The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Columnist
Electricity shot through the political press corps on Saturday night when we heard that Kamala Harris had diverted her plane to New York.
Reporters scrambled to pin down the story: On this last weekend before the election, that most guarded of politicians decided to take a risk and swing by 30 Rock for a surprise through-the-looking-glass appearance with her “Saturday Night Live” doppelgänger, Maya Rudolph.
In a cultural and mass media landscape that has been so delineated and fractured and polarized, where people are in their own little bubbles, “S.N.L.” is one of the last venues that speaks to the culture at large when it satirizes politicians.
So I was riveted, wondering if Rudolph and Harris would do their sketch face-to-face.
When I was reporting a Vanity Fair cover story on Tina Fey in October 2008, she was creating a sensation with her Sarah Palin impression. The key to mimicking Palin, Fey told me, was to talk as if she were “lost in a corn maze.”
In that wild political season, Palin agreed to come on the late-night show, as did her running mate, John McCain, creating skits that astounded even Lorne Michaels and the “S.N.L.” cast.
But Fey and Palin merely walked past each other in identical suits in their sketch.
I thought it was a lost opportunity, but Fey was adamant that she didn’t want to do what the legendary “S.N.L.” writer Jim Downey called a “classic sneaker-upper” with Palin. In the end, Palin offered her daughter Bristol as a babysitter for Fey’s 3-year-old daughter, and Fey got her husband’s parents and sister tickets to a Palin rally.
“I just didn’t want to have to do the impression at the same time with her,” Fey told me. “One, it would shine a light on the inaccuracies of the impression, and two, it’s just always — the only word I can think of is ‘sweaty.’”
Donald Trump had clowned around with two of his “S.N.L.” impersonators, Darrell Hammond and Taran Killam, during his monologue when he hosted the show in 2015 (a night that left many cast members torn about whether they were helping Trump). Bernie Sanders once came on to do a skit with his hilarious double, Larry David, and Hillary Clinton did a deft turn as a bartender named Val mocking Trump with her adoring double, Kate McKinnon.
After last night’s show, some viewers pointed out that Trump did a similar through-the-dressing-room-mirror skit with Jimmy Fallon in 2015. And Hillary had a similar line about whether her laugh was annoying in a cameo with Amy Poehler. Whatever. This is comedy on the fly.
Though conservatives never believe it, Lorne Michaels is going for the comedy, not trying to sway the election or hew to liberal values. He thought that Will Ferrell’s fumbling but affectionate impersonation of George W. Bush in 2000 made Bush more lovable and helped sway the election — even though it didn’t jibe with the politics of Ferrell and the rest of the “S.N.L.” cast. But if it helped W., so be it, Michaels said.
Kamala has privately worried about her laugh and was once so nervous at the prospect of having to dine with Washington journalists that she held a pre-dinner rehearsal with her staff pretending to be the journalists. (I can attest that dinner parties with Washington reporters are kind of hellish!)
Given that caution, she seemed nervy just for showing up to do a high-wire comedy routine live on the cusp of the election. The candidate and the comedian wore identical black suits, necklaces, earrings and flag pins.
Self-deprecation always works, and the radiant Kamala came across as appealing. She genuinely seemed to be having fun — a good avatar for her campaign of joy.
It felt like the popular Rudolph was giving the vice president a girl-power comedy benediction. “Take my palm-ala,” she told Kamala. “Kick back in our pajama-las and watch a rom-com-ala.”
And finally, Rudolph sent her off with some good advice for the nerve-racking, nail-biting, white-knuckling, goose-bumping 48 hours to come: “Keep calm-ala and carry on-ala.”
Editorial Board Member
As Election Day approaches, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. So I thought it would be useful to try to separate out those things that keep me up at night from those that don’t.
What Doesn’t Concern Me: Vote Certification
There is no shortage of doomsday scenarios about electoral chaos floating around out there, and it’s not unreasonable to be concerned. We have already seen cases of officials refusing to certify vote totals and taking matters into their own hands because they don’t like the outcome.
The good news is that there are many buffers in place, more than in 2020. First, the decentralized nature of American elections means that no one person’s actions can spread beyond a certain area.
Second, all states, including swing states, have legally binding deadlines for certification of their vote tallies, most in late November. Meeting these deadlines is not a choice; it is a requirement.
Third, Congress in 2022 passed the Electoral Count Reform Act, which, among other things, sets expedited procedures for federal courts to hear election disputes, including cases in which a local official somewhere refuses to certify a vote count.
I’m not including all the poll workers and election officials who have left or been pushed out of their jobs since 2020, in part because of harassment or threats of violence. That brings me to:
What Does Concern Me: Violence
The history of American elections is replete with threats, intimidation and violence by those who apparently lacked the confidence that they could win through voting and majority rule. In recent decades, the most glaring examples of such behavior have come from Republicans.
There was the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000 that helped shut down the recount in the Miami-Dade area, the precursor to George W. Bush’s victory; the caravan of Trump supporters who aggressively surrounded a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway; armed militia members standing near ballot drop boxes; and, of course, the attack on the U.S. Capitol that Donald Trump incited on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the election and install himself as president against the will of the people.
This year the threats are pouring in, putting decent Americans in fear for their lives and undermining the basic functioning of civil society. And thanks to mass disinformation peddlers like Elon Musk, the threats and lies are being amplified and disseminated like never before. It’s not just Musk; YouTube and Facebook have essentially given up on trying to police the worst offenders on their platforms.
