Gonna be a busy day. Delaware’s primary elections wind up today – polls close at 8 p.m. – and the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump begins at 9 p.m., about the time primary results should be coming in. We’ll have an open thread for debate watchers and another for primary watchers.
House Republicans are yet again threatening to hold their breath until they turn blue shut down the government unless they get what they want. This time it’s a bill that would force people to show proof of citizenship in order to vote. It stands no chance in the Senate, of course, not least because shutting down the government just before a big election probably isn’t going to win their party any votes.
Ron DeSantis had his hopes for national office smashed, but that hasn’t stopped him from running Florida as a literal police state. He deployed state police to the homes of people who signed a ballot petition that will let voters add abortion rights to the state constitution. Critics say it’s purely for voter intimidation purposes, as the deadline for challenging signatures has passed.
Ever wonder why all those Republicans who initially scorn Donald Trump come crawling back in supplication? Mark Leibovich has the answer, and it’s something Trump told him early in the 2016 primary campaign that he eventually won.
I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers,” by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.
“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
As for the people who vote for Trump, his strongest supporters aren’t who you think. Yes, they live in rural areas and earn less than urban elites, but they’re not the poor people, they’re the local gentry – in the words of author Arlie Russell Hochschild, people who are doing well within a region that was not – resentful that they’re culturally marginalized. I guess that’s why you see boat parades for Trump, which always made me wonder, “What the fuck are you whining about? You can afford a fucking boat!”
The floor’s yours.