Heading To The Jungle

 and 100 degree heat.

Say a prayer for us!

The Ghost Of John C. Calhoun

 The issue with the border crossings has moved from a policy problem to a possible constitutional crisis. The situation is that Texas has claimed the right to make immigration policy, which is properly a federal power. The Supreme Court told them that they could not interfere with the Border Patrol, but they seem to be opening the door to Calhoun's doctrine of nullification. The odious governor of Texas even used the term "compact" when describing the Constitution, and that's concerning.

Calhoun argued that the Constitution was a compact rather than a contract. By this, he meant that each state entered into an agreement that created the national government. Rather than a contract that bound the participants, a compact is largely voluntary - and thus largely meaningless. For Calhoun the compact theory meant ignoring any federal efforts to restrict slavery. This naturally led to secession.

So, when Governor Abbott refers to a compact, he's explicitly placing Texas on the same level as the federal government and implicitly threatening civil war.

Ever since Ammon Bundy, I've felt that the national government has overlearned the lesson of Waco and Ruby Ridge. Still, I can see the danger in resorting to forceful measures when you have a set of states basically embracing nullification and civil war.

What's baffling to me is that slavery was the economic and cultural backbone of the South. It informed everything about how that society functioned. WTF is up with this border stuff? One has to assume that it is entirely a political stunt, since efforts to actually solve it garner rebuke from Trumpistan. Trying to examine what Republicans think the stakes are here immediately break down when coming into contact with facts. 

For cynical political gain, the GOP is scaring the shit out of their voters with bullshit stories about an "invasion" and then creating conditions that have killed a mother and her children and could lead to open violence between the second largest state and the federal government.

Move Fast, Break Things, (Build Them Back Up)

 We are in Buenos Aires, which is both hot and cool. The temperature is hot, the city is cool. New York, Paris and Milan mushed into one.

Anyways, we hooked up with an old college teammate of mine who lives here and we started talking about their new president. What was interesting was that - while I couldn't tell if my friend supported Milei in particular - he was clearly impressed with the impulses that led to his election. In his poorly paraphrased words, everything in Argentina is so broken, that they need someone to break it more.

You see this thinking a lot. Now, Argentina is a great example of modern day "broken". It's a reasonably wealthy country, but chronic misgovernment, especially with regards to monetary policy, has left it poorer than it should be. Uruguay and Chile are both wealthier countries, per capita, because they have not been trapped in the vicious cycle of currency malfunctions that have been such a burden for Argentina.

However....

The "things are terrible and the wheel must be broken" thinking is typical of almost all populist thinking (and my friend had the utmost contempt for the previous populist governments). The problem is that "breaking things" is easy. Building things is hard. The reason why Nelson Mandela is a secular saint is because he managed to break apartheid but build a (more or less) functioning state. Milei might be able to break some of the worst aspects of Argentine policy, but I'll be surprised if he can build a better, more efficient state. Can he really tackle the epic problem of corruption? I'm skeptical.

Naturally, all of this leads back to Trump. 

Trump's basic appeal among a substantial number of his followers is that things are broken and they need to smash the system (Deep State) to bring about some imagined utopia. Of course, utopias are bullshit. What's more, the idea that America is deeply broken is a flawed one, I believe. There are incredible problems - beginning with the Trumpenproletariat. Our political system is not ideal for the 21st century. Presidentialism is a flawed form of government compared to parliamentarism, but it's important to note that those flaws are not fatal and compare better to ANY authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regime. 

So there are real problems in America. Off the top of my head: opioids, climate change, wealth inequality, an aging population and hollowed out cities and rural areas. Those are real problems. Trumpist freak outs over immigration is both not a top-tier problem (it is a problem, but not the way the bigots and MAGAts say it is) will do nothing to solve the other problems.

Breaking shit is easy. A toddler is quite adept at it; Trump is a toddler, so that tracks.

Populism can break shit. It has never - to my knowledge - built things back. 

Adios, Uruguay

 Loved your laid back vibes. On to the hustle and bustle of Buenos Aires.

