The primary reason not to send Trump back to the White House is that he will try to end substantive democracy in America. He has already tried once.
The other is that his policies are objectively bad. Of course, understanding this is going to be beyond the analytical experience of most American voters.
I have a small gig as the Atlanta Falcons analyst for Draftek. That means I have to pay attention to their games, their roster, their salary cap and divine what they plan to do as a franchise adding personnel to win games.
Last night, Atlanta shocked the world by drafting Michael Penix, Jr. after spending a massive amount of money to add Kirk Cousins as QB1. They used the 8th overall pick on a guy who is going to be QB3 to start the year. In other words, they used scarce resources - money is Cousins' case and a top-10 pick in Penix's case - to fill one position, while leaving other positions wanting.
As someone who both cares about this and spends way too much time thinking about it, it was one of those gut punches that takes the air out of you. This is Atlanta, the 28-3 team. They keep finding new and horrible ways to disappoint their fans.
I'm going to quit writing for Draftek because I simply can't justify making myself feel bad for something I don't have to feel bad about.
George Packer at The Atlantic makes the case that the events at Columbia and elsewhere are a product of the sort of campus illiberalism that Jon Chait has been going on about for years. Packer quotes a student:
I think [the protests] do speak to a certain failing on Columbia’s part, but it’s a failing that’s much more widespread and further upstream. That is, I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept in to every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in “decolonization” or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief. And after all this, one day the university wakes up to these protests, panics under scrutiny, and calls the cops on students who are practicing exactly what they’ve been taught to do from the second they walked through those gates as freshmen.
I lived through the "political correctness" debates of the late '80s. However, it was a debate. It's unclear to me whether students are allowed to challenge certain orthodoxies. Packer's conclusion from the student letter:
So when, after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Jewish students found themselves subjected to the kind of hostile atmosphere that, if directed at any other minority group, would have brought down high-level rebukes, online cancellations, and maybe administrative punishments, they fell back on the obvious defense available under the new orthodoxy. They said that they felt “unsafe.” They accused pro-Palestinian students of anti-Semitism—sometimes fairly, sometimes not. They asked for protections that other groups already enjoyed. Who could blame them? They were doing what their leaders and teachers had instructed them was the right, the only, way to respond to a hurt.
The retreat into safe spaces has garnered a lot of contempt from right wing critics, and little of that is in good faith. However, the inability of students to accept a challenge to a position that they might have, especially one based on identity, means that they aren't really learning.
I don't know where I heard this, but the "colonization" framework is really just the left wing version of "Blood and Soil" nationalism. I never really bought into the "language is violence" framework, and frankly I would be loath to argue against it. (Actually, that's not true, I love a good argument.) The idea that accidentally or even intentionally misgendering someone constitutes "violence" means that Jewish students can plausibly call chants calling for a Palestinian state as anti-semitism.
Protests are, by definition, provocative. Columbia and the University of Texas have handled these protests about as poorly as they possibly could. The provocation is intended to elicit an overreaction.
However, the broader pedagogical question of how to be true to the same practices across all parts of the student body is not something the universities have really wrestled with.
UPDATE: What is happening at Emory and Texas is immoral and, perhaps even worse, a mistake.
Martin Longman ponders what would happen if Trump is actually sentenced to jail. The hush money case has always been considered the weakest case, even though - bizarrely - everyone pretty much admits that he's guilty. The application of the law here is somewhat unique though perhaps not as unique as a lot of critics of the case assert.
First of all, a conviction would - I believe - seal Trump's defeat in November. A sizable portion of Republicans are still unable to choke down his return to the White House - Nikki Haley continues to rack up 15-20% of the vote in primaries - and a felony conviction even without jail time will push the casual voter to either vote for Biden, stay home or possibly vote for Kennedy. In fact, I think Kennedy is going to wind up with a LOT of those Haley protest votes. Trump has never won the popular vote and if he loses 1-15% of REPUBLICANS and independents abandon the convicted felon, then he's toast.
But what about prison? There's a cathartic need to see this odious jackal in an orange jumpsuit. However, if he does escape jail time even if convicted, then that could further enrage the anti-Trump voters. If he were to be sent to the clink, I doubt it would be for very long and it could even be a form of house arrest.
As David Axelrod points out, Trump's entire political persona is as a "winner" and the bully who will fight the people you despise. Losing in court even with house arrest or a suspended sentence makes him look like a loser. It's not certain that Trump will face more legal peril before election day, but he very well might. His fraud appeal could fail. The Georgia case might go foreword. He could get indicted in Arizona.
Of course, a hung jury would complicate all this immeasurably. It sounds like the Supreme Court is going to help delay Trump's election interference case even further down the line.
In the end, Trump will need to be defeated at the ballot box one way or another, but a few months in prison would sure make that easier.
Scott Lemieux points out who the real agenda setters are in the GOP: small business owners. I can remember how Clinton and even Obama lauded these hardy emerging capitalists as the backbone of America. However, a sizable number of them really only want to be able to squeeze every penny from the sweat of their worker's brows.
I was at the gym and the owner of the local pizza place was there in the sauna with me and another guy who runs a small IT company. Pizza Guy (and I love his pizza) was complaining about how minimum wage laws were requiring him to raise his prices which upset his customers. And I'm sure that's true! However, it's precisely because we have minimum wage laws that none of his competitors can undercut his wages and lower prices. (This is leaving aside the argument that a tight labor market means wages would be rising anyway.)
Races to the bottom are a real problem that can lead to deflation and recession. That's why we have labor regulations. The current crop of laws passing through red states are like the abortion laws I wrote about a half an hour ago. They can't help themselves. Prohibiting water breaks in Texas and Florida? What in the chicken fried fuck is that all about?
In 2016, I described Trump voters as "WWC" which stood for both White Working Class and Whites Without College. I think the latter is a better descriptor. These aren't "working class" in the sense of working for someone else in return for wages. These are reasonably well off people who want to be millionaires and labor laws appear to be standing in their way. They combine with White Evangelicals to create the base of Trumpsitan.
For all of Matt Yglesias' BS about "policy" determining this election, the reality is that the two biggest issues are Dobbs and January 6th. Trump's many trials more or less revolve around his contempt for democratic norms and practices (maybe not the documents one), but the muddied nature of those trials and whether they even come before a jury before election day, means that Dobbs remains the most salient issue for millions of voters.
Even Trump realizes this, which is why he issued a bullshit anodyne statement about leaving it up to the states, even though we know he would sign a national ban. Republican strategists understand that Dobbs is a millstone around their necks, and as each state takes up more and more draconian measures, any national messaging is going to be drowned out by the reality on the ground in reddish states across the country. We already saw Arizona Republicans gleefully kill efforts to repeal an 1863 territorial law banning almost all abortions. Arizona is a potential tipping point state, and this will matter.
Meanwhile, Idaho is out here arguing that a woman can bleed out in the ER until the point very near death before she can be treated. Now, Idaho will not vote for Joe Biden. However, if the Assembly of Religious Experts rules in their favor - and oral arguments today suggest they are trying to find a way to - Idaho's draconian law will be imitated by other deep red states. Tennessee strikes me as a state that would try this, and again, Tennessee won't vote for Biden, but Georgia is right next door. North Carolina is right next door. Media from Tennessee will cross over.
What's more, Democrats can rightly point to laws in these places as the Republican agenda for winning in November.
The doubling down on the most toxic abortion positions seems to be a temptation that the GOP can't help but embrace. The smarter members of their party (Holy SHIT, does that include Trump?!) know that they have to soft-peddle their extremism, but all these state legislators from gerrymandered districts are zealots. They just can't help themselves, but hopefully it will help Democrats this fall.
There are two narratives that the Trump legal team appears to be advancing in the hush money trial. The first that's gotten some notice is that his lawyers in opening statements said that it's not a crime to try and influence elections. While this is true, that's not the crime being charged; it's campaign finance laws that were broken. To admit that Trump was trying to influence elections, even in passing, is a very Trumpian move, in that Trump's entire persona is about committing crimes and then basically waiving them away with "everyone does this, I just have the courage to admit it." Trump's lawyers have to play to both the jury and their client, and this is a great example of how playing to their client will hurt.
