Vee

I loved Chris Pennock on Dark Shadows but I always wondered why they never brought Tom O'Rourke back. Such a great actor in so many things, not just GL.

I'm speaking more to the tiresome, ancient sentiment on social media that everything Trump does is 4-D chess and will always succeed. It doesn't succeed, it hasn't been succeeding for some years now electorally. Marc Caputo, who is a slimeball, is out there laundering the Trump campaign line that cat-eating in Ohio is a great win for them because these smears vaguely go back to immigration. But that's just a line. It's cope from a campaign staff deep in the grips of delusion. "They're eating the cats" has done nothing to grow their base or cut into Harris. So what's left? 38% (and slowly fading) of whackjobs.

Real or staged, it's gonna have even less impact than the first one which blew away in a week and moved no voters - which I don't think any of us would've believed would happen the first time. He's just that unpopular. That's the surreal universe we live in (and the kind of pariah Trump is to anyone outside his 38% core base) where not one but two assassination attempts on a central presidential candidate and ex-president do nothing to his polls. This guy apparently was trying to push a unity ticket of (wait for it) Nikki Haley/Tulsi and Vivek Ramaswamy. He's just a weird crank.

But viewers are getting to know her, and she's opened up leads as a result of that as well as the debate. All of her polling on trust, personality, security, etc. have gone up over the last month and particularly in the last week. This is verifiable. And he hasn't crowded her out of the conversation. And this latest attempt is going to do even less for him than the first one did. Meanwhile, Laura Loomer and his Springfield smears aren't effective outside of his base - they've done nothing but turn more people outside of his shrinking base off. So why believe weak spin that everything he does is a success before it even happens, when it's proven to fail over and over? When was the last time Donald Trump won an election cycle, for himself or his party in a general or a midterm? Eight years ago.

Honestly, like what was posted above, most of these disasters are not deliberate. They are not about shifting focus. They are simply self-made disasters and impulsive fúck-ups which ultimately hurt him. Attacking the biggest pop star on the planet with hundreds of thousands if not millions of young fans (and suburban family fans, mothers, fathers, etc.) who she can mobilize to vote is not a brilliant plan or ploy - you can see GOP pundits all over social media dooming about it and saying that he has screwed himself with this. Inciting a race pogrom in Ohio when his opponent is opening up a lead and this kind of specific behavior turns off moderates and undecideds and causes him to bleed more of the support he has been bleeding for eight years is not a brilliant plan. And a potential new assassination attempt won't be a brilliant opening either. After the last attempt complete with fist-pump photo op and a yell of "fight!" faded within a week and did nothing for him, no second attempt will do anything either. It's not even going to knock Vance's blunder today out of the news for long. Look at the half-life the last assassination bit had and cut it in half, if that. As long as Trump, Vance and their people can't stop talking about Haitians, that story will continue to play even if there is a minimal interruption (which I doubt). The only way Trump knows how to operate is to flood the zone and never stop talking, hoping the last thing he did will fade away. But that hasn't worked In any election cycles since at least 2020, if not since 2018. And again, most of what he has done and is doing is just him riffing and lashing out - no one told him 'let's go after Taylor Swift.' That's the last thing they want. This is him just going wild. There is no master plan. There is no brilliant ploy. There is no media jiujitsu anymore. Nothing has helped his poll numbers. Nothing has changed the national conversation about him becoming the loser of this race. Nothing has changed the fact that he bombed the debate and Harris has opened up more leads as a result. He just looks like a blithering fool stepping on one rake after another. It is no longer a series of incidents that are fading; in an election cycle they all merely become cumulative, building on themselves into a mountain of shít that drags him deeper. That is his new reality. People need to accept that Trump is not some trailer trash Sun Tzu. It doesn't fit and it doesn't work.

Jonathan Martin's bad mood over the election continues to spiral as he grumbles about Trump's latest blunder and sounds exactly like an exasperated 'stick to policy' Republican pundit, then takes shots at the Harris team's well-received Swift lyric joke:

A longer thread of Vance's train wreck interview with Bash: And a damning, non-paywalled NYT investigation into John Roberts' influence on recent SCOTUS decisions.

If you liked that, you'll love this. Meanwhile:

This is only state polling for Iowa, but is a striking change from how Trump was doing there in June against Biden. (And it's a pre-debate poll.)

But it doesn't move new votes. And it alienates the middle (and yes, some of his peeling base) further. That's his problem, and that's why Harris is opening up since the debate.

Felicia has been pretty present over the last year IMO.

The outlier here (Atlas) also was pushing Herschel Walker beating Warnock a few years ago, I believe. It's also a conservative think tank. Judging by the above, it hasn't.

Trump and Vance's people are apparently livid about this piece and targeting Bouie.

Quantus is a nobody poll here. Meanwhile: I am loath to post Yashar, but:

Meanwhile, no, this is not going to energize his numbers or magically find new voters eager to vote for inciting bomb threats against schools. This is both disgusting and very bad for Trump/Vance.