The primary reason not to send Trump back to the White House is that he will try to end substantive democracy in America. He has already tried once.
The other is that his policies are objectively bad. Of course, understanding this is going to be beyond the analytical experience of most American voters.
I have a small gig as the Atlanta Falcons analyst for Draftek. That means I have to pay attention to their games, their roster, their salary cap and divine what they plan to do as a franchise adding personnel to win games.
Last night, Atlanta shocked the world by drafting Michael Penix, Jr. after spending a massive amount of money to add Kirk Cousins as QB1. They used the 8th overall pick on a guy who is going to be QB3 to start the year. In other words, they used scarce resources - money is Cousins' case and a top-10 pick in Penix's case - to fill one position, while leaving other positions wanting.
As someone who both cares about this and spends way too much time thinking about it, it was one of those gut punches that takes the air out of you. This is Atlanta, the 28-3 team. They keep finding new and horrible ways to disappoint their fans.
I'm going to quit writing for Draftek because I simply can't justify making myself feel bad for something I don't have to feel bad about.
George Packer at The Atlantic makes the case that the events at Columbia and elsewhere are a product of the sort of campus illiberalism that Jon Chait has been going on about for years. Packer quotes a student:
I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.
I lived through the "political correctness" debates of the late '80s. However, it was a debate. It's unclear to me whether students are allowed to challenge certain orthodoxies. Packer's conclusion from the student letter:
So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.
The retreat into safe spaces has garnered a lot of contempt from right wing critics, and little of that is in good faith. However, the inability of students to accept a challenge to a position that they might have, especially one based on identity, means that they aren't really learning.
I don't know where I heard this, but the "colonization" framework is really just the left wing version of "Blood and Soil" nationalism. I never really bought into the "language is violence" framework, and frankly I would be loath to argue against it. (Actually, that's not true, I love a good argument.) The idea that accidentally or even intentionally misgendering someone constitutes "violence" means that Jewish students can plausibly call chants calling for a Palestinian state as anti-semitism.
Protests are, by definition, provocative. Columbia and the University of Texas have handled these protests about as poorly as they possibly could. The provocation is intended to elicit an overreaction.
However, the broader pedagogical question of how to be true to the same practices across all parts of the student body is not something the universities have really wrestled with.
UPDATE: What is happening at Emory and Texas is immoral and, perhaps even worse, a mistake.
Martin Longman ponders what would happen if Trump is actually sentenced to jail. The hush money case has always been considered the weakest case, even though - bizarrely - everyone pretty much admits that he's guilty. The application of the law here is somewhat unique though perhaps not as unique as a lot of critics of the case assert.
First of all, a conviction would - I believe - seal Trump's defeat in November. A sizable portion of Republicans are still unable to choke down his return to the White House - Nikki Haley continues to rack up 15-20% of the vote in primaries - and a felony conviction even without jail time will push the casual voter to either vote for Biden, stay home or possibly vote for Kennedy. In fact, I think Kennedy is going to wind up with a LOT of those Haley protest votes. Trump has never won the popular vote and if he loses 1-15% of REPUBLICANS and independents abandon the convicted felon, then he's toast.
But what about prison? There's a cathartic need to see this odious jackal in an orange jumpsuit. However, if he does escape jail time even if convicted, then that could further enrage the anti-Trump voters. If he were to be sent to the clink, I doubt it would be for very long and it could even be a form of house arrest.
As David Axelrod points out, Trump's entire political persona is as a "winner" and the bully who will fight the people you despise. Losing in court even with house arrest or a suspended sentence makes him look like a loser. It's not certain that Trump will face more legal peril before election day, but he very well might. His fraud appeal could fail. The Georgia case might go foreword. He could get indicted in Arizona.
Of course, a hung jury would complicate all this immeasurably. It sounds like the Supreme Court is going to help delay Trump's election interference case even further down the line.
In the end, Trump will need to be defeated at the ballot box one way or another, but a few months in prison would sure make that easier.
Scott Lemieux points out who the real agenda setters are in the GOP: small business owners. I can remember how Clinton and even Obama lauded these hardy emerging capitalists as the backbone of America. However, a sizable number of them really only want to be able to squeeze every penny from the sweat of their worker's brows.
