November

 I don't think - within the context of January 6th - that it is an exaggeration to say that the future of the American Republic is on the line this midterm election. Given that context, it's tricky to brush aside the threat that Trump could pose at any step of the election process. We are already seeing him attack voting by mail. We hear dark whispers of ICE at polling places. We've obviously seen the mid-decade gerrymandering.

My take is that there are legitimate threats, but that we need to take a deep breath. Republicans can see the polls, but there is a real question as to whether Trump actually sees unfavorable polls of whether Natalie Harp prevents him from getting bad news. The behavior from a lot of Republicans is that they know they are going to get pummeled and they are preparing themselves for that. Even Trump seems to be aware of that. We don't see the behavior of people who have it fixed so that they can't lose.

The two biggest threats are overall voters suppression and efforts to void the election after the fact. The first is very real, I fear, as Republicans will use the bullshit excuse of voter fraud to justify targeting Democratic constituencies. They won't and can't cancel elections, but closing polling stations and setting up ICE checkpoints near those polling stations could depress voter turnout. However, anti-Trump voters are INCREDIBLY fired up, and I hope there will be an effort to circumvent those measures. For instance, if you vote by mail, you better turn your ballot in in person.

Efforts to void the election after the fact - January 6th Part II - seem less likely to succeed. The idea will be to caterwaul about voter fraud and delegitimize the election in order to placate the cultists surrounding Trump. Hardcore Trumpists are already predisposed to distrust objective reality, so that will work as an effort to keep Cult 45 happy. 

However, are there enough Republicans in Congress to actively take measures to end American democracy? The number isn't zero, which is appalling, but I don't think it's more that dozens in the House and fewer in the Senate. As we saw with the pre-riot January 6th actions, only a handful of Republicans supported Trump's fabulist claims. Also, given the nature of cults, the loyalty of MAGA lies with Trump, not the GOP. Having a Democratic Congress isn't going to provide the same motivation that existed with "Stop the Steal." 

It's objectively not great. We shouldn't be having these discussions. However, I do think that Democrats will take the House and probably the Senate. I think there is a groundswell of anger out there over Trump's naked corruption and manifest incompetence. I think his supporters are dispirited and many will stay home. 

Hopefully that will be enough.

In 1951, as American troops moved largely unopposed up the Korean peninsula after the Inchon landings, Stalin reportedly sighed and said, "I guess the Americans will be on our borders." (Korea shares a small border with Russia.) Even Stalin bent to reality, though Mao decided to throw hundreds of thousands of troops into the conflict. My point is simply that even dictators surrounded by sycophants often bend to reality.

More AI

 Josh Marshall has been ruminating on the backlash to data centers.

I can't help but feel it comes from three main concerns. The first is simply that energy costs are rising and data centers consume a lot of energy.

The second is that we are being forced to use AI for non-AI purposes. When I Google something on my phone, I don't have a choice about the fact that it's going to give me an AI bot - one that is often hard to click out of.

The final reason is simply that people are fed up with Tech Bros coming in, altering our lives without our consent (see above), hooking us on algorithmic dopamine and then jacking up prices and throwing up paywalls to things that we have been using for free for years.

The fact that people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and even Jeff Bezos seem like actual Bond villains doesn't help, but in a growing climate of "eat the rich" it's not nothing.

AI's Brave New World

 We are spending the day working with AI within an educational setting. It is profoundly worrying in two ways.

The first is obvious (at least to me). This is a very easy way to avoid "doing the work" that education requires for minds to grow and improve. Education is an active cognitive process and AI allows students to skip the hard part and arrive at the answer. I was there already, and nothing I've heard so far alleviates those concerns.

The second was related to the first, in that I am very much anti-AI. I am inherently skeptical of new technology, because I find that it ultimately curdles into something bad. Remember when the Internet was going to democratize knowledge and expertise and instead we got new ways to distribute porn? Social media was supposed to keep us in contact with distant friends, and instead it has become a way to isolate ourselves and degrade interpersonal actions within those spaces.

