Words Of Wisdom From Sean Trende

I've never understood the point of Sean Trende, or in fact of Real Clear Politics. I've commented on his obtuseness many times here. A week ago, I saw this piece at RCP, Please Don’t Pay (Much) Attention to Early Voting Numbers. I had an instinct that, although it was conventional wisdom, it wasn't going to age well, and I bookmarked it for review after the election. Here's what he said:

Every two years around this time, we finally get [solid numbers] in the form of early voting data. Like manna, these data seem heaven-sent, tempting those who analyze elections into making predictions about the future.

And, every two years around this time, I find myself writing the same column with the same message: Don’t do that. It is not manna. It is more akin to a poisoned chalice offered to a thirsty man.

. . . To see why this is a problem, it is useful to think of a party’s vote total as a part of an equation: The number of votes cast early times the party’s share of the early vote, plus the number of votes cast on Election Day times the party’s share of the Election Day vote. If you do this for both parties, you can calculate a winner.

Here’s the rub: We have only one of those four numbers. All we know is the number of votes being cast early. We might guess at a party’s vote share among the early votes by registration data, but even this is a fraught endeavor since we don’t know how registered independents are voting (if the state has party registration at all).

. . . Republicans are actively encouraging their voters to turn out early. So maybe what we’re seeing in states like North Carolina and Nevada is Republican enthusiasm in early voting that will result in fewer Election Day voters turning out. In other words, the strong Republican performances in early voting might cause a smaller Republican Election Day vote.

Except that that by November 4, the day before the election, even CNN could see what Trende couldn't:

The key states of North Carolina and Georgia both saw record numbers of voters participate in early in-person voting, with the totals in Georgia exceeding the numbers from 2020. The total pre-election voting in North Carolina, however, was still lower than four years ago due to significantly fewer people choosing to vote by mail.

. . . Republicans have made up more of the pre-election vote than they did in 2020. The Trump campaign made more of an effort this year to encourage Republicans to vote early and by mail, a major shift from messaging against pre-election voting in 2020.

Across the 27 states for which Catalist has comparable data, registered Democrats have cast 37% of pre-election ballots, while registered Republicans have cast 35%. That’s a significant tightening in the partisan gap since 2020, when, at the same point and in the same states, registered Democrats held a 12-percentage point lead – 42% to 30%.

In four of the seven key states that will likely decide the presidential election, voters register by party, and in every one of them, Republicans have made up a larger share of the pre-election vote than they did at the same time four years ago. Democrats in these states have overall decreased their share compared with 2020.

In other w0rds, by looking closely at early voting numbers, which Trende said please don't do, CNN came up with important insights into the election night outcome, which seem to have evaded Trende. Jim Hoft at The Gatewaay Pundit points out another intriguing development:

It’s still a bit early in the counting but it appears that Democrats and Kamala Harris not only lost the 2024 election to former President Donald Trump but they lost around 15 million votes in the past four years.

In 2020 Democrats and the legacy media claimed that Joe Biden tallied 81 million votes to defeat President Donald Trump who gained 74 million votes – more votes than any US president in history.

. . . Fast forward to 2024.

So far in 2024 Kamala Harris and Democrats were only able to must[er] 66 million votes – down 15 million from their 2020 total.

Those numbers are expected to rise in the coming days but it is unlikely that Kamala will get anywhere near 80 million votes.

On one hnnd, I think the shift in strategy to early voting was a consequence of Trump's seizure of the Republican National Committee during the 2024 primary season, control he never quite had in 2020. On the other, the decrease in Democrat vote count was almost certainly due to what I pointed out Monday, that Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz weren't just bad candidates or surrogates, they were all outright annoying, which caused even Democrats to stay home.

So far, neither Sean Trende nor anyone else at RCP has pointed this out.

Mark Halperin: Kamala Is Winning The Info Flow!

I've been noting here that Mark Halperin, who was banished from cushy corporate media jobs after sexual harassment allegations in 2017, has been workling to rehabilitate his career as a putative honest and non-partisan commentator in this year's election cycle. The problem is that, as I did in part, he grew up in Bethesda. I don't know where he lives now, but I do know you can take Mark Halperin out of Bethesda, but you can't take Bethesda out of Mark Halperin.

