Good morning and welcome to yet another performance of the Carnival of Fools, my weekly chronicle of American political folly. Last week it seemed like a sewage pipe full of scandalous idiocy had burst, and we’ve been flooded by sleazy bilge ever since. Tracking it is a dirty job — one that involves a self-proclaimed “black Nazi” with a fetish for the sexually unspeakable — and right now it feels a bit like being asked to drain a sump with a sieve. I’ll skip the lengthy introduction this time and wade into the muck with at least one serious story first. (If you haven’t already, please subscribe here to get this newsletter in your email inbox.)
Is November Slip Slidin’ Away from Trump, or Merely Reverting to Form?
Though autumn is upon us, who can forget the “Summer of Vibes” that was Kamala Harris’s sudden replacement campaign? The delirious media party essentially wrapped after Harris’s lone debate with Donald Trump, and we are now left drifting queasily — unmoored and utterly unsure of what to expect along the way — toward the November election. In other words, with Harris strategically unavailable to media, hostile or otherwise, and therefore not making any news, we are back in a campaign zone of vibes and narrative-driven unreality. And the vibes have been poor for Trump as of late. With his “they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats” stunt at the debate, he has left the American public with a lingering bad and weird taste in their mouth, and both the media and Trump’s own running mate are doing their level best to keep it that way.
Leave aside the tenor of news coverage as a causal factor and just look at the new numbers: The New York Times/Siena poll, after showing Trump up 48–47, now has him falling back to earth at a national 47–47 tie with Harris. More important are Trump’s numbers among educated suburbanites. On that score, he’s returning to 2020-level margins in many key states — notably Pennsylvania, where he’s doing as well as ever with the white working class but bleeding out ever more middle-class suburbanites cycle after cycle.
The new NBC/Hart/Public Opinion Strategies poll out on Sunday morning was even worse for Trump; the Harris 49–Trump 44 two-way result is a sharp turnabout from NBC’s last test of the national race in July, when Trump led a post-debate Joe Biden 45–43. The signals are distinctly mixed, however: The New York Times was out on Monday morning with a set of polls of the Sun Belt swing states — Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia — showing Trump retaining a persistent lead in all of them. (The momentum swing in Arizona toward Trump alone is notable — he now leads there 50–45.)
Everyone is tempted to accept good polls for their candidate and dismiss bad ones, and it is always a mistake. Even if one dismisses an outlier poll here or there (and neither of these looks in any way like an outlier), the trends usually speak amply enough, and the trend for Trump is, across all pollsters, a downward slide over the last month. But is it enough to matter? The electoral math on this is crystal clear: Assuming Trump holds North Carolina and retakes Arizona and Georgia, then Harris will need to win all three of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — or bust. One isn’t enough. Two will not be enough. In 2016, when Trump, comically, won all three of those states, the reason such a thing hadn’t seemed possible is that none of them had fallen to the GOP since 1988. Nobody labors under such delusions anymore. The Midwest, and Pennsylvania, will decide America’s fate.
What If Someone Tried to Shoot the President and Everybody Forgot?
Hey, remember when a madman tried to assassinate Donald Trump? For the second time? It was just last week! The attempted shooter is still alive, for God’s sake. And the story has vanished, swept away by the ongoing current of campaign news. As I noted last week, the media were reluctant to cover it for all the most obvious and dishonorable reasons — but there is another reason, of course, one I myself am quite willing to credit: The would-be shooter is transparently a madman with a hero complex. But it is remarkable nevertheless how Donald Trump was shot or nearly shot twice already during this presidential campaign and almost instantly afterward we carried on with Capitol Hill hijinks and quotidian political sex scandals, as if the political violence and near-violence were of a piece with those. I find it worthy of note for that reason alone. Sometimes it feels like I’m the last person left who hasn’t moved on from it yet.
Here’s to You, Mrs. (?) Robinson
I bring you bad news: Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina, is apparently a transgender-sex fetishist. It gets notably worse from there.
Many of you, no doubt, will have read Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt from Friday, wherein he briefly laid out the sordid plight of MAGA darling Mark Robinson, the lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for the gubernatorial mansion soon to be vacated by the Democratic two-term incumbent, Roy Cooper. Robinson has a “posting history,” as the kids these days say. Apparently he used to be fond of hanging around the chatboards of a porn website hilariously named “Nude Africa,” and while there he reportedly said many memorable things suggestive of his fitness for statewide office, such as that he considered himself a “black Nazi” who would happily own some of his fellow African Americans as slaves, out of pure contempt for their uncivilized subhumanity if nothing else.