And We Were Laughing

 My wife and I were sitting on the Rambla in Montevideo, Uruguay, when word came down via the interwebs that Donald Trump is going to be throwing ketchup drenched hamburdlers against the wall tonight.

For so many of us normal people, the moment in 2016, when Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic admitting sexual assault and still won the presidency was a really low point in our faith in American civic life. That faith remains shaken, as he shudders along the road to being the GOP nominee once more. He is a sexual predator, he always has been. The jury found he sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. When she came forward, he defamed her. Repeatedly. He did it this week. 

And now he has to pay a tremendous amount of money. Even if he wants to appeal, he has to pony up the money; money which he said under oath that he has. This is going to sting, all because he couldn't keep his puckered asshole of a mouth closed. He has the discipline of a spoiled toddler, but yeah, let's make him president again.

I try to live by Epictetus' words: "He who angers you becomes your master." I try not to feel hatred or anger towards anyone, and I work to see things through my opposite number's perspective. 

But THIS GUY? Fuck this guy. I hope he gets reamed in his NY fraud trial. I hope his bullshit immunity claims get shot down. I hope all of this gives him a slight stroke, one that causes him to lose his already limited ability to speak coherently. Because the fucking GOP will nominate him anyway!

Maybe by letting Trump anger me, he becomes my master, but I know E. Jean Carroll owns his ass.

Cleetus Safari Bags a Real One

 Scott Lemieux finds an actually incisive interview with a Trump supporter. I think there's a tendency to reduce many Trumpists to racists. As (I think) Adam Serwer said, "They might not be racists, but racism isn't a deal breaker for them."

What increasingly comes across from all points of the political spectrum is a nihilism about America's political future. This passage was key:

“He breaks the system,” he said, “he exposes the deep state, and it’s going to be a miserable four years for everybody.”

“For everybody?” I said.

“Everybody.”

“For you?”

“I think his policies are going to be good,” he said, “but it’s going to be hard to watch this happen to our country. He’s going to pull it apart.”

And it's not just the Trumpist Right. The Very Online Left has convinced themselves that a second Trump term will usher in the proletariat revolution that has otherwise been just over the horizon. The common thread is that there are a bunch of people living in the most powerful and wealthiest nation in the history of the world who are convinced that everything is in desperate straights and therefore electing a malignant narcissist, career criminal, aspiring dictator is "exactly what this country needs."

I'm current in Uruguay (The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful.) a country that slipped into dictatorship for 12 years during the Cold War. They are deeply ashamed of that episode, but when they threw off their dictatorship, they simply went back to normal left of center, Latin American democracy. There is no "clarifying moment" there is only the suffering and global crisis that Trump would bring. 

Crisis Actors

 A common trope in the Right is that anytime there's a distressing event linked to preferred GOP policies - mass shootings being the most common - the victims are dismissed as "crisis actors". George Soros paid them to pretend that their kids were killed; this was at the heart of the Alex Jones lawsuit.

I think, however, we need to acknowledge the real crisis actors today: the former institutional wing of the GOP. People like Ron DeSantis.

The DeSantis boomlet (oddly touted by Chait himself) sought to cast DeSantis as the heir to Trumpism. He wasn't the manifestly unfit goon, the impulsive idiot that Trump is. DeSantis was disciplined! He could tap into Trump's populism while focusing on destroying the regulatory state and cutting taxes, like a good Republican. 

It collapsed for two reasons.

The first was that DeSantis is a deeply unlikeable goombah. He simply cannot do retail politics. He was able to use Trumpist rhetoric to win the governorship of Florida, but the more you get to know him, the less you like him.

The second is that Trumpism is not the lyrics, it's the music. Trump has few things that can be discussed as policies in the traditional sense of the word. Even when there is a specific policy - think the border wall - he lacks the ability to follow through, because he's an impulsive moron. Following through and building the wall is entirely beside the point though. You have to gesture at a wall (the lyrics) but the real meaning is anti-immigrant xenophobia (the music). Populism tends to collapse under the scrutiny of logic - or increasingly in a court of law.

