The case against media coverage is over-wrought. But he’s still out of his mind.

Andrew Sullivan

Sep 06, 2024

It was the original insanity, the first time we saw, in front of our nose, as it were, a president proudly untethered to basic empirical reality. Trump’s inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama’s, if you can recall that initial contretemps, bigger than anybody else’s! (A statement instantly and incontrovertibly disproven with the naked eye.) And, eight years later, he’s still insistent. In a new coffee table photo-book of his career, we start with a picture of that crowd. And his commentary:

Democrats tried to disparage Crowd size, knowing that this was the Largest Inaugural Crowd EVER — See for yourself!

He is now obsessed with Harris’ crowd sizes, falsely claiming she used AI to make her crowds look bigger: “She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE.” And what about her virtual crowd size?

WE’RE DOMINATING HER ON SOCIAL MEDIA, SO SHE MAKES UP A FAKE LIST OF HER NUMBERS VERSUS MY NUMBERS. … IT’S ALL FAKE, IT’S ALL MISINFORMATION AND DISINFORMATION.

Not true, as any brief perusal of TikTok will prove. On August 30, after Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment, we got this:

Kamala ordered her Silicon Valley henchmen to censor free speech & rig the [2020] election. Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg admitted the collusion! She orchestrated the cover up of the Hunter Biden story by the FAKE NEWS MEDIA.

The all-powerful Kamala also took out Biden: “That was the first coup of the history of our country, and it was very successful.” In a speech for Moms For Liberty, Trump declared: “Think of it, your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.” There are many concerns about sex reassignment for children, but this has never, ever happened, and never, ever would. Like virtually everything else the man says, it’s completely fabricated out of thin air and a fat ego.

I wrote in my first column for New York Magazine in early 2017:

I keep asking myself this simple question: If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him?

To which my answer was, and is: you’d think he was so psychologically warped as to render him indistinguishable from someone mentally ill. If his psyche demands it, he will believe something is true. That is why he still insists he won landslide elections in both 2016 and 2020; it’s why he still insists there was massive electoral fraud; and ultimately it’s why he prevented the peaceful transfer of power on January 6.

As I continue to parse Kamala Harris’ contradictions, and rhetorical blather, and refusal to explain all her sudden alleged policy switches from four years ago, I don’t mean to elide the fact that her opponent is out of his mind. When recently asked why the price of meat remains so high, he replied:

You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon anymore. We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem. This was caused by energy. This was really caused by energy …

Wind farms are the real reason for the price of bacon. His position has nothing to do with his fight over a golf course in Scotland where a wind farm blotted his view. (“Unreliable” wind now provides nearly a third of the UK’s power needs.) Then this recent digression on the causes of climate change:

The problem is nuclear weapons, it’s nuclear warming. The level of power of the nuclear weapon today… You take a look, go back many many decades, and look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki — that was so many years ago. And now you look at today, and multiply that by what took place there by 300 or 400 times. And that’s the problem.

Nuclear warming? He elaborated to Elon Musk:

The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming.

I wonder why. Then this week, we got this about funding universal childcare:

[Y]ou have to have [childcare] — in this country you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to … Uh, those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care.

One of his main policy planks is a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods, and 60 percent on goods from China. It would give us both super-charged inflation and a depression. But in his nutty brain, he thinks it’s a tax on foreign countries, has no negative domestic impact, only adds to the government surplus, and will pay for everything any of us could possible desire for. And again, the only word for this is insane.

Some are incensed that after (much delayed) scrutiny of Biden’s mental deterioration, Trump still gets a pass for what in anyone else would be regarded as utter derangement. The trouble with this argument — see Jim Fallows’ Twitter feed for the full huff-and-puff — is that Biden was clearly declining fast because of incipient dementia and physical frailty, which is a story; and Trump has always been nuts, is not appreciably nuttier than he ever was, and, in stark contrast with Biden, seems physically robust.

The MSM is dead right to report every single one of these madnesses, but to frame every news story with the narrative of Trump’s mental illness is not and cannot be the job of the reporter. This deranged con-man was president for four years — with of all this plain to see — and is still the likeliest winner of this election. Half the country takes him seriously, and they think — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that he is mentally fit to perform the most powerful job in the world.

It’s merely our job, as citizens and voters, to note that we have one mentally ill candidate in this race and one mediocre but sane one. And to vote accordingly.

Biden Has Solved The Immigration Problem!

Well, something like that. Despite insisting that nothing could be done at the Southern border without bipartisan legislation along the lines of the Lankford bill, the president has slashed the number of illegal arrivals by half this year. How? A simple executive order made a difference:

Under the new rules, border agents are no longer required to ask migrants whether they fear for their lives if they are returned home … The administration believes the new screening process is more fair, because migrants are more likely to express fear if they are prompted with a question.

And it worked:

In July, there were about 56,000 illegal crossings, the lowest monthly tally of the Biden administration. In December [2023] alone, that number was 250,000.

