A YouGov poll conducted Wednesday shows more than 53% of Americans think pop superstar Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris after Tuesday night’s debate will benefit the Democratic presidential candidate, FiveThirtyEight reports Friday, and that includes 31% of Republicans surveyed. Just 4% believe Swift’s endorsement will hurt Harris.

This follows Donald J. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, telling Fox News apparently without irony that Americans will not be “influenced by a billionaire celebrity.”

What do you think? Whether you are a never-Trumper or a pro-MAGA conservative, we humbly seek your comments on this question for this column. If you lean liberal, anywhere from center-left to hard-progressive, we want to hear from you, too, for posting in the left column.

We also seek your opinions on Trump's association with racist/conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer.

You are also invited to comment on whether the US and UK should approve Ukraine’s request to continue and intensify its missile attacks on Russia and whether or not we should take Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threat against NATO seriously. 

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FRIDAY 9/13/24

Vice President Kamala Harris meets former President Donald J. Trump for the first time, at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia Tuesday night for what looks like their only debate before the November 5 presidential election.

The debate begins 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific time on ABC TV with moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir, and NPR will simulcast the debate on radio.

An NPR/Marist poll says 70% of all Americans say they'll watch all or most of the debate, Morning Edition reports Tuesday. The poll results break down 72% of Democrats, 74% of Republicans and 67% of independents.

You know what’s coming. We would like you to participate in a civil discussion about the debate. Who won the night? Did either candidate convince you, or change your mind, about who to vote for? 

Whether you are progressive or pro-MAGA, center-left or center-right, we want to foster fair and civil discourse in these columns. 

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By Stephen Macaulay

It is somewhat like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story Silver Blaze: it doesn’t bark.

The absence brings up presence. What should have happened doesn’t.

Which brings us to Mitch McConnell, who is still the leader of the Republicans in the Senate.

Back in February McConnell pushed a bipartisan immigration and foreign aid bill. 

Donald Trump had posted this on Truth Social about the bill that was to both tighten asylum standards and shut down the border if there was an influx of an unmanageable number of illegal crossings, both the sort of thing that would provide the “border security” that so many Trump and Trump-PAC ads are now shrieking about: “Only a fool, or a Radical Left Democrat, would vote for this horrendous Border Bill, which only gives Shutdown Authority after 5000 Encounters a day, when we already have the right to CLOSE THE BORDER NOW, which must be done.”

The bill was written, in part, by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), not a fool nor a “Radical Left Democrat.”

Lankford wrote of the bill, “Americans are not opposed to legal and orderly immigration, but they are tired of the chaos and abuse at our border.”

No one should argue against that. Or maybe people need to be reminded that we are a nation of immigrants.

Lankford went on to write:

“The border security bill will put a huge number of new enforcement tools in the hands of a future administration and push the current Administration to finally stop the illegal flow. The bill provides funding to build the wall, increase technology at the border, and add more detention beds, more agents, and more deportation flights. The border security bill ends the abuse of parole on our southwest border that has waived in over a million people. It dramatically changes our ambiguous asylum laws by conducting fast screenings at a higher standard of evidence, limited appeals, and fast deportation. 

“New bars to asylum eligibility will stop the criminal cartels from exploiting our currently weak immigration laws. The bill also has new emergency authorities to shut down the border when the border is overrun, new hiring authorities to quickly increase officers, and new hearing authorities to quickly apply consequences for illegal crossings. It changes our border from catch and release to detain and deport.” 

Remember: this is a conservative Republican (a real conservative, not the kind that have co-opted the ideology).

What’s not to like about that?

But Trump spoke, his acolytes listened, and McConnell, who had once been a force in the Senate — and in his party — wandered off in silence. Even though he is not running for reelection, even though he would have no political capital to lose by strongly voicing first his support then his concern, McConnell folded.

The reason Trump was against the bill was because if the border was at least somewhat “fixed,” he wouldn’t have one of his primary issues to rant, rave and inexplicably riff about.

So people fell into line and supported their liege.

Now arguably the bill has things in it that people don’t like, but the nature of developing legislation is — or it used to be — one of give-and-take and compromise. It is working to get the most of what you can get and to minimize the amount of what you don’t want, knowing full well that there are opposite numbers to your position trying to do the same thing from their points of view.

