Glitchin' Mitch

 Mitch McConnell seems to be having a series of mild seizures in public that cause him to freeze. Naturally, that means that Joe Biden should step aside, because this primary season is really boring for the political press, as it's just a rematch of 2020. I mean, who cares about the future of American democracy and the rule of law? It's SOOOOO BOOOOOORING. 

Back to McConnell, the clear mirror image for Democrats is Dianne Feinstein, who has clear dementia and should resign. The problem, however, is that Feinstein is on the Senate Judiciary, and if she resigns, the Republicans will deny - hell are currently denying - the Democrats the ability to replace her. So Feinstein - like McConnell - is being propped up by staffers and, in Feinstein's case, required to say what her staff tells her to say, because the Senate is so fucking broken.

And it's Mitch McConnell who broke it. Now, Biden has gotten an extraordinary amount of "stuff" through the shadow Congress and he was able to use his knowledge of the Senate and the people who work that to maneuver legislation and appointments through that body in a way that was obscured by Manchinema's high dramatics. But the Senate is still pretty broken.

One of comments at the link notes that McConnell's replacement from Kentucky will almost certainly be a worse human being but less effective. 

I disagree.

McConnell's breaking of the Senate has happened. His use of the archaic procedural bullshit that is "Senate tradition" is now common practice. Sure, he was able to help Trump pack the Courts, but that has already happened and any Republican who comes after him has the playbook. 

What's more, we have an ongoing example of an awful fucking human being using the insights of Senate obstruction that McConnell pioneered: Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville is holding up all promotions in the military because he wants to deny female service members (or the female spouses of service members) from reproductive choice. Almost everyone thinks this is awful, including most Republicans, but the Senate is so awfully broken that he continues to get away with it.

Mitch McConnell is a bad person with a singular insight into how to turn the Senate into a roadblock for needed reforms in America. That cat is out of the bag and mauling everyone in sight. 

It is conventional wisdom that Democrats face a tough Senate map ion 2024, and unless Dobbs saves them, they could likely lose their majority. Even if  McConnell is gone, his legacy isn't going anywhere.

On a different note, yes, Joe Biden is old. So it Donald Trump. Pelosi has stepped aside to let a younger generation lead the House Democrats. Regardless of what happens next November in the Senate elections, it's time to move on to a younger generation of leadership that's less enthralled with the bullshit traditions of the sclerotic Senate.

Death By Actual Death

 After yesterday's post about the economic inequality that blights so many lives, it's worth noting that young people being anxious and depressed might have something to do with mass shootings.

When we were dropping our youngest off at college, I actually pondered if someone would do exactly what happened at UNC the other day. It was a long drive out to Colorado, and my mind wandered about until it landed on "Oh, yeah, I wonder if there will be a mass shooting." That's not a topic that students in other countries have to deal with. 

There have been stories about how the war is creating long term trauma in Ukrainian children, but something similar - if at a much smaller scale - is happening here.

Death By Hedge Fund

 Why are Americans so unhappy? Why are they retreating into a fentanyl induced haze? We live in the most prosperous society in the most prosperous time in world history. We have things that would gobsmack our grandparents, much less our great-great grandparents. 

I keep coming back to the idea that happiness is not a fixed quality. After a certain level of material comfort - once you've moved up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - happiness is not determined by the state f your material possessions, but rather by your perception of your material possessions in comparison to others. 

Where are the happiest countries in the world? Scandinavia is always at the top of the list, as these countries are relatively homogenous and sustain robust welfare states that perpetuate relative equality. It can't be the weather that's making them happy. The US actually ranks fairly high on the list at 15, so we aren't saying we're miserable, we just seem to act that way.

I think, at some point, the high levels of wealth inequality are driving Americans, especially those at the margins, into despair. Polarization has also ruptured our sense of national purpose. We really do live in two alternate realities at this point, and that fracturing both weakens our commitment to social welfare programs and creates a general sense of unease. I think millions of us looked around from 2016 until today and marveled that our countrymen could think that Donald Trump was anything but a shallow conman.

Which brings me to Vivek Ramaswamy. He is largely being touted as the "next Trump" because he has certain attributes that align with Trump's political skills and messaging. DeSantis thought abrasive cruelty was the message, but it's a sort of smiling, devil-may-care cruelty that actually typifies Trump. Dark, sure, but also joking. DeSantis was too grim. Ramaswamy is also a "business man" though I will concede that, unlike Trump, he actually has shown the ability to make money as opposed to lose it.

Ramaswamy and Trump are both, at their core, salesmen. They are bullshit artists who operate at or over the margins of fraud. (Trump mostly over the margins.) Salesmen have a great read on people and what they want to hear. Trump has no policy agenda, except to translate the rage and grievance of his audience into vague ideas, like bombing Mexico. Ramaswamy seems to be cut from the same cloth. 

Ramaswamy also has a link to Mitt Romney - hedge funds. The massive wealth that these funds manipulate have a distorting effect on the economy and on the economic lives of Americans. This has its most profound effects at those margins - the inner city and rural America - where economic opportunities are few. When a hedge fund buys up a business and "streamlines" it, they are firing people and driving smaller competitors out of business. 

There used to be a stupid talking point about how "We need to run America like a business." Except business - especially the sorts of businesses that Trump and Ramaswamy ran - are very poor models for governance. Romney, for all his plutocratic cluelessness, at least makes a nod towards the "common good" whereas these two carnival barkers are all about grabbing as much as they can as soon as they can. Business has become about winning the quarter and cashing your stock options, whereas government is about service. Sure, your local grocer might have service in mind, until Stop & Shop comes in a drives him out of business.

This isn't limited to the United States. We have a global problem of unaccountable and undemocratic wealth. Yesterday, I wrote about the links between fundamentalist Christianity and authoritarian thinking, but it's also clear that the super wealthy are eager to make cause with Christianist voters, as they share a contempt for democracy and equality.

This Feel Wrong

 The Post has a piece on how people are misguided in their approach to mitigating climate change. Recycling, for instance, has little impact on climate change and cutting out meat has a bigger impact, but people have that reversed.

OK, but I think that misses the point. Nothing YOU do will impact the climate. YOU are insignificant. It's what WE do that matters, and you aren't getting Americans to give up meat and dairy anytime soon. 

