Trump’s Vile Defense of “That Ad” Bodes Very Ill for the Last 12 Days

It had to happen. On Thursday, Donald Trump defended that despicable Republican attack ad that everyone is talking about this week, writing on Truth Social: “Vivek Ramaswamy put up a very powerful Ad about a mother saying that her daughter, Amy Acton, who is running for Governor of Ohio, is a liar, and much worse.” And he didn’t stop there! He of course took the side of Donna Arthur, Acton’s estranged mother, who decided to stay married to her daughter’s rapist and is the ad’s “star”: “Frankly, anybody whose mother spoke about a daughter in that way would normally lead to the daughter being precluded from serving in Office, let alone the Office of Governor.” And he didn’t stop there, either: “The Press is trying to convince everyone that this Ad is bad, because it’s so good! Who wouldn’t use such an Ad? I would, it’s called, ‘hitting pay dirt.’”

There you have it. The sickest and most repulsive TV ad in American political history, endorsed by the sickest and most repulsive human in American political history. Once again, Trump drags America to a bottom that most of us didn’t know existed.

But is it really the bottom? Please. There’s always a new bottom with Trump. We’re 12 days out from Election Day. And we’re 73 days out from January 3, when, by custom and in theory, the next Congress will be sworn in and seated—a ceremony whose execution right now seems very much in doubt. There’s time for a dozen new bottoms between now and then.

But this is the bottom we have for now, and it’s worth noting, because it screams at us that there is literally nothing these MAGA Republicans won’t do for power. And don’t be fooled by these headlines about “overwhelming bipartisan denunciation.” Yes, some Republicans have denounced the ad—but if you look at it, it’s not really that many. Ohioans Mike DeWine and Jon Husted did, lest its mephitic stink encircle them (although DeWine added that he still endorses Ramaswamy, so what is that denunciation worth?). But if you google “Republican senators and House members who have denounced the Ramaswamy ad,” you’ll find pretty slim pickings.

The press loves to slap the word “bipartisan” on a story whenever it can, even on the thinnest of justifications. When a group of New Republic editors was discussing this matter on Wednesday morning, one editor said, “Yeah, I see these headlines that say ‘bipartisan criticism of Trump,’ and I look for the Republicans, and it’s one quote from Thom Tillis.”

So: Does it really matter that Meghan McCain denounced the ad? Or even Nikki Haley, who is (for now) retired from politics? Representative Nancy Mace, who has spoken about being raped, laid into it, so at least that’s one sitting non-Ohio GOP pol. I’d imagine there were a few others that I missed, but the outrage has been a long, long distance from universal.

And among right-wing pundits? I admit that I don’t read or watch them much, and spending too much time googling the matter feels a bit like googling how many mass shooters denounced Dylan Roof. So maybe some Fox News host was indeed genuinely outraged, and for this, I (with one hand) applaud them.

But Media Matters for America has collected a number of right-wing commentators who are as pleased as punch about it:

• Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire called it “brilliant, brilliant,” adding: “I think it’s a very, very effective ad. It’s brutal.”
• Newsmax host Greg Kelly: “Everybody in Ohio and the country should be listening to Amy Acton’s mom.” And: “The mother speaks with love here. I believe the mother loves Amy.” And: “And she seems like a very nice lady, actually.… Wow, that’s some—the mother, I believe her.”
• Dan Bongino, the podcaster turned FBI honcho turned podcaster: “This is the most destructive political ad I have ever seen.”
• Gateway Pundit’s Wayne Allyn Root: “The more you meet these Democrat candidates, they’re all crazy. They’re all covering up for the fact that they’ve had mental illness their whole life. They’re crazy, whacked-out people.” He also called the ad “absolutely hilarious.”

You might say that this doesn’t add up to much. And perhaps it doesn’t. Maybe Ramaswamy’s polls will tell him that the blowback is too much.

