin, interfered in our 2016, 2020 and 2024 election, in cooperation with the Trump campaign. The evidence, in and outside of classified channels, is overwhelming.
Putin’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine has been an exercise, in cultural and actual genocide, against the Ukrainian people. Stalin via the Holodomor or starvation of Ukrainians in the 1930s, was the first attempt at erasing Ukrainian culture from history. Putin, in his pathetic attempt to regain the territory of the former Soviet state, is doing the same. Putin is under sanctions by the International Criminal Court for genocide. The Ukrainian people, have suffered what no American could possibly understand and yet, they fight for not only their freedom, but their very lives and culture.
Our current president and his entire administration supports Putin. There is no argument to support the opposite and I would respectfully challenge anyone, to argue these points.
My friends and family, the massacre of men, women and children, along with the attempt to erase the very culture of Ukraine, is everything that our nation has long fought against, honorably. It is as simple as, this is what it means to be an American citizen. Democracy is our creed and the lifeblood of our nation. We cannot allow our nation to be submissive to the hopes and desires of genocidal despots, like Vladimir Putin. Still, POTUS Trump, has long admired and has attempted to emulate him. I cannot in any sense, stay quiet, without selling out my own morality.
Americans defend freedom. That is who we are. We do not praise, endorse or support tyranny. Maybe President Trump does and his entire cabinet and party, but those of us who have demonstrated our values on the battlefield, can never allow ourselves to condone and assist such tyranny. The events today in the White House, did in fact endorse genocide, tyranny and every value abhorrent, to our nation’s values and history.
President Trump, his sycophantic party and his entire cabinet, should feel absolutely nothing but shame this evening. Any moral American, would resign immediately. No one in this administration will do so.
Many will argue that what occurred was fine with them, from a party perspective. My friends, our values transcend political parties. Americans do not do, what our president and VP did today, with the full support of the cabinet and party.
I never endorse a party as that I do not believe in them. I will though, strongly and with every fiber of my moral spine, condemn this administration as un-American and a threat to US and global security. I ask all true patriots, to make your feelings clear to your elected congressmen and senators, that you will not stand for treason.
I have employed the most reasonable language that I am capable of, to bring you this message. I emplore everyone, to revisit our constitution and demand that your representatives and senators, do so as well. I and others in my profession that have worked at the highest levels, predicted today, as far back as 2015. No one would listen then and in the interim. Please, consider my words now, before there is nothing left of what it means to be an American.
David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart converse every Friday night on the PBS Newshour about the big story of the week. In these exchanges, Brooks is the conservative, Capehart is the liberal. Tonight’s story, of course, was the Trump-Vance attack on Zelensky and the apparent preference of these two American leaders for Putin over our allies.
Amna Nawaz:From visits with heads of states to further restrictions on the press corps, we now turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That is New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for The Washington Post.Great to see you both.
Jonathan Capehart:Hey, Amna.
Amna Nawaz:So you were both watching, of course, everything at the White House today in the meeting between Presidents Trump and Zelenskyy. We have talked about it a lot today, but I do want to play for you a little bit of the interview we know President Zelenskyy gave soon after that meeting.He sat down with FOX News and Bret Baier, and Baier asked him if Zelenskyy thought that the public spat there served Ukraine in any way. Here’s what Zelenskyy said.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian President:I mean, this is not good for both sides anyway. And I will — I will — very open, but I can’t change our Ukrainian attitude to Russian. And I don’t want — they are killers, for us.This is very, very clear that Americans are the best of our friends. Europeans are the best of our friends. And Putin, with Russian, they are enemies. And it doesn’t mean that we don’t want peace. We just want to recognize the reality.
Amna Nawaz:Jonathan, what did you think when you were watching this unfold in the White House and what do you make of the way Zelenskyy is talking about it now?