Workable climate solutions have to involve asking fewer sacrifices from a people that isn't especially interested in long or even short term sacrifices (see Covid mitigation). Workable climate solutions will create electricity abundance without creating carbon dioxide. Solar, nuclear, wind, geothermal...that's how you reduce carbon, because that's how you move people to EVs and get rid of things like home heating oil. That's how you create cheap, carbon free hydrogen for industrial processes. That's how you do atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration.

If you think you're getting Americans to give up meat to forestall a distant climate apocalypse, you haven't been paying attention.

Obey!

 Driving across the vast expanses of Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri makes one sympathetic to the idea of "flyover" country. It's...a lot. One thing that's striking is the quantity of religious billboards. There's a LOT of anti-abortion stuff, but there's also a lot of how God wants you to obey His laws and commandments. It's not a touchy-feely Jesus out in Kansas.

In some ways, this looks like the common thread between Trump - a twice divorced, serial adulterer from NYC who's never made a sincere trip to church in his life - and evangelicals who believe God demands obedience. They are both explicitly authoritarian. Racist? Sure, but I think the racism is adjacent as much as motivational. Black and Brown people are scary because they represent the horde of democrats and Democrats who are going to deny them their rightful place at the top of the hierarchy.

The sick bastard in Jacksonville notwithstanding, most of them are not animated by their racism, they are animated by their demand for obedience: from their kids, from the culture, from their women. And they extend that obedience to the leader of their cult.

It's disturbingly un-American out there in the heartland.

Back Home

 Having driven from Connecticut to Colorado and back again, I can say with confidence about America:

That's a shitload of corn.

Time Delayed Polling

 Bill Scher gives the historical context for a president - like Biden - getting credit for a strong economy. It might be that inflation is different, but it seems more likely that public opinion just lags the economic situation.

Truman And The Bomb

 If you've seen Oppenheimer or simply been exposed to the re-energized debate over the decision to drop the bomb, here's a really good corrective to what actually went into the decision making.

In Transit

 Moving about. Blogging will be light. 

Don't try and overthrow democracy while I'm gone.

Mississippi v. Great Britain

 Is Great Britain poorer than Mississippi? Poverty, of course, is a weird metric. The author of The Atlantic piece uses a few metrics like GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. That is definitely an important way to compare economies, and Mississippi comes out on top. Another way - one the author ignores - is the GINI index, which measures inequality. Great Britain, which has a more robust welfare state including universal health care, has a GINI index of .40. Not too bad, really. Mississippi's is .49. That actually is bad. It doesn't seem like a huge difference but it is. 

Yglesias like to talk about how much wealthier America is than Europe and there are a lot of ways that this is true. We tend to have bigger homes and better consumer goods and options. But we also have more homelessness and more people with food scarcity.

Many European countries make a more conscious effort to reduce inequality and that comes at the expense of growth. Britain has a smaller welfare state than most European countries, but it also shot itself in the face with Brexit.

The question America has to ask itself is whether it makes sense to restrain some wealth in order to reduce things like homelessness and food insecurity. The idea that we could simply tax billionaires probably doesn't get us all the way there. Wouldn't hurt though, as I don't think a wealth tax, for instance, is going to de-incentivize the next Elon Musk from building a self-driving car that crashes, rockets that blow up or social media platforms that suck. 

Policy tradeoffs are real. We tend to ignore that, because it's really important to "be right online".

Straight Up Gangsta Shit

 This TPM reader is right. Trump's life goal was to be a mafia guy. He studied under Roy Cohn. He clearly admired the tough-guy persona, despite being a marshmallow himself. He has the full Tony Soprano interior decorating aesthetic. 

So, yeah, it's not surprising that he's facing a RICO charge.

These Are Not Very Smart People

 

MSNBC apparently has video of one of the most corrupt sons of bitches this Republic has produced - Roger Stone - basically outlining the fake electors scheme even before the election was called for Biden. Someone recorded it and someone transcribed it.

Now, it's not up on the WaPo or Times websites and it is Roger Stone, a guy who cut his teeth ratfucking for Nixon. So, maybe Stone is planting this for some unknown reasons. Maybe he's planting a false video to trigger a...Hell, I don't know.

Or - using Trump's Razor - Stone, who had already been pardoned by Trump once, really did take notes of a criminal fucking conspiracy.

UPDATE: It's Thursday morning and the major papers still haven't picked it up. Odd.

The 2024 Electorate

 Paul Campos notes - via Jon Chait - that Lindsey Graham has argued that you shouldn't prosecute Trump because reasons, but he should be held accountable via democratic processes...and Graham has endorsed Trump for president. Graham is therefore a typical Republican who coddles Trump will hoping some mysterious process will rid him of this boorish idiot.

At the end, Campos asserts that 45% of the electorate doesn't care about Trump's sedition or other myriad crimes. I wonder.

It's true that Trump won 46.8% of the vote in 2020, despite being the incumbent. That was actually a tick upwards from winning 46.1% in 2016 as a challenger. So, I totally get where Campos is coming from. The key word is "electorate" not "population". Who will actually go to the polls in 2024 and what will they then do?

There are several reasons why I think Trump's percentage falls off a bit. In 2020, Trump won voters 50-64 by 6%. He won voters 65 and over by 4%. Put generationally, he won the Silent Generation by 16% and Boomers by 3%. Biden won Gen X by 3%, Millennials by 19% and Gen Z by 20%. Another demographic is important. In 2016, Trump won the suburbs by a scant 2%; in 2020, Biden won the suburbs by 11%. 

So who's going to vote. First of all, we have every election since Dobbs showing hidden or surprising strength for Democrats/Pro Choice measures. Hell, if New York Democrats weren't so incompetent, Biden might have had four years of working majorities in both houses of Congress. Dobbs absolutely matters, and so does 1/6. The non-stop prosecutions of Trump's criminality will help remind people that this poltroon tried to overthrow the election with force and fraud. I have to think there are a non-trivial number of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who will struggle to support him. 

The other issue is grimly actuarial. Trump voters are older; the pandemic still killed a ton of people - mostly older Republicans - after November 2020. Even without Covid, more Trump voters are going to have died since the last election. How many elders will drag themselves to the polls to vote for a guy who's under multiple indictments and perhaps has already been convicted?

