Ashley Steele Archive

Make no mistake, a Donald Trump presidency would be a disaster for our country. So we thought it would be good to jog everyone’s memories on just how bad Trump is on the economy.

Here are 10 things you should remember:
1. Trump buys his steel from China.

Trump talks a big game on creating good manufacturing jobs in the United States, but his business practices say otherwise. A recent Newsweek study shows Trump purchased steel from Chinese manufacturers rather than from U.S. producers, in at least two of his three recent construction projects.

2. Trump manufactures his own products overseas.

His clothing line is manufactured in Bangladesh, China and other low-wage countries. A far cry from “Made in the U.S.A.”

3. Trump’s economic advisers got rich off the backs of working people.

Seven of the 13 white men on Donald Trump’s economic team are hedge fund managers or Wall Street bankers who made billions off of the housing crisis and by taking advantage of bankruptcies and/or investing in companies that price-gauge lifesaving medicines, and putting workers’ safety at risk. Trump’s advisers are focused on maximizing short-term profits for themselves, at times at the expense of the health and well-being of working people. They have shown no interest in developing stable jobs for working people.

4. Trump refuses to recognize a union election at his own hotel.

For someone who boasts he has a great relationship with union members and working people, he sure has a strange way of showing it. Some 500 working people at the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas voted for a union last December, and Trump has yet to acknowledge the union or come to the negotiating table. Watch Celia’s story below:

5. Trump doesn’t pay his bills and stiffs working people.

Atlantic City, New Jersey, was decimated by Trump’s bad business deals. Small family-owned businesses took a huge hit and many went under when he refused to pay his bills. Hundreds of people share the same stories about Trump not paying them. Watch Marty’s story below:

6. Trump doesn’t pay his taxes.

As if stiffing hardworking people wasn’t enough, it also was recently revealed that Trump hasn’t paid his fair share of taxes to run the country he supposedly wants to make “great again.” Does Trump owe you money?

7. Trump crosses picket lines.

Another example of Trump’s blatant disregard for the struggles of working people trying to make better lives is when he crossed a Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) picket line. Read Dan Mahoney’s story of how it felt.

8. Trump only builds with union labor when he has to.

The Electrical Workers (IBEW) union recently did an investigation and found that Trump only hired its members when he was in union-dense areas. Otherwise? He chose to build nonunion.

9. Trump has declared A LOT of bankruptcies.

So many, in fact, that a CNN Money article pointed out that “no major U.S. company has filed for Chapter 11 more than Trump’s casino empire in the last 30 years.”

10. Even his own economic advisers admit he’s probably a fraud.

Don’t take it from us, hear it straight from one of Trump’s own advisers:

Source

In a 1969 speech, then-President Richard Nixon directly addressed the “silent majority” of Americans who he hoped would support his middle path policy on Vietnam. The speech itself, if you read it, is rather banal and unremarkable, but the turn of phrase came to be a powerful icon of the politics of the era. At a time when American society seemed in many ways to be pulling apart, Nixon argued for stability.

And with that phrase, he offered recognition to the large number of Americans who were neither Black Panthers nor Klansmen, neither war hawks nor hippies, just basically normal middle-class white people who rejected Jim Crow without embracing Black Power, disliked the war but disliked communism even more.

Nixon’s presidency itself descended into oblivion, but his silent majority of hard hats and conformists carried forward, dominating American politics for the rest of the 20th century. Under George W. Bush, Republican rhetoric took a different turn — more overtly pious and messianic — but in the wake of Bushism’s self-discrediting collapse, Nixonian themes have strongly reemerged under the leadership of Donald Trump.

Trump-branded signs intoning the slogan “THE SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP” festoon his rallies, and optimistic writers invoke the notion of a silent majority to tout theories that the polls are undercounting Trump voters.

But though Trumpniks are certainly the demographic descendants of Nixon’s white working-class silent majority, the basic reality is that they are anything but silent. Trump’s rallies are, as Trump would be the first to tell you, enormous, raucous affairs. He brings in big ratings. He attracts constant coverage, and so do his supporters, in the form of endlessly writerly explorations of the agonizing anxieties of “Trump Country” communities afflicted by everything from deindustrialization to opiate addiction to an influx of immigrants from the Dominican Republic.

Nor, crucially, are the Trumpniks a majority. Polls give every indication that Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump, just as she beat Bernie Sanders — who also drew larger rally crowds and more think pieces than she did — in the Democratic primary. Clinton crowds aren’t as big, and her voters aren’t as loud or as interesting to the media. But there sure are a lot of them. And it’s about time we acknowledge them and their emergence as a new silent majority that reelected America’s first black president and is poised to elect its first woman.
The new silent majority is minorities and educated women

In 1972, Nixon’s silent majority, grounded firmly in the white working class, delivered a smashing victory for the GOP, dashing the hopes of George McGovern supporters that a new coalition of young white professionals and racial minorities could upend American politics. Forty-four years later, America is facing another silent majority election — one in which the story has been all about Trump’s supporters but the victory will go to Clinton’s.

