Notices by Philip Bump (pbump@journa.host)

Trump and Vance are making it very clear that the targets of their proposed mass deportation effort will be identified at their discretion, not the law’s. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/03/who-does-trump-plan-deport-who-trump-wants-deport/

Jack Smith is the latest to delineate in excruciating detail Trump's effort to subvert the 2020 outcome. This will also be the latest such delineation that fails to change the perspective of his supporters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/03/no-amount-evidence-will-convince-republicans-trumps-2020-guilt/

I wrote about the expanding ways in which Trump and Vance are blaming America's problems on immigrants. Stick around for the kicker. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/02/debate-false-claims-immigrants-housing-crime/

That the Trump $100,000 watch (that you can buy with your anonymous bitcoin) dropped at the same moment as the Adams influence-peddling indictment made it easy to see the echoes of the latter in the former. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/27/trump-keeps-creating-avenues-people-quietly-give-him-money/

Donald Trump's insistence that Harris never worked at McDonald's is basically just a rehash of his focus on Obama's birthplace.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/26/why-donald-trump-keeps-talking-about-kamala-harriss-mcdonalds-job/

A really useful poll conducted by YouGov for CBS shows how claiming a focus on "policy" is a way Trump supporters wave away his demagoguery. (Undecided voters take a stray here, too.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/23/policy-mirage-that-undergirds-donald-trumps-support/

It has been a truism for some time that the "I was hacked" response to a scandal is generally bullshit. Thanks to Mark Robinson (and Trump) we can add "it was AI" to the list. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/20/mark-robinson-comments-cnn-story-north-carolina/

Three months ago, a quarter of Americans viewed both presidential candidates unfavorably. Today, suddenly, there's actually a candidate that Americans generally like. Sort of.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/17/harris-trump-election-favorability/

It wasn't just that Vance admitted that he was "creating stories" casting immigrants as dangerous in order to aid the campaign. It's also that his rationale for those stories was thoroughly dishonest. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/16/jd-vance-explains-political-utility-anti-immigrant-hostility/

This week’s newsletter includes lots of great data visualizations. And also this one. https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?trackId=596b02b6ade4e24119ac1a18&s=66e596f004bcbf6847781aa3&linknum=2&linktot=58

Laura Loomer is a symptom of what makes Trump Trump, not the cause of it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/13/trump-loomer-backlash/

Polls shifted to the Dems when Biden dropped out. Now they show narrow Harris advantages nationally and in states. So turnout becomes key — a factor that's hard to predict.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/12/with-early-voting-looming-turnout-becomes-central-question/

"If the path to prosperity was flooding your nation with low-wage immigrants," JD Vance said, "…America would be the most prosperous country in the world." Well, it is. So…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/12/vance-immigration-prosperity/

After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, encouraging her fans to register to vote, Google recorded a surge in people wanting to register to vote. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/11/taylor-swift-endorses-searches-voter-registration-jump/

This whole, unsubstantiated thing about pets being eaten in Ohio is a really great example of the scale of the right's conversational bubble and how it makes the "weird" descriptor effective. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/09/rumors-about-an-ohio-town-show-scale-right-wing-bubble/

There’s no evidence non-citizens vote regularly in elections. But it’s politically useful for Trump to claim they do, so Republican officials say they do, so Republican voters think they will. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/09/gop-warnings-about-illegal-voting-by-immigrants-land-with-republicans/

Two months until the election, Trump is being more explicit about who he'll put under the boot if reelected and how much it will hurt. Because he's playing to his base.
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3TkprxP

It wasn't just the "fact of life" bit. It was also the suggestion that states with tougher gun laws have more shootings (they don't per capita) and that school shootings are a function of "psychos" seeking out targets. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/06/vance-school-shootings-guns/

One way to cover Trump's viral child-care-cost answer is to clean it up. Another is to walk through it, using it as a stream-of-conscious look at how he approaches politics. Gift link: https://wapo.st/3ZxCJLt

Let’s imagine a world in which Elon Musk does to the U.S. what he did to Twitter. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/05/trump-musk-government-commission/?itid=ap_philipbump