So, I'm anti-AI. I've read and watched science fiction; this is how the world ends.

When I started using it though, I could immediately see the appeal. To be clear, I didn't shift my opinion of AI, but I can see how beguiling it can be. It's not that what it provided me was wrong, but it was shallow. (Some was at best confusing if not wrong, but generally it's just a really robust, interactive search and creation function.) The consultant said it's best to think of Claude or Gemini as an intern, and I totally get that.

But...

As we have seen with social media, once you get hooked on the ease of getting one more video after another, it's really hard to kick that habit. The stories about people developing unhealthy relationships with AI seem very, very real to me, and that will get worse as we go further down this road.

The idea that AI can help with cognitive offloading - taking on tasks to free our minds to be better - seems appealing at first, but take GPS navigation. Who can read a map anymore? Who can drive to a new place without a screen? We used to be able to do that, but that skill has largely atrophied. What skills will AI atrophy?

I just asked Gemini what are the dystopian elements of Huxley's A Brave New World. I then asked it how that is reflected in social media. I got a good answer and one that doesn't surprise me (I asked the question), but it did allow me to recall a novel I read 40 years ago. AI feels very much like it will not walk down the road that social media took, but sprint without tiring. It did also tell me how Huxley's nightmare is reflected in generative AI. 

That doesn't mean I read the book, lived with the book, felt the book. I got the Cliff's Notes. 

We already lived in a superficial world, and it's going to get much, much worse.

What Does Defeat Look Like?

 The ongoing destruction of American military preparedness is very much the fault of Pete Hegseth and therefore Donald Trump. When the rogue's roll of Cabinet appointees came out in the winter of 2025, Hegseth's CV was the thinnest and obviously Defense is a critical Cabinet position. He has lived down to the worst assumptions about what his tenure would be. RFK, Jr may be currently responsible for more American deaths though. Still, the fact that Hegseth still has a job is inconceivable in a normal political environment.

There are obviously short and long term consequences for this disastrous fustercluck in the Persian Gulf. In the short term, the US military does not have enough of certain important types of missiles and interceptors to be at peak military readiness. The individual crews of ships in the region are being worked beyond endurance. For what? We aren't invading Iran and we can't bomb them out of their strategic position.

In the medium term, one has to worry about Trump's decision to keep Hegseth, because he wants a lackey at Defense. Trump has zero loyalty, so he's not sticking with this idiot out of principle. 

In the longer term - and let's presume we retain American democracy - what will the Iran War mean for the US military. Some of this is wrapped up in the short term; Hegseth's evisceration of brain power in favor of physical fitness is driving away the sort of smart officers who will be required to rebuild the American military for the 21st century battlefield. 

I am fairly confident that in the corners of the Pentagon and the War College, serious officers are looking at the Persian Gulf (and Ukraine) and seeing what the future of warfare looks like. They will not be able to realize these institutional changes, which puts the US behind China in the race for drone dominance. In fact, in a lot of ways, we already trail Ukraine when it comes to the sort of drones that seem likely to be the dominant battlefield weapon of the immediate future.

After Vietnam, junior officers like Colin Powell rose through the ranks determined that there would not be a disastrous war like that again. Then Powell himself helped engineer the Iraq War disaster. Yet, the US military had the capacity to retool and rearm fairly quickly. We likely retain that capacity.

The question is whether we will get a civilian leadership in the Pentagon to move us towards that future or whether Trump will keep Hegseth around doing push up photo ops and ignoring the reality staring him in the face.

The Politics of Surrender

 Yglesias makes sort of a good point, but in his usual polemical style that robs it of its merit. He says Democrats should "surrender" in the trade war with Canada. That's just aggressively stupid rhetoric from a guy who prides himself of his language, but also his edginess. Democrats shouldn't "surrender" on anything. They should END the trade wars, the should END the Iran war - though that gets tricky.

