They don't know when to shut up

Trump wants to make the race so ugly that good people sit it out.

The GOP dumpster fire is raging. While it’s hard to compete with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for being vile, North Carolina GOP gubernatorial nominee Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson is giving them a run for their money. None of them know when to shut up. The more they talk, the worse they sound.

Robinson decided he needed to do a “wide ranging” interview with WSOC last week, probably in an attempt to improve his flagging poll numbers. He told reporter Hunter Saenz that, if elected, he would sign a six-week abortion ban. Robinson has spent millions of dollars on an ad telling North Carolinians that he supports the law as it currently stands, which is 12 weeks. His statement comes on the heels of a recording released where Robinson says he would “like to get down to zero weeks.” In other words, he told us that he supports a 12-week ban, but he really supports a total ban.

His extreme position on abortion is probably enough to fatally damage his candidacy, but he went on the six o’clock news and told us that he lied in his television ad. Voters can’t trust what he says. Expect to see more side-by-side statements of Robinson contradicting himself.

As for the Stein campaign, they released another ad this week of Mark Robinson telling on himself. Again, no announcer, just Robinson using violent rhetoric in speech after speech. This one closes with the lieutenant governor declaring, “Some people just need killin’.” Robinson thinks he sounds tough, but to most people, he just sounds extreme.

Trump, for his part, spent the week arguing that he won the debate and spreading false rumors that Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. As a result, the town has basically been shutdown because of threats of violence. The Haitian community is living in fear with their cars and properties getting vandalized. The mayor and Republican governor of Ohio have debunked the claims, but Trump refuses to rebuke the violence or refute the lies.

The Trump campaign sent J.D. Vance to Sunday shows to put out the fires and he added gasoline instead. When Dana Bash asked him why he spread lies about Haitians in Springfield, Vance replied, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do." He’ll incite the mob with lies to attack innocent migrants to get the media to focus on immigration. And the people of Springfield are his constituents.

Trump and Vance are using race and xenophobia to motivate their base. They’ve shunned traditional field operations in the swing states and opted for a narrow program that identifies low-propensity voters as targets for get-out-the-vote programs. Their research clearly tells them that fear of Black people and immigrants motivates their targets.

As if to distract from the controversy in Springfield, Trump started Sunday morning by posting on Truth Social, “I hate Taylor Swift!” I suspect he believes picking a fight with the singer and her legion of young fans is good politics. Divide and conquer is his MO. Not only does he change the conversation from Ohio, he sics his fanatical followers after Swifties. It seems like a dumb political bet to me, but I’ve underestimated his base before.

Of course, the conversation got changed again because another nut job went after Trump with a gun. Republicans are pointing the finger at Democratic rhetoric, but the gunman was, again, an unhinged guy with a history of mental illness who voted for Trump in 2016 and mainly supported Republicans. The problem is access to guns, not freedom of speech.

The polls are rattling Trump, pushing him to more extreme behavior. Throughout the week, polls showed that voters believe Harris won the debate and she’s building a small but consistent lead. Several high-quality polls dropped this weekend showing Harris ahead by four to six points nationally, enough to probably win the electoral college.

While Trump is trying to scare his base into the polls, Democrats are building a permission structure for moderate Republicans to support Harris. Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzalas came out in support of Harris last week, Dick Cheney the week before that. More than 200 former members of the Bush administrations endorsed her back in August. A dozen former Reagan aides announced their endorsement yesterday. Even conservative columnist George Will urged Republicans to support Harris. The last big Republican fish is George W. Bush but he’s said that he will not endorse.

Vance, Trump, and Robinson can’t seem to help themselves. They are so enamored with hearing themselves talk, that they make statements that hurt their campaigns. I suspect Trump thinks that making inflammatory statements will muddy the water of the negative press he’s gotten. He hopes the rhetoric will make people so disgusted with the process that they don’t show up. As for Vance, he just thinks he’s so much smarter than everyone else that he can win every argument—and he cant’. Robinson, for his part, just wants the applause and he will say anything to get it. None of them really knows when to quit talking.