Right Now With Perry Bacon

Donald Trump has picked three anti-immigrant hard-liners for his administration: Stephen Miller will be deputy chief of staff for policy; Tom Homan, his former head of ICE, will be “border czar”; and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem will be Homeland Security secretary. Which means Trump will act on his threat to carry out mass deportations. We talked to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who...

During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he can. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisers are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media, calling for investigations into people supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention t...

This week, after Donald Trump won the election, Jeff Bezos issued an extraordinary tweet: He didn’t just congratulate Trump; he also bent over backwards to hail his extraordinary political comeback. We think this is a bad sign of what’s coming: People in key institutional positions going out of their way to curry favor with Trump in advance. How bad will this get? We talked to Philadelphia Inquire...

After Donald Trump won the election, Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, who is becoming a senior figure in MAGA-world, declared on Fox News that he has a big mandate to govern exactly as he campaigned, while specifically listing what’s coming. This is alarming, since Trump campaigned relentlessly on a platform of explicit threats of authoritarian retribution and violence. We talked to David Kurt...

If Donald Trump is going to be defeated, it will probably come down to this: Female voters look poised to vote for Kamala Harris in numbers that we can only guess at. And on Monday, Liz Cheney went on “The View” and flatly predicted that women will save us from Trump, laying out why she believes right leaning and conservative women should—and will—reject Trump and his increasingly unstable hatreds...

Donald Trump’s allies reportedly fear Trump’s recent hate rally might have badly hurt him, and worry their internal polls aren’t getting it right on how shaky his standing is in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, new polls show surprising movement among women and undecided voters toward Kamala Harris. Trump raged at a rally about the highly regarded Des Moines Register poll showing him down three in Iowa an...

Kamala Harris’s campaign just released a hard-hitting ad featuring Donald Trump’s quotes about the need for a “punishment” for abortion, and tying them powerfully to horrific stories about women suffering and dying under GOP abortion bans. If Harris wins, it’ll probably be due to women who are motivated by messages like this one. We talked to Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of political communicati...

The presidential race is tied, and Donald Trump very well could win. But he is now scapegoating others for a possible loss: He’s reportedly angry with Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley, he’s raging about supposed voter fraud in Pennsylvania, and his allies are sounding new alarms about his ground game in key states. Meanwhile, new polls show engaged voters tilting to Kamala Harri...

As the backlash to Donald Trump’s hate rally in New York intensifies, he defended the event as a “lovefest” in a rambling monologue on Tuesday. Why? Because the vile “joke” at the rally comparing Puerto Rico to a pile of garbage is infuriating Puerto Rican voters, a surprisingly large constituency in Pennsylvania. We talked to GOP strategist Mike Madrid, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, expert o...

MAGA suddenly seems very, very out of sorts. Donald Trump raged at Fox News on Monday, blasting the network for its supposedly favorable coverage of Democrats. Meanwhile, a number of Trump’s allies suddenly seem very worried about the backlash to his hate rally at Madison Square Garden. We spoke with Democratic strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio, who regularly does research into disaffected voters and...

Over the weekend, Michelle Obama delivered an extraordinary speech that reminded us how catastrophic Donald Trump’s presidency was, harshly criticized his debased moral character, and asked why the press expects Kamala Harris to meet basic standards of public conduct that aren’t expected of Trump. Could this closing message win over the undecided voters who will decide the race? We talked to Reed...

In a new interview, Donald Trump seethed with anger at Jack Smith, and confirmed that if elected president, he’ll fire Smith as special counsel immediately. On top of that, Trump also boasted that the Supreme Court has now given him immunity from criminal prosecution. Which suggests Trump really does think that if he wins, he’ll be able to function as president with something like absolute impunit...

Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff, John Kelly, just revealed that he believes Trump will rule as a dictator and a fascist—and that he mused aloud about having his generals function as Hitler’s generals did. Kamala Harris jumped on this news to highlight the dire threat posed by a second Trump term. Can Harris translate this bombshell into a strong closing message in swing states tha...

With two weeks to go, the presidential race couldn’t be closer. But if Kamala Harris is to win, how exactly would that happen?  Veteran journalist Ron Brownstein has a new piece in The Atlantic laying out what Harris’s path to victory looks like. The short version: She has to run up massive margins in cities and affluent suburbs, while limiting Trump’s gains among nonwhite and working class white...

The other day, Donald Trump playacted as a worker at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. But he ran into trouble, evading a question about whether he would support a minimum wage hike, producing scalding headlines. Which gets at a larger scam: Trump enjoys public approval on the economy, even though his agenda for working people is borderline nonexistent, whereas Harris has a detailed economic agenda fo...

At a rally in Nevada, Barack Obama offered a blistering new warning: Trump’s vows to persecute the “enemy within” should be taken with deadly seriousness. Trump’s displays are deeply dangerous in someone who would be president with no guardrails left. Yet even now, a sizable subset of voters just doesn’t take his threats seriously. We talked to veteran analyst Michael Podhorzer, author of a good n...

On Thursday, Donald Trump erupted with rage at Fox News over its election coverage, explicitly slamming Fox for making a Kamala Harris presidency more likely. Meanwhile, CNN reports that among Trump allies, plans for another fake electors scheme are in full swing. Which raises a question: What sort of chaos could erupt, if the voting is close and Fox and other right wing media start amplifying Tru...

The word “fascist” has fully penetrated the presidential race. We just learned that a top general under President Donald Trump described Trump as “fascist to the core.” Trump has been threatening to unleash the military on the enemy within, which numerous observers describe as fascist politics. And at a Fox News event on Wednesday, Trump uncorked an unhinged, rambling response to all this, insisti...

Is the media finally figuring out how to cover Donald Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency? First, CNN’s Jake Tapper dressed down a Trump surrogate for whitewashing Trump’s threat to unleash the military on his enemies. Then Trump held a strange town hall at which he abruptly stopped answering questions, which generated aggressive media coverage. And Kamala Harris has directly engaged on Tr...