Squeaky, Sarah, and Ryan  🌴 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 🌴

Yet Again:    Another crazy who despite his lengthy criminal record possessed an AK 47 style rifle attempted to assassinate Trump yesterday as he played still another round of golf in Florida.  Assasination attempts are always bad, but still it’s worth putting this second attempt to take out Trump in historical perspective since it turns out that he’s not the first president, or in this case former president, to be targeted twice in one summer.  A Charlie Manson cult member named Lynette Alice ”Squeaky” Fromme and another woman named Sarah Jane Moore each tried to kill Gerald Ford within 17 days of each other in September 1975.  With AK 47s not yet in vogue, their attempts both involved somewhat less lethal pistols.  Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man who tried to shoot Trump this weekend, was captured not long after he was spotted hiding in some golf course bushes with his rifle point at Trump. Routh voted for Trump in 2016 but appears to have grown disillusioned with him over his pro-Russia/anti-Ukraine position thus his twisted rationale for attempting an assassination. By the way, after the attempts on his life, President Ford was persuaded to wear a special bullet proof trench coat.  Somehow, I doubt that Trump will follow suit. He also probably won’t give up playing golf despite the challenges and costs of protecting him in such wide-open spaces.  

Memes: We shouldn’t let the assassination attempt divert from all the other crazy things that Trump and his team said last week and continued to say over the weekend because those utterances are bad too, and they have the potential to be responsible for the loss of life among people who don’t have Secret Service protection teams or bullet proof trench coats.  In particular, there’s that whole “Haitians are eating pets” bull sh-t, sure the memes are funny but the hate part not so much.  VP candidate/Ohio Senator JD Vance admitted to CNN’s Dana Bash that he happily spreads and amplifies the lies despite knowing they’re fabricated because he just has to get Americans focused on the ills of illegal immigration. That is evil because those lies have already led to bomb threats, school closings and hospital lockdowns in Springfield and in some neighboring communities in Ohio including Dayton.  It’s also a misrepresentation of the status of the Haitians living in Springfield, they’re in the US legally having been granted temporary immigration status and permission to work due to the upheavals in their home country.  We shouldn’t be fooled by any of this, Taking a page from Goebbels and company, Trump and Vance are targeting Haitians to foment racial hatred, to freak out marginalized white voters to get them to show up and vote for him on election day.  Keeping with the theme of hate and division Trump’s Republican Party abettors are also running ads in Michigan’s Arab communities that highlight that Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff is Jewish because while Trump has been telling Jewish Americans that they’d be idiots to vote for “anti-Israel” Kamala, his team wants Arab Americans to believe that voting for “pro-Israel” Kamala would be equally idiotic.  To put the icing on the hate cake, before the assassination attempt sucked the oxygen out of the news cycle, Trump posted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT” on Truth Social yesterday. Though it would be easy to slough off his post as more kindergarten level sour grapes, there are Trump idolizers out there who will interpret it as a permission slip to hurt Swift who cancelled three Vienna performances in August in response to very real threats. After all, Trump’s all in on Laura Loomer, the right wing conspiracist who routinely spreads hatred across social media and asserts that Kamala who is either too pro-Israel or very anti-Israel is going to set up a caliphate.  Trump says he keeps Loomer around because despite her evil lies, she’s a “free spirit” who really likes him.  Isn’t that the only thing that matters?     

Polling:  For whatever it’s worth the national polls mostly show Kamala up a few more points. Nice but it’s winning the Electoral College vote that matters, and the important swing state polls remain too close for comfort, mostly within the margin of error. Curiously or, dare I optimistically say, an indication of things to come, some polls in states that don’t really matter are also moving in Kamala’s direction. According to the respected Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll Kamala is now down by only 4 points in Iowa where Biden was down 18 points in the Spring.  Similarly, Kamala is now down by only 5 points in Alaska, a state where Trump beat Biden by 10 points in 2020.  These trends which need to spill into the swing states to influence the outcome of the election, likely explain why the Republican machine is hyper focused on voter suppression because preventing blue votes from counting is just as effective as getting red voters to vote.    

#BringThemAllHomeNow