I was at the gym and the owner of the local pizza place was there in the sauna with me and another guy who runs a small IT company. Pizza Guy (and I love his pizza) was complaining about how minimum wage laws were requiring him to raise his prices which upset his customers. And I'm sure that's true! However, it's precisely because we have minimum wage laws that none of his competitors can undercut his wages and lower prices. (This is leaving aside the argument that a tight labor market means wages would be rising anyway.)
Races to the bottom are a real problem that can lead to deflation and recession. That's why we have labor regulations. The current crop of laws passing through red states are like the abortion laws I wrote about a half an hour ago. They can't help themselves. Prohibiting water breaks in Texas and Florida? What in the chicken fried fuck is that all about?
In 2016, I described Trump voters as "WWC" which stood for both White Working Class and Whites Without College. I think the latter is a better descriptor. These aren't "working class" in the sense of working for someone else in return for wages. These are reasonably well off people who want to be millionaires and labor laws appear to be standing in their way. They combine with White Evangelicals to create the base of Trumpsitan.
For all of Matt Yglesias' BS about "policy" determining this election, the reality is that the two biggest issues are Dobbs and January 6th. Trump's many trials more or less revolve around his contempt for democratic norms and practices (maybe not the documents one), but the muddied nature of those trials and whether they even come before a jury before election day, means that Dobbs remains the most salient issue for millions of voters.
Even Trump realizes this, which is why he issued a bullshit anodyne statement about leaving it up to the states, even though we know he would sign a national ban. Republican strategists understand that Dobbs is a millstone around their necks, and as each state takes up more and more draconian measures, any national messaging is going to be drowned out by the reality on the ground in reddish states across the country. We already saw Arizona Republicans gleefully kill efforts to repeal an 1863 territorial law banning almost all abortions. Arizona is a potential tipping point state, and this will matter.
Meanwhile, Idaho is out here arguing that a woman can bleed out in the ER until the point very near death before she can be treated. Now, Idaho will not vote for Joe Biden. However, if the Assembly of Religious Experts rules in their favor - and oral arguments today suggest they are trying to find a way to - Idaho's draconian law will be imitated by other deep red states. Tennessee strikes me as a state that would try this, and again, Tennessee won't vote for Biden, but Georgia is right next door. North Carolina is right next door. Media from Tennessee will cross over.
What's more, Democrats can rightly point to laws in these places as the Republican agenda for winning in November.
The doubling down on the most toxic abortion positions seems to be a temptation that the GOP can't help but embrace. The smarter members of their party (Holy SHIT, does that include Trump?!) know that they have to soft-peddle their extremism, but all these state legislators from gerrymandered districts are zealots. They just can't help themselves, but hopefully it will help Democrats this fall.
There are two narratives that the Trump legal team appears to be advancing in the hush money trial. The first that's gotten some notice is that his lawyers in opening statements said that it's not a crime to try and influence elections. While this is true, that's not the crime being charged; it's campaign finance laws that were broken. To admit that Trump was trying to influence elections, even in passing, is a very Trumpian move, in that Trump's entire persona is about committing crimes and then basically waiving them away with "everyone does this, I just have the courage to admit it." Trump's lawyers have to play to both the jury and their client, and this is a great example of how playing to their client will hurt.
The second way they look to be playing to Trump's vanity is that they are going to argue that Trump never had sex with Stormy Daniels. This is one of those assertions that Trump probably feels like he has to make in order to keep Melania from killing him in his sleep and to retain the votes of some wavering evangelicals. However, they will have testimony from Daniels and McDougall and Cohen and likely several others saying that there was sex. Arguing that there wasn't will call into question the credibility of the entire defense.
This is where Trump the Narcissist and Trump the Candidate is going to ruin the chances of Trump the Defendant. If he could take the stand and directly refute the charges, it would make sense, but that would involve perjuring himself, because he simply could not help himself. His defense team can't possibly put him on the stand, but he may demand it. Otherwise, he's claiming not to do a thing he clearly did, but doing so without taking the stand.
No, I don't think the case is a slam dunk, the way the documents and election cases are. However, Trump's own (lack of) character might be the tipping factor.
Paul Campos compares the student protests over Gaza with student protests in 1968 over Vietnam. The similarity is that you have two surprisingly progressive and surprisingly effective veteran politicians as president who are seeing their re-election imperiled by a foreign policy issue.