But there exists another possibility. Now that the president of the United States has lent the ad his imprimatur, a day after his vice president did the same, I submit to you that it’s pretty clear what the next 12 days could bring. Trump, Ramaswamy, and JD Vance—the latter two, by the way, were buds when they were at Yale Law together—will keep pushing and pushing this. And the right-wing media, and that segment of it that might have been knocked back on its heels for the first 48 or 72 hours, will collect itself and hop enthusiastically on this toxic train.

I hope Amy Acton and her campaign team are ready for this. A normal person … well, a normal person wouldn’t have made and run that ad to begin with. But let’s say a normal person did. Said normal person would take stock of the revulsion and quietly pull the ad, or scale back the buy, and change the subject to something “relevant” like trans athletes.

But these are not normal people. These are sick, twisted, cruel, sadistic, and psychotic people. That’s five adjectives, which may seem like a bit much, but I chose them with care. They do not care at all that Acton was raped as a 12-year-old girl. They care only about how they can crush her—politically, emotionally, in every way. That’s what makes these people different. They don’t just want to win elections. They want to destroy lives.

And here’s a question that I really hate to ask, but it’s one we must contemplate: What if Ramaswamy still wins? It’s possible. And if he does, it’s hard for us normal people to imagine what kind of attacks will be unleashed for 2028 and beyond if this vile smear works.

It probably won’t work. It probably will backfire. But I hope Acton and her team are not sitting there assuming that Ramaswamy is going to soften his approach. He’s going to start hitting harder on this and other points. And Trump and Vance will have his back. It will be yet another new bottom. But rest assured that it won’t be the last.                     

We’re two-plus weeks out from Election Day. Republicans are in a dead panic and taking the wildest of swings. Maryland Representative Andy Harris, who is as close as we have in the United States Congress to an actual, bona fide fascist (I know that’s saying a lot, but Harris’s father served in a pro-Nazi paramilitary unit in Hungary toward the end of World War II, and Harris himself veritably worshipped Viktor Orbán), tried to blame diesel prices on the Democrats. He got laughed out of the room. Democratic candidates who are barely really liberal are suddenly not just socialists but Communists. And it practically goes without saying that they’re all gay.

This kind of scaremongering has been a part of Republican campaign strategy for my entire life. I hit my first Little League baseball the same year Richard Nixon launched the Southern Strategy, his dog-whistling and race-baiting campaign to carry the South in 1968 against Hubert Humphrey. I was a young man when Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 general election campaign near Philadelphia, Mississippi, touting “states’ rights” and making a point of doing so not far from the spot where three civil rights workers were killed by the Ku Klux Klan 16 years before. I’m pretty tired of it, though not so tired that my blood doesn’t still boil.

But these kinds of moves used to be only part of a Republican campaign. Once upon a time, Republicans did try, sometimes, to advance forward-looking ideas, or something resembling that. Reagan had his optimism; Newt Gingrich, his Contract With America; George W. Bush, his global democracy agenda. At the very least, these Republicans understood that the scare tactics had to be dressed up in the finery of something resembling a positive vision for the country.

But that was then. Now the scare tactics are the whole package. The GOP of 2026 is stripped of all artifice. It’s down to its essence. The closing days of this campaign will feature three trajectories from the GOP. They’re going to try to cheat. They’re going to lie. And they’re going to try to win on grotesque and open bigotry.

First, the cheating. This is all about suppressing the vote and trying to convince Americans that noncitizens are going to be casting votes by the thousands or even millions (OK, this involves a dose of bigotry too). On Thursday, Todd Blanche’s Justice Department sent a letter to California and Los Angeles County demanding that they prove—within 48 hours, mind you—that some 20,000 voters are citizens. Because Attorney General Todd Blanche, you see, suspects that they are not.

The Trump administration has tried this before. Very recently, in fact. Just last month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin alleged that there were 15,903 noncitizens on the voter rolls in Nevada. He then whittled that down to 185 names (heck of a whittle!). DHS said it had confirmed that these 185 were noncitizens. Nevada looked into it. Every one—every single one—was a citizen.