Yes, the Trumpenproletariat will crawl over broken glass to vote for their Cheeto Jesus. I would not, like Campos, peg that number at 45%. I think Cult 45 is around 30% of the voting population. The other 15% are simply hardcore Republicans who would rather die than vote for Joe Biden. However, there are going to be fewer of each category. What's more, Gen Z has actually showed up to vote recently. If that continues because of Dobbs and 1/6, then I think Trump hovers more in the low-40s.

Yes, that's optimistic. I know what the polling says, but I think we are right to be skeptical of all polling at this point. Again, ideally he's convicted in the first trial and shit snowballs from there.

Indictment Day: Part Four

 Here we go again! Trump gets indicted a fourth time. Trump has responded to the DC and Atlanta indictments with attacking the Black judge and prosecutor in vaguely and not-so-vaguely racial and gendered ways, because of course he did. As Josh Marshall notes, Trump is first, second and last about "dominance" in everything. Trump Steaks are the best; Trump sleeps with the hottest women; Trump really won the popular vote in 2016 and the election in 2020. This character trait is both strategy and just who this fucker is.

And that has to be broken. As Marshall also notes, Trump has to go 4 for 4 in court. He can't lose in ANY of those cases or he goes to jail for the rest of his miserable life. So his best chance is winning the election and pardoning himself or short circuiting the prosecutions. He's certainly not behaving like he's innocent.

So we return once more to the question that has dogged us since 2016: Can Trump win the election? He did in '16 by running an inside straight in the Blue Wall of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Can he do that again? I'm REALLY doubtful because of Dobbs and all those prosecutions. I think the GOP has kind of locked themselves into Trump, since he's the only guy to win since 2004, even if that election feels very much like a one-off. 

Let's say Jack Smith gets his trial in early January. Let's say Trump gets convicted on at least one count. I think that outcome is likely though by no means assured. My guess if that occurs is that Chutkan throws his ass in jail while waiting on appeal. Trump is in jail and yet is likely still the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. That's...insane, but so is everything about living in Trumpistan. 

What will the GOP do? If he's convicted, does that immediately kick him off the ballot under the XIVth Amendment? Would the GOP just take the "L" and finally break with this motherfucker? Would Trump launch a third party bid or would he simply be banned from running altogether?

During the Trump years, there was a popular sentiment among the Very Online that "Our institutions aren't strong enough to withstand Trump." Yet if anything, they have been. Even the Reactionary Supreme Court drew the line at violating democracy. 

If Trump gets convicted, my best hope would be that the GOP bans him from being the nominee, he runs a third party desperation campaign with a full-blown MAGA party running candidates up and down the ballot. MAGA and the GOP devour each other in bitter recriminations and bile and Biden gets working majorities in both Houses of Congress. Much more likely is that he either flees the country or slinks away to prison while his cultists commit random and scattered acts of violence in his name. 

Trump's need for dominance in all things makes him vulnerable to this laundry list of indictments, because the institutions have ;largely held and because once it's pierced, a lot (though sadly not all) of his support will face away. 

A beaten, humiliated Trump is not "Trump" anymore.

Essential Reading

 Jamelle Bouie has a critically important piece explaining why the some of the rich are so cozy with White Supremacists. He traces the support for eugenics and "race science" by people like John D. Rockefeller to the current support of people like Richard Hanania by people like Peter Thiel. 

While Bouie doesn't go back that far, this was the critical political dynamic of the Post-Reconstruction South. "Hey, sure, you're a dirt poor farmer trapped in the same debt peonage/sharecropping system as Blacks, but you are White and therefore racially superior. If you want to keep things that way and avoid Radical Republican efforts to create an egalitarian South, then vote for the rich White planter." When the Populist Party threatened the political control of the Planter Class in the 1892 election by trying to link poor farmers, regardless of race, that was the end of Black voting in the South for 70 years. 

Sound familiar? Voter suppression in the service of White Supremacy?

The toxic Gilded Age idea that the rich were simply better than the average person has obvious limits as an appeal for votes in a democratic society. Few people are interested in being told that they are inferior and that they should cede political control to their economic superiors. It has to be couched in racist or nativist terms. "Trump is protecting you from Blacks and Hispanics who are coming to destroy your way of life." That's it. That's the message. It doesn't have to make sense, he doesn't actually have to build the wall, it's just an clear appeal to in-group/out-group dynamics.

We should go on to note that a disproportionate number of Tech Billionaires are really fundamentally awful people. These are men (almost exclusively) who stumbled into an economic ecosystem where it was exceedingly easy to turn a small fortune into a large one. The idea that Peter Thiel or Elon Musk or David Sacks is actually superior to the rest of us is largely absurd. That Thiel was born in Germany and Musk and Sacks in South Africa is - I'm sure - just a random quirk. 

The slavish devotion that a certain type of person has to perpetuate the myth that Elon Musk is a super-genius is a tell that it's Musk's persona that's being evaluated, not his accomplishments or actions. Musk is important because he's a White Bro and any number of screw ups or errors won't matter because he's a superior dude.

I am not and never have been in favor of revolutions, because I don't think they tend to work. I'm a fan of evolutionary change, because I think it does. But these motherfuckers do make me sympathetic to the guillotine crowd. I'm willing to settle on a wealth tax, but...

Jack and Fani Sitting In A Tree...

 There are rumors that Fani Willis has concrete evidence linking Trump's lawyers to a hack of the voting system in Coffee County, Georgia. In other words, she has firm evidence that Trump's legal team committed a felony related to trying to overturn the election. This isn't the bullshit "free speech" lie that Trumpists are peddling about Trump just "raising questions" about whether the election was fraudulent. This is a concrete criminal act. 

If there is evidence that Trump was aware of the hack, this would be a boon not only to Willis but to Jack Smith's case in DC. Smith needs to prove that Trump committed "bad acts" in furtherance of his agenda of overturning the election results. If Willis has the goods from Georgia, that would be another nail in Trump's coffin.

Once again, it is a marvel that Republicans can defend this guy. It's a testament to how desperate they are for power, and see Trump's cultists as their only hope. They could, just as plausibly, jettison Trump, lose in 2024 and then re-establish themselves as a Center-Right party. But since Trump was able to win an election he should have lost because of not-so-latent misogyny, I guess they have no choice but to yoke their party to this criminal fuckwad.

