Weekly News Roundup - 11/1/24

Round the bend // It's as close as it's been, though many of DJT's supporters are being told it's not // The election system is even more secure & stronger than it was in 2020

Nov 01, 2024

In 2024, the Border Stalkers Substack is featuring one news update a week, and one book a month, with weekly posts on each book. The book of the month schedule is here.

These weekly dispatches are designed for people who may not have time to do more than glance at the headlines, or who want to stay informed without becoming obsessed by politics and news. These roundups are a targeted way to get a sense of the shape of the past week on the national level. Without such a map, we can be disoriented, not knowing where we have been over the past several days, or where we may be going.

But by spending concentrated, limited time thinking about the big picture, we can devote more of our time to where “agency and justice begin and end,” as Karen Swallow Prior put it: “on the ground, bodily, in community and real relationships, in flesh and blood.”

Quotes of the Week

"We have culturally performed some kind of psychological experiment on ourselves where our relationship to media, our relationship to information, our relationship to fame, celebrity, has turned many of us into spectators who watch reality as though it were the first act of a movie which we hope is going to be good. So, the stakes, no one feels in their gut that they're part of the stream of history ... where things could really become unrecognizable and unrecognizably wrong with us as a democracy." - Sam Harris

"What has happened in our time is that the basic structure of public trust has changed. Trust no longer comes from the sense that those in the center, and in authority, have the answers—it’s not Eisenhower’s grin, Walter Cronkite’s glasses, or some president sitting with hands folded over a desk and speaking into the camera. Trust comes from the sense of immediacy and naturalness—from believing that the person you’re speaking with is communicating from their own heart and their own experience … As the old saw has it, ‘Everything is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.’” - Sam Kahn

"Thanks to a combination of new state laws and the inaction of legislators who could have made vote-counting more efficient — but didn’t — it may take even longer to declare a winner than it did in 2020, when news organizations called the race four days after Election Day ... Delays themselves are not evidence of a conspiracy. They should not breed mistrust. If either candidate jumps the gun and declares victory before the votes are counted, dismiss it as political posturing and know that each state’s rules will decide the outcome." - Ben Ginsberg

"Former president Donald Trump has left little room for doubt about his intentions. He will almost certainly declare victory on election night, as the votes are still being counted. He may turn out to be right. But if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, Trump will reject the result as corrupt and launch a scorched-earth campaign to overturn it ... But the arc of the evidence, based on interviews with state, local, and federal election officials, intelligence analysts, and expert observers, bends toward confidence. Since 2020, the nation’s electoral apparatus has upgraded its equipment, tightened its procedures, improved its audits, and hardened its defenses against subversion by bad actors, foreign or domestic. Ballot tabulators are air-gapped from the Internet and voter-verified paper records are the norm. Bipartisan reforms enacted in 2022 make it much harder to interfere with the appointment of electors who represent a state’s popular vote, and harder to block certification in Congress of the genuine electoral count. Courts continue to deny evidence-free claims of meddling. The final word on vote-certification in key swing states rests with governors from both parties who have defied election denialism at every turn. The system, according to everyone I asked, will hold up against Trump’s efforts to break it." - Barton Gellman

"We have been studying democratic crisis and authoritarianism for 30 years. Between the two of us, we have written five books on those subjects. We can think of few major national candidates for office in any democracy since World War II who have been this openly authoritarian. The view that Mr. Trump poses a grave threat to democracy is shared by his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, who called him ‘fascist to the core,’ and by his former chief of staff, retired Marine Gen. John Kelly, who described him as a fascist who prefers dictatorship to democracy." - Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt

"If this is America’s champion of free speech and architect of the new 'public square,' then God help it." - Luke Hallam