What's going to be interesting is whether Nikki Haley can consolidate enough support to legitimately challenge Trump. She's recently been hitting him on his age (Trump confused Haley and Nancy Pelosi recently) and New Hampshire is about as favorable a landscape as she can hope for. Still, she's likely to go down to defeat soon, too.

At which point all the crisis actors within the GOP will pretend that Trump makes sense. They will pretend he's not a dictator in waiting (some will embrace that). They will line up behind a guy they know is manifestly unfit, and act like he's a legitimate choice to be president.

Ron DeSantis' epic failure of a campaign faceplanted because people can sense when someone is just mouthing the words and doesn't know the music. He was a fake, hell Nikki "America was never racist" Haley is a fake, too. Trump isn't. He's a legitimate racist who shares all the seething resentment of his cultists.

Intermittent Signal

 Blogging could be very sparse over the next month or so. "I'm off on an adventure!"

Cheapskate

 One of the many paradoxes surrounding Trump is that he purports to be a billionaire, he has a lifelong habit of suing or threatening to sue people...and then he stiffs his lawyers. The result is that he winds up with lawyers like Alina Habba. Her main selling point seems to be that she's kinda hot, because her legal skills seem like she cribbed from reruns of Law and Order. One should never assume some sort of hidden masterplan behind Trump's erratic actions, but you almost have to wonder if they are going for an appeal based on incompetent counsel. It was Habba, if you remember, that failed to check the box for a jury trial, and now she's making a meal out of the damages phase.

Hopefully Trump will have the same level of competence in his other trials.

So Much Winning

 This week Trump won the Iowa caucuses handily. However, while his margin was plenty comfortable, getting 50% for the de facto incumbent is pretty weak. In 1968, when Eugene McCarthy kept Lyndon Johnson around 50% in New Hampshire, Johnson was so shook, he dropped out of the race. Trump has rigged the primary process to be mostly "winner take all" so unless is quickly become a Trump-Haley race, he's still going to cruise to the nomination. He will cruise, however, with significant discontent within his party. Yes, Cult 45 will crawl through broken glass and then swim through lemon juice to support him, but there are a LOT of Republicans who are muttering "Christ, not this asshole again."

Secondly, Paul Campos notes that your average voter - someone who really pays almost no attention to politics until after Labor Day of an election year - is still reluctant to accept that Trump is going to be the nominee. Once that reality lands, a lot of people will refuse to vote for him again, just as they refused to vote for him in 2016 and 2020. 

This is especially going to be true as Trump's legal woes compound. Trump's narcissistic bluster notwithstanding - I love how he claims he's still going to win the NY fraud case when he has, in fact, already lost it - the losses are piling up. The fraud case is in damages phase and so is the E. Jean Carroll defamation case. Again, Trump was found in a court of law to have sexually assaulted Carroll. Since Trump can't help but continue to defame Carroll, the jury settlement could be huge. 

Pundits had a certain denial that the GOP was going to re-nominate Trump. A critical swath of the electorate has a similar denial. Once he's the nominee - around the time Jack Smith hopefully brings him to trial - more than a few people are going to be horrified and act accordingly.

"Congress" Isn't Broken

 The GOP is.

We have two fairly major bipartisan bills working their way through the labyrinths of Congress. One would help children in poverty and provide some tax breaks. That bill is being negotiated between committee chairs in the GOP House and the Democratic Senate. The second would address the situation at the border and it moves pretty far to the right to win GOP support in the Senate. 

Both are likely DOA in the House for two reasons. 

The first is that any bipartisan deal is likely to be popular. The bill doesn't even have to have a bunch of intrinsic merit; as long as it's "bipartisan" people will like it. They want the two parties to do their freaking jobs and pass legislation. Since it is an election year, popular, bipartisan laws will presumably help Joe Biden's election campaign. Any actual solutions for the border, for instance, will deprive the GOP of their most potent campaign issue (especially as perceptions of the economy improve).