The second way they look to be playing to Trump's vanity is that they are going to argue that Trump never had sex with Stormy Daniels. This is one of those assertions that Trump probably feels like he has to make in order to keep Melania from killing him in his sleep and to retain the votes of some wavering evangelicals. However, they will have testimony from Daniels and McDougall and Cohen and likely several others saying that there was sex. Arguing that there wasn't will call into question the credibility of the entire defense.
This is where Trump the Narcissist and Trump the Candidate is going to ruin the chances of Trump the Defendant. If he could take the stand and directly refute the charges, it would make sense, but that would involve perjuring himself, because he simply could not help himself. His defense team can't possibly put him on the stand, but he may demand it. Otherwise, he's claiming not to do a thing he clearly did, but doing so without taking the stand.
No, I don't think the case is a slam dunk, the way the documents and election cases are. However, Trump's own (lack of) character might be the tipping factor.
Paul Campos compares the student protests over Gaza with student protests in 1968 over Vietnam. The similarity is that you have two surprisingly progressive and surprisingly effective veteran politicians as president who are seeing their re-election imperiled by a foreign policy issue.
It would seem self-evident to me that the most obvious distinction between the two is that in 1968, Americans were dying in Vietnam by the thousands and the Tet Offensive had exposed some of the lies that the military and the White House had been spreading about America's progress in Vietnam. The backlash to student protests often came from those Americans who - unlike privileged college students - could not keep their sons and brothers out of Vietnam. The famous hard hat riots were working class Whites venting their anger over the confusing narrative surrounding Vietnam at the protestors whom they saw as being un-American.
Now, I do think there's a real backlash towards a lot of these protests, as several have crossed lines from protesting to harassment. Many of the protestors are either pretty far to the left or Muslim, and it's easy for the same sort of person who supports Trump to see these people as fundamentally un-American, for both racist and ideological reasons.
However, the real concern is that Gaza protests threaten to disrupt Biden's re-election campaign, including the convention which is in - gulp - Chicago. To me, the primary difference is one of numbers. There is probably a great many Americans who are horrified in the abstract by the civilian suffering in Gaza. It's genuinely awful, but like many international calamities, it is also remote. It is not remote for Palestinian-Americans, but it's unclear how much it's that one very specific ethnic group driving these protests.
Instead, some of what we are seeing seems to be a form of protest chic. The Trump years, culminating in the George Floyd protests, were a great period for organizing and protesting very real and tangible injustices. Biden's election drained a lot of that energy, at least on the left-of-center. Gaza became a cause celebre for people who really need to belong to a cause. My guess is that a substantial number of non-Muslim protestors had no fucking clue about the situation in Gaza on October 6th. Even many non-Palestinian Muslims probably weren't that tuned into what was going on there or in the West Bank.
One thing we have seen in the past quarter century is a decline in linkage institutions that bind people together into groups with common goals and values. The protest movement offers that. You're a part of something big and important and moral, and that has a lot of appeal to idealistic young people.
What it does not really offer is a solution.
In 1968, the goal of protestors was to end the war in Vietnam. It is worth noting that they really weren't able to achieve this; Nixon doubled down on the war and as many Americans and Vietnamese died after his election as before. It would be another 5 years before America finally threw in the towel.
It's less clear what the goal is of these crop of student protestors. A "permanent ceasefire" isn't really a thing; that's called "peace". What's more, it's unclear how you get peace with neither side able to achieve a strategic victory. Hamas cannot defeat Israel and Israel cannot eradicate Hamas. True, the more extreme protest voices call for the eradication of Israel, but that simply isn't going to happen. That's like coming up with a rhyming chant and thinking you've cured cancer or unlocked nuclear fusion. It's pretty to think you've solved something, but that simply isn't happening.
In the end, protests become about the protestors. The emotional high of belonging to a Glorious Cause needs more and higher doses to achieve the same high. The actions at Columbia and elsewhere are no longer about Gaza, really, they are about constantly needing to be more outrageous on order to retain "engagement" and attention. Gaza is the pretext (unless you're Palestinian yourself), but the real target is "the Man" and currently the Man is Joe Biden.
Actually policy outcomes are irrelevant, beyond the paradox of "permanent ceasefire".
I do think that Democrats are right to be worried about protests this summer and into the fall. As Trump faces a possible felony conviction and is apparently sharting into his Depends in the courtroom, the new media will need a bothsides angle to level their coverage, and a handful of egregious, transgressive protestors will allow them to write about Biden promised us a boring presidency, but look at these kids!
However, I also think that the recent decisions by Columbia and Yale to take firmer action means that for a lot of these kids, the Fuck Around period is ending and the Find Out period has begun. Students should absolutely be free to protest, but when that becomes threats and a consistent disruption to student learning and safety, then it's time for Find Out. Hopefully that will induce some reflection on the part of the bulk of these protestors. Hopefully, they will start asking what they realistically hope to accomplish.
UPDATE: Chait, naturally, takes on this issue.
Some key passages:
It is true that most anti-Israel protesters do not engage in antisemitic harassment. It is also true that the formal demands associated with anti-Israel protests are legitimate (if not policies I’d endorse) and do not require the collective punishment of American Jews. But the reason incidents like these occur over and over is that they are part of the ideological character of the movements that give rise to them. Dismissing this pattern as the actions of “inflammatory individuals” is to evade the question of who is inflaming them.
And:
The main national umbrella group for campus pro-Palestinian protests is Students for Justice in Palestine. SJP takes a violent eliminationist stance toward Israel. In the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks, it issued a celebratory statement instructing its affiliates that all Jewish Israelis are legitimate targets:
Liberation is not an abstract concept. It is not a moment circumscribed to a revolutionary past as it is often characterized. Rather, liberating colonized land is a real process that requires confrontation by any means necessary. In essence, decolonization is a call to action, a commitment to the restoration of Indigenous sovereignty. It calls upon us to engage in meaningful actions that go beyond symbolism and rhetoric. Resistance comes in all forms — armed struggle, general strikes, and popular demonstrations. All of it is legitimate, and all of it is necessary.
SJP likewise directed its members to join the struggle directly: “This is a moment of mobilization for all Palestinians. We must act as part of this movement. All of our efforts continue the work and resistance of Palestinians on the ground.”
When you consider this kind of violent rhetoric in the context of slogans like “Globalize the Intifada,” especially when you consider the lack of authentic Israeli military targets outside of Israel, then the pattern of harassment and violence that follows from this propaganda is inevitable.
And finally:
Many students were attracted to these groups because of the horrendous human toll inflicted by Israel’s counterattack in Gaza. But the groups themselves are very clearly not advocating for “peace.” They are for war. Their objection is not to human suffering but that the wrong humans are suffering.
More broadly, these groups reflect the influence of “settler-colonist” theory, a fashionable school of thought that is being taught at many institutions. (In this sense, the universities themselves are incubating the protests against their own administrations.) Settler-colonist theory is a left-wing version of blood-and-soil nationalism, positing that every ethnic group possesses an inherent attachment to certain lands and is inherently alien to others. The theory has some use in explaining European imperialism, but when applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict, it turns the Jews into a global alien subaltern class.
This ideological framework works in concert with a rhetorical approach that seeks to shrink the mental space between Gaza and the outside world, inviting activists to conceive of themselves as literal participants in the struggle. Their practice of accusing anybody who refuses to endorse their views of murder — hence the otherwise bizarre chants accusing figures like American university professors and administrators of “genocide” — reimagines any dissent from the movement’s demands as a form of literal violence.
The decision by autoworkers to unionize at Chattanooga's Volkswagen plant is a major development in labor relations. Now, as the link above kind of notes, Volkswagen actively supports unions. They were not the impediment, so much as the South's ingrained resistance to empowering its poorest citizens. Unionizing additional auto plants in the South will prove more difficult.
But maybe not impossible. There seems to be an important moment for unions in this country. After decades of rolling back union membership and watching the gains in the economy funneled up to the very top, workers are fed up.
Paul Campos notes the growth of online conspiracy theories and the relative degeneration of even reasonably intelligent people. This was in light of the crazed person who lit himself on fire yesterday and died this morning. Embracing conspiracy theories is very common in authoritarian regimes, because you can't trust those in power for accurate news. What we have is something different, I think. We have killed off the gatekeepers like the Times and Walter Cronkite and nothing has taken its place, or perhaps everything everywhere has taken its place.
