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JoinSign inHomePodcastsNewslettersSpecial ProjectsEventsFoundersStoreArchiveAboutShare this postThe BulwarkThe Soft Bigotry of Our Trump ExpectationsCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMoreMorning ShotsThe Soft Bigotry of Our Trump ExpectationsOne candidate gets graded like a normal candidate would. The other gets excused for talking about Arnold Palmer’s junk.Sam Stein and Andrew EggerOct 24, 2024430Share this postThe BulwarkThe Soft Bigotry of Our Trump ExpectationsCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMore34252ShareIf Donald Trump hadn’t backed out of it, we would have had a second presidential debate last night to chew over this morning. Frankly, of all his faults, his indifference to the needs of newsletter writers with copy to move may be the most unforgivable. Happy Thursday.Kamala Harris speaks as CNN moderator Anderson Cooper looks on during a Town Hall event at Sun Center Studios on October 23, 2024 in Aston, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Andrew Harnik / Getty Images.)Two Different Planetsby Sam SteinShortly after Kamala Harris’s CNN town hall last night, longtime Democratic operative David Axelrod was asked to assess her performance. His review was mixed. While Harris made her points, Axelrod noted that she also stumbled, often when she just didn’t want to answer the question posed to her.“Her habit is to kind of go to word-salad city,” he said. He went on to say Harris missed opportunities to distinguish herself from Biden on immigration. He added that she lacked the Clintonian touch of forging personal bonds with the people in the hall questioning her.All of these are valid criticisms, offered by someone who has pretty sterling credentials when it comes to matters of political stagecraft. And yet it is impossible to escape the larger, fundamentally slanted, context in which they were offered.Twenty-four hours earlier, on that very same network, another CNN panelist with clear partisan preferences was pressed on his candidate’s stumbles. But Scott Jennings wasn’t being pressed on any on-stage performance by Donald Trump. He was being asked to respond to an audio tape of Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, saying that the ex-president was definitionally a fascist, alongside reports that Trump had praised Hitler’s generals and the Führer himself. Jennings wasn’t just unbothered, he was dismissive.I would humbly submit to Mr. Kelly that if he’s worried about Hitler and he’s worried about fascism, he ought to pick up the newspaper. There’s thousands of Hitlers running around this country right now, running around college campuses, running around New York City chasing Jewish people around, blocking their access on college campuses.If ever there was an illustration of the divergent planes upon which this election is being waged, it is here. It’s not just that different layers of scrutiny are being applied to Harris and Trump—in which one gets graded like a normal politician while the other sees his abnormal behavior excused or refashioned as a virtue—it’s that our collective expectations for their respective performance are galaxies apart.She didn’t quite nail that answer on her biggest weakness. His line about Arnold Palmer’s dick was a bit odd but could win him some young male voters!If you need proof of these disparities, just go read Sarah Longwell’s great piece for us yesterday about the efforts among Trump sycophants to try and diminish and downplay Kelly’s remarks. Here’s a taste:Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends said of Trump’s praise for Nazi generals: “I can absolutely see him go, ‘It'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do,’ maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis, or whatever.” (Not a parody.)Sen. Bill Hagerty, on CNN, downplayed the entire revelation as a matter of personal dispute between two men. Kelly and Trump, he said, “were not a good fit.”There is something deeply pernicious to this routine. These people want you to forget the cumulative weight of the accusations against Trump, especially when those accusations are coming from his own former employees—many of them high-ranking military officers. They’re doing so not because they don’t believe the accusations but because they know how harmful they could be.And Sarah only scratched the surface. Bill Ackman, Trump’s conspiracy-addled hedge fund booster, dismissed Kelly as “one person stating a series of things" (there’s a dozen-plus people saying the same thing). Piers Morgan accused Harris of “playing the Trump/Hitler card”—as if Harris could or should have ignored Trump’s own former chief of staff’s testament to his dewy-eyed fascination with Hitler’s generals.So much ink has been spilt trying to explain the impulse of Trump’s most ardent backers to rush to defend the indefensible. Some probably do it out of personal loyalty. Some probably do it out of partisanship. Some probably just want to see liberals squirm. Some probably know it’s wrong but think Democrats are worse. In the end, what matters is that they do it, not why. What also matters is that we recognize the end result of it: One candidate gets treated entirely differently from the other.As Van Jones said later on last night on CNN: “He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless.”At The Bulwark, we don’t do double standards. We’re not on the red team or the blue team—we’re on Team Democracy. Join us.JoinThe Cavalry Isn’t Comingby Andrew EggerSomething odd has been happening on MAGA social media these past few days.Donald Trump has been hit by a barrage of October-surprise stories: testimony about his fascist tendencies from his former chief of staff John Kelly yesterday morning and yet another sexual-assault allegation—from a former model with ties to Jeffrey Epstein no less—yesterday afternoon. But MAGA influencers seem to be bracing themselves for something else.“They will deepfake Trump saying something he didn’t,” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec tweeted. “Screenshot this.”