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Item one: He takes a 9/11 "truther" to the 9/11 ceremony. Are we going to start talking frankly now about his mental unfitness?

I know some people don’t like to play the "Imagine If!" game, but at times it’s hard not to wonder, "Imagine if Joe Biden had said the crazy thing that Donald Trump uttered." So I’m sorry to say that there is a story from this week that demands we indulge ourselves. Imagine with me that Kamala Harris had attended—oh, let’s say a Holocaust commemoration ceremony—and she brought, as a member of her entourage, someone known for saying the Holocaust was a hoax. Or that she attended a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in the company of someone who’d argued, pace Alex Jones, that the shootings were faked. 

That’s what Donald Trump just did by bringing Laura Loomer to Wednesday’s September 11 commemoration.

It’s just a surreal moment. I lived in New York when the attacks happened. I keenly remember how zealous Republicans and conservatives were about 9/11, how quick they were to pounce on anyone on the left side of the spectrum who said anything that even hinted at departure from the accepted narrative—and especially those who, along the way, departed from reality. And now, years down the line, the Republican Party standard-bearer comes to New York on 9/11 itself, palling around with someone who called those attacks an "inside job."

You’ve seen that reference many times now in the last couple of days, but it’s worth unpacking the phrase in a paragraph. "Inside job," with respect to 9/11, meant that the U.S. government had advance knowledge of the attacks and let them happen. Or even staged them. In some variants, Israel, naturally, was involved as well. I believe a lot of bad stuff about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney (still!), but I have never believed that. It’s loony tunes. But adherence to this zany theory was disturbingly widespread, at first on the far left before it spread to and was taken up by some on the far right. In polls at the time, up to a quarter of respondents, sometimes more, said they believed this silliness.

By the way, when I say that Loomer believes lunatic nonsense about the September 11 attacks, I’m not dredging up statements she made 20 years ago to criticize her today. HuffPost reported this week that just last year, Loomer "shared a video on X that said ‘9/11 was an Inside Job!’ and claimed it was somehow related to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s announcing $2.3 trillion in ‘lost’ government funds on Sept. 10, 2001."

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Loomer’s sins hardly end there, of course. She’s a racist and a xenophobe and a provocateur. She’s claimed that school shootings were staged and that the Las Vegas mass shooter was affiliated with ISIS. Remember that murder of the 6-year-old Palestinian boy outside Chicago, who was stabbed 26 times by his white landlord shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks? The landlord said he feared a "global day of jihad," a lie spread by Loomer and Jack Posobiec (of Pizzagate infamy) as well as Jones’s InfoWars website, among others. There’s a lot more. She’s poison.

The fact that Trump took Loomer to the 9/11 event has gotten a lot of coverage. I woke up Friday morning ready to unload on The New York Times for not doing a story on this, but then I looked at the website, and to its credit, the Times has a good piece up today that highlights Trump bringing her to New York and traveling with her more generally. In case you missed it, she was at the debate Tuesday night in Philadelphia. She’s a frequent Mar-a-Lago presence. He wanted to give her a campaign job back in the spring, until others objected. Loomer is apparently too crazy for Marjorie Taylor Greene. I didn’t know "too crazy for Marjorie Taylor Greene" was possible. 

What does all this tell us about a possible future Trump presidency? That this racist conspiracy theorist will be around the White House whispering in the president’s ear. And she won’t be alone. Trump’s "social media war room" at the debate included Loomer, Posobiec, and Chaya Raichik, who created the "Libs of TikTok" account that promotes hate speech and transphobia. Children’s hospitals across the country have received bomb threats after social media posts on Libs of TikTok—accusing the hospitals of performing gender-affirming surgeries that in some cases they didn’t even perform—went viral in the right-wing fever swamp.

Imagine the White House filled with people like this. That’s what we’re probably talking about if Trump is elected.