Big Stories This Week

An exhausted nation staggered and swerved through the final full week of the presidential campaign, with many looking away most of the time out of self-preservation. Kamala Harris tried to appeal to independent voters and Republicans who are unhappy with Trump. She held rallies in Houston with Beyonce and 30,000 supporters last Friday, and with an estimated 75,000 people in Washington, D.C. Trump went on Joe Rogan and held a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden with Tucker Carlson and around 20,000 fans.
64 million Americans had voted as of Friday morning. That's nearly half the 155 million votes cast in 2020.
Trump's supporters, meanwhile, and much of the right-wing media universe had a clear message for Trump's voters: he can't lose, he's going to win big, and if he somehow is said to have lost, it's fake and stolen. They are using partisan polling that is not accurate, as well as opaque online betting markets with large amounts being wagered on Trump winning from a small number of bettors, as a pretext for these claims. It's a clear-as-day, slow motion ramp up to provide a foundation of belief in Trump winning that will allow him to be believed by millions if he loses and says he actually won. It's the same playbook that Trump followed in 2020, before and after the election, when his supporters slung theories and sketchy videos around faster than they could be debunked, creating an atmosphere of confusion and murky distrust that allowed reality-defying belief to grow.
In actuality, the race is as close as it's been the entire time. That is still good for Trump, if he over performs the polls as he has in the past. But many of Trump’s supporters have a view of the race that is at odds with the overwhelming preponderance of data, because of media echo chambers.
Both candidates tried to capitalize on comments made by their opponents, in a way that belied the intensity of the last few days before the election. Trump hit Biden for saying his supporters were "garbage." Harris hit Trump for saying he'd protect women "whether they like it or not."
We may not know the winner this time next week. Read Ben Ginsberg's explanation for why.

Week in Review

Friday, Oct. 25

Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for the last two years, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The Washington Post's decision not to endorse a candidate for president creates an uproar in its own newsroom and amid subscribers. Two columnists quit, along with three of the paper's nine editorial board members.

Saturday, Oct. 26

Israel launches airstrikes against Iran, but Iran downplays the damage.

Sunday, Oct. 27

Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden. A comedian's joke about Puerto Rico being a "floating island of garbage" gets the most attention. But more consequentially, Tucker Carlson primes Trump supporters to reject any outcome in which the Republican does not win, claiming that it's not possible and implying that any win by Harris would be automatically suspect, regardless of whether there is any actual grounds for questioning the outcome. “It’s very hard for me to believe the rest of us are going to say, ‘You know what? ... She won fair and square ’cause she’s just so impressive. I don’t think so." Conservative writer Matt K. Lewis notes that "there is a real danger when media echo chambers falsely and knowingly tell half the country that their candidate is going to win. People wake up to the results the morning after the election, and are incredulous."
Actor Timothee Chalamet shows up at a Timothee Chalamet lookalike gathering in New York's Washington Square Park. The crowds at the event swell so big that the police disburse it, arresting four individuals, including one Chalamet impersonator.

Monday, Oct. 28

Donald Trump says there were 2,600 "fake ballots" discovered in Pennsylvania, and they were "all written by the same person." In reality, a local prosecutor in Lancaster County announced that applications for voting, not actual ballots, had included "incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information" in a batch of 2,500 submitted by groups who are typically paid to sign up new voters. "The Elections system in Lancaster County is secure. Our systems worked," District Attorney Heather Adams says in a statement.