It would seem self-evident to me that the most obvious distinction between the two is that in 1968, Americans were dying in Vietnam by the thousands and the Tet Offensive had exposed some of the lies that the military and the White House had been spreading about America's progress in Vietnam. The backlash to student protests often came from those Americans who - unlike privileged college students - could not keep their sons and brothers out of Vietnam. The famous hard hat riots were working class Whites venting their anger over the confusing narrative surrounding Vietnam at the protestors whom they saw as being un-American.
Now, I do think there's a real backlash towards a lot of these protests, as several have crossed lines from protesting to harassment. Many of the protestors are either pretty far to the left or Muslim, and it's easy for the same sort of person who supports Trump to see these people as fundamentally un-American, for both racist and ideological reasons.
However, the real concern is that Gaza protests threaten to disrupt Biden's re-election campaign, including the convention which is in - gulp - Chicago. To me, the primary difference is one of numbers. There is probably a great many Americans who are horrified in the abstract by the civilian suffering in Gaza. It's genuinely awful, but like many international calamities, it is also remote. It is not remote for Palestinian-Americans, but it's unclear how much it's that one very specific ethnic group driving these protests.
Instead, some of what we are seeing seems to be a form of protest chic. The Trump years, culminating in the George Floyd protests, were a great period for organizing and protesting very real and tangible injustices. Biden's election drained a lot of that energy, at least on the left-of-center. Gaza became a cause celebre for people who really need to belong to a cause. My guess is that a substantial number of non-Muslim protestors had no fucking clue about the situation in Gaza on October 6th. Even many non-Palestinian Muslims probably weren't that tuned into what was going on there or in the West Bank.
One thing we have seen in the past quarter century is a decline in linkage institutions that bind people together into groups with common goals and values. The protest movement offers that. You're a part of something big and important and moral, and that has a lot of appeal to idealistic young people.
What it does not really offer is a solution.
In 1968, the goal of protestors was to end the war in Vietnam. It is worth noting that they really weren't able to achieve this; Nixon doubled down on the war and as many Americans and Vietnamese died after his election as before. It would be another 5 years before America finally threw in the towel.
It's less clear what the goal is of these crop of student protestors. A "permanent ceasefire" isn't really a thing; that's called "peace". What's more, it's unclear how you get peace with neither side able to achieve a strategic victory. Hamas cannot defeat Israel and Israel cannot eradicate Hamas. True, the more extreme protest voices call for the eradication of Israel, but that simply isn't going to happen. That's like coming up with a rhyming chant and thinking you've cured cancer or unlocked nuclear fusion. It's pretty to think you've solved something, but that simply isn't happening.
In the end, protests become about the protestors. The emotional high of belonging to a Glorious Cause needs more and higher doses to achieve the same high. The actions at Columbia and elsewhere are no longer about Gaza, really, they are about constantly needing to be more outrageous on order to retain "engagement" and attention. Gaza is the pretext (unless you're Palestinian yourself), but the real target is "the Man" and currently the Man is Joe Biden.
Actually policy outcomes are irrelevant, beyond the paradox of "permanent ceasefire".
I do think that Democrats are right to be worried about protests this summer and into the fall. As Trump faces a possible felony conviction and is apparently sharting into his Depends in the courtroom, the new media will need a bothsides angle to level their coverage, and a handful of egregious, transgressive protestors will allow them to write about Biden promised us a boring presidency, but look at these kids!
However, I also think that the recent decisions by Columbia and Yale to take firmer action means that for a lot of these kids, the Fuck Around period is ending and the Find Out period has begun. Students should absolutely be free to protest, but when that becomes threats and a consistent disruption to student learning and safety, then it's time for Find Out. Hopefully that will induce some reflection on the part of the bulk of these protestors. Hopefully, they will start asking what they realistically hope to accomplish.
UPDATE: Chait, naturally, takes on this issue.
Some key passages:
It is true that most anti-Israel protesters do not engage in antisemitic harassment. It is also true that the formal demands associated with anti-Israel protests are legitimate (if not policies I’d endorse) and do not require the collective punishment of American Jews. But the reason incidents like these occur over and over is that they are part of the ideological character of the movements that give rise to them. Dismissing this pattern as the actions of “inflammatory individuals” is to evade the question of who is inflaming them.
