The Unrest of Us

No matter how things go today, you can count on Trump declaring victory and flooding the zone with misinformation and election fraud falsehoods. The good news is that he won’t be doing it from the White House this time. The bad news is that this time he has help. “Having manipulated the platform’s recommendation algorithm to show his posts to more users, he can single-handedly push election narratives to millions of people with the tap of a button. (Over the past day he has become obsessed with the euthanization of a TikTok-famous squirrel at the hands of the state, which he has presented as an example of government overreach.)” X’s plan to interfere with the election. “Elon Musk’s effort to deny Kamala Harris an election victory is already underway. Can it work?”

+ If you want to correct the record, you won’t be doing it from Mar-a-Lago: Trump campaign denies and revokes journalists’ election night credentials after critical coverage.

+ It’s sad that we have to fortify the Capitol, the White House, and vote counting venues in many parts of the country. So far we’ve seen some fake bomb threats from Russia and the arrest of a guy trying to enter U.S. Capitol with a torch and flare gun. While the vote will be secure and we hope everyone stays safe, we can expect more of this. One of the candidates incites it, repeatedly. Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: “Tired Trump is often the most revealing version of Trump, and so perhaps it’s no mistake that at that Pennsylvania rally, Trump finally admitted publicly what he had privately told some of his advisers four years ago—that he did not willingly depart the White House after his 2020 defeat. ‘I shouldn’t have left,’ he said. Trump’s 2024 campaign of vengeance was born out of that moment. No matter what anyone says, it is not over yet.” Even Losing May Not Stop Trump’s Campaign of Vengeance. (Win or lose, the campaign of democracy, decency and grace won’t stop either.)