BRAT SUMMER… SPLAT FALL?

Donald Trump is ending the campaign with a spasm of foul language and attention-grabbing antics. Can Kamala Harris counter his media dominance… with normalcy?

• Polls continue to show Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump locked in a dead heat with only two weeks before the election, capping a race that, statistically speaking, has been more static than any presidential campaign in decades. The logjam is especially frustrating for Democrats, given the course of recent events. They’ve watched Harris launch a series of broadly successful media appearances, survive an antagonistic cage match-style interview on Fox News, hold dozens of rallies, and make social media-friendly jabs at MAGA supporters… while the polls barely budged. They continue to suggest Harris remains very slightly ahead of Trump. It’s a dynamic that Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) believes will deliver Harris a narrow victory, if she just stays the course. “If we do everything we’re supposed to do, we will win. If we do anything we’re not supposed to do, we will not,” Schatz told Pod Save America today.

• And yet Schatz’s rule only seems to apply to the veep. Every Democrat I’ve spoken to over the past week seems to ask the same question: How can Trump campaign so terribly, while still hanging in the race? In the past week, the dude has spoken in unfortunate graphic detail about Arnold Palmer’s naked manhood, invented the word “schlonged” while talking about the criminal sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein, proposed using military force against American citizens and urged the country to “go back to” 1798,  a time in U.S. history when, among other things, slavery was legal and women couldn’t vote. This afternoon, The Atlantic reported that Trump said: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had … People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.” He reportedly wasn’t aware that  Hitler’s generals plotted to assassinate him.

• Trump’s superpower has always been to manipulate the media with wild statements and stunts — a capacity that seemed to fade over the summer, when President Joe Biden stepped away from his campaign and Harris led the news. Now, Trump seems to be turning up the crazy to recapture the spotlight. “Maybe some of these hiccups, maybe the fact that he’s starting to turn down media opportunities, maybe the fact that he’s not even campaigning in swing states … could end up being, in retrospect, the reason he loses,” Schatz said. “If you took all the polling out of it, Kamala Harris is kicking ass and Donald Trump is melting down. And then if you put the polling into it, it’s damn close.”

• Sure, it’s damn close. And yet history suggests that tight polls actually favor Trump. In 2016, Trump famously defeated Hillary Clinton (in the Electoral College, not the popular vote), outperforming polls that showed him losing. In 2020, he outperformed his polls by an even greater margin, though he still lost to President Joe Biden. Pollsters refine their models every election cycle, and it’s always possible that they are, in fact, more or less accurate this time. But in the end, we’ll all find out how good they were together — after November 5. “Pollsters have tried very hard to correct for the error, but there’s no silver bullet,” Courtney Kennedy, of the Pew Research Center, told the Wall Street Journal.

The bottom line: Donald Trump is closing out the final weeks stronger than he did in 2016 and 2020 — even while flailing, making batshit racist statements, and exhibiting major signs of cognitive decline. If the American people still want him after all this, well that’s certainly a choice.

MAGA NIGHT RAW

The fight over who will have Donald Trump’s ear if he wins the election is ramping up. Will the White House be run by Trump’s golf buddies, his business cronies or a coterie of right-wing extremists? Boy it’ll be fun to find out! (Editor’s note: it will not, in fact, be any fun at all.)  

“Knife-fighting is underway” among three candidates for one of the most important jobs, the White House Chief of Staff, according to Politico. The top three combatants: Brooke Rollins, president of a MAGA think tank; Susie Wiles, his de facto campaign manager; and Kevin McCarthy, the disgraced former House speaker who was hated by basically everyone in Congress.

Trump hasn’t held any official meetings about who would serve in his cabinet, the outlet reports, but he’s prone to watching TV and saying, “He would be great at this,” or “She would be great at that.” Which is more like the way you watch “Survivor,” or, heck, even, “The Price is Right,” not staff the country’s leadership — but this is Trump we’re talking about. Names being floated for top spots include Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) — all far-right Trump loyalists unlikely to waver for the boss’s demands.

The Heritage Foundation, the think tank that created the far-right Project 2025 agenda, would likely fill in the gaps of a second Trump administration. According to the New York Times, 31 of its 40 authors and editors previously worked for Trump in some capacity. At least 144 of the project’s 267 contributors also served in his past administrations, campaign or transition teams

NEWS NEWS NEWS

The FBI announced an investigation today into the alleged leak of classified U.S. documents showing Israel’s potential plan to strike Iran. The documents were posted on an Iran-linked Telegram account, and the White House has said it doesn’t know whether they were leaked or hacked.

Canvassers for billionaire conspiracy theorist Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC may have tampered with GPS signals to say that they’ve knocked on doors that they haven’t, according to the Guardian. That could spell trouble for Trump, since his campaign has largely ceded its ground game to the America PAC.

Seventeen million ballots have already been cast in this election, showing that Americans’  love of early voting since the pandemic has stayed strong. Democrats are leading among the early votes so far, but Republicans are closing the gap. Funny, Trump now supports early voting… after pushing claims about how it leads to voting fraud. Shocking!

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon privately supports Kamala Harris for president, but doesn’t want to go public for fear of blowback if Trump wins, the New York Times reports. He has told confidantes that he would consider a job in a Harris administration as Treasury secretary, and described Trump’s election denialism as “close to a disqualifying factor,” the outlet writes. You know you’re really bad at keeping secrets when the world’s largest newspaper is airing your dirty laundry. Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone!

Gov. Gavin Newson (D-CA) is crafting plans, including an emergency disaster relief fund, in case Trump wins the election and refuses to give California federal money to fight natural disasters. That comes after reports that Trump, while president, hesitated to give the Golden State money to fight wildfires because its residents didn’t vote for him

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