Ironically, the basic contours of the coalitions are essentially the same as in Nixon’s day.

Data from the Pew Research Center shows that Republicans enjoy the allegiance of the vast majority of white voters without a college degree — a trend that Trump will, if anything, accelerate. Democrats, meanwhile, enjoy overwhelming majorities among people of color, who now comprise almost 40 percent of their party — a trend that Trump will, again, accelerate. White Democrats these days are mostly college graduates, and mostly women. And while white male Democrats will back Clinton over Trump, they went pretty overwhelmingly for Sanders in the primaries. Clinton’s core coalition is composed of racial minorities and well-educated women, especially unmarried ones.

Clinton also enjoys the support of more than 70 percent of LGBTQ Americans and is trouncing Trump with Jewish voters by higher margins than any 21st-century Democrat.
The new silent majority is quiet

Clinton led in the Democratic primary from the first day to the last, and has consistently led in general election polling since the beginning of the campaign. Yet the Clinton voter has not made the same kind of impression on the media, in part because the new silent majority voter offers less visible evidence of being fired up and the new silent majority’s signature politicians — Clinton and Obama — do not do grand performance of anger, even at a time when rage is all the rage in American politics.

This is almost certainly not a coincidence. As Rebecca Traister wrote after the Iowa caucus, “No one likes a woman who yells loudly about revolution”:

And no, it’s not just this woman. This is a paradigm; it’s why Mom is the disciplinarian and Dad is the fun guy, why women remain the brains and organizational workhorses behind social movements while men get to be the gut-ripping orators, why so many women still manage campaigns and so many men are still candidates.

Obama, of course, is in a similar boat. Trump can deliver a speech excoriating establishment elites in business and government who don’t care about his people and sound like a populist champion to white America. An angry black man talking about his desire to burn down the system would sound like, well, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama had to loudly and immediately disavow to be deemed acceptable to a sufficiently large minority of white voters to win.

There is, of course, something lost in this. The financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuring Great Recession were genuine outrages, and it’s understandable that many voters yearn for politicians who’ll give voice to that rage. But ability to perform anger without coming across as the wrong kind of person is still a privilege in the 21st-century United States, and the new silent majority values other forms of representation that a woman can bring to the table over the performance of rage that her rivals bring.

Clinton’s signature weakness is that she is an ultimate insider — a veteran of a system many Americans have come to despise. This is, however, another way of saying that she has an unusually impressive résumé for a presidential candidate, with a longer and wider range of experience than any president since the Civil War. Clinton’s silent majority values competence and experience, and recognizes that it’s no coincidence the first plausible woman president had to be the most well-qualified candidate in generations and equally un-coincidental that in the hands of her enemies her great asset has been relabeled as a weakness.
The new silent majority has a lot to lose

During his August month of faux outreach to African-American voters, the most loyal bloc of the new silent majority, Trump surveyed black Americans and asked, “What the hell have you got to lose?”

Black people are, of course, well aware that they continue to face a large number of important struggles on both economic and non-economic fronts. But the vast majority of black voters perceive themselves as having a great deal to lose from the election of Donald Trump. That includes the repeal of a health care law that’s reduced the uninsurance rate among African-Americans by more than one-third, an approach to housing policy that’s attempted to reinvigorate decades-old anti-discrimination legislation, and a Department of Justice that actually cares about protecting nonwhites’ right to vote.

Latinos worry about losing these things, and they also worry about friends and relatives being deported and communities torn asunder.

Clinton’s silent majority is at times caricatured by her critics on the left as complacent, but a better characterization of the predominant view would be that Clinton voters feel precarious.

Voters who are a generation or two removed from the tyranny of the lynch mob or just a few years into enjoying the right to marry the person of their choosing are not that excited about the idea of bringing back the good old days. Thirty years ago, there was only one woman in the Cabinet and just two in the Senate. Educated, professional women chipping away at glass ceilings in their own workplaces see meaningful progress over a generation in politics and hope for more with the election of the first woman president.

Clinton’s coalition is under no illusion that all is well in America, but it does believe the country is improving in important ways. It’s skeptical of the impulse to flip the table over and hope for the best, and absolutely allergic to the view that the current version of the United States is a fallen one and the country reached its peak in the days of Mad Men and union factory jobs.
The new silent majority is diverse

Many Clinton supporters — especially people of color who are not enjoying inordinately privileged positions in the American socioeconomic hierarchy — have become increasingly frustrated with an endless parade of pious calls from inside the elite media for elites to pay more attention to the real pain of Trump voters.

Part of this is that even though Clinton has a winning coalition of voters behind her, it is a coalition of people who are traditionally marginalized in American society. It’s common for writers to start with the observation that Trump is popular among white voters with no college degree and then fall into shorthand describing his “working class” or “blue collar” appeal as if working-class black and Hispanic voters simply don’t exist.

Women, famously, are quieter about their views — less likely to submit blind op-eds or send obnoxious emails — to the point that many of America’s Trump-voting husbands are unaware their wives are for Clinton.

But Clinton’s silent majority is also hard to see precisely because it’s so diverse. There is not necessarily a “typical Clinton voter” in the sense that an older, white working-class person is a typical Trump voter and a young white college graduate was a typical Bernie voter. As a mid-30s, non-observant Jewish college graduate, I’m a very typical Clinton voter. But so is my older gay neighbor, and the black mom living a few houses down, and the house next door of single women roommates. The affluent DC suburb of Arlington County will deliver Clinton a hefty haul of votes, but so will the small, slightly-poorer-than-average city of Richmond, Virginia, and rural, poor areas like Holmes County, Mississippi, and Starr County, Texas.

You can’t profile “Clinton Country” or the “Clinton voter” as a single kind of person or place. Clinton Country, instead, is like America itself — vast and diverse, incorporating a staggering range of disparate individuals and localities that do not have an enormous amount in common beyond allegiance to a common set of political ideals.
The noisy minority used to be the majority

In the summer of 2000, Joel Rogers and Ruy Teixeira published an Atlantic article that was designed to be a counterpoint to the then-current political obsession with “soccer moms” and “wired workers.”

Titled “America’s Forgotten Majority,” Rogers and Teixeira’s article sought to remind readers that though America had changed over the past generation, it still hadn’t changed that much. White working-class voters, they pointed out, were still 55 percent of the population. Sixteen years later, the white working class is anything but forgotten — at times it seems the press can’t write about any other political demographic — but it’s no longer a majority.

The Latino share of the electorate has grown. The Asian share of the electorate has grown. The African-American share of the electorate has grown. A new cohort of white voters — the most highly educated generation in American history — reached adulthood.
The new silent majority understands coalitions

The greatest difference between the new silent majority and Trump’s noisy minority is that Clinton’s majority is a coalition of minorities, and it is self-aware about that fact.

Black voters, Latino voters, LGBTQ voters, Asian voters, Jewish voters, and all the rest demand respect and recognition from the politicians they support. But they are also tempered and realistic in terms of exactly how much respect and recognition a minority slice of the population can expect. African Americans were thrilled to have a black candidate on the ballot but vote for white Democrats all the time — including ones like Missouri Senate candidate Jason Kander who engage in elaborate displays of cultural affiliation with rural white sensibilities.

Members of the new silent majority recognize that most candidates, most of the time, will not be embracing their particular niche cultural cues. Tim Kaine does a speech in Spanish every once in a while, but he mostly speaks English, and Clinton, like Obama before her, speaks English exclusively. Every component group would like more recognition rather than less, but each recognizes that it is a piece of a larger whole. What they want, most of all, is candidates who will advance their interests in concrete, specific ways.

Clinton’s voters, like Trump’s, experience economic challenges. But they are responding mostly by backing a candidate who is offering specific forms of assistance — middle-class tax cuts, more subsidies for child care and higher education, immigration reform, policing reform, etc. — rather than holding out for someone who will deliver an overwhelming message of cultural solidarity.

Trump voters were surprised and alarmed to learn that Obama could win reelection with scant support from people like them, and have reacted with the Trumpian primal scream. To turn things around in the future they’ll have to learn the lesson that Hillary and Bill Clinton learned 44 years ago as organizers for George McGovern — just because the noise is on your side doesn’t mean the votes are.

To win as a minority, you have to learn to play nicely and work well with others. Clinton’s voters — and Clinton herself — have mastered that, and in doing so made themselves the new majority.

Source

With his campaign flailing in the final stretch of the race, Donald Trump refused to endorse the legitimacy of the presidential election during Wednesday night’s presidential date, telling moderator Chris Wallace that he could not commit to recognizing its results.

“I will look at it at the time,” the Republican nominee said, adding, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”

Blaming the media for slanted coverage and saying that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should not have been allowed to run for president, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition, even as Wallace tried to explain to him that it was a bedrock principle of American government.

“This is how Donald Trump thinks,” Clinton said. “It is funny, but it is also really troubling. This is not how our democracy works. We have been around for 240 years. We have had free and fair elections. We have accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”

Trump’s refusal to endorse a core principle of American democracy, on stage during a general-election debate with much of the country watching, might be the weirdest, and most disturbing, moment yet in a campaign marked by breathtaking violations of protocol and decorum. Faced with accusations from his critics on both the left and the right that he is a wannabe tin-pot dictator, Trump rose to the occasion, determinedly confirming the attack. It was perhaps the most irresponsible thing ever said during a general-election debate.

That exchange, more than an hour in, was just one of several nasty moments that made this the tensest of the three debates. But in many ways, it followed the pattern of its two predecessors: Trump was irritable, blustery, and spouted dishonest statements. Clinton, meanwhile, was workmanlike and studious, and found herself occasionally on the defensive over her email server and hacked messages released by WikiLeaks. In general, she seemed content to play it conservative, holding on to what most polls find as a strong lead, rather than aim for a knockout blow. Trump delivered his most substantive and detailed performance, and landed a few solid blows, but as in previous debates, his erratic behavior overshadowed them.

The Republican has a habit of turning insults and criticisms back on his critics. When Clinton argued that Trump was too close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and would be a puppet, he sniped, “No, you’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet.” When she questioned his unfitness for office, he replied, “No, you are the one that’s unfit.” Late in the debate, as she answered a question, he said, “Such a nasty woman.” At other times, he tangled with Wallace. Clinton, for her part, repeatedly tried to run over Wallace’s attempts to keep her to time limits, speaking over him.

It took 50 minutes for the issue of allegations of sexual assault against Trump to come up, and Wallace arguably did Trump a favor, setting it up as a contrast between those allegations and past allegations against Clinton’s husband Bill. Trump said, falsely, that the allegations had been debunked, then tried to pivot hard to videos released by conservative muckraker James O’Keefe that purport to show Democratic operatives bragging about inciting violence. Clinton, who surely expected such a question, turned directly back to the assaults.

With his campaign flailing in the final stretch of the race, Donald Trump refused to endorse the legitimacy of the presidential election during Wednesday night’s presidential date, telling moderator Chris Wallace that he could not commit to recognizing its results.

“I will look at it at the time,” the Republican nominee said, adding, “I’ll keep you in suspense.”

Blaming the media for slanted coverage and saying that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, should not have been allowed to run for president, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition, even as Wallace tried to explain to him that it was a bedrock principle of American government.

“This is how Donald Trump thinks,” Clinton said. “It is funny, but it is also really troubling. This is not how our democracy works. We have been around for 240 years. We have had free and fair elections. We have accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone standing on a debate stage during a general election.”

Trump’s refusal to endorse a core principle of American democracy, on stage during a general-election debate with much of the country watching, might be the weirdest, and most disturbing, moment yet in a campaign marked by breathtaking violations of protocol and decorum. Faced with accusations from his critics on both the left and the right that he is a wannabe tin-pot dictator, Trump rose to the occasion, determinedly confirming the attack. It was perhaps the most irresponsible thing ever said during a general-election debate.

That exchange, more than an hour in, was just one of several nasty moments that made this the tensest of the three debates. But in many ways, it followed the pattern of its two predecessors: Trump was irritable, blustery, and spouted dishonest statements. Clinton, meanwhile, was workmanlike and studious, and found herself occasionally on the defensive over her email server and hacked messages released by WikiLeaks. In general, she seemed content to play it conservative, holding on to what most polls find as a strong lead, rather than aim for a knockout blow. Trump delivered his most substantive and detailed performance, and landed a few solid blows, but as in previous debates, his erratic behavior overshadowed them.

The Republican has a habit of turning insults and criticisms back on his critics. When Clinton argued that Trump was too close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and would be a puppet, he sniped, “No, you’re the puppet. No, you’re the puppet.” When she questioned his unfitness for office, he replied, “No, you are the one that’s unfit.” Late in the debate, as she answered a question, he said, “Such a nasty woman.” At other times, he tangled with Wallace. Clinton, for her part, repeatedly tried to run over Wallace’s attempts to keep her to time limits, speaking over him.

It took 50 minutes for the issue of allegations of sexual assault against Trump to come up, and Wallace arguably did Trump a favor, setting it up as a contrast between those allegations and past allegations against Clinton’s husband Bill. Trump said, falsely, that the allegations had been debunked, then tried to pivot hard to videos released by conservative muckraker James O’Keefe that purport to show Democratic operatives bragging about inciting violence. Clinton, who surely expected such a question, turned directly back to the assaults.

“Donald thinks belittling women makes him bigger,” she said. “He goes after their dignity, their self-worth, and I don’t think there is a woman anywhere who doesn’t know what that feels like. So we now know what Donald thinks and what he says and how he acts toward women. That’s who Donald is.”

“No one respects women more than I do,” Trump answered—eliciting open laughter from the audience in Las Vegas.

Clinton kept pushing, bringing up Trump’s past attacks on New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Senator John McCain, and Khizr and Ghazala Khan. “Every time Donald is pushed on something, which is obviously uncomfortable, like what these women are saying, he immediately goes to denying responsibility, and the not just about women,” she said. “I’d love to talk about other things,” Trump said, a moment of frankness. Perhaps that was unwise, though—within minutes, he had refused to endorse the legitimacy of the election.

For a few minutes at the start of Wednesday’s third presidential debate, it seemed like voters might actually get a substantive look at policy from the two candidates. The first question, to Clinton, was about how she would approach Supreme Court appointments, delivering a straightforward description of a liberal court that would defend Roe v. Wade, rule against major companies, and reverse the Citizens United case. Then Trump was up. He began with a swipe at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, criticizing her for attacking him (she did) and his supporters (which she did not). When Wallace asked him directly whether Roe would be overturned under a Trump presidency, he tried to dodge the question, finally saying that with the justices he picked, it “inevitably” would be. But Trump quickly attacked Clinton for backing late-term abortions. She fired back that he was using “scare rhetoric” and pledging to protect the right to choose—contrasting the U.S. with countries with forced abortion or forced pregnancy.

So far, so good—or at least as good as could be hoped. Next up was immigration. Trump delivered one of the more memorable lines of the night, justifying mass deportations by saying, “We have some bad hombres here and we have to get them out.” Trump made a curious, quietly effective argument that Clinton, who voted for border security, and Obama, who has deported millions, were stronger on immigration that Trump had previously suggested.

Wallace asked Clinton about a speech to a Brazilian bank in which she said that she favored “open borders.” Clinton insisted that she was referring only to electricity markets—a statement that seems hard to support based on the transcript. She quickly tried to pivot, complaining that the hacked emails, revealed by WikiLeaks were a Russian plot, as U.S. intelligence officials have said. Trump said he did not know Putin, and he complained—in an echo of the 1960 election—of a missile gap with Russia.

“I find it ironic that he’s raising nuclear weapons,” Clinton said. “This is a person who has been very cavalier, even casual, about the use of nuclear weapons. Trump insisted she was wrong: “There’s no quote. You’re not going to find a quote from me.” He was, yet again, lying. In April, in an interview with Wallace, Trump said, ” So, North Korea has nukes. Japan has a problem with that. I mean, they have a big problem with that. Maybe they would in fact be better off if they defend themselves from North Korea.” Asked by Wallace whether that included nuclear weapons, Trump said, “Including with nukes, yes, including with nukes.”

As has often been the case, Trump is most effective when talking about his opposition to existing free-trade agreements, one of his core arguments. He worked to tie Clinton to NAFTA.

“I pass factories that were thriving 20, 25 years ago. And because of the bill that her husband signed and she blessed 100 percent, it is just horrible what’s happened to these people in these communities,” he said. “She can say that her husband did well. But, boy, did they suffer, as NAFTA kicked in, because it didn’t really kick in very much. But it kicked in after they left. Boy, did they suffer.”

Clinton, for her part, accused Trump of outsourcing jobs, employing undocumented workers during the construction of Trump Tower, and using cheap Chinese steel to build his own hotels in the U.S. She vowed to not add a single penny to the national debt with her economic-stimulus plan.

Everything from Trump’s filibuster on electoral legitimacy felt a little anti-climactic. The candidates went through pro forma discussions of foreign-policy hot spots, for the most part reiterating past positions. At the end of the debate, it was no great surprise when the candidates did not shake hands.

The end of the election is looking equally anticlimactic. With less than three weeks to go, Trump is falling behind in the polls. While debates are seldom good places to change the momentum of the race, it was one last chance for Trump to impress upon a huge national audience his readiness for the presidency; instead, he chose to question the very enterprise he wishes to run. If he loses on November 8, there’s no reason to expect a friendlier denouement to the election than there was to Wednesday’s debate.

Source

When Donald Trump ludicrously accused Hillary Clinton, at the first presidential debate, of trying to fight the Islamic State for her “entire adult life,” Clinton didn’t offer a rebuttal. Instead, she issued a request: “Please, fact-checkers, get to work.”

They were already working. Thanks to the brazenness of Trump’s deceit, fact-checking, that unglamorous journalistic activity once mostly relegated to niche websites and little boxes beside newspaper articles, is having a moment. Big news organizations now assign teams of reporters to fact-check the debates in real time. CNN, among other networks, is using its bottom-screen chyrons to challenge Trump’s most obvious lies. And every day, full-time fact checkers take a false claim, or three, or four, and meticulously explain why it is wrong.

I decided a month ago that this wasn’t enough.

What we’re experiencing from Trump is a daily avalanche of wrongness. The essential truth of this election cannot be conveyed with an examination of any one particular chunk of ice. The story is the massive accumulation of nonsense, big stuff and little stuff alike, day after day.

I’m now spending much of my time immersed in Trump’s dishonesty. I’m the Washington correspondent for Canada’s Toronto Star newspaper, and since September 15, I’ve published a daily tally—or as close to a daily tally as I can produce while also sleeping occasionally—of every false claim the Republican presidential candidate has uttered in a speech or interview. At the end of each day or the beginning of the next, I tweet a screenshot of the list, then publish it on our website, thestar.com.

The fewest inaccuracies I’ve heard in any day is four. The most is 25. (Twenty-five!) That doesn’t include the first two debates, at which I counted 34 and 33, respectively. Over the course of 33 days, I counted a total of 253 (including some that repeat).

I’m not doing anything particularly innovative with what I call #TrumpCheck. Trump has been dutifully fact-checked all campaign by several others, including Politifact and the Washington Post’s excellent Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee. American readers who have bitterly joked that America’s fact-checking has been outsourced to Canada are far too hard on their own journalists. Some of each list I make borrows from the analysis of Americans.

What I’m doing differently, though, is keeping count. Because I think the count is a story in itself. And it seems that at least some of the American electorate agrees. The TrumpCheck lists have been more widely read, retweeted and shared than anything I’ve ever written, even the stuff I wrote about a crack-smoking mayor. They have put me in the crosshairs of trolls who had been wonderfully unaware of my existence. And they have shown me, again, the limited power of truth to reach people who are sure they already know it.

When I arrived in D.C. last year, I thought 2 a.m. fact-checking was a thing of my past. I was excited to finally get to experience the bliss of normal political dysfunction. From 2010 to 2014, I had covered the surreal Toronto administration of infamous Mayor Rob Ford and his lesser-known brother Doug, a city councilman who did not suffer from addiction but shared the late mayor’s allergy to accuracy.

During the Toronto mayoral election two years ago, the bombastic blond media-bashing conservative-populist outsiders—yes, Toronto finds the Trump phenomenon eerily familiar—made so many false claims that I decided the only way to convey the truth of the election was with the blunt, accessible tool of a list. A typical headline on the “Campaign Lie Detector” fact-check feature I hastily invented: “Doug Ford says 21 inaccurate things during radio appearance.”

It occurred to me this September, during a particularly outrageous and dishonest Trump Thursday, that the lie detector needed to be reincarnated. I had a third once-in-a-lifetime liar on my hands—and this one was even worse.

My first day making a Trump lie list, September 15, I counted 12 false claims. Among them: Trump falsely claimed again to have opposed the Iraq War, falsely claimed that Clinton’s campaign invented the phrase “alt-right,” falsely described his rocky visit to a church in Flint, Michigan, falsely claimed his poll numbers with black voters were skyrocketing and falsely claimed Hispanic poverty has worsened under the Obama administration.

Reporters noted some of this on Twitter. But the fact-checking largely stayed confined to personal social media accounts, out of articles and cable segments and corporate feeds seen by many more people. These are some of the headlines Trump got that day: “Donald Trump reveals more details of his tax plan.” “Donald Trump releases one-page summary of medical records.” “Donald Trump: The Fed Is Very Political.”

That is perfectly understandable. All of the above is real news. Other than the Iraq lie, which was already old news by then, none of his false claims was, in itself, tremendously significant.

But I think they added up to something crucial. All together, one of the day’s most important news items was really this: “Candidate makes up a whole bunch of things in rapid succession for no particular reason.” It went largely untold.

That’s why I include in my lists even the small errors that provide easy fodder for the Trump supporters (and sometimes non-supporters) who accuse me of pedantic nitpicking. While I’d make the lists more unimpeachable if I stuck to the big falsehoods, I think the accumulation of little ones is sometimes just as revealing.

Trump, for example, likes to read the lyrics to the song “The Snake” as an allegory for the supposed danger posed by Muslim refugees. He has repeatedly claimed it was written by singer Al Wilson, who performed it in the late 1960s. In fact, it was written in the early 1960s by Oscar Brown Jr., the late singer and civil rights activist, whose family has asked Trump to stop using it.