It’s impossible to predict how else they’ll try to cheat between now and November 3. At Democracy Docket, which you should be checking between now and Election Day if you aren’t already, they’re tracking dozens of voter suppression lawsuits. And Axios reported on Friday that MAGA activists are pushing the Trump administration to prepare to declare martial law. The president can’t send armed troops to polling places—or at least, the law says he can’t. But he can send them into certain neighborhoods. And the DOJ can send out more such orders, and to much swingier states than California. We can be sure that the administration has thought of things we haven’t.

Next comes the lying. Of course, cheating of the sort described above is lying, but I mean a different kind of lying. I mean here the kind of lying Trump does at his rallies, about how great the economy is, how “hot” America is; and the lying House Speaker Mike Johnson does, about this Congress being the most productive in 80 years.

All politicians from both parties offer up to voters their version of reality. But they rarely say the naked opposite of reality. Barack Obama in 2010, for example, implicitly acknowledged that the economic landscape was pretty barren, but he did try (to no avail) to highlight certain “green shoots” sprouting heavenward. But no one has ever done what Trump is doing. There’s no sign it’s working—in fact it’s probably making things worse because you just can’t tell people the sky is blue when it’s full of clouds.

What’s amusing is watching Republican candidates across the country try to walk this tightrope. Some gently break with him, as Maine’s Susan Collins and Michigan’s Mike Rogers have done on tariffs. But most defend them or try to change the subject. Some still blame the economy on Joe Biden. And all of them, having voted for the Iran war, just pray that that subject doesn’t come up.

And finally—the dividing. It’s JD Vance hinting not so subtly that James Talarico is gay. Rogers and others, including Trump, talk about Abdul El-Sayed being part of the Muslim Brotherhood. On a debate stage this week, Georgia GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins slipped in a reference to Jon Ossoff’s “friend” El-Sayed, for no apparent reason other than to be able to scare viewers with a Moozlem name. And of course the flood of dehumanizing anti-trans ads continues apace and will continue through Election Day.

This is what they’ve got. And it’s what they’ve got because it’s who they are. Oh, plus they have hundreds of millions or maybe even billions of dollars, much of it from a small handful of people—like real-life supervillain Elon Musk—who want to own the government. It’ll be pretty depressing if it works.

And if it fails? It will upend decades of conventional wisdom about how Republicans can win and about voters’ susceptibility to such campaigns. And that may mark the start of a new and at least marginally less cynical and less hateful and less stupid era in American politics. And it will be made all the better by the fact that it will have been brought on, ironically enough, by the stupidest and most cynical and hateful man in recent American political history.

Barbarism surrounds us. ICE thugs have once again shot a man, firing at least five shots while he was in his car with his five-year-old son in New York City. Our incompetent and offensive “secretary of war” announces that the United States of America is going to livestream the execution by firing squad of a mass killer. Public executions are against international law. Amnesty International reports that in 2025, there were 17 public executions in the world. Eleven were in Iran, and six in Afghanistan. Great.

At least America is now fully starting to recognize what a moral cesspool Donald Trump and his cronies have made of this country. A new poll out from Pew has Trump’s approval at 30 percent and his disapproval at a stunning 68 percent. Can he get into the 20s before November 3? It sure seems that way. Does he really think, as The Atlantic reported this week, that bombing Iran before the election will help his numbers? He’s really so delusional as to believe that escalating a deeply unpopular war would lead to people rallying around the flag?

Against all this, most Democratic elected officials still haven’t found the right words to encapsulate all this corruption and rot. One Democrat, though, continues to stand out above all the others. If you haven’t yet seen some of the clips of Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff’s evisceration of his GOP challenger in last night’s debate, you need to watch them. The guy is a virtuoso—Bernstein with a baton, Jordan with a basketball.