It is a tense and dangerous moment, and we can only hope it will end without more people getting hurt. The whole point of electoral politics is to resolve our differences peacefully and to accept our losses as well as our wins, knowing that there will soon be a chance to try again.
But when one party removes itself from that agreement and refuses to acknowledge defeat, bad things will inevitably happen.
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Opinion Writer
It should surprise no one that Elon Musk’s head-over-heels infatuation with Donald Trump has turned some potential customers away from Tesla, but it’s still interesting to see the data.
Even though Musk didn’t go full MAGA until this year, Democrats had already begun unplugging from Tesla in 2022, the year that Musk bought Twitter, according to a new analysis of motor vehicle registrations by county by four Yale University economists. That trend continued in 2023, the last year for which the researchers had data.
Democratic disillusionment is bad news for owners of shares in Tesla, because Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to buy electric vehicles. Last year, 84 percent of Tesla’s vehicle registrations were in the counties that leaned most Democratic by voter registration. Less than 3 percent were in the most Republican counties, with the remainder coming from less polarized counties.
In other words, any uptick in buying interest by Republicans couldn’t possibly make up for the loss of Democratic buyers. “Musk and his shareholders are paying the price for his partisanship,” the economists Ken Gillingham, Matthew Kotchen, James Levinsohn and Barry Nalebuff wrote in a brief write-up that they sent me this week.
Tesla used to be more popular in the most Democratic counties than in the most Republican counties, possibly because Musk was viewed more positively there. In early 2022, Tesla had 75 percent of the E.V. market share in the most Democratic counties but just 64 percent of the E.V. market share in the most Republican counties.
Tesla’s overall market share understandably fell as more competitors entered the market. But it fell much more in the most Democratic counties, to 51 percent at the end of 2023. That was one percentage point lower than its share in the most Republican counties, 52 percent.
The latest accessories for Teslas are bumper stickers that say “I bought this before Elon went crazy,” or variations on the theme. It reminds me of when condo owners in Manhattan voted to have Trump’s name removed from their buildings. It’s never a good sign when your customers are embarrassed to be associated with you.
Opinion Writer
If you’re searching for yet another reason a second Trump presidency is not the right choice for Americans, look no further than his team’s potentially scary, unscientific position on vaccines.
On Wednesday, Howard Lutnick, who is a co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team, said that he had a long talk with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about vaccines. What Kennedy explained to him, Lutnick said, “was when he was born, we had three vaccines, and autism was one in 10,000. Now a baby is born with 76 vaccines. Because in 1986, they waived product liability for vaccines.”
Maybe I was just foggy from the epidural, but I don’t remember either of my daughters getting 76 consecutive shots in her tiny arm when she was born. Both girls got one vaccine to protect against hepatitis B. And there not has been any credible evidence linking autism and vaccines.
Lutnick did say that Kennedy will not get a job with the Department of Health and Human Services, but on Thursday Donald Trump contradicted him and said that Kennedy will “work on health and women’s health and all of the different reasons, because we’re not really a wealthy or a healthy country.” JD Vance also discussed vaccines this week on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he claimed the side effects he experienced from the Covid vaccine made him start “to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing.”
Side effects from vaccines do happen, and as I have written, I think the conversation around vaccines needs more nuance. But nuance about side effects is very different from falsehoods about childhood vaccines causing autism or making up random numbers to scare anxious new parents. (In case you were wondering, there are actually seven diseases American children are typically vaccinated against by 24 months, not “76 vaccines.”)
While a vast majority of children still get their routine childhood vaccines, KFF reported in July that rising levels of vaccine hesitancy are increasingly partisan, and that misinformation — including from Trump himself — may help fuel this hesitancy.
Trump’s surrogates may be even worse. “I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Donald Trump said of Kennedy at his Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday. “I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.” If Trump plans to vest power over our health in the country’s most famous vaccine skeptic, we should all be concerned.
We really don’t need to make America get polio again.
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Opinion Columnist
Once again, we confront a malicious Donald Trump word salad. On Thursday night, he called Liz Cheney “a very dumb individual” (which is typical Trump language), and then he said, “She’s 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.”
He went on to say, “You know, they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building, saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’”
MAGA is outraged that anyone would interpret his statement as calling for Cheney to face a firing squad. The reference to “nine barrels” was just a vague reference to facing hostile fire, they say. To MAGA, this was nothing but a classic chicken hawk attack.
Republicans used to hate the chicken hawk argument. It was often wielded against advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and if you think about it for more than five seconds, you recognize its bad faith. We don’t live in some sort of science-fiction fascist regime in which only those who serve get a voice in military affairs. Where was Trump’s record of service when he ordered strikes on ISIS, attacked Syria or killed Qassim Suleimani?
I served in Iraq, yet I would never dream of arguing that only my fellow vets get a say in American military policy in the Middle East. The very idea is repugnant to the notion of civilian government.
Yet once again, Republicans have become what they used to hate, and they’ve done it in a way that is even worse than the original slur. In addition, this is not the first time that Trump has attacked Cheney in disturbing ways. In July he called for “televised military tribunals” for her, so it’s hardly strange or unreasonable to think that the reference to “nine barrels” could refer to a firing squad.