Ending the trade wars is easy, because they are almost all certainly illegal. Trump's bizarre obsession with tariffs is politically unpopular, and - as Yglesias notes - it is unpopular across just about every interest group you could think of. So you just end them. There's no "surrender" involved and using that term would be political malpractice.

This becomes clearer when you look at the Iran situation. The US and Iran are launching shit at each other again. Why? Because Trump cannot extricate himself from this colossal mistake. There is no clean exit and Iran knows it. Iran's victory exists in enduring the sort of pain that is unimaginable in the US, because this is a war of regime survival for them and it's a fucking video game for Hegseth and Trump. 

I don't even know if there IS a solution to this ongoing disaster, unless China and Russia want to jump in and pressure Iran to come to the table. Why would China want to extricate the US from this quagmire? I suppose the economic cost of continued restrictions on oil supply will bite them, too, but again, they might be willing to suffer through that, because the Iran War is just an ongoing disaster for the US. Combine it with the incessant attacking of our allies, and Trump is working overtime to isolate the US from everyone in the world.

However, as we saw in Afghanistan, simply declaring defeat and withdrawing isn't popular either. Americans are not necessarily smart when it comes to foreign policy, and they would prefer a perfect outcome every time. They want to end the war in Iran without using ground troops and without losing. That's more or less impossible. 

The struggle for Democrats is that someone has to pull the plug and it won't be the GOP. They may have to force the US to come to grips with its defeat and that won't be popular.

Tax The Rich

 Krugman's weekend explainers are always pretty good, but today he looks at the decline in tax enforcement under the GOP going back to the 1980s. The story - unsurprisingly - has been that whenever possible, when Republicans have the trifecta, they slash enforcement measures by the IRS. The people most likely to avoid or evade taxes are the very rich. They have both the motive and means to create tax shelters or pass-through corporations or offshore accounts to avoid paying their share of tax. The tax code itself is legally crafted to preference capital over wages, and when you add various legal and illegal measures, the very rich pay a much smaller share of their yearly income or wealth than do people who earn most of their money through wages and salary.

When you hear various left wing populists talk about Medicare for All or expanding program X, they typically don't talk too much about where the money will come from, as they have learned from Republicans not to care about the national debt. However, we really are starting to get to a place where government borrowing to finance the debt is crowding out private borrowing, which is one reason why interest rates remain high. 

Closing the tax avoidance gap will by itself will not fund the progressive wish list. Particularly Medicare for All will require broad-based taxes to fund a broad-based program. You also likely need some version of a wealth tax to target the multi-billionaires, but again, this likely won't fund everything you want to do.

The thing is the billionaires have largely chosen their side. They are lining up behind Trump, because his own lawlessness and disregard for the public weal mirrors their own. Google just changed Lake Ontario to Lake America on Google Maps, which strikes me as a terribly short-sighted decision on the part of a company that is ripe for anti-trust prosecution under a Democratic administration. You could squint and see an argument that Democrats should go too hard after billionaires to prevent them from giving all their money to the GOP - most corporations balance their campaign contributions to preserve access to both sides. The billionaires have chosen their side, and like Trump himself, they aren't likely to be challenged on this by the murmuring minions who surround them.

Writing tax enforcement into law will help a lot. I would think you should also craft a treaty with the EU to standardize tax enforcement, because there will absolutely be efforts to hide wealth offshore. The Panama Papers were proof of that. Creating a universal enforcement regime and a universal suite of consequences would go a long way to stopping the descent into oligarchy. If Sergei Brin decides to avoid paying his taxes, and Google pays the price along side him, would he still avoid taxes?

Unravelling the corruption of Trumpistan will not be easy, and the Supreme Court will try and stand in the way. However, that has to be a major focus of the next Democratic trifecta. 

Masks Or Rather Hoods Off

 The decision to end TPS status for Haitians is tightly linked to the increasingly obvious racism of the Trump Administration, especially the imagery they are using. Haitians in this country have been offered the protection from danger that they would face at home, because that used to be what America offered the world. 