There's an argument that losing the authoritative voice has been a blow for human liberty, but I fear we are trending towards a 21st century Thomas Hobbes situation. The levelling nature of knowledge and authority leads to a sort of intellectual and cognitive anarchy that means that all knowledge if treated as equal.
What's more, the borderline lunatic person like Aaron Rodgers was trapped by these authoritative figures. Now, they are a few clicks away from like-minded people who can amplify the crazy. There was a music video from the '90s by Blind Melon - you'd remember it - with a girl wearing a bee costume wandering around until she finds a bunch of other people in bee costumes. It's great! She found her people! The internet is really good for that...until your people are similarly deranged. Then, instead of being checked, your cognitive fallacies are effectively multiplied.
Like the impact smart phones are having on your attention spans, I'm not sure there's a solution, but it's not great.
This is an astute piece by Nick Kristoff about Biden's support for Israel and, by default, Netanyahu. There were concrete and important reasons to support Israel this fall. However, the current situation has changed and the conditions in Gaza no longer can be left to the Israeli Right. The US helped defend Israel from the Iranian attack and it looks like a massive military aid package for Ukraine and Israel is actually going to pass the House.
Biden has to use that package to force better behavior from the IDF and open aid corridors into Gaza. What's important in the Kristoff piece is that it's not just disruptive college students who are calling for this, but moderate Democratic Senators like Van Hollen and Kaine. Nancy Pelosi signed off on the letter.
As Kristoff notes, this is somewhat out of character for Biden, as he usually an empathetic person and suspicious of military force, at least some of the time and in the Middle East especially.
My hope is that Biden had to wait to condition aid to Israel until after the GOP passed it through the House. If he was threatening to withhold aid, then the bill might not pass. Once the aid leaves Congress and gets to the White House, it can be held up until Israel finally accedes to humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Biden stood on principle to get us out of Afghanistan and paid a price for it, because it was the right thing to do. I understand why he though wrapping his arms around Netanyahu was necessary in November, but I am increasingly baffled as to why he thinks it makes sense now.
Look, one of the least important threats that a Trump Restoration would bring is bad policy. Not malicious policy, like weaponizing the government and destroying democratic practices, but just run of the mill bad policies. Chait and Milan Singh take note of what the effects would be. Chait is more focused on the political impact, which is that a tax cut in this environment will send interest rates spiraling upwards. Right now, interest rates are the anchor on the economy, but in a good way. We have a hold on inflation, but it's not tamed. Wages are still rising, which means that inflation will keep rising, especially in rent and anything linked to oil.
Another tax cut will explode the deficit even more. After a quarter century of not really having to care about the deficit, we kind of have to do. We don't need a lot of austerity, but we have to start claiming more non-wage income from the top 5%. Trump and Republicans oppose this, but if they come back into power and cut taxes, we will either enter massive austerity or we will see interest rates explode where they go from an anchor to a hole in the bottom of the boat.
Democracy and women's rights are the two most important issues in this election, but Republican plans to explode America's fiscal situation is important, too.
There are rumors that Mike Johnson (R-Trump's Pocket) will allow a vote on the aid bill that funds Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The Senate smartly packaged those so that Sinophobes and anti-Palestinian conservatives could find their way towards defying the de facto head of the Republican Party: Vladimir Putin. If there's an up-or-down vote, I would expect the package to pass.
What could happen after that is a motion to vacate that will almost certainly pass...unless Democrats agree to keep Johnson in power for at least a few more weeks. It's unclear how many Republicans will move to vacate the Speaker's Chair and also how much attention Trump can shed on the House while his trial is moving forward (quite briskly, too).
We have so starved Ukraine of needed aid that the tide of the war is shifting against them. Ideally, provided them with more ammunition can blunt the expected Russian spring offensive. This is a life or death moment for a democracy against an authoritarian ghoul, and it all could come down to whether Trump's hush money trial distracts him enough to allow it to slip through.
The next question is what concessions Democrats can wring from Johnson - aside from Ukraine - to keep the gavel in his tiny, sweaty hands.
Jon Chait looks at Paul Krugman's case that the economy is actually doing great. Some of the problem - and I'm surprised that Chait didn't go there, because he loves to go there - is that if you are a left wing activist, there is absolutely no yield in arguing that things are good. Chait quotes a few left of left of center people who make the case that the American economy (which is inarguably the strongest in the world right now) is always broken. Liberal economics is fundamentally bad and can never be good.
I do think that inflation is such a long-ago phenomenon that most people simply can't recall what it was like and therefore that the current spike really wasn't all that bad. That inflationary spike was not unique to the US, as it was caused by supply issues surrounding the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The problem is that inflation is a feedback loop. Prices rise, labor is tight so wages rise, so spending keeps pace and price keep rising, albeit at 3%, not 7%.
Where it gets really interesting is at the end when Chait notes that people's opinion of their OWN economic situation is pretty good. Consumer confidence and spending are pretty robust. People think that their own economic situation is sound, but that the economy as a whole is shitty. Some of this is negative polarization, as no Republican is going to say the economy is good with a Democratic president. The other factor is the Eeyore disposition of the American Left.
It does seem like we are starting to see opinions of the economy change. I'd love to see more Biden ads reminding people of what 2020 was actually like and that it happened under Trump. That seems self-evident, but it is precisely that sort of amnesia that has people saying the economy was better under Trump.
Trump's first trial begins today. Meanwhile, his meme stock has collapsed in value. Also, hey Times? The reason Trump is the first former president to go to trial is that Harding died and Nixon was preemptively pardoned by Ford.
The hush money trial is going to be an interesting one, as it will test whether he can abide by the judge's gag order (I'm guessing he won't, but will there be consequences) and the credibility of Michael Cohen. If the jury believes Cohen, then Trump is likely found guilty. Then, does he get a prison sentence? If so, how long?
There's part of me that sees some polling of 18-30 year olds having a positive opinion of Trump that suggests they should be running his rallies on TV again, because he's gotten seriously unhinged. Trump actually benefits when he get muzzled, because his words are such rank shit. OTOH, it would be funny if he got a few months in prison for this particular crime, perhaps his least significant.
So, yes, it looks like we will be avoiding World War III in the Middle East. The ability of the US to marshal a multinational coalition on a moment's notice to shoot down almost all of Iran's missiles was indeed a tour de force of American diplomatic and security capabilities. The massive barrage that Iran launched was effectively neutralized not just by US and Israeli weapons, but Jordanian and Saudi weapons, too.
Needless to say, you have the usual Republican attacks on Biden for "allowing" the attacks to happen, because something something Afghanistan weakness senility something. The reality is that the US's number one goal since October 8th has been to prevent a regional war. It's not something anyone wants, but it is something that could obviously happen. Israel took a huge risk attacking Iranian military figures in Damascus, and the US and its allies saved their butts the other night. I doubt Netanyahu cares, but Israel should.
Iran launched a massive attack of missiles and drones against Israel in retaliation for Israel killing military personnel in Syria. The attack was almost entirely thwarted by a combination of Israel's Iron Dome and the military assistance of not only the US and Britain, but some Arab nations, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
In all the sturm and drang over Gaza, it's important to place the events of October 7th and the subsequent invasion within the larger context of the ongoing proxy wars that Iran is fighting in the Middle East. Iran and Saudi Arabia have been fighting through proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen since at least 2010. Most Sunni majority countries like Jordan support Saudi Arabia, whereas a country like Iraq is torn and largely hoping to stay out of harm's way.
Hamas is part of the Axis of Resistance that Iran has built along the Shiite Crescent and with the Houthis in Yemen. The IDF striking in Damascus was a strike against this broader coalition and - importantly - something the US was really not on board with. Ever since 10-7, the US's position has been to try and stave off a longer and larger war between Israel and the entire Iranian coalition. We took on the Houthi in order to get this point across (and because they were fucking with international trade).
With every turn in this conflagration, the question always turns back to Netanyahu. He's a desperate man, working to avoid an election that will oust him from power and likely send him to jail. There's an argument that Iran had to respond to Israel's attack, and that - having made the response - Iran will elect not to escalate further. The other argument is that this was not a symbolic attack, but a real one, even if almost all the incoming missiles and drones were shot down.
