But...Why?

 Why did Trump keep those documents? That's really the central question American politics is pondering at the moment. Outside of the hardcore Trumpists like Lauren Boebert or Gym Jordan, establishment GOP figures are taking a somewhat arm's length approach to Trump's crime - and it is certainly a crime - while not embracing bringing him to justice. There are whispers that leading GOP figures are distancing themselves from Trump, but we heard that after January 6th, and I'm not sure why this would be all THAT different, unless he was actively peddling state secrets to other countries.

Josh Marshall has been a consistently good analyst of Trump's warped psyche, and he thinks it's probably just his warped personality that led Trump to keep these documents. In Marshall's analysis, having these documents made you cool and powerful, and Trump wants to be cool and powerful, so he kept them. 

That's plausible as far as the winter of 2021 or even 2022 goes. However, we are seeing that the National Archives and then the DOJ kept asking for the documents and Trump and his "legal team" kept stonewalling them. Now, Trump's lawyers are...bad. But we have to consider that they either did not know that Trump had troves of top secret documents or that they did know, but knew they couldn't turn them over because that would be worse than keeping them and breaking the law.

So, either Trump lied to his lawyers, because he thought it was cool and powerful to have a bunch of top secret documents or his lawyers were trying to protect their client from serious legal consequences. The first is absolutely plausible, but the second is, too.

We also know that Trump is having a full narcissistic collapse on his Twitter knock off, which suggests that things are getting bad inside his legal team. He has skated from legal consequences for so long, that this must feel different to him. 

It feels weird to type this, but ideally, we have the receipts on Trump giving secrets to someone like the Saudis in return for cash or some other emolument. I feel confident the hardcore Trumpists will still cling to his bloated corpse, like barnacles on a whale carcass, but the GOP has had ample opportunity to cut ties with Trump. They can't, because his voters/cultists are the only way to win elections in the short run. 

There are still persuadable voters out there. They still swing elections. The combination of Dobbs and Trump being an outright traitor might be enough to keep the House and expand the Senate majority.

Might be... 

Debt Relief In Context

 I've been largely agnostic about debt relief for student loans, though I thought the measure Biden approved was judicious and fair. Yglesias, of all people, actually has a decent piece on the context for the explosion in student debt.

One thing he leaves out is Joe Biden's direct contribution to this problem by prohibiting student debts from being erased in bankruptcy proceedings. That's...terrible. I'm surprised more on the Left haven't seized on this as a cudgel.

Anyway, the problem with exploding student debt in Yglesias' telling is the combination of demographics and the 2008-9 financial crisis and recession. We had a ton of 18 year olds graduating high school around that time. There were no jobs, so college seemed a decent option. You get "skills" that will pay off, and you aren't unemployed, you're a student. Spending 2008-12 in college presumably kept one out of the unemployment pool and theoretically set you up for success. However, if you graduated college in those years, you have a hole in your earnings that will never really be filled relative to your near peers. 

All these 18 year olds and all this demand for college space meant that more students went to marginal colleges. Ronna McDaniel of the GOP was Tweeting that it wasn't fair to ask middle class people to pay for Ivy League degrees. But I would guess very little of the Biden debt relief goes to Ivy Leaguers for two reasons: one is that Ivy League degree holders are probably doing fine financially and two is that the Ivies offer really generous financial aid. A graduate from Yale just isn't going to have the same level of indebtedness as someone from Quinnipiac or the University of New Haven, and they will be more likely to be able to pay it off.

It's pretty clear that the means testing and limited amount of relief were targeted at those who went to second and third tier universities that don't have the resources to offer financial aid and whose graduates are not first in line to be hired at Goldman Sachs or be admitted to Harvard Medical School. 

We've also had people talk - unironically - about how they went to college on the GI Bill to pay off their debts, so why should their tax dollars go to people who didn't serve? The issue here is that the GI Bill was originally targeted for the same macroeconomic conditions as 2008. Sure, honor veterans of the Second World War! But postwar economies go into recessions, because you have to demobilize the army and retool industry for peacetime demands. One purpose of the GI Bill was to soak up returning soldiers to keep them out of the labor pool from 1945-1950. This is precisely what Yglesias argues happened organically in 2008-12.

It's not clear that retiring part of the student debt situation will have a major measurable macroeconomic outcome. It is, of course, laughable that the GOP is objecting to deficit spending after exploding the debt every time they gain the "trifecta." However, this round of deficit spending is basically a deferred buffer against the trauma of the Great Recession. It also will make a huge, huge impact for a lot of middle class families.

