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Donny is Done

By James Moore

I will not believe it. I cannot. There is nothing left to know about Donald Trump. And I will not accept that even the most base and uneducated of Americans will offer him enough support to restore him to the White House. Just after writing those sentences, I went to the betting markets and saw that he was now leading Kamala Harris in the presidential race. Too many observers assign a level of credibility and accuracy to the thinking of the bettors, but that’s probably not wise. Decisions can be based on hype or responses to aggregated polls that include an overabundance of surveyors who work for conservative and GOP groups. Data gets distorted; opinions become influenced by skewed results.

The gambling markets can sometimes, however, capture consensus. Obama’s elections were both accurately predicted but in 2016 bettors put their money on Hilary Clinton and she was heavily favored over Trump until election night. The outcome defied expectations, which is also what happened when gamers tried to make money off the Brexit vote; they got it wrong. The true value of these markets is to capture in real time the impact of changes in sentiment among the electorate. Polls are more methodical and rife with latency. The assumption is not safe that people betting on elections are any more informed than the average voter. In fact, a large number of gamblers from any political party can easily skew results, which is what happens when party pols buy up thousands of books written by a favorite candidate and make it a faux bestseller.

Nonetheless, as I watched Trump on his “Insult America Tour,” I had to contemplate how in the hell the presidential race is even close. In Detroit, the biggest city in an important swing state, he ignored the billions spent on reinvestment and reinvention of the motor city and its vital emerging new economy. Ignorant of history, as he is of most subjects, he figured the people at the Detroit Economic Club would be on his side if he spoke condescendingly of their efforts to forge a different future by telling them the all of America would be as screwed up as where they are living if Harris wins in November.

“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit,” he said, “If (Harris is) your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

There was never any chance Trump was going to carry Detroit. President Biden won 94 percent of the vote in the last presidential contest and an energized electorate turned out more than 250,000 voters. The numbers are likely to be similar for Harris but Trump’s insult cuts more than just residents of Detroit. Michiganders have taken substantial pride in Motown’s turnaround, which did not escape the Democratic campaign’s attention. The rapid response ad below from Harris’ team, prompted by Trump’s ponderous stupidity, is one of the best political ads I’ve ever seen in decades of writing, reporting, and analyzing politics.

 

The man who believes dogs and cats, household pets, are on the dinner tables of Haitian immigrants in Ohio, zipped off to Aurora, Colorado after Detroit to inform them of a threat they had not noticed. Without their knowledge of the danger, Trump told the residents of the Denver suburb that they were being overrun by gangs from Venezuela, who came from dungeons and prisons and were being personally shipped in by Kamala Harris. His entire campaign has thematically been built about blaming immigrants. If anything bad has transpired in America, immigrants are the cause. Even though red states are complimenting FEMA for hurricane recovery, Trump has convinced his mindless minions there is no money for real relief because Harris has given it all to illegal immigrants. Who do we believe? The bronzer poster boy or the governors of states hit by hurricanes who are pleased with the assistance they are receiving from Washington?

 

 

Trump is promising to find and deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. without documentation. Logistically, it is almost certainly impossible and another one of his hollow promises like a health care plan or infrastructure week. Regardless, he is describing a kind of jack-booted army of gunslinging agents of Homeland Security who will ferret out the immigrants, load them up in vans, and take their numbers to the border. That will not work, of course, even if he were able to put the pieces together to execute the assault of his storm troopers. Mexico will only take back Mexican citizens and they account for less than half of undocumented people living here at 47 percent of the total. If he gets a chance, though, Trump will not exercise discretion. Anyone who votes for him can have on their tiny conscience the coming images of families being loaded onto trains and shipped off to oblivion.

The most confounding element of this election is the ability of the GOP MAGAts to listen to Trump speak and still consider giving him their vote. The broadcast and social media ether are filled with his strange non-sequiturs and and speech pathologies that would have him sent to a rest home by most families. Instead, he’s running for president as if he is healthy and knows what he is doing and seems to be clinging to his 70 million supporters from the last election. Because he was in Detroit, a city I know well and where I have spent a fair amount of time, I watched Trump’s speech to see what he might tell the community’s economic leaders. I had been in the same room in 2000 when George W. Bush laid out his economic vision of tax cuts, reform of Social Security and Medicare, and job growth plans along with a policy of fiscal and compassionate conservatism.