But even if he wanted his “very dumb” opponent — whom he wants to put in front of a military commission — to be at the receiving end of only hostile fire, we’re confronting inexcusably malicious political language. There is no benign explanation for Trump’s attack.
Opinion Columnist
The great Biden employment boom (16 million jobs added since he took office) took a breather last month, according to Friday morning’s report, with a gain of only 12,000 jobs and downward revisions to some earlier numbers. Much of the slowdown reflected special factors — Hurricane Helene and the Boeing strike. But job gains still fell short of most forecasts, even though the forecasters knew about these factors.
So what did we learn? Mostly that you shouldn’t pay much attention to monthly job numbers.
I’m not sure how many people are aware that the monthly numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are based on surveys, not a comprehensive count; in that sense, they’re like opinion polls. (The numbers are revised once a year when the B.L.S. does a comprehensive count associated with the unemployment insurance program.) There’s also an element of modeling involved, as the bureau tries to estimate the effects of entries of new employers and exits of existing employers.
All of this is done both competently and scrupulously, at least for now. One concern I have if Donald Trump wins is that his administration may well do what Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of doing and begin rigging the economic data. (If you think these accusations will stop because the B.L.S. announced weak job numbers just before the election, you’re being naïve.)
But there is, inevitably, a lot of noise in monthly data, and it’s foolish to draw big conclusions from one month’s numbers. No, the big number last month didn’t mean that the Fed was wrong to go for a big rate cut. No, this weak report doesn’t mean that we’re on the edge of recession.
The broader picture is that America is still adding jobs at a solid pace but that job growth is probably slowing. And that’s OK. Although immigration has expanded the work force, employment probably couldn’t keep growing as fast as it has over the past year without eventually producing an overheated, inflationary economy.
What we seem to be getting instead is employment growth decelerating to a sustainable pace while inflation has already fallen close to the Fed’s target. That’s exactly what we mean by a soft landing. And we seem to have pulled it off.
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Opinion Writer
Every Friday through the election, Michelle Cottle has highlighted outstanding examples of misdeeds, outrageous statements and simply bizarre political behavior.
Election Day is nearly upon us, and I feel as though we barely got to scratch the surface on all the nuttiness of the season. And although the Democrats have had their share of inglorious moments — Tim Walz’s bio embellishments, President Biden’s verbal blundering — Trumpworld has remained peerless in the how-racist-sexist-and-creepily-authoritarian-can-you-get department: “island of floating garbage,” “childless cat ladies,” “eating the pets,” “the enemy within,” “poisoning the blood,” “vermin,” Daddy spanking his “bad little girl.”
Sorry. I still throw up a little every time I recall that daddy rant from Tucker Carlson. Anyway, you get the idea.
That said, this week, it’s not the trash talk that most needs calling out. Rather, it is Trump’s early accusations of widespread voting fraud. Already, the former president has been aggressively spreading unfounded claims of “large-scale levels” of cheating in Pennsylvania.
Yes, Trump spreads cheating claims every time he is on the ballot, before the voting even starts. But we have learned the hard way that destroying public trust in the integrity of elections is dangerous. The former president’s accusations of rampant voting fraud should not be shrugged off as Trump being Trump. Or rather, they are absolutely Trump being Trump, and speak directly to his unfitness for office. At this point, I wouldn’t trust the guy to pick up my garbage.
It is time for Democrats to stop putting a mic in front of President Biden unless absolutely necessary. As you’ve probably heard, on a Tuesday call with Voto Latino, Biden tried to express his dismay at the “island of floating garbage” line that came out of Trump’s ugly little Sunday rally in Madison Square Garden: “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American,” Biden blathered.
Was Biden calling Trump’s supporters garbage? Or was he sputtering about the particular remarks of one supporter, the shock comic who first spewed the garbage line? Hard to say, since the president gets so tongue-tied these days. But Trump World was happy to seize the opening for some performative outrage.
With just a few days left in this race, I’d like to request — ever so gently — that Biden keep those lips zipped on political matters. Things are crazy enough out here without his help.
On Wednesday, Trump took another stab at wooing the ladies. At a rally in Wisconsin, he vowed to “protect the women of this country,” insisting he would do so, “whether the women like it or not.”
Forcing his attentions on women against their will? Yep. That tracks.
I want to pause here for a quick public service announcement.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed on Monday that Trump has promised him “control of the public health agencies.”
Parents, best make sure your kids are up-to-date on all their vaccinations, just in case.
Trump isn’t the only Florida Man getting twitchier as Election Day nears. On Tuesday, police officers in Neptune Beach arrested an 18-year-old Trump supporter for waving a machete at two women — one in her 70s, another in her 50s — outside an early-voting site. The supporter, Caleb Williams, part of a gaggle of pro-Trump teenagers who gathered at the site, is facing several charges, including a third-degree felony count of voter intimidation or suppression.
Stay safe out there! And remember, voter intimidation is no joke: Leave those weapons at home when you head to your polling place.
Opinion Climate Editor
Almost once a month, somewhere around the world, people are caught off guard by extreme rain.
On Tuesday, parts of Valencia, Spain, and the surrounding region were swamped with 13 inches of rain in just four hours and a year’s worth of rain in less than 24 hours, leading to devastating flash flooding. At least 158 people have died in the deluge, and some are calling the floods the worst natural disaster to hit Europe in years.