Of course, that wasn't always true. In the 1920s, the US - really for the first and only time - deeply restricted immigration. They set quotas designed to dramatically decrease the number of immigrants from "undesirable" places like Italy, Greece and Eastern Europe. Under the apartheid-like delineation of race under "scientific racism" those people were considered different races than more Nordic, Northern European races. 

The engine backing this legislation was the "Second Klan" which drew on anti-Catholic, antisemitic and anti-Black prejudices to become briefly very powerful across the nation, not just in the South. Donald Trump's father was arrested at a Second Klan rally in NYC.

The dynamic seems to be this: Trump is losing his juice. He's unpopular across broad swaths of the public. His supporters are upset with him. He has backed himself into a losing war with Iran and a stupid trade war with Canada. The alarm bells are going off among Congressional Republicans, as a Blue Wave seems to be building across America. Democrats are slightly favored to win statewide races in places like Texas, Iowa and Alaska.

In response, all he has left is the racism that exists deep within his DNA (The Central Park Five anyone?) and to unleash the foulest creatures in his administration. Just as the Adults In The Room, who prevented him from disastrous and illegal policies in his first term, are gone, they have been replaced with just the absolute dregs of society: racists, Nazis, and an army of trolls and sycophants.

Look, this November shouldn't be close. Democrats should win in places like Kansas and Kentucky if the American people had a shred of sense and decency about them. Trump isn't telling you who is, he's screaming it. If we don't course correct, that's the end of America as we know it.

Lying Liars

 Richardson's run down today focuses on the rampant lying of the Trump Administration. One of Trump's political insights going back to 2016 is that people have such low opinions of politicians that they will assume the worst about them, so he can behave terribly and more importantly openly terribly and lots of people will just shrug it off.

"All politicians are liars" is a popular trope, that up until Trump was largely untrue. Politicians have always promised things that they would struggle to deliver once in office, though if a politician ran on a specific platform, often they would try to pass that platform. Given the nature of our political system, if you ran on ending legal abortions or universal healthcare, you would not be able to achieve that if you won. That's not exactly lying, but you can see why people return to "All politicians are liars."

Even more so, this is true if "All politicians are corrupt." This builds on the above idea, if Senator Smith runs on slashing the defense budget to pay for better schools, and then is unable to achieve this, the lazy assumption is that Smith was paid off by defense contractors. 

What Trump has done is to take these ideas - which are far more prevalent the further you move down the education pyramid - and supercharge them. In 2016, he famously said, "I alone can fix it." Much of his evangelical support began with the idea that this deeply flawed man was their champion precisely because he was deeply flawed. His own corruption would allow him to fight the corruption in DC.

Obviously, that was some weapons grade bullshit.

It is reasonable to wonder how much longer his naked greed and mendacity will be tolerated by even his supporters. People would rather chew their own foot off than admit they were wrong about something like that, so there's a real good chance that he continues to hold onto a fair amount of the electorate. Still, what is that fair amount? 35%? 27%? Can he go lower than the Crazification Factor?

This doesn't mean that his voters will vote for Democrats. However, if millions of them stay home....

RFK, Jr Can Go Straight To Hell

 I lost my dad to melanoma. I lost my mom to pancreatic cancer.

RFK is trying to destroy incredibly promising research that might have saved or extended their lives.

Also, he's a liar.

Losing Wars

 Trump and Hegseth lost the Iran War, because they don't understand war properly. They think the expensiveness of a weapon's system is what matters. It's like the old Spinal Tap joke ("But this one goes to eleven."), where you can't even see the stupidity of the metrics that you're using. With Hegseth's hard-on for "lethality" he completely missed that wars are inherently political acts and leading a democracy to war requires public suasion first and foremost. Sometimes (Pearl Harbor, Fort Sumter, 9/11) that suasion is handled by your enemy. Trump/Hegseth never made a case for the war, they just did it, trusting that the disparity in military budgets would carry the day. It has been the political will and the ability to leverage cheap drones that has led to an Iranian victory (and it leading to a Ukrainian one, as well).

