The previous president’s desperation might drive his actions even after the ultimate votes are solid.
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“Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral methods,” Peter Wehner wrote in The Atlantic as we speak. Amongst these is Trump’s insistence on refusing actuality: This weekend, the previous president pushed a weird conspiracy principle that the huge crowds at latest rallies for Kamala Harris had been faked by AI.
Apparently affected by a extreme case of crowd envy, Trump seized on right-wing social-media hypothesis and claimed that “NOBODY” had actually proven up at Harris’s rallies. Regardless of in depth photographic proof that hundreds of supporters had turned out at an airport in Detroit, Trump insisted that the crowds “DIDN’T EXIST.” In actual fact, he declared, “there was no one there,” and cited as proof “the reflection of the mirror like end on the Vice Presidential Aircraft,” which didn’t mirror photographs of the gang that was in any other case in plain sight.
Trump’s claims had been pathetically simple to debunk. His rally-crowd lie is yet one more of his denials of the reality in entrance of him. However it was additionally a warning of a unique kind: The previous president is brazenly laying the groundwork for difficult the legitimacy of the November election.
After claiming that Harris had “CHEATED on the airport,” Trump telegraphed his different message: “That is the way in which the Democrats win Elections, by CHEATING – And so they’re even worse on the Poll Field.” Trump has been workshopping his claims that Harris’s candidacy is illegitimate; he has already advised that the substitute of Joe Biden with Harris was someway “unconstitutional.” (It wasn’t, as a result of the Structure is silent on celebration nominations.) In his weekend rant, Trump advised that Harris “must be disqualified as a result of the creation of a faux picture is ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Anybody who does that can cheat at ANYTHING!”
Within the 2020 race, Trump used the lie that the election had been stolen to incite a violent assault on the nation’s Capitol; now he and his allies have the added benefit of an infrastructure for sowing chaos the subsequent time round. One in all Trump’s marketing campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, has already made it clear that Trump could combat the end result of the election lengthy after November 5. “It’s not over till he places his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita mentioned in a latest interview with Politico on the Republican Nationwide Conference. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone final month discovered that just about 70 pro-Trump election deniers function election officers in key battleground counties.
In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted guidelines requiring “cheap inquiry” earlier than election outcomes are licensed, a transfer that might give GOP county-election-board members the flexibility to reject the 2024 election’s final result. And as The Guardian studies, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the previous couple of years increase a community of activists targeted on native boards of elections.” On the nationwide degree, the Republican Nationwide Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, together with hundreds of ballot watchers, to concentrate on “Democrat makes an attempt to bypass the foundations.” In the meantime, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this 12 months for her position in making an attempt to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not responsible).
Then there may be the temper of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies concerning the 2020 election have change into a litmus check within the GOP, and a latest Pew Analysis Heart ballot discovered that though 77 p.c of Democratic voters consider that the election might be carried out “pretty and precisely,” lower than half of Republican voters place confidence in the system. Regardless of Harris’s latest surge, nearly all of Trump supporters are assured that he might be victorious. (A latest YouGov ballot discovered that just about eight in 10 Trump supporters assume he would win if pitted towards Harris.) Trump totally intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger on the risk that he might lose. As Wehner warned lately: “If in case you have mates who’re Trump worshippers, a phrase of counsel: They’re heading to a really darkish place psychologically … They felt this race was received; now it’s slipping away. Anticipate even higher self-delusion and extra poisonous rants.”
A defeated Trump may very well be much more harmful this 12 months than he was in 2020, as a result of the private stakes for him are larger than ever: Trump is already a convicted felon, but when he wins, he could make most of the remaining felony circumstances towards him go away. If he loses, he faces not solely private humiliation but in addition a possible authorized nightmare. This makes Trump a determined man—and that desperation might drive his actions even after the ultimate votes are solid.
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- Israel’s army is on excessive alert in anticipation of a attainable response from Iran and Hezbollah to the killing of a Hamas chief in Tehran; U.S. Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin despatched a guided-missile submarine to the area.
- Ukraine’s high army commander mentioned that Kyiv controls 1,000 sq. kilometers of Russian territory, seven days into its incursion over the Russian border.
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Who Needs a ‘Man in Finance’?
By Christine Emba
This 12 months’s “Music of the Summer time” is extremely contested; artists reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX, and Sabrina Carpenter have been duking it out on the high of the charts. However an sudden hit has emerged from TikTok. You will have heard it your self:
“I’m searching for a person in finance. Belief fund. Six-five. Blue eyes.” Repeat, till the person himself seems—or the ghost of Andrea Dworkin rises as much as roll her eyes.
Megan Boni, a video creator also called Lady on Sofa, shared the pattern in April with a prescient caption: “Did I simply write the music of the summer time?” Her 19-second clip has gone on to gather practically 60 million views and encourage a whole bunch of parodies and remixes—together with by music-industry superstars reminiscent of Diplo and David Guetta …
In interviews, Boni has mentioned that she made the music to poke enjoyable at daters with excessive requirements for potential companions. However whether or not or not it’s truly tongue in cheek, “Man in Finance” has taken off for cause. Its lyrics encapsulate two of the largest developments on the core of recent heterosexual courting: the passing of the girlboss period and the sudden return of classic gender norms.
Tradition Break
Learn. A new poem by Brad Walrond.
“we didn’t select one another / on that underground Wednesday evening / Harlem dance flooring. / We had been chosen.”
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