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Fascism, as we note, is about being strong. There is an irony to that, since fascism actually tends to eat away at the foundations of a government, leading to its fall. How many fascist regimes manage to last more than a generation? Yes, there are the Kims in North Korea, but they are the outlier.
Anyhow, there are many Republicans out there who have clearly seen the light, and concluded that country and, you know, sober, rational leadership are paramount right now. So, Kamala Harris continues to pick up some important endorsements from that side of the aisle. Yesterday, two more folks explicitly added their names to the list, and both spoke about their fears of what Trump represents. Fred Upton, who represented Michigan for 18 terms in the House, said he is backing Harris, and explained that it is because "Trump's just totally unhinged." Meanwhile, Mayor Shawn Reilly, who serves the Wisconsin town of Waukesha, a GOP stronghold, explained that he could not just remain silent and cast his vote for Harris, he felt the need to tell everyone that "I am terrified of Donald Trump becoming our next president." Will those two gentlemen make a (small) difference? Not on a national level, they won't, but in the two swing states they live in, they certainly could.
That said, we thought the most interesting "endorsement" yesterday came from the nation's capital. We put endorsement in quotations, because it most certainly is not a direct endorsement. However, we would argue that it functions as something of a backdoor endorsement. As readers will know, because we've already written about it a couple of times, Mitch McConnell has a biography coming out called The Price of Power. Yesterday, the publisher released another excerpt from it, in which the Majority Leader absolutely decimates Trump, referring to the former president as a "sleazeball" and a "narcissist," opining that he should have been removed from office after the events of 1/6, and decreeing that the "MAGA movement is completely wrong" and that Ronald Reagan "would not recognize" the modern-day Republican Party.
McConnell is not the author of the book, but it is being written with his cooperation. We find it hard to believe that he has zero control over the contents, and zero control over what is released and when. Similarly, we struggle to accept that it's just a remarkable coincidence that this came out less than 2 weeks before the election. And even if the Kentuckian had nothing to do with this—even if he was staunchly opposed to the release—the fact is that his words are now out there, and their message is exactly the same as that of Upton, Kelly and many other Reagan Republicans: You should not vote for Trump, because he's destructive to both the country and the Republican Party. So, even if McConnell is officially backing Trump, it ends up being a backdoor endorsement for Harris.
And we would say there was a second backdoor endorsement, as well. Stuart Stevens is a Republican strategist who used to work for Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). We can find no indication that Stevens has endorsed in the presidential race this year. However, he did just do an interview where he said that all Trump has is "intimidation" and "chaos," and that "I think the Harris campaign is running what we're probably going to look back at as the best presidential campaign ever run." He also guessed the VP would win the election "fairly comfortably."
Finally, as long as we are on the endorsement beat, there is another high-profile endorsement that Kamala Harris won't be getting, that of The Los Angeles Times. The Times most certainly has a lefty slant, and had already worked its way up the nominations pyramid, endorsing a whole bunch of Democrats (including Adam Schiff for the U.S. Senate). When it came time to finish the series, there was no question the paper would endorse Harris. But before they could, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018, stepped in and forbade it. He suggested the editorial board run a side-by-side comparison of Harris and Trump, so that readers could decide for themselves. To do that would be a really awful version of bothsidesism, and it's also just not how endorsements are done (if so, they would not be called "endorsements," they would be called "comparisons"). The board refused, and the head of the board, Mariel Garza, resigned in protest.
The general assumption in Los Angeles (and nationwide) is that Soon-Shiong is just a Trumpy billionaire who wants more of those sweet, sweet tax cuts, and so doesn't want a cross word spoken about the former president. Maybe so; (Z) has been in Los Angeles for Soon-Shiong's entire public career, and has no idea what the man's politics are, despite his prominence. However, it's not like California has any chance of voting for Trump, and by doing this, Soon-Shiong not only aggravated his staff, he also brought vastly more attention than if the newspaper had been allowed to just endorse the candidate everyone knows the staff favors anyhow. Streisand effect, anyone? Oh, and note that Soon-Shiong didn't say anything in 2020, when the staff endorsed Joe Biden.
Because the default answer to the question of what happened doesn't hold up too well, we have an alternate theory. Keep in mind that Trump has held Jeff Bezos responsible for the things printed by the newspaper Bezos owns, namely The Washington Post. Then take note that the primary source of Soon-Shiong's wealth is pharmaceuticals and biotech. That means his various firms do a lot of business with the federal government. Could this be a case of silencing Peter to protect Paul, in the event of another Trump administration? Seems a much cleaner explanation to us. Of course, using government power, or the implied threat of government power, to silence critics is also a part of the fascist playbook. (Z)