So what does Netanyahu do now? He had the support of a number of countries last night, all of whom are doubtless trying to de-escalate the situation. If he goes it alone, how far will America and the Arab states go in support? Biden pretty clearly does not want to get dragged into a war in the Middle East, but he's also been far too supportive of Israel during worse actions in Gaza. OTOH, Iran's government sucks. But attacking Iran would legitimize a regime that doesn't have a lot of legitimacy with most of its population.
There are massive incentives on all sides to de-escalate. Israel can't afford another front in this war; Iran is fundamentally weak; the US wants no part of this and the Saudis are trying to build a more stable region. But then you have Netanyahu, who's incentives might run the other way.
If the next few days bring bluster and tough talk, but no more missiles flying over the Jordan River, I think maybe someone finally hammered a good idea into Netanyahu's head.
Trump and the GOP - both in Arizona and nationally - are really screwed by the Arizona Supreme Court decision on abortion. We keep coming back to how much GOP politicians really believe the shit they spew on Fox News for the rubes. Abortion is a great example of this. Most Republican pols don't actually care; certainly Donald Trump does not give two shits about abortion. He has almost certainly paid for and pressured women into getting them.
However, the GOP has wed itself to an electoral strategy that relies on mobilizing a very narrow range of voters. and that very much includes religious fundamentalist theocrats for whom abortion is of paramount importance. As long as Roe was on the books, they could safely pander to their extremes, but now that Dobbs has erased that, we have more and more examples like Arizona, where the Talibangelicals are making things very uncomfortable for elected officials.
Bless their hearts.
A fascinating piece in the Post about how the global demand for cocaine has destabilized a once peaceful country, in this case Ecuador.
What struck me is the basic tension between certain liberal/left positions on decriminalization and - at the extremes - police abolition and damage wrought in places like Ecuador when you stop trying to interdict drugs. As in Nicaragua, the president has responded with something akin to martial law and this has made both men very popular. I'll say again, too many people forget Thomas Hobbes' basic insight that the first responsibility of a state is security. The cosplay revolutionaries think that bringing the system down will free people and led to some sort of "better world" when inevitably it leads to predation of the peaceful by the violent and then a form of repressive police response.
Reading the story, it's very easy to become sympathetic to the notion that Ecuador needs a US Ranger battalion to go down there and exert extreme violence on people who are waging war on their own government. That's an obvious non-starter, but the lack of capacity of Mexican armed forces, for instance, is a huge impediment to stabilizing that country. Hopefully, the Ecuadorian military can regain control.
But I also get the concerns of human rights' groups who fear the impact of militarizing police functions. It's just so frustrating seeing ostensibly intelligent people look at what's going on in Ecuador (or Mexico or Venezuela or Central America) and think that America needs less police and more legalized drugs.
A similar dynamic is how legalized gambling in the US has led to increasing problems for many Americans. The Shohei Ohtani spectacle is a good example of how debilitating a gambling problem can be. Similarly, addicts are real. Addiction is a powerful cause of homelessness and poverty.
When Portugal legalized almost all drugs, things went great for a while. Recently, things have gotten worse. Again, "this time will be different" is one of the great lies we tell ourselves.
Drugs are bad. Gambling is bad. Sure, in small doses I guess it's OK, but for many people there is no such thing as a small dose. And gangs are REALLY bad and an inevitable byproduct of this shit.
But right now there are people who simultaneously think that Biden building a port in Gaza to alleviate famine is "imperialism" but reducing drug enforcement which is destabilizing Ecuador is enlightened.
Paul Campos looks at a now viral speech by conservative billionaire Thomas Klingenstein, a prominent money guy behind the reactionary Claremont Institute. In it, we get a glimpse at why so many people who would seem otherwise capable of looking at the overwhelming evidence that Trump is manifestly unfit for office have decided that he's the "right man of the job".
In this vision of America, the country teeters on the edge of destruction. In this, Trump's supporters and critics align. For his supporters, if he's not elected, America will collapse; for his critics, if he IS elected, American democracy could end. It is exhausting, of course, to constantly be on the edge of disaster, but that's our moment.
The evidence in support of "Trump is a threat to democracy" seems pretty clear. He worked to overthrow the 2020 election; he routinely violates the laws that as president he is sworn to uphold; he has explicitly promised that he will use his office to punish his enemies; he has worked to strip women of their right to choose and will likely work to strip other rights from groups of Americans he hates. This is in the historical and written record.
What Klingenstein argues (and I defy you to listen to the whiny speech in its entirety) is that America is about to collapse into a Maoist hellscape. "Multiculturalism"/DEI, "socialism" and tyranny are on the march and about to stamp out American freedom. The Left hates America, you see, and wants to destroy it.
Now, there is a fair amount of "America is uniquely bad" crap on the academic left. However, the argument that "DEI is killing everything good about America" is largely projection. It's projection that is felt extremely keenly by billionaires. Yes, given substantive control of government, Democrats will absolutely raise taxes on billionaires - hopefully by a lot. For a certain brand of billionaire, ALL taxes are theft and raising them on anyone (but especially the billionaires) is just obviously Marxist.
Where this falls apart is in what Campos terms the "Fascist Contradiction":
The Fascist Contradiction is that the Nation is essentially great and pure and chosen for its world-historical destiny, but simultaneously decadent and depraved and almost past all saving, hence the need for its resurrection via the leadership of the Leader. This is amusingly (or maybe not) captured by Trump’s claims that America had ceased to be great by 2016, became great again for exactly four years, then ceased to be great on January 20th — or perhaps January 6th — 2021, but can become great again in a few months.
You can't have a logical framework for this. It exists beyond cause and effect or the historical record. For instance, Klingenstein's critique that the left thinks that slavery makes America an unredeemable country isn't true (outside a few outliers). However, slavery did put America on a different path that continues to have echoes down to today. So was America great when it had slaves? Jim Crow? If it only became great after Jim Crow ended, was it just great during Reagan's presidency?
One of Obama's greatest rhetorical flourishes was in pointing out that the American project was about creating a more perfect Union. Democracy, in this framework, is an action verb. This ultimately is the normie liberal position. America is an ongoing project. For Trumpists, America is his rhetorical gambit of "American carnage".
In the 1960s and '70s, a similar dynamic was roiling our politics. It was an age of assassinations, hyperinflation, unprecedented political corruption and national humiliation. In the end, we came through it. It led to an aging Irishman selling an optimist vision of what America might be and the general ebb and flow of political fortunes, but the country survived and hopefully will again.
It is said that money is the life's blood of politics. If that is true - and I have some qualms about that - then Trump is bleeding out. My qualms are that money is less a mover of elections than a reflection of support. If Candidate A is kicking ass in her fundraising, it's because a lot of people with the means to give are supporting her. Dark money and PACs have muddied this picture considerably, because they can allow billionaires to funnel money around whatever weak campaign finance laws still exist.
Trump - who was found guilty of lying about his wealth to scam loans and evade taxes - has said that he raised $50,000,000 in a single night. This was - suspiciously - twice as much as Biden raised at a fundraised a few days earlier. There was also a caveat that suggested that a lot of that money will go to PACs and "affiliated groups". The math is very suspect, as it would require attendees to give more than they can actually give legally. It's Trump; it stinks to high heaven.
We do know two additional things.
First, Trump is going to strip the RNC and his campaign of funds to stay out of prison. It won't be ALL the money, but sizable amounts - especially this summer - will go to legal fees.
Second, the Trump campaign is going to be threadbare. We've already seen that they are WAY behind on hiring staffers in their state offices. Trump ran his business as a family affair. There were only a few people who made the decisions and implemented his will. That was because, again, Trump was not a builder or developer, but a marketing and licensing firm. He was frustrated by trying to govern because it's complicated and somewhat autonomous from the White House. That's part of his "Deep State" frustration.
For decades, we heard people say "We need to run this country like a business" as if governing was the same as running a retail outlet. Trump tried to run America like his business and couldn't, which is why he's got a plan to strip the government of workers if he get elected.
As it is, his campaign is going to be understaffed and controlled by lackeys who will do his bidding, as he becomes more and more desperate.