Jonathan Capehart:I thought the low point for America on the world stage was the Trump-Putin press conference in Helsinki in 2017, when the president of the United States sided with the president of Russia against his own national intelligence apparatus.What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia.And, look, I give President Zelenskyy major points for standing up for himself, for standing up for his nation and standing up for his people. He is in there fighting for America’s backing, which, I’m sorry, it should not even be in doubt, given the stakes that are involved and who he is trying to protect his people from.
Amna Nawaz:David, from that Helsinki meeting in 2018 to this meeting today, what do you make of it?
David Brooks:I will stick with today.(Laughter)
David Brooks:I have enough to say about today.I was nauseated, just nauseated. All my life, I have had a certain idea of about America, that we’re a flawed country, but we’re fundamentally a force for good in the world, that we defeated Soviet Union, we defeated fascism, we did the Marshall Plan, we did PEPFAR to help people live in Africa. And we make mistakes, Iraq, Vietnam, but they’re usually mistakes out of stupidity, naivete and arrogance.They’re not because we’re ill-intentioned. What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen.Donald Trump believes in one thing. He believes that might makes right. And, in that, he agrees with Vladimir Putin that they are birds of a feather. And he and Vladimir Putin together are trying to create a world that’s safe for gangsters, where ruthless people can thrive. And we saw the product of that effort today in the Oval Office.And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.
Amna Nawaz:You heard Congressman Lawler, who would not criticize the president necessarily, but is a Ukraine supporter, say, we’re further away from a deal, they have to get back to a deal, the war has to end.You also heard Nick Schifrin report earlier, his European sources are saying there’s a fundamental transatlantic break now. Is this the realignment, Jonathan? Has this happened? The U.S. is now closer to Russia than to its European allies?
Jonathan Capehart:Undisputed. Yes. Yes.And the fact that the Europeans are already looking at it as a break, I think they have to do that. They can’t depend on the United States now. After what happened to President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, what happens to the Baltic states, what happens to Estonia if Russia rolls over the border? What happens to Poland if Russia rolls over the border?What happens if any of the NATO countries are attacked by Russia after what we just saw? They cannot depend on the United States anymore, after more than seven decades. I’m sure the Europeans are probably even more in shock than we are at this table.And I’m glad you used the word gangster, because that was the thing. When the — when President Trump got into it with President Zelenskyy, you don’t have any cards. Without us, you have no deal.It — that was gangster rule there. And between him and the vice president, it also felt like watching a wrestling match, where Vance jumps in the ring and then taps in the president, and then they gang up on a man who is literally fighting for the survival of his country.
You may recall that the Wall Street Journal published an article about Marlo Elez, the 25-year-old whiz kid who made racist tweets, deleted them, then resigned after they went public. Elez is or was the senior member of the DOGE team that has been scooping up government records.
Musk conducted a poll on Twitter, asking whether the mildest member of his DOGE team should be rehired.
On Friday morning, Musk posted a poll to X, asking his followers if DOGE should rehire the “staffer who made inappropriate statements via a now deleted pseudonym.” Within hours, it had amassed more than 200,000 votes, almost 80% in favor of bringing Elez back.
Musk is likely to rehire Marko.
Some of Marlo’s tweets were extremely prejudicial towards Indians, because they get great jobs in Silicon Valley.
I wonder what JD Vance’s wife thinks of Elez. She is of Indian heritage. She is a graduate of Yale Law School, like Vance. I wonder if she likes the racist crowd he runs with.
In the post at 9 a.m today, Joyce Vance included a photo of a T-shirt of Trump and Vance, billed as “the Outlaw and the Hillbilly.” Now, that’s clever marketing!
An Outlaw is often an admirable figure in westerns. He’s a folk hero. He’s the guy who goes up against the Establishment. He’s the Sundance Kid, he’s Robin Hood, he’s the handsome guy who gets the girl, he’s a lot of characters who live on the fringes of society and stand up for the little guy.
