Kamala Harris Refuses To Let Donald Trump Whitewash Jan. 6

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‘The American People Are Exhausted With His Gaslighting’

With JD Vance’s claim that Trump won in 2020 and Trump himself calling Jan. 6 a “day of love,” the GOP ticket is doubling down on the Big Lie with three weeks to go before Election Day – and Kamala Harris is having none of it.

In a noticeable shift, Harris has expanded her usual campaign speech to include more direct critiques of Trump’s anti-democratic extremism. Earlier in the week, she pulled in his remarks on “enemies within,” going so far as to begin playing video of his remarks at her own campaign rallies. As the week comes to an end, she’s incorporating into her own speech Trump’s latest remarks minimizing Jan. 6.

“So now, we here, know Jan. 6 was a tragic day. It was a day of terrible violence. There were attacks on law enforcement — 140 law enforcement officers were injured, some were killed. And what did Donald Trump say last night about Jan. 6? He called it a ‘day of love,’” Harris told a rally in Wisconsin Thursday.

In Trump’s remarks earlier this week, he once again referred to the Jan. 6 rioters as “we,” an admission that is sure to pique the interest of Special Counsel Jack Smith: “We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walked down — this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows.” Trump’s claim that none of the rioters had guns is a falsity that he often repeats.

For her part, Harris folded Trump’s Jan. 6 lies into her larger “We Are Not Going Back” theme: “The American people are exhausted with his gaslighting — exhausted. … Enough,” Harris said. “We are ready to turn the page.”

Zombie Fake Electors

CNN: At least 30 election deniers and 2020 fake electors are serving as Trump electors this year.

Chutkan Rejects Trump Plea For More Delay In Jan. 6 Case

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected a request by Donald Trump to postpone until after Election Day the public unsealing of a filing in the Jan. 6 case related to presidential immunity. In denying the request, Chutkan said she would order the appendices to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s mammoth filing on immunity unsealed today. Trump may seek appeal court intervention, but no sign this morning that he has done so yet.

The Aftermath Of Kamala Harris’ Fox News Interview

• Bret Baier says he aired the wrong Trump clip during the Harris interview: “I did make a mistake.”
• Greg Sargent: Harris’s Harsh Takedown of Fox’s Bret Baier Exposes MAGA’s Biggest Lie
• The ratings for the Harris interview swamped those for Trump’s town hall the same day on Fox News and were the highest for an episode of “Special Report With Bret Baier” since 2020, reports The Wrap.

Quote Of The Day

Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, on Donald Trump’s increasingly dire rhetoric: “From a mainstream candidate, I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of tapping into the most vicious, nativist, racial backlash. He doesn’t even really use code words or anything. He’s just all in.”

Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, And Mussolini

Anne Applebaum: “The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the ‘bloodbath’ that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn’t win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents—none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics. But neither has this rhetoric been tried in modern American politics.”

The Never-Ending Shame Of Mitch McConnell

Mitch McConnell, in private: Donald Trump is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered,” a “despicable human being,” and a “narcissist.” 

Mitch McConnell, in public: “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”

Does Elon Musk Want To Get Sued By Dominion, Too?

NBC News: Musk pushes debunked Dominion voting conspiracy theory at first Pennsylvania appearance

In Other Elon Musk News …

• NYT: How Tech Billionaires Became the G.O.P.’s New Donor Class
• Susan Glasser: How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again
• NPR: X/Twitter has changed its terms of service to force litigation with its users into the friendly confines of the Northern District of Texas for federal cases and Tarrant County (Fort Worth) for state cases, even though the company is not headquartered in either place.

Disinformation Watch

• NBC News: The Pipeline: How Russian propaganda reaches and influences the U.S. 
• AP: Right-wing influencers hyped anti-Ukraine videos made by a TV producer also funded by Russian media
• WSJ: A Mystery $30 Million Wave of Pro-Trump Bets Has Moved a Popular Prediction Market

‘We Created A Monster’

Former chief marketing executive at NBC apologizes for helping to create Trump’s reality TV image: “While we were successful in marketing ‘The Apprentice,’ we also did irreparable harm by creating the false image of Trump as a successful leader. I deeply regret that. And I regret that it has taken me so long to go public.”

‘It’s The First Amendment, Stupid’

A federal judge in Tallahassee blocked the DeSantis administration’s pressure campaign against TV stations for airing pro-abortion-rights ads in support of Amendment 4, with this withering summation: “To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it’s the First Amendment, stupid.”

UPDATE: Trump Assassination Attempts

• NYT: “An independent panel reviewing the failures that led to the attempted assassination of former President Donald J. Trump in July called on the Secret Service to replace its leadership with people from the private sector and focus almost exclusively on its protective mission.”
• WaPo: “In its 52-page report, the panel wrote that ‘the Secret Service as an agency requires fundamental reform to carry out its mission. Without that reform, the Independent Review Panel believes another Butler can and will happen again.’”
• WSJ: “The Secret Service has become bureaucratic, complacent, and static even though risks have multiplied and technology has evolved,” the panel said in the report. “It is simply unacceptable for the Service to have anything less than a paramount focus on its protective mission, particularly while that protective mission function is presently suboptimal.”
• Politico: “Lawyers for the man charged with attempting to assassinate former President Donald Trump on a golf course in Florida last month have asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon to recuse herself from the case.”

Texas Supreme Court Halts Controversial Execution

After intervention from a bipartisan group of Texas legislators, the state Supreme Court halted the execution of Robert Roberson that was scheduled for last evening. The late reprieve in the controversial shaken-baby case came after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene earlier in the day.

“Roberson remains alive following a 48 hours unlike anything I’ve seen in a decade of covering the final days preceding virtually every execution to have been scheduled in the United States in that time,” Chris Geidner reports.

Harris v. Hecklers

Kamala Harris: Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally. I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street pic.twitter.com/tjhbDB9m3R

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 17, 2024

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