The smart money is already shorting Truth Social, which has fallen in value by a quarter and seems poised to continue to fall. I would guess the smart money will stay away from Trump, especially if he starts to fall in the polls as his legal troubles mount.
Josh Marshall examines Kari Lake's response to the Arizona ruling on the 1864 abortion law. It's pretty funny (except not), because Lake and other anti-abortion zealots are realizing just how toxic their anti-abortion positions are. Despite some pushback from certain Talibangelicals, most conservatives are waking up to the reality that Dobbs is killing them. So you wind up with the bizarre statements like Lake's that basically retreat from their own positions on abortion while embracing their own positions while denying that that's what they're doing.
I found this column from 1941 about "who becomes a Nazi". It's a fascinating historical document, but what the author does is note that there are a handful of "born Nazis" and then a bunch of people who will acquiesce to Nazism out of self-interest or even indifference. So many Republican politicians simply don't care about the things their voters care for. We know in our bones that Trump has paid for abortions; apparently he wanted to abort Tiffany. Yet he also knows he needs the Talibangelicals. We see a similar dynamic with normie Republicans who have embraced America's Worst Person ever since 2016, even though they all know that he's a criminal, an authoritarian, a narcissist, a moral sewer and a con artist.
There's an old adage that it's so much simpler to tell the truth, because you only need to remember one story, whereas if you lie you have to retain multiple versions of events. Republicans are like those liars who have to keep so many contradictory versions of the world straight in their head that they wind up speaking gibberish.
Reactionary judges on the Arizona Supreme Court just banned ALL abortions in the state, though I think there's a temporary stay on the ruling.
Total bans are incredibly politically toxic, and this has to help Biden and muddy the waters around Trump's non-answer on the issue yesterday.
As Josh Marshall notes, Trump's statement on abortion yesterday was nonsensical. He very much wants to avoid talking about abortion, because even the idiots and grifters around him have figured out that abortion is an electoral loser. His statement about "leaving it up to the states" is the sort of rhetorical dodge that Republican appointees to the Supreme Court would resort to in their confirmation hearings.
Again, as Marshall notes, the real question is whether he would sign a national ban if it reached his desk and would he apply the Comstock Act to the mailing of abortion medications. He never addressed this and he most likely never will. He can't win, because if he takes the popular position - Biden's position - he will lose his evangelical support. If he doesn't, he will lose the debate over Dobbs, which has altered the dynamics of every election since it was ushered from the Assembly of Religious Experts.
Trump does not do normal interviews with actual journalists. He sits down with Fox, OANN and Newsmax for fluff pieces. If he ever should cross paths with an actual journalist, will they try and pin him down? Or will they point to this bullshit non-statement as proof that Trump is a "moderate" for not wanting a national ban, when we all know he will sign one?
Folks like Yglesias continue to argue that Trump in 2016 was a moderate because he opposed Paul Ryan's plans to cut Social Security and Medicare, but I think we all know that if Congress passed such cuts, he would sign them. If a national abortion ban were to pass, he would sign that, too.
The press is unlikely to press him on this, but this is precisely the peril of having a debate with Biden.
I'm old enough to remember when Jack Welch was considered one of the four or five greatest Americans, back in the '90s. He had saved (I guess) GE and was considered a savant of business management. There's a pretty good argument, however, that Welch's "Shareholder Value" school of management has been an unmitigated disaster for American industry, and the best example of this is Boeing.
Fundamentally, orienting your company's performance around increasing stock prices (shareholder value) is mistaking cause and effect. A successful company will grow and prosper over time. If you are consistently working to produce a better product, you should be fine, as long as it can be made at a price point that consumers want. There's a great passage from Henry Ford in a deposition when he was sued by the Dodge brothers, where he says that if you make a good product at a fair price, you can't help but make money. Ford didn't care about share price, he cared about the quality and price of his product. In the process, he incidentally became filthy rich.
Today's very savvy MBAs and corporate managers are all attuned to the price of their stock options. Under the Welch model, you give your executives these options so they are heavily incentivized to increase the short term increase in the price of the stock. You have made them partners in the success of the company. The problem with this theory is that stocks are volatile, and that volatility can warp the incentives of the corporation.
The clearest outcome of this sort of thinking is seen in the McKinsey/Blackwater school of business. The basic idea is to "reduce costs", which is really just firing workers and shuttering long term investments. Blackwater comes into a company and strips it for parts which can be sold at greater profit as smaller segments than the whole might be worth. This is great for Blackwater, but the company is toast.
All of this is fundamentally at the root of American inequality. That top 3% are making money - not off producing a superior product at a reasonable price, but by making short term decisions in return for short term gains. Even if that means ending democracy.
The obvious solution would seem to be rewriting the tax code to short circuit the incentives, but that will require a better Congress than the one we have now.
This TikTok made the rounds over the last couple of days and was widely and mercilessly mocked, as it should have been. First of all, shout out to her abuse of the filter on her video. I bet she was going for Sandra Bullock, but she looks like a 3D anime character.
The idea that their family is "struggling" is based on their ridiculous consumption habits. On one macro level, having people buy a bunch of stuff they can't afford is a short term boost for the economy. In the long term is can create serious problems (see 2008). What really is inexcusable is the idea that "the economy" is bad when you are leveraging the shit out of your lives in order to drive one of those ridiculous penis extensions. A pickup truck used to be a working person's tool, now it's an exurban status symbol with the price tag to match.
Your inability to budget your money is not a sign of a weak economy, it's a sign of weak self-discipline. Oh, and this goes just as much for people living in Brooklyn and complaining about the rent.
Yglesias makes the case for broad based funding for carbon mitigation technologies, and I'm guessing he was prompted by this piece in the Times about spreading microdroplets of water into high clouds to reflect more sunlight away from the planet.
There are certain pre-existing ideas in some environmental circles that have greatly impeded efforts to combat climate change. A legacy resistance to nuclear power is certainly one of them. Opposition to geo-engineering looks to be another one. There are obvious concerns about monkeying around with the atmosphere, but it seems more like the default position of many environmentalists is de-growth and/or punishing oil companies. I have no brief with oil companies, but that would be a knock-on effect rather than a primary cause in my book. If we bankrupt Exxon or not, I don't care. I just don't want the world to cook.
Trump accused Joe Biden of using cocaine during the State of the Union speech.
So we now know that Donald Trump uses cocaine. I think we always suspected it, but this would be confirmation.
Paul Campos links to an Economist study of excess deaths during Covid. Excess deaths are the spike away from the "normal" number of deaths in a given population in a given time period. If an elderly person dies of Covid at home, they might not show up as a Covid statistic, but their death was still caused by Covid. Similarly, if they had a heart attack but couldn't access health care, because ERs were overwhelmed...same difference.
The basic idea was that during Covid public health officials were either overwhelmed or forbidden from keeping accurate tallies of the dead. The US, despite efforts by people like Ron DeSantis to screw with the numbers, actually kept reasonably accurate tallies of the Covid dead. The official death toll was 1,170,000 (consider that number for a moment), when the the "excess death number" was 1,400,000.
You can look at the numbers in the Economist, but it's striking how some countries' numbers are just ridiculously skewed. It should come as no surprise that Russia and China lead the way with fake numbers, but India's inclusion is likely simply a lack of capacity in their public health department.
For everyone who said and still says "It's just the flu", please do me a favor and fuck off. There is no doubt that masking and distancing were incredibly traumatic, but so are a million and a half deaths. Oh, and Covid still kills about a 1,000 people a week in the US. That's a Vietnam War's worth of deaths every year.
The Times - of all outlets - interviews Simon Rosenberg, the author of the Hopium Chronicles substack, about his prediction that Biden will win in November.
One thing I think he says that might be worth emphasizing is that we have a sort of "polling industry mindset" that really isn't predictive of much in politics, especially this far out from the election. Nate Silver, Nate Cohn and others have all made us feel like polling experts when we ask to look at crosstabs, sample sizes and screens. The reality is that polling is an approximation of any given moment. Polls are what they are, but they are not elections. Arguments that Trump shocked the world in 2016 so therefore he is going to shock the world in 2024 are fallacious reasoning. It's equally as likely that Biden wins Texas and Florida; polls can be wrong in the other direction. Witness 2022.