The second is simply that the GOP is a post-legislative party. They cannot function within the constraints of Congress. They cannot - both out of temperament and tactics - reach accommodation with the Democrats.  Democrats are willing to concede quite a lot in order to get these bills done. They want a border solution for the election and they are generally opposed to children living in poverty.

The GOP however will blow this all up rather than create a better situation for the American people.

Time To Pivot

 I have been somewhat supportive of Israel's right to defend itself and have understood that this would entail some suffering among the Palestinians generally. The first wave of the conflict was always going to be brutal and fall heavily on innocents. C'est la guerre. 

However, I also understood Biden's embrace of the Israeli government as a combination of strategic - Israel is perhaps our best ally in the region - and tactical. If he ever wanted to break with Netanyahu, he would have to make clear his support for Israel.

As Marshall points out, Netanyahu openly allied himself with the GOP during Obama's presidency and Trump's regency. If Biden were now to say, simply, "The United States cannot continue to support Israel as long as Netanyahu is prime minister" that might break open a logjam in Israeli politics and provide Biden with more political cover at home. There's little doubt that his approval ratings with young voters has been pummeled by supporting America's traditional ally in its conduct of terrible things. This would not be abandoning Israel - we would still strike Houthi rebels firing missiles on behalf of Iran - but rather abandoning an odious man who has committed horrible deeds.

There is no possible "Day After" for the Gazan War with Netanyahu calling the shots in Israel. If we can make his government toxic within Israel, maybe we can find a way forward, instead of sinking further down into a morass of atavistic hatred.

The Critical Question Goes Un-Asked

 Ron DeSantis admits what we all know: conservative media is not news. It's a messaging apparatus for the reactionary movement in American politics. What goes largely unsaid in Chait's account of this is that we have a Frankenstein's monster situation here. For years, Fox and its imitators riled up the rubes with fear-mongering and populist pablum. Now, they can't really influence their viewers as they could in the past.

It's like a drug. The first few months, you get a little high, you enjoy it. But then you build up a tolerance so you need more and more. Innuendo and dog whistles no longer cut it; so you get Trump who's an airhorn. Efforts to put the monster back in its cage are fruitless. 

All of this means that the most important question in American politics: "What to do about Trump?" is somewhat off target. It's the Trumpenproletariat that are the problem. My hope is that once Trump (hopefully) shuffles off to prison or flees the country to avoid prison that large numbers of his cultists will drop out of the political process entirely. That was my point about the routinization of charisma. 

Still, the disheartening aspect of these last eight years in Trumpistan is the realization that tens of millions of Americans look at that bloated con artist - a man whose very skin color is a lie - and see salvation. 

The Dumbest Arguments

 For some reason, foreign and military policy seems to engender the dumbest arguments. Yesterday, a multinational force struck Houthi missile sites, because they were striking at international shipping in the Red Sea. Remember "Stuck Ship" and how that created knock on effects in the entire global economy? Same shipping channel.

First, you get this typical Times bothsides nonsense. In this instance "the Middle East" largely refers to the Iranian coalition that would object if the US declared itself in favor of puppies and kittens. Really? Hamas and Hezbollah aren't fans of the US striking back at their ally? Unpossible! 

Yes, there is other, better coverage in the Times. Tellingly, you get bits like this:

Yahya Sarea, a Houthi spokesman, has said frequently that the group is attacking ships to protest the “killing, destruction and siege” in Gaza and to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The idea that striking at international shipping lanes would somehow alleviate the suffering in Gaza is nonsense. The entire point is to activate popular sentiment in the West that has become somewhat reflexively pro-Palestinian/Hamas. Hamas, need one  be reminded, is fucking awful. And, yes, Netanyahu's government is awful, too. But the idea that making a strike at a critical global shipping lane that could have an immediate and tangible effect on global inflation is going to help innocent Palestinians is simple bullshit.