In yesterday's edition of his Morning Meeting show on 2WAY, embedded above, entitled "How to Lose an Election", he announces that Kamala is winning something called the info flow. At 7:08, he says,

. . . From Madison Square Garden until yesterday, [Trump] has lost the info flow. . . . Sean [Spicer}, do you agree that he has lost the information flow in the past week and explain your counterargument.

At 12:02, he demands that Sean

Name a good moment Trump has had since Monday [October 28].

Spicer, who seems like an agreeable sort of guy, and he probably doesn't want to lose his gig on the Morning Meeting, stutters and stumbles, appearing to forget one of Trump's best moments in the whole campaign, the garbage truck and the hi-vis vest at the Green Bay rally on October 30.

Halperin never really defines the information flow, and I had to do a web search to see if it means anything at all. Wikipedia says,

Information flow in an information theoretical context is the transfer of information from a variable x to a variable y in a given process.

Well, that clears it all up. Halperin seems to think it has something to do with Trump being dark, pessimistic, and rambling, while Kamla is bright and disciplined, and she has celebrities endorsing her, so she's gonna win. Or something like that. But later in the day, he returned to reporting the generally bad news for Democrats from the early voting patterns. So which is it? She could lose the popular vote, lose the Electoral College, but win the information flow?

As best I can see, Halperin is doing what he can not to disrupt the consensus psy op from corporate media at the end of the campaign, that Kamala has had a last-minute surge, and she's going to pull it out. There's been a coordinated dump of optimistic polls into the RCP aggregate that's erased the popular-vote lead Trump had last week, which I suspect doesn't even convince the corporate media who put this stuff out, and certainly not the editors at RCP, but they do it anyway.

Nevertheless, Halperin is fully aware that at this stage of his rehabilitation campaign, he absolutely can't come off looking like a Trumper, even if the real situation is that Trump is the likely winner. His goal is getting back in corporate media, not reporting the truth.

It occurred to me last night, and I don't know why it didn't earlier, that the public is tired of Kamala, Dougie, and Tim Walz, and they can't wait to get them off the news. This is behind the low Democrat turnout in early voting; the Democrats are just as tired of those characters as everyone else, and they're going to stay home today as well.

Halperin is no dummy; he's got to be fully aware of this, but he wants his corporate media career back, and he'll keep his mouth shut. He simply isn't an honest broker, he's from Bethesda, he wants his career back, and he can't be trusted.

Hugh Hewitt Storms Off Talk Show, Nobody Notices

I was a little surprised this morning to discover there had been some sort of non-event Friday where Hugh Hewitt, a talk show B-lister stormed off a Washington Post show,

“First Look,” the Post’s live show hosted by Jonathan Capehart, alongside Ruth Marcus, an associate editor and columnist at the Post, during a discussion over former President Donald Trump [sic] legal efforts in battleground states.

This happened Friday, but it didn't reach YouTube or the aggregators until this morning. It seems to me that this says something about Rush Limbaugh and the huge gap his departure has left in public discourse. Nobody has been able to replace him, least of all Hugh Hewitt, for all Hewitt seems to be trying. The whole episode has the air of something Hewitt cooked up to promote himself in the wake of Jeff Bezos's intervention at the Post:

“We are news people, even though we have opinions, and we have to report the whole story if we bring up part of the story,” Hewitt added. “So yes, he’s upset about Bucks County, but he was right, and he won in court. That’s the story.”

Capehart replied: “I don’t appreciate being lectured about reporting when, Hugh, many times you come here saying lots of things that aren’t based in fact.”

“I will not come back, Jonathan, how’s that? I’m done,” Hewitt fired back as he stood up from his chair and removed his earpiece. “This is the most unfair election ad I have ever been a part of.”

“You guys are working, that’s fine, I’m done,” Hewitt said before walking off screen.

Boy, he quit his job over principle! What a sacrifice! Except,

After storming off the show, Hewitt confirmed to Fox News that he had parted ways with The Post.

“I have in fact quit the Post but I was only writing a column for them every six weeks or so,” Hewitt told Fox.