We have started to see some real movement towards Biden as it becomes clear that it will be Biden v Trump. However, it's important to remember that traditionally few professionals used to pay any attention to polling before Labor Day. It was always considered largely noise.
Every so often there will be a post somewhere about weird laws that remains on the books decades or centuries after they were passed. You can't walk a snake on a leash in Kansas is one of them. You're genuinely curious as to why those laws were passed.
The Comstock Act, on the other hand, was a notorious "Blue Law" that prevented any mailing of materials that could be deemed "obscene". While it was partly aimed at pornography, it also included information on reproduction, including abortifacients. (I've been slowly making my way through HBO's Boardwalk Empire, set in the 1920s, and a small subplot is trying to get a women's health clinic up and running with the Catholic Church censoring everything. Like you couldn't say "pregnant", you had to say "with child.")
The current battleground over abortion is medication abortions through mifepristone and similar drugs. Red states have been able to shutter clinics, but if women can order drugs through the mail, then are they even TRYING to oppress women?!
The Comstock Act is an embarrassment to a 21st century country, especially one that has a culture much more accepting of nudity, sex and foul language than the 19th. If Republicans and Talibangelicals want to run on banning porn along with mifepristone...be my guest.
For Democrats, the three most elusive states to win are Texas, Florida and North Carolina. If Democrats win those states, it's a wipeout election.
So where do they stand? North Carolina has nominated an absolute freakshow of a gubernatorial candidate. He's on record opposing woman suffrage FFS. Texas has Ted Cruz on the ballot and he's one of the worst people not named Donald Trump. Texas has also been so very, very poorly governed by the GOP, though hating on immigrants does surprisingly well there.
Then there's Florida. Florida has been the site of Democratic heartbreak since 2000. It's also moved to the right since then. However, we have ballot initiatives that might help Biden and Democrats, including the Senate race, if the election is close to begin with.
Winning a Senate majority could come down to ousting Cruz and Voldemort cosplay enthusiast Rick Scott. If abortion is the issue that makes that happen, so much the better.
Josh Marshall highlights an op-ed from the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In it, the author says about January 6th: "We all saw it." Here's the nut graph:
This is not subjective. We all saw it. Plenty of leaders today try to convince the masses we did not see what we saw, but our eyes don’t deceive. (If leaders began a years long campaign today to convince us that the Baltimore bridge did not collapse Tuesday morning, would you ever believe them?) Trust your eyes. Trump on Jan. 6 launched the most serious threat to our system of government since the Civil War. You know that. You saw it.
We have taken it as an article of faith that Trumpists are immune to facts and that we live in a post-factual world where nothing really matters. He then invokes Godwin's Law:
As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump. We can debate the success and mindset of our current president, as we have about most presidents in our lifetimes, but Biden was never a threat to our democracy. Trump is. He is unique among all American presidents for his efforts to keep power at any cost.
Personally, I find it hard to understand how Americans who take pride in our system of government support Trump. All those soldiers who died in World War II were fighting against the kind of regime Trump wants to create on our soil. How do they not see it?
The March 25 edition of the New Yorker magazine offers some insight. It includes a detailed review of a new book about Adolf Hitler, focused on the year 1932. It’s called “Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power” and is by historian Timothy W. Ryback. It explains how German leaders – including some in the media -- thought they could use Hitler as a means to get power for themselves and were willing to look past his obvious deficiencies to get where they wanted. In tolerating and using Hitler as a means to an end, they helped create the monstrous dictator responsible for millions of deaths.
How are those German leaders different from people in Congress saying the election was stolen or that Jan. 6 was not an insurrection aimed at destroying our government? They know the truth, but they deny it. They see Trump as a means to an end – power for themselves and their “team” – even if it means repeatedly telling lies.
I guess the hopeful side of me thinks that eventually the memory of January 6th will crowd out the nonsensical memories of things being great under Trump. Trump was president four years ago, when we were huddled in our homes hoping not to die. Trump was president when the George Floyd protests rocked this country. His presidency was a shitshow.
However, while the editorial does make the case of "We all saw it" I think we have to acknowledge that 35% of Americans think it was fine. Which...OK. Trump can't win with 35%. It's really those 10-15% who think it was "bad" but are willing to wave it away in false equivalencies about Biden something something argle bargle.
The simple truth is that in a sane world, a world based on objective facts, that editorial wouldn't be necessary.
If Biden wins and holds the Congress, he will only have a bare majority in the Senate. That majority will not include Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema, though. Biden is routinely accused of "lawfare" against Trump, which is rank bullshit, but if your opponents are calling you a tyrant, hey, why not lean into it.
If you can hold the levels of power, there are two things that you could do through reconciliation that would be really, really satisfying. The first is to tax the shit out of billionaires and the second is to tax the shit out of megachurches.
Billionaires continue to support Trump, as Chait notes, because even though they thought January 6th crossed a line, there is additional millions to be had from tax cuts so...po-tay-to/po-tah-to.
As for the megachurches, the tax exemption for religious organizations has allowed cretinous scum like Joel Osteen to become filthy rich off the backs of his parishioners. That needs to stop.
Look, you aren't winning those groups and what's more, they aren't helping the country.
Eat the rich, damnit.
Josh Marshall talks about the one thing I've been waiting for since Donald Trump emasculated his primary opponents in 2016: the breakup of the GOP.
American parties are coalitional, catch-all parties. This comes as a shock to many young people on the Left, who can't understand why their choice has to be either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. As someone said, "politics is a bus, not a taxi" and you have to go where the bus takes you and hope it's close to where you want to go. This coalitional rift over Gaza is very real and very concerning.
However, if you want schisms and rifts, check out the GOP, especially the House caucus. Basically, the GOP is currently made up of several factions:
- First, there are the "faith based" Trumpists who are immune to facts and logics. Currently this is the dominant faction, encompassing everyone from Mike Johnson to Lauren Boebert.
- Second, you have old Chamber of Commerce Republicans. These are the money men and they will vote for fascism if it means lower taxes. However, they have to be pretty nervous about Trump's complete takeover of the GOP fundraising apparatus.
- Finally, you have the old neo-con, national security conservatives and they are fed up with Trump and his bullshit. Are there enough of them to sway an election if they break for Biden? It's tough to say, but it seems like the pressure on Johnson to bring the Ukraine bill to the floor is immense. Someone like Ken Buck is more or less to the right of Attila the Hun, but he can't countenance what Trump is doing to America's place in the world.
The key demographics in this election are that second group of Republicans and the young people who voted for Biden in 2020. If the money men vote for Trump, but withhold their funds, that's big. If their wives or children pressure them into not supporting Trump, that could be huge. That first group is a cult; you can't convince them of shit. But if enough dominoes fall, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans might fracture.
Biden's challenge is to bring young people back into his coalition, but I remain convinced that any campaign that relies on voters under 35 is in trouble. If Biden can break with Netanyahu, that might bring some people home. But if he can also moderate his economic platform a bit, he might draw in enough people like Mark Cuban who would otherwise vote for a normie Republican.
Coalitions are fractious things. Left of Center coalitions are especially fractious and factional. What we are seeing in the GOP is a parallel factionalism that could burst asunder under the right conditions. We are already seeing huge defections by suburban, college-educated Whites.
If the GOP finally fractures, it would be in the nick of time.
I know this happened a few days ago, but I've been traveling.
There are a few people I hate. Most odious creatures of the Right like Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Traitor Greene are more curiosities, oddities that you stop, look at mouth agape. Trump I hate.
One person I hated with such a crystalline passion was Joe Lieberman. He was the Senator from my state (not my Senator) from 2000 until Chris Murphy finally bounced his soggy ass from the Senate.
I was frustrated by Joe Manchin, but I get why he did what he did. Democrats have to be a big tent party and that includes fairly conservative guys from West Virginia. I disagree with his principles, but I believe he had them. (Sinema has no principles that I can discern.)
Joe Lieberman represented one of the strongest Democratic states in the country, and he represented it from about as far right in the Democratic Party as you can be. He was a sanctimonious prick who was deeply in love with himself. I've actively marched for very few candidates or done phone banking, because I'm not convinced of its efficacy and I'm an introvert, especially on the phone. I did both for Ned Lamont when he took on Lieberman.