We also have the reflexive, illogical and ahistorical "pacifist" left in the US, who will accuse Biden of getting us involved in a Middle Eastern war. As Josh Marshall has argued (and I completely agree) Biden's decision to get out of Afghanistan was bold, proper and necessary. Biden's foreign policy is clear-eyed and restrained. He's doing everything possible to keep us out of Middle Eastern wars and limit the expansion of the Gazan War. 

There's no doubt that the Houthi actions were designed to get the West, broadly speaking, involved in a shooting war. However, the Houthi will not be the first group to underestimate the military capabilities of the United States and NATO. We aren't putting boots on the ground in Yemen, but Houthi capacity to strike at shipping is going to collapse in short order.

Increasingly, we have to understand the current situation in the world as having, perhaps, four blocs. 

The first bloc is the "Liberal North." This is NATO, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. You can add Ukraine and other various countries around the world who broadly subscribe the idea of the liberal order. These are democratic countries, for the most part, who actively want peace.

The second bloc runs through Moscow and Tehran. These are cultural and political reactionary regimes, committed to authoritarianism, illiberal cultural issues and anti-"Western" politics. Russia is launching Iranian drones at Ukraine and Russian mercenaries backed the Iranian-allied regime in Syrian. 

The third bloc are the largely unaligned, yet "West-skeptical" countries of the developing world. India is the primary locus of this bloc, but it runs through most of Africa and parts of Latin America. Their position is changeable, but anti-colonial politics makes open alliance with the Liberal North bloc difficult.

The fourth bloc is China, and there are ties with this bloc and the previous one. China has been flexing its economic muscle in Africa, in particular, and they have real influence there. China's problem is that their economy is still struggling, and they need a broader global economic recovery. These wars of choice by the Moscow/Tehran axis are not good for business, and the stark limits of Russian military prowess are on display in Ukraine. China also imports 60% of its oil, and they likely aren't keen on a broader Middle Eastern war either.

Finding a "day after" solution to the Gazan War is impossible with Netanyahu in power. However, there should be common ground between the Liberal North and China and her allies. Whether China would be willing or able to pull some strings in Moscow is very much in doubt. A collapse in oil shipments from the Gulf would help Moscow. However, building some sort of peace coalition with the Global North, the West-Skeptics and China needs to become the Biden Administration's new goal.

The Coward's Obituary

 Josh Marshall exposes the cowardice at the heart of the Chris Christie campaign, much less the two remaining non-Trump options. The GOP has already been a semi-authoritarian movement. ("Democrats need to fall in love, Republicans just fall in line." "The Eleventh Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill Of Another Republican.") Trump has taken away the plausibility of democratic processes within that party and now wishes to do the same nationally. 

As Marshall says, "Sad".

The Day After

 One of the most infuriating examples of online nonsense that I am exposed to is people who blame Biden directly for the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza. Yes, he has not exercised enough constraints on Netanyahu, but again, look around the Arab World. There's not a ton of people playing the Palestinian card the way Western leftists are. Everyone kinda gets that Hamas needs to be dramatically weakened, if not destroyed.

The problem, as Josh Marshall points out, remains as it always has with Netanyahu himself. If Trump largely managed to not bring about a total catastrophe for the US (Covid was close, but he didn't start actively fucking things up until later), he is still a cautionary example of poor leadership in a crisis. Netanyahu is arguably worse. He directly helped create the threat from Hamas; his leadership threatens to make the situation in the West Bank similarly explosive; his constant need to stay out of prison means he will go to absurd lengths to stay in power; his political allies are fascists.

Frankly, one more broadside from a member of Netanyahu's rightist cabinet and Biden should drop the hammer on that son of a bitch. 

Merrick Garland's Critics Were Right

 After January 6th, there was a lot of energy around prosecuting Trump after the second impeachment failed to remove and more importantly disqualify him. When Biden selected Garland to be his AG, there were concerns about whether he had the temperament to aggressively go after Trump. For over a year, we had no evidence that the Justice Department was even investigating him (they were). 

For the most part, I was confident that the DOJ was doing the needed background work to prepare for prosecution. If you were going to prosecute a former president, you'd better have everything nailed down tight. I still feel that way. The biggest catastrophe would be a Trump acquittal of crimes he's clearly guilty of, because the DOJ did sloppy work.