Spaniards have lately been preoccupied with drought and extreme heat as the world warms. But an unstable jet stream combined with a very warm Mediterranean Sea may be why the storm system generated such unusually intense rain. As the Spanish meteorologist Mar Gomez posted on social media: “Is climate change responsible for extreme events like this one? Yes,” adding that warmer temperatures mean “the air is capable of retaining more water vapor that can make more intense rains.”
One friend of mine who lives in Valencia noted that the storm felt completely unexpected. “Imagine a sneaky hurricane that just shows up,” he said. Regional authorities also reportedly failed to pass along a warning from Spain’s National State Meteorological Agency that the storm would bring “extreme danger” until the flooding had already begun. That meant that some people who might have stayed off the road were caught in their vehicles — the most dangerous place to be in a flood. The photos of cars and trucks piled up in narrow streets and on railroad tracks are among the most powerful images from the disaster.
Americans experienced similarly surprising devastation recently because of Hurricane Helene’s record-breaking rainfall and terrible destruction in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. We’ve probably paid less attention to the many other flash floods this year that have taken lives and destroyed livelihoods around the world, from Uruguay to Nepal.
Altogether, these startling torrents from the sky are among our most frightening foes in a warming world, and should be among our top motivations to change course.
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Opinion Columnist
Elon Musk has put full force of his billions, his ownership of the X platform and himself on the line for Donald Trump, especially in Pennsylvania. Some of what he has promised to do, such as a $1 million giveaway, may well be illegal. Other out-out-the ordinary actions — appearing onstage at Trump rallies or blasting false claims about election integrity — have involved aggressively breaking longstanding norms.
By blatantly upending practices (or even laws) and seemingly getting away with it, Musk also appeals to a constituency that both parties are trying to win: young men. Musk’s companies look like the boy-toy aisle in a store organized according to traditional gender roles. And both Musk and Trump frequently float coded ideas about their version of a male-dominated society in their public comments.
All this may help explain why Musk and Trump have aligned their brands. Musk gets a big platform for his version of masculinity and the possibility that Trump will put him in charge of parts of the government and provide favors to his businesses. Trump gets someone who could gin up turnout among the young male voters he needs to balance the widespread revulsion he has engendered among women.
Each man is taking advantage of an emergent crisis of masculinity in American society in order to gain greater power. With the rise of feminism and the fall of one version of a male-dominated society with traditional lines of authority and industrial jobs, many men now lack the classic masculine roles they once might have filled. Historically, authoritarian (and, yes, fascist) movements have projected a sort of über-masculinity that’s unrestrained by rules and promised to usher in a world in which their will would triumph through force and dominance. A modern-day masculinity crisis makes room for this kind of thinking to take root in the United States.
This is why more men should speak up loudly for a positive, empowering vision of masculinity that doesn’t come at the expense of women and doesn’t prize “getting away with” breaking rules. And the rest of us must recognize that a masculinity crisis exists, rather than dismissing it — as many do on social media — as merely the last cry of those who have lost special privileges.
Young men, in particular, have grown up in a world of feminism and deindustrialization, and they certainly face distinct challenges as they find their way in an unsettled world. Around them are a gaggle of podcasters, YouTube video producers, Twitch streamers and organizers of political rallies who assert that men have been shafted and claim that they should wrest back control over society by any means available, including force.
It’s not hard to see why this combination may seem attractive to many young men, especially when Trumpian appeal is matched with Musk’s money, boy toys and an implied promise that if you’re a man like them, you too can dominate and get away with it.
But there are other ways to be strong and decent young men, and it’s essential to build and model that alternative, positive vision. The stakes are high in this election, and they will only continue to grow after Tuesday.
Editor at Large, Opinion
I live in Manhattan, an island you should in theory be able to crisscross by bus with no problem. But the failure of congestion pricing (thanks, Gov. Kathy Hochul), combined with the behavior of some of the city’s bus drivers, can make it tough to get around, particularly for people who are disabled, as I am temporarily.
Let me first say that many of the drivers — or bus operators, as the M.T.A. bizarrely calls them — are wonderful. They kneel the bus for you, they wait at the stop when they see you coming, and they speak up when people are too busy on their phones to “give up” their seats “to the handicapped.” Give up.
This behavior, however, is not universal. Over the two and a half years that I have been living with a cane and a knee brace, or just a cane, or just a limp, I have been ignored by many drivers. They look at me, see me (or maybe don’t see me, in the deeper sense), and then drive off.
I mostly let this go.
My wife is the kind of person who does not let things go. She writes a lot of emails to public officials. I often tease her that she resembles the titular character in the Saul Bellow novel “Herzog,” who mentally composes letter after letter that he almost never sends. But she sends them.
Not long ago, I was at the terminal stop of the crosstown bus route below my building. It is also, by definition, the first stop. The driver, who had closed up his bus, saw me standing there, cane in hand. He looked me up and down, then drove around the corner. I was so close I could see the number of the bus. I decided it was time to emulate my wife.
I registered a complaint with the M.T.A. that the driver had ignored me. To my surprise, I got a nice note back Wednesday afternoon, telling me that “based upon the information you provided, the bus operator has been identified and was reinstructed on the proper policies and procedures.”
I can only imagine this conversation.
Maybe: “Don’t leave people who can’t really walk at the bus stop.”
