Maybe this cycle’s October surprise will be a Bob Woodward book that succeeds where Democrats have failed in making people care about wtf Donald Trump has been up to behind the scenes the last few years? But first…
Seems like it will take some time to know just how devastating and deadly Hurricane Milton was. As a strange man once said, it was “one of the wettest we've ever seen, from the standpoint of water." As a political matter, it’s unclear why Joe Biden didn’t use his weather machine to aim Milton more directly at the most Republican parts of Florida. A glitch in the firmware perhaps.
Trump’s lies about Hurricane Helene have been so deleterious that multiple House Republicans issued lengthy refutations of them, including directly to Fox News, hoping to stop their spread. Instead, Fox buried its own scoop and deployed on-air talent to call the Republican debunking into question.
Early in the pandemic, when terrified Americans couldn’t get tested for COVID-19, and Donald Trump was scoffing at the very notion of mass testing in order to hide the extent of the spread, he secretly sent testing machines to Vladimir Putin.
That’s the most stunning revelation we have from the rollout of Bob Woodward’s new book.
It’s followed closely by the admission from one of Trump’s senior aides that he’s had perhaps seven private conversations with Putin since leaving office.
Maybe that’ll move President Biden to do what I’ve been urging for many months: tell Americans what the intelligence community knows about Trump’s corrupt relations with foreign leaders, particularly since his presidency ended.
“I would not purport to be aware of all contacts with Putin,” Biden’s Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told Woodward. “I wouldn’t purport to speak to what President Trump may or may not have done.” That’s not the same as “we can’t possibly know,” and the public deserves to know before the election.
As Marcy Wheeler noted, this adds “phone records” to a list of disclosures campaign journalists should demand from the Trump campaign including health records, tax returns, and the Arlington National Cemetery video.
On the one hand, the New York Times has finally discovered that Trump is a raging old liar in cognitive decline.
On the other hand, they continue to sanitize the crazy things that come out of his mouth, in this case describing his belief in Nazi-esque eugenics as “a long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”
Kamala Harris is doing a TV blitz.
Elon Musk is apparently going around Silicon Valley bragging about how he can be, like, the shadow president if Trump wins, because he’s so much smarter than Trump and Trump is so easily manipulated. It’d be a shame if Trump got wind of it.
Seems pretty empty, idk.
How’s everyone holding up in the home stretch? We can ~~~unburden~~~ ourselves this afternoon during the weekly member’s chat, and for those subscribers who can’t join, I’ll take questions in the comments section, too.
UPDATE: LFG!