This is not Donald Trump. He is reverse Robin Hood. He steals from the poor and fattens the bank accounts of the rich. He doesn’t defend the helpless damsel, he sexually asssults her, then laughs about it and defames her. He does not stand outside society on its fringes, he owns the biggest, gaudiest mansion and installs solid gold toilet seats. Far from being handsome and buff, he is an obese old man with thinning hair and sagging jowls. He is a coward who dodged the draft five times yet pretends to be a tough guy.
As for J.D. Vance, he was once a hillbilly but that was long, long ago. Now he plays a hillbilly. He is a graduate of Yale Law School who made millions of dollars in the financial sector, where his patron was Peter Thiel, the woman-hating billionaire.
Not an Outlaw! Just a womanizing convicted felon who is a superb liar, braggart, and bully.
Not a Hillbilly! Just another far-cat who attached himself to super-rich patrons.
Trump passed one piece of legislation in his first term: a big tax cut for his billionaire buddies, corporations, and himself.
We know what his priorities are. Ego. Money. Power. Control.
He’s already forgotten about the people who voted for him. They can’t do anything for him any more. He won’t lower the price of food or gasoline or home insurance. He might take away their Social Security or Medicaid. He might cut programs they rely on.
He will take care of the people rich enough to belong to Mar-a-Lago.
We have never seen anything like it: A candidate for President who tells interviewers that he won’t participate unless they agree not to fact check his assertions.
The Post has a regular fact-checker, Glen Kessler, who reports on claims by politicians. He says that Trump made 30,573 false or misleading statements during his four year term in office. That’s an average of 21 lies a day.
What do you say to political candidates who think it is unfair to correct them if they lie?
Donald Trump and his campaign have waged an aggressive campaign against fact-checking in recent months, pushing TV networks, journalism organizations and others to abandon the practice if they hope to interact with Trump.
Trump nearly backed out of an August interview with a group of Black journalists after learning they planned to fact-check his claims. The following month, he and his allies repeatedly complained about the fact-checking that occurred during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, berating journalists and news executives in the middle of the televised debate.
And this month, Trump declined to sit down for an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” because he objected to the show’s practice of fact-checking, according to the show.
Campaign advisers also expressly asked CBS News to forgo fact checking in its vice-presidential debate with Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance — who then complained on air when a moderator corrected him.
The moves are the latest example of Trump’s long-held resistance to being called to account for his falsehoods, which have formed the bedrock of his political message for years. Just in recent weeks, for example, Trump has seized on fabricated tales of migrants eating pets and Venezuelan gangs overtaking cities in pushing his anti-immigration message as he seeks a second term in office…
In August, Trump had agreed to appear at a National Association of Black Journalists gathering, where three of the group’s members would interview him. But upon realizing that he would be fact-checked in real time, Trump’s team said he would not be taking the stage
NABJ president Ken Lemon described a tense scene backstage as Trump’s team objected to any fact-checking of the interview, with the discussions lasting more than an hour. “If you guys are going to fact check, he’s not going to take the stage,” Lemon said a Trump aide told him. “They were just totally insistent that he was not going to take the stage if we fact-checked.”
Lemon said he spoke with three Trump aides — who at one point called to confer with someone not at the event — about their objections to fact-checking as the audience waited.
At one point, Lemon said he became convinced Trump was ultimately going to back out of the interview over his fact-checking concerns, so Lemon prepared remarks to go out and explain the cancellation to the crowd. But in the end, Trump took part in the interview, making headlines by falsely suggesting that Vice President Kamala Harris had only recently decided to identify as Black.
“It was a very revealing moment where we got to hear him answer questions, and we were shocked at what some of the answers were,” Lemon said. Trump officials blamed the delay in taking the stage on technical audio issues.