I was so happy about this that I stopped on the way to my bus home Wednesday night to forward the email from the M.T.A. to my wife, with a little note saying that emulation was the sincerest form of flattery.
I got to the stop a minute late and watched a bus slip away. My fault, no issue. Then the next driver came by. He wasn’t even in the bus lane; he was driving down the center of Seventh Avenue.
I waved my cane; I waved with my other hand. I shouted the way you can only shout if you grew up below 23rd Street. He tossed me a look and drove off.
Hey, bus driver, where are you going? Why can’t you see us?
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I salute the commitment of the new chief executive of Starbucks to cut down on the complexity of its menu and customization options, which he expressed on Wednesday. It will speed up ordering. It will cut down on waste. And it just might help the company, which has struggled with declining sales, return to growth.
Right now, by giving people every possible way to modify every drink, “we kind of incentivize people to customize drinks that probably aren’t the best way to execute the drink,” Brian Niccol, who took over as the chief executive of Starbucks in September, told Wall Street analysts on a call to discuss the company’s disappointing quarterly earnings.
Niccol said Starbucks will be “maniacal” about getting the time from order to handoff to customer consistently under four minutes across the chain. Simplifying the menu will help with that. He said baristas have told him they want “guardrails” on ordering. Bringing back the condiment bar, where people can add their own milk and sugar, will also help.
It’s as if Niccol read the guest essay in The Times in August by Bill Saporito. The one headlined, “There Are a Billion Possible Starbucks Orders — and It’s Killing the Company.”
No decisions on what will be cut from the menu have been made. Niccol made clear that Starbucks will never approach coffee the way Henry Ford approached the Model T: You can have any color as long as it’s black. “We know customization is an important part of the customer experience,” he said.
But I get the impression that once he’s through, it may not be possible to order silly drinks such as The Edward — a customer-designed drink, not on the menu, that consists of a venti Caramel Crunch Frappuccino with five bananas, seven pumps of dark caramel sauce and one pump of honey blend.
The first to go, Niccol said, will be “products frankly that add complexity, have a lot of waste and really don’t add a whole lot to the experience.”
Some people aren’t going to be happy: “Everybody has their one favorite thing that maybe is on the long tail,” namely far from the mainstream, Niccol acknowledged. Still, for Starbucks, simpler will be better.
Opinion Staff Editor and Writer
Each Wednesday in The Point through the election, Katherine Miller highlights a revealing moment from a stump speech on the campaign trail.
Like Michelle Goldberg and our colleagues in the newsroom, I attended Sunday’s long and surreal Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, which was very grim in all the ways they describe. But because the rally itself involved six full hours of speeches, a few less-discussed parts of it keep coming back to me as though from a dream.
That includes Dr. Phil McGraw’s surprise appearance, in which he endorsed Trump. He opened, for one thing, like this:
I can be honest because we have free speech in America. I can be honest and say I don’t like or agree with everything that Donald J. Trump does or says. Come on. Nobody agrees with everything or likes everything somebody else says or does, right? No human is perfect.
This is a kind of argument that some conservatives make about Trump. Brian Kemp and Nikki Haley have both essentially said, for instance, that you don’t have to like Trump to prefer his policies. But that line went over to a bewildered silence at M.S.G.
McGraw said he was there instead to “talk to and stand up for the people who have declared their support for Donald J. Trump” but who “get canceled, intimidated, marginalized, excluded or even fired or boycotted. And you know what that means? In short, that adds up to being bullied.” This is where the speech started to get both somewhat interesting and weird:
Now, let me tell you what the critics are going to say when they hear me talking about this. They’re going to say, “Now, wait a minute. Come on. Isn’t Trump a bully?” And let me tell you why the answer to that question is no. Because to be a bully, there has to be an imbalance of power. And when there’s not, it’s just called a debate, and he’s just better at it than anybody else. It is called debating. It’s called arguing. It may even be name-calling, but it’s not bullying unless there’s an imbalance of power. And whoever he talks to, they’ve got a microphone, they got on their big-boy pants, they got a stage, they got everything else.
On some level, this makes sense when he’s talking about Trump and Harris going mano-a-mano on a debate stage, or any number of prominent people talking about Trump. But one of the hallmarks of the Trump presidency was the way he still talked about others like he was on a level playing field with them even though he was the most powerful person in the world, with the weight of the government behind him. Weirdly, McGraw then flipped it and said that Trump also wasn’t being bullied by Democrats:
And the same thing is true. When the Democrats or Harris call him fascist, Hitler, racist, misogynist or a crook, is that bullying? Not really. It’s ugly. But with the First Amendment, which we all want to keep, there’s no imbalance of power, so it’s not bullying. It’s just like when he does it. It may not be the best use of energy. But when you attack civilians, when you attack a citizen and you use the power of the internet, you use mob mentality, you incite people to gang up and cause boycotts, then it’s beyond ugly.
It was weird: McGraw offered a fairly coherent framework around bullying and free speech — and incredibly strangely, he said from the Madison Square Garden stage that even though it might be ugly when Harris calls Trump a fascist, it was free speech and not even bullying.
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Polling suggests that as we go into Election Day, the Republicans’ advantage on the economy is substantially smaller than it was a few months ago. But if you look at the numbers, what’s astonishing is that the advantage doesn’t go the other way.