Now, the administration is looking for a way to make this permanent:

Under the June order, the restrictions on asylum would lift when the number of people trying to cross illegally each day drops below 1,500 for one week … Now, administration officials want to extend the required period of lower crossings to several weeks (my italics), according to two people with knowledge of the order. That change would make it extraordinarily unlikely that the restrictions would lift any time soon.

Yes, this reneges on an old American promise. But the world has changed, mass migration is intensifying, and asylum was never meant to include mere escape from lower living standards or crime. Given the massive abuse of asylum claims in recent years, Biden’s shift is a pragmatic move — even though it is reminiscent of Trump, even though it may turn away some worthy cases, and even though Biden previously said he had no ability to do it.

If Kamala Harris ever gives another interview before the election, or bothers to add actual policy positions to her website, it would be worth asking her if she approves of this move and is proud of her administration’s newfound success, or whether she intends to abandon it in office and believes it is inhumane. If Trump is capable of it, he should ask her in the debate if she’s happy that President Biden is now all but copying Trump’s methods of keeping fraudulent asylum cases out of the country.

Back On The Dishcast: Eric Kaufmann

Eric is a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he runs the new Centre for Heterodox Social Science. He’s also an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His new book is The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism (its title in the UK is Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution), which blames liberals — not leftists — for woke excess.

Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on why race/gender/sexuality are considered sacred, and whether peak woke is past us. That link also takes you to a ton of commentary on our popular pod with James Carville, as well as continued reader debate over the presidential race.

Money Quotes For The Week

“Harris should hang out in the coconut tree and not release any economic plans that can’t fit within a Venn diagram. To win, Harris doesn’t need policy. She just needs vibes,” – Peter Rothpletz, TNR.

“Free speech, the free exchange of ideas, and the concept of a Fourth Estate are entirely theoretical to [Harris’ defenders]. All are secondary or tertiary to winning,” – Ross Barkan.

“Kamala Harris is a radical liberal who would raise taxes, take away guns & health insurance, and explode the size and power of the federal gov’t. She wants to recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle. We won’t give her the chance,” – Liz Cheney, August 2020.

“Kamala Harris has been leading the Administration’s $42B plan for expanding Internet service for 1,023 days and zero people have been connected,” – Erick Erickson.

“Why does my brain not work right? Cause I was born wrong!!!” – Audrey Hale, the trans murderer of three children and three adults at the Covenant School, March 2023.

“I would say about 75% of the arrests in Midtown Manhattan are migrants … [Y]ou can’t be 100% sure [they’re migrants] unless you arrest them in a shelter or they’re dumb enough to give you a shelter address,” – a NYC cop on the prohibition against asking the immigration status of offenders.

“I think we need to entertain the hypothesis that he’s simply a person who’s wrong about everything, pretty much; and his true achievement is one of stamina and quantity, which I do not mean in a snide, negative way. I find that extraordinarily impressive,” – Tyler Cowen on Noam Chomsky.

The View From Your Window

Chicago, Illinois, 12.25 pm

Dissents Of The Week

On my latest column grappling with the Harris candidacy, a reader writes:

You really don’t see the irony, do you? Kamala Harris publicly shifts to the center, and rather than see it as a victory over the woke-ism you’re obsessed with, you react with skepticism and instead parse her past record for any statements she’s ever made that would reveal the “real,” woke Kamala.

Where’s the irony in that, you ask? It’s that you treat wokeness as an immutable aspect of one’s core identity, cast in stone, that can be identified by a deep dive into one’s past statements in search of anything they’ve ever said that fails the test — and that, once found, is grounds to forever dismiss them as irreparably unsuitable. In doing so, you’re guilty of the very same sins, the very same way of judging a person, as the cancel culture warriors who went digging into your New Republic record to cancel you. You label someone as “woke” the same way others label someone “racist.”

If we’re ever going to move past the mindset of cancel culture, it has to start with embracing the reality that people’s views can and should change over time; that people are allowed to learn from their mistakes and should be encouraged to do so, rather than forever be tarred for having made any statement in the past that doesn’t retroactively meet some current litmus test; and that nobody, nobody, should be forever defined as any one thing, not when they’ve signaled a willingness to evolve. Much like with racism, the only way out of wokeism is to reward those who, however belatedly, come around to your way of thinking — not to just keep pointing backward for having failed to pass the test soon enough.

I very much agree. But the move to the center has either been almost entirely rhetorical — using the word “freedom”, for example — or conveyed by anonymous campaign sources. The website has zero policies on it. She picked as her vice president the wokest governor in America. On nine clear shifts in policy — from Medicare for All (now against) to banning fracking — she has in person explained exactly none, while insisting her “values have not changed.” Forgive me for skepticism, but when a candidate for president refuses to explain her policy shifts in her own words in public, I remain dubious.