Tuesday, Oct. 29

Kamala Harris speaks to an estimated 75,000 supporters in Washington, D.C. on the Ellipse, with the White House in the background. It's the same spot where Trump spoke on January 6, 2021, when he told them to go to the U.S. Capitol and continue their protest there, which led to the attack on the Capitol. "Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table," Harris says.
Trump repeats his falsehood about Lancaster County, Pa, and inflates it even further at a rally in Allentown, PA. "They've already started cheating in Lancaster. ... We caught them with 2,600 votes," Trump says of a situation that does not include any votes at all.
President Biden injects himself into the race in the final week, not helpfully for Harris. On a Zoom call with an advocacy group, he responds to the comment at Trump's rally about Puerto Rico being a "floating island of garbage." Biden says: "The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters.” The White House immediately tries to clean up the comment. “His demonization of Latinos is unconscionable. That’s all I meant to say," Biden says.
Washington Post reporters confirm that over 250,000 subscribers, around 10% of the Post's customers, have cancelled their subscriptions out of anger over owner Jeff Bezos' decision to not endorse a candidate for president. "In Hungary, newspapers were not destroyed by censorship, but rather by government pressure and threats to owners and advertisers. It’s now very easy to see how that could happen here," Anne Applebaum, a historian, is quoted as saying in another article in The Post.
Two Israeli airstrikes in Gaza kill at least 88 people.
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon is released from prison after serving four months for defying a subpoena in the congressional investigation into the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, defends the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate.

Wednesday, Oct. 30

Harris distances herself from Biden's comment. She says she disagrees “with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.” “I will represent all Americans, including those who don’t vote for me,” she says.
Trump stages a photo op with a garbage truck and puts on an orange vest, while telling his supporters: “They’ve treated you like garbage. The truth is, they’ve treated our whole country like garbage.”
North Korean troops wearing Russian uniforms are heading toward Ukraine, according to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
Police release some details about the man who set fire to ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington state, but have not yet apprehended him. The man has metal working experience and included messages that said, "Free Gaza."
The Los Angeles Dodgers defeat the New York Yankees in Game 5 of the World Series, winning the championship by four games to one. Celebratory crowds in parts of Los Angeles grow out of control, burning a bus and looting a Nike store, before being disbursed by police. About a dozen people are arrested.

Thursday, Oct. 31

Trump, at an event in Arizona, calls Liz Cheney -- one of his top critics -- a "radical war hawk" and says: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."
The Associated Press reports that the Biden White House altered the print transcript of Biden's remarks on Tuesday where he used the word garbage to make it look like he was not referring to Trump's supporters but to their actions.
Flooding in Spain kills at least 158 people.
Hamas rejects a temporary ceasefire plan, and Hezbollah rockets kill 7 people in Israel.

Friday, Nov. 1

Liz Cheney responds to Trump's comment about her the previous evening. "This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant," she writes on Twitter. Trump's campaign backpedals, saying his comments were "clearly describing a combat zone.”
Job growth was muted in October and unemployment remained flat at 4.1% according to the latest statistics.

Interesting Reads

John Fortier on the Integrity of American Elections, by Robert Doar for The American Enterprise Institute
How to Take the Constitution Seriously, by Yuval Levin for The American Enterprise Institute
How to Take the Constitution Seriously, by Yuval Levin for The American Enterprise Institute (video)
The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy, by Greg Ip for The Wall Street Journal
My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say Enough With Trump, by J. Michael Luttig for The New York Times
What Trump 2.0 Really Means, by Damon Linker for Persuasion
I’ve Been Through a Lot of Election Nights. Here’s How Nov. 5 May Go, by Ben Ginsberg for The New York Times
The Christians Trying to Restore Our Faith in Elections, by Harvest Prude for Christianity Today
Harris and Trump offer worlds-apart contrasts on top issues in presidential race, by Josh Boak, Jill Colvin and Seung Min Kim for The Associated Press
Amid Talk of Fascism, Trump’s Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past, by Peter Baker for The New York Times
Trump falsely claims noncitizen voter fraud is widespread. Here are 5 facts - by Laura Doan for CBS News
Late Abortions Rarely Happen, but They Still Dominate Politics, by Kate Zernike for The New York Times
Could Trump Win the Popular Vote but Lose the Electoral College? by Nate Cohn for The New York Times
Timothée Chalamet Showed Up at His Own Look-Alike Contest, by Victor Mather for The New York Times
We tried Christian nationalism in America. It went badly, by Bob Smietana for Religion News Service
The Danger to American Democracy, by Yascha Mounk for Persuasion

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