The imperishable line that will be remembered, I think, for a long, long time, came when Ossoff said of Representative Mike Collins and his white supremacist and far-far-right ties: “It’s not just that you’ve hired half the Third Reich to staff your congressional office,” but you’re supporting policies that are “robbing your constituents to pay your donors.” Then came another killer, which is also so good that it would be the takeaway line for most debaters: “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.”

That’s how you do it, folks. And make no mistake: It took some guts for Ossoff to decide to make his central attack on Collins his racism. There’s no guarantee, even in 2026, that a liberal Jewish Democrat could make that stick against a Republican in the state of Georgia. But Ossoff has pressed the point of Collins’s bigotry relentlessly. This is not someone who consulted polls and focus groups and listened to consultants telling him to keep the focus on Collins’s position on prescription drug prices. This is someone who asked himself, What is my opponent’s core moral flaw? and who went right at it with both barrels.

He’s almost certainly going to win, and possibly by a lot. And in doing so, in making his opponent’s bigotry his central line of attack, he’s doing something too many Democrats are gun-shy about doing these days: He took aim right at the heart of MAGA-ism, and he’s doing it without qualification or equivocation. And that’s why so many Democrats are so impressed by him.

As I wrote of Ossoff back in August, after his delicious barb about “Natalie” (Harp, the Trumpy amanuensis): “He understands that in today’s media environment, you have to create conflict to generate attention and buzz, and you have to do it in a way that stands a chance of going viral.” He did that last night, but he also did even more. Saying “half the Third Reich” is, among other things, really funny. It’s wildly hyperbolic, of course, but that too is the point.

It’s the kind of rhetoric the right has been using against Democrats for many years now. Back in 2004, I recall the right-wing Club for Growth launching a broadside against Howard Dean saying that he should “take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times–reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.” No Democrat would ever have said then that George W. Bush should “take his tax-cutting, government-hating, beer-swilling, brisket-eating, pickup truck–driving, Branson-loving right-wing freak show back to Texas where it belongs” anymore than any Democratic president would have suggested—twice in one week—that maybe Iran should bomb Birmingham or Tulsa.

That just wouldn’t work in reverse, for reasons having to do with which Americans the media deems to be “real.” But what does work, when Trump’s at 30 percent in the polls and more than half the nation is disgusted with him, is doing what Ossoff is doing: making moral cases against Republicans’ very obvious and offensive moral failings.

He says he has no interest in running for president. Who knows. And of course if he does run, we’ll have to take stock of his positions on a busload of issues. But liberals can be too focused on positions, and on candidates, especially presidential candidates, passing a range of litmus tests. Ossoff is from Georgia, not Massachusetts, so he has to be careful about some stuff. He may not check some boxes. But his rhetoric suggests that there’s a potential unchained Ossoff somewhere in there just waiting to burst out, an Ossoff who might be willing to take more aggressive positions while seeking national office. For now, while he’s not the front-runner in the 2028 polls or the betting markets, he is for my money the person most likely to catch fire and be satisfactory to enough progressives and enough moderates to bring the party together after what will probably be another fractious primary.

In the meantime, let’s just appreciate what he did last night. Democrats, we need more of that.

We’ve all had our laughs now at Eric Schmitt. I plan on continuing to laugh at him for quite some time. That was the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever seen a United States senator do. But it was also two other things besides embarrassing.

First, it was deeply revealing—of the Missouri senator’s crazed conspiratorial mindset, and of his presumptions about the world. What convinced him in the first place that former special counsel Jack Smith was in cahoots with Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Perhaps it came from some dark fascist corner of the interwebs that you and I don’t even know about, and from there to X to Fox News and so on. Basically the same way people came to believe Haitians eat dogs.

It was also amusingly revealing of Schmitt’s (and his staff’s, and let’s face it, modern conservatism’s) cultural prejudices. They checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college basketball game roster and saw just one game with a 7:30 p.m. start time—Warriors vs. Hawks in Atlanta—and thought, “A-ha, we’ve got our man.” But it seems never to have occurred to them to check the women’s college schedule. After all, what kind of man wants to go watch girls bounce balls around? A deep-state Hillary lover, that’s who! They’re probably kicking themselves for not thinking of it!