But at the end something — not nothing — results.

Or at least that used to be the way things worked before the House became not much more than something you might find on the grounds of a carnival and the Senate has gone from a “deliberative body” to one where people thinks the word “debate” is something that Herve Villechaize might have referenced in relation to fishing on Fantasy Island.

Now Trump has returned to directing Congress by saying that if the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act isn’t signed into law (it is essentially a law that says illegal aliens can’t vote in federal elections, which is actually something that noncitizens can’t do anyway, so if you’re all about reducing regulations and the size of government, enacting something that essentially repeats what’s already there is nothing but waste), then:

“I would shut down the government in a heartbeat if they don’t get it.”

Congress is going to have to actually do some work, or the government will be largely shut down on September 30. 

What Trump is saying, in effect, is that if the SAVE Act isn’t passed, then Congress shouldn’t do its job to keep the government running.

Here is the man who wants to lead the government who is saying that it should be shut down.

How does that make any sense?

It is all about him and what he wants. Never mind the rest of the people in the country he wants to represent. If he doesn’t get his way, then it is no way.

And there is either silence (McConnell) or fist-pumping support (Hawley, Jordan).

Trump clearly doesn’t understand that it isn’t about him, in large part because there are so many who either keep quiet or tell him that it is and pretend that it has something to do with making America great again.

It isn’t. It is simply giving him what he wants.

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Whether you’re left or right, conservative or liberal, progressive or pro-Trump, your civil comments on Thursday night’s CNN interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are welcome here. We treat readers’ comments in the same manner that traditional newspapers handle letters to the editor, which means no false facts or personal attacks and none of the conspiracy theories or extremism that social media sites like X-Twitter, Telegraph and Facebook allow while hiding behind Section 230.

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

By Stephen Macaulay

What did Mike Pence do while serving as vice president? There was the important act of obeying the law on January 6, 2021. But other than that?

[PLEASE SCROLL DOWN this column for reader comments on the interview --Ed.]

What did Joe Biden do except make a remark that resulted in President Obama having to come out an announce his support of same-sex marriage?

Arguably Dick Cheney did more while in office than even he would probably admit to.

Al Gore, of course, invented the Internet, but that was before he moved into Number One Observatory Circle.

And Dan Quayle’s contribution to the polity was making it clear that there needs to be greater support for elementary education, particularly when it comes to spelling skills.

The point is, vice presidents don’t do a whole lot outside of ceremonial activities. Yes, the Constitution has it that the vice president is the president of the Senate, “but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.” A tie-breaker. Swell. 

Then there is the 25^th Amendment. Section 1 puts it tersely: “In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.”

Section 4 is a bit more robust as it says, in part, “Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

While we’ve seen Section 1 in action since 1963, with Johnson succeeding Kennedy after the assassination, and in 1974, when Nixon resigned and Ford assumed the office, Section 4 hasn’t happened. Which is probably a good thing.

Which brings me to the Kamala Harris CNN interview. The observation about the vice presidency and warm spit comes to mind.

There are those who tie Biden’s policy to her, as though she had something to do with them. 

In the early 1920s, when Warren Harding was president, there was a bit of a change for the vice president. As the White House Historical Association puts it: “As vice president to President Warren G. Harding, Coolidge had little to do aside from presiding over the Senate, although the gracious Harding invited him to regularly attend cabinet meetings.”

Presumably the vice president’s role in the cabinet is not unlike that of a tourist.

There are those who seem to think that Harris should break with Biden in a big way. But realize that she has to work with the man until noon on January 20, 2025 no matter who wins the 2024 election, so it is probably better to be civil.

Did she do well during the interview with Dana Bash. Yes.

But what is probably more to the point is to make a comparison between that press conference and, say, Donald Trump’s at Mar-a-Lago on August 12.

He opened, “Hello, everybody. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate your being here. Just a statement before I talk about debates.”

Then rolled into things including, “I think that our country is right now in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in from an economic standpoint, from a safety standpoint. Both gangs on the street and frankly gangs outside of our country in the form of other countries that are frankly very powerful. They’re very powerful countries and we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Gangs that are very powerful countries?