So this was a gig that paid him a few hundred bucks, if that, every six weeks or so. He could afford to lose it if he could get publicity for coming out on Jeff Bezos's side, or something like that, except it looks like nobody actually noticed. He made a statement about it on YouTube this morning:

At 6:07, he says,

On Friday I quit the Washington Post, and some of you will know that. But I want to make sure you understand -- thank you to all of you who've texted me and posted me and sent me your kudos, thank you Elon Musk, thank you President Trump, everybodyh who's said something or anything else -- I just want you to know. Ruth Marcus has nothing to do with this. Ruth Marcus is my friend, Ruth Marcus is a fabulous jo0urnalist, she has got legal chops the equal of anyone in the business. Ruth and I are the same age. . .

He then goes on and on about how wonderful Ruth Marcus is, and then he expands into all the wonderful editors he's had at the Post: "You can be wrong, but not rotten." He lists all the wonderful editors by name,

Michael Duffy, Michael Larrabee, David Von Drehle, Mark Laswell, many others, the New Boston editorial page, David Shipley is a wonderfully nice man. Ruth is the equal of any edifor I've had over alol these years. . . . I quit the Post for reasons unrelated to any of that. . .

So, after all this kissy-kissy, he never quite gets to why, precisely, he quit the Post. I think this is because the only reason he did it was to call attention to himself. Rush Limbaugh has been off the scene for nearly four years, and nobody has risen to anything like the status he had before his death, least of all Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt in fact had been almost completely unknown before he was made a moderator for the February 25, 2016 Republican primary debate, where he pestered Trump with gotcha questions, only to have Trump reply,

First of all, very few people listen to your radio show, that’s the good news, which happens to be true – check out the ratings.

Commentators then noted that it was in fact a real challenge to find Hewitt's show on the air. I suspect that Hewitt's aim at the time was to do what Megyn Kelly had been unable to do in August 2015, end Trump's candidacy by taking him down with le mot juste. Nobody should try this, Trump will win it every time. Hewitt's main gig has always been a syndicated show with Salem Media, a Never Trump outlet. He couldn't manage for Salem Media the task Megyn Kelly had been assigned by Fox, but at least he kept his job.

But none of his self-promotion has managed to make him anything more than a B-lister.

How Many Pet Ferrets Are In California?

California and Hawaii are the only states that make it illegal to own a pet ferret. The reasons have never been clear, but more important, according to California's own Department of Fish and Wildlife,

Published estimates for total numbers of pet ferrets in California for the last 3 decades range from 30,000 to 1,000,000, but most cluster around 100,000.

According to this reddit thread,

I'm from California... Get them in Las Vegas, not Arizona. Just got to toss a blanket over them when you drive thru agriculture checkpoint.

Someone else posted,

[I]t only takes one assh* of a warden, AC, or cop to have your ferret confiscated, deported, or possibly euthanized. It's a risk, but there are supporters out there. Good luck!

Which brings us to the case of Peanut the Squirrel:

Peanut the Squirrel, a beloved pet who was an internet sensation before New York state officials confiscated and then killed it, is drawing even more social media attention after the rodent's death.

The state Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) seized Peanut and a raccoon named Fred from owner Mark Longo's home and animal sanctuary in rural Pine City, near the Pennsylvania border, earlier this week. The agency, which said it had received complaints that wildlife was being kept illegally, then euthanized the critters, to the horror of Longo and about 550,000 of Peanut's best friends. As word got out, the X memes went up.

. . . Longo told his followers that he had taken the rodent in after he witnessed the squirrel’s mother being hit by a car. The squirrel refused to return to the wild and became attached to the couple.

The legality of pet squirrels varies from state to state:

Squirrels are considered exotic animals and many Americans do enjoy keeping them as pets. In some states, you can own a pet squirrel with no paperwork or permits required. Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming all allow people to own pet squirrels.

Additionally, Nebraska requires that the squirrel wasn’t captured from the wild for it to be a legal pet. New Jersey allows red squirrels and flying squirrels to be kept as pets. South Dakota allows squirrels to be kept as pets as long as they were purchased from a state where they are legal. Massachusetts and Montana allow pet squirrels as long as they are flying squirrels.