I Love The Poorly Educated

 The GOP's assault on college education proceeds apace. Deep red and even purple states are waging war on the credibility and professionalism of educators at state universities. West Virginia just ended teaching any foreign languages and any post-grad mathematics. DeSantis is doing untold damage to Florida's once proud university system. Moms for Liberty (sic) have made high school teaching so onerous that we are facing a massive shortage of teachers.

We can see that in 2020, Biden won post graduate degree holders 67-32; college graduates 56-42 and basically tied among "some college" 49-50. Trump won high school or less 56-41. Given the GOP's current priority of thwarting the will of the people via gerrymandering and the stunt they just pulled in Ohio, we can see this as part of their campaign to shape the electorate, rather than shape how the electorate perceives them. In other words, if college grads vote Democratic, then lets have fewer college grads.

Why do college grads prefer Democrats? Wouldn't they prefer lower taxes on their (presumably) higher income? 

I think it comes down to a really underrated aspect of better and higher education: basic liberal arts shit. By that, I mean basic thinking skills. My sons are either in or planning to be in pre-professional programs. The idea of being an English or History major doesn't really appeal to them, even if one wants to go into Business, Marketing or Communication. That worries me. Those Basic Liberal Arts Shit skills of questioning, writing and analysis seem to be on their way to being replaced by basic fungible skills.

Still, they have to do some of that Basic Liberal Arts Shit, and they introduces them to doubt. Doubt is a key aspect of intelligence. Easy. reflexive cynicism is bad; I see enough of that amongst teenagers. It's not real thinking, but it approximates real thinking. Real thinking begins with doubt. It requires you to be comfortable with doubt. It is in short the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect that has been made flesh in Donald Trump and others. 

This inability to be comfortable with doubt might explain why Republicans can hold - fervently hold - beliefs that are counterfactual. The refusal to doubt is a hallmark of evangelical Christianity and religious fundamentalism in general, so it creates a natural reinforcing effect. Trump can be wrong again and again and again, and it can all be in the public record, and it will not matter to Cult 45. 

UPDATE: Buried near the end of this excellent piece about an honest security system repairman trying to navigate clients who believe that things are way more dangerous than they are, is an encounter with a 64 year old retired police officer. This guy, admittedly a former cop, carries a .45 with him everywhere. What's interesting is that he believes we are in the Biblical end times. 

Fun fact: Revelation was not a book that Jesus had anything to do with. John was clearly having a psychotic break. Revelation is the ravings of a mentally ill man. 

And that book informs the worldview of many Americans.

Reactionaries

 It would be fun to watch Republican bewilderment over the backlash to Dobbs if it weren't so perilous for women's actual lives. Their struggles to understand why this issue is now salient for millions of Americans could be a classic class of epistemological closure.

I think it also speaks to something that speaks to the basic "conservatism" of most people (especially those older than 35). By conservative, what I really mean is a skepticism of rapid, untested change. As I've argued here for years, the American "Conservative" movement is, in fact, deeply reactionary. This is what Trump has so expertly grifted off of: turning the reactionary impulses of older Americans, especially fundamentalist Christians, into campaign funds and votes.

I think you'll find a fair amount of widespread aversion to weirder impulses amongst the Left like "Latinx" or "Defund the Police" for this reason. The recent increased visibility of trans people has left a lot of Americans perplexed. I don't think that leads to support for the sort of bullying and harassment that the GOP is currently fixated on, but there are a bunch of people saying "What now?" when informed of current thinking about gender. 

Do I think that transphobia is a vote getter? I'm skeptical. But trying to make out Democrats as trying to force your kids to be gender fluid will trigger some backlash. The falseness of the accusation will only mitigate things a bit, but again, I don't think there's a clamor for trans-bashing outside of the deeply reactionary base of the GOP - which again are fundamentalists.

When conservatives say, "Whoa, maybe we shouldn't jump straight to a single-payer health insurance system" they will enjoy support. When reactionaries try and unravel ACA, they will face a backlash.

This is why I really think the best hope for this country is an implosion of the Republican Party for about 12 years. Just a full on schism between normies and Trumpists that leaves Democrats largely in power to slowly make important changes like, say, a public health insurance option or maybe a baseline universal system supplemented by privately held insurance. Not banning gasoline powered cars, but creating infrastructure and incentives that makes it so much easier for EVs to replace ICE vehicles - similar to how solar power has largely buried coal.

After that, it's almost inevitable that Democrats will overreach and create a backlash that might allow a chastened GOP back into power. But only a chastened one, and only as a corrective to some overreach.

Because right now, the GOP's policies are pretty much toxic all the way down, precisely because they are just as much an attack on the status quo as the wildest dreams of the Kenyon undergrad fervently hoping that Bernie Sanders runs for president again. 

Matt Yglesias drives me crazy, but his impulse to name his blog Slow Boring is a nod to Max Weber's dictum that "politics is the slow boring of hard boards". Only one party is committed to that work, the other wants to ride the anger of old people and Christianists who pine for a mythic past. No one else wants to go back there, though, so subverting elections is all they have left.

Flouting Thomas

 If it's Friday, we must have another revelation that Clarence Thomas has taken more undisclosed gifts from billionaires. There is, I suppose, a narrow question of whether laws were technically broken, since there are few laws that bind the Supreme Court. The question of whether or not this is corrupt seems open and shut, especially because Thomas refused to disclose these multitude of gifts. Of course, the proper remedy for corruption is impeachment and removal from office.

Now, enter the clickbait merchants. They will petulantly whine and pound the table about how Thomas needs to resign or be impeached. Ok, sure. But he's not. He's not going to resign; the House won't impeach them and even if Democrats had a majority to do so, he would be acquitted by a plurality of Senators. 

What, exactly, is the purpose of calling for things that are obviously not going to happen? How does that do anything but gull the naïve into condemning Democrats for not "doing something". You want to know why Dobbs happened? Because a bunch of people were led to believe that there was no substantive difference between someone with decades of experience in public service but bad email practices with a career criminal, failed businessman and reality TV star. 

Luckily, Democrats are coming home to Biden, so as long as we can tamp down the third party ratfucking, we should be fine. Still, Thomas isn't leaving the court alive.

Politicizing Prosecutions

 Yesterday, a MAGAt from Utah was killed during a raid by FBI agents, after he had made repeated and credible threats against Joe Biden, who is visiting Utah soon.

