Two Months to End Trump

Burn the village. Salt the earth. Kill the bards.

It’s Labor Day, and I’ve spent a couple mandatory days off the road.

By “mandatory” it meant my team, my beloved, and my body were screaming at me that 30 days on the road was enough, and a break from the travel, fundraising, speeches and meeting schedule (and something like 16 flights in that window) wasn’t an option. (Oh, and while I was doing all that I was also still writing and producing ads, doing press, doing podcasts, et al just as I normally do.)

They were right.

At 60, I may still have a demonic energy level that has broken younger staffers, but even I run out of gas after a point. So, I took a break, a breath, and stayed off the phone and computer for the last 96 hours. I also got to spend some time with Wednesday Eleanor Wilson, who is a magical little princess about whom you will never hear the last and if I get started, this essay will diverge into how ridiculously cute she is already.

Every one of us is about to enter the final sprint to the electoral finish line in the race to end all races. Two futures are roaring towards us, and even on Election Day, expect a fight to the finish. This race won’t be over until Kamala Harris puts her hand on the Bible while standing on the West Front of the Capitol Building and swears the oath.

This is my mandatory warning about complacency, laziness, or lack of imagination concerning just how evil, destructive, manipulative or violent Trump and his allies will become in their raging desperation to win.

Here are a few thoughts on where we stand:

Trump Is Cracking

Nothing has gone right for Donald Trump since Kamala Harris entered the race. Every day has been a deeper and deeper hole, his

The only thing saving Trump is the media’s insistence on the absurd double standard in which he is treated like a normal candidate, where his lunacies and cruelties are treated like

You’ll note that when Biden stuttered or slipped in a speech, it was front-page national news. When Trump drifts off in a Castro-esque ramblefart of a “speech” — and by speech, I mean a slurry of absurd lies, retcons of his terrible record, and leering at tween girls in the audience — the press is deeply uninterested. Even today, you get the “but everyone knows he’s crazy” and “that’s all baked in the cake” excuses.

Harris has an opportunity to break him in the coming debate personally. I’ll write a much longer debate prep piece shortly, but if she keeps the “bro, what the fuck is wrong with you, weirdo?” tone of the moment, she’ll be fine.

Trump spends his days largely stewing in his own oleaginous juices, golfing, and rage-tweeting. He’s narrowcasting to the Andrew Tate demo, not America. He feels trapped and angry, with his sense of risk and danger rising by the moment. He’s in a dark, angry place, and his audience is worse.

His campaign team is fractured and engaged in daily blamestorming. His fundraising is anemic. His Russian patron is about to be tossed out a window. The economy stubbornly refuses to conform to his bullshit. His pollster is digging deeper and deeper into rabbit holes to bring the Donold good news.

The Race Isn’t Over

Kamala Harris is doing very, very well in the race for President.

Her campaign is a fundraising juggernaut, her message is resonating with the American people, her charisma is drawing in new voters, and her events are blowing the doors off. I wouldn’t trade our position for Trump’s in the race at all.

The polling trend lines are moving in the right direction. Trump’s pathways to the Electoral College victory are narrowing — a few weeks ago, Trump’s team boasted of having 25 or more pathways to win. That number has inverted, with Harris having multiple paths to victory as Sunbelt states come in to play.

She can still lose.

No one wants to hear that.

No one wants to believe that.

Kamala Harris is turning out to be a great candidate. She is most certainly the best candidate to beat Trump, but the brutal reality of the Electoral College map and system means this race is still a knife fight in a phone booth. Depending on your model, the range is between an Electoral College tie to a decent win.

But campaigns are fickle pranksters. Externalities always occur. Just when you get complacent, the campaign gods slap you across the face hard. Don’t underestimate mischance, the MAGA media machine’s reality-distortion field, or Trump himself.

Trump’s loyal core of around 33% of the electorate is slightly lower in its intensity than in 2020 and meaningfully lower than in 2016, but that still means about 40 million Americans will crawl over broken glass for him. Never underestimate fanatics and a cult leader. Osama Bin Donald knows how to play, enrage, and motivate them, even in his vastly diminished state.