Potentially Huge

 Unsurprisingly, Ukraine has slipped from the headlines. This is both a product of media attention deficit disorder and the fact that the conflict has largely slipped into a static war of attrition. Two huge things have happened that could signal a new phase of the war. First, Putin called up some reserve units, signaling that Russia is running low on manpower. Putin has been reluctant to do this, for the same reason that Bush never brought back the draft during his wars: simulacrum of normalcy. 

Second, Ukraine has finally launched their counteroffensive near Kherson. The two are linked, in that offensive operations usually incur higher casualties than defensive operations. Offensives also require more material and logistics. The latter is what sunk Russia's initial invasion. 

As Ukraine goes over on the offensive, they could incur higher casualties, just as Russia is presumably bringing new units into Ukraine. Or maybe Russia is bringing new units into Ukraine, because the Ukrainians have so attrited Russian forces that they are in danger of collapse.

Regardless, this conflict - which has been largely measured in hundreds of meters of movement a day all summer - could be about to enter a new phase. The Ukrainians have been "preparing the battlefield" around Kherson for weeks, taking out bridges and supply depots. Kherson is the most distant reach of the Russian advance into Ukraine and arguably the place that Ukraine must liberate first. 

There is a real potential for Russian collapse in the area of Kherson, with a retreat to Crimea and potentially even the Donbas. At that point, it becomes a question of whether either side will countenance a status quo ante at the negotiating table. 

In terms of material, Ukraine is getting stronger, while Russia gets weaker. Russia is now buying Iranian drones, for instance. There is also no question of Ukrainian will to fight, which is superior to Russia's. The real question is manpower. Does Ukraine have the troops to press an advantage when they break through Russian lines?

We are about to find out.

Bad Faith All The Way Down

 Trump's removal of top secret government documents has no defense. There was no defense when he did it; there was no defense after they were subpoenaed; there is no defense now. Fair analysis of what happened is pretty clear:

- The National Archives found a lot of documents missing. They asked for them back. Trump gave some of them back.

- National security documents remained missing, so the DOJ got a subpoena. They removed many documents last January.

- Informants let them know that there were still documents at Mar A Lago. The FBI asked for them back. Trump or his attorneys refused.

- The DOJ got a warrant and sent the FBI to collect these top secret documents.

Spending even a fraction of a second engaging with Trumpist defenders is enough to make you lose your freaking mind. There is a tremendous amount of goalpost moving, as they ask for proof, the proof if provided up to the degree it can be when dealing with secrets, and then they complain that it's not enough.

The redacted affidavit is a great example of this. For obvious reasons concerning the content of the files and the names of the informants, large parts of the document were redacted. First of all, few affidavits are released because it tips the government's hand as to what they know and allows for witness intimidation or destruction of evidence. Nevertheless, the Trumpists have seized on the most heavily redacted pages, ignored the mounting evidence of Trump's blatant crime and possible treason and continue to scream about "defunding the FBI" and nonsense like that.

There are really very few if no good faith arguments against the FBI seizing government documents from a retired man living in Florida. Still, what we know from the past half dozen years is that his cultists will believe any shit thrown at them, if it exonerates them from the tragic mistake of elevating this narcissistic conman to the office of the presidency.

As I wrote the other day, I hope this collapses in on itself, but I worry it won't. Not enough. There is going to have to be video tape of Trump giving state secrets to Russia, and even then, 20% of American voters will still support him. Disgusting.

Collapsing In On Itself

 Trump managed to animate a portion of the electorate that rarely participated in the past. The "missing White voters" that doomed Romney and McCain showed up for Trump. Those numbers, however, are not enough to consistently win elections. Trump famously never won the popular vote and never can win the popular vote.

Since 2020, Trump's narcissism has forced him into a consistent defense of the Big Lie that he won re-election. This has become the only real benchmark for continued good standing in the GQP. If you believe Biden is the legitimate president, you have to keep that to yourself.

This has two downsides that I think savvy GOP operatives understand.

The first is that this turns off independent voters. January 6th has bad. Really bad. And it's a natural consequence of Trump's rhetoric about stolen elections. We don't know how election deniers will do on the ballot in November, but hopefully they go down in a wave of defeats. This is the Democratic strategy of saying "Democracy is on the ballot."

The second is that if elections are "rigged," why should you even participate in them? We can call this the Laura Loomer effect. Loomer is an unhinged bigot, and therefore a bog-standard Trumpist. She lost a primary challenge to a sitting Republican House member, because that's what almost always happens. She has since said that it was rigged, because.... What's more, she's saying that her supporters shouldn't even come out and vote in November.