But the second thing Schmitt’s own goal was, besides embarrassing, was ominous. Because it showed how deep down this absurd rabbit hole the Republicans have gone—and the depths to which they’ll descend to try to find something on Smith. This perfervid posturing was on display Tuesday not only from Schmitt, but from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, who you could tell thought he was about to lower the boom on Smith about something having to do with his clandestine relationship with former CIA chief John Brennan. When a confused Smith said he’d never met Brennan, Grassley went all Emily Litella (there’s an old reference for you!) and ended his questioning under the kind of abrupt and petulant silence one might associate with a six-year-old being bluntly informed that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.

But make no mistake: MAGA is still out to nail Smith. You’d think after a humiliation as comprehensive as Tuesday’s, they’d drop it. But you know these people. They don’t drop stuff. Case in point: Schmitt has repeatedly defended his catastrophic failure, claiming he regrets nothing while continuing to insist that Smith is a liar. A fiasco like that just makes them more convinced that the ruthless deep state is out to crush them, and their only recourse is to crush the nefarious foe to dust.

What might this mean, in practice? Well, for the nonce, it has manifested itself in a lawsuit—filed the day after the hearing debacle—by Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn, alleging that Smith’s probe violated the Constitution’s speech and debate clause, which protects members of Congress from criminal or civil prosecution for activities they’ve undertaken in the legislative sphere. Prosecuting the case for Blackburn, who’s leaving the Senate and running for governor, is an outfit called the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a kind of right-wing version of the ACLU, conjured to life in 2017 with backing from groups affiliated with the Koch brothers and Leonard Leo (it made its bones fighting Covid-era mask and vaccine mandates).

The suit argues that when Smith, while probing the January 6 insurrection, subpoenaed phone companies for some GOP lawmakers’ call logs (but not the content of the calls), he was in violation of that clause. It’s an argument Republicans have been making for a while, and it’s nonsense. The speech and debate clause is a protection against being arrested and prosecuted for legislative activity.

Smith wasn’t looking for people to arrest; he was looking for witnesses to a coup d’état (like Senator Darline Graham’s late brother, Lindsey, as Smith explained to her Tuesday in yet another planned gotcha moment that flopped). In any case, the clause has generally been understood to protect only legislative activity. Admittedly, the law here isn’t settled, and these days you never know when a case like this might land in the lap of some Federalist Society servant. But there’s a reason federal judges have been in the habit of tossing MAGA suits like this.

Smith’s pursuit of these call logs is the basis of the claim by some House members, notably Jim Jordan, that Smith perjured himself before the House last January. It’s a little complicated, but: At two hearings last December, House Republicans asked Smith: “Did the toll records that you requested from the senators, did they include the content of the phone calls?” Smith replied no. It was truthful as far as it went, but it wasn’t quite the whole story because Smith and his team did see the contents of some congressional text messages from 44 legislators—but it wasn’t as a result of records requested from the senators. It was as a result of a separate subpoena, to the National Archives and Records Administration. Republicans never asked about that subpoena.

Like every good lawyer, Smith learned in law school: Answer the question you were asked, and only the question you were asked. Jordan contends that Smith was engaging in half-truths, and so he issued a criminal referral against Smith to the Justice Department in July. Jamie Raskin counters that “wishing that you had asked different questions while you had the opportunity to examine a witness is not a proper basis for a referral of a witness for criminal prosecution.” Smith’s lawyers said at the time that “the questions and answers preceding and following these exchanges also make clear that the focus of the question was on the toll records subpoenas. Notably, the referral letter does not contest the truthfulness of Mr. Smith’s answers.”