“Here’s the truth: President Trump initially couldn’t take the stage because there were audio issues. Once the audio issues were resolved, President Trump took the stage and participated in the discussion, and the fact-checks still occurred,” Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Harris, too, has taken a cautious approach to interviews, largely eschewing rigorous policy questioners for lower-stakes venues and having her advisers, at times, try to prescreen questions. Her blitz this week of unscripted media settings hewed to friendly questioners, including Howard Stern of Sirius XM, CBS’s “Late Night with Stephen Colbert” and the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast. During Harris’s NABJ forum, the interviewers pressed less contentiously than they did Trump, and during the ABC presidential debate with Trump, the moderators did not fact check her in the same manner.
One Trump adviser, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the campaign’s thinking, argued that Trump is treated more harshly than others. “Every candidate is opposed to fact checking on some degree, but if you’re Trump, you know they are always going to go after you harder,” the adviser said.
But Harris does not misstate the truth regularly, as Trump does, and she has also not protested being fact-checked. And unlike Trump, she sat down for a wide-ranging interview with “60 Minutes” that aired last week.
As part of Harris’s interview, the show took the extraordinary step of explaining why it was not airing a similar segment with Trump, who had initially agreed to an interview before changing his mind.
“A week ago, Trump backed out,” CBS correspondent Scott Pelley explained. “The campaign offered shifting explanations. First, it complained that we would fact-check the interview. We fact-check every story. Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020.”
Pelley went on to explain that the 2020 incident for which Trump requested an apology had never occurred….
During the debate between Trump and Biden, CNN publicly stated in advance that the moderators would not fact-check, instead leaving that to the candidates.
Before the second debate, Jason Miller, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said the team was told by an ABC journalist that similar to the CNN debate, there would be no fact checks from the moderators. However, a copy of the ABC News debate rules, obtained by The Post, did not put any limitations on fact checking.
Nonetheless, Trump and his allies were furious with ABC for pointedly fact-checking Trump live during his debate with Harris. At one point, after Trump falsely claimed that some Democrats support executing babies after birth, moderator Linsey Davis noted, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
At another point — after Trump repeated the false and baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs — moderator David Muir interjected to say that ABC News had reached out to the city manager, who “told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
Trump’s advisers — including Chris LaCivita and Miller — erupted at ABC executives and journalists in the middle of the debate, according to the people familiar with the situation. They implored the network to stop fact-checking for the rest of the event and said it had breached its promise, and a call was even lodged to the president of ABC News by Susie Wiles, the campaign’s top aide. At least one Trump adviser demanded to talk to the moderators during the debate.
The network declined to comment.
“Everyone who watched the ABC debate agreed that it was a 3-on-1 fight with 2 moderators who wrongly ‘fact-checked’ President Trump multiple times, but did not fact check Kamala Harris ONCE, even though she spewed multiple lies on the debate stage,” Leavitt said in her statement. “The ABC debate was widely viewed as one of the worst moderated debates in history, yet President Trump still won.”
Harris spokesman Kevin Munoz responded: “You have to lie to be fact-checked, and only one person on that stage was telling lie after lie.”
No matter what the problem, the cause is always IMMIGRANTS, in the minds of Trump and Vance. The answer to the problem, to them, is always the same: Round up and expel the immigrants!
Greg Olear wonders about their fixation and concludes that it’s fascistic. Are housing prices going up because of immigrants? How many do they want to deport? 25 million? 13 million? 11 million? What about Trump’s idea of building new cities on empty federal lands? Where are those federal lands?
“O, what a happy, contented land this would be if only we could expel the immigrants!” They say. once they are gone, middle-class Americans could occupy the immigrants’ palatial estates. Housing crisis solved.
At the VP debate…, Margaret Brennan addressed “the top contributor to inflation, the high cost of housing and rent,” asking the candidates, Tim Walz and JD Vance, what they’d do about the “shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States… [that] contributes to the high housing crisis.”
It’s not all bad news. The homeownership rate is not, as I feared watching the debate, in freefall. On the contrary, it’s in the same two-thirds-give-or-take range it’s occupied for my entire lifetime, as this Federal Reserve chart shows:
The decennial census of 1890 was the first to ask basic housing questions and, in particular, whether one owned or rented. The census data since 1890 show three distinct eras of homeownership in America.