There's a certain logic in this, if you feel like your vote is an expression of consumer loyalty and not an expression of your desire for certain political outcomes. Democrats have been subject to this over the years, as Democrats have felt like they have to LOVE their candidates. As we are seeing with Biden's approval numbers, Democrats are fine with not loving Biden, but still voting for Democrats. If he's the nominee in 2024, they will vote for him.

But if - and I don't necessarily see it happening - DeSantis beats Trump for the nomination, a lot of those members of Cult 45 will stay home. Trump is their Tangerine Jesus, and DeSantis's mimicking of him is just an imitation.

Democrats and left-leaning independents still have to vote and vote in large numbers, but there is certainly a path forward where the Trumpist coalition collapses under the weight of its own lunacy.

UPDATE: This analysis of how Dobbs has scrambled the midterms is good. In it, they compare the accuracy of polls and how they've been off the past few cycles. Of note, they consistently under-sampled GOP support in 2016 and 2020 - years when Trump was on the ballot. Trumpists vote when Trump is on the ballot. 

My hope for the Urban-Suburban Blue Coalition is that we reverse the decades long pattern of GOP voters voting in greater numbers than Democrats in midterm elections. If Trumpists only really vote for Trump, that's a fatal flaw in the heart of the GOP coalition.

Jubilee

 Biden's debt relief plan for student loans is getting the usual screeching from the GQP, which means it's probably going to be popular. There are a few idiots on Twitter saying it's too targeted or not enough, but he forgives a ton of loans for people who typically don't attend Middlebury or NYU. That will absolutely be felt by people who went to Appalachian State or a two year college for an associates degree.

There are other structural issues about student debt - especially interest - that are really good. The problem with student debt is that it was exempted from normal bankruptcy proceeding in a law written by...Joe Biden. So the debt keeps accumulating via interest and becomes unsustainable. This EO caps that interest and annual payments. That's huge.

The larger problem of college costs will likely require legislation and the GQP has declared war on education in general, so that's out absent holding the House and expanding the Senate. It's still a nice step and it will benefit African Americans and Hispanics more than any other group.

The GOP messaging right now kind of reeks of desperation. They careen from inflation to IRS agents to the border to now weird ideas about how taxing and spending work. Inflation is coming down, but if they could focus on the IRS seizing your income to pay for someone's art history degree...I mean, maybe it could work. The electorate has made a dumber decisions for worse reasons in the past.

It just feels like the adults have left the room with the Republican Party. They are all Trumpist grievances and poorly spelled Tweets, without the message discipline of a Karl Rove.

Meanwhile, Democrats have "Roe, Roe, Your Vote" to focus on GQP extremism. That combines the general threat to democracy and democratic rights that Trumpism represents with a simple message.

Gerrymandering (and the lack thereof in NY State) could make holding the House impossible, but the doom and gloom is lifting. Also, the specter of the Supreme Court invalidating Biden's debt jubilee would further motivate voters under 40.

Turns out the old Irish pol is good at politics.

Asymmetric Warfare

 The past week has given us two examples of how being "liberal" - which is to say, left of center as opposed to farther left - is playing against a stacked deck.

The first are the NY and FL primaries. Florida pulled a Texas and aggressively gerrymandered itself to provide a few more seats for Republicans. New York Democrats tried the same, but the state supreme court ruled it unconstitutional. Both efforts at gerrymandered are "bad," and if you want to play by the Marques of Queensbury rules, you should act like the NY supreme court. But if one side is aggressively gerrymandering two huge states in FL and TX and the two largest blue states - CA and NY - are determined by neutral arbiters, you are going to struggle to win in a 50-50 environment.

The second was the decision by CNN to axe Brian Stelter. Incoming CNN chief wants CNN to be neutral between Democrats and Republicans. Prominent board member John Malone says he wants CNN to be neutral "the way it used to be." If anyone has half a brain, they would realize that the Republican party is not "the way it used to be." I mean, it still sucked, but it wasn't so aggressively post-factual as it became under Trump.

I've recently been blocking some of the Trumpier voices in Twitter, because they infuriate me by saying shit like "The documents in Mar A Lago were covered by executive privilege" or "The American people all love Trump" or "Trump is the least corrupt person to ever be president." Just bonkers, anti-factual statements that get picked up and bounced around conservative media. Treating statements like "Trump can exert executive privilege after leaving the White House" as worthy of debate is just...wrong. It's a failure of journalism.

Josh Marshall likes to say that the institutions of DC tend to lean towards the GOP, not because people in DC are conservative. They aren't. Rather it's because our institutions presume some good faith from both major parties.

In Trumpistan, that couldn't be more dangerous.

Fund The IRS

 While I do think there is a potential political attack here that could bear fruit for the GOP, the idea that we need to properly fund the IRS is a good one. 