Other states allow pet squirrels if a permit is obtained. These states are Delaware, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Florida allows for many exotic animals to be owned, but squirrels are not specifically mentioned. It is unclear if squirrels can be kept as pets in Florida.

I haven't been able to find statistics on how many squirrels are kept as pets in states that prohibit the practice. Some states, including California, are especially strict about even feeding wild animals. In San Bernardino County:

§ 32.1301 Food Left Outside for Certain Mammalian Predators. (a) No person shall feed or in any manner provide food for one or more non-domesticated mammalian predators. A non-domesticated mammalian predator shall include coyotes, raccoons, foxes, opossums, bears, mountain lions, and bobcats.

§ 32.1302 Food Left Outside for Any Animal During Certain Hours. No person shall leave or permit to be left out-of-doors food for any animal between the hours of 10:00 p.m. of any one day and 6:00 a.m. of the following day, unless the area where the food is left is not accessible to non-domesticated mammalian predators.

My wife and I, had we lived there, would have been in violation of these ordinances simply by leaving bread out for our backyard birds if a possum had happened on it, or indeed, even if a bird had found it between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM.

Most of these laws are simply unenforceable. At best, they're equivalent to the current situation with marijuana laws: even in states where marijuana is still illegal, police will usually just seize it for destruction or stamp it out on the ground unless the quantity appears to be for sale; they'll usually either issue a citation or just a verbal warning. As a practical matter, officers have fairly wide discretion, and they recognize that when it's legal in one state but still illegal in their jurisdiction, the perception of fairness is important.

So it's particularly puzzling that the New York authorities treated Mark Longo so harshly:

Mark Longo, whose pet P’nut captured the hearts of 3 million social media users, was stunned when a convoy of vehicles carrying officials from the state departments of Environmental Conservation and Health arrived at his Pine City home Wednesday.

They served him with a surprise warrant allowing them to snatch away P’nut the squirrel and Fred, a raccoon he’d taken in.

“They treated me like I was a terrorist. They treated this raid as if I was a drug dealer. They ransacked my house for five hours,” Longo told The Post Saturday.

“They asked my wife, who is of German descent, what her immigration status was. They asked if I had cameras in my house. They wouldn’t allow me to go to the bathroom without a police escort, who then checked the back of the toilet to see if I was hiding anything there.”

State laws allowing raccoons as pets vary as widely as those for squirrels. In addition, Longo was apparently working to obtain legal status for the squirrel:

State law requires people to get a license if they wish to own a wild animal. Longo has said he was working to get Peanut - also known as P'Nut or PNUT - certified as an educational animal.

Those who watch On Patrol: Live know that officers who stop motorists for registration irregularities are often lenient if the motorists can explain what they're doing to get the problem straightened out, recognizing that they need the car to get to work. I'm puzzled that the New York authorities couldn't take a similar position with Longo, considering the high public profile of the case. According to the link,

"We will make a stance on how this government and New York state utilizes their resources," Mark Longo said in a phone interview.

He declined to specify his possible next steps but said officials would hear from him soon about what happened to Peanut the squirrel and Fred, a rescued raccoon that was also confiscated and put down.

. . . Longo said Saturday that he didn't see Peanut bite anyone during what he described as an hourslong, heavy-handed search. The authorities haven't spoken with him since they left the property, he said.

. . . A request for comment was sent to the DEC on Saturday.

At best, it appears that the New York authorities displayed remarkably poor judgment, the sort of thing that could result in disciplinary problems for an ordinary police officer.

Games Are Being Played

NEW: Mark Halperin says his sources in both parties say Kamala Harris is not doing well in Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

Halperin says one Democrat source and two Republican sources say they would be “somewhere between surprised and shocked” if Harris won Wisconsin.

“It… pic.twitter.com/uAyqwKDXNY

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 2, 2024

I've already noted here that Mark Halperin, one of the most influential commentators on this year's campaign, is working hard to rehabilitate himself and get back into a cushy corporate media job. His selling point appears to be that he's got all kinds of contacts that he presumably developed the last time he was in a cushy corporate media job, before the unpleasantness, and he still strategically pulls the contacts out when it suits him. This he did yesterday, as shown above.

