Donny is Done

I will not believe it. I cannot. There is nothing left to know about Donald Trump. And I will not accept that even the most base and uneducated of Americans will offer him enough support to restore him to the White House. Just after writing those sentences, I went to the betting markets and saw that he was now leading Kamala Harris in the presidential race. Too many observers assign a level of credibility and accuracy to the thinking of the bettors, but that’s probably not wise. Decisions can be based on hype or responses to aggregated polls that include an overabundance of surveyors who work for conservative and GOP groups. Data gets distorted; opinions become influenced by skewed results.

The gambling markets can sometimes, however, capture consensus. Obama’s elections were both accurately predicted but in 2016 bettors put their money on Hilary Clinton and she was heavily favored over Trump until election night. The outcome defied expectations, which is also what happened when gamers tried to make money off the Brexit vote; they got it wrong. The true value of these markets is to capture in real time the impact of changes in sentiment among the electorate. Polls are more methodical and rife with latency. The assumption is not safe that people betting on elections are any more informed than the average voter. In fact, a large number of gamblers from any political party can easily skew results, which is what happens when party pols buy up thousands of books written by a favorite candidate and make it a faux bestseller.

Nonetheless, as I watched Trump on his “Insult America Tour,” I had to contemplate how in the hell the presidential race is even close. In Detroit, the biggest city in an important swing state, he ignored the billions spent on reinvestment and reinvention of the motor city and its vital emerging new economy. Ignorant of history, as he is of most subjects, he figured the people at the Detroit Economic Club would be on his side if he spoke condescendingly of their efforts to forge a different future by telling them that all of America would be as screwed up as where they are living if Harris wins in November.

“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit,” he said, “If (Harris is) your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

There was never any chance Trump was going to carry Detroit. President Biden won 94 percent of the vote in the last presidential contest and an energized electorate turned out more than 250,000 voters. The numbers are likely to be similar for Harris but Trump’s insult cuts more than just residents of Detroit. Michiganders have taken substantial pride in Motown’s turnaround, which did not escape the Democratic campaign’s attention. The rapid response ad below from Harris’ team, prompted by Trump’s ponderous stupidity, is one of the best political ads I’ve ever seen in decades of writing, reporting, and analyzing politics.

The man who believes dogs and cats, household pets, are on the dinner tables of Haitian immigrants in Ohio, zipped off to Aurora, Colorado after Detroit to inform them of a threat they had not noticed. Without their knowledge of the danger, Trump told the residents of the Denver suburb that they were being overrun by gangs from Venezuela, who came from dungeons and prisons and were being personally shipped in by Kamala Harris. His entire campaign has thematically been built on blaming immigrants. If anything bad has transpired in America, immigrants are the cause. Even though red states are complimenting FEMA for hurricane recovery, Trump has convinced his mindless minions there is no money for real relief because Harris has given it all to illegal immigrants. Who do we believe? The bronzer poster boy or the governors of states hit by hurricanes who are pleased with the assistance they are receiving from Washington?

Trump is promising to find and deport the estimated 11 million immigrants in the U.S. without documentation. Logistically, it is almost certainly impossible and another one of his hollow promises like a health care plan or infrastructure week. Regardless, he is describing a kind of jack-booted army of gunslinging agents of Homeland Security who will ferret out the immigrants, load them up in vans, and take their numbers to the border. That will not work, of course, even if he were able to put the pieces together to execute the assault of his stormtroopers. Mexico will only take back Mexican citizens and they account for less than half of undocumented people living here at 47 percent of the total. If he gets a chance, though, Trump will not exercise discretion. Anyone who votes for him can have on their tiny conscience the coming images of families being loaded onto trains and shipped off to oblivion.

The most confounding element of this election is the ability of the GOP MAGAts to listen to Trump speak and still consider giving him their vote. The broadcast and social media ether are filled with his strange non-sequiturs and speech pathologies that would have him sent to a rest home by most families. Instead, he’s running for president as if he is healthy and knows what he is doing and seems to be clinging to his 70 million supporters from the last election. Because he was in Detroit, a city I know well and where I have spent a fair amount of time, I watched Trump’s speech to see what he might tell the community’s economic leaders. I had been in the same room in 2000 when George W. Bush laid out his economic vision of tax cuts, reform of Social Security and Medicare, and job growth plans along with a policy of fiscal and compassionate conservatism.

Trump’s economic vision was a bit different.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “You know. It isn’t like Elon with his rocket ships that land on the moon within 12 inches of where they want to land or he gets the engines back. That was the first, I really...I said ‘who the hell did that?’ I saw engines about three, four years ago. These things were coming, cylinders, no wings, no nothing, and they’re coming down very slowly, landing on a raft in the middle of the ocean someplace with a circle. Boom! Reminded me of the Biden circles that he used to have, right? He’d have eight circles, and he couldn’t fill them up. And then I heard that he beat us in the popular vote. But that, I don’t know, I don’t know. Couldn’t fill up the eight circles. Couldn’t fill up the eight circles. I always loved those circles. They were so beautiful to look at. In fact, the person who did that, that was the best thing about his, the level of that circle was great. But they couldn’t get people, so they used to have the press stand in those circles, because they couldn’t get the people. Then I heard we lost. Oh, we lost. But we’re never going to let that happen again. We’ve been abused by other countries but we’ve been abused by our own politicians, really, more than other countries.”

Is there any remaining wonder why Biden decided not to run for reelection? He could not fill up his circles. And, for the record, Elon has never landed anything on the moon. He has landed a few rocket bodies on barges in the ocean after they have lifted cargo capsules into orbit. Not sure if Biden ever “filled up his circles,” but don’t even know if he had any or where they were. Trump, though, has not made a single public appearance where he has not sounded like some kind of a demented clown or an alcoholic street preacher predicting the end is near and angels and ariels will come and carry you away if you do not vote for him. An irreligious man is trying to expropriate faith and scripture and between his litany of sins continues to convince evangelicals he is an emissary of their god, if not god manifest.

And yet the race remains close because there appear to be millions of Americans who live in Trump’s illusions. They believe the government can create and steer hurricanes to state’s where he has majority support. They believe in Jewish space lasers and pizza parlor pedophile rings run by Democrats. They believe Trump is still the president and Biden is a hologram or an actor who is being controlled by satanic forces. They are convinced President Kennedy is still alive and with his son may still show up to help Trump take control of the government and they waited days at Dealey Plaza in Dallas for the dead JFK and his dead son, JFK Jr., to arrive as political saviors. Too many of them are still convinced the Covid virus was a hoax and that vaccines were part of a plot involving microchips, mass sterilization, or government control.

I do not believe there are enough MAGAts to reelect Trump, and even though the polls are close, I believe Trump fatigue and his rank idiocy will help people get America shed of this madman. Everybody knows who he is and what he wants and his ambitions are connected to himself and his family, not you, not this country. To vote for Trump is to surrender America’s imperfect democracy to a man who will destroy it in due course. I think the polls in these closing weeks will show the undecideds breaking toward Harris. According to Simon Rosenberg of Hopium, Republicans have dropped 60 polls in swing states in the past two weeks trying to push poll numbers in their direction. Do not fall for the cooked data. This race is not as close as they claim.

And I expect sanity to prevail.