A grab bag of absurdities

So much lunacy; so little time.

(1) Trump is already saying that he plans to challenge the legitimacy of Harris winning the election on the basis of the claim that replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket was “unconstitutional.”

“We know one thing for sure: Trump never loses. And so if he’s not declared the winner of 2024, as in 2020, it must be because he was treated unfairly yet again; it was stolen yet again,” John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser and has since become a vocal critic of the former president, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins last week.

“I don’t think he knows exactly what his theory is going to be this time to explain how he was denied winning the election, so he’s trotting out a number of things,” Bolton said. “And I think this is why people need to start thinking more now about how to deny Trump the ability, the day after the election, if he loses, to try and throw the process into chaos again.”

John Bolton is a horrible person, but he’s absolutely right about this.

(2) JD Vance continues to haunted by things he was recorded as saying in interviews in public fora a few months ago:

In 2020, long before he entered politics, [ed.: this was the year before he announced he was running for the Senate] Vance appeared on a podcast where the host said that having grandmothers help raise children is “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female.”

Vance agreed—and that wasn’t all of what was discussed on the episode.

The host also said that grandparents helping to raise children is a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” and Vance again agreed, recounting how his mother-in-law, a biology professor in California, took a sabbatical from her job to help look after his newborn son.

“Painfully economically inefficient,” Vance said, making a larger point of what he saw as a societal problem. “Why didn’t she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do.”

Speaking of immigration policy, the spouses of the men on the Republican ticket provide evidence that there are in fact quite a few jobs that Americans just won’t do.

(3) A friend of mine, a 50something financial advisor who was a lifelong Republican until Trump finally broke him (yes he’s voting for Harris, and with no hesitation), sums up the current vibe in what I believe is a very accurate way:

I’ll put my marker down. Authoritarianism/autocracy took its best shot and we weathered it.

The whole movement there is based on catastrophizing, demonizing, othering, and isolating. What once came across as alarming and defiant now comes across as Chicken Little and whiny. [Tim] Ryan [talking about JD Vance] is right – people are tired of it. The message is stale. The economy didn’t collapse. The Covid vaccines didn’t kill everybody. The emergency measures were lifted. We are not in World War 3. There is no mandatory transgendering in schools. No immigrants have committed terrorist attacks and nobody’s Minnesota lake house got invaded.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been damage or that the autocratic message doesn’t still appeal to some, but IMO the surge in Harris/Walz energy, popularity, and fundraising is an awesome sign that the majority people want to put the craziness in the rearview mirror and the psychos back into obscure.corners of the internet. The Dem convention is only going to highlight the contrast between weird and not weird, positive and negative, alarmist and normal, even more sharply.

Trump’s act is tired even with his own people. One by one people are recovering some sense of sanity and seeing him for what he really is – not a cypher for whatever they happen to think is wrong with the country that he will fix – but instead and a selfish and petulant narcissist too lazy to do much besides give the same tired speech over and over again whining about how unfair everyone is to him. It’s old and it’s tired, just like he is.