Wednesday’s data release on gross domestic product for the third quarter, the last one before the election, paints a portrait of remarkable economic success. One way to see how amazing that success has been — The Economist calls it “glorious” — is to compare where we are now with Congressional Budget Office projections released in January 2020, before Covid struck. There were widespread warnings that the pandemic would cause “scarring” — that is, do lasting damage; instead we have substantially outperformed those projections:
At the same time, inflation looks beaten: The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation is close to its 2 percent target. What looked like a bump in inflation early this year was probably just a statistical blip:
Today’s political scene being what it is, Republicans will continue to denounce Biden-Harris economic policies as a failure. But if this is failure, what would success look like? Claims that we have a bad economy are about as credible as claims that armed migrants have taken over Times Square.
Opinion Writer, reporting from Washington
“That is who Donald Trump is, but that is not who we are.”
If there is one line to take away from Kamala Harris’s Tuesday night speech, not far from the White House, that seems like a good choice. With it, the vice president sought to remind us of the chaos and confusion that cling to the former president like slime on a shoe, while expressing the hope that Americans still have faith in themselves, and in one another, to demand better.
That, more than anything, is what Harris was selling in her closing argument to that curious collection of voters still on the fence in this presidential race: A way “to turn the page on the drama and the conflict, the chaos and the division” of Trumpism.
As high-stakes speeches go, this one was solidly constructed and solidly delivered. Harris isn’t an Obama-level orator, whether we’re talking Barack or Michelle. She acknowledged that many voters still don’t feel that they know her well, and this appearance most likely didn’t help much with that. It was loaded with platitudes and with sentimentality that wasn’t quite personal enough to be moving or illuminating: Raised in a middle-class family. Instinct to protect the little guy. Always listen to you. Always tell you the truth. Never stop fighting for you. Build consensus. We need to stop pointing fingers and start locking arms? Oof.
Once she got rolling, though, Harris did spend some time drawing distinctions between what she would do and what Trump would do, including: “On Day 1, if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list. When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.” A little cheesy? Sure. But totally accurate, and the presence of the Oval Office right over her shoulder made it real.
She then ran through her plans to help make homeownership more accessible, to fight for an expanded child tax credit, to invest in the caregiving economy — complete with a nice shout out to the struggling “sandwich generation.” In discussing immigration, she mentioned border security first thing. She vowed to fight for the reproductive rights stripped away by Trump’s “handpicked Supreme Court justices,” and she talked up the need for a strong military.
This reads like a down-to-earth, bread-and-butter to-do list — with a little something for everyone, and a little something for everyone to hate. Did she dig into the specifics of any of her proposals? No, she did not. This was neither the time nor the place.
Harris’s top job was to remind everyone what is at stake in this election. Of course, more than perhaps anything she said, her choice of setting drove that point home: the Ellipse at the south end of President’s Park, the very place where the Jan. 6 riot took form as Trump whipped his supporters into a frenzy before unleashing them on the Capitol.
Say this about the Trump era, it has taught everyone the value of political theater.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Harris reminded us.
In another week, we’ll see if she’s right.
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Opinion Senior Staff Graphics Editor
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are neck-and-neck in terms of how many television ads they’ve aired in battleground states. The tones of those ads, however, have been worlds apart from each other.
Using data from AdImpact, a tracking firm, I watched every presidential campaign spot that aired on broadcast TV between Aug. 1 and Oct. 25. I categorized the ads as “positive” if they promoted the candidate, “contrast” if they mentioned the candidate and the opponent, and “negative” if they attacked the opponent. The differences were stark.
Source: New York Times analysis of data from AdImpact and Comscore
Note: For broadcast TV ads.
In the weeks after President Biden dropped out of the race, Democrats rushed to define the narrative around their new presumptive nominee. Democrats spent most of August’s presidential ad budget on positive spots extolling Harris’s background, accomplishments and agenda.
Throughout September, the Harris campaign started running more ads that contrasted the two candidates, drawing a line for voters between their backgrounds, economic policies and stances on abortion.
In the final weeks of the election, Harris and her allies were less shy about attacking Trump, spending hundreds of million dollars on negative ads that characterized him as unstable and unfit to lead.
Republicans have been much more consistent in their messaging. When Harris went high, they went low, over and over again. Trump and his allies spent 81 percent of their ad dollars on invective against Harris and Tim Walz. Less than 1 percent went to ads touting the former president’s accomplishments or policy proposals.
“Any attempt to introduce Donald Trump to the American people would be pointless,” said David Nickerson, a political scientist who worked on analytics for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. “Trump is a well-established brand. All he has to do is convince people that Kamala Harris is not a good fit.”
While that may be true, it makes Trump’s complaints about Harris’s relatively few negative ads particularly laughable. Appearing on “Fox & Friends” this month, Trump suggested that it was indecorous for the network to air Democratic attacks on him in the election’s final days. If the network applied the same standards to Trump, his campaign wouldn’t have many ads left to run.
Opinion Editorial Assistant
In advice last month for Catholic voters in America, Pope Francis said that both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris “are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants or be it the one who kills babies.” Following this, Francis urged voters to choose the “lesser evil,” though the moral math was up to the individual voter.
But how do you choose? For all of Trump’s anti-immigrant roaring and Harris’s comparative softness, both candidates have promised asylum restrictions. While Harris is campaigning on protecting abortion rights, Trump’s waffling — and floating of state-funded IVF — means that neither candidate is an unquestionable choice for those voters who oppose abortion, including the destruction of embryos. Voters who care about the sanctity of life may find that discerning the “lesser evil” of the two is more difficult than one might expect.