For all the bullshit talk about "politicizing the DOJ" to go after career criminal Donald Trump, the real politicization of law enforcement is the political decision to treat people like Craig Robinson with unusual deference. Beginning with Amon Bundy, law enforcement has decided that another "Ruby Ridge" or "Waco" isn't worth the risk. Therefore they don't actually treat these people the same way they would a Black person who wanders into a public park with a loaded weapon. 

Increasingly and especially after 1/6, law enforcement is stepping up surveillance and interdiction of people like Robinson, because we now know that they constitute a "clear and present danger" to civic order. As Marshall notes above, the rhetoric coming from people like Robinson could be lifted from Trump's social media, Fox's White Power Hour or any random House member's fundraising emails.

To a certain degree that I don't think we've internalized, we are in the midst of a very low level insurgency that started in January 6th, 2021. It will spike again as Trump faces justice. That is absolutely not a reason to avoid prosecuting him; it is in fact the best reason to do so. 

Fundamentally Broken

 I have been concerned for some time now about college athletics, and those concerns are now largely shared by others. The recent evisceration of the PAC 12 has drawn the attention of people like Jon Chait who note the failure of "market based" libertarianism to create a good solution to what has become a strictly money-making enterprise surrounding football and basketball.

The ridiculous move of schools like Washington and Oregon into the Big-10 creates an obvious problem for, you know, students. As Chait noted, the myth of college athletics was the solve surviving example of the amateur ideal in athletics that was formerly typified by the Olympics and rugby. As those two sports admitted professionals, the pressure on American college sports - at least the ones on television a lot - grew until it created a self-justifying monster of a profit incentive.

As we well know, the best paid "public official" in almost every state is a college coach. The four best paid college coaches, Nick Saban, Kirby Smart, Dabo Sweeney and Lincoln Riley will make over $10,000,000 this year. 

Let's take a moment to consider how many high school teachers or college professors or student education initiatives we could fund with that obscene amount of money.

Regardless "market forces" require paying coaches millions of dollars from the funds of nominal educational institutions so that they don't go somewhere else. This has been broken for years. Kudos to the following states whose highest paid public official is not a coach: Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York (!), Delaware, the Dakotas, Nevada, Montana and Alaska. (In four of those states, NY, the Dakotas and Nevada it's the med school dean). 

Now quick, name a powerhouse athletic program from those states. In fact, it's hockey in Maine, Mass and the Dakotas. So if you're a college hockey coach...screw you.

A few years back, college athletes were allowed to profit off their likeness, which again only really helped a handful of football and basketball players.

It should be obvious that the overwhelming majority of college athletes are not playing football and basketball, especially at a level that would bring them money. In football, in particular though it does apply a little bit to basketball, college sports are de facto minor leagues for the NFL and NBA. For other sports like MLB and MLS, players are just as often identified in high school and there are developmental teams and leagues to train them.

So, basketball and football have warped the entire structure of college athletics to create three super leagues. For the volleyball player, the wrestler or the tennis player how in the living hell are you supposed to travel across country to play multiple games and still remain a credible student. Sure, if you're playing football at Alabama or women's basketball at UConn, you might have a shot at making the pros (but that shot is pretty damned small unless you're a star). If you're a swimmer, there's almost no remunerative future for you in swimming. You are in college for the education and swimming was your ticket into a better school.

Recently, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action for racial minorities. Yet college admissions is hopelessly warped by certain schools privileging athletes (and, yes, legacies) over the "best students" whatever that means. 

At this point, the NCAA is such a festering pustule of a joke that it needs to be replaced with an entity - almost certainly governmental - that protects college athletes from the exploitation by the football and basketball profit-driven decision making of people who self-evidently don't give a flying fuck about education. 

Hell, we should probably sever the relationship between the semi-pro sports of basketball, football and perhaps baseball from education entirely. You could still affiliate with the school and athletes could take certain classes, I guess, but the idea that Oregon is going to somehow win a national championship in football by moving to the Big10 is stupid. It's all about the money and the money is poisoning sports.

I coach a team that does not produce college athletes (though I think my son could've wrestled DIII), and that makes me unique at what is supposed to be an elite academic boarding school. The football team has sent kids to Wisconsin and Stanford, lacrosse and hockey funnel kids to the Ivies and ACC schools. We did this because we did this. In other words, we didn't decide to become a clearing house for athletes, we saw that a top lax player could go to Harvard, which allowed us to say we sent X number of kids to Harvard.

However, I really do think that my wrestlers learn important things by competing in sports. It's part of character education that is a model going back to British boarding schools. You played sports to learn about hard work, teamwork, sportsmanship and leadership. Now, you play sports to get into a better school (and sportsmanship be damned). 

How is that educational? How is that augmenting the life of the mind? What the hell is the point here?

Dobbs Keeps On Resonating

 Last night, the reliably red state of Ohio voted to stop Republican plans to make it harder to amend the state constitution. This effort was made because there is a ballot initiative to amend the constitution this November to write abortion rights into the Ohio constitution, so Republicans wanted to make it harder to achieve this. While the narrow issue was the ability to amend the state constitution, everyone knew that abortion rights were on the ballot, and abortion rights got 57% of the vote. In Ohio.

The question that we will not have an answer to for 15 months is whether widespread outrage over Dobbs will lead to Democratic victories for Joe Biden, Jon Tester and the like. If New York Democrats weren't such feckless knobs, the Dems would've carried both houses of Congress in the midterms during a time of economic unease. If the economy continues to hum along, it could be that the backlash to Dobbs creates a wave that carries Democrats. If Trump is on the ballot - which looks almost inevitable at this point - then Dobbs will intersect with 1/6 to create the sense that it is Republicans who are out-of-step extremists. 

The main strategy for Dems should be to make the case for overturning Dobbs, saving democracy and not launching a bunch of unforced errors like Defund the Police. If they do that, I think - for once - that the under 30 demographic could tilt the field overwhelmingly towards Democrats.

Ideologues

 There is a theory called horseshoe theory that posits that if you go far enough out to the right or left on the political spectrum it bends back in on itself. This is the "Red-Brown" alliance that links "tankies" (unreconstructed Stalinists) with Trumpists. This is how some on the far left can look at Trump's populism and see a legitimate attack on wealth, which is of course bullshit. The rhetorical nods towards egalitarianism are simply an attack on cultural elites, not on wealth and plutocracu.

