Trump tonight: "I haven't been treated right .... If I don't win this election ... the Jewish people would have a lot to do with the loss." I don't think of Trump as an antisemite, exactly. He stereotypes Jews, but he is not especially hostile to Jews. But he is tonight offering a "stab in the back" legend that will resonate powerfully with the next generation of MAGA that is more self-consciously antisemitic.

The difference:

The upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true.

The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true.

Trump really did mount a violent coup against the Constitution. He and his relatives really did take bribes in office, including from foreign governments. He really was helped into power by Russian espionage agencies. He really did steal secret documents from the US government after his election defeat. And Vance really did, and by his own admission, intentionally "create stories" for political advantage that put residents of his state at risk of physical harm. When a group of right-wing extremists were arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer during the COVID pandemic, then-President Trump shrugged it off. "Maybe it was a problem, maybe it wasn't."

cbsnews.com/news/gretchen-…

I wrote this after the attempt on Trump's life in July. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Trump and his running mate have spent the past week successfully inciting violence in Springfield, Ohio. Today they want to present themselves as near-victims of violence - in this case, of violence completely unrelated to themselves and at a very safe distance from themselves.

Everybody remembers Ronald Reagan's famous question from the 1980 presidential debate, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" But have you recently watched the whole 60 seconds? A link follows ... Notice the simplicity and dignity of the language. Notice the temperateness of the mood. Notice that he "suggests" - not demands - the viewer's vote. Notice the respect for the voter's ultimate right of decision.

There's no mystery about this election. Trump's party talked itself into the idea that their guy led some mighty popular movement. In fact a voting majority of Americans have rejected Trump and Trumpism every chance they got since 2015. Now they're readying to do it again. Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million in 2016. He lost the popular vote by 7 million in 2020. He was under 50% approval in every reputable poll every single damn day of his presidency.

A Trump loss would be good news for the MAGA grifters. Their target market will feel even more isolated and aggrieved- therefore, even readier to donate to scam PACs, subscribe to antisemitic podcasts, etc. etc. 1/x A Trump loss will fall hardest on those who wanted real-world results: big tax cuts for the very rich; the surrender of Ukraine to Putin; etc. Such persons had *goals*; MAGA offered only performance - a performance that once fluked into power, but was too weird to hold it. 2/x

I wrote this yesterday about protectionists of Left and Right. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Trade policy is often presented as a contest between producers and consumers. "Pay more for toasters; save jobs."

That's a false image. The people who buy tariff-protected aluminum are not "consumers." They are other producers. Raise their costs, reduce their competitiveness.

Elon Musk posted this after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023. 1/x Musk allies, sidekicks, and wannabes spread the message of panic after the SVB failure, some genuinely fearful - others eagerly excited - that the US economy trembled on verge of collapse. 2/x

GW Bush's top communications aide Karen Hughes was walking along a beach one day when a plane appeared overhead, pulling an advertising banner behind it. The banner read, approximately, "Jill, come back. I am miserable without you. Jack." She thought ... 1/x She thought: "Bad message Jack. Too much about you; not enough about her."

The Trump campaign's evident decision to campaign on the message that "Kamala Harris isn't black enough" reminds me of the doomed Jack-and-Jill banner.

WHO IS THIS MESSAGE FOR?

2/x

"Weird" is code for "expresses obsessive hostility to women, including the women in his own personal life" - and because MAGA Republicans don't get the code, they don't understand why they are losing the argument. That's why it doesn't help when Don Jr. posts video of Kamala Harris greeting a flamboyant drag queen. Yes, the drag queen is "weird" in the sense of "exhibiting highly unusual behavior." But he's not weird in the sense that is draining quarts of blood from the GOP ticket.

For two years of our early married life, @DCrittenden1 and I lived in a Manhattan apartment owned by a successful psychiatrist. He kept his office on the ground floor of the same building. Hour after hour, limousines idled at his curb waiting for his patients to emerge. 1/x I once asked the psychiatrist:

"You seem to specialize in treating rich and famous people. Do they present many different problems?"