So far, the last six months have claimed Henry Kissinger and Joe Lieberman. Yes, it claimed Alexei Navalny, but he was dead the minute he entered that prison, it just took a long time for his heart to stop. Meanwhile Jimmy Carter hangs on while this fucker died.
Trump's hamburdler has the opportunity to do the funniest thing.
Today was supposed to be the day that Donald Trump finally faced some form of concrete reckoning. Sure, he's been convicted of fraud three times now. Sure, he's been found guilty of defamation twice and liable for sexual assault. Sure, he's lost the popular vote twice and the Electoral College once. Sure, he's been impeached twice.
Still.
Today was the day the law was finally going to hit him where it hurt and he got a reprieve. He is not out of the woods, certainly, as he will likely still struggle to find a bond, but by halving the needed funds necessary to secure the bond, he might wriggle free. And while Trump and his partisans have claimed that he is being treated to a double standard, this is a double standard. Few people would likely be extended this sort of consideration, having already been convicted of fraud three times.
There is outrage rippling through the online left of center, because this was going to be the day. And now it's not. Trump has escaped from normally crippling defeats so many times before - hell, the Access Hollywood tape or denigrating a Gold Star family should have been the end of him - that he feels invincible. But of course, he's not. He is racking up a string of legal defeats that would destroy most people, but since Trump is nothing if not fueled by petty grievance, large grievances just keep him going.
The hush money trial will now start in April 15th. I would wager that Trump will be found guilty, because he's fucking guilty, but you never know. However, a guilty finding might not send him to jail. He might get a suspended sentence while his appeal plays out. He might only get fined.
The sickening fact is that rich people rarely do time for their crimes. It's not unique to Trump.
For millions of us, we waited for anything to suggest that a moment of reckoning was finally at hand, and it feels like we were cheated of it.
Trump still has to find the money though. I'm not sure he can.
UPDATE: Jesus wept, the Times decides to run a column comparing Trump to Al Capone in a favorable way.
Being an adult in many ways is accepting that you won't get everything you want all the time. At best, life is a two-steps-forward, one-step-back sort of endeavor.
The House GOP are children. The compromise bill to keep the government functioning has enraged all the usual howler monkeys in the Chaos Caucus and Marjorie Traitor Greene is looking to bring down Mike Johnson (R-Gilead) without, of course, a plan for what comes next.
Keeping the government open would seem like the most basic function of members of Congress. Like the literal least they can do. With a Democratic Senate and White House, that will require some necessary tradeoffs and a GROWN UP WOULD UNDERSTAND THIS. As Scott Lemieux notes, the lunatics in the GOP have made Ken Buck look like the voice of reason. That's... something.
The other element to all this is the irresponsible rhetoric coming from irresponsible people. The Congress has passed a compromise bill to keep the government open and provide for some important policy goals to be fulfilled, like additional border patrol agents that Republicans say they want. Yes, sadly for them it means that fewer children will be in poverty, but beating up on immigrants means you have to feed some kids, sorry.
The rhetoric that oozes from the fever swamp is that of apocalyptic collapse. About everything all the time. Now, yes, Democrats point to a potential Trump restoration as a potentially lethal threat to democratic governance in America. That is true, but then again...that is true. Dems say this, but only because that's exactly what Trump is promising he will do if re-elected. Meanwhile, the GOP thinks that earned income tax credits are the end of the republic. There's $300,000,000 for Ukraine - completely inadequate, but still something - that the howler monkeys will attack as being the end of America or something.
Some of this is simply the way that politics functions in an age of high negative partisanship. You see the other side as intrinsically alien. Social media makes it worse by amplifying the worst voices in any debate. Trump is our first social media president, and he's "good" at shouty ALL CAPS frothing madness that drives so much "engagement". Hell, I'm guilty of it, too, by responding rather than blocking the lunatics on Twitter.
Why do people who are otherwise decent people support Trump? The man has been convicted of fraud three separate times; he has been found liable for sexual assault; he attempted to overturn the election; he has committed serial financial crimes.
However, if you believe that $1billion for more Head Start programs and military day care centers are the "end of America" then this sputtering demagogue who threatens to wreck havoc on Washington DC seems less like the "Worst American Ever" and more like the champion of your bizarro cause.
There are two stories that are not political that I think testify to the weirdness of the age we live in - where "information" is abundant but unreliable.
The first is the Kate Middleton saga. It is, of course, very sad when a young mother has to confront a cancer diagnosis. There is a superficial plausibility that they wanted to take time in order to tell their kids, in order not to upset them, though there is no good time for that conversation with young children. More astonishing is that "the Firm" so bungling the media approach to this. The photoshopped picture, the complete absence until yesterday...who thought that was a good idea? Into this void, every conspiracy theory expanded.
The second is the Shohei Ohtani gambling story. Ohtani is one of the most bankable stars in all of sports and his interpreter (perhaps) racked up huge gambling debts and money from Ohtani's account was used to pay it off. At first, Ohtani said he was helping a dear friend out, then he switched his story to one where his friend stole from him, which strains credulity.
In both cases, we have a hamfisted series of public statements though for different reasons. Ohtani commented too soon and the Royal Family not soon enough. The absence of even a cursory statement from Middleton created a set of conditions where people could fill in their own plausible and implausible theories. Ohtani committed to one story (I paid my friends debts) which became a problem because he may have violated baseball's rules and California law in doing so, so he switched his story.
There is a particular type of moral scold who is wagging their censorious finger at everyone who advanced theories about Middleton, under the guise of "she deserves privacy". Does she? Isn't she a public servant employed at the taxpayer's expense? We freaked out when the Secretary of Defense was out of commission and incommunicado for a few days, and while the Princess of Wales is considerably less important than the SecDef, it's still a public position and there were months of this rather than days.
What's more, it's increasingly harder to understand what "deserves" or "should" means anymore. There are lots of things that "should" happen, but they simply won't. Middleton should've been able to say that she had surgery and that complications ensued that will require more treatment until she had a chance to talk to her kids. She didn't do that and - as a public figure - speculation bloomed. Did she "deserve" that? No, probably not. Is anyone - and I mean ANYONE - surprised that it happened? Similarly, baseball's rules are VERY clear about gambling. Does Ohtani deserve to be suspended for helping a friend? No, but he likely broke a sacrosanct rule and what did he actually expect?
I hope Ms Middleton makes a full recovery and enjoys a long healthy life watching her children grow up. I hope Shohei Ohtani does not get the Pete Rose/Shoeless Joe treatment, even if he does get a lengthy suspension. I also hope that the people who are responsible for public relations can learn something from this ridiculousness.
Russia and China's veto of a ceasefire plan for Gaza pretty much gives the game away. It has been more than a little suspicious how young people in America have become frankly radicalized over Gaza. There's no doubt that it's a humanitarian nightmare and both Hamas and Israel are culpable for multiple war crimes. But horrible things happen in the world all the time. Myanmar, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Haiti...take you pick.
Hamas' primary source of support is Iran, who is allied with Russia and China. That Russia and China have scuttled this plan suggests that their primary goal is continue to hinder Biden's ability to reclaim his base and help elect Trump. You want "election interference" Donny? Here it is.
That oily motherfucker has slithered out of so many traps that it's tempting to think that he was never have a reckoning.
The caveat is that the perception that he is never held accountable isn't exactly true. Yes, like millions of Americans, I want his bloated, diapered ass behind bars, and that is unlikely to happen soon enough. However, there have been "accountability moments" for Trump: numerous court defeats for his policies, especially on immigration; the 2018 midterms; the 2020 election; the Trump University and Trump Foundation fraud decisions and now the E. Jean Carroll and NY fraud cases.
The latter two are important because they hit Trump's ego at its most vulnerable spot. Trump isn't "rich" in the way we would typically understand it. Trump is leverage to high hell to support a celebrity lifestyle. Trump isn't a "builder", he's a brand manager whose brand is "Donald Trump, NY Tycoon and Celebrity."
The impending margin call on that lifestyle on Monday is huge. It is not our preferred outcome of Trump being frogmarched into Danbury penitentiary in an orange jumpsuit, but it hits him where he lives. Literally. Trump pulled in all his markers to pay the Carroll bond. Now he faces a bond five times as large, and no one will loan money to a guy guilty of lying about his properties to secure loans. He's also leverage everything he owns. That's so critically important. Trump HAS to appear rich. The fragility of that position is what has him scrambling.