In the 1890-1940 period, the homeownership rate fluctuated in the 43- to 48-percent range. From 1890 to 1920, the homeownership rate fell as immigration and urbanization offset the rise in income. Income growth increased the homeownership rate during the 1920s, but the Depression more than wiped out this gain so that the rate had fallen to a low of 43.6 percent by 1940.
During the 1940-1960 period, the homeownership rate rose by over 18 percentage points, from 43.6 to 61.9 percent. This remarkable transformation was facilitated by higher incomes, a large percentage of households being in prime homebuying age groups, the FHA-led revolution in mortgage financing, the GI bill of rights, improved interurban transportation, and development of large-scale housing subdivisions with affordable houses.
For the middle class, homeownership is a critical metric. We don’t want too many Americans living in rentals owned by private equity firms, and at the mercy of rapacious Wall Street speculators.
But that’s only part of the picture. There is a shortage of housing—and the gap is a lot more than the number Brennan suggested. According to a study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the U.S. real estate market is plagued by
a shortage of 7.3 million rental homes affordable and available to renters with extremely low incomes—that is, incomes at or below either the federal poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income, whichever is greater. Only 34 affordable and available rental homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households. Extremely low-income renters face a shortage in every state and major metropolitan area. Among states, the supply of affordable and available rental homes ranges from 14 affordable and available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households in Nevada to 57 in South Dakota. In 12 of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the country, the absolute shortage of affordable and available homes for extremely low-income renters exceeds 100,000 units.
Households throughout the country, particularly those with the lowest incomes, are struggling with the high cost of housing because of decades of underbuilding, high construction costs, and the resulting shortage of homes for sale and for rent, all combined with inadequately funded housing assistance.
So, yes, this is a big problem.
In the debate, Tim Walz proposed rolling out a down-payment assistance plan similar in concept to the GI Bill that helped increase the homeownership rate after the Second World War, as well as incentivizing new construction—boilerplate New Deal-style solutions that will almost certainly work, if Congress could be swayed to vote for them.
But it was JD Vance’s answer to Brennan’s question that gave me pause. The Ohio Senator and eyeliner enthusiast expounded on Donald Trump’s concepts of a plan to tackle the national housing crisis. There were two proposals, if we can call them that, the Republican VP nominee advanced, both of them bone-chilling.
Let’s look at them more closely:
1. Mass deportation of tens of millions of “illegal aliens” to create more housing inventory
“We don’t want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices,” Vance said. “But we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country, which does drive up costs, Tim. Twenty-five million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country. It’s why we have massive increases in home prices that have happened right alongside massive increases in illegal alien, alien populations under Kamala Harris’s leadership.”
First—and I only say this because a lot of people who watched the debate are probably unaware of how the federal government works: as Vice President, Kamala Harris has zero authority to do fuck-all. She can break a tie in the Senate, and she can succeed the President Biden if he croaks. That is the comprehensive and unabridged list of her constitutional powers. Can she suggest? Sure. Can she propose? Absolutely. But POTUS is under no obligation to listen to her at all, let alone act on what she says. One can mount an argument that Biden is responsible for the housing crisis, but the idea that Harris is to blame is objectively untrue. So, yeah, Vance lied.
Second: it is troubling to me that the alleged number of “illegal aliens” in the United States seems to rise every time Trump opens his mouth. It was 15 million, then 18 million, then 22. Now it’s 25 million, Vance says. Bear in mind that the total U.S. population is something like 333,000,000. Thus, Couchfucker claims that 7.5 percent of the residents of this country—about one in 13—is here illegally, which is preposterous. The actual number, according to Pew Research, is closer to 11 million:
Are Trump/Vance and their surrogates exaggerating the undocumented population to play up the MAGA fear of a border invasion? Or—and this is the scary part—is that how many U.S. residents they intend to round up and deport? Because, like, 25 million is more people than just those here illegally. A lot more. Over twice as many.