Call it speculative if you want. This is part of why it’s difficult for news outlets that follow traditional reporting norms to fathom these possibilities, let alone make a news story out of them. But the fact that these people are hanging around at Trump’s invitation can’t be allowed to pass without our reckoning with it. On whatever path forward Trump hopes to forge, these people will be along for the ride. And the mere possibility that the White House is going to be bursting with racists and xenophobes and transphobes and multipurpose haters and conspiracy theorists is something to which attention must be paid. There has to be a way, within the conventions of mainstream reporting, to place this alarming possibility in front of the electorate’s collective nose. 

Let’s conclude by returning to the "Imagine If" game. What would the mainstream media be doing right now if, on Wednesday, Harris had indulged in one of my above scenarios? First of all, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine, because Kamala Harris is a good human being who has normal human morals. But if she had, everyone—and I do mean everyone: the right wing, of course, but the New York Times editorial page, the talking heads of MSNBC, and even yours truly—would be in a state of meltdown apoplexy until she apologized and explained herself; and even after she did so, loads of people, right and left, Republicans and Democrats, would be declaiming on her unfitness for office and demanding that she stand down as the nominee.

But in the real world? This story, like all Trump stories, is likely to fade. That would be to the detriment of all. At the very least, the mainstream media should not let this outrage die; it should continue to rub this ugliness in the faces of the hypocrites who once called liberals enemies of freedom because we opposed the stupid and tragic War in Iraq Bush and Cheney used 9/11 as an excuse to start, and who now want this amoral nitwit to be the leader of the free world.

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Item two: Taylor’s "The Man"

Is Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris going to have a real impact? That’s what the experts keep asking. This week, TNR contributor Ana Marie Cox talked to Beto O’Rourke—a serial receiver of celebrity endorsements who could never parlay them into electoral victory—about what the realistic expectations of a Taylor Swift endorsement should be.

But the answer is that it looks like Swift is already having an effect. From CBS.com: "Taylor Swift’s post endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House on Tuesday drove 405,999 users to visit the site vote.gov over the course of the following day, a sign of the potential effect her decision to speak out could have on November’s election." The article notes that on a typical, pre-assault-of-the-Swifties day, about 30,000 people logged on to the site.

Let’s assume that half of these people end up voting in November. That’s a lot of votes. But let’s also assume that this isn’t the end of it. Let’s assume, and it seems reasonable to do so, that Swift will remind people of her Harris endorsement and urge them to vote again. Maybe again and again and again. And maybe she’ll perform at a campaign event, à la Springsteen in many recent elections. 

In sum: It’s not hard to picture Swift driving one million voters to the polls. She can do it if she chooses to. Probably more. It just depends on how political she wants to get. 

As for the Harris campaign and the way it uses the Swift endorsement … I know Team Harris doesn’t wish to dwell on the candidate’s gender, and I get why. But to me, they could do worse than to adopt Swift’s song "The Man" as one of their anthems. I mean, check out these lyrics:

I would be complex

I would be cool

They’d say I played the field before I found someone to commit to

And that would be okay

For me to do

Every conquest I had made would make me more of a boss to you

I’d be a fearless leader

I’d be an alpha type

When everyone believes ya

What’s that like?

I’m so sick of running as fast as I can

Wondering if I’d get there quicker

If I was a man

And I’m so sick of them coming at me again

’Cause if I was a man

Then I’d be the man …

Pretty apposite, wouldn’t you say?

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Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: "Raymond Shaw was the …" About movies and politics, in honor of the fact that "Making Change: The Most Significant Political Films of All Time" debuted on Turner Classic Movies last Friday (when you could have seen me chatting with Ben Mankiewicz). It’s their limited series on the great political films of all time, and it was inspired (yes, this is true) by The New Republic’s special issue from last year, "The 100 Most Significant Political Films of All Time." The series runs every Friday night until the election and will feature a slew of fantastic movies, so check it out.

1. My personal favorite political film is The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which finished second in our poll. What is the correct order of the adjectives in the quote about Raymond Shaw that his battalion members are brainwashed by the North Koreans to repeat?