The IRS needs people to answer the phones, and many of those new agents will do that. But the real target of new investigations will be shady pass-through corporations used by private entrepreneurs to avoid income tax. 

So, there's a reason why the GOP is panicking, as many of those folks are Republican voters - though not all. Still, the point of the IRS is to insure that everyone pays their required taxes. The GOP wants to spin that they are going to zealously seek out people to throw in jail.

Every accusation is a confession. 

Russia

 Josh Marshall notes that the Trump-Russia scandal was perhaps the real missed opportunity from the Trump years. Mueller's investigation was too narrow. Barr's memo - a lie - sullied the narrow findings anyway. 

The evidence is pretty clear that there was some form of coordination between Trump's campaign and Russia. It's not clear if Trump was directly involved but Manafort clearly was.

Because the Russia scandal never tied everything up into a prosecutable case, every subsequent investigation of Trump's brazen lawlessness is presumed on the Right to be just another attempt to smear him with a "hoax" like the Russia investigation.

This is why it's important for the DOJ to go slow. Trump's recent court filings over the FBI search of Mar A Lardass demonstrate that he's getting pretty shitty legal counsel. That happens when you famously don't pay your bills. Nevertheless, getting a Trump conviction - not an indictment - is the only possible outcome that pays off. Otherwise, it feeds into Trump's narrative of persecution by the Deep State.

Spanking

Yglesias ran a column last week about "values." His basic idea - which I agree with - is that Democrats should talk more about values than policy. Voters who are not already partisan tend to think politicians are liars, which wasn't really true until Trump came along. But policy is boring and it's been hard to find a lot of examples of how policy has impacted lives positively recently.

So, yes, Democrats should talk about values like democracy, freedom, tolerance and so on. Needless to say, it wouldn't be an Yglesias column without punching some college educated activists. One area where he does admit some problems is an interesting one that comes up more frequently in identifying partisan psychological traits: spanking.

The strongest support for spanking roughly falls into two broad opposed groups: African Americans and Republicans. What's more, support for spanking correlates to support for authoritarian sentiments. This does not follow through with Black voters, but spanking is fundamentally about parental authority, and patrimonial politics is about strong man authority, so it makes sense.

I live in a very Trumpy town, and last night we had a thing where they close of Main street and bring in food trucks and  - I swear to Dog - an Elvis impersonator. As we were sitting there eating our shitty food truck food, some kids rode by on bikes and some guy barked at them. Now, I don't know if he was related to them, but the kids seemed surprised that this guy was talking to them. Should they have been riding their bikes? No! It was crowded.

However, the guy said, "If I catch those kids on their bikes again, I'm going to take them from them."

Let's operate from the assumption that he wasn't their dad, but that he saw kids doing stupid kid things, told them to stop and then got significantly pissed when his authority wasn't being respected. So he was going to basically take this kids off their own bikes.

Early in my teaching career, I likely would have agreed with this (youngish) man. A bit of age and wisdom (and being a Father of the Year, I have the mug) means that I understand how pointless this exercise is. But I also would be willing to wager that he had a similar interaction with an adult when he was a child. 

The argument against spanking is that it merely enforces authority without teaching good behavior. I do think that consequences for bad actions, including punitive ones, can stop bad behavior. It cannot, however, create good behavior.

So, if you snatch a kid off his bike, you will likely implant a strong message against riding a bike through a crowd. You won't be able to teach him why it's bad, though. About why we owe others courtesy and consideration in shared spaces. So, the kid might not ride his bike through a crowd, but he will engage in some other form of behavior that is similarly reckless.

I see it all the time on our town's Facebook page. Adults just ripping into kids for vandalism or riding ATVs in the streets at weird hours.

Here's the thing, I guarantee that they did the same stupid things when they were kids. 

Now that they are adults, they expect to be respected, because they are adults. But they didn't respect adults when THEY were kids...because they were kids.

A slight majority of Americans support spanking, including bare majorities of women. This is not a "value" that Democrats can run on, but it represents a problem for American political culture. Spanking or other forms of corporal punishment don't have to be outlawed, and doing so would be a political malpractice. 

We do need to get to a country where support for spanking declines, I just don't know how.

Laying With Vipers

 The Saga of Trump is, of course, the saga of the past six years in America, but more than anything, it is the saga of the collapse of the Republican Party. Now, the GOP has been the party of racism and White resentment since Nixon's Southern Strategy in 1968. Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi talking about states' rights over the shallow graves of slain civil rights workers. This strain of nakedly racist GOP politics has always been there, and the paranoid Q-Anon shit goes back to the John Birch Society and Hoover's Liberty League.

