Garbage Litters the Home Stretch

◼ Donald Trump played Madison Square Garden in New York City, headlining a rally that featured dozens of speakers over the course of hours. Thousands of supporters overflowed into the surrounding streets. It was an amazing spectacle and a show of force in the largest media market in the closing weeks of the election, and it was also offensive at times. This time the controversy was caused not by what Trump himself said but by a joke describing Puerto Rico as “garbage,” from insult comic Tony Hinchcliffe. Democrats hoped the remark would flip votes, especially among the Puerto Rican population in Pennsylvania. They also portrayed the venue choice as a nod to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally at MSG, as if that were the only association of an arena that has hosted concerts, sporting championships, the first Ali–Frazier fight, and the Democratic conventions that nominated Jimmy Carter twice and Bill Clinton the first time. By this logic, in a few days we will be able to say that Kamala Harris carried New York, the site of a 1939 Nazi rally.

◼ The Hinchcliffe controversy faded when Joe Biden said on a “get out the vote” Zoom call with Latinos two days later that “the only garbage I see out there is [Trump’s] supporters.” After a brief and unconvincing attempt by Harris-Biden media partisans to claim that Biden had in fact been referring to Trump’s “supporter’s” demonization of Puerto Rico, Biden, Harris, and other national Democrats have apologized or “clarified.” Meanwhile, Trump was last seen driving a garbage truck bedecked with American flags and Trump-Vance logos around Green Bay, Wis., with a knowing grin on his face.

◼ In a Washington Post op-ed explaining why the newspaper will not endorse a presidential candidate in this election or future ones, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, explained that the shift was not the product of intimidation, of a conflict of interest, or of a dirty quid pro quo but of the American public’s lack of trust in journalists as a group. “Our profession,” Bezos writes, “is now the least trusted of all,” and, in his view, the problem cannot be fixed while the members of that profession are seen openly siding with the politicians they have been asked to cover. Ending political endorsements, Bezos concluded, “is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”  This was not the view of most of the newspaper’s staff and contributors, a handful of whom quit or left the editorial board. Neither did it please the 250,000-plus readers—about 10 percent of the total number—who reportedly canceled their subscriptions in anger. But Bezos is correct: Americans do not trust the media, and the trend line is getting worse. If, as he insists, Bezos believes good journalism to be a vital component of American democracy, he is obliged to take seriously the contempt in which journalists are held. “We must be accurate,” Bezos proposed, “and we must be believed to be accurate.” Currently, “we are failing on the second requirement.” That assessment, as our own past corrections to Post stories have suggested, is charitable.

◼ Trump was interviewed on the Joe Rogan podcast last Friday. The three-hour conversation has racked up more than 41 million views on YouTube. Millions more listened on Spotify and other podcast apps. Trump was lively, funny, and outrageous—no one ever said the man wasn’t entertaining. Harris’s campaign declined to be interviewed on the show after Rogan rejected her demands that Rogan travel to Harris and that their conversation be limited to one hour. Will Trump’s interview change any votes? Who knows—though Rogan’s audience is disproportionately made up of just the kinds of voters both sides are trying to attract. It is, however, another example of the Harris campaign’s reluctance to expose its candidate to fora that aren’t carefully scripted.

◼ The Department of Justice, and Kristen Clarke of its Civil Rights Division, succeeded in convincing four federal judges—two Biden appointees and two Obama appointees—to prevent Virginia from removing noncitizens from the voter rolls. But they were overruled by the Supreme Court in a 6–3 decision. Governor Glenn Youngkin (R.), enforcing a Virginia law signed in 2006 by then-governor Tim Kaine (D.), ordered election officials to review on a daily basis the individual information received when a Virginian informs the state Department of Motor Vehicles that he or she is not a citizen. The DOJ argues that this “systematically” removes those voters, which federal law forbids during a 90-day “quiet period” before an election. The four judges mentioned above acknowledged that “a process is systematic if it uses a mass computerized data-matching process to identify and confirm names for removal without individualized information or investigation.” But the appeals court argued that “the challenged program does not require communication with or particularized investigation into any specific individual”—ignoring that Youngkin’s order covers only new, individualized information submitted personally to the DMV. The Supreme Court was right to prevent such a flimsy justification from being used to let noncitizens vote.