And: “We have a very, very sick country right now. You saw the other day with the stock market crash. That was just the beginning. That was just the beginning. It’s going to get worse. It’s going to get a lot worse in my opinion. . . .”

On the day of that press conference the Dow closed at 41,086.81. On the day of Harris’ press conference it closed at 41,577.97.

While past performance is not indicative of future results, a Dow that’s been over 40,000 since mid-May doesn’t seem sick.

He went on and on until he got to the debates.

“With all of that being said, I think it’s very important to have debates and we’ve agreed with Fox on a date of September 4th. We’ve agreed with NBC, fairly full agreement subject to them on September 10th, and we’ve agreed with ABC on September 25th.”

Turns out that the September 4 Fox debate was, for example, something that the “we” he used was inclusive of him and only him.

The point it, Trump gives a press conference and pretty much makes a whole lot of stuff up and the general response is a shrug and a “that’s just Trump.”

If we think press conferences from presidential candidates are important, shouldn’t we hold them to some standards?

Macaulay is pundit-at-large for The Hustings.

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On the Harris/Walz CNN Interview

In a country like ours, it is difficult to believe that the best and brightest that Democrats have to offer in 2024 is Kamala Harris. What happened to the party who produced presidents like Kennedy, Clinton, Obama and frankly even Joe Biden? A couple of them never missed a chance to talk to the press or explain their political positions and policies. As a Reagan conservative, I disagreed politically with the last three, but I never doubted their ability to serve as POTUS. Donald Trump and JD Vance face the media every day and are clear about their positions and policies. Like them or not, Americans know where they stand, and voters can at least be confident that Donald Trump knows how to serve as president at home and abroad. 

After watching Kamala Harris uncomfortably struggle her way through “The First Interview” with Tim Walz filling in the gaps, there is little reason to be confident that she has a “clear” plan or positions that Americans can confidently believe. Just because Harris tells us that “she’s been very clear” … she has clearly flip-flopped on several positions. I’m left thinking it was just another word salad and filled with way too much chit-chat that covered little substance of importance to Americans.

--Rich Corbett

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

Dear left and right, liberals and conservatives, pro-MAGA and progressives, we seek your opinions on our center-column political news aggregate and right- or left-column commentaries. Up for discussion most recently are…

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By Stephen Macaulay

One of the knocks against Kamala Harris thus far is that she hasn’t participated in interviews with legacy news organizations. Arguably she hasn’t participated in any interviews with new media organizations, either.

But the likes of the Times and the Post and NBC and ABC treat this like not merely an affront to the people’s need to know, but to their fundamental importance to the polity.

So Harris’ ghosting their conference rooms is something that they repeat. Just like Donald Trump.

They treat it like she doesn’t respect them. He clearly doesn’t respect her. 

In the case of Them it is interesting that there was less angst and anguish over the fact that Trump didn’t give his first press conference this year until August 8, a couple weeks after Biden dropped out of the race.

The day Biden dropped out, July 21, Harris announced she was running. Trump announced he was running for president on November 15, 2022. So if we take the Trump metric of 633 days, Harris has until April 14, 2026.

This is not to say that I don’t think it is a good thing for her not to talk to the media. She should.

But it is to say that those legacy organizations need to understand that their editorial boards are not quite as influential as they once were. For example, about 36% of the U.S. population is between the ages of 18 and 44 and there are probably more than a few of them who never consult the legacies. Never.

According to a recent article in The Drum, a publication that follows the media (old and new), “During this election cycle, digital is expected to attract $3.46bn in spend, or about 28% of total spend in the cycle.”

That means, of course, that 72% is not being spent on digital.

But then The Drum goes on to point out this about the $3.46bn spend: “This represents a 156% uptick from 2020 levels.”

Few things go up 156% in four years. And if it scales that way, come 2028. . . .

Team Harris knows where the money should be directed. And, of course, Team Trump likes to keep things close, so there’s always lots of advertising space available on Truth Social.

This, of course, isn’t about ad spending. It is about communicating.

To what extent do politicians, especially those going for the highest offices, “owe” the public something more than “I’m _________________ and I approve this message”?

I’d submit a lot.

And not only during campaigns. And not only to accredited media.