And:
The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets:
Liberation is not an abstract concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary. In essence, decolonization is a call to action, a commitment to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. It calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric. Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.
SJP likewise directed its members to join the struggle directly: “This is a moment of mobilization for all Palestinians. We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of Palestinians on the ground.”
When you consider this kind of violent rhetoric in the context of slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” especially when you consider the lack of authentic Israeli military targets outside of Israel, then the pattern of harassment and violence that follows from this propaganda is inevitable.
And finally:
Many students were attracted to these groups because of the horrendous human toll inflicted by Israel’s counterattack in Gaza. But the groups themselves are very clearly not advocating for “peace.” They are for war. Their objection is not to human suffering but that the wrong humans are suffering.
More broadly, these groups reflect the influence of “settler-colonist” theory, a fashionable school of thought that is being taught at many institutions. (In this sense, the universities themselves are incubating the protests against their own administrations.) Settler-colonist theory is a left-wing version of blood-and-soil nationalism, positing that every ethnic group possesses an inherent attachment to certain lands and is inherently alien to others. The theory has some use in explaining European imperialism, but when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, it turns the Jews into a global alien subaltern class.
This ideological framework works in concert with a rhetorical approach that seeks to shrink the mental space between Gaza and the outside world, inviting activists to conceive of themselves as literal participants in the struggle. Their practice of accusing anybody who refuses to endorse their views of murder — hence the otherwise bizarre chants accusing figures like American university professors and administrators of “genocide” — reimagines any dissent from the movement’s demands as a form of literal violence.
The decision by autoworkers to unionize at Chattanooga's Volkswagen plant is a major development in labor relations. Now, as the link above kind of notes, Volkswagen actively supports unions. They were not the impediment, so much as the South's ingrained resistance to empowering its poorest citizens. Unionizing additional auto plants in the South will prove more difficult.
But maybe not impossible. There seems to be an important moment for unions in this country. After decades of rolling back union membership and watching the gains in the economy funneled up to the very top, workers are fed up.
Paul Campos notes the growth of online conspiracy theories and the relative degeneration of even reasonably intelligent people. This was in light of the crazed person who lit himself on fire yesterday and died this morning. Embracing conspiracy theories is very common in authoritarian regimes, because you can't trust those in power for accurate news. What we have is something different, I think. We have killed off the gatekeepers like the Times and Walter Cronkite and nothing has taken its place, or perhaps everything everywhere has taken its place.
There's an argument that losing the authoritative voice has been a blow for human liberty, but I fear we are trending towards a 21st century Thomas Hobbes situation. The levelling nature of knowledge and authority leads to a sort of intellectual and cognitive anarchy that means that all knowledge if treated as equal.
What's more, the borderline lunatic person like Aaron Rodgers was trapped by these authoritative figures. Now, they are a few clicks away from like-minded people who can amplify the crazy. There was a music video from the '90s by Blind Melon - you'd remember it - with a girl wearing a bee costume wandering around until she finds a bunch of other people in bee costumes. It's great! She found her people! The internet is really good for that...until your people are similarly deranged. Then, instead of being checked, your cognitive fallacies are effectively multiplied.
Like the impact smart phones are having on your attention spans, I'm not sure there's a solution, but it's not great.
This is an astute piece by Nick Kristoff about Biden's support for Israel and, by default, Netanyahu. There were concrete and important reasons to support Israel this fall. However, the current situation has changed and the conditions in Gaza no longer can be left to the Israeli Right. The US helped defend Israel from the Iranian attack and it looks like a massive military aid package for Ukraine and Israel is actually going to pass the House.
Biden has to use that package to force better behavior from the IDF and open aid corridors into Gaza. What's important in the Kristoff piece is that it's not just disruptive college students who are calling for this, but moderate Democratic Senators like Van Hollen and Kaine. Nancy Pelosi signed off on the letter.
As Kristoff notes, this is somewhat out of character for Biden, as he usually an empathetic person and suspicious of military force, at least some of the time and in the Middle East especially.
My hope is that Biden had to wait to condition aid to Israel until after the GOP passed it through the House. If he was threatening to withhold aid, then the bill might not pass. Once the aid leaves Congress and gets to the White House, it can be held up until Israel finally accedes to humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Biden stood on principle to get us out of Afghanistan and paid a price for it, because it was the right thing to do. I understand why he though wrapping his arms around Netanyahu was necessary in November, but I am increasingly baffled as to why he thinks it makes sense now.