However, it does feel like that timeline needed to be pushed up. As Josh Marshall writes, the lack of urgency within the DOJ has now gotten us into a scenario where Trump is going to try and slow walk and delay trials until after the election. The challenge now for Jack Smith is to expedite Trump's bullshit delaying tactics and get the trial going this spring. If Trump can be convicted before the Republican Convention, there's a chance - however slim - that we can avoid the possibility of Trump on the Republican ballot in November.

Nope, Still Not Buying It

 Jon Chait continues to make his case that banning Trump from running based on the XIVth Amendment is a bad idea. I continue to find it pretty unconvincing. He dismisses the argument that the Constitution pretty clearly bans insurrectionist from holding office even while admitting that Trump likely committed insurrection. He weasels around the argument by noting that it's not a slam dunk case that Trump engaged in insurrection even though Chait thinks he did. Well, if you think he did, and then argue that he should be left on the ballot, I have to agree with Ryan Cooper: 

What I object to is this pathetic lack of resolve. We are facing an utterly corrupt would-be dictator, who already tried to overthrow the government once, who is plotting his regime consolidation and punishment of his enemies in broad daylight, and these clowns are making his legal arguments for him....The amount of loser, kick-me energy on display here is nigh indescribable.

You can't argue that Trump is a would-be dictator who committed insurrection and would destroy American democracy if re-elected and not reach for every available tool in your toolbox. It's the same bullshit idea that protected Trump in 2021. "You can't prosecute your political opponents." The fuck you can't. If they are serial criminals, you prosecute!

The most sympathetic reading of Chait's case is that banning Trump from the ballot would be sort of undemocratic and should have been done in 2022 or 2023. But this is precisely why the issue waited until now. People like Chait assumed that the Republican Party could never support someone like Trump after 1/6. Chait spend endless time explaining why DeSantis would wrest control of the GOP from Trump. He was catastrophically wrong about that. 

Yes, you need to defeat Trumpism as much as you need to defeat Trump, but first things first. Trump himself rests at the center of Trumpism. He took root in the heart of the GOP, because the party was ripe for takeover by an Orban-esque strongman. However, so much of Trump's appeal and liability is tied up in the man himself. 

Trump embodies what Max Weber called charismatic legitimacy. He represents an idea (You're losing you country and I alone can save it.) and is the personal embodiment of that idea. Almost every revolutionary leader relies on this charismatic authority to mobilize revolutionary movements. However, every revolution struggles with something called the "routinization of charisma." How do you preserve a revolutionary movement that is embodied in Dear Leader when Dear Leader is gone?

If Trump dropped dead tomorrow, that would not be the end of the threat to American democracy from a GOP that has abandoned all fealty to democratic principles. Trump, however, mobilized a certain segment of the population that had been dormant politically. Absent their Tangerine Jesus, there's no guarantee that Trump's authority transfers to someone else. In fact, that was precisely the fatal flaw at the heart of DeSantis-mania that Chait himself fell victim to. 

Trump's unique hold on the GOP is because he won an improbable victory in 2016, when everyone thought he would lose. For Cult 45, that victory signified that he was God's Chosen Vessel, instead of someone who drew an inside straight thanks to latent misogyny. Since that time, the GOP has seen consistent losses in elections (which is why they are embracing authoritarianism), yet the "glory" of 2016 remains (combined with Trump's lies about the subsequent losses). Remove the man and the movement will fracture. Let him run because you're dithering whether it's "insurrection" or "sparkling unrest" and you risk losing everything.

Dork Money

 I've been slightly skeptical of the claim that you can "buy" an electoral result with dark money and the like. There have been an abundance of well-funded candidates who flame out spectacularly when confronted with actual voters. Hello, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis.

However, one thing the money sloshing around our campaigns does is allow narcissistic grifters the ability to hang around their vanity campaigns, soaking up Super PAC money. The colossal amount of bad faith present in the "campaigns" of grifters like Marianne Williamson, Cenk Uygur, and Dean Phillips is difficult to measure with the tools available to science. Then you have the third party grifters like Jill Stein and Cornell West, not to mention No Labels.

