AS ELECTION NEARS, A FINAL TORRENT OF BS. Vice President Kamala Harris got some terrible news going into the last weekend of the presidential campaign when the Labor Department reported that the economy added just 12,000 jobs in October. Even with hurricanes and a Boeing strike, economists had expected a job gain of 100,000 or 110,000 jobs. Instead, the number was 12,000. In addition, the Labor Department revised figures for August and September downward by 112,000 jobs, “reflecting that the labor market was softer in the late summer than previously reported,” in the words of the Washington Post. Given that jobs reports have been revised downward in eight of the last 11 months, October’s 12,000 might even turn out to be less than zero.
So that is bad for an incumbent vice president trying to win the White House in a time of deep economic concerns among voters. Which may explain the tenor of the campaign in the last few days.
This morning, you might have woken up to the news that former President Donald Trump called for one of his highest-profile antagonists, former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, to be executed by firing squad. There it was on the Drudge Report: “TRUMP CALLS FOR CHENEY’S EXECUTION.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Trump “called for Liz Cheney being shot in the face by nine rifles.” It quickly became common among the journalistic elite to say that Trump had called for Cheney “to face a firing squad.” It was repeated over and over and over again.
If you have been alive and conscious since, say, 2015 and if you generally want to learn the whole story before becoming hysterical, you probably reacted by asking, “OK, what did Trump say?” And here is a transcript of what Trump said Sunday in Arizona during a conversation with Tucker Carlson. The passage in question came when Carlson asked Trump’s reaction to Cheney supporting Harris in the election. “I think it hurts Kamala a lot, actually,” Trump said. Then:
Look, she’s a deranged person. The reason she doesn’t like me is that she wanted to stay in Iraq, she wants to — tough, tough person, you know, people get killed all over, she’s real tough, right? … But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She wanted to go — she wanted to stay in Syria. I took them out. She wanted to stay in Iraq. I took them out. I mean, if it were up to her, we’d be in 50 different countries. No. 1, it’s very dangerous, No. 2, a lot of people get killed, and No. 3, it’s very, very expensive. … She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face. You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, ‘Oh, gee, well, let’s send, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy.’ But she’s a stupid person. And I used to have — I’d have meetings with a lot of people, and she always wanted to go to war with people.
Trump continued for several minutes, exploring, in addition to Cheney, the folly of much of the U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in the George W. Bush administration and its treatment of Cheney aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and much more. It was all delivered in classic Trump meandering style, but its basic reading of those events was correct. It was, with all the Trump flourishes, a pretty cogent analysis. If you would like to watch it yourself, go here, start at about 36:00, and listen for the next eight or so minutes. It was a revealing look at a former president’s view of U.S. military misadventures and some of the Republicans, sometimes referred to as “chickenhawks,” who advocated them. And no, Trump did not call for Liz Cheney to be executed by firing squad — or by another method, for that matter.
Nevertheless, for Trump’s adversaries in the Harris campaign, the Democratic Party, the activist world, and much of the media, the red light flashed on, the outrage machine roared into action, and the attacks began. Trump calls for executing his political enemies! Given that Election Day is less than 100 hours away, the attacks came with a heightened level of intensity. Yes, it’s crazy, but it is consuming one of the final news cycles before the election.
Some of the other stories dominating the final news cycles before the election were the Trump-Hitler brouhaha and the Puerto Rico garbage brouhaha. There is no time to go through them all again. But for a while, a brief while, it appeared that the Harris closing argument might be that Trump is Adolf Hitler redux. Then the conversation moved on to garbage, based on the insult comic’s unfunny joke at the Trump rally in Madison Square Garden. That consumed a day or two until President Joe Biden jumped in, and then the Trump side got its own outrage machine going and another news cycle was consumed until Trump sentenced Liz Cheney to death by firing squad.
Is that how the campaign ends? Yes, it is. Sure, there are still three days left before voting begins, and there can be three more ridiculous news cycles before the polls open. But this is how the campaign is going, and it will continue until it stops. What is next? Well, we haven’t heard about Vladimir Putin in the last several days, and it seems highly unlikely Democrats and their allies in the press would let the campaign end without another Putin cycle. But who knows? There could be something entirely different just waiting to become the most important topic in the world for a few hours. Here we go.
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