Politics
MAGA-friendly centrists are yada yada-ing over Trump’s threats
In a classic “Seinfeld” episode, George Costanza’s new girlfriend abbreviates her dialogue by saying “yada yada yada,” often eliding the most pertinent parts of a story. George adopts the habit, too, and he and his girlfriend end up yada yada-ing over “little” details like criminality and an untimely death. It’s hilarious and patently absurd — the conversational equivalent of burying the lede in journalism.
This is what a lot of self-identified heterodox political commentators do when they talk about former President Donald Trump. You can see it often on “Real Time With Bill Maher” panels, hear it on any number of “politically homeless” podcasts or read it daily on scores of Substack sites. These ostensible independents view “the establishment” — which includes everything from centrist Democrats to anti-Trump conservatives to non-right-wing media — as the true threat to freedom and the American way. They might concede Trump’s vulgarity is distasteful or that he’s sometimes incompetent and often incoherent, but when it comes to confronting his incorrigible criminality, corruption, racism and misogyny, and his relentless dishonesty on matters both trivial and existential, they typically yada yada past the gory details and pivot into pathological whataboutism and both-sidesism.
I could list so many more of his outrageous, inexcusable words and deeds, but it wouldn’t matter. Yada yada yada to all that, Trump’s useful centrists will argue.
In just the past 30 days, Trump has helped whip up a racist, xenophobic furor against Haitian immigrants in Ohio based on lies; suggested that people who criticize Supreme Court justices should be imprisoned; and mused that police should be allowed free rein to commit wanton violence on retail thieves over the course of “one real rough, nasty” day. I could list so many more of his outrageous, inexcusable words and deeds, but it wouldn’t matter.
Yada yada to all that, Trump’s useful centrists will argue. Only the humorless, Trump Derangement Syndrome-afflicted could possibly take the former president’s rhetoric seriously: “That’s just Trump being Trump, shooting from the hip, flying off the handle, being funny in his uniquely Trumpian way that triggers the hated establishment.”
Last week, Judge Tanya Chutkan released special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page brief laying out evidence that he says shows Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was a private matter and not in the capacity of a sitting president. (The Supreme Court ruled this summer that a president acting in his or her capacity as president is essentially immune from prosecution.) It’s all there: Trump knew he lost the election very early, but Smith’s filing says he engaged in numerous criminal acts to overturn it anyway. Smith’s brief says he also encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, refused pleas from his own staff to call for calm, and after being told by an aide that Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger thanks to his own instigations, he reportedly replied, “So what?”
As I’ve previously written, if Trump hadn’t ever given his riot-inciting speech on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, he still attempted a self-coup through alleged fraud, intimidation and threats of violence. But high-profile MAGA-adjacent “independents” have spent the past four years yada yada-ing away the whole thing as an unfortunate and brief act of mob violence. Some have even suggested it might have actually been a trap laid by Democrats.
So don’t expect to hear anything louder than throat clearing about the Smith brief (if even that) from Trump’s useful centrists. They’re still having a fit over Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s stupid, discrediting lie about being in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests (he was most likely in Nebraska at the time).
As someone who is actually without a political tribe — in that I don’t neatly fit into any ideological box and feel no need to carry water for either party — I’ve concluded that Trump is, by leaps and bounds, the greater threat to American democracy and rationality.
And yet, I still say go ahead and nail Walz on his lies. Make him squirm. Hold Vice President Kamala Harris’ feet to the fire on any of her untrue or misleading statements, too. Make all power-hungry politicians feel uncomfortably accountable when they mislead the public.
And then look back at Trump. On the ledger of politicians’ falsehoods, do statements like Walz’s mistruths about whether he was in China 35 years ago (he claims he “misspoke”) even remotely measure up to Trump’s attempted self-coup or his racist incitements against immigrants?
As someone who is actually ‘politically homeless’ … I’ve concluded that Trump is, by leaps and bounds, the greater threat to American democracy and rationality.
At the vice presidential debate last week, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, refused to answer the direct question of who won the 2020 election. You’d think a true political independent — no matter how much they’re triggered by the “woke” or the “establishment” — would see Vance’s nonanswer as a craven cop-out, given how thoroughly adjudicated the legitimacy of the 2020 election has already been. But not if you’re Free Press columnist Abigail Shrier, who lamented during the debate“Dear Lord, more January 6 questions?!”