Of course, the Iran War isn't Trump's only ongoing war. His trade war with Canada is now accelerating. Like the previous example, Trump's fundamental stupidity means that he doesn't understand the basic dynamics of the situation. The US and Canadian economies are mixed together; trade wars make zero sense. Like with Iran, it's a question of political will. Canada is united, the US is not. What's more this will have its biggest impact in states close to Canada. Are their important elections in Maine, Michigan, Alaska and Wisconsin, I wonder? Are farmers' votes important in Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas?

I know I've beaten this dead horse to a bloody pulp, but Trump doesn't understand the process of creating a policy, because he spent his entire adult life running a company of about 10 people, bullying other people and then going bankrupt. He never had to do real horse trading or compromising; in fact, he finds those things contemptibly weak. 

When Trump looks at the smoldering mess he's making, he blames it on Biden. This isn't just his malignant narcissism. This is his entire way of doing business over the past 50 years. Nothing his fault; attack, attack, attack; deflect, deflect, deflect; never admit weakness. Character really is destiny. Ignorance really isn't bliss.

If Democrats and independents wind up sweeping through elections in the Great Plains and along the Canadian border, it will be because Donald Trump has dragged us into wars that we did not have to fight, with goals that were unrealistic in the most optimistic projections and have been waged with a fecklessness that would shame a toddler.

The Wrong 80 Year Old

 Dolly Parton's death rather unexpectedly floored me. I was not a huge fan of her music, but enjoyed it. Rather I was a massive fan of Parton the human being. As many have noted, Parton was perhaps the last universally loved American. She was authentic and authentically kind. Her charity work is legendary and her sense of humor sublime. She was the best of us.

That obviously stands in rank contrast with the man who is trying to tear down the country in, as Krugman suggests, a rage against a people that have moved against him. Trump's depredations are increasing precisely because he can read the polls. His threat to tear down the Kennedy Center, because the Courts won't let him put his name on it is a prime example of his narcissistic rage in action.

This is also the "logic" of a domestic abuser: if he can't have you, no one can. He would destroy the country rather than let it pass into someone's hands. Trump's tidal wave of bullshit swept him back into the Oval Office, but he never had a plan or even really a motivation to actually improve people's lives. He never has. He ran for president to stay out of jail and millions of Americans were stupid enough to believe him over the legion of people who told them - straight out - who he was. 

There are two big, huge, massive differences between Hitler and Trump. The first, obviously, is age. Hitler's death was...sudden. Trump, however, is old and looking older every day. The second difference is that Hitler was popular. His early actions and even his actions in the first half of the war were designed to shield the German people from his worst policies. He pulled Germany out of an economic spiral - he did not start one. Right now, Trump is manifestly unpopular with the American people and becoming more so. He's lost the Iran war, which people didn't want him to fight in the first place. 

He's not Hitler, he's Mussolini but with a more powerful country at his feet. 

We are a lesser country and a lesser world with Dolly Parton gone. Her goodness and decency, her ability to laugh at herself, her grace and even her tackiness were all so wonderful and the world is dimmer without her around. Do better next time, Reaper.

Go, Canada

 Trump has launched a trade war against arguably our closest ally, Canada. We have multiple trade agreements with Canada, but Trump's lawlessness and Congress's complete submission have rendered those laws moot. These trade wars make zero sense from any rational perspective. They have to be viewed through the ongoing psychodrama of Trump 2.0.

During the first maladministration, there was a lot of talk about the "adults in the room." Given the dysfunction of Trump 1.0, those assertions seemed absurd. We are now seeing that they were largely correct. There is no one to rein in Trump's erratic "policies." Of course, they aren't really policy, but rather the extension of his NY real estate tactics. You open a negotiation, seem close to a deal, then you fuck it all up to get more leverage. You "assert dominance" in a way to get the other side to submit to your demands. His routine stiffing of contractors was a prime example of that. They thought they had a contract, but he sued and blustered and reneged on agreements to exhaust the other side.