He replied, "No, it's almost always some variant of the same problem. They feel like frauds on the inside." 2/x

When Charles Evans Hughes ran for president in 1916, a politically ally of Woodrow Wilson's wrote a lengthy pamphlet arguing that Hughes was ineligible because his father was a British national at the time of Hughes' birth on US soil in 1862. That ally went on to notoriety ... That ally of Woodrow Wilson's went on to serve in the US State Department during the Franklin Roosevelt administration where he implacably resisted issuing emergency visas to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/art…

Donald Trump's fourth year in office was the most catastrophic final year of any president since Herbert Hoover's in 1932.

Joe Biden's fourth year in office is the most secure and prosperous since - when? Ronald Reagan's in 1984? Calvin Coolidge's in 1924? Republicans are selling nostalgia for one of the worst years in US economic history.

Democrats cannot sell satisfaction with one of the best years in US economic history.

Some have asked whether I wrote all or part of last night's piece in advance. Answer: No. My method when I write about something set for a fixed time (SOTU address, etc.) is to try to blank my mind beforehand, so I can see without preconceptions. (thread)theatlantic.com/politics/archi… Yesterday, for example, I walked the dogs, went for a two-hour bike ride through Ontario countryside, and read a lot of Doug Irwin's history of US trade and tariffs. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

Did you know this? cnn.com/2024/06/10/us/…
2024 shaping up as the largest one-year decline in crime in American history cnn.com/2024/06/10/us/…

"Donald Trump tried to overthrow an election by violence."

That's old news, we already reported that.

"As president, Donald Trump directed tens of millions of tax dollars to his own pockets."

Old news.

(cont'd) "Russian intelligence helped elect Trump by illegal means. Trump welcomed the help."

Russia, Russia.

"He was proven in court to have raped a woman."

Civil proceeding, not criminal - and sexual assault, not rape. Besides ... old news.

(cont'd)

A word to everybody writing, "The Democrats have nobody to blame but themselves" takes ... The fundamental reason we're in this crisis this morning is that the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan is about to nominate for president a dictator-loving criminal against the Constitution. That disgrace and shame is theirs.

Half a point to Trump on Smoot Hawley. The tariffs that put the world on the path to the Great Depression were the US tariffs of 1922, which doomed hopes for an export-led recovery from WW1. War-ravaged Europe was obliged to borrow dollars it needed rather than earn them ... Because the 1922 tariffs were followed by a short-lived financial/consumer boom in the United States, Americans were -and remain - blind to their catastrophic effect on the world economy (and also on the US farm sector, which had a terrible 1920s). ...

Lincoln Alexander Law School is Canada's newest. It opened its doors to its first students in September 2020. To distinguish itself from more established competitors, it early identified progressive activism as its reason for being. . (Thread)lsac.org/choosing-law-s… An institutional commitment to progressive activism may have seemed a good idea in 2020. Three years later, it resulted in almost half the full-time student body signing an open letter endorsing and defending the October 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel. thestar.com/news/investiga…

If Americans had chosen free trade and collective security in 1924, their sons would not have had to storm the beaches of Normandy in 1944. "America First" is the path to isolation, depression, and war. Germany was a democracy in 1924. To survive, that democracy needed to export to pay for food and fuel and service its war debts. When the United States imposed heavy tariffs under Presidents Harding and Coolidge, it doomed German democracy - and Japan's too.

This brilliantly revisionist book published in 2017 will transform your thinking about the Canadian role in D-Day. kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700625246/
The story as most of us know it: Canadians landed on the most easterly of the D-Day beaches, made the deepest inland penetration on Day 1, cut a crucial road ... but then stalled. That anticlimatic story, argues "Stopping the Panzers," completely misconceives the Canadian role.