Consider the Prime Minister’s Questions in the UK. Every Wednesday when the House of Commons is sitting the Prime Minister shows up at Westminster and takes questions for about 30 minutes. Not only does that show what the PM knows and thinks, but it also does the same for the House members.

But of course, this is after the people in question have been elected to office and the concern here is Harris’ so-far resistance to a sit-down interview with Lester Holt or Maggie Haberman or whomever.

While this will certainly happen between now and the election, its importance is in inverse relation to the concern expressed about it.

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COMMENTS: editors@thehustings.news

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•We’re especially interested in your opinions, for posting in the left and right columns, on what effect you think the Federal Reserve’s coming September interest rate cut, and the effect the once-again failed talks to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza will have on the November presidential race. 

•This is also your chance to tell us why you agree or disagree with Pundit-at-Large Stephen Macaulay’s latest commentary, “Who’s the Real Cheater?”

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By Stephen Macaulay

In 2016 no one, it seems, reportedly not even the campaign itself, thought that Donald Trump would win the election.

But he did. But that didn’t make him entirely happy.

Because he thought Hillary Clinton received too many votes (while she lost in the Electoral College, she actually had some 2.9-million more Americans vote for her; he claimed that was a result of “large scale voter fraud”), in May 2017 he signed an executive order creating the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” It included noted voter-fraud-claiming enthusiast Kris Kobach and Hans von Spakovsky of the outfit that brings you “Project 2025,” The Heritage Foundation.

What did this fair-and-balanced investigatory commission find? Well, evidently nothing. So Trump disbanded it in January 2018.

However, then-press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders maintained the commission ended because many states didn’t provide the requested data. And that there is some “substantial evidence of voter fraud” although no evidence of the evidence was provided.

We all know what happened regarding the 2020 presidential election results.

Long before the election Trump claimed that it was going to be “fixed.” Which is somewhat odd when you think about it. That is, he held the levers of power and wasn’t afraid to use them. If the election was going to be “fixed,” wouldn’t it have been fixed in his favor?

Be that as it may, Biden trounced Trump in terms of the popular vote, garnering some 7-million more than Trump.

You can understand why the man may have blown a gasket seeing a number like that.

Clearly there had to be massive cheating involved . . . but cheating only as it related to the top of the ticket because down-ballot Republicans generally did well, thank you very much.

The Heritage Foundation swung into action. And discovered, for example, four cases of fraud in the Arizona 2020 election — one of which was a Republican casting a Republican vote for her deceased mother. (And you thought only corpses in Chicago vote.)

When the Republican-hired Cyber Ninjas reviewed the results of the 2020 election in Arizona it found . . . 360 more votes for Biden. Clearly that was a team of stealthy ninjas because no one saw that coming.

Despite Trump’s request to the Georgia Secretary of State for the discovery of 11,780 votes that would shift the results from Biden to Trump — a.k.a., “fixing” the results — Heritage found no election fraud in the 2020 Georgia election.

So were there to have been fraud at any scale in Georgia, it would have been the result of Trump requesting it.

Not surprisingly, even when it seemed to be a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 Trump started warning of “cheating” in the forthcoming election. Now, with Kamala Harris showing significant signs of strength he has significantly amped up his claims of cheating. (It is well known that when people get older their ability to sleep soundly through the night decreases. Not only is Trump 78, but on those sleepless nights he must be vexed by the 306 to 232 Electoral College votes Biden won and the 81,283,501 popular votes Sleepy Joe got to his 74,223,975.)

Claims like Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ “substantial evidence of voter fraud” are simply unfounded. There is no evidence.

Which brings us to the whole issue of cheating, which Trump claims will be rife. Although this could be construed as him thinking he won’t win, if he does and he doesn’t get the numbers that his pal Vladimir Putin got in his last election — 88% -- then that will only be because of cheating.

But there is something to be considered here. Just as it seems odd that Trump was claiming the fix was in against him during the 2020 election — when he was in charge — it is also odd that there is sufficient evidence — evidence beyond a reasonable doubt — that he is a man for whom cheating is not out of the question when it comes to personal benefit.

Remember: Last May he was convicted in New York on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

“Falsifying” — like what he and his associates claim has been done regarding vote totals.

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