What finally changed is that these seething, stupid, angry figures have now overwhelmed the institutional Republican Party. The "respectful" GOP would put up "respectful" figures like Dubya Bush to contrast with the naked hate of a Pat Buchanan. James Carville's old line "Democrats have to fall in love, Republicans just fall in line" represented the ability of the GOP establishment to harvest White resentment without ceding the spotlight to them.

In 2012, there was a revealing moment on Election Night. Karl Rove freaked out because Fox News called Ohio for Obama. Rove was certain Romney had won Ohio and eventually the idea of the "missing White voter" took over. Basically, Romney is a plutocrat. He's not evil, but he's Richie Rich and that doesn't play well in Ohio. (Ask JD Vance's Campaign.) 

Trump activated those "Missing White Voters." It still wasn't enough to win a majority of the popular vote and he was probably helped by Russian interference and definitely helped by roiling misogyny and hatred of Hillary Clinton. It was enough, however, to run an inside straight through the Blue Wall.

Rather than see an opportunity to embrace Trump's economic heterodoxy on issues like Social Security, the GOP simply decided to let an erratic, racist, sexist, narcissist overwhelm the party leadership.  In 2016, Lindsay Graham said that if the GOP nominated Trump, they would get killed and they would deserve it. In 2020, he likely committed crimes to keep Trump in office against the will of the voters of Georgia. 

In other words, Trump won by not being a rich stiff like Romney, but the GOP decided that rather than distance themselves from the Paul Ryan austerity program, like Trump did, they simply seized on to his racism and xenophobia. Oh, and the rank criminality, too.

The GOP has slid so far down into the mire of authoritarianism that reactionary Republicans like Liz Cheney are purged simply because they do not worship at the feet of Trump.

All of this is the context for the FBI search of Mar A Lago and the suddenly bleak picture for the GOP Senate chances.

Trump broke the damned law. His defenders don't even argue that point anymore. They argue against the law or that Trump has magical powers to declassify stuff, but they don't even pretend that he abided by the law. Oh, yeah, Hunter Biden's laptop and shit. It is highly probable that Trump's law breaking with regards to national security secrets goes further than mishandling documents. It is a leadpipe certainty that he has committed massive and sustained tax fraud over the decades. It's on the record that he obstructed the attempts to accurately count the votes in 2020.

However, having basically abdicated any judgment about politics to Trump - they missed their chance in the second impeachment - the GOP is not saddled with Trump until 2024, he goes to prison or dies. 

Party hacks like Mitch McConnell can lament that they have to support clowns like Mehmet Oz, Herschel Walker or Kari Lake, but they already supported clowns like Rand Paul, Rob Johnson and Louie Goehmert for years before Trump came on the scene. What Trumpism has done is stripped away plausible deniability.

The Dobbs decision - and hopefully an improving inflation situation - will likely determine control of the House. The Senate currently looks to have an expanded Democratic majority, but I've given up hope of relying in the voters of Florida, North Carolina, Iowa or to a lesser degree Wisconsin to do the right thing. But they might! The RSCC is pulling money out of Nevada and Pennsylvania because they are broke and because they don't think they can win. 

If the Dobbs decision has the electoral impact on suburban and young voters that I hope it does, then we could be looking at the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate with a commitment to get rid of the filibuster. We could fix voting rights, abortion rights, and a host of other things. It will be because the country is tired of minority rule - whether Trump or the Roberts Court - and because the GOP really seems like the extremist party.

In 2020, the GOP had some success painting the Democrats as extremists who were going to defund the police and make your kid transgendered. In 2022, the extremist party is pretty clearly the Party of Trump.

And We're Back

 It was a fascinating trip to Iceland for the Missus and me. It truly is a unique place, though that term gets thrown about too much. The scenery reminded me of Montana or Wyoming, but on the coast, married with Scandinavian efficiency and charm. The bathrooms were all clean (and too small). The people spoke excellent English - both for tourism and presumably when only about 300,000 people speak your language, you have to get you culture elsewhere. 

It was VERY expensive, especially in the every day stuff like meals. Truly good meals I'm fine paying a premium for, because you know you're getting a great meal and you know the cost up front. When a mediocre sandwich or burger for two sets you back $75 it adds up. Whether this is because Iceland is a remote island or the inflationary pressures of Scandinavian democratic socialism is beyond my power to grok.

The scenery, though, is truly amazing. The trip basically went like this.

Day One: Landed in a cool, overcast Iceland, went to the Blue Lagoon - which lived up to the hype - then ate the world famous hot dogs of Reykjavik.

