the fact that the national news coverage of this stuff is that it is a) an absurd lie and b) producing bomb threats makes me think that when we see polling it will show that it is poisonous for the trump campaign, which makes vance’s choice to double-down a destructive one.

I hope you are right. It could be a big miscalculation on their part. My first fear was that it would play in to Project 2025 goals of militarizing our towns more. But 🤞

I imagine he wants to pull a Harris, he assumes Trump's unhinged nature will eventually force him to step down and then everything is coming up JD. Bulldozing his way to the top via appealing to racism took him this far so he assumes it will take him to the White House. I hope he is wrong.

Dude's admitting that he's spinning up lies to incite lawlessness. There's a clear intention to disrupt tranquil society & public safety. Harm is imminent. And JD & Donald should have reasonable known harm was imminent. So these lies aren't constitutionally protected. Fails Brandenburg test.

My fear is that this is not a campaign message, this is them trying to actually run these immigrants out of this town

Trump loves Vance because he’s a sycophant and a “fighter” but Vance’s inability to see how his shtick comes off to normal people is a major weakness. Trump has the same tendencies but he has the instincts not to lean into too far (e.g. “it’s just something I heard, I don’t know if it’s true).

Voters hate chaos, which is what makes border stories so effective, because the border always looks like a chaotic mess given the collapse of our immigration system. One thing that you don’t want to do, if you care about winning elections, is to be the source of chaos, which is what Vance is now.

Maybe as destructive as moving all the Haitian immigrants in his state to a struggling town in order to bolster local industry with cheap labor, while not investing in improving the local infrastructure to support them or taking steps to limit local landlords raising rents to profit off of them?

Do you think it actually being poisonous depends on effective, principled response from news media and other politicians?

"Smart" is not a description that will ever be used in the same universe with 34-felon, JD or any of their sycophants.