That doesn't work with sovereign countries with their own power dynamics. 

This recent falling out with Canada seems hard to divorce from Trump's other impotent crises. The failure in Iran, the cratering approval ratings, even the defeat of his endorsed candidates in primaries...all of these are expressions of weakness for a man who cannot ever, ever admit weakness. (see the above about NY real estate.)

So, he lashes out in febrile, unpredictable ways. Picking this fight with Canada is just fundamentally stupid. What's more, this is a lifeline to Democratic hopes in Maine, Michigan and other states that do a lot of business with Canada. For someone like El Sayed, this offers an opportunity to change the subject from his association with odious troll Hasan Piker. 

It's also worth noting that Trump is ALSO cutting tariffs to import more grounded beef to reduce prices. Trump has lied (shocker!) about the role that tariffs play in inflating prices, but his own plan to lower prices is to...lower tariffs. Basically he's driving prices up with one policy and trying to reduce it in focused ways to help him in November. All he's accomplishing is to piss off farmers, drive home the inflationary nature of his tariffs and probably import tainted beef. Anyone want to gamble on the rigor of the FDA's inspections these days? I guess people still eat at Taco Bell, so maybe they are.

The "adults in the room" really did turn out to be important. 

You Take The Meeting

 The Online Mob was out for Hakeem Jeffries yesterday, when a story came out that he met with Jared Kushner. Jeffries statement was:

In a statement, Mr. Jeffries did not acknowledge the meeting, but suggested that the only way Democrats would cut deals with the administration would be if Republicans were willing to come their way on cost-of-living issues, his party’s top priority.

“Throughout this Congress, Republicans have adopted a my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing that has failed the American people,” he said.

He added: “In every conversation that we have with the Trump administration, we will continue to make it explicitly clear that the affordability crisis is not a hoax, and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable. We are fighting for an affordable America. The question is whether Republicans will join us.”

The anger was that Jeffries met with Kushner at all, because...well, I was never really given a compelling reason why. There was one weird argument that Kushner wasn't really part of the administration, which is a prima facie absurdity. Kushner is Trump's Son in Law, married to the only kid he really cares about. Kushner runs around as a shadow Secretary of State. He may not have an official government title, but as someone noted, DOGE wasn't "real" either and they've still killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Maybe it was just meeting with Kushner, because Jeffries should be "fighting" more. So, I posted the picture of Trump meeting with Mayor Mamdani - not to dunk on Mamdani, but because you take the meeting.

This was met with real anger and name calling from accounts that I've had positive interactions with previously. I was called a "dumbfuck" and the like, because I really don't think this is a big deal. 

What's more, as I thought about for more than one hot second, this is a really bad story...for Jared Kushner. This is a member of Trump's inner circle looking for the lifeboats. Kushner is a little weasel, but he isn't a complete moron, and understands that Jeffries will be the next Speaker. He wasn't meeting with Mike Johnson to stop it; he's trying to get ahead of the coming Blue Wave.

There has been a lot of doomer-casting about the coming midterms. "Trump will cancel the elections." 
"Johnson won't certify the election." That sort of stuff. And after January 6th, nothing should be considered off the table. Still, the Republicans in the room seem to accept that Jeffries will be the next Speaker. That's pretty remarkable.

The seething anger against Trump, though, was transmogrified online to be directed at Jeffries. 

The anger is the problem. I hate Donald Trump more than I've hated anything in my life. However, if I were being asked what to DO about Donald Trump, I would take my anger and my hatred and put it in a box. You cannot make your best decisions when you are enraged. You cannot strategize if all you feel is hate. You have to separate the two.

Of course, the algorithm rewards anger, it rewards hate, it rewards impulse. The Very Online people are being mad just to be mad, because that is what the internet is for. 

Politicians meet with people they disagree with or don't like all the time. Mamdani doesn't agree with Trump, but he met with him. People tried to be upset that it was a meeting two months before the midterms, but again, that just shows that Trump's inner circle knows they are about to take a beating. 