“You are about to see insanely desperate stuff from Democrats,” chimed in TPUSA’s Charlie Kirk. “Expect fake AI generated crap about Trump coming soon. Stay focused and VOTE!”Because we’ve apparently learned nothing over the last decade, all this kicked off a round of rampant online speculation about what such a story might entail. By Wednesday afternoon, a few shit-stirrers online said they knew precisely what the bombshell was, though no actual evidence of this alleged incident has been produced (and for that reason, we aren’t sharing their posts).All of this does create a compelling thought experiment: At this late date, what new fact could we possibly learn about the former president that would have the capacity to shock?Maybe the Kirks and Posobiecs of the world are doing preemptive damage control about some genuinely gnarly story. Maybe they’re just indulging in a little bankshot ratfucking, dangling a shiny new object to distract from the objectively insane fact that so many of Trump’s own former top allies are telling us he’s an authoritarian danger to the country.Ever since we took the Earth-2 fork in the road that led to Trump’s first election, many of his opponents have been falling into a comforting mental trap: hoping or expecting that some new revelation was surely bound to emerge, shining a light terrible enough to sear the scales from the eyes of Trump’s supporters and allow them to see him at last for what he was.But that hope remains sheer fantasy. Yesterday afternoon, David Frum had the correct take on these rumors: “Do you think somebody possibly has video of Trump mocking the handicapped, demeaning US prisoners of war, boasting about sexually assaulting women, praising Vladimir Putin, or urging a violent attack on the US Capitol? That would be huge.”We don’t know what stories may drop about Trump between now and the election. But the cavalry is not coming to save us. Yes, a mini-scandal could move some voters on the margin. But there is simply no revelation possible, at this late date and in this media environment, that would cause a mass exodus from his camp. They’re simply in too deep.It’s a grinding and exhausting: blowing every horn and clanging every gong about Trump’s manifest unfitness, all in the hope of moving some tiny sliver of voters across a few key states who might prove the pivotal swing. For the moment, that’s the best we can hope for. Figuring out what to do to heal our hopelessly divided people is the work that comes later.ShareQuick HitsAGAINST THE DOOMERS: We’re frequently tempted to slip into cynicism and nihilism about the state of the country around here. But up on the site today, Mona has a lovely piece reminding us of all the ways in which America remains a place to be proud of:After I voted yesterday, I made it a point to thank every poll worker and citizen volunteering at our polling place. They must have heard the stories of harassment, abuse, and threats that have skyrocketed since the Republican party got into the Big Lie business in 2020. . . . Still, at my polling place and across the nation, the poll workers show up. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re performing a civic function because they believe it’s important—and they’re so right. God bless them all.That civic-mindedness in a nihilistic moment is one of the things that is going right with America. There are so many others.Read the whole thing.DREW AND FRED: Look, it’s not Mitt Romney or George W Bush. But Harris got a decent GOP lawmaker endorsement today in the form of former Rep. Fred Upton. Upton, who voted for Trump’s impeachment, left office in 2022 (probably because he determined that the MAGA retribution wave would sweep him out). Hailing from Michigan, he could help the VP in that critical state.But the bigger Harris endorsement this morning probably comes from Drew Carey, who called Trump a “Hitler-loving, lying POS,” in his post explaining his vote for Harris. Think of all those late-stage Price is Right fans out there, hanging on his every tweet. This should tuck Arizona away.GOTTA TAKE AWAY THEIR BROADCASTING LICENSE NOW. THEM'S THE RULES: CNN is out this morning with a report that Fox News edited out “many of Trump’s rambling comments and false claims,” when it broadcast an interview with Trump following a “surprise” visit to a barbershop in the Bronx. Since editing a television interview is now a violation of the Geneva Conventions, we expect a few Truth Social posts in the next couple of hours calling on Fox to be taken off the air.NEVER KNOW UNLESS YOU TRY: Kamala Harris is spending a lot of time courting disaffected Republicans, but you don’t see a lot of Republicans out there explicitly courting Harris voters. In blue Maryland, Larry Hogan is the exception. Politico notes this morning that Hogan’s closing Senate ad features a ticket-splitting voter who plans to support both Harris and her former Republican governor:“Look, they’re both pro-choice,” says the voter, identified as Rebecca from the Democratic stronghold of Montgomery County, of Hogan and Democrat Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks. “But Hogan cut taxes, tolls and fees in Maryland.”She goes on to say that Hogan “works with both parties,” while Alsobrooks “would support her party 100 percent of the time, even their most extreme positions.”Cheap ShotsGenuinely sorry to make you see this one:430Share this postThe BulwarkThe Soft Bigotry of Our Trump ExpectationsCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMore34252SharePreviousNextDiscussion about this postCommentsRestacksLiberal CynicOct 24Liked by Andrew Egger"the cavalry is not coming to save us" Yes it is. We're the cavalry. Look for us at dawn on the 12th day. Expand full commentReplyShare4 repliesLinda Mitchell, KCMOOct 24I am sure you two boyz know why Dem pundits are critiquing Harris in ways they never, ever would dare to critique a 60-year-old male candidate, yes? The statement by Van Jones, "He gets to be lawless. She has to be flawless,” demonstrates that Harris is NOT being "graded like a normal candidate would." Indeed, the (white, male) thumb on the scale re: VP Harris is a lot of tonnage that demonstrates how antediluvian the Democratic Party's supposed boosters actually are. As the creator of Frank and Ernest (an old cartoon found on the funny pages) said about Ginger Rogers, "She did everything Fred did, but backwards and in high heels" so, too, does VP Harris have to endure the sneering perfectionism of male pundits whose "junk" (as you call it) feels a bit limpish as they ponder someone with a vagina sitting at the Resolute Desk. The blatant sexism and misogyny on display in this campaign has been epic--and it has appeared on both sides. CFDT and "JD Vance" (not his real name) might be more overt in their loathing of women, based on fear of that old Freudian vagina dentata idea, but all those people with dangling members on the other side, who should be fighting tooth and nail against criticizing VP Harris because she is not "perfect" and fighting for actually treating her like any other candidate, are instead sniping from the sidelines. Shame on them.Expand full commentReplyShare3 replies340 more comments...TopLatestDiscussionsNo postsReady for more?Join© 2025 Bulwark MediaPrivacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice Start WritingGet the appSubstack is the home for great cultureShareCopy linkFacebookEmailNotesMore





































































































































































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“In the end, what matters is that they do it, not why” , is the actually appropriate journalistic response to the maga movement .