It seems to me that the root of this phenomenon is a predilection for seeing the world through a lens of abstract ideas. Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist economics does not work. Period. We ran an experiment on this and we got real data. Planned economies don't work and collectivized agriculture is one of the worst ideas humans have ever conceived. Yet there are still people out there who will claim that we just didn't communist hard enough. 

In other words, if you are "imprisoned by your priors", if you are devoted to an idea, then you simply don't care what the evidence actually says.

This is obviously true of Trumpists and rightists in America right now. We can see this pretty clearly in the response to Trump's multiple indictments. There is a mountain of evidence, including Trump's own words and actions, that essentially prove Trump's guilt. "Find me the votes." "Check out these top secret files I shouldn't have." Instead of looking at actual evidence, Trump is innocent because...well, you have to believe some pretty nefarious shit about anyone who is not a Trumpist/Republican. In an almost comical touch, you get the Anti-Anti-Trumpers whose basic position is "Sure, Trump is an authoritarian, a bigot and a crook, but at least he's not a Democrat."

The ironclad belief that someone like Biden (Biden?!) is a communist is therefore impervious to evidence that contradicts that belief. I have been saying since 2020 that "Defund the Police" is a terrible slogan or strategy, and whatever few impulses towards police reform we have seen, few of them have been outright "Defunding". Still, ask a Republican and Biden wants to get rid of the police, despite increasing budgetary aid for police departments.

Which brings me to an especially fraught topic: human and especially child trafficking. This is, of course, the central tenet of QAnon: that the cultural elites who are making you look at same sex couples in your Volkswagen ads are also trafficking in children to harness some sort of chemical from kids brains. (In an aside, my one almost-paid effort as a screenwriter was to write a sci-fi horror film about rich people kidnapping kids and stealing the poor kids "intelligence" by doing something to their brains...it was a shitty, unworkable idea, but that was 1994.)

The third biggest movie of the summer is Sound of Freedom, which is about Tim Ballard's quest to stop child trafficking and stars QAnon nutter Jim Cavaziel as Ballard. 

The reason these allegations are so powerful among the overlapping circle of Trumpers and QAnon is that it's almost impossible to have a reasoned, evidence-based discussion on child and human trafficking. Any effort to introduce perspective on how much trafficking actually takes place and how lunatic the idea of harvesting adrenachrome is basically demonstrates that you endorse the trafficking of children.

Now, it should come as absolutely no surprise that one of the people who helped get Sound of Freedom made is under investigation for, you guessed it, child kidnapping. Sure, this is the millionth example of "every allegation is a confession" but it's also the weird effect of people who are obsessed with the exploitation of children are spending a lot of time thinking about the exploitation of children to begin with. Efforts to prosecute this individual will be seen by lots of people as the "deep state" of pedophiles trying to silence a brave truth teller - a repeat of the narrative on the right about Trump's numerous indictments.

There is also a lot of evidence that Ballard himself is basically a self-aggrandizing con artist who has done very little actual work, and mostly claims credit for the work of others. Meanwhile, if you are legitimately concerned about the sexual exploitation of children, that overwhelming evidence points to religious figures - especially in the more patriarchal denominations. It's not just the Catholic Church, as evangelical youth pastors seem to be another target rich environment for pedophiles.

What do we actually know about trafficking? Here's the government website on the issue (which is of course suspect among QAnon-ers):

Due to the “hidden” nature of trafficking activities, gathering statistics on the magnitude of the problem is a complex and difficult task. The following statistics are the most accurate available, given these complexities, but may represent an underestimation of trafficking on a global and national scale.

Each year, an estimated 600,000 to 800,000 men, women, and children are trafficked across international borders (some international and non-governmental organizations place the number far higher), and the trade is growing. (U.S. Department of State. 2004. Trafficking in Persons Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State.)

Of the 600,000-800,000 people trafficked across international borders each year, 70 percent are female and 50 percent are children. The majority of these victims are forced into the commercial sex trade. (Ibid.)

Each year, an estimated 14,500 to 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the United States. The number of U.S. citizens trafficked within the country each year is even higher, with an estimated 200,000 American children at risk for trafficking into the sex industry. (U.S. Department of Justice. 2004. Report to Congress from Attorney General John Ashcroft on U.S. Government Efforts to Combat Trafficking in Persons in Fiscal Year 2003. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice.)

The largest number of people trafficked into the United States come from East Asia and the Pacific (5,000 to 7,000 victims). The next highest numbers come from Latin America and from Europe and Eurasia, with between 3,500 and 5,500 victims from each. (U.S. Departments of Justice, Health & Human Services, State, Labor, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. 2004. Assessment of U.S. Government Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice.)

Globally, we are in fact dealing with an unknowable number of women and children trafficked into forced sex work. I was struck by the internal number (in bold), which struck me as being really large. (These numbers are from 2005, too.) This HHS post from last year suggests a much smaller number, as they have been able to discover 2,600 cases in the previous year. Now, let's say they only find out about a quarter of the cases. That's about 10,000 cases of child trafficking, which is a pretty big difference from 200,000 internal cases.

However, if I were to say, "There's no way we are seeing 200,000 cases of internal child trafficking a year" then I'm a pedophile, or at least an enabler. But understanding the scope of the problem is the first step in solving it. A single case of human trafficking is too many. The nature of the crime is private and hidden, so it will be both hard to find and hard to track progress. 

In this case, we have a doubled problem. We have a group of people who are naturally resistant to evidence and a crime that resists accurate quantification and evidence. As a result it's perfect for Trumpists who can argue - amazingly! - that Democrats were all going to Epstein's island, when we know Trump took numerous trips there and is on the record lusting after young and very young women. We can have pious Christians outraged over Hunter Biden's cavorting with prostitutes (which is bad, BTW) while ignoring the multiple of sexual predators in the clergy.

There are few worse things to be in the world than a pedophile. (One of the more disturbing things to routinely encounter when reading about the past is the common practice of marriages of teenagers and younger to middle aged men.) Using the term pedophile as an all-purpose political weapon is also gross. To me, the danger of Sound of Freedom is that it elevates someone like Ballard to heroic status by giving him credit for work he hasn't done. Yet, calling the film out for that makes you - you guessed it - a pedophile.

