US Presidential Election 2024 - Here comes Agent Orange

Shes literally a heart beat away too. We used to laugh at sarah palin that time, this is much worse

Holy shit, talk about avoiding a direct question

https://twitter.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/1846635661639508240?t=kYkayUM9xqHiXooLLnZe6A&s=19

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A bad night for Dems and particularly female members of the party.

https://twitter.com/collinrugg/status/1846959933138579481?s=46

STOP THE FIGHT

That obama fella knows how to wear a suit

Don’t see why trump has shortened so much.

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Would it take much to sway the market?

I dunno tbh. People can lose if x or y wins so they may be hedging. People could have x or y at bigger prices and be laying off.

I think I read on Betfair the market has flopped 9 times.

What’s a few hundred k if it makes people believe Trump is gonna win… Twitter guy would have us believe Russia, China and Turkmenistan are all pushing hard for the Trumpster… be nothing for them to influence the market. They’d make it back in sweat shops and mines in an hour

That’s some lovely organ playing. Took me right back to the Christening scene in Godfather I

Betting markets probably responding to the tightness in the polls and the fact that Trump outperformed the polls in both ‘16 and ‘20. In the 2020 race Biden was +8 in national polls on Election Day and won +4. He was +6 in WI and only won by 0.8, same story in PA and AZ where the winning margin was several points less than most recent polls.
There’s talk that the pollsters have factored in the undercounting of Trump support into their current polls so supposedly more accurate. But who knows. If the trend of previous two elections continues then Trump would win.

Greg Sargent/

October 17, 2024

JUST BRUTAL

Harris’s Harsh Takedown of Fox’s Bret Baier Exposes MAGA’s Biggest Lie

For 10 years, Fox has built a fictional informational cocoon around Donald Trump. Kamala Harris just burst it open.

Judging by the video that Kamala Harris’s campaign is circulating, her aides are pleased with one particular exchange during her interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. In it, Harris dressed down Baier for playing video of Donald Trump that sanitized away his threat to unleash the military on “the enemy within.”

Many observers immediately surmised that this moment—which showed Harris digging in hard against Baier—could wreck Trump’s most cherished spin about Harris. As Andrew Egger noted at The Bulwark, Harris punctured the “right-wing caricature” of her as “an insipid airhead with no ability to think on her feet.”

But this is a seminal moment for another reason as well. It starkly revealed the degree to which Fox News—and by extension Trump’s other right-wing media propagandists—has constructed an informational universe around Trump that, at the most fundamental level, is comprehensively fictional.

MAGA’s biggest deception of all may be its portrayal of Trump as enjoying public support that is not just authentically, broadly, deeply majoritarian but also is only constrained from realizing its full explosive potential by interference from corrupt institutions like the media and the Deep State. The reality is the opposite: Without the massive propaganda support system he benefits from—and the gravitational pull it exerts on mainstream news outlets—Trump, who has never enjoyed majority support in this country, probably could not long politically survive.

Harris’s confrontation with Baier illustrates the point. After Harris pointed out that Trump has threatened to target an “enemy within,” Baier said that Fox News had asked Trump to address those comments at its town hall on Wednesday. Baier then played Trump’s response at that town hall, but he left out the footage of Trump recommitting to targeting the “enemy within,” only airing Trump’s insistence that he is the one treated as the enemy.

That makes Trump look uniformly like the victim of corrupt political prosecutions—prosecutions that are actually in keeping with the rule of law—while omitting Trump’s explicit doubling down on his threat. Harris called out the omission.

“With all due respect, that clip was not what he has been saying about ‘the enemy within,’” Harris noted. “You didn’t show that.”

Baier protested, but Harris kept it up, essentially accusing him of concealing what he knows to be true about Trump. “You and I both know that he has talked about turning the American military on the American people,” Harris said. She added:

He has talked about going after people that are engaged in peaceful protest. He has talked about locking people up because they disagree with him. This is a democracy. And in a democracy, the president of the United States, in the United States of America, should be willing to be able to handle criticism without saying he’d lock people up for doing it. And this is what is at stake.