We have simply conceded that Trump has some sort of secret sauce for "winning, so much winning" because he managed to squeak out that catastrophic win in 2016, but he's been losing ever since, and hopefully Monday will see him lose bigly yet again.
Josh Marshall echoes what I've been saying for a couple of years now: we, as a society, underwent a shocking series of traumas from March of 2020-January of 2021, and we have never truly processed them in a way that has allowed us to move on. The great unspoken mover of politics right now is this lingering sense of doom and trauma. Incumbent governments everywhere are unpopular; in fact, Biden is reasonably popular on the global scale. The reason this is happening in contradiction of some pretty good objective metrics is because we have never been able to process the events of the annus horribilus.
It began four years ago this month. Things shut down ominously, I will not forget driving home from Georgia down the Jersey Turnpike and it was ghostly empty at 8:30 at night. We lived in fear of every delivery, every chance encounter. They were stacking bodies like cordwood in New York.
Then we had the eruption of anger over George Floyd, which folded into the simmering anger over Trump's rank unfitness for office and the blind devotion of his cult. I remember getting a text from a wrestler who asked if anything ever got better.
Then, of course, there was January 6th, an event whose only closest predecessor was secession in 1860. When Trump was not convicted in his second impeachment, we were faced with the very real possibility that we would be faced with the exact situation we are faced with today: a Trump re-election with dire consequences for America and the world.
Since then, we also had the Delta and Omicron waves. The Delta wave nearly killed me and during the Omicron wave, we made the decision to keep the school open without testing, risking the lives of the faculty in the process. The entire period from March of 2020 through roughly January of 2022 was a period that alternated between fear and anger. That's almost two years of living through a prism of trauma.
If the Biden team are not working to tie the worst of the pandemic to Trump, they are guilty of malpractice. However, the problem runs deeper, because Biden was president during the second half of the pandemic - the half where people began to resent the precautions being taken and the inflationary costs of the pandemic and then the war.
When it comes to inflation, there is no scenario where Trump becomes president and makes inflation better. His preferred policies - tariffs and deportations combined with deficit funded tax cuts - will increase inflation. This should not be a controversial opinion; it's economic fact. However, no one really cares about facts. Some of this is the pervasive effort of Republicans and Trump to destroy the idea of objective truth, but it's also a byproduct of the balkanized media landscape of social media.
I've struggled to understand why young people are so incredibly outraged by events in Gaza. It's not that events in Gaza aren't outrageous; they are. But why do they care? There are worse events happening right now in Myanmar and there are comparable events happening all the time in Africa. Haiti is on fire. This sort of human horror show happens all the time. Why Gaza?
Some of it is that anti-American elements in Russia, China, Iran and Iran's proxies see a perfect opportunity to exploit this very real tragedy to create a new fissure in America's culture wars. That wouldn't work, though, if there wasn't a real sense of displaced anger among America's youth that has no place to land.
The fact that the Biden Administration is doing more than any other administration ever by a country mile on climate and pollution is objectively true. The vibes of climate doomerism are real, though.
If the vibes change, I think Biden wins Texas, Florida and North Carolina. If they don't, America could see a dictatorial strongman seize power - or not depending on distressingly thin margins.
Finding a peace solution in Gaza will only go so far to bring young voter back into Biden's column. I just don't know what else will.
UPDATE: I forgot about everyone freaking out about crime. Crime absolutely spiked and it has absolutely declined and we only feel the increase.
There was a scholar of fascism that noted that in Weimar Germany, Nazis would say horrific things, they would be called out on it, and then they would say, "It's just a joke, of course we wouldn't round up all the Jews and kill them."
Marshall points out that Trump instinctively does this with his "bloodbath" language. For Trump, though, it's more that "logic" of dominance. He calls the tune, and everyone else has to dance to it. If we are debating whether he meant a metaphorical or literal bloodbath, we are dancing to his tune and profoundly missing the point, which is that he has already tried violence before.
What's going to be interesting is how he reacts to the impending fines in his fraud case. His mental breakdown about this is linked to the fact that he cannot make the judge dance to his tune. All his bullying and braggadocio not only doesn't work, but it backfires.
Trump always seems to slip through the nets of justice, but if he has to pay his fines next week...
A structure in nominally communist states like the Soviet Union and China is the creation of the party-state, whereby the party controls the apparatus of the state. For instance in China, Xi Xinping is the Party Chairman AND the President, because he is the head of the party and the head of state. For every entity of the state, like the People's Congress, there is a corresponding and controlling party entity like the Party Congress. This is done to retain all the levers of power within the party and render the state as a neutered tool to implement the party's will.
Anyway, Donald Trump's latest purge of the RNC sure shows all the signs of a similar dynamic, but in this case, he is subsuming the Republican Party to his cult of personality and, most likely, criminal enterprises. As Marshall notes, the nominee controls the Party. That's understood. Strategy is coordinated between the presidential candidate and the party committee. The only reason to purge the RNC and install unqualified family members is because you want to use the RNC as an ATM for your hundreds of millions of dollars in fines.
So there's two ways to see this: the good news and the bad news.
The good news is that if he really follows through and turns the RNC into the ATM, then a few things will happen. First, big money donors will stop giving. They aren't fools. They will give to the RSCC and the RCCC and individual candidates, but many will simply despair and not give. What money does flow into the RNC is extremely unlikely to work well towards electing Republicans. If this fall is as close as it appears to be, that's good news.
The bad news is that the Republican Party is increasingly simply a cipher for Trumpism. At some point, the grip that this demagogic, authoritarian con-man has to be broken. We cannot continue to have every election be a contest between those who respect democracy and those who don't. Sure, at some point Trump will die and that cult of personality will die with him, but the degradation of one of the two parties is deeply troubling.
I think I mentioned a discussion I had with a college friend in Argentina who welcomed Javier Milei because he felt the apple cart needed to be overturned and a chaos agent was required. Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend who lamented the state of the world in so many ways. The thread that connected them was this sense of doom and futility. This is the first step towards abandoning democracy.
This Twitter thread lays out so many ways that the world is improving. The basic thesis is "Yes, the world isn't perfect and 'X' is bad, but we are making remarkable progress towards solution 'Y'." Take climate change. In the thread there are numerous examples of breakthroughs in energy storage, access to lithium and hydrogen and geothermal energy. However, even if we brought all of that online tomorrow, the world would still continue to get hotter for another decade or so, until existing carbon was removed from the atmosphere. The news on climate is promising, but not to the degree that the crisis has passed.
It seems we are wired to need the instant gratification of immediate results. The internet has its plusses and minuses, but few can argue that it has not completely reshaped the world. It was basically invented in 1983, yet it really didn't start to enter our lives until the late 1990s. It feels like we are in a similar pattern with technology now.
Additionally, we are so much richer today than we were 40 years ago. Global inequality has shrunk dramatically, even if we have the troubling concentration of wealth in a super-class of billionaires. My friend yesterday said that we managed to grow up, sitting in the back of a station wagon with no seatbelts while our parents chain smoked in the front and we didn't die. True, but plenty of people did. Today, the stench of cigarette smoke is a jarring exception rather than the miasma through which we move. We have cars that can seat 6 and get 35MPG with crazy amounts of user friendly tech. Go back and drive that 1986 Honda Civic; your preference for it is nostalgia, not fact.
Of course there are problems. Big problems, but we tend to blow them up into catastrophes. Take Gaza. That is a wrenching humanitarian crisis brought about by two awful entities - Netanyahu's right wing government and Hamas' theocratic terrorism - but calling it "genocide" is intended to elevate it to the levels of the Holocaust or Cambodia. It simply...isn't. It's awful, and we should be doing everything we can to end it and bring lasting peace through a two state solution. But it simply isn't genocide, and calling it that is designed to create this sense of catastrophe that extremists need to justify eroding democracy.
Joe Biden ran on getting things back to normal. Sadly, that proved beyond his reach. Not because he didn't try, but because we have become addicted to the doom spiral.
We have met the cognitive enemy and he is us.