Serious problems deserve serious solutions. We live in a time when empiricism is on the ropes. The QAnon/Trumpist overlap is a good example of the effects of believing something and then finding the evidence to justify what you already believe. This extends throughout the horseshoe dynamic. "Trump is innocent and elite Democrats are pedophiles" becomes the proof itself and evidence that contradicts this is ignored. 

I'm not sure democracy can survive if this becomes common place. 

The Jersey

 Yesterday in the wee small hours, the US Women's National team crashed out of the World Cup. It was a tough road this year, as they played pretty uninspired ball in the group stage, which led to a second place finish. This led them to face a Swedish team in the round of 16 that was ranked 3rd in the world (the US is ranked 1).

While I was not awake to see it, apparently, the US played their best game of the tournament, dominating possession and creating all the meaningful chances during the first 90 minutes and again during extra time. They could not get past the Swedish goalkeeper and so it went to penalties. There, three Americans missed the goal mouth, including Megan Rapinoe. The Swedes seventh PK went over the line by millimeters.

What followed next is repugnant. The usual suspects in the US cheered on the American defeat. They labelled a team with numerous gay members an embarrassment. Stars like Rapinoe have been outspoken in support of Black Lives Matter, equal pay and the fair treatment of LGBTQ folks.

This led "patriotic real 'Muricans" to cheer on the defeat.

First, I doubt very much that most of those cheering the defeat know much about soccer or give two shits about the team except to hate on them.

This, however, distills the problem facing America today. Some Americans are cheering on the defeat of other Americans - in a sporting event, not an election - because they disagree with them. That's repugnant.

You cheer the jersey, and for those who say that the players "disrespected" the jersey by taking a knee (something done before most soccer/football matches around the world). These players dedicated their whole lives to wearing that jersey. Rapinoe had an absolutely terrible tournament, but she has left the jersey in a better place for her having worn it.

Jesus, get a grip.

Quick, To The Hypothetical Mobile!

 We have Yglesias' intern and Martin Longman both take a look at what sort of Republican can beat Trump. Maya Bodnick's take is that Vivek Ramaswamy is taking the optimal approach of presenting Trumpist policies in traditional political language. As we've seen with DeSantis, the bullying approach really only works for Trump, a fact that Longman's analysis explains. For Longman, any credible challenger needs to be fundamentally different than Trump in some important ways.

I don't think that the replacement for Trump stands much of a chance in 2024. Obviously, Trump could die; he's old and looks like a boiled sheep's stomach. Even more likely, he could be in jail before the convention. I suppose that there is a chance that if he's in jail, it makes sense to be DeSantis and offer your Dollar General version of Trumpism. 

Of course, there's the most likely outcome, which is that Trump moves heaven and earth to delay the 1/6 trial and somehow pulls it off. in which case he's the nominee. 

The truly interesting scenario is the one where he's in jail and decides to run anyway. Obviously a pardon would be his only hope, so would he try and continue his quixotic quest to return to the presidency and pardon himself? Or would he throw his weight behind a Republican who promised to pardon him, if he won?

The Republican caterwauling about this, of course, obscures a fundamental difference between Republicans and Democrats, that I think goes back to Reagan. Look, I think Joe Biden is a decent human being and remarkably effective president for this moment in our history. But, if Biden wasn't running I could quite easily throw my support behind a Buttigieg or a Whitmer or a Pritzker or a Booker or so on and so on. What matters, fundamentally, is that the Democratic Party stands for a set of principles and policies that I agree with. I want Dobbs overturned; I want meaningful action on climate change; I want meaningful restrictions on gun ownership; I want more progressive taxation and more efforts to reduce poverty.

Republicans want a strong man. Policies? Who gives a fuck? We want the strong man who will make the Democratic boogeyman angry and go away. The nature of the authoritarianism that has always been present in the American Right naturally adheres to singular individuals. What's interesting about Trump is that when the Bushes left office, they were unpopular for different specific reasons. Bush pere was unpopular because he raised taxes; Bush fils was unpopular because Iraq and the economy melted down. In other words, they betrayed the "ideas" of the GOP. The GOP has no more real "ideas" that you can really point to. 

Trump was beaten soundly in 2020, but that's no longer disqualifying. This is profoundly worrying, because it means that the GOP will struggle to correct its course back to being a center-right party. You have to learn from your defeats, and the Trumpist GOP refuses to admit it lost.

So who will be the 2024 nominee if it isn't Trump? If he's dead or in prison? Maybe it will be Ramaswamy, but do we really think that the Trumpenproletariat are going to to vote for a guy named Ramaswamy?

Finally, let's take the internal arguments of the Trumpists at face value: Trump actually won in 2020. The biggest predictor of an incumbent losing re-election is a stiff primary challenge. (Roosevelt in 1912; Kennedy in 1980; Buchanan in 1992) Trump doesn't exactly have a "stiff" primary challenge, but he does face a fractured party. However, what allowed him to win in 2016 was a divided field, which is what he faces again.

Bernie Sanders rose to prominence in 2016 because he was the Not Hillary candidate. There isn't a singular Not Trump candidate on the GOP side (Hutchinson and Christie are dividing that role, and the others just mimic him.). If one emerges? That's the person who will take the mantle from Trump if he cannot run. If he can, it's him.

So That Happened

 John Eastman just admitted that they were trying to overthrow the government on January 6th.

Could It Happen?

 Josh Marshall responds to a reader who wonders if the GOP might finally turn on Trump and admit that he lost in 2020. What's so bizarre about all this is that A) of course he lost in 2020 and B) the only way to win the nomination in 2024 is to point this out.

The result is a GOP primary field that largely won't take Trump on for...anything or everything. The one exception appears to be Chris Christie who is in the primaries for exactly that reason. Pence might get there under oath in the 1/6 trials, and he's made a few halting moves in that direction.

For DeSantis, whose whole schtick is being a suppurating asshole, not attacking Trump directly makes him look weak and whiny. That's how Trump is defining him and his refusal to take on Trump directly is one of many reasons why he's collapsing in the polls. 

A few of the people running for the nomination are likely positioning themselves to be Trump running mate, so that they can call on the allegiance of the Trumpenproletariat in 2028. But he's going to pick some lunatic like Kari Lake, so why bother?

If enough people in GOP come out and attack Trump over the Big Lie, we could see that disheartening number of Republicans who believe Trump won slowly decline. Getting THAT number down is huge.