None of these idiots has a snowball's chance in Florida/hell of becoming president. Unlike Bernie Sanders, who I think legitimately ran for political messaging purposes and then did surprisingly well, they have no message, no platform. They soak up money, live large for a few months and then slink back off to wherever they came from. 

In the case of people like Uygur and Phillips, they then actively spread Trumpist bullshit about electoral fraud. In Uygur's case, he is constitutionally banned from running. This isn't even a question! He was not born a U.S. citizen! Yet, he could poison just enough naïve young leftists to tip a close election. All to "boost his brand" and live off the campaign contributions.

Three Years Out

 So we are three years removed from Trump's attempt to overthrow democracy in America and at the beginning of his campaign to overthrow it next year. There are a number of op-eds in the Times today about efforts to disqualify Trump on account of his being an insurrectionist. 

I'd start with Jamelle Bouie (always insightful, if a bit prolix) and his definitional account of why Trump is an insurrectionist. Even those Colorado judges who ruled he could be on the ballot felt that he had committed insurrection. We have no idea what the SCOTUS might rule, but most likely they will try and escape out a loophole that allows Trump to be on the ballot but does not rule whether he committed insurrection. Their biggest escape hatch is to allow each state to make that determination, which would mean Trump would be banned from a few Blue states that he wasn't going to win anyway. The central question of "Did Trump commit insurrection?" seems self-evident. 

Samuel French (a Never-Trumper) reaches the same conclusion but addresses the arguments that "Well, if we ban Trump, his supporters would be outraged and might commit violence." If the threat of Trumpist violence dissuades the Court from reaching the logical conclusion that the XIVth Amendment bans Trump from running again, then we are already under the threat of more insurrection. The argument that kicking Trump off the ballot might lead to violence is a sobering but not compelling argument. If one side requires violence to get their way, we are no longer a republic...which is precisely the threat Trump posed yesterday and poses today and tomorrow.

There's a guest writer who again reaches the obvious conclusion that Trump participated in insurrection, but notes that Congress and Congress alone has the power to waive that prohibition. This is clever. In the author's opinion, Trump could and perhaps should be banned from holding office on account of his behavior surrounding 1/6. However, the text says that only Congress has the power to remove this penalty, and it requires 2/3rds to do so. First, of course, it would require Republicans to admit that Trump engaged in insurrection, which they might not be willing to do. Second, it would require Democrats to allow an open insurrectionist and would be dictator on the ballot. That seems a stretch, since Democrats will be actively running on the threat Trump poses to democratic rule. 

Finally, we have perhaps the single most important figure in this debate: John Roberts. I was surprised when Roberts went along with the Dobbs decision, because he has seemed interested in protecting the Court's overall legitimacy. Dobbs has certainly shaken that legitimacy and the upcoming cases surrounding access to reproductive care will also let us know if the Court is basically going to act like Alito or Roberts.

Kicking Trump off the ballot entirely seems like a bridge too far, and I'm sure Roberts would like to craft a 9-0 or 7-2 decision. Basically ruling that each state can determine its election laws and allowing each state to determine if Trump is banned might satisfy that. As Josh Marshall notes, that would likely mean Trump is booted off the ballot in a few Blue states that he wasn't going to win anyway. From an Electoral College standpoint, Trump was never going to win in Massachusetts, Colorado or Vermont, so if they oust him from the ballot it won't materially impact that election. It might even give Trump a rallying cry among his cultists about "fraud". 

One way or the other, it feels like the single most important issue right now is getting Jack Smith's case to trial this spring. 

The Teflon Don

 John Gotti was known as the Teflon Don for his ability to beat charges in court. Donald Trump - a man who openly admires mafioso - is Teflon Don for his ability to weather scandals that sink normal politicians. He is by far the most corrupt person to ever sit in the White House and second place isn't really close. Nixon was a criminal, but he was not so much interested in enriching himself as he was in his paranoid attempts to retain power. 