But you gotta give the MAGA braintrust credit. Displacing one thirteenth of the entire U.S. population would indeed make available a lot of housing. The Trump/Vance plan would absolutely work. We know it would work, because that’s literally what the Nazis did in Poland in 1939.
In her incredible and horrifying book The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War, Lynn H. Nicholas explains Hitler’s attitude toward the Poles:
In an extraordinary speech to his highest commanders, delivered on August 22 [1939] just after he had agreed to sign the Russian treaty, Hitler had urged his forces to “act brutally…be harsh and remorseless,” and had encouraged them to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish descent or language” in the coming “invasion and extermination of Poland.”
For Poland was to become Germany’s creature totally. Its culture and peoples were to be eliminated and replaced by Hitler’s “New Order.” The Nazis were only too eager to put their racial theories into actual practice in a place where resistance could be countered with total brutality. They believed without any qualms that Slavs, Christian or otherwise, were so inferior they could not be considered human. They, along with the Jews, were the “degenerate art” of the human race.
The Nazis rounded up anyone they considered undesirable and sent them to the concentration camps, and then they took their suddenly vacant homes—and everything in those homes—for themselves. Housing crisis solved!
I trust that by this point, we’ve all heard enough of Trump’s dehumanizing invective about immigrants—a hateful and fascistic theme of his campaigning since he came down the escalator in 2015—to make pointing out its similarly to stuff Hitler said about the Jews unnecessary. In spirit, Donald is a Nazi.
After the debate, CBS showed a graphic comparing the two housing proposals. Walz: “$25,000 Down Payment Assistance; Tax Incentives for Builders.” Vance: “Changing Regulations & Making Federal Land Available; Mass Deportation to Ease Demand.”
This led the attorney who goes by NYC Southpaw to remark on BlueSky: “This is one that I genuinely think will be printed in history books one day to show how insane American media culture has become. CBS News presenting ethnic cleansing as a housing policy to be compared with home construction tax incentives.”
And if Donald’s housing policy being eerily reminiscent of the Third Reich’s weren’t bad enough, when we consider that Hitler modeled the Nazi conquest of Poland on what the United States did to the Native Americans in the 19th century, that makes the second part of the MAGA plan seem even more ominous:
2. Building new cities on federal land.
“Well,” Vance said, “what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country. We have a lot of land that could be used. We have a lot of Americans that need homes. We should be kicking out illegal immigrants who are competing for those homes, and we should be building more homes for the American citizens who deserve to be here.”
A former celebrity real estate developer and TV personality, Trump has a long history of outlining audacious new initiatives that are heavy on imagery and light on details. The latest offerings come with a few explanations for how they will be executed.
Trump says he would host a contest for the public to design and then build “Freedom Cities” on a small portion of federal land to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”
(A contest? Everything is a reality show with this ass-clown.)
calls for the creation of new tech-controlled sovereign cities that would essentially act as miniature countries. These independent territories can be created in one of two ways.
The first is called Voice. This route entails using the political system to take over existing city governments through elections. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is currently trying the “voice” method in San Francisco, where he is spearheading a tech-funded campaign to capture control of City Hall. (How do I know this is a Network State project? Because Tan has described his project as such.)
The second method is called Exit. The “exit” method involves finding a bare piece of land that can be built up into a new tech city, ideally with tax breaks or other exemptions from “host governments.”
Próspera, on the island of Roatan in Honduras, is an example of this: a tech-run Special Economic Zone where certain rules don’t apply. Próspera has become a mecca for unregulated gene therapy experiments.
And then there’s our local version: California Forever. This proposed tech city in Solano County was supposed to go to voters for approval on November’s ballot, but it has been delayed due to massive community opposition. California Forever denies being a Network State project, but [libertarian tech bro Marc] Andreessen is one of its investors.