Heaven forfend a candidate for the second-highest office in the land, whose running mate tried to steal the previous election, be asked about it. We nonpartisans really ought to just move on, I guess.
Many anti-anti-Trumpers yada yada’d through 2022’s”https://www.thedailybeast.com/your-grandkids-will-care-about-the-jan-6-hearings-even-if-you-dont” target=”_blank”>Jan. 6 Committee hearings — where remarkable video evidence and testimony from ex-Trump White House officials (including Trump’s own daughter) and other Republicans laid bare Trump’s grand conspiracy to overturn a free and fair election. Trump and his allies have also spent the past four years plotting to do it again — and thanks to state-level election overhauls and a sympathetic judiciary, they’re much better equipped to do so now. Also poisoning the discourse are pro-Trump billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thielwho publicly spread the fiction that Democrats are cheating — already, they say — to win the 2024 election. Axios recently reported, “Through public remarks, Truth Social screeds and more than 100 preemptive lawsuits, Donald Trump is assembling a detailed catalog of excuses for rejecting the results of the 2024 election — if he loses.”
Yada yada yada, Walz lied about parts of his biography.
I used to think Trump-sympathetic nonpartisans suffered from a failure of imagination. Ever since Trump’s escalator descent in 2015, warnings that Trump could do unthinkable things (like try to steal an election he lost, then preemptively discredit the next one) have been dismissed as the panicked bleatings of basic establishment Chicken Littles.
But Trump is a known quantity in 2024. He was president. He’s been the GOP nominee three consecutive times. He’s been convicted of felonies and found liable for sexual abuse. He’s threatening to use the Department of Justice to jail his political rivals.
At what point do Trump-sympathetic independents think it’s OK to take Trump at his word when he promises to do horrible things — like once again pre-emptively attempting to overturn an election based on nothing?
Go ahead and nail Walz on his lies. Make him squirm. Hold Kamala Harris’ feet to the fire on any of her untrue or misleading statements, too.
To be clear, I’m not here to police anyone’s political preferences. It’s perfectly respectable to be a nonpartisan who thinks Harris and Democrats are worse. But you can’t credibly make the case that Dems are worse by blithely waving away Trump’s most egregious offenses.
I’ve”https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-antifa-book-only-bougie-wimps-oppose-left-wing-violence-against-fascists?ref=author” target=”_blank”>unequivocally criticized left-wing excesses and liberal threats of censorshipas well as Biden’s and Harris’ records. And yet, I’m reminded of the late legendary libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourkewho despite leaning right his entire adult life, explained his vote for Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016 on the basis that “she’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”
Yes, you can reject political tribalism and still choose a side in an election. But if your criticisms of Trump, MAGA and Republicans are rare, trivial and half-hearted — and you denounce Trump opponents (including those exiled from the center and the right) as TDS-afflicted liberals — you’re not politically tribeless and you’re not fearlessly independent. You’ve got a tribe; it’s Trump’s, and you’re a reputation sanitizer for his presidential campaign.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.
MAGA Inc. is planning to trim the map in a homestretch bid to cling to power in November.
The President Donald Trump-aligned super PAC, with several hundred million dollars still in the bank, is planning a series of major money moves coordinated with other leading GOP super PACs in the final three weeks before Election Day. The push includes cutting off spending to a group of less attainable House races, piling in money to shore up others and training its focus on key Senate seats to salvage Republicans’ Senate majority.
Ohio, Alaska and Iowa are the Senate races that Trump officials view as increasingly critical to keep their majority in the chamber, according to three GOP officials familiar with MAGA Inc.’s strategy, granted anonymity to candidly assess the midterms.
One of the people said MAGA Inc. and a leading House GOP super PAC would pull spending out of Michigan’s 8th District by the middle of this week. The move effectively acknowledges Democratic Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet’s strength over GOP challenger Tom Smith. They have similar plans for a group of other House races in the coming days that are trending away from Republicans.