Republicans are mostly authoritarian-curious or committed at this point. They will follow the lead of the strongest voice, even to the point of convincing themselves that Trump is Christian.

Until the GOP challenges Trump directly, that dynamic will remain a threat to our democracy.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

 Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy that applies when someone mistakes the result for the cause. An obvious example would be thinking that smoky air causes wildfires. Of course, not even stupid people believe that. but stupid people do believe that the Department of Justice, the Attorney General of New York and shortly the Attorney General of Georgia have all decided to indict Donald Trump in order to make sure that he is the Republican nominee. Since Trump's polling numbers have surged since the indictments and Ron DeSantis has collapsed into pudding, clearly this was the Democrat's plan all along.

Jon Chait dissects the many ways that what he accurately calls anti-anti-Trump conservatives have coalesced around this narrative. This nefarious plot absolves them of the need to take actions that might prevent a career criminal and conman from becoming the nominee of their party again. "If it weren't for those meddlesome kids!"

One aspect of this that Chait doesn't discuss, but that I've been thinking about a lot is the power of motivated reasoning. We know about Cleek's Law, which remains the best explanation of conservative politics since at least Obama and likely Clinton. Because anything Democrats want Republicans must oppose, that puts them in a passive, reactive stance. It also explains why they have no policies of their own, except to oppose and overturn Democratic or liberal ones.

Once you're in that headspace, anything can be justified to further your goals. Is Donald Trump a repeat criminal? Of course. He's evaded taxes, sexually assaulted women, defrauded people and violated civil rights laws before he even came down the escalator. Since then, he's added a fucking coup to his resume. 

But since it's Democrats who are the real villains, Trump must be part of their nefarious plan. Why? Because Democrats won in 2018, 2020 and did really well in 2022. 

Is it because the GOP is a bunch of God bothering fascists who support Trump even after January 6th and a party that revels in Dobbs? Is it because they offer no positive solutions to America's problems? Is it because they hump guns and deny climate change? Impossible!  I'll turn it over to The Simpsons here:

Tuberville

 I think there might not be a better symbol of what has become of the GOP than Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. First, he is - by all accounts - dumber than a box of rocks. Second, he's a god-bothering panty sniffer in public, who's pitching a fit because the military will pay for female service members travel to receive abortions. Third, as he tries to pick a fight over this, he manages to take a position that is ultimately self-defeating. Fourth, even though his pigheadedness has deprived Alabama of a military base that would benefit Alabama's economy, he will likely get re-elected anyway.

Oh, and the GOP could put an end to this shit of holding promotions hostage, but they won't, because they're cowards.

Selling Bidenomics

 As things stand now, I think the hump that prevents Biden from winning not only the 2020 states but possibly NC and TX is the economy. What's weird is that by most metrics the economy is kicking ass. Some of this is the lag in perception between actual improvements in the economy and how people think the economy is going.

My worry, frankly, is that fucking algorithms have poisoned our ability to accept good news. We've hard-wired our brains to crave outrage and upset, and we may not even accept good news unless we have no other cognitive choice.

Sure, 45% of Americans will believe that we are in a socialist, communist, atheist, gay depression because we have a Democratic president, but you still do win in the middle. Are the fickle weathervanes that constitute independent voters capable of assimilating good news at this point?

Indictment Day III

 It's depressing seeing that you can't find any MAGAts rethinking their support for Trump in the light of all these indictments, as it's pretty clear that the indictment actually help him among Cult 45. The basic "defense" of Trump seems to fall into these baskets.

- They are attacking Trump's First Amendment rights. This is, of course, bullshit. The First Amendment doesn't cover crimes. The basic idea that you can plot to overthrow the Constitution and that's "protected speech" is ridiculous.
- The Biden Administration has weaponized the Department of Justice. This falls into the "every accusation is a confession" idea that defined the Trump Administration's attempt to punish political enemies via the Justice Department. Again, this shows stunning lack of understanding (willful or ignorant) of how indictments work. The DOJ didn't indict Trump, a Grand Jury did. 

One of the hallmarks of Trump's failed autogolpe has been the remarkable run of failures in court. The reason, of course, is that in court you can't just allege things and make shit up. You have to present evidence. There was no evidence that the election was stolen and in fact most examples of marginal voter fraud was committed by MAGAts. Jack Smith has been able to bring multiple indictments because there is a wealth of evidence that Trump committed both sets of crimes. 

What has been interesting is how Indictment Day I was possibly, kinda weak tea. Trump has lied and defrauded people for years and this is a little bit like getting Al Capone on tax evasion, but Capone did evade taxes. Indictment Day II upped the ante, as this was about clear criminality and willful obstruction of justice. Indictment Day III involves a plot to overthrow the government of the United States. When Indictment Day IV arrives, it will basically be a remake of Indictment Day III.

Josh Marshall notes something important about the series of indictments and potential trials in the context of the 2024 election. He points out that there are two narratives that Trump sells to his cultists: The swaggering tough guy who can save America and since the indictments dropped the martyr of real America being persecuted by the Deep State. The spectacle of being a defendant is a spectacle of being dominated. You can only be so defiant. What happens when Trump makes some racist remark about the Judge in DC? What happens when he makes an overt threat against Alvin Bragg? He could be tossed in jail for contempt. That's powerless. It will feed the martyr narratives, but it will unmask what is true of all bullies: they are basically cowards.

Trump's play will be to delay these trials until after the election for that reason. Given what Judge Chutkin has said about January 6th, I don't see her deferring to Judge Cannon in Florida. If that happens and he's on trial in the spring of 2024, he's going to get flopsweat desperate and when he does so, he inflicts a lot of damage on himself.

I don't think that he WILL go in trial before the election, but if he does, I don't think it's going to go well for him politically. Eugene Debs ran for president from jail, but that's not usually considering a winning tactic. I do think that Dobbs remains the factor in this election that could most hurt Republicans. If the economy continues to improve, that should help Biden and Democrats, too. Also, the demographics of relying on an aging and, yes, dying base of voters won't help Trump either.

Still, these indictments simultaneously help Trump cement his hold on the nomination and hurt his chances of actually winning in November.

Public Service Announcement

 There is a Times poll out showing Trump and Biden tied.

Don't look at polls in August, 16 months before an election.

Polling remains largely broken as a metric to assess presidential races at any rate and August? Please.