Another reader touches on immigration:

You claim that Kamala wants the Lankford bill because she wants weaker restrictions than what Biden has imposed by executive order. Perhaps, as a lawyer, she knows that executive orders, especially on the border, can be overturned by the courts. So having actual legislation is a way to fix the problem in a sustainable way. When there is a logical explanation for a position, that might be a good reason it is chosen.

You probably choose the alternative reason because you suppose that Kamala of 2019 is the true Kamala; that in a primary with Bernie and Warren she tacked left not to be competitive, but because that was her true essence (unlike when she was CA’s attorney general). But perhaps 2019 Kamala was the posturing Kamala, and centrist Kamala of 2024 is the real deal. Is there any evidence at all for your conjecture over mine? Not that I can see — unless you believe that people only reveal their true instincts when running in primaries that cater to extreme base voters.

No evidence either way, to be honest. She has no policy proposals on her website! But she is the candidate of the woke elite, marinated in its subculture, and a creature of the Democratic lobby groups. She’s a California Democrat. Before the last election, as Biden was running (disingenuously) as a moderate, Harris personally tweeted a cartoon defending equality of outcomes over equality of opportunity. She didn’t have to do that. As vice president, she has elaborated on her belief that government should ensure that “we all end up in the same place,” i.e. communism. “We are proud of the fact that equity is one of our guiding principles,” she once declared.

When she insists that “my values haven’t changed,” and says nothing explicitly about which policies she once backed and now doesn’t and why, I believe her. But if she were to come out and publicly say that she has grown or tell us which policies she has changed her mind on over the years, and why, I’m all ears. But what I’m hearing is the sound of some deeply cynical crickets.

Another reader has a “simple question”:

Would you NOT vote for a goldfish over Trump?

You’re grading Kamala’s first interview on some kind of objective scale of political skill and character while you must be grading Trump on a curve of presidential aptitude in which a rabid hyena is the median. An objective apples-to-apples comparison of her interview and any interview Trump has ever given puts her light-years ahead of him, even if on an objective scale of political talent she might have earned a C+.

There is nothing partisan about preferring absolutely anyone (or anything) that hasn’t attempted to undermine our democracy, including a goldfish. And compared to any goldfish I’ve ever seen interviewed, Kamala did an outstanding job!

This is what Kamala is relying on: ignoring everything about her in order to keep Trump out of the White House. My reader is perfectly entitled to this point of view, and I take the point, but I’m a writer, and it’s not my job to cheerlead but to hold to account. I’ve done that with Trump and Biden for over eight years. I’ll do the same with Harris.

Another reader doesn’t think I should abstain from voting this year:

You’re overthinking this. Voting isn’t about you. Voting is about choosing the best, or the least bad, of the realistic alternatives. That’s all. I take a backseat to no one in my loathing of Donald Trump, but I would vote for him without hesitation if I believed the alternative was even worse.

The most important reason to vote for Harris is that if she wins, there WILL be a legitimate election in 2028. It is not hyperbole to say that this could be our last fair election for a long time. All it takes is for a few critical states to staff their election divisions entirely with people who intend to manipulate election results to make sure that important offices are won by MAGA loyalists, with a corrupt DOJ that lets it happen.

Yes, you live in a reliably blue state, but your vote still counts toward the national popular vote results. If Harris crushes Trump in the popular vote, public unrest is less likely if she wins the election in the Electoral College. And if she loses the election, a commanding majority of the popular vote might impede Trump somewhat. The effect might be small, but at least it’s something. Abstaining doesn’t help at all. We all have one chance to do our small part to save democracy and the rule of law in our country, and I hope you take it.

Don’t rush me! In the meantime, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Mental Health Break

A bunch of silly and insane ping-pong moves:

In The ‘Stacks

• Pressure mounts on Bibi after six hostages are murdered, including a US citizen. Park MacDougald backs Bibi’s response.
• Jeremy Scahill warns, “Israel is in the midst of its largest scale assault of the occupied West Bank since 2002.” Continued here.
• In the wake of Ukraine’s weak incursion into Russia, the cabinet gets a big shakeup. Mearsheimer talks it over.
• Ann Coulter doesn’t buy the media narrative that Biden is now tougher on the border than Trump was.
• Will Trump and the House GOP shut down the government over “voter fraud”?
• Harris’ coalition appears to be whiter and wealthier than Biden’s in 2020.
• Cathy Young responds to my piece on Never Trumpers and concludes they can back Harris “without pain.”
• Abigail Shrier has a dim view of Harris and Walz when it comes to free speech.
• Dan Drezner talks up Harris on foreign policy chops.
• Konstantin tackles “the Woke Right, for which Tucker Carlson is the undisputed spiritual leader.”
• Ayaan delves into the growing political divide between the sexes.
• Zaid Jilani questions how useful “diversity” is to productivity.
• Solar power is growing exponentially.
• Michael Pollan appears on a new pod, Altered States, to discuss whether docs will soon prescribe MDMA.
• Jon Ronson, the consummate storyteller, starts a ‘stack.

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“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” – Orwell