I've also already pointed out here that Nate Silver, who is frequently characterized as a "pollster", "statistician", or most recently "election guru", is none of the above; his background is in professional poker. For reasons that are unclear, he was eased out of his cushy corporate media job at FiveThirtyEight and, like Halperin, is trying to get himself another cushy corporate media gig to replace his old one.

All spring, Silver was building his reputation on pointing out that Joe Biden needed to make big changes, which made Silver a bit of a contrarian, and it got him a lot of attention. But by early August, after Harris became the Democrat pick, he was with mainstream media in giving her a 55-45 chance of winning the election. He stayed with Harris for much of the campaign -- so much for the contrariam, at least for the time being. Then a few weeks ago, he began cautiously realigning himself with Trump. Now all of a sudden, it's back to the full monty:

Polling guru Nate Silver lashed out at other survey junkies in his field for “cheating” in the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election — accusing them of recycling some results to keep the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris close.

The FiveThirtyEight founder said irresponsible pollsters were “herding” their numbers, or using past results to affect current ones, to keep Vice President Harris and former President Trump within a point or two of each other each time.

“I kind of trust pollsters less,” Silver said on his podcast, name-checking Emerson College. “They all, every time a pollster [says] ‘Oh, every state is just plus-one, every single state’s a tie,’ no! You’re f–king herding! You’re cheating! You’re cheating!” he fumed.

“You are lying! You’re putting your f–king finger on the scale!'”

Silver’s own vaunted model puts Trump ahead of Harris, 55% to 45%, as voters prepare to head to the polls in just three days.

I can't see this as anything but a strategic move on Silver's part to position himself as an accurate predictor, hoping that the likely outcome of the election will make him look insightful -- although of course, there were smart people who never thought Kamala had much of a chance, just not many in corporate media.

But let's look at Mark Halperin's take in the post above.

Mark Halperin says his sources in both parties say Kamala Harris is not doing well in Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona.

Halperin says one Democrat source and two Republican sources say they would be “somewhere between surprised and shocked” if Harris won Wisconsin.

. . . And the focus has been on Pennsylvania. Here, on this platform, we did a two-hour show called 'It's All About Pennsylvania'. And what I'm here to tell you tonight, based on my reporting with both Democrats and Republicans, . . . that it could be that Kamala Harris wins Pennsylvania but loses the White House, because she loses Wisconsin.

Wait a moment. Halperin has all these great sources, Republican, Democrat, local, national, and in all the states, best sources you could possibly have, bunches of them, and they're calling North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona -- but none of those muiltitidinous and authoritative sources has told him anything about Pennsylvania? Whoa, that means the election is a tossup!!

In other words, Mark Halperin, whom a commenter on the thread says

has emerged as the most impressive source of election reporting this cycle. He has a really nice delivery style and somehow maintains an objectivity I’ve seen in almost no other journalist.

is almost certainly withholding information that could make things look much worse for Kamala. He's acting as if he's got the latest, breathless insider information, and it's that the race is a tossup?? Well, that's likely to make someone in corporate media decide all is forgiven as far as Halperin is concerned: he's the guy who can take the corporate line and make you think it's the latest skinny from behind the scenes.

I'm more with Mark Mitchell, the head pollster at Rasmussen Reports, speaking with Matt Margolis:

He told me he’s seeing an election comparable to 1980.

“I think this is Reagan/Carter,” Mitchell told me. “I think there are very specific reasons.”

He explained, “I thought this whole time that Trump would outperform my polling,” largely because voter loyalty has shifted, and traditional party affiliation “means a lot less.” To account for this, Mitchell adjusted Rasmussen’s polling method to “weight by recall vote,” which focuses on how voters cast their ballots in 2020, rather than relying solely on demographics like age, gender, or race.

Mitchell’s polling has shown Trump with a consistent lead, even “up two points nationally,” revealing a “mind change of about 6-7 points” from Biden to Trump from 2020 to 2024. He attributes this shift to “low propensity voters crawling over broken glass to vote Trump” while some Democrat-leaning voters stay “on the couch in traditional blue areas.” Mitchell argues that the polling industry is still “a little bit left” of reality and underestimates the enthusiasm among Trump’s base.