A Close Win Isn’t Enough

We need a blowout in the Electoral College.

We’ll never see another Reagan-Mondale-level blowout in our divided times, but we can’t have a tie-ball game. Our goal should be an election night that looks much more like 2008, though that is admittedly a stretch.

But, Rick, you ask…a win is a win, right?

Sadly, a win is absolutely not a win.

Joe Biden won the 2020 election 306-232, and Donald Trump nearly snatched it away between lawfare and a violent coup attempt.

The goal is not a win. The goal is political devastation for MAGA and the GOP. The goal is to break the back of the Trump movement and turn the very idea of Trump and his foul, low, cruel behavior into electoral poison.

It’s ambitious, certainly, but when American forces finally stormed the beaches of Normandy, the goal wasn’t to seize, say, Dusseldorf and give the Nazis a stern talking-to.

The goal was to drive to Berlin, break the Nazis, and hold them to account. (Oh, no, did I offend the MAGAe for making a comparison to the Nazis? Well, if the jackboot fits…)

I know it’s not fashionable to think about the total political destruction of the opposing party. Now that we’re off the fainting couch, you should be thinking about the total destruction of the MAGA GOP because they’re overtly planning much worse if they seize power.

It’s not a party. It’s an authoritarian cult that has no place in a representative democracy and a constitutional Republic. We need a center-right party, but MAGA isn’t it, and until Trump and MAGA are in the dustbin of history, no such party can emerge.

Nuclear Lawfare

This time, the legal teams they’re assembling aren’t the Four Seasons Total Landscaping crew from 2020. You won’t have a farty, dripping Rudy and his hapless wingmen. They’re more funded, more serious, and more determined. Expect them to work behind the scenes, not just on the air at Fox. Expect election complaints to be filed on election night in the key states.

In red states, the deck-stacking of local and state election boards will turn anything but a blowout into a Trump victory. One ex-GOPers in Georgia Think I’m exaggerating? Take a look at Georgia.

The Harris campaign and the DNC should escrow about $100 million for post-election legal battles. Trump will not go down without a legal fight.


Election Day Minefields

So you’re pumped up to vote for Harris? Good. Do you think it’s going to be easy? Think again.

The red state governments have also been following the Trump/MAGA playbook on purging the voter rolls in their states.

According to a Florida Bulldog report,”Voter records from South Florida’s three most populous counties reveal similar declines. In Miami-Dade 85,640 voters were moved from active to inactive status, with 90.75 percent being Democrats and NPAs; in Broward, 190,876 were moved to inactive status, with 84.24 percent being Democrats and NPAs; in Palm Beach, the active voter rolls were sliced by 156,148 voters, 82.75 percent of whom were registered Democrats or NPAs.”

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Ron DeSantis and his pet Elections Supervisor put passing an election purge bill at the top of their priority list and that it’s wildly over-purging Democrats. It's a total coincidence.

Over 7 million people have been purged nationally in the last year. One voter-modeling expert told me she believes about 2 million are legitimate drops — people who have died or moved out of state — but that most are driven by a deliberate winnowing plan to remove Democratic and NPA (non-party affiliated) voters from the registration rolls.

Have you checked yours lately?

If you live in a red state and haven’t voted as recently as two years ago, you may have been purged from the voter rolls. Almost every state allows you to check your voter registration status online. Vote.org can also help.

Do you have a current approved voter ID for your state? If you live in a red state, Voter ID laws passed in the last 2-4 years may invalidate your ID, particularly if you’re a non-driver. Need help with Voter ID? Contact Vote Riders, the leading national organization that helps people understand and obtain valid voter identification in their states.

If you can vote early, do it. If you can vote absentee, do it. (Those are getting harder, also, but we’re not quite to “only white male landowners” as the voting criteria.

Clausewitz says, “The activities characteristic of war may be split into two main categories: those that are merely preparations for war, and war proper.”

The preparations are over now. On the first day after Labor Day, get ready for “war proper.”