Election Countdown, 20 Days to Go: Eyes Wide Open as We Near the End.
What we know, as voting begins. A note for the historical record.
Forty years ago this week, the 38-year-old Donald Trump and his lawyer, Roy Cohn, announced their $1.69 billion antitrust lawsuit against the NFL, on behalf of the startup US Football League. When the case came to trial two years later, in 1986, Trump’s courtroom testimony was widely derided as braggadocio and lies that turned the jury against him. The jury ruled in Trump/USFL’s favor on technical grounds—and awarded him total damages of $1. After “one dollar” was read out in court, John Mara of the NFL’s New York Giants pulled a dollar bill from his wallet and gave it to the humiliated Trump.
Roy Cohn was not there to hear the verdict, because he was less than a week away from dying from AIDS, at age 59. A new movie recounts the crucial Cohn/Trump relationship. (Photo Bettmann / Getty images.)
This post is about a docu-drama; about real statistics that may or may not “matter” but should be noted; and about a change that does matter and is happening before our eyes.
1) ‘The Apprentice’: Go see it.
At this time yesterday, I thought there was nothing more I could possibly want to know about Donald Trump. He has been a public figure through much of my adult lifetime. As Barack Obama recently put it, Trump’s nonstop megaphone presence has made him like a gas leaf blower that is never turned off.1
Then Deb and I went to see the new film The Apprentice. We’re glad we did, and we highly recommend it. Not because of any assumption that it will “make a difference” in this election. I have no idea what might change anyone’s mind at this point.
Whether or not it “matters” politically, the film is worth seeing for many reasons. It includes several superb performances. It achieves something very difficult—making Trump’s now-familiar back story “actually interesting.” And it does something I would have thought impossible, by making Trump, briefly in his youth, seem worthy of sympathy and even pity. By the end of the film, Trump has emerged as the pitiless, vain, deluded figure of today’s headlines. But the film—in parallel with Mary Trump’s accounts, though she was not involved in this production—makes clear that we are seeing a damaged personality. Hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes.
Among the performances: from the get-go, Jeremy Strong leaves no doubt that he is Roy Cohn. Perhaps someone will beat him in the year’s Best Actor awards. It’s hard for me to imagine who or how.
As for pathos, the movie’s underlying theme is that Trump now bullies and humiliates others because he was so often humiliated himself, especially but not only by his father.
And for contemporary relevance, I think two points will strike any viewer. One is Roy Cohn’s iron insistence to his protege, Trump, that “killers” like the two of them must never admit defeat, always claim victory, never ever back down or say that they’ve been wrong. This is among the reasons Trump is sure to claim victory even before the polls close on November 5.
The other is the descent into Alzheimer’s-dementia of Trump’s father, Fred Trump Sr., becoming evident when he was in his 80s. (Donald Trump is now 78.) In the film, Donald tries to trick his half-aware father into signing a trust revision that favors Donald over his siblings. His still-alert mother notices and intervenes.
I’m aware that this is dramatization, and that most of the world’s mind is basically made up about Trump. But the film is worth your time.
2) Facts: Do they ‘matter’?
No one can be sure what will happen less than three weeks from now. But while we’re in this veil-of-ignorance, let’s lay down some knowable realities of the world as of mid-October 2024. The items listed below are the ones that “normally” determine elections, and that nearly all weigh on the Harris-Walz side.
First, most elections are said to turn on “the economy.” James Carville became famous for formulating this as “It’s the economy, stupid”2, but the principle has always applied. (With urgent-wartime exceptions like 1864 and 1944.)
And based on everything that is measurable, this election-year economy is about as good as the US economy ever gets. Some illustrations:
—US growth after the pandemic, compared with other developed economies:
—As The Economist billed it in a new special report:
—Heather Long, with a background in banking and as a Rhodes scholar, had a column in the Washington Post last week with the headline: “This is a great economy? Why can’t we celebrate it?”
She included this chart (below) from the Federal Reserve. The US economy is famously and cruelly unequal. But the chart shows that through the past four years, it has become less unequal, rather than more.
—Gas prices—which dominated the news 18 months ago—have been coming down. The stock market is up by more than 60% from Donald Trump’s time. The famed “misery index”—the inflation rate added to the unemployment rate—is better than in nearly all other re-election years.3
In short, the US economy is better than it was under Donald Trump, not worse. Like every economy of every country at every time, it is imbalanced and unjust. But overall it should be something the Democrats can run on, rather than running away from.
Second, scandals. No “real” ones have attached to Kamala Harris. The closest his critics have come with Joe Biden is the Hunter Biden case—which his own justice department prosecuted. Meanwhile, we have convicted-felon Trump.
Third, war and peace. Brutal wars are underway. Dealing with them will, as always, be a major responsibility for the next president. But in strictly electoral terms, wars have most often “mattered” when US troops are engaged in large-scale combat. At the moment, and allowing for the ever-possible “October surprise,” they are not.
Finally, party solidarity. Most of Donald Trump’s former appointees and senior staffers are warning and working against him. So are hundreds of Republican elected officials and appointees across the country. As Nikki Haley famously said before leaving the race and kissing Trump’s ring, “The first party to retire its 80-year-old nominee will win.” That was then.
Meanwhile, the usually fractious Democrats are acting as a team. They have two former presidents actively working the stump, and one other surviving past age 100 explicitly to cast his vote for Harris in Georgia. Apart from Hulk Hogan and Dennis Quaid, the Dems have most of the cultural and pop-media establishment on their side. “Dems in disarray” is a journalistic cliche. This year has brought us “Dems in array.”
Just to wrap this up: On the basis of “realities” as they have applied in any previous election, this race should not be close. The economy is stronger than in most re-election years. Scandals all weigh against Trump. War-and-peace issues carry great weight ethically and historically, but electorally not as much as in other election years. Party solidarity is all on the Democrats’ side.
It should not be close. And yet, every poll tells us that it is.
Are the polls wrong? (As they were in 1980, when they predicted a hair’s-breadth result until days before Ronald Reagan’s landslide win?) Or are all the historical gauges of “reality” wrong? One or the other will be true.
We know that Donald Trump will claim power—“always declare victory” was one of the lessons from his mentor, Roy Cohn. Whether he will receive it … I can’t really stand to finish this sentence.
3) Two frontiers Donald Trump has passed.
As a time-capsule note, within just this past week: