Solving Problems

 Kamala Harris and others have come out and said that should Democrats win control of the House and Senate next week, they should not focus on impeachment. The argument is that Democrats will have been elected to fix things, including the War in Iran, tariffs and "affordability." 

There are a host of problems here. The first is that almost all of Trump's deeply unpopular actions have either at their root or branch the connecting issue of corruption. If you want to address his tariff powers, you also have to look at how he's squeezing companies for bribes to repeal tariffs in their specific industries. There is fundamentally no profound distinction between solving affordability and ending Trump's abuse of power.

Next, there is the simple math of what even the most profound of Blue Tsunamis can bring. Let's say that it's just an absolute crushing defeat for Trump. Not just Mississippi and South Carolina, but Arkansas flips Senate seats. Harris and other would note that if you get to, say, 58 Senate seats that this isn't enough to remove Trump from office. This is accurate. However, it's also still not enough to override a presidential veto. What's more, fundamental to Trump's abuse of power is his contempt for laws passed by Congress and his refusal to abide by court decisions. As an autocrat, he cannot work within the separation of powers. Focusing on "affordability" isn't going to lead to "solutions" anymore than impeachment will lead to removal. 

The essential burden that Democrats face is that they are a party devoted to government actually working and our system makes it difficult to make things work. What's more, you can pass a really impressive and beneficial program like the Affordable Care Act or nutrition assistance programs and agent provocateurs can simply gin up some small borderline act of corruption to try and discredit the whole project. The perils of running on "doing something" is that when you have partial power - and the system is set up so that one party always has partial power - you can't actually do anything. If el Sayed and Nixon win their Senate races, they aren't going to be able to pass Medicare for All at least until 2029 and likely not even then.

So arguing that Democrats should not focus on impeachment because it won't actually remove Trump doesn't make sense, because Democrats won't be able to really do anything until 2029.

Finally, people are pissed. The smooth brained swing voters are inherently distrustful of both parties. They are - seemingly - pissed at Trump because things suck. Democrats will not be able to make things magically not suck in January, no matter how many seats they win next week. They will have to show that they are prepared to hold corruption accountable. They will have to investigate everything WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY PASSING BILLS THAT TRUMP WILL VETO OR SIMPLY NOT IMPLEMENT. You can do both! I know Mike Johnson didn't believe in actually having the Congress meet, but you can stay in DC and legislate while ALSO investigating and impeaching.

The criticism from the insurgent left is that institutional Democrats are wimps. El Sayed has some serious political deficits, but he understands the need for combative politics. Even someone as mild mannered as Ossoff gets that. If Harris can't see that and if Chuck Schumer can't see that, then we are right back where we were in spring of 2021, when we let Trump slide for January 6th. 

Impeach him for murdering fishermen in the Caribbean. The impeach him again for accepting bribes. Then impeach him again for Iran or for not supporting Ukraine as required by law. 

MAKE HIM FUCKING MISERABLE.

75-25

 Let's posit that the Democrats win the House and Senate next week. Unless the margins are 75% to 25%, it will still feel like a failure of democratic accountability. I know that Democrats suffer from a perpetual Eeyore problem, but after the American electorate fucked up so incredibly badly before, there has to be some sign if complete and utter rejection of all Trump has done and stands for. 

Sadly, that almost certainly will not come to pass. 

Decompressing

 This Times expose of Trump and the White House's mental and emotional state these days is...woof. We've known for decades that Trump is a narcissist, but the combination of a squadron of lackeys and lickspittles to cocoon him in the warm light of adulation and the increasingly obvious reality that he is deeply unpopular could be truly explosive if it really is a Blue Tsunami next week. 

If, for instance, Democrats pull of incredible wins in Texas and South Carolina, that will be directly because Trump saddled the GOP with Paxton and Graham. His instincts are shit when it comes to "normal" politics. He actually thinks these rallies will save the GOP in the midterms. How could they not, because Trump is amazing, just ask Natalie Karp!

Look, my seething hatred of the man and all he represents makes me want him to suffer a crippling narcissistic wound, but it would also mean that democracy is saved. Of course, anything less than a 75%-25% popular vote drubbing would still constitute a sort of failure of democratic accountability, but let's just try and win the House and Senate and go from there. 

Lawfare Is The Stupidest MAGA Neologism

 When the Biden DOJ began - slowly, oh so slowly - to investigate and prosecute Trump for his many crimes, his partisans screamed "Lawfare! They're weaponizing the Justice system!" The reality, of course, is that Trump WAS guilty of crimes. We know this because he was fucking convicted by a jury in NY. The other indictments never made it to trial, but there's a pretty good chance that he would have been convicted. 

The Lawfare idea was an example of two different aspects of MAGA. The first is that every accusation is a confession. Trump has treated the DOJ as his own private law firm to sue, bully and persecute his enemies. The other day, they went looking for a third indictment against James Comey. They couldn't even get an indictment against Cassidy Hutchinson. 

The second is the idea of muddying the waters so thoroughly that you can't distinguish the actual criminality with the firehose of scandals and quasi-scandals and outrages that flood your media. They are seeking to inoculate themselves from future prosecutions, by complaining about what is effectively their own behavior. Launch vindictive prosecution after vindictive prosecution and then you can complain that every prosecution is vindictive. 

This even has international implications, with the recent treatment of Flavio Bolsonaro. MAGA screams about criminal entering the country illegally, then illegally bring in a criminal. Not just Bolsonaro, but the Tate Brothers qualify as opening the doors for right wing criminals. 

This drives home the fundamental truth of Trump and MAGA: this is a group that is completely devoid of principles. Trump has always been intensely transactional in his relationships. A wife is not life partner (ha), best friend and helpmeet, but an ornament that exists as long as she looks good on his arm. A business deal is only successful if it screws over the other guy. Political figures only exist to serve him. 

The idea of "justice" as an abstract principle is so foreign to the marrow of MAGA that it cannot even occur to them that people might want to prosecute people "on their side" for crimes. Democrats aren't perfect, but they have moved pretty quickly to disown Graham Platner, Eric Swalwell and Bob Menendez when their misdeeds became apparent. Meanwhile, MAGA wants to shove Ken Paxton - a cartoonishly evil character - into a 6 year Senate term. Is he a criminal? Almost certainly, but he's on the team.

What's more, a criminal investigation of Paxton is not about finding whether he committed crimes but "lawfare." 

Recently, Elissa Slotkin said that there needed to be criminal investigations and prosecutions of low level MAGA people to dissuade the lawless behavior that is swirling through the People's Government. The equation was inherently conservative: If you have committed a crime, you should fear prosecution. It was not, however, "Conservative" in Wilhoit's Law, which says, "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." 

In MAGA, the in-group is, well, MAGA. The law should protect them from swarthy brown criminals, but not bind their own rampant criminality. 

If History is to be our guide, there will come a reckoning for MAGA. Perhaps it starts in a few days. Perhaps the true reckoning comes in 2029, but it will come. When it does, there will be voices suggesting that prosecuting the tsunami of corruption would be bad because Trump engaged in frivolous prosecutions and prosecuting him and his cronies would be the same. These are terrible voices and we should punch them in the fucking mouth. 

AI's Risk

 AI overlords made headlines over the past year, talking about how their business model could lead to the end of life on earth. Fun! Exciting!

After the usual hyperventilating, many experts on issues like nuclear safety or biological engineering wondered how this extinction event could occur. Seemed very unlikely. One writer I recall differentiating between existential and catastrophic threats. The idea that AI is an existential threat seems overblown and melodramatic, but the idea that AI poses some sort of catastrophic threat seems distressingly real.

The main issue - as Krugman notes - is from a proliferation of hacking that makes life fundamentally different. Best case scenario is that everything becomes stickier and more labor intensive as AI actually unwinds some of the digitization of the modern world. Over the past 40 years, countless forms of commerce and other means of interacting have moved into the digital world. Much of the code undergirding that world is very old. AI - it seems - is very much adept at exploiting that ancient code. 

Best case scenario is therefore a slowing down of economic activity as we cope with the various threats from hacks. Every transaction becomes suspect, and the world of two-factor authentication is therefore not really enough. The process of enshitification is when websites start out easy to use, but then are designed to be harder to use until you pay them for premium access. It's the proliferation of paywalls and other hurdles to access in order to maximize returns.

AI has the potential explode enshitification without actually gaining anything from it in terms of ease of access or additional content. Every website will become a pain in the ass to access.

The worst case scenario is the erasure or hostage taking of critical realms of the digital world. Imagine, for instance, major brokerage firms suddenly having all of their accounts just erased or taken over by hackers. AI makes hacking easier, it's not that AI itself is doing the hacking (necessarily). We worry about someone using AI to bioengineer a supervirus that kills everyone, but far more likely is just a rampant proliferation of hacking. 

We are already seeing some aspects of this in electoral interreference in places like Brazil, but so far people have been able to outlast the bots and other issues. How long will that last? That seems more or less the oligarchs placing their thumbs on the scale, but how soon until AI fueled mis and disinformation overwhelm the voting public? How long before AI's risk become so profound we wind up unraveling the digital revolution?

Cuba

 This is a striking story about the current situation in Cuba. It is a familiar tale of the collapse of communist institutions in the face of economic stagnation and the rush of people to turn to religion as society seems to collapse around them. 

What was interesting in the piece was that no one in Cuba blames the US for their plight. Despite the embargo that we have had forever and that Trump made considerably more stringent, Cubans blame their local leaders for their misery. And they are clearly miserable. This gibes with what I saw in the Museum of Remembrance in Santiago, Chile. There was no mention of the role the CIA played in supporting Pinochet's coup, but rather the blame was kept squarely on the military and industrial leaders who ushered in those decades of brutality.

Of course, if you ask an overeducated leftist in the US, we are responsible for the repression of Pinochet and the junta in Buenos Aires; we are starving the people of Cuba with our embargo. This is the dark twin of American Exceptionalism on the right, which is that the US is a uniquely evil place that does uniquely evil things. The reality, I think, is much more complicated.

The US absolutely contributes to misery and repression by its actions. We supported and support military dictatorships, if it serves our national interest. Of course, that's what national interest means. Until recently, however, we also funded things like USAID and tried to help countries that were not actively hostile to us. This could vacillate between Democratic and Republican administrations, but the rest of the world at worst tended to tolerate us, because we tended over time to be on balance more benevolent than malign.

Trump has, of course, tilted the scale so far towards malevolence that he has burned bridges all over the world. The one area where he seems to be - if not exactly admired than at least tolerated - is Latin America. Perhaps it is the long tradition of caudillismo -  strongman politics - that they tend to respond to. I actually think that accounted for some of his gains among Hispanic voters in the US in 2024. They saw in Trump the sort of machismo leader that they've traditionally admired. That's why he tended to outperform Harris among that demographic.

We will know in a little over a week, if Trump has surrendered all those gains and more with Hispanic voters, through the reckless brutality of his policies. I have to wonder and perhaps hope that the all the "mini-Trumps" springing up in Latin America will also see their popularity and grip on power recede. We saw Luna win in Brazil, and Sheinbaum in Mexico, but overall, there almost has to come a reckoning for the new cynical brutality of American policy towards Latin America. The people there want to believe in the US, because often their home grown leaders are terrible - as in Cuba.

If the Cuban communist regime finally does collapse Trump will take some credit for it, and some of that will actually be deserved. However, the real issue is that communism doesn't really work and that problem is not a problem of the United States' making, though we have ostracized and deprived that country of so much for so long, that I don't think a non-communist regime would have fared much better.

Harbingers?

 The news from overseas elections is pretty good, actually. Brazil rejected a second generation Trump clone and Serbia ousted their long time pro-Russian government at the polls. Brazil got more coverage, because Brazil is a huge country and represents one of the few rejections in Latin America recently of Trumpist style politics. I remember talking to people in both Buenos Aires and Santiago that they needed a Trump-style president. Brazil had one, ejected him and have now rejected his son.

Krugman notes that Meta has been up to some serious fuckery surrounding first the recent No Kings Rally and now the Brazilian election. We've obviously seen Musk throw hundreds of millions to elect Republicans, and he has been openly supportive of Orban and Putin. Zuckerberg apparently looked at Elon destroying any institutional goodwill among people to the left of Dick Cheney and decided he wanted in on that action.

I've said before and I will say again, the intellectual ecosystem among the Broligarchy is fundamentally barren. They have about three ideas on how the world works, and they are going to ride those three ideas into the ground. Any smart business leader - think Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase - would be very careful to hedge their bets between the two political parties. The Lords of Ones and Zeroes think that they have no need of a party that might criticize them and hurt their fee fees by pointing out that their products have enormous societal costs. 

There is absolutely no reason for Democrats not to haul Musk and Zuckerberg before Congressional committees and grill them, with an eye towards either changing their behavior or punishing them the next time they have a trifecta. 

This week, Israel has an election and if Netanyahu's coalition loses, that would be a massive boost to the hopes for peace in the region. Whether these elections mean anything for the US midterms is entirely up for debate. Everyone seems to concede that Democrats will win the House. 

Many of the marquee Senate races are entirely within the margins of error. Some Republican analysts have suggested that they are seeing a wipe out election, but that is based at least somewhat on early voting, which figures to favor Democrats regardless. Early voting is great; it's votes in the bank. It allows Democrats to target their voters who haven't voted and get them to the polls.

Still, it does not predict what the electorate will look like in a week or so. All the signs - foreign and domestic - point to a strong midterm, but...damn, does anyone feel confident in the sagacity of the American voter?

Collapse

 Richardson cheerily relates the circumstances of the Market Crash of 1929. Krugman, meanwhile, looks at the situation from today forwards. 

The three things Krugman looks at are a possible stagflation cycle, a liquidity trap caused by the bursting of the AI bubble and a debt crisis. All three are very, very bad. 

The stagflation argument has to be linked - though Krugman doesn't do so explicitly - to rising energy costs. The Iran war has caused energy prices - and therefore the price of everything that requires oil to be produced or shipped - to spike, and as businesses begin to price this in, that can create rising prices, even as the economy does not grow. There is some evidence that we are seeing to productivity gains related to AI, but the real economy - as opposed to the stock market - does not seem to be growing at the same rate as prices are rising.

The liquidity trap is related to the AI situation, because if that's a bubble (and it sure seems to be) and it bursts, the US is not in a great position to escape the downturn with monetary stimulus, because interest rates are already fairly low. We could spend our way out, but that leads to the third risk, which is a debt crisis.

It seems unlikely that the US could enter a debt crisis - France might -  because of the way the dollar functions. But the extraordinary costs of borrowing means that interest payments on US debt are rising at a time when we already have problems with revenues - Thank, Republicans! - and, oh, yeah, we are fighting a war with Iran.

Krugman also notes that there are risks we can't see. He talks about how Covid screwed everything up without warning, but what about a massive hack or crash of the digital world because of AI. That seems far more likely than SkyNet becoming self aware and wiping out humanity.

What goes unstated by Krugman, but Richardson nods at, perhaps without realizing the connection, is that we have absolute fucking morons running things in DC. Andrew Mellon's policies were a leading cause of the Great Depression, blinkered as he was by ideology. Trump is both blinkered and an idiot. The creatures he surrounds himself with warp themselves into his image. 

If any of these risks become reality, we don't have anyone in the Executive branch who seems capable of pulling us out. 

The market crash of 1929 didn't lead immediately to the "Great Depression." It led to one crisis, then another, most of which were met with poor or underwhelming responses. A depression was likely inevitable by the spring of 1929, but the Great Depression was created after October of '29.

Buckle up.

The ActBlue Industrial Complex

 Josh Marshall notes an article that breaks down the broad dysfunction of consultant class in Democratic politics. The focus of the article is the perverse incentives of political consulting that siphons off money that should be going to win elections that instead goes to a sort of circular economy of ad buys and consultant fees.

He notes that it certainly seems that Democrats are winning the small donor wars, whereas the GOP relies on billionaires, Dark Money and Super PACs. I can say for my own experience that I really wanted to give money this year, but the literally non-stop barrage of emails and texts has made me balk at making a donation that will open my up to more emails and texts. 

There is a clear reform agenda for Democrats in attacking the ability of billionaires to buy elections. There also needs to be an effort to clean up their own house and change the dynamics of how they run campaigns. 

The Smooth Brained American Voter

 Yglesias has one of his circle-jerk mailbags, where a bunch of chin stroking "pragmatic centrists" congratulate each other on their rigorous bothsidesing of politics. In particular, he nails Obama to the cross for moving left on things like the Keystone pipeline, immigration and campus sexual assault (how does one move "left" on campus sexual assault?), and that this is what cost Hillary Clinton election against Trump in 2016. 

First of all, winning three consecutive terms is hard. Second, Clinton won significantly more votes than Trump. Third, I remain convinced that in these highly polarized, tightly contested time, sexism is an underrated explanatory factor in Trump's two victories.

However, Elliott Morris may have the definitive answer. His analysis is about 2024, but I would be shocked if it didn't apply to 2016. What's more, I don't think it's incompatible with the latent sexism factor. The reason is that a massive swath of the American electorate is profoundly ignorant. Ignorant in terms of things like "Which party currently controls Congress?" When you can't distinguish between which party controls the Senate (or likely what the Senate even does), then you are left with vibe-based shorthand that reduce people to visual signals and broad feelings about the status quo. 

Yes, in October ten years ago, you had the media conflate the Access Hollywood tape with the endless stories about Clinton's email practices, making it seem like they were fundamentally the same story. Bothsides are corrupt! These broad brush strokes are enough to let people avoid the hard work of actually learning about how the political system works and what the parties actually stand for. It's far easier to notice that suddenly the barista has changed their gender and you find that weird and upsetting, so you vote for a rapist.

If you were to ask the median voter what the impact of tariffs are, they would be unable to provide a coherent answer, though they can see that prices have gone up and so they will vote for the other party. That might be enough to save democracy in the short run, but in the long run, we will always have to worry that some new Trump will come along and leverage the profound ignorance of the electorate to launch another attack on competent and just government.

Taking Down A Warlord

 One hallmark of state dysfunction is the presence of warlords or regional powers within a country that are unanswerable to the national government. As state capacity declines, petty local rulers step into the gap and become powers unto themselves, unaccountable to the popular will.

Elon Musk should now be seen as a warlord within the teetering structure of American democracy. His decision to throttle Starlink and Starshield in Ukraine represents a form autonomy on matters of national security and national policy making that should be denied to any individual. You cannot have some ketamine-fueled autocrat unilaterally deciding whether a US ally - acknowledged and supported by the US Congress - has access to strategic assets.

What's more, Musk has done something that contemporary business leaders typically eschew: he has aligned himself not just with one political party, but one political figure. Some of this is the nature of Trump, who requires personal fealty, but some of this is Musk's complete simpering ignorance of how politics works in the US. Parties swap control of power, and that means that smart executives play both sides, give to both parties. Musk has wrapped himself so tightly around Trump that he's not really giving Democrats any reason NOT to go after him, once they have subpoena power. 

Musk's reputation as a genius is overblown. He has some decently profitable companies in Tesla and SpaceX, but their net profits are fairly low compared to their stock valuation. Tesla's P/E ration is a little over 350; SpaceX is somewhere between 160 and 225. Those numbers are...insane. Back before the tech start-up revolution, a safe P/E usually wouldn't exceed 20-25. Anything more than that would be considered intensely speculative. 

What's more, Musk's "safest" company is obviously SpaceX, because they have largely taken over satellite launches and Starlink is a genuinely impressive achievement. That company, though, is largely dependent on government contracts. What's more, if he's operating outside of governmental oversight and control, then he risks having the entire enterprise seized on national security grounds, and if he loses even a part of SpaceX, the whole enterprise collapses. 

Tesla is already getting hammered by people abandoning his cars in favor of companies not owned by megalomaniacal douchecanoes. Tesla's profits have declined 43% last year. People more on the left side of the spectrum are generally more likely to want to buy EVs and he's pissed them off all over the place. Europe has already hammered him and is trying to develop an alternative so SpaceX and Starlink. China obviously wants no part of ceding autonomy to someone who is not controlled by the Chinese state. If Musk loses cover in America, he's going to spend some time in the barrel.

Given that DOGE's murder of USAID is likely leading to the premature deaths of 100,000s of children, I'd say whatever brings this colossal colostomy bag to heel is a good thing. 

Polls And Narratives

 The follow-on revelations about Wedgewood polling add context to what we already know, but are not likely to be the end of what we will know. Wedgewood produced fake polls as a "social experiment" to see the impact of these fake polls on narratives. OK, so that's...bad. There is at least some evidence that this might have tilted close races, including the Michigan Senate race. Elliott Morris, who has been doggedly pursuing this story, suggests that the prime mover behind these polls was a Republican operative, but it might also be some degenerate Kalshi gamblers trying to sway "prediction markets."

The two big examples is that perhaps they tilted the Michigan race to Abdul El-Sayed and they certainly tried to tilt the Wisconsin race to Hong. Hopefully AES wins, because I think the Senate would be a better place with his perspective, but he could very well be an electoral underperformer in a Blue year. Hong thankfully lost, as she looked doomed in the general election. 

Ratfucking has always been a Republican prerogative, going back to Nixon. In Trumpistan, the reverence for the democratic will of the people is irrelevant, so ratfucking seems the least of things to worry about. Still, with Trump hitting historically low popularity numbers, the question is beginning to emerge about whether it will be a Blue Wave or Blue Tsunami. The numbers are reaching 2008 levels of anger at the GOP.

Ratfucking is all they have.

Getting a reform agenda through both Houses of Congress and past Trump's veto pen will be nearly impossible, but Democrats do need to be thinking seriously about reforms. A few places they should be looking:

- Ending partisan gerrymandering. This - and many other areas - are where legislation intersects with Court reform. Simply outlawing partisan and racial gerrymandering might not survive this Court's arbitrary constitutional interpretations, but they have to try.
- Campaign finance reform. This, too, will likely run afoul of the Court absent reform. At the very least, transparency laws need to exist.
- Prediction Markets. We have a gathering gambling scourge across multiple cultural avenues, but they need to ban gambling on political outcomes, even if they can't ban gambling on sports.
- Establish criminal penalties for fraud. This would include AI deep fakes, but also the Wedgewood nonsense. Electoral democracy cannot survive in a landscape where the very idea of objective truth is absent.

It's a lot and they won't get a lifted finger of help from the GOP. All they have is fraud and ratfucking. 

Early Voting

 "Friends don't let friends extrapolate from early voting." This basically means that leaning into the relative composition of the electorate based on people who vote early is a fool's game. Democrats do tend to vote early; Republicans tend to vote on election day.

Still, one thing Democrats and democrats might hope for is that this year, Republicans, even MAGA Republicans, just stay home. That might be happening, emphasis on the might.

Hopefully, a lot of typical GOP voters are sitting on the fence about whether to reward their party with their vote, even when they nominate terrible candidates. If one more scandal or price shock occurs between now and election day, those late GOP voters might also stay home. Maybe some new Epstein revelation or yet another corruption scandal.

Let's hope.

Trump's Third Impeachment

 Operating from the twin assumptions that we have free and fair elections and that no effort is made to refuse to sit the impending Democratic House, I think it goes without saying that Trump will be impeached again. I also think that if we get the result that the polls are suggesting - Democrats with the House and about 51-55 seats in the Senate - then we will see Pete Hegseth impeached and possibly even removed from office. If a bloodbath comes for the GOP, will they see what Trump has done to their party?

However, the question is whether the House will impeach even without much chance of removal. There is...ample...evidence of Trump's crimes, so it's not a question of looking under every couch cushion for some slim evidence to impeach. The corruption is an obvious one, but I think that will require more digging to really build a case. Democrats should think about two full years of investigating every single instance of GOP corruption, from Trump down through the MAGAt ranks.

In January, they already have the evidence that they need to impeach Trump on his betrayal of Ukraine. This will also get worse and not better as we get closer to the election. Krugman thinks that impending defeat will make Trump more reckless in his flailing as the impending defeat looms. Possibly, but I think it's more likely in the lame duck period. Certainly the GOP is behaving like they are going to get crushed, and even Trump is behaving that way. Someone must be telling him this uncomfortable truth, which is not something Trump wants to hear. Maybe this is why Susie Wiles is apparently going to get canned. If she is replaced with Stephen Miller, I think we can see this degenerating incredibly quickly. 

It will not be enough for Democrats to win the toss-up Senate races in Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa. They will need to score huge upsets in places like South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas in order to get close to 60 votes. That's the only way we can get 8-10 Republicans to put their country over party and their own political careers and save this country more abject humiliation at the hands of this deluded and dangerous old man.

Wired For The GOP

 Over the years, Josh Marshall has argued that the DC Press Corps is "wired for the GOP." He doesn't mean that individual reporters lean towards Republicans. What he means - if I recall his argument correctly - is that there is a sort of horse-race, inside-baseball tilt to the way that they cover politics. This leads to focusing on the tactics of a electoral competition, rather than the impact that one side's policies may have.

Another way this shows up, obviously, is in the bothsides framing that preserves neutrality in voice. However, bothsidesing things is not neutral. By elevating certain stories over other stories, the media takes a side without "taking a side." The best example remains the stories in October of 2016 about Hillary Clinton's email practices, while dropping the story of Trump bragging about sexual assault after a few news cycles.

The other example is the process of "nut picking." There are some crazy opinions out there, on the left and the right. In order to flip the Michigan Senate seat, Republicans are trying to draw a straight line between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and the podcaster Hasan Piker. Piker has some legitimately obnoxious positions and statements, some of which fall into the "shock jock" category, some of which are the noxious rhetoric of the Very Online Left. El-Sayed has tried to distance himself from those positions, but I think he likely hasn't been forceful enough to completely sever himself from Piker, which is why he seems to be running behind the national climate.

On the other side, we have - well - the President of the United States saying legitimately insane things that would somehow be more damaging if they came from someone who wasn't the President of the United States - especially if it came from someone aligned with the Democrats. Even you want an apples to apples comparison, there's Elon Musk. Musk is an open White Supremacist and eugenicist. He has some frankly insane positions that are passed off as genius. He is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the election, because he's landed so firmly in Trumpistan that a Democratic government will feel compelled to clip his wings - wings that are feathered with US tax dollars.

In trying to figure out why Trump won election after January 6th, Paul Campos lists three possibilities. The first is that people believe Trump when he says the 2020 elections was rigged. These are, of course, MAGA voters. I don't think that holds water as a portrait of the electorate that actually swung the 2020 race.

The second is that they knew he was lying but didn't care; the third is that they didn't even know he made these lies. Look, I think there are a lot more people in that third category than there should be. Maybe a better way to think of them is that they didn't understand WHY those lies about the 2020 election were so profoundly important. If so, that is the shared fault of the media, civic education and basic informational literacy. 

To me, the real problem is likely the second group. These are people who think that "all politicians lie" and "all politicians are corrupt." If you begin from this basic position, then Trump is "just like the rest of them" - even if you admit that maybe, just maybe he's MORE of a liar and MORE corrupt than most - it's really just a difference in how much lying and graft he does. But since all politicians lie and steal, then why not Trump?

This, to me, is the real failure of our media institutions. In an effort to bothsides political disputes, they show someone like Bob Menendez or Graham Platner and make them the equivalent of Trump, without noting that Democrats abandoned both of the former and Republicans have created a cult of personality around the latter.