The Obligatory Pre-Election Newsletter

This will be over soon, I promise (Orange Man Bad)

Just some scattered thoughts. I’m extremely nervous and having a great deal of trouble focusing on anything other than doomscrolling and arguing with people on Twitter.

I Voted Yesterday And In A Silly But Viscerally Meaningful Way It Reinforced My Radical Belief That Democracy Is Good, Actually, And Defending It Should Be A High Priority

I was able to vote early at a site right on the route of the New York City marathon. It was basically across the street from a high-school marching band urging on the runners with the theme from Rocky. I was in and out in about 10 minutes, and the polling place was staffed by a bunch of really kind, efficient volunteers — older black ladies, mostly — who guided me through every step. 

The whole thing — the voting, the marathon, the marching band — made me feel very lucky to live in the United States, the most successful and longest-running continuous democracy in the history of humanity. I fear we take it for granted.

While I’ve voted only for Democratic presidents in my life, including yesterday, I’m no hardened partisan. I could imagine hypothetical situations — albeit fairly wild ones — in which I’d fill in the R bubble. If Hasan Piker were running against Mitt Romney or, like, some New England Republican governor or former governor, I’d vote Republican.

In this case, though, my vote is motivated mostly by my fears about what four more years of Trump will do, and my conviction that anyone who has done what he has done — most importantly, his attempts to steal the 2020 election — should never be allowed anywhere near the halls of power again. I’m frustrated that otherwise reasonable people who I personally like disagree with me on this, but I happen to think it isn’t a close call. 

We’ve built something special in this country, and anyone who threatens it — which Trump does, even if I don’t think his reelection will actually lead to the end of democracy — should be roundly condemned and ostracized. It’s disturbing that this hasn’t happened to Trump.

Right To The End, Mainstream Outlets Are Participating In The Bullshit That Has Undoubtedly Turned Some Voters Against Them

I don’t want to overgeneralize, because there are a lot of great journalists and great outlets. But I was shocked by how many outlets handled Trump’s recent, weird rant about Liz Cheney, one of his mortal enemies.

PolitiFact, for example — a really sorry excuse for a fact-checking organization, as I’ve documented on this newsletter — led off its coverage of this controversy by writing that “Former President Donald Trump called former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney a ‘radical war hawk’ and said she should see how it feels to face guns ‘trained on her face.’ ”

Then, a bit further down the piece:

When asked about Liz Cheney campaigning for Harris, Trump said, “Well, I think it hurts Kamala a lot. Actually. Look, (Cheney is) a deranged person. The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq.”

Trump covered many other topics, then said: “I don’t want to go to war. (Liz Cheney) wanted to go, she wanted to stay in Syria. I took (troops) out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if [it] were up to her, we’d, we’d be in 50 different countries. And you know, number one, it’s very dangerous. Number two, a lot of people get killed. And number three, I mean, it’s very, very expensive.”

Later, Trump added “I don’t blame (Dick Cheney) for sticking with his daughter, but his daughter is a very dumb individual, very dumb. She is a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

There is no meaningful sense in which Trump said Cheney should face down rifle fire. Rather, he made, in his usually bombastic, vindictive, aggrieved way, the point that people who call for war sometimes don’t understand its consequences. Setting aside the merits of the policy debate or the accuracy of his claims about Cheney’s actual beliefs, he said Maybe Liz Cheney wouldn’t be pro-war if she were in the firing line. This isn’t remotely a threat against Liz Cheney.

And yet multiple outlets reported it as though it were. As is too often the case, Vox was one of the worst offenders, publishing a summary of the exchange that didn’t contain nearly enough context for readers to understand what was going on without seeking a fuller transcript.

This is such a ridiculous own-goal for mainstream outlets! Especially given that Trump provides such a target-rich environment of legitimately scary rhetoric. He really did say that he wouldn’t mind if, in an attempt to assassinate him, a shooter took out a bunch of journalists in the process, which is the sort of insanely irresponsible, hateful rhetoric that should be disqualifying on its own, but which we now view as totally normal and standard thanks to the sheer immeasurable quantity of bile Trump has produced since his 2015 campaign.

Whatever Happens, I Hope The Democrats’ And Progressives’ Profound Failure To Fight Trump Effectively Leads To Soul-Searching And Some Firings

For about a decade, the Democratic Party has been screeching to the high heavens that Donald J. Trump is completely unfit for office, racist, sexist, fascist, and on and on and on. I don’t even entirely disagree with this, but the party’s failure to convince Americans of this argument has been absolutely profound.

It’s remarkable that we’re facing a coin-flip given how weak and bruised and, in many ways, pathetic a candidate Trump is. As I’ve said previously, if Trump does prevail, I don’t think Harris deserves much of the blame. She’s a mediocre politician but, with the exception of a couple of hiccups, she’s run a perfectly solid B or B+ campaign.

Rather, the blame should lie with one specific group and one general group.

The specific group: The absolute jackalopes who hid Joe Biden’s decline from the public and pressured journalists and pundits into not talking about it. Harris, whatever you think about her, has been put in a ridiculous position, and had no chance to build a normal campaign. All of this could have been avoided if not for a small group of people close to Biden. I hope the full truth comes out, and I hope they’re not welcome in Democratic politics going forward.

The general group: Honestly, a large chunk of the progressive academic-journalistic establishment. Not all of them. I like some of them! But, again, can you imagine a bigger botch job than what’s happened over the last decades? Millions of words spilled on how awful Trump is, much of them directed not at the man himself but at the supposed evil of his followers, only for him to remain a viable candidate.

Maybe there’s nothing that anyone could have done. Maybe Trump is, in his blundering and primal way, a political genius who will always have a third of the country in his thrall. But if that’s true, shouldn’t we — meaning left-of-center America — try something else before giving up? Shouldn’t we recognize that all the idiotic columns and essays and books that made us out to be sanctimonious pricks more interested in judging than in offering solutions didn’t help?

To be clear: I don’t think the causal mechanisms here are as clear as someone gets offended by mainstream media, and then that turns them into a Trump voter. I also don’t think political persuasion is easy, especially given the very real limits on what a 21st-century American president can do, policy-wise. But I do think the smugness and the swarm and the sanctimony have driven some people to Trump, or at least made it easier to justify quietly supporting him.

Whether he wins or loses, this whole. . . thing should be recognized as a giant flashing red light that the progressive ideas world has lost the plot.

***

This was a rambling post. I’ll be more focused after this goddamn election is over. If Trump wins, I don’t think America will descend into dictatorship. Rather, I think there will be a lot more dysfunction, corruption, and scandal than there would have been otherwise, and I think his immigration policies, in particular, will cause more harm than good. I hope journalists and academics and others can do a better, more honest job understanding Trump’s appeal than we have the last eight years, whether or not he wins.

My only real prediction is that our glorious experiment will shuffle along, warts and all. The sun will rise Wednesday morning, or Thursday morning, or Friday morning, or whenever we know the final results. There will still be pizza and NBA basketball and flowers and sunshine and internet bullshit and social-science controversies. Politics isn’t everything.

But still: I really, really hope Donald Trump loses, and I really, really think that if he doesn’t, our country is in for quite a turbulent ride.

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Questions? Comments? Best countries to flee to when, in a surprise twist, President Harris puts everyone in camps? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal.

Image: ATLANTA, GEORGIA - NOVEMBER 1: Voters head into a polling location to cast their ballots on the last day of early voting for the 2024 election on November 1, 2024, in Atlanta, Georgia. Georgia has had a record turnout for early voting with nearly 50% of active voters in the state voting early. (Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)