You Don't Own Me
Is there a Silence of the Ma'ams surprise awaiting Donald Trump in November?
By Deidre Depke
I’ve been saying for weeks that there is a secret sorority of female voters who, out of fear or in the interest of harmony, have been nodding their heads in agreement as their angry male mates rant about Joe Biden’s America.
But come Election Day, in the privacy of the voting booth, they will speak their own minds with a silent clarity that will blow the blond mane off the head of Donald John Trump and push a plate of humble pie into the smug mug of JD Vance.
Is there a surprise bloc of disaffected women, mostly Republican, who have muted their voices to keep the household peace and/or be in step with family and friends who have bathed in the orange-flavored MAGA Kool-Aid?
Liz Cheney thinks so.
Swing-state-stumping this week with Kamala Harris, the former Republican representative didn’t single out women when she said: “I would just remind people, if you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody. There will be millions of Republicans who do that on Nov. 5.” The subtext was clear: Females of the GOP persuasion can cast a vote for Harris without fear of being found out.
It's no surprise that voters — female and male — worry about ballot privacy. Trump has spent the past four years yammering on about voter fraud and election integrity and girding an ominous army of true-believing election observers for battle. An April study in New Mexico found that a full 70 percent of the state’s voters believe their ballot choices can be shared without their consent.
The secret Harris voters aren’t showing up in polling for a simple reason: They’re lying about their ballot-box preferences. Harris and Cheney hope their appeal to GOP women will widen what already is a massive gender gap. A New York Times/Siena College poll this month showed Harris besting Trump with women voters by 56 percent to 42 percent. Among men, the GOP nominee led 53 percent to 40 percent.
Those numbers are holding up in early voting. As of Friday, 9.5 million votes had been cast in the seven swing states. Fifty-five percent of those votes were by women. In Michigan, there was a 14-point lead of women over men. In Pennsylvania, it was 13 points, 12 points in Georgia, 9 points in Wisconsin….
A majority of early voters are registered Democrats. So do these numbers break in Harris’s favor? Hell yeah. But you do the math.
The Awful & Odious
Trouble in Trump Transition-Land
Back at the end of August, we ran a piece entitled “Trump’s Curious Pack of Pickers,” which focused on the team charged with selecting candidates for a new Republican administration.
The news peg was the appointment of failed 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, herself a onetime Democratic contender for the White House, as honorary chairs of the Trump transition committee.
RFK Jr. enveloped Trump in a bear hug once it was clear his independent candidacy — propped up by the Google money of his running mate, Nicole Shanahan — was as dead as a compromised Covid victim who rejected the vaccine. And Gabbard, who nominated Bernie Sanders at the 2016 Democratic Convention, this week announced at a Trump rally that she was registering as a Republican.
But even odder than Kennedy and Gabbard was the choice of former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as one of the two official co-chairs. Yes, McMahon served as chief of the Small Business Administration under Trump and has reportedly donated $20 million to Make America Great Again Inc., her ex-boss’s so-called super political action committee. But her husband and WWE co-founder, Vince, is the chief defendant in a particularly sordid lawsuit.
Vince McMahon is accused of a string of vile acts perpetrated on a young woman employee of the family’s professional wrestling empire, which was sold to TKO Group a little more than a year ago for over $9 billion. TKO is controlled by Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Group. The suit is on hold at the request of the Justice Department, which is reportedly investigating, and McMahon, who was on the TKO board after the WWE deal closed, has been forced out.
Now an entirely new lawsuit has been filed against not just Vince, but Linda and TKO, too. On Wednesday, five former “ring boys” who helped with preparations for matches, alleged that the McMahons turned a blind eye to their sexual abuse at the hands of a longtime WWE announcer, now deceased. The plaintiffs, many from broken homes according to the suit, were 13 to 15 at the time of the alleged incidents. An attorney for Vince McMahon told NBC News the suit dredges up old charges and has no merit.
Separately, Politico reported this week that Howard Lutnick, the other co-chair designated by Trump to help populate his new government, has been mixing (his own) business with politicking for his old pal Donald. Lutnick is the longtime chief of Wall Street investment firm Cantor Fitzgerald and seemed like a fairly benign choice, a sop meant to settle down a worried financial community. But he is revealing himself to be more dangerous than that.
“The entire transition team is solely focused on ensuring President Trump is victorious and that he is ready to start building out his historic second administration immediately with dedicated individuals who will advance his America First agenda,” Politico quoted him as saying.
The America First Policy Institute is a relatively new right-wing think tank that for the moment seems to be winning a knife fight with the Heritage Foundation, architect of the notorious Project 2025, over setting the agenda for a potential second Trump term. Linda McMahon is chair of AFPI, founded by former Trump White House official Brooke Rollins, who Politico Magazine calls “one of the most important Republican operatives you’ve probably never heard of.”
While some elements of the AFPI’s game plan are said to be less radical than those of Project 2025, The New York Times says “it goes significantly further…in one key area, calling for the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees” — an effort to “root out” public servants who supposedly helped thwart Trump during his first term in office.
Trump has publicly disavowed the Project 2025, but with the McMahon Family now confronted with two lawsuits involving alleged sexual abuse and with Lutnick catching flak for allegedly promoting his own fortunes and not just Trump’s, don’t be surprised if the influence of Kennedy, Gabbard, and the trio of honorary transition co-chairs — JD Vance, Eric Trump, and Don Jr. — rises.
Vance’s Christian nationalist leanings seem aligned with Project 2025, so it also isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the ultra-radical-right Heritage Foundation turns the table on AFPI and its agenda moves to the fore should Republicans win back the White House.
Dump, The (Short) Musical
If you have any lingering doubts about your choice for President on November 5, this never-before-released film might help bring you to your senses
In the run-up to the Election of 2024, The Constant Tribune has been posting dialogue and songs from Dump, The Musical — a two-act show in which a tabloid clown unexpectedly becomes President and takes America on a careening crazytown ride. This animated short film captures the essence of Act Two, when the laughs stop as the daffy demagogue desperately tries to cling to power.