Day Two: Saw a very well done presentation on Iceland settlement in Borganes, hiked to an extinct volcanic crater at Edfloss, drove around the Snaefellsnes peninsula, saw where they filmed scenes from Game of Thrones, and we discovered that many of the roads of Iceland are not paved. We stayed that night in an old boarding school converted into a hotel.

Day Three: Drove along the northern coast. Had a disappointing side trip to see seals, we saw them, but from quite a distance. More dirt roads. We went near the top of Iceland, looking out at the Arctic Ocean. Drove though a two-way tunnel only wide enough for one care with little turnouts. That was exciting. Visited a fishing village and then arrived at Akureyri. The gasthaus had shared showers.

Day Four: Drove up to Husavik for whale watching. We shadowed a humpback whale for about two hours as it languidly napped around the surface. We then hit the Waterfall of the Gods on the way back to Akureyri for a really excellent dinner.

Day Five: We went pony riding around the pseudo craters of Lake Myvatn. Quite the jostling experience and I even fell off the pony. We then hit the Myvatn thermal baths that reek of Sulphur. The Myvatn geothermal field also smells of sulphur so strongly it made me gag.

Day Six: Long driving day from Akureyri to Hofn on the southeastern coast. Stretches of desolate nothing and then a more alpine stretch of dirt road near a series of lakes. At Hofn we had a simply transcendent meal and were treated to an amazing sunset.

Day Seven: The long drive along the south coast, with a long stop at Jokulsarlon to watch small icebergs form. Throughout the drive through long stretches of empty land, we would see little farm houses nestled against the cliffs and in small valleys that were hours from towns of any note. Even a town like Vik only has 300 people in it. We spent the night at another former boarding school near Skogafoss. Less impressive.

Day Eight: The plan was to hike to the active volcano, but weather conditions made that impossible. So we drove straight to Reykjavik where we finally had a luxury hotel. We cruised the main drag for tourist shit and then went to see a whale museum that was as well done as all the museums in Iceland. For whatever reason, we ate a tapas joint where an Icelander named Magnus(!) told us to head to Perlan the next day.

Day Nine: Perlan is the Iceland Natural History museum and it, too, was amazingly well done. Efforts to get on an earlier flight failed and so we waited around the Keflavik airport for hours. Don't really recommend it.

And that was it. I have too many photos and videos on my phone and we retroactively made the trip our 25 anniversary second honeymoon (to justify the costs).

10 out of 10, would do again.

Law And Order

 Frank Wilhoit said the following:

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.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

That immediately sprang to mind in the online aftermath of the FBI's raid on Mar A Lago. The so called "Law and Order" party has - as always - fulfilled the other dictum about conservatism: Every accusation is a confession. Their constant raving about antifa and Democratic lawlessness was simply cover for the most corrupt administration in the nation's history. What was striking about the response from those closest to Trump was how they went after the FBI.

Think about that for a moment. The Republican Party - who ran somewhat successfully in 2020 on opposing "defund the police" - are now talking about eliminating the FBI. Admittedly, it's the Lauren Boeberts, Matt Gaetzs and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world who are saying this, but many of the more mainstream adjacent Republicans are echoing this.

My "favorite" talking point is "If they can do this to a former president of the United States, they can do this to you." Let's leave aside the fact that they were apparently there to seize documents illegally removed from the White House at the end of Trump's presidency, though I can't imagine the average American has classified documents laying around the house. 

No, the critical thing is that because Trump is famous and powerful, he should not be held accountable to the law.

If you're Eric Garner selling loose cigarettes on the streets and the police choke you to death, well, he "should have complied" and he was "no angel." Blacks and others are an "out-group" that the law must bind, but not protect. The law is there to protect Donald Trump, "rich" White guy, but not apply to him. Trump can break the law with impunity because he's Trump.

We are seeing the same line of attack with the long overdue addition of people working for the IRS that was part of the Inflation Reduction Act that just passed the Senate. The GOP are going to argue from now until Election Day that Biden wants to come after everyone for tax evasion when the law is clearly designed to go after the wealthy and large corporations who are evading taxes. 

Once again, every accusation is a confession. The loudest screams about the IRS coming for Joe Sixpack are from people who have been cheating on their taxes. The idea that Biden would politicize the IRS comes from the party of Trump, who would absolutely politicize the IRS and, in fact, appears to have done so.

Every single caterwauling wail about "politicizing the DOJ" is bullshit. If this investigation was about classified documents Trump illegally possessed, then he was breaking the fucking law. That's the story!  Full stop! The idea that Trump should somehow be above the law is another example of a fundamentally Unamerican idea that has nestled in the bosom of one of our two parties. 