Nate Silver has been all over the place since Joe was edged out of the race, but it looks like he figures who's the winner at this point, and he's going to call it for Trump in hopes it will help his career. Mark Halperin is still tying to sell himself as the safer choice. Games are being played either way.

More On Authenticity

Yesterday I talked about Trump's authenticity, but I thinbk authenticity goes both ways. What aboslutely nbody has mentioned about Kamala is her forced upper-class style, fully visible in her Vogue cover last month. I did some web searching on "upoper class style" and got answers like this:

The biggest thing I learned about these kinds of women is that they signal their wealth to others in their social class through hair, skin, and nail care even more than clothing. Upper-class women go for natural and subtle. They want you to think their hair and skin are just naturally gorgeous.

So no loud or unnatural colored hair, and a great, simple, flattering cut. If you color your hair, find a skilled stylist who can make it look super natural with highlights and lowlights, and be willing to pay for their skills. Rich women will notice a poor dye job immediately and will perceive you as cheap. I am dead serious.

Fake nails are a big no-no, it's judged as trashy. I mean those super long, brightly colored, square-tipped nails that are big right now. The kind you see on women like Cardi B or Billie Eilish, with nail art and such. Instead, you want to keep your hands well-manicured at all times and looking as natural as possible. Very rich women often have their nails manicured bi-weekly (the manicurist comes to their home) and have them buffed to a shine instead of using polish of any kind.

Skincare is a big thing among these women. If you have great skin, show it off using just a little bit of subtle eye and lip products, and let your good skin glow. If you need something to cover imperfections, go for a high-quality BB cream rather than a foundation. Korean and French skin care brands are the most well-regarded.

In clothing:

Cultivate a high-end look through minimalist shapes, neutral colors, and quality fabrics. Look for clothing or accessories crafted from luxurious natural materials. Opt for simple yet classic designs with earth tones and neutrals like black, white, beige, and navy. Make your style exude sophistication and class.

. . . Jewelry can be a trap. A little of it cries out "rich," but too much of it cries out "poseur." Think Jay-Z more so than Trinidad James, and Queen Elizabeth more than Snooki. A few pieces of stylish jewelry can give your look rich elegance.

Among Kamala's handlers must certainly be a fashion consultant. CNN describes her outfit:

Dressed in a mocha-colored sharp lapelled suit (a Gabriela Hearst piece from her own collection, according to Vogue) and a plum satin blouse, Harris assumes a relaxed yet considered power pose.

But there are also incongruities in her style that can't be fixed with a fashion consultant. Other upper class characteristics include:

A well modulated voice, devoid of too much emotion.

. . . We make certain assumptions about other members of our clubs. Private clubs are still socially homogeneous and there really is no way that middle or working class people can participate and consequently can’t learn club etiquette.

. . . There is a common thread and that’s that the mannerisms are learned from an early age and are natural, not artificial or obviously “learned”,

Her nasal voice and the cackle clearly don't fit, and no amount of coaching appears to have helped. This contributes to her overall air of inauthenticity, despite the effort her handlers put into her wardrobe and grooming.

But the biggest problem is her eagerness to talk in what she thinks are ethnic or working-clas accents:

Kamala Harris has raised eyebrows on the presidential campaign trail for using 'fake accents' that experts suggest could be a result of a confidence issue.

Harris, who was born in California and spent some of her childhood in Canada, has been accused of putting on Midwestern, Southern and even French accents during depending on who her audience is.

Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, who owns a practice in New York, said there are two main reasons people alter their accents, which in psychology circles is known as 'mirroring' or the 'chameleon effect.'

. . . While her shift in policies has come under fire over the years, her 'fake accent' has taken center stage in the last few months and some Americans have viewed it as superficial.

'By altering her accent she might be perceived as inauthentic or manipulative and ultimately could undermine trust if the audience feels she is not genuine,' said Alpert.

This has become a particular problem with African-Americans, who see her as clearly affecting a white upper-class wardrobe and look, married to a rich white man who's suddenly decided to identify as an observant Jew in order to accuse Trump of being a Nazi, while variously adopting black and other ethnic speech patterns in an effort to appeal to the working class and minorities.