Trump’s economic vision was a bit different.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “You know. It isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land on the moon within 12 inches of where they want to land or he gets the engines back. That was the first, I really…I said ‘who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming, cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom! Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up. And then I heard that he beat us in the popular vote. But that, I don’t know, I don’t know. Couldn’t fill up the eight circles. Couldn’t fill up the eight circles. I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person who did that, that was the best thing about his, the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the press stand in those circles, because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost. Oh, we lost. But we’re never going to let that happen again. We’ve been abused by other countries but we’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.”

Is there any remaining wonder why Biden decided not to run for reelection? He could not fill up his circles. And, for the record, Elon has never landed anything on the moon. He has landed a few rocket bodies on barges in the ocean after they have lifted cargo capsules into orbit. Not sure if Biden ever “filled up his circles,” but don’t even know if he had any or where they were. Trump, though, has not made a single public appearance where he has not sounded like some kind of a demented clown or an alcoholic street preacher predicting the end is near and angels and ariels will come and carry you away if you do not vote for him. An irreligious man is trying to expropriate faith and scripture and between his litany of sins continues to convince evangelicals he is an emissary of their god, if not god manifest.

And yet the race remains close because there appear to be millions of Americans who live in Trump’s illusions. They believe the government can create and steer hurricanes to state’s where he has majority support. They believe in Jewish space lasers and pizza parlor pedophile rings run by Democrats. They believe Trump is still the president and Biden is a hologram or an actor who is being controlled by satanic forces. They are convinced President Kennedy is still alive and with his son may still show up to help Trump take control of the government and they waited days at Dealey Plaza in Dallas for the dead JFK and his dead son, JFK Jr., to arrive as political saviors. Too many of them are still convinced the Covid virus was a hoax and that vaccines were part of a plot involving microchips, mass sterilization, or government control.

I do not believe there are enough MAGAts to reelect Trump, and even though the polls are close, I believe Trump fatigue and his rank idiocy will help people get America shed of this madman. Everybody knows who he is and what he wants and his ambitions are connected to himself and his family, not you, not this country. To vote for Trump is to surrender America’s imperfect democracy to a man who will destroy it in due course. I think the polls in these closing weeks will show the undecideds breaking toward Harris. According to Simon Rosenberg of Hopium, Republicans have dropped 60 polls in swing states in the past two weeks trying to push poll numbers in their direction. Do not fall for the cooked data. This race is not as close as they claim.

And I expect sanity to prevail.

 

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. His newest book will be released mid- 2023. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”

 

 

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16 comments

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  1. Kerri

    Don’t you mean MAGots?

  2. Phil Pryor

    Trump the slimy, sleazy, saharanskulled, simpleton, scummy, suppurating septic sore of a dud human is not fit to lead a mob of maggots to market. Who, and they are many, could be so low, stupid, sick, angry, tired and deluded as to back Trump. Who??

  3. JulianP

    Thank you James – topical, as always.
    Got to love those circles but.
    BTW, I noticed that only a few days ago Mr. Walz raised the spectre of the Electoral College presenting a real threat to a potential Harris win on the popular vote, saying the College should get the boot – no doubt having in mind the result in 2016.
    About a day or so ago he attempted to walk that back by saying all he was attempting to do was to “make sure that everybody understands their vote … matters.”.
    Conclusion: Trump is in with a chance with the Electoral College vote.

  4. B Sullivan

    The author of this article seems to be suffering under the delusion that the USA is a democracy. It is arguably the most anti-democratic nation on earth if you consider all the efforts it has made to overthrow democracies with regimes the USA objects to.

    It is the oligarchs who decide who governs in Washington not the people. As it was always intended to so be by the founding oligarchs.

  5. Frank

    Spot on B Sulivan,America is a war nation,and calling them a democracy is a joke,they are responsible for millions of people dying around the world,and to think Harris is going to be any better is totally delusional,who ever wins,its not going to be good for the American people or the rest of us in the world,nothing will change maybe inch a bit more closer to world war3 is all.