Look, one of the least important threats that a Trump Restoration would bring is bad policy. Not malicious policy, like weaponizing the government and destroying democratic practices, but just run of the mill bad policies. Chait and Milan Singh take note of what the effects would be. Chait is more focused on the political impact, which is that a tax cut in this environment will send interest rates spiraling upwards. Right now, interest rates are the anchor on the economy, but in a good way. We have a hold on inflation, but it's not tamed. Wages are still rising, which means that inflation will keep rising, especially in rent and anything linked to oil.
Another tax cut will explode the deficit even more. After a quarter century of not really having to care about the deficit, we kind of have to do. We don't need a lot of austerity, but we have to start claiming more non-wage income from the top 5%. Trump and Republicans oppose this, but if they come back into power and cut taxes, we will either enter massive austerity or we will see interest rates explode where they go from an anchor to a hole in the bottom of the boat.
Democracy and women's rights are the two most important issues in this election, but Republican plans to explode America's fiscal situation is important, too.
There are rumors that Mike Johnson (R-Trump's Pocket) will allow a vote on the aid bill that funds Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The Senate smartly packaged those so that Sinophobes and anti-Palestinian conservatives could find their way towards defying the de facto head of the Republican Party: Vladimir Putin. If there's an up-or-down vote, I would expect the package to pass.
What could happen after that is a motion to vacate that will almost certainly pass...unless Democrats agree to keep Johnson in power for at least a few more weeks. It's unclear how many Republicans will move to vacate the Speaker's Chair and also how much attention Trump can shed on the House while his trial is moving forward (quite briskly, too).
We have so starved Ukraine of needed aid that the tide of the war is shifting against them. Ideally, provided them with more ammunition can blunt the expected Russian spring offensive. This is a life or death moment for a democracy against an authoritarian ghoul, and it all could come down to whether Trump's hush money trial distracts him enough to allow it to slip through.
The next question is what concessions Democrats can wring from Johnson - aside from Ukraine - to keep the gavel in his tiny, sweaty hands.
Jon Chait looks at Paul Krugman's case that the economy is actually doing great. Some of the problem - and I'm surprised that Chait didn't go there, because he loves to go there - is that if you are a left wing activist, there is absolutely no yield in arguing that things are good. Chait quotes a few left of left of center people who make the case that the American economy (which is inarguably the strongest in the world right now) is always broken. Liberal economics is fundamentally bad and can never be good.
I do think that inflation is such a long-ago phenomenon that most people simply can't recall what it was like and therefore that the current spike really wasn't all that bad. That inflationary spike was not unique to the US, as it was caused by supply issues surrounding the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The problem is that inflation is a feedback loop. Prices rise, labor is tight so wages rise, so spending keeps pace and price keep rising, albeit at 3%, not 7%.
Where it gets really interesting is at the end when Chait notes that people's opinion of their OWN economic situation is pretty good. Consumer confidence and spending are pretty robust. People think that their own economic situation is sound, but that the economy as a whole is shitty. Some of this is negative polarization, as no Republican is going to say the economy is good with a Democratic president. The other factor is the Eeyore disposition of the American Left.
It does seem like we are starting to see opinions of the economy change. I'd love to see more Biden ads reminding people of what 2020 was actually like and that it happened under Trump. That seems self-evident, but it is precisely that sort of amnesia that has people saying the economy was better under Trump.
Trump's first trial begins today. Meanwhile, his meme stock has collapsed in value. Also, hey Times? The reason Trump is the first former president to go to trial is that Harding died and Nixon was preemptively pardoned by Ford.
The hush money trial is going to be an interesting one, as it will test whether he can abide by the judge's gag order (I'm guessing he won't, but will there be consequences) and the credibility of Michael Cohen. If the jury believes Cohen, then Trump is likely found guilty. Then, does he get a prison sentence? If so, how long?
There's part of me that sees some polling of 18-30 year olds having a positive opinion of Trump that suggests they should be running his rallies on TV again, because he's gotten seriously unhinged. Trump actually benefits when he get muzzled, because his words are such rank shit. OTOH, it would be funny if he got a few months in prison for this particular crime, perhaps his least significant.