Some Trump supporters chortle when I point this out. But it matters to the Browns, and I think it tells us something about this potential president. Every politician sometimes gets things wrong about complicated issues, sometimes practices evasive dishonesty. Trump gets things wrong all the time, pointlessly, about almost everything, and almost never corrects himself. Even if he’s not intentionally lying, he’s habitually erring. At very least, it suggests a serial carelessness with facts and a serial resistance to conceding error. Both traits seem relevant to the discussion of who should be commander-in-chief.

The fairest question I get asked is why I don’t do a daily fact check of Clinton. The short answer is that I don’t even really have time to check Trump, which amounts to a part-time job on top of my job writing regular articles about the campaign. The better answer is the same as the one New Yorker editor David Remnick offered in September when he introduced a series called “Trump and the Truth”: Trump is on a whole other level requiring its own special kind of coverage.

“Hillary Clinton has had her bald-faced moments—moments that are too kindly described as ‘lawyerly,’” Remnick wrote. “But, in the scale and in the depth of his lying, Donald Trump is in another category.”

I would never argue that Clinton is a thoroughly honest person. She has lied at length about her email server. She has lied about her stances on the Trans-Pacific Partnership . You can make a convincing case that she is inauthentic. But on a daily basis, she is, believe it or not, predominantly factual. The two general election debates, for which I fact-checked both Trump and Clinton, have shown how much more accurate she is than her opponent: Clinton made four false claims at the first debate to Trump’s 34, five false claims at the second debate to Trump’s 33.

Save for one critical tweet by Trump advisor A.J. Delgado—“Perfect ex(ample) of what I mean by ‘silly fact-checking’ Sigh” —the Trump campaign has ignored me. His fans have not. Nothing I’ve ever written has made so many people so angry.

Perhaps it’s simply that all the retweets expose my work to a larger number of people and therefore a larger number of crazed people. But it also seems clear that there’s a devoted reluctance, among a substantial number of Trump supporters, to believe that their man is anything but the straightest of shooters. When I drive around the country reporting election stories, I meet friendly people who say they support Trump because Clinton is a pathological liar. When I’m at my desk in Washington, I hear from Trump’s vaunted base—and its Canadian franchise—in vitriolic emails.

They’ve accused me of being controlled by the CIA. They’ve accused me of having a sexual attraction to Clinton’s “colostomy bag.” (Fact check: what is even happening, man.) I’ve been told to “get a life” and, more confusingly, to “get a job.” And, at times, I’ve gained some more insight into the mind of Trump’s unshakable loyalists.

“Find something important to report on,” one of the more respectful correspondents emailed in late September. “98% of the population could care less about what false things were said. They are people in politics…”

In fact, I’m told the same thing every week by sympathetic left-wingers—that I’m wasting my time, that Trump’s enduring base of support proves that nobody cares.

I don’t think that’s right.

Truth is a worthy end in itself, whether or not it sways an election. Some polling suggests that the critical coverage of recent weeks might be having an impact on public perceptions: In the ABC/Washington Post poll released this week, just 34 percent of voters viewed Trump as honest and trustworthy, down from 42 percent the month prior. (Clinton was also at 34 percent, another sign of her reputation for duplicity.) And the Twitter reaction to my lists suggests there is still a significant market for nonsense-debunking. The September 15 list got more than 2,000 retweets, as many of the lists do.

To some extent, I know I’m fact-checking to the converted. I think the lists are popular with anti-Trump readers partly for their cathartic value—because they tell powerless bystanders that the perpetrator of this heist isn’t just being allowed to waltz out of the bank. Maybe the man is still going to get away with it, but at least somebody is waving their arms and shouting, “Hey, wait!”

The man himself, of course, almost never appears to care. Fact-checking sometimes prompts normal candidates to abandon or modify their false claims, often to spin some sort of explanation. Trump simply keeps on lying.

I saw this as recently as Monday night, when I fired up YouTube to watch Trump’s rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He peddled his previous lies about Clinton’s supposed plan for “open borders with the Middle East” (ridiculous), illegal immigrants being treated better than military veterans (ridiculous), his supposed endorsement from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (actually, a union of ICE officers). This time, he added a spate of new lies on the subject of voter fraud.

Exhausting, as always—I tallied 22 false claims between the rally and Trump’s three interviews.

Trump had been falsely saying, over and over, that the United States has a trade deficit of nearly $800 billion. That’s wrong, as I’ve pointed out—it is closer to $500 billion, unless you specify that you’re only counting trade in goods and excluding trade in services, in which case it is $746 billion, more or less close enough. But Trump doesn’t make such specifications. Except, this time, he did.

“We have nearly an $800 billion annual trade deficit, in goods, with the rest of the world,” he said.

You didn’t notice? You don’t care about this tiny technical thing? I’m still claiming it as a victory. When you’re fact-checking Donald Trump, you take what you can get.

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During a telephone interview with CNN”s Don Lemon, billionaire Mark Cuban was asked if he was surprised by all of the women who have come forward to accuse GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump of sexually assaulting them.

His answer: not at all.

“Have ever heard of anything like these women coming forward or him being untoward?” host Lemon asked him.

“Yes,” Cuban told the clearly surprised CNN host.

“You have?” Lemon asked.

“Yes, and I know one. “Cuban continued. “And it just didn’t happen recently. My friend reminded me and it was from 2000 and she, you know, I don’t expect her to come forward. I wouldn’t recommend she come forward. I know somebody else from two years ago that won’t come forward. So you know, it’s not anything that caught me by surprise.”

“So, again, this is you saying this, it’s not CNN’s reporting but tell us what you can since you know him,” Lemon pressed.

“That’s what I can tell you,” Cuban replied. “I can tell you my friend that was dating this one woman, you know, he just reminded me of the story they told me right after it happened and they put it all down in detail and obviously I remembered it. And then I had another person who contacted me after the race started and told me a story. I don’t want to go into it, it’s all all second- and third-hand, other than to say it’s factually true. i don’t have any doubts that what we’re hearing is true.”

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For all the chaos and unpredictability and the sometimes appalling spectacle of this election season, the question of which candidate actually deserves to be president has never been a difficult one.

Vogue has no history of political endorsements. Editors in chief have made their opinions known from time to time, but the magazine has never spoken in an election with a single voice. Given the profound stakes of this one, and the history that stands to be made, we feel that should change.

Vogue endorses Hillary Clinton for president of the United States.

Perhaps that sentence won’t come as a surprise. Vogue has enthusiastically covered Hillary Clinton’s career, her rise from Yale law student to governor’s wife to First Lady to senator to Secretary of State. She has been profiled by the magazine six times.

(For the record, we have also featured Donald Trump—or, more particularly, his family members Ivana, Marla, Melania, and Ivanka—multiple times in our pages.)

We understand that Clinton has not always been a perfect candidate, yet her fierce intelligence and considerable experience are reflected in policies and positions that are clear, sound, and hopeful.

She supports comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship. She speaks up for racial justice, for reforming policing and sentencing laws. Her years as Secretary of State have shown that she understands how to strengthen alliances abroad, respond to global crises, and continue American leadership in the world. She is forceful in her support for LGBTQ rights, including an end to discrimination against transgender people. She knows the challenges working women face. Her tax proposals and commitment to infrastructure investment will be a boon to the middle class. She will continue the important work on health-care reform begun by President Obama. She is a sane voice on guns.

Can Clinton unify a deeply divided America? Heal the wounds of this unbearably fraught political season? Our divisions are real, and it will take more than one intensely qualified leader to heal them.

And yet two words give us hope: Madam President. Women won the vote in 1920. It has taken nearly a century to bring us to the brink of a woman leading our country for the first time. Let’s put this election behind us and become the America we want to be: optimistic, forward-looking, and modern.

Let’s head to the polls on Tuesday, November 8, and vote.

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A Indiana man was surprised to see a photo of himself on a Donald Trump campaign flyer in Ohio.

“A friend of mine, she sent me the link,” says Fishers native Gurinder Singh-Khalsa. “She said your picture is showing a campaign ad, a campaign flyer for Trump.”

The flyer includes Singh Khalsa with the description “Muslim,” but he is Sikh, not Muslim, and he doesn’t support Donald Trump.

“I was completely shocked,” he says. “Nobody ever asked me to use my photo.”

Singh Khalsa has lived in Indiana for eight years, after coming to the U.S. in 1996. In August he founded the Sikh Political Action Committee, a non-partisan group encouraging state lawmakers to include Indiana’s Sikh population in the conversation.

He says the group wants to make people aware: “Who we are, why we wear the turban and the beard.”

Singh Khalsa says Sikhs and Muslims are two completely different religions and that it is very ignorant to confuse them.

“Those that want to lead this country as the president, they don’t know who Sikhs are,” he says. “They cannot differentiate, that’s why they are putting picture of a Sikh and writing it as Muslim.”

Singh Khalsa says Sikhs in the U.S. have been accused of being part of the Islamic State militant group and have been the targets of hate crimes.

“I am an American and I am American by choice,” he says. “Faith is my personal preference and I don’t want to be judged by my faith or that appearance of what I wear.”

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