Raskin said that if the referral were ever brought before a judge, it would “get laughed out of court.” That it probably will—although again, it depends on whose court it lands in. But in between here and there, Republicans can make Smith’s life very difficult indeed. The week before Jordan issued his referral, Attorney General Todd Blanche sat before the same Senate Judiciary Committee that became America’s laughingstock this week for his confirmation hearing. Missouri (really, Missouri again?) Senator Josh Hawley, surveying Smith’s supposed transgressions, asked Blanche if he had “thought about investigating this guy for perjury?” Blanche’s answer: “We take testimony in front of this body very seriously. Yes.”

In sum: We should all be steeling ourselves for the day that Blanche files an indictment against Smith. It would be another textbook example of Republicans doing exactly what they accuse the liberal deep state of doing: using the machinery of the government to engage in political witch hunts. There’s no actual evidence that Smith was engaged in any kind of witch hunt. Republicans say his investigations were unprecedented. Well, yes, they were—but that’s because we’ve never had a president who orchestrated a coup against the United States and who carted away boxfuls of classified documents and spent months ignoring polite requests from the FBI to come down to Florida and have a look.

Any prosecution of Smith should go about as far as Trump’s other failed revenge cases. But make no mistake: It could be assigned to an Aileen Cannon–type judge. And MAGA could claim a scalp and persuade uninformed Americans that there is no such thing as a rule of law, that there is only power, which is their point.

And finally, let’s end by returning to Schmitt. He’s not an idiot. There’s a standard joke about Trump that it’s a good thing he’s so dumb because if he were a smart fascist, he’d be a lot more dangerous. Well, Schmitt, Tuesday aside, is not dumb. He knew exactly what he was saying, for example, when he gave a speech about a year ago to the National Conservatism Conference that was for all intents and purposes a fascist interpretation of American history.

It’s a clever speech—there is no single incendiary line that can be quoted to outrageous effect. But in its entirety, it’s an ode to a national mythos rooted in blood and soil (he’s smart enough not to say those words) and an explicit rejection of the notion that America is in any sense an idea. Here’s a good contemporaneous analysis by Bridgette Dunlap of the Missouri Independent.

That’s who Schmitt actually is. And crazy ambitious. Tuesday morning—the day of Smith’s testimony—Axios ran with a “scoop” that Schmitt had “grown close to Vice President Vance and is seen as a top prospect” to be Vance’s running mate in 2028. That was almost surely teed up by Schmitt’s staff in anticipation of the nuclear bomb he was going to explode in his Javert’s lap that afternoon. That it blew up in his face because he believes in nutso conspiracies and forgot that women play basketball is a form of cosmic justice. But it doesn’t mean the MAGA version of the deep state is done with Jack Smith.

It was far from the most important development of the week, but the “deal” the Trump administration struck with Denmark over Greenland was just oh-so-perfectly-emblematic of virtually everything Donald Trump does. He and his people of course touted it as a great triumph that only Trump could have achieved, when in fact it was basically a reiteration, with a few small changes, of the agreement that’s been in place since 1951. For example, one change is that any non-NATO military presence is now explicitly barred. But it’s not like Russia or China was rushing to get a base on the island anyway.

Funnier still is the way the thing was hammered out. The New York Times reported that the deal “explicitly stops short of conveying any territory to the United States. And no one—especially Denmark, which governs the vast but mostly empty space—wanted to emphasize that point, for fear that Mr. Trump might renounce the agreement he had just hailed as ‘tremendous for Europe and for the United States.’” Why yes, dear Emperor, you have the most magnificent clothes!

It would be a huge embarrassment for any other president, except that Trump did so many more other embarrassing and vile things this week that Greenland doesn’t even rank. The White House press ban. The appalling welcome to Xi Jinping, where Chinese state media got more access than some U.S. media (speaking of press freedom, China ranks 178th out of 180 countries, while Trump’s United States is now sixty-fourth). The invitation to Vladimir Putin to the G20 summit, to be held in December outside Miami (well, specifically, and inevitably, at Trump’s golf resort).