The official stressed the tacking would amount to “re-allocating, not cutting” the total planned spend.
MAGA Inc. and its affiliates are still competing in all of the Senate battlegrounds, including Texas, where they expected to add at least $5 million and potentially more in the coming days, according to the official.
For the Senate, winning two out of those three states of Ohio, Alaska and Iowa would make it “hard” for Democrats to take the Senate, one of the senior GOP officials projected, adding that a three-state sweep would decisively put it out of reach for Democrats. That, however, would require Republicans to win Texas and a handful of other at-risk red states, while also flipping Michigan or another blue state. The same senior Republican official said there’s confidence GOP Rep. Ashley Hinson “probably pulls through” in the Iowa Senate race.
Texas, however, remains a massive headache for Republicans — and the GOP official is pointing to Ken Paxton as the problem.
The senior Republican official said MAGA Inc. would do what it can to help candidates and vowed to “unload the tank” — a promise the group has been making for months even as it’s only spent more than half of the half-a-billion-dollar war chest with three weeks to go.
But the onus for standing up a winning campaign is shifting. Ultimately, the official said, “it’s up to the candidates, not the outside groups” to “bring it home and have a reason to get a few more points of swing voters their way.” They also need to maximize their votes with Republicans, this person said.
“Over the next week to 10 days you will see a lot of moves — a lot of coordinated moves — that are around trimming the map for the home stretch,” the senior GOP official familiar with MAGA Inc.’s plans said. “It’ll be all over the place. It’ll just just be moving on from districts that we don’t think it’s the right time for, and piling in further on ones we think it is the right time for.”
That would force top House GOP groups to decide whether to shift their own cash to take over key spending from MAGA Inc. as they work to defend a host of once-safely red House seats Trump won by more than 10 points in 2024 that are now at risk. That includes key districts across the Midwest, North Carolina, Nevada, along with a seat in Kentucky, which Trump won by 15 points.
In Ohio, where Trump is traveling for a rally on Monday, Republicans have privately worried about GOP Sen. Jon Husted for months. The former lieutenant governor, who was appointed to serve out Vice President JD Vance’s Senate term, has been trailing former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in public and private polling for months. The top Senate GOP super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, has unloaded close to $100 million in Ohio and a slew of outside groups have joined, making it one of the most expensive Senate contests in the country. Just in the last week, Husted notched his first narrow lead over Brown in one recent poll.
“We want a maximum spend,” Ohio GOP Chair Alex Triantafilou, who played host to Vance on Friday in Lima and will reprise that role as the president lands in Youngstown, said in an interview. “We want as much attention. I mean, the president’s coming, the vice president. Look, I’m the chair of the Republican Party — I want full resources in this state. We welcome it very much.”
And while Texas has emerged as an unexpectedly expensive headache for Republicans, another GOP operative familiar with MAGA Inc.’s thinking suggested Ohio could end up costing Republicans more spending from all sides, despite its smaller size.
Democrats see the same final battlefield taking shape. Senate Majority PAC, the top Democratic-aliied PAC, is injecting $2.5 million in Iowa and $7 million in Ohio for television ads, according to plans shared first with Blue Light News, “injecting new resources to help close the gap in those battleground states,” a spokesperson said. They’ll also continue to back aggressive digital campaigns in each state. This comes on the heels of SMP dropping $5 million in Kansas.
Beyond Ohio, other senior Republicans are busy trying to staunch the bleeding in red states across the map.
Top Senate GOP groups have already cut off spending in North Carolina, where Republicans are struggling to defend a GOP-held seat. They have also pulled some money back in Georgia but are still planning to unload millions more in the Peach State.
Senate Leadership Fund expects to keep spending broadly across the map in the final weeks. The group plans to pour even more money into Texas as a potential lifeline to Paxton, hitting a total of nearly $200 million. They’re also dropping dough in Kansas to defend Sen. Roger Marshall, whose tough race against Democrat Adam Hamilton blindsided top Republicans in the final weeks, along with a crop of other endangered GOP incumbents, according to two Republicans with direct knowledge of the plans. And, SLF is expected to keep unloading money into the Michigan Senate race, which Senate Republicans view as their top flip opportunity.