But even if there were a clear choice here, voting for a “lesser evil” is far from voting for a better good. As such, I’ve become curious about the American Solidarity Party, incorporated in 2016, which describes itself as a Christian democracy party. Any practicing Catholic could guess its stances: anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, just-war principles. But the party also champions workers’ rights and a “family wage,” and it explicitly condemns racial injustice. On the ballot in seven states this year are the party’s presidential candidate, Peter Sonski, and his running mate, Lauren Onak; in other states, voters will have to write them in.
A third-party run for president in America has always been a losing game, and there are myriad arguments that a third-party vote this year is essentially a vote for Trump. But it’s also true that achieving an effective, human-oriented coalition outside the two major parties will take time, and voters who want other options have to start somewhere. In an age of physician-assisted suicide, abortion and an inhumane economic system, a serious Catholic voter could reasonably think that the time to start building such a coalition is now, even if the Solidarity Party is far from perfect. (It takes issue with no-fault divorce, for example.)
The A.S.P. received 42,305 votes in 2020. But maybe this year, it will receive 80,000, and maybe down the line, it will receive a million. Voting outside the two major parties can also facilitate the creep of positive values. When I spoke with Marcos Lopez, A.S.P.’s chair at the time, in June, he said that the party “would not be displeased if our advocacy and our presence forced other parties to dance to our tune a little bit, even if they didn’t fully adopt or, you know, completely change what they’re saying to match us.”
Some would say that considering a third-party vote in this election incorrectly presumes that democracy will survive another Trump term; to that, I say that America survived him once already. No matter who wins this year, our future will be well served by creating a political home for millions of voters who are not represented wholly by an imperfect two-party system. Am I naïve? Perhaps. But I’d rather choose naïve faith than cynical despair.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
Just joking! That has been Donald Trump’s go-to damage control tactic for years. It has helped him skate past comments on everything from “grab ’em by the pussy” and urging Russia to find Hillary Clinton’s emails, to injecting bleach to prevent Covid and wanting to be “dictator for a day.”
Now we’re about to find out how damaging a “joke” just before an election might be, this one from Tony Hinchcliffe, who loosed a series of racist remarks at Trump’s noxious Madison Square Garden rally on Sunday night.
Hinchcliffe told the throng: “There is literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Hinchcliffe wasn’t done. “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.”
The Harris campaign pounced. The campaign released a TV ad highlighting the remarks and contrasting them with Trump’s indifference. The Puerto Rican stars Bad Bunny, Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin denounced Trump to their huge social media audiences and praised Harris’s “Opportunity Economy” proposals for the island, which she expanded on Sunday at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia.
A big one is upgrading the island’s defective electrical grid, which goes down almost daily. Harris visited Puerto Rico in March and promised to cut red tape and hasten disaster relief, not just toss paper towels at infuriated Puerto Ricans, as Trump did in 2017 after Hurricane Maria, a climate disaster that caused 1.2 million Puerto Ricans to move to the mainland.
According to 2021 figures, more than 470,000 Puerto Ricans live in Pennsylvania, 115,000 in North Carolina, 100,000 in Georgia, 64,000 in Arizona, 61,000 in Wisconsin, 43,000 in Michigan and 23,000 in Nevada. And the numbers are higher now.
The Puerto Rican vote is no monolith. In Pennsylvania, Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia are liberal, while newer arrivals in the Lehigh Valley (Allentown, Reading and Bethlehem) — many of whom have converted from Catholicism to the Pentecostal church — are right of center. The latter, I’m told by a seasoned Puerto Rican political operative, don’t use social media and probably heard little about the ethnic slurs. They might respond more to a centrist Harris message on Univision and Telemundo about small business and help for battered Puerto Rico.
Will any of this increase the historically low turnout of Puerto Rican voters? As the legendary screenwriter William Goldman said about predicting a movie’s success: “Nobody knows anything.” But the Madison Square Garden rally was an unforced Trump error at what could be a pivotal moment.
Opinion Columnist
For many Americans in 2020, a Donald Trump rally was the best place to get a dopamine fix. While his humor left — and leaves — many liberals cold, it hit millions of Americans in the feels. When he mocked a disabled person or reveled in denigrating countries with a barnyard epithet, his followers felt the vicarious thrill of transgression. MAGA became their dopamine hit factory.
When he does the act these days, however, some of the thrill is gone. A Trump punchline still lands but it doesn’t have the same power as it did four years ago. Trump’s appearance in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., two weeks before the election should have been a show of strength in Trump’s best setting. Instead, social media images showed a half-empty auditorium.
Trump’s constant mention of his huge crowds belies the truth — he isn’t packing them in like he once did. That’s the problem with selling a dopamine rush. The dealer has to keep leveling up. If your audience can’t get its fix from the usual drug, they’ll start looking somewhere else.
On Sunday, Trump leveled up, with a Madison Square Garden rally that was a dopamine jamboree for the MAGA faithful who have OD’d on Trump’s racist, sexist, xenophobic political humor. This time, Trump and his surrogates offered the pure, uncut humor of hate.