But for all that, it was a positive week in that we finally began to see cracks in the MAGA foundation. A couple Senate candidates said the war in Iran has to be brought to an “immediate” end. Mississippi GOP Senator Roger Wicker denounced the pomp surrounding the Xi visit.

And most encouragingly, the word bloodbath began to appear in articles about the midterms, but there’s nothing Trump or Congress can do to turn the economy around dramatically in seven weeks, as mortgage rates top 7 percent and are expected to rise even more. But remember—it’s a small price to pay for preventing Iran from having the nuclear capability it never had until Trump tore up the Obama deal.

Let’s focus on that word, bloodbath. Yes, a lot of these Senate races are stubbornly close. But each passing week brings news of the experts shifting Senate and especially House races from “likely R” to “lean R” and from “lean R” to “toss-up.” A bloodbath may or may not happen, but one is surely gathering strength out there. And most Republicans are preparing for it in the way that politicians normally do—throwing whatever Hail Marys they can to try to save their hides but preparing themselves psychologically for a thrashing.

Trump doesn’t do that. Roy Cohn didn’t teach his protégé about the most dignified way to throw in the towel. He taught him that when you can see you’re going to lose, you search for new and more creative and abominable ways to cheat.

And so we have this rather alarming report from The Atlantic this week that an old friend of Trump’s is urging him to declare martial law “on or around” Election Day. Peter Ticktin went to military school with Trump and apparently has his ear. He persuaded Trump to pardon Tina Peters, the MAGA county clerk in Colorado who tried to prove nonexistent voter fraud in 2020. Radio host Wayne Allyn Root is another named in the article who has pushed Trump to declare a “national-security emergency” around Election Day.

These people are mad as hatters, but the problem is that the president of the United States is too, and he listens to them. Another problem is whether there’s anyone else telling Trump the opposite. The Atlantic article suggests that there are; that the more wizened political professionals around Trump are prepared to advise against things like sending troops to polling places and issuing declarations of martial law.

Comforting if true. But I wonder if, when the moment of truth comes, chief of staff Susie Wiles or any of the other supposed normies around Trump will make a forceful, concerted effort to prevent him from taking whatever extreme measure he wants to take. If Trump wants to find a way to invalidate the election, well, that isn’t Wiles’s bailiwick. It’s a Justice Department thing. So Todd Blanche is going to stop Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act?

Democrats and liberal groups are preparing for all this, to the extent they can. Marc Elias’s law firm filed an important suit this week with major Democratic campaign committees to block the Trump administration from sending armed guards from the FBI and ICE to the polls on Election Day. Why do they need to do this? Because Trump and his top officials have hinted or said repeatedly that they’d do it.

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin confirmed that he had the authority to place officers at polling places. Border czar Tom Homan has said: “I mean, bottom line is, what are they afraid of? They say illegal aliens don’t vote.… But if only U.S. citizens can vote, I don’t see the issue.” FBI chief Kash Patel said, “If there’s a reason to go [to a polling place] because there’s been a violation of the law, we will.” And Blanche said at the Conservative Political Action Conference: “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can’t vote.”

In addition, as the Elias lawsuit explains, in June, the Justice Department quietly removed from its website a long-standing manual about prosecuting election crimes. The manual noted that federal law prohibits dispatching “any” officer to “any polling place in any election.” Now that language has been scrubbed.

Donald Trump is an ignoramus, but he does know two things. One, he knows that if the Democrats take Congress, he’s in for an extremely difficult two years—or worse. With subpoena power, Democrats could launch investigations that could eventually make their way into federal courtrooms and dog him for the rest of his iron-slicing, well-done-steak-eating life.

Two, he knows how to cheat and steal—and that cheating and stealing, done brazenly enough, usually work. That’s where he’s going to be concentrating his efforts between now and November 3. And if all that fails, we can be sure that Peter Ticktin will be standing at the ready with advice.