The best comparison is this: Nixon leveraged China's fractured relations with the Soviet Union to drive a wedge between them and open up better relations with China to help end the Vietnam war (albeit far too late and at far too high a cost). Trump simply sold them access via his hotels. Nixon hated the Soviet Union, Trump is a dupe for Putin.

The expression "Every allegation is a confession" came to my attention early in Trump's political career. If Trump says that Democrats are a bunch of pedophiles, it seems like it's a pretty good bet that Trump committed statutory rape on Epstein's island. 

As Chait notes, the House GOP is working to impeach Biden for accepting money from China through his brother and son. This is rank nonsense. Meanwhile, Trump is on the record as receiving millions from China while president.

One problem - and this predates Trump by years - is that we have asymmetric parties, in the sense that one party has a normal shame response and the other doesn't. Al Franken was right to resign. There are dozens of GOP lawmakers in DC alone who should resign, too. Claudine Gay was forced out as president of Harvard over a fairly minor but still real plagiarism scandal; Neil Gorsuch has committed much worse. Don't even get started on Clarence Thomas.

One of the debilitating features of Trumpistan is that there is no credible reason for Trump to be leading the GOP nominating field, given his disastrous handling of the pandemic, his 91 criminal indictments, his confessed sexual crimes, his open acceptance of bribes, his tax evasion, his...it goes on and on. There are plenty of other cruel, mendacious assholes in the GOP, why not pick another one? 

The Epstein Lists

 According to lawyers privy to some inside information, there really won't be any truly incriminating bombshells in the documents surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. There's this:

Attorney Spencer Kuvin said the records might reveal one or two people who knew Epstein and have not been previously identified, but it’s unclear if they will be accused of wrongdoing. He said he expects the list of names to include a wide range of people, from high-profile politicians, executives and socialites who knew Epstein to little-known employees who worked at his multiple estates.

“I don’t think there will be any really big surprises, but the name Epstein has turned into such a nuclear disaster that people in his periphery get smeared,” Kuvin said.

This feels true, simply because if there was directly damning evidence one would expect charges. Epstein and Maxwell are dead and in prison respectively because they never gave up the names. We will have a lot of names of wealthy and famous people, because Epstein cultivated wealthy and famous people. Their presence at some of his parties, perhaps even on his infamous island, is not proof of a crime per se.

At some point last night, I saw what looked like a legal filing alleging sexual assault by Donald Trump on a 13 year old. That would obviously qualify as a major development. He has already been found to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll and confessed to similar behavior on the Access Hollywood tape. However, precisely because it would totally believable, it's entirely possible (and seems likely so far) that this is misinformation. The reason why I believe that Trump might have sexually assaulted a 13 year old are the same reasons why MAGAts believe Clinton would have done the same.

TL;DR: everyone is bringing their prior political hatreds to these names. 

Oh, and Joe Biden isn't anywhere on the lists, but I would expect someone on Fox to start alleging a cover-up without any evidence. That would be on brand.

Uh Oh

 Since October, I think one of the primary goals of the United States in the Israel-Hamas war has been to limit the conflict to Gaza. A wider war would be..bad.

In the last day or so, the IDF killed a senior Hamas leader in Hezbollah territory, prompting Hezbollah to promise retribution. Meanwhile, there was a large blast in Iran at the grave of Qasem Soleimani. No one has claimed responsibility for the Iran blast, and frankly killing a bunch of their own citizens to create regime legitimacy is something that Iran's government did during the revolution. Still, it's reasonable to suspect Israel may have partnered with regime opponents to plan the attack. 

The Israel-Hamas war is part of the larger conflict between just about every country in the Middle East against Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi. It has been US policy (I think) to confine this conflict to Gaza, but constraining Israel has proven near impossible. Netanyahu could wager that Israel is strong enough to weather any backlash from Washington over expanding the war. 

Frankly, killing Hamas' leadership is far, far preferable to what the IDF is doing in Gaza