  6. Terence Mills

    Trump supporters have acknowledged a fundamental truth that will guide them to victory :

    ‘It’s not the way people vote that counts it’s how you count the votes that matters’

  7. Pete

    Agree B Sullivan, funny thing Aust is one of its faithful servants of US Inc. We even have a couple of holding companies set up on their behalf – Labor & LNP corporations.
    Re Trump, I’d vote for him to disrupt and get rid of the proto-communists currently in power. If Trump can combine with Kennedy and exit the WHO it’d be worth it. Not ideal but a transitionary step. The ideal would be for Trump to win and then a month later say ‘WHO sorted, I’m done, hello golf course’, leaving the rest of the sh*tshow to Kennedy to sort out.
    Hurricanes, lows and highs can be steered to a degree and rainfall, storms manipulated. In Aust there’s even a private company set up by David Miles doing that – https://www.milesresearch.org/
    The video clip ‘United Nations demonstrator’ on his site gives an idea of his work. If Miles company, with limited resources and minimal technology, can moderate weather by using ground-based EMF signals to redirect the flow paths of atmospheric rivers on a small scale, what does anyone think govts with access to gigawatt radar facilities and the ability to iodine cloud seed at altitude can do?
    As for turning a blind eye to local angst in Colorado re integrating masses of undocumented migrants, what will that achieve? If you look at the work of indi journos, there are reasons why locals are restless t’out the US:
    ‘Savanah Hernandez in Denver CO exposing the “Tren de Aragua”, (criminal gang) activity’
    h ttps://www.bitchute.com/video/KtZjMfQFMFsa

  8. GL

    He’s a nasty and petulant 12 year old mind in a crumbling 78 year old body.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4929331-trump-insults-harris/

    It’s all he has; insults, bile, tantrums and his malignant narcissism and ongoing cognitive decay means he’s only going to get worse. He’s also a pretty good candidate for a massive stroke.

    “Trump not expecting chaos on Election Day from his supporters”

    https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4930899-trump-not-expecting-chaos-on-election-day-from-his-supporters/

    Nope, that will raise it’s ugly and potentially violent head if he loses.

  9. Arnd

    The prospect of another four years of Trump’s whiny incoherence beamed into my lounge room via nightly news bulletins really is almost too much to contemplate.

    But I don’t much like “I am not a socialist!” Kamala, either. I don’t like any of’em – which might not be surprising, given my anarchist persuasion. Laffer-curve Ronnie, “Read-my-lips” Bush sr, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” Slick Willie C., the wildly misoverestimated Bush jr, “Yes we can (but most certainly won’t!)” Barack O., “We will not forgive, we will not forget!” Joseph B., and now possibly a deja-vu “Grab’em by the pussy” Donnie.

    Before Reagan, there was Carter, of whom I do not remember all that much.

    And before that, Nixon: I have faint memories of my parents taking me to my first “grown-up” outing, to watch “All The President’s Men” with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

    How much longer can this train crash called “Government of the United States” keep unfolding? How many sequels, each one worse than the one before, are there still to come?

  10. wam

    Why does Americophobe google elicit “Did you mean: americophile”? The education system that supports no americophobe, the septic xstian misogynist god and trump’s “It’s so simple,” form the trilogy that will stop enough women voting for Kamala, (how can trump get away with his pussy grabbing remark??) for trump to win. As an Americophobe, the septics deserve him, the world will get plenty to laugh about and is unlikely to lose
    ps
    Pete how close to the septics are we??? anglophobe is pommie hater but australophobe is australophone or australophile???
    ppps
    Michael what happened to ‘reflections’???

  11. Gregory

    Good article James. Hitting the nail squarely on the head once again. Unfortunately I’m not convinced by your last sentence. Sanity to prevail in America??? Is that even possible from a land where so many people seem clinically insane, gullibly brain-washed, cult indoctrinated or just many sandwiches short of a picnic? I guess we will find out next month just how bad the Divided States has gotten, or whether there are enough good people out there who truly care about their country to get off their arses and vote America’s biggest ever embarrassment out of the limelight forever.

  12. Max Gross

    I assume the comment by “Pete” is satire.

  13. Andrew Smith

    Like ’22 mid terms and media claims of a ‘red wave’ that neither existed nor eventuated.

    According to the Bulwark, Meidas etc. media, the close poll averages have been achieved by flooding the zone with GOP polls to manipulate averages ie. drag down Harris and boost Trump, for then media suggestion to take over….

    Early voting has started and at high rates, but silence from the GOP, suggesting early signs are not good, because if they were it would be shouted from the roof tops by the GOP and media?

    Manipulating perceptions, FoxNews Baier – Harris interview….

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