Former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh has noted that quite a few Republicans have started to move away from Trump in light of the January 6th hearings and just general fatigue. Yesterday's search has triggered Cleek's Law and they are now returning to the fold. Trump is now a target of a "political witch hunt" instead of an actual criminal investigation. So the GOP will eventually rally around Trump, simply because he's being attacked for being, you know, a criminal.

Walsh portrays this as a problem, because he wants the GOP to rid itself of Trumpism. In the long run, I think that's important. The question is: how will Trump's rampant criminality play with non-Trumpist independents? Currently, the GOP is saddled with Dobbs, and I'm sure they want to change the subject. The "IRS are coming for your money" was a potentially fruitful line of attack - not because it's accurate, but because taxes is in their wheelhouse. If they pivot to "How dare the Biden administration hold Trump accountable for breaking the law"...I don't think that will pay off outside the base.

They Have To Break

 This tidbit from Wisconsin is interesting.  Trump is training his fire on a right wing Speaker of the House, Robin Vos, in the Badger State because said Speaker refuses to say that he can somehow overturn the 2020 election. Vos is on board with the Big Lie, but he understands that there is no way to somehow install Trump as president in 2022. 

Trump HAS to commit to the Big Lie that he actually won. If he doesn't, then he's just another Loser. This is why he whined about voter fraud in the 2016, an election he won but lost the popular vote by millions. There can be no losses in Trumpistan.

Republicans have largely moved towards Trumpism out of narrow self-interest, with some exceptions like Liz Cheney. Trumpism defines the GOP in 2022, and breaking with Trump entails breaking with the GOP base. Yet, Trump's manic obsession with 2020 is an anchor on the GOP. First, he plumps up ridiculous candidates like Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz and Kari Lake. That has the very real possibility of costing the GOP winnable seats in swing states.

The combination of January 6th and Dobbs has dramatically reshaped the midterms. But at the heart of all of this is Trump. With any luck - not that we've been lucky recently - the GOP gets hammered in the midterms as Mini-Trumps go down in a wave of defeat. Democrats retain the House and add enough Senators to scrap the filibuster and actually govern. My gut feeling is that by 2024, the economy will be humming along nicely - barring any more shocks like Covid or Ukraine. Then the GOP erupts into civil war between Trump and someone like DeSantis. 

We will need about 12-16 continuous years of Democratic governance to erase the damage done to American institutions by Trump. Let's hope the breakdown in the GOP comes sooner rather than later.

Lots Of Radio Silence

 I was down at Washington & Lee for a wrestling camp with my younger son, and the Spousal Unit and I are about to take a little trip of our own to Iceland, so there won't be many/any posts for a while. 

What Have We Learned, Exactly?

 Yglesias has a piece on the failures surrounding the response to monkey pox, but as is typical for him, it's really about a long running hobby horse of his. (Luckily, this bit isn't about urban planning.)

His critique is a reasonably solid one and he's applied it across other topics besides public health, even if that has been his main focus. Basically, we have some regulatory structures that are terribly outdated and do not account for different types of risk. He's written about this in regards to nuclear power in the past. If you never approve a new nuclear power plant then you will never have another nuclear accident. The problem is that hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year in extreme weather events caused by global warming.

Pandemics fall into the same risk blind spot. Monkey pox (and coronaviruses) circulate freely in parts of the world that we don't typically pay a great deal of attention to. We actually have the tools to fight both, but we tend not to use them. In his piece, Yglesias notes that any "pox" vaccine will protect against monkey pox, including a smallpox vaccine. The existing stockpiles of one vaccine are being replaced - slowly - with a new, better vaccine. Fine! But we should have been offering/requiring vaccinations with the existing vaccination for anyone traveling to west Africa. 

As Covid should have proven, the best way to deal with a pandemic is to contain it early. Covid was so tricky because it spread easily and became symptomatic slowly. You were exposed, a couple of days later you're contagious, a week later you actually get sick. That made containing it really hard. The WHO and CDC work very hard to monitor new and emerging viruses, and they caught on to Covid reasonably quickly. The problem was...then what?

When you look at cases of Covid over the span of the pandemic, the early days don't show that many cases. Some of that is a lack of good testing. But some of it was that all the isolating that we did in spring of 2020 really did work. There are three "spikes" in reported cases of Covid: winter of 2020-21; late summer 2021  (Delta) and winter 2021-22 (Omicron). The daily death rate - which is not subject to a problem with testing - had five spikes: spring of 2020; late summer of 2020; winter of 2020-21; early fall of 2021 (Delta) and winter 2022 (Omicron).