The senior GOP official familiar with MAGA Inc.’s strategy defended the group’s spending decisions, despite waves of criticism from some Republicans who wanted it to unleash all its $400-million-plus war chest, and sooner. So far, MAGA Inc. and its affiliates have spent just over $200 million this cycle, including future ad reservations, according to data from AdImpact.
The cash the wider MAGA Inc. operation deployed last month, which was close to $100 million, shielded candidates from further losses as the environment worsened for Republicans, the official argued.
“The money’s working,” the official said. “The money stopped everybody from getting killed in September when the environment rapidly deteriorated further. The money held the line.”
The campaigns that received the September spending were able to “stay afloat,” one of the other officials said. “There are more candidates in a position that they can still win their race today that wouldn’t have been had that not happened.”
Many of those GOP candidates, however, privately argue it was Trump’s poor approval rating and his decisions around the ongoing war with Iran, tariffs and sky-high fuel prices that are sparking voter backlash.
It was during that September panic that GOP officials became increasingly worried about the growing map.
At one point, Trump officials believed they may need to start intervening to boost even Sen. Ashley Moody in ruby-red Florida as warning signs shot up across the Sunshine State, according to two Trump officials with direct knowledge of the matter.
But recent internal polling for Moody has turned a corner, alleviating many of those concerns and prompting Trump officials to stand by plans for the president to visit the state — but more as a way to boost Rep. Byron Donalds, who is running for governor, and several key House races that Republicans are worried about, according to the people.
Jessica Piper contributed to this report.
Under the political radar, the country’s food stamps program is undergoing a slow-motion transformation. The ramifications could bubble up into the midterms.
Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act are rolling out in phases, from tougher work requirements to restrictions on non-citizens. Food stamp rolls already shrank by more than 5 million people nationwide as of this summer, as the hardest-hit state, Arizona, saw an outright majority of its food stamp recipients lose benefits.
The latest alteration clicked into place Oct. 1, when the share of administrative costs states and counties have to pay rose to 75% from 50%. An even bigger financial shift looms in a year, when states with high payment error rates will have to assume some benefit costs for the first time, a scenario that’s already rippling through state and local budget planning.
It all adds up to a new era in federal-state relations — and in the size and nature of the welfare state.
In a year when affordability worries top voters’ priority lists and grocery prices strain their wallets, Democrats think the SNAP shift gives them an opening to make Republicans pay politically after the GOP used social safety net cuts to food aid and Medicaid to help pay for last year’s tax cuts.
“People are getting kicked off these programs at the very moment they’re going to the polls to vote,” House Agriculture ranking member Angie Craig (D-Minn.) said. “I sure wouldn’t want to be a Republican headed into the November ballot.”
But Republicans think they have a compelling story to tell voters, trying to right-size a program that spends millions of dollars on erroneous payments. The SNAP changes align with the Trump administration’s broader push to crack down on fraud and make the government smaller or more efficient. Implementing stricter work requirements for welfare often polls well, and trying to move people toward work gets at the root causes of poverty, they argue.
“The premise is simple: Let’s make sure that this program is preserved for those truly in need, and that we aren’t squandering taxpayer dollars,” a senior USDA official told Playbook in an interview. “And let’s make sure that if folks are able-bodied, they are work training or volunteering for 20 hours per week.”
That doesn’t mean Republicans in competitive races are putting SNAP and Medicaid cuts front and center on the campaign trail. When they tout last year’s megalaw, new tax breaks typically lead the messaging. And 10 frontline GOP House campaigns didn’t respond to requests for interviews about how they can win on SNAP.
At the state and county level, some governments are scrambling to prepare for a massive cost shift, hitting at the same time as significant Medicaid changes. The resulting bureaucratic jumble has contributed to some of the SNAP losses this year, as recipients struggled to get through overtaxed call centers, some states cut staff, and others tightened their processes.
“It really sets up a change in the federal responsibility, and I view it as a slippery slope,” warned Barbara Guinn, New York’s commissioner of the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance. Her state is staring down a possible $1 billion added burden next year, though they’re advocating for a repeal of the benefits change. “Once they implement any kind of cost shift, I think it will be easier for them to take similar actions in the future.”