It’s just not the best look in a competitive statewide race. And it’s a fascinating question whether one considers that to be more or less scandalous than the other subject he reportedly discussed on that message board, namely his fondness for transgender fetish pornography — that’s right, folks, the proverbial “chicks with something Nixonian down there.” I cannot believe I even find myself in the position of having to write about this for an outlet as venerable as National Review, so my research into the subject began and ended on Saturday night within the exact span of 1.2 seconds. The only information I can report back to you here willingly is what happens when you enter the phrase “transgender fetish” into Google Image search: nothing good.
Robinson has refused to depart the race, denouncing all the (extremely well-sourced) allegations as “lies.” The North Carolina GOP is stuck with him, since the deadline to drop out passed on Thursday. His own staff feels differently: Nearly all of them resigned en masse over the weekend, leaving him with only three paid employees by Sunday night. The race is over, and I extend my congratulations to governor-to-be Josh Stein on boarding the Shapiro train with a first-class ticket: destroying your opponent in what should have been a close contest — if not a loss — simply by being sane. (Ruben Gallego is currently chortling his way to a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona along similar lines.)
North Carolina likes to elect Democratic governors in any event; it’s easy to resign oneself to the fact that Mark Robinson is a dead man walking. What’s maddening is that he was dead long before the ship even sank, and everyone knew it — yet still allowed it to happen quiescently anyway. The first thing to understand about this scandal is that, while the particulars of the Robinson mess may surprise some, the existence of it has been the biggest open secret in North Carolina state politics for years now. Our own Audrey Fahlberg was reporting on the whispers of scandal surrounding Robinson as early as June of last year, and that was back when she was still at the Dispatch and he was a year away from his primary. Absolutely nobody with an ear to the ground in North Carolina politics failed to pick up on the bizarre demons lurking within Robinson’s oppo file. I know this because nearly two years ago I was quietly told to keep my eye on him for these reasons, and I don’t even live there.
Jim already raised the most salient issue in North Carolina — whether Robinson is so toxic that he could be the rare statewide candidate to negatively synergize with the brand of the national topline and depress it for Trump in N.C. — so I will leave you with a question, for which I will provide an answer: Why couldn’t this train wreck have been avoided even though it was known to be coming well over a year in advance? Because Donald Trump endorsed Robinson back in 2023, and nobody wanted to get crosswise of Donald Trump.
He may not lose North Carolina for it, but he deserves to.
With ShotSpotter Gone, It’s Now Open Season in Chicago
The Chicago White Sox finally lost their 120th game this Sunday, tying a record for baseball futility once thought to have been permanently established by the expansion-franchise 1962 New York Mets. And it wasn’t even the worst thing that happened to my city that day, because on Sunday, Mayor Brandon Johnson officially closed out Chicago’s ShotSpotter contract as well. Over the last year, I’ve written copiously about ShotSpotter — the bullet-detecting echolocation system that allows police and (most importantly) EMTs to race to the location of shots fired in anticipation of casualties — and Brandon Johnson’s mindlessly dogged progressivist folly in canceling its services come hell or high water. (Anything that attracts the police to a black neighborhood is, in Johnson’s stated worldview, inherently suspect as a manifestation of systemic white racism.) Nobody doubts this — the Chicago Tribune itself editorialized against Johnson’s decision last week, joining nearly all of the aldermen whose wards are most affected by it. The only constituencies for eliminating ShotSpotter are North Side white-collar progressives, committed activists, and the criminals themselves. (ShotSpotter saves lives, which is not advantageous if your job is “professional street hit man.”) And here in Chicago, they now run the show.
What I’m Listening To: The Dismemberment Plan
An ugly name for a band, for sure — the band members actually took it from a great line in the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day — but the newest episode of my long-standing NR music podcast Political Beats went up yesterday, and few groups from the turn of the century feel more like missed opportunities than D.C.’s own local indie great the Dismemberment Plan. I’ve already written more elsewhere about how their music resonates for me on an emotional level, so here I’d like to repost a little introductory playlist (emphatically not a “greatest hits”) I made to explain what the late ’90s D.C. area actually felt like to those of us who were there to live through it, put in terms of the music of a band I should have known and treasured in their time, and will forever regret missing out on.
Until next week.