In addition, Balaji Srinivasan—the main evangelist of the Network State idea—has strongly suggested that California Forever is a Network State project. (Note: Srinivasan has clearly derived his ideas from J.D. Vance associate Curtis Yarvin, who calls these tech-governed dictatorships “patchworks” or “realms” rather than network states.)
This is an important detail because Andreessen, Srinivasan and Thiel are working closely together to make the Network State a reality.
Peter Thiel, of course, is the very same Sauron-like billionaire who funded JD Vance’s Senate campaign, and before that, his venture capital enterprise. We can safely assume that Vance is nothing more than his whoremaster’s mouthpiece.
To me, this “freedom city” proposal looks less like a solution to the dearth of low-income housing and more like the 21st century version of a medieval stronghold, where well-to-do residents can simply wall off the starving, unhoused hoi polloi: out of sight, out of mind.
Furthermore, the creation of new “network states” run by MAGA puppets would inevitably lead to the creation of new actual states—further gerrymandering the Senate to establish a more permanent minoritarian rule.
Then there’s this vague “federal land” suggestion. Here is a map of all extant federal land:
Most is in Alaska, or in the Western states. The sections in brown are managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Is “federal land” a euphemism for “American Indian reservations?” Donald Trump, remember, hung in the Oval Office a portrait of Andrew Jackson—maniacal conqueror of Native lands, driving force behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830, author of the Trail of Tears, and arguably the most anti-Native American president in U.S. history. Is confiscating more Native American territory how Donald Sr. plans to Make America Great Again?
These MAGA proposals are not just bad policy. They are dangerous, they are Hitlerian, and if implemented, they are sure to bring woe upon tens of millions of human beings.
“That’s never going to happen,” the non-MAGA Trump voters insist. To which I reply: That’s what the Germans said in the 1930s. The only difference is that the Germans in the 1930s didn’t have the Germans in the 1930s as a precedent to learn from.
There’s been a lot of grumbling in the media about Kamala not sitting for interviews, so these past few days she has sat for interviews. She was on “The View.” She sat for a long interview with Howard Stern. She did a podcast with Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy,” a very popular show whose audience is women., especially young women. And she did the obligatory interview with “60 Minutes.” So did Tim Walz. I thought she was terrific. Watch and seeehat you think.
Trump was supposed to be interviewed but he canceled at the last minute. He said the show owed him an apology for something Lesley Stahl said four years ago. He claimed she said that Hunter Biden’s laptop came from Russia; CBS denied it. He complained that CBS would fact check him; that was unacceptable. CBS said it always fact checks.
Let’s be clear about one thing: JD Vance lied about every important issue during his debate with Tim Walz. He lied about Obamacare (Trump did not save it, he repeatedly tried to kill it). He lied about Trump’s refusal to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. He lied about January 6. And he lied about abortion, expressing his sorrow that Amber Thurman died of a botched abortion in Georgia because the state ban made it impossible for her to get the care she needed. I tweeted this yesterday: “JD Vance is sorry that Amber Thurman died but happy that Roe v. Wade was overturned, which led to Georgia’s ban on abortion care, which caused Amber’s death.” So much for contrition.
During the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, former President Trump tried to bail his running mate out of an abortion question with a series of half-truths and lies. “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,” Trump posted to social media, “BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!).”
This is a nonsensical sentence for many reasons. Among them: No one is saying that Congress would pass a new federal ban and hand it Trump to sign or veto. What Trump might do—what his allies want him to do—is enact a ban by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which can’t be vetoed since it’s already on the books. Trump’s misdirection distracts from his consistent anti-abortion record while in office, what the Republican Party platform states, and the very public plans of his former staffers detailed in Project 2025, which Trump also pretends he has nothing to do with. That is part of the Trump-Vance campaign’s plan on abortion: to do whatever they can not to talk about that plan, or at least to confuse the public about what that plan is.