Whether to delay next year’s cost shift has already generated tensions over the farm bill in the Senate, where Democrats are demanding a longer postponement than Republicans’ offer of one year. Some Minnesota counties are considering significant property tax increases to pay for the extra costs, Craig said: “We’re going to be pushing hard for a two-year delay — at the request of, frankly, many of my Republican county commissioners, not just Democrats.”
Conservatives see the new calculus as a long overdue change to improve efficiency and incentivize program integrity. Improper payment rates are high in many states (though they comprise both over-payments and under-payments, and error rates are different from fraud). Those that reduce errors enough won’t have to take on paying the benefits. And even opponents of the changes think lower error rates are a worthy goal. SNAP rolls often ebb and flow with the economy, and the recent drop could reflect the job market pulling people out of need — or the removal of people who shouldn’t have been getting food stamps in the first place.
“There needs to be some level of accountability,” the USDA official said. States with high error rates “need to start to have skin in the game.”
But at a time when many households are already squeezed by inflation, the SNAP changes have correlated with higher numbers of Americans turning to charities to ward off hunger. The surge in people losing food aid came more quickly than expected. The unemployment rate hasn’t meaningfully changed. And the vast majority of large food banks in a recent NBC survey said they were grappling with higher demand, in part due to food stamp changes. Another rule kicking in the day after the midterms could lead to many retailers being bumped out of SNAP as places where low-income people can use their benefits.
For state governments, a set of sweeping operational changes are now underway to conform to new policy demands, often requiring more money or staffing at already under-resourced offices. And the budgetary stakes to get error rates lower are sky-high.
“It’s a really complicated, nuanced and confusing time for states who are trying to administer SNAP,” said Lauren Kallins, a senior legislative director at the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, which has advocated for a delay in the benefits costs shift.
National Democrats are increasingly shifting their attention away from North Carolina’s Senate race as polls show former Gov. Roy Cooper ahead, eyeing once long-shot races as possible pickups. But a veteran Democratic strategist who helped deliver the party’s last presidential victory in the state is urging donors not to take a win for granted.
David Plouffe, who managed behind Barack Obama’s narrow 2008 victory in North Carolina, urged Democratic donors and supporters not to grow complacent in the final weeks of Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign, according to audio obtained by Blue Light News.
“I think that this race … has I think been the best run race in the country,” Plouffe said on the call. “But that doesn’t mean that we can rest easy.”
He warned about North Carolina’s relatively fixed partisan makeup as a purple state, making it difficult for a candidate to dramatically expand their base of support.
“There’s certain states that elections happen within a bound, and this one will be that way as well,” he said.
In public polling, Cooper leads Republican Michael Whatley, who has struggled to boost his name recognition against the much better-known former governor. And as Democrats grow increasingly bullish on their candidate’s chances of flipping the seat — one of four pickups they need to take control of the Senate — national groups have begun shifting their money and attention to other contests, including most recently to Kansas.
But Plouffe said North Carolina needs to remain a priority.
“We have to win the ones we have to win,” he said on the call to Cooper’s finance committee.
Just days before Plouffe’s remarks, Senate Democrats’ top super PAC pulled back some of its spending in North Carolina, following a much bigger retreat by Republicans’ top super PAC in the state.
Plouffe cautioned that North Carolina has historically been a tough state for Democrats at the federal level, especially in recent years. The party hasn’t won a Senate race there since 2008, when Obama became the last Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state, winning by fewer than 15,000 votes. He lost the state in 2012.
“Even though we carried the electoral votes back then, we only did so by I think 14,000 votes. So it was our narrowest victory,” Plouffe said. “And in 2012, we tried to win North Carolina again with the help of so many people on this phone, and we just couldn’t get it done. And that tells you how difficult the state is.”
Plouffe also cast the stakes of Cooper’s race as extending beyond November, arguing that a Cooper victory could provide a blueprint for the party’s eventual 2028 presidential nominee.
“Democrats need to compete and win in North Carolina in 28,” he said. “And it’s one thing to look how a governor can win a state. The best route, the best scout that you receive, is how someone in a federal race won in a tough state, and that can show you the way.”
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