What Harris revealed here is that, at the most basic level of all, Trump is campaigning on an explicit vow to treat the opposition and its voters as sub-American. He has threatened persecution of the “vermin” opposition, vowed to use federal disaster relief money to extort blue states into doing his bidding, floated sending the military into Democratic-run cities, and, now, made it all even more explicit with his latest “enemy within” rants.

Trump is essentially running on an open promise to serially violate his oath of office to carry out a kind of scorched-earth campaign against blue America. Baier knows all this is toxic among swing voters. And so the picture of Trump he presented was one in which the only victim of persecution is Trump himself.

What’s more, in a little-noticed move, Baier also inflated Trump’s public support. Baier asked Harris: “Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?” But that’s false: It’s largely tied in all of them, with Harris retaining an almost imperceptible edge in enough states to win the Electoral College. Baier also repeatedly said “half” or “50 percent” of the country backs Trump. But again, Trump has never enjoyed majority support at any point.

MAGA is a minoritarian movement that derives energy from treating itself as “the people” and the non-MAGA majority as rooted in political aspirations and beliefs that are in some sense illegitimate. Yet Baier erased Trump’s lack of majority support and downplayed his explicit campaigning on a vow to violate his oath of office toward the more populous rest of America that doesn’t support him. As Matt Gertz of Media Matters has shown, Fox often downplays and sugarcoats Trump’s most explicitly antidemocratic threats and actions. Baier carried out that project at an exceptionally high-profile moment.

Something similar happened with Baier’s widely discussed questions on immigration. It’s true that Harris had trouble answering them—no one would deny that the Biden administration has struggled to manage the immigration system—but this is partly because here, again, Baier constructed a largely imaginary world. The basic premise of his questions was that under Trump, all migrants were either detained all the way through their removals or forced to wait in Mexico; that none were released here; that crimes committed by migrants occurred only during the Biden years and are directly traceable to lax border policies.

But as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has demonstrated, none of this is true. During the period that Trump’s Remain in Mexico program was in effect, only a small minority of apprehended migrants were forced to wait there. And according to Reichlin-Melnick’s calculations, tens of thousands of migrants were released into the interior while Remain in Mexico was in place, which debunks the Fox News host’s suggestion that the program created some sort of enforcement panacea.

In fact, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier has shown, hundreds of thousands of migrants were released all throughout the Trump presidency. That’s fewer than under Biden—in part simply because more have migrated during his presidency for all sorts of complex geopolitical reasons—but far from the migrant release–free utopia Baier presented.

Why did Trump release so many migrants? Because Congress under-resources the executive for processing and detaining them and because the law requires some releases. In Baier’s fictional portrayal of the situation, if migrants are released, it can only be a function of the executive’s permissiveness. But every administration has done this—including Trump’s. How many migrants released by Trump then committed crimes? We don’t know—in part because Democrats don’t highlight such crimes to demonize immigrants the way Republicans do. In the universe Baier constructed, none of these complications exist.

Harris deserves credit for calling out Baier’s MAGA cleanup efforts. But all this raises a bigger question: How much public support would Trump have right now if Fox and other right-wing outlets had not been pumping out sanitizing propaganda about him and his presidency for the last 10 years?

Greg Sargent @GregTSargent

Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine*,* and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.

https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1847189471533432956?t=MR_zxvlW2itPh2nnobytrg&s=19

He’s a gas cunt

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Making America funny again.

A real character.

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Absolute savage.

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1729271152468367681814442476720

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Trump has @Little_Lord_Fauntleroy figured out

https://twitter.com/bennyjohnson/status/1847281628705435846?t=wLrgV4kX4i5skd5TSHHWgg&s=19

Latest Polls NY Times.

Trump looked tired and just like in 2016, like he doesnt actually want the job but he seems a bit livelier the last few days. Who knows what they injected him with. He doesn’t have the same outsider appeal he did before and is a bit of a beaten docket, except, Harris isn’t just a vapid suit, she represents a hard left turn for the Dems which most decent conservative Americans want nothing to do with. Black and Hispanic men are moving in droves towards the Republicans because they don’t want anything to do with woke politics. If it was Walz on a centrist platform he’d easily beat trump. Dems selling trump as armageddon doesn’t make much sense as he was already in there for four years, and it was stable.

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