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◼ Johanna Olson-Kennedy began leading a research team in 2015 on the effects on adolescents of puberty-blocking drugs, and the project has received nearly $10 million in government funding since. The New York Times recently reported that the research team will not immediately release the data, owing to political concerns: Olson-Kennedy found that the drugs did not lead to improvements in mental health and expressed worry that the study’s findings could be “weaponized” in court to support legal bans on so-called gender-affirming care. In response, Republican lawmakers are rightly launching an investigation into the withholding of the data. Follow the science, unless it leads to the wrong place.

◼ Justin Trudeau is the latest Western leader to confess that his government’s immigration policy was unsustainable and driving social problems—crime, school overcrowding, housing shortages—into overdrive. He follows Leo Varadkar (Ireland) and Rishi Sunak (United Kingdom), both of whom must regret saying so too late to save their premierships. Trudeau began his tenure hoping that a high level of immigration would drive economic growth. But he has discovered not-so-hidden social costs as new residents have made claims on the public treasury and bidden up the price of scarce goods. Canada is aiming for a 21 percent drop in the number of permanent residents it allows per annum. Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship, admitted that the government should have acted earlier. Trudeau’s move was explicitly timed to match the souring mood of Canadians, a majority of whom are telling pollsters for the first time ever that there is too much immigration. Elections loom in the not-too-distant future, which is not a coincidence.

◼ North Korean troops are now in Ukraine, fighting alongside Russians. Some Americans think the United States should “pivot” to East Asia. Some East Asians are “pivoting” westward. World affairs are connected. The Russians are killing Ukrainians with Iranian drones. The United States has just sanctioned two Chinese companies for collaborating with Russia in drone-making. Taiwan looks nervously at Ukraine’s fate. Putin has a cluster of allies: China, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. An axis of evil, one might say.

◼ On Monday, tens of thousands of protesters gathered outside the parliament building in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, which lost a war, and territory, to Russia in 2008. Georgian Dream, the pro-Russian governing party, has claimed victory in Saturday’s parliamentary election, but Georgia’s pro-European president and opposition parties have cried foul. International observers describe the administration of the election as generally sound but express concern about reports of abuses leading up to it. They have noted “a pre-election environment marked by the ruling party’s misuse of public resources, vote buying, and voter intimidation, all of which contributed to an uneven playing field and undermined public and international trust in the possibility of a fair outcome,” U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken said in a statement issued on Sunday. The U.S joins “calls from international and local observers for a full investigation of all reports of election-related violations.” The Georgian opposition needs to marshal evidence for their charges. Meanwhile, Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who made his fortune in Russia and is the founder of Georgian Dream, vilifies NATO and speaks of a global “party of war,” hawking appeasement of Moscow and calling it peace.

◼ Congratulations are in order for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who defeated the New York Yankees four games to one to claim the franchise’s eighth World Series victory after dispatching the San Diego Padres and New York Mets in the playoffs. It was the fourth time that the Dodgers have bested the Yankees in twelve October meetings, but the first time the two teams had met since 1981. The hero of that 1981 Dodgers team, Fernando Valenzuela, died just before the Series opened. This Dodgers team was massively hyped after handing out a billion dollars’ worth of free-agent contracts in the offseason to Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, but even aside from Ohtani’s preexisting arm injury, the Dodgers overcame a pulverizing barrage of pitching injuries along the way. Even in a short series with a few lopsided games, the Series provided some electrifying drama, from World Series MVP Freddie Freeman’s come-from-behind walk-off grand slam in the 10th inning of Game One to the Dodgers erasing a five-run deficit, the largest ever in an elimination game, to win the clinching Game Five. Freeman, who homered in four consecutive games and needed just five games to tie the Series record with 12 RBI, likely put the icing on his case for Cooperstown. A Fall Classic indeed.