Those first three spikes in deaths tended to coincide with people being forced inside and ignoring distancing and masking. By the time Omicron came along, there was such exhaustion with masking and distancing that it created a spike in deaths only surpassed by the previous winter - despite the widespread availability of vaccines.

The lessons should be clear. 

- Certainly non-medical suppression methods work, but they are largely unsustainable over long periods of time.
- Vaccines need to be deployed as quickly as possible to contain outbreaks.
- There are going to be gaps, but the fewer the gaps, the fewer the outbreaks.

Monkey pox is not very lethal. It does seem to be centered on sexual contact among gay men at the moment. The response, however, does not inspire much confidence in our ability to handle another version of Covid, if it were to appear. What if we got a bird flu pandemic in 2024? Does anyone think we have demonstrated that we've learned anything from Covid-19? 

Vaccines do not make drug companies the same sort of money that daily medications like statins or antidepressants do. This is clearly a place where governments need to act with vigor and clarity. 

I'm not seeing that vigor and clarity.

What's The Matter With Kansas?

 Clearly, the repercussion from Dobbs are only now coming into focus. As Josh Marshall notes, the political message of the Kansas referendum is clear: Dobbs is unpopular. Marshall is also correct - and has been for some time - that Democrats need a crystal clear message on this issue. The referendum in Kansas was binary; it it passed, abortion rights in Kansas would end. Democrats need to establish a similar binary. "If you give us control of the House and X number of new Senators, we will codify Roe."

Marshall's outfit at TPM has been tracking Democratic Senators' positions on what he calls Roe and Reform. In order to pass a codified version of Roe, you need to overcome the filibuster. Unless the anti-Dobbs movement is a legitimate tidal wave, you aren't going to get to 60 Democratic Senators. Therefore you need to reform the filibuster. Marshall calls it "Senate Think" when people like Angus King have more reverence for the filibuster - which is objectively terrible - than passing legislation that a supermajority of Americans support. 

Getting Democrats on the record that they will trash the filibuster to write abortion rights is important to clarify the midterm elections about Roe rather than inflation. It also helps House candidates in suburban districts. By nationalizing abortion, EVERY House district and EVERY Senate race becomes a referendum on Dobbs. Surplus wins, especially in the Senate, locks in a majority for a while.

Kansas should scare the shit out of Republicans, but only if Democrats realize what the message is.

Joe Biden Was Right About Afghanistan

 The killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri is big deal. He was the last of the 9/11 Al Qaeda leadership still alive and free. Shameless war pig hacks like Marc Thiessen are going to try and spin this as yet another reason why it was wrong to "abandon" Afghanistan last year. From a GOP perspective, Biden's approval ratings began to tumble around the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal, and with the Democratic showing on the generic ballot polling improving, why not trot out last August's greatest hits?

The reason to withdraw from Afghanistan was clear: We were not going to be able to create a legitimate democratic government in that country no matter how long we stayed. Staying became a sort of solipsistic version of foreign policy: all that matters is the occupation of Afghanistan because the occupation of Afghanistan is all that matters. There was no achievable mission. 

The argument that festering pustules like Thiessen want to advance is that leaving Afghanistan makes us less safe. But America did not abandon its security prerogatives when it abandoned Afghanistan. The strike on Zawahiri is proof that we don't need to occupy a war-shattered country on the other side of the world to exact justice on terrorists and keep America safe.

By the way - not that anyone cares anymore but - more Americans will die of Covid this month than died on 9/11, if we really care about saving American lives...

Bill Clinton Was Right On Economics

 Bill Clinton's star within the Democratic firmament has dimmed considerably in recent years. Some of this is rightfully concerns about his admitted and possible sexual transgressions. Things like the Crime Bill are unpopular, but that's usually among people who aren't old enough to remember how bad crime was in the '80s and '90s.

On economics, there developed a consensus that Clintonomics was just Eisenhower fiscal policy. By reducing the deficit, you would lower interest rates and spur private investment, went the theory. Reagan  had exploded the deficit, crowding out private borrowers. When Clinton raised taxes and limited spending increases, the Fed reduced interest rates, touching off the internet boom of the '90s. 

The situation is a bit different today with the Inflation Reduction Act. This is about reducing the need of the Fed to raise rates, by capturing some money through tax increases to pay off some of the debt. This removes money from the overall economy in the same way (albeit more slowly) than interest rate hikes remove it. 

Still, the IRA is a good bill, especially in climate. In fact, it seems to be a more aggressive climate bill - in terms of reducing emissions - than anything Europe has done. It will still get pilloried from certain climate activists, which is a damned shame. This looks to be a really, really good bill.

Yes, Congress is a sausage factory, but sausage is delicious.