A. "warmest, most wonderful, kindest, bravest"

B. "most wonderful, warmest, bravest, kindest"

C. "kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful"

D. "kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful"

Answer: D, "kindest, bravest," etc. What a movie. That scene where the battalion members think they’re at that New Jersey garden club meeting is mind-blowing. Maybe the greatest single movie scene of all time. 

2. A Face in the Crowd (1957) finished tenth in our survey. What famous twentieth-century newsman made a cameo in the film? At the time, as was not unusual, he hosted some game shows in addition to reporting news.

A. Walter Cronkite

B. Mike Wallace

C. Peter Jennings

D. David Brinkley

Answer: B, Wallace. You can see some clips on YouTube of him hosting game shows, like this one, called The Big Surprise.

3. Election (1999) placed sixteenth in our poll. In a short coda scene toward the end, where does the film tell us Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) went to college?

A. Notre Dame

B. Georgetown

C. Northwestern

D. Wheaton College

Answer: B, Georgetown. Remember? "Some people are trying to study!" Also, I just learned in googling around about this that Tom Perrotta, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, wrote a sequel called Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Maybe I’ll take that to the beach next summer.

4. The drama Advise & Consent (which finished twenty-third) showed what kind of scene, amazingly frank for its day and undoubtedly bewildering to 1962 audiences?

A. An interracial love scene

B. A scene in which a cute dog dies

C. A scene inside a Greenwich Village gay bar

D. A female CEO of a military equipment company

Answer: C, Village gay bar. Just incredible for 1962. Remember, the Hays Code was still in force, or just beginning to be challenged. It’s just a great movie overall and, by the way, a great political novel too, by Allen Drury.

5. Another list from this summer, at GoldDerby.com, declared this drama, which revolves around whether the U.S. Senate can rise to the occasion, the best American political film of all time (it was eleventh in our survey).

A. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

B. The Best Man

C. The Candidate

D. Lincoln

Answer: A, Mr. Smith. I think my hint may have given it away. Anyway, Jimmy Stewart is Jimmy Stewart, you know all about him. But Jean Arthur? Wonderful in this film, and very underappreciated today.

6. Match the president to his (purported) favorite film.

Answer: Nixon = Patton, Clinton = High Noon, Obama = Godfather, Biden = Chariots. I must say, points to Biden for the least predictable answer. I remember asking politicians their favorite books, and it was usually stuff like Churchill’s history of World War II. Only Bill Bradley ever gave me a hot-damn interesting answer: John Ralston Saul’s The Doubter’s Companion, which I happened to have read for some reason. Great book. Bradley’s fondness for it probably explains both (a) why he was more cerebral than most pols and (b) why he never became president.

This week’s quiz: Oh, the horror. Because today is Friday the 13th, let’s look at the history of horror and slasher movies.

1. Which of the following stories or novels was not adapted into an early, pre-talkie horror film?

A. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

B. Frankenstein

C. "The Fall of the House of Usher"

D. The Phantom of the Opera

2. Everyone knows Boris Karloff played Frankenstein. But who played his famous love interest in the sequel Bride of Frankenstein?

A. Alice Faye

B. Elsa Lanchester

C. Irene Dunne

D. Ida Lupino

3. The 1950s were the decade when horror films, especially those featuring scary creatures and monsters, came into their own. Two of the great classics of the genre, Godzilla and The Creature From the Black Lagoon, were released in the same year. What year was it?

A. 1951

B. 1954

C. 1957

D. 1958

4. This phenomenally successful 1978 movie is said to have inaugurated the golden age of slasher films.

A. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

B. Friday the 13th

C. A Nightmare on Elm Street

D. Halloween

5. Match the female slasher-movie star to her character.

6. In 2022, writing that it "whispered in moviegoers’ ears that maybe there were some things that science couldn’t explain," Rolling Stone named this the greatest horror film of all time.

A. Psycho

B. Get Out

C. The Exorcist

D. The Blair Witch Project

Bonus Boris Karloff question: What is the actual greatest thing he ever did in his career? It wasn’t playing Frankenstein. It came three decades and change later. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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