It's phony, and people notice. My instinct says that most people can't wait to get Kamala, her husband, and the Walzes out of the public eye, they're all so phony they're annoying.

Trump Puts On A Hi-Vis Vest

I don't think we've seen a presidential politician with a visual instinct like Trump's since either Roosevelt, and that includes Reagan. The harumphs from the corporate media have been non-stop, George Takei, Star Trek has-been, said, “In fairness, it’s not really a Trump garbage truck until it’s on fire.” Rolling Stone's headline was, "Bizarre: Billionaire Trump Awkwardly Dresses Up as a Garbage Truck Driver". Newsweek says, "Video of Donald Trump 'Struggling' to Enter Garbage Truck Goes Viral". CNN said,

Donald Trump broke out the props Wednesday in the final days of this chaotic campaign as the former president seized on a garbled remark by President Joe Biden that seemed to insult Trump voters as “garbage.”

Trump emerged from his plane ahead of a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, wearing a bright orange and yellow safety vest before climbing into a garbage truck – with a big “TRUMP” sign emblazoned on the side – to take questions from reporters.

. . . Still wearing the safety vest, Trump opened his Green Bay rally – one of his final chances to address Wisconsin voters before next week’s election – by speaking at length about the props. He praised his “very capable people” for getting it all together so quickly and then recapped their discussion beforehand.

“One of my people came in and said, ‘Sir, you know the word ‘garbage’ is the hottest thing right now. Out there, the hottest thing out there. Sir, would you like to drive a garbage truck?” Trump said. “They pulled up this garbage truck. I don’t know how the hell they did it so fast. I have very capable people. They put a big sign on the truck. Did you see it?”

I have a feeling Trump is minimizing his own role in the stunt here. Two weeks ago, I thought he couldn't possibly outdo the imagery from his McDonald's gig, but all of a sudden, he's done it. Before that, I marveled at how the image of his fist in the air under the flag at the Butler rally evoked the famous Iwo Jima flag photo, while the shot of the Secret Service agents helping him down from the stage there somehow brought Michelangelo's Pieta to mind.

This reflects Trump's instinctive ability to suck all the air out of public debate. His detractors call it narcissism, but the problem with that is that narcissists are phony, and many people instincively respond to phony. It's hard to find insightful disccussion of Trump's authenticity, but here's a take from a UK writer, Gunn Enli:

Trump’s perceived authenticity, a rarity in the polished realm of politics, has been a cornerstone of his unexpected 2016 triumph and remains a potent force as he positions himself at the forefront of the upcoming race. But what underpins this connection with voters, and why is it problematic for the health of our democracy?

At the heart of Trump’s relationship with his base is a performance that has been meticulously crafted to exhibit traits which are valued by his supporters: consistency, spontaneity, ordinariness, outspokenness, and outsider status.

. . . This strategic performance of authenticity is not without its perils. The problem arises when authenticity is conflated with virtue. Being perceived as authentic gives Trump a troubling latitude to engage in behavior and rhetoric that, under traditional scrutiny, would be considered unacceptable or even reprehensible. His ‘authentic’ persona allows him to navigate past scandals and missteps with an ease not afforded to traditional politicians.

Enli then worries that if his authenticity gives Trump a free pass to violate social boundaries, he might turn into Hitler, or something like that. I think there are key reasons why this won't happen. The first is that Trump has a sense of humor, even a self-deprecating one, when for instance he said he'd continue to wear the vest because it made him look slimmer. This isn't Hitler. Nazis didn't have a sense of humor.

The second is that Trump is a truthteller. By their nature, truthtellers violate boundaries. This is Groucho Marx's secret, and it's worth pointing out that Trump has a Hollywood sense of the visual and a comic's sense of timing. Like Marx, Trump often sneaks the truthtelling past the boundaries by dressing it up as humor.

The conventionally minded are having a difficult time wrapping their minds around the election outcome as things stand. Nobody seems to know quite what to do about Trump in a hi-vis vest -- Trump in a McDonald's apron was bad enough.