I can take my anger and hatred out of that box without losing the ability to put it back in when needed. Maybe that's what allows me not to be mad at Jeffries, since Jeffries isn't the enemy. Unless enemies is what keeps your blood flowing, in which case, assemble the circular firing squad. 

UPDATE: At the end of this piece on the Canadian trade war, Josh Marshall notes the same dynamic when discussing the issue with Canadians. It's simply impossible to have a reasoned discussion with an enraged person.

The Post-Reality Party

 A lot of pondering has gone on about whether Trump is a symptom or a cause of the decline of the GOP into a cult of idiocy. We know Trump is - by the standards of the Oval Office - a very stupid man. Josh Marshall relates how Trump made his money not through skill but through legal bullying. Trump is also incredibly unversed in the basic contours of liberal democracy as a concept. So, yeah, Trump is dumb; Trump is the center of a cult of personality; that cult of personality is super dumb. 

However, this cult of unreason does very much precede Trump. Reagan wasn't nearly as stupid, but he was also not some genius. That largely goes for both Bushes. They were...fine...in terms of intelligence compared to the average, but they also had long experience in government - unlike Trump. They were, in essence, trained in civic government. Trump is not, which is why he's an authoritarian goon.

The cult of unreason, though, can be seen in Reagan and Dubya, as Krugman points out with regards to budget math. Reagan bent a little to the reality that cutting taxes would not create so much growth as to pay for themselves. Bush 41 was even more responsible in that regards. Bush 43, however, was the same sort of spender that Trump has been. If a few hundred votes in South Florida had been counted differently in 2000, the fiscal situation in the US would be sterling. Gore would not have had a Democratic Congress, so spending would have remained low. There's a 50-50 chance that the Gore national security team stops 9/11, the way they did the Millennium bomb plot. Even so, they likely would not invade Iraq with that catastrophe hopefully avoided.

Maybe Obama and Obamacare doesn't happen in that world. Or maybe healthcare becomes such an issue it gets addressed without the collapse of support for Bush 43 from 2005-2008. 

The fiscal situation of the United States would be immeasurably better, and that really can't be debated.

A bunch of dumb ass voters, though, would continue to insist that Republicans are better for the economy, because...ugh.

Debt

 Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein have a long discussion about the exploding national debt. Basically, the important thing is the ratio of debt to GDP and Trump's massive explosion of the debt has knocked us into an unhealthy place economically. The absolute number - $40 trillion - is eye-grabbing, but it's the ratio that's key and that is bad. Because economic growth is stagnating and possibly the start of stagflation that means the debt is growing up while much of the economy is a bit moribund. Take data centers out of the equation and things get really grim, really fast.

The obvious question then is: What is to be done? Both Bernstein and Krugman are pretty liberal, so neither one wants to embrace Austrian austerity. Ideally there are ways to get more revenue by taxing the rich and increasing enforcement of existing tax laws. There are likely a lot more ways to tax capital gains progressively, too.

However, one thing I've never seen anyone mention about trying - in 2029 - to increase social programs AND reduce the debt is the role that health care plays in everything. It's considered politically toxic to raise taxes on the bulk of the middle class, because they are struggling. Taxing them would work counter to the affordability issue that many see as Democrat's best lever. (I still think that corruption is lever number one, but affordability is right behind it.)

However, if we offered a public option in Medicare/Medicaid. that both individuals and corporations could access, we could shift what we currently spend on private insurance to the public programs without raising "taxes." People buying the public option would be replacing their Aetna premiums with Medicaid premiums. Most likely this system would be a hybrid, with most basic care being administered through tiered Medicaid/Medicare but then private insurers would allow for more boutique care and things like vision and dental. This is pretty common in countries with "universal" coverage. The same could be true here.

Ideally, the public option could raise revenue for the single most expensive part of the budget - healthcare - without being a "tax." 

Unless I'm missing something, which I wouldn't know, because I'm missing something.