The questions moderators posed to vice presidential candidates Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance on Tuesday night did little to clear matters up. They were not about abortion or abortion rights; they were questions about whether the candidates were lying about abortion.
The question one moderator asked Walz reinforced anti-abortion misinformation spread by Trump. “After Roe v. Wade was overturned, you signed a bill into law that made Minnesota one of the least restrictive states in the nation when it comes to abortion. Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no? Is that what you support?” asked Norah O’Donnell of CBS News. “I’ll give you two minutes.”
O’Donnell’s own news organization debunked this same “ninth month abortion” point after the last debate. “Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed during Tuesday night’s presidential debate that Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports the ‘execution’ of babies after they are born, repeating earlier false assertions that Democrats support killing babies,” CBS News fact-checker Laura Doan wrote way back on September 11.
Walz answered the question posed to him about Minnesota’s abortion law very, very briefly—“That’s not what the bill says”—before pointing out the simple truth that, via his appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump helped end the federal right to an abortion in this country. “He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v. Wade, 52 years of personal autonomy.”
Trump typically responds to this kind of argument by talking about “the will of the people,” as he did in his all-caps post. But when voters have been asked directly about abortion through ballot measures, they affirm the right to abortion. Trump is going to have his say as one of these voters: As a Florida resident, he will be able to vote on the Florida ballot measure that would repeal Florida’s post-Dobbs six-week abortion ban. He has said he would vote “no.” The Republican Party’s platform advances the idea that a fetus is a legal person with rights under the Fourteenth Amendment—which, should the courts agree, would effectively make abortion a crime in every state. Failing that, Trump’s former head of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, argues that a national abortion ban alreadyexists, in his section of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” This argument that the Comstock Act of 1873 could be enforced today to ban abortion is legally dubious at best, but it enjoys the support of 145 Republican members of Congress and has already been entertained at the Supreme Court by Justices Thomas and Alito.
The first abortion question moderators posed JD Vance was about whether he and Trump would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. “No, Norah, certainly we won’t,” he said, before launching into a lengthy digression about how the Republican Party needs to win back Americans’ trust on “this issue.” But having affirmed the importance of trust, in subsequent questions, he went on to lie spectacularly on two fronts: First, by saying “I never supported a national ban” (in 2022 he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks), and later, by making an utterly bizarre claim about Minnesota abortion law. “The Minnesota law that you signed into law, the statute that you signed into law,” Vance said to Walz, “it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”
“The idea of abortion being performed after birth is sometimes used to stigmatize abortion care received later in pregnancy,” as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists write in a fact sheet responding to such misinformation. Talking points like Trump’s also distort perinatal palliative care, ACOG points out, which is given to reduce the discomfort of sick or disabled newborns whose conditions cause them to die shortly after birth. “At no point in the course of delivering a newborn with life-limiting conditions and subsequently providing palliative care does the obstetrician–gynecologist end the life of the newborn receiving palliative care.”
Walz tried to push back again, to say this isn’t what the law said. Vance adopted a know-it-all debate club stance: “What was I wrong about? Governor, please tell me. What was I wrong about?”
In this way, the debate became more about competing claims of what the other person said than about clarifying the candidates’ actual positions. If this sounds tedious to you and impossible to follow, well, you’re not alone. The meta-debate about abortion is boring and exhausting. But you can see why Trump and Vance would prefer to stay there, in the meta-debate. So long as the campaign sows confusion and rewrites reality around a policy position that is wildly unpopular—restricting abortion access—it helps Trump.
Democrats should take every opportunity to argue for what they want and reassert reality, as Walz tried to do. But there’s still a lot further to go: According to a May 2024 Times/Siena poll, around 17 percent of registered voters in swing states said that Biden is more responsible “for the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to abortion” than Trump. Twelve percent of Democrats in those states said the same thing. What more proof do Democrats need that they have more and better storytelling to do?
Yes. However, I would say that Democrats need more truth-telling to their voters. Leave the storytelling to JD.