Tony Hinchcliffe, a comedian and podcast bro, mocked Puerto Ricans as oversexed animals with a crude line about the rhythm method that doesn’t bear repeating. Tucker Carlson, continuing to cast about for relevance after being fired by Fox News, took the low road of eugenics punchlines, calling Kamala Harris the “first Samoan Malaysian low-I.Q.” candidate to possibly become president.
The entire event seemed to put Trump back in rare form. When he took the stage, he was buoyant and ebullient. He was also clearly recalibrating what it takes to satisfy his addicted masses — cruder transgressions for dopamine-addled political minds.
This election is about electing a president. It is also about how elections will look and feel for the foreseeable future. There are structural issues at stake, like gerrymandering and big-money influence. But we are also voting for how much transgression we want to consume in the years to come. The weekend’s showdown with norms at Madison Square Garden is a warning about how much worse things could get — MAGA truly has nowhere left to go but down.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
At times I thought I was watching some fifth, long-delayed, never-ending night of the Republican National Convention, the one when any final pretense of civility was junked, any feeble attempt to hide the party’s racism was jettisoned and there was no lid whatsoever on the contempt for the Democratic candidate for president.
Then Donald Trump took the stage at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, some two hours behind schedule, and spoke. And spoke. And spoke. About the phallic wonder of Elon Musk’s rockets, evoked in rapturous detail. About the House speaker Mike Johnson’s “little beautiful face with those glasses.” About the promise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s stamp on a second Trump administration. “I’m going to let him go wild on health,” Trump said. “I’m going to let him go wild on the food.”
Trump spoke most extensively and most effusively about himself, because the thousands of people in the audience existed above all as an adoring mirror and, just like Narcissus, he couldn’t get enough of his reflection. Every time I thought he might be winding down, he took another long look. His listeners’ strained patience couldn’t compete with his unrestrained self-love. He luxuriated in it for nearly 80 minutes of boastful and baffling remarks.
Though the event was billed as a show of strength in the media capital of the universe, it was really an indulgence of ego by the biggest braggart on the planet. Trump wanted the iconography of this arena, a symbol of triumph for any entertainer who can fill it. He wanted to tell New York City — where he was born, where he was convicted — that it could never be rid of him. He wanted a measure of affirmation beyond anything he got in Milwaukee in July, beyond anything he can get in any of those battleground states. Sunday’s rally — Sunday’s orgy — was born not of political calculus but of personal need.
The superlatives were the tell. The seemingly endless parade of character witnesses who took the stage before Trump didn’t merely praise him. They described some spectacularly generous, preternaturally potent figure as believable as the Easter Bunny.
And Trump turbocharged his trademark vocabulary of superiority and singularity. He claimed that during his presidency, America had the “safest border in the world” and “the greatest economy in the history of the world.” He declared that he was on the precipice of the “biggest victory in the history of our country.” He mentioned an overflow crowd on the streets: “They’re outside watching this now at levels that nobody has ever seen before.”
If Trump wins this election, he’ll go wild with a magnitude and intensity of vanity that nobody has ever seen before. That’s a superlative you can trust.
Deputy Opinion Editor
Liz Cheney made a few bits of news on Saturday afternoon in a conversation with the journalist David Remnick at the 25th annual New Yorker Festival. She pointedly called on former President George W. Bush to endorse Kamala Harris for president, as Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice president, have done. She said she had canceled her subscription to The Washington Post because the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decided not to endorse Harris for president under the fig leaf of forgoing endorsements.
Liz Cheney said Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to vote to convict Donald Trump in 2021 on the articles of impeachment was the reason Trump is the nominee today, arguing other Republicans would have fallen in line to convict if McConnell had the “courage” to do so.
But most interesting of all to me was the reason for her confident prediction that opened the festival conversation: “Kamala Harris is going to be the next president of the United States.”
I wasn’t surprised by the prediction — Cheney is campaigning energetically for Harris to defeat Trump — but I was struck that Cheney, the former vice chair of the Jan. 6 House select committee, did not primarily argue that threats to democracy would lift Harris to victory.
Rather, she said that in her conversations with independent and undecided voters, what is really moving them into Harris’s corner was “what a second Trump term would mean for the women of this country.” She cited the draconian Republican bans and limits on reproductive health care and other medical needs that have led to traumatic and disabling injuries for pregnant women in Texas and other states with bans in place.
To be sure, Cheney argued that many voters would reject Trump because he broke his oath to the Constitution and tried to overturn the 2020 election results and because he has degraded the rule of law. That’s what turned her against Trump after years of supporting him, which she called her “biggest professional regret.”
But she said she thought women would rally against Trump in enormous numbers, seeing him as a fundamentally cruel and depraved person who did not care about their health, rights or well-being.
With that, Cheney put her finger on one of the big known unknowns of this election: Would women and others who support abortion rights turn out for Democrats in such a wave, as they did in 2022 and 2023, that Trump won’t know what hit him?
For the most part, the Manhattan audience was deeply appreciative of Cheney’s reassuring words about Harris and her leadership against Trump; the steady applause for her is another reminder of the bizarro Trump political universe we are in, where a strong conservative like Cheney is warmly welcomed by a predominantly liberal audience.
But it’s also a reminder of how Trump unites everyone from Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift, as Liz Cheney noted.
Asked by Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, if she thought Trump was a fascist, Cheney said, “I think you’d be hard pressed to say he’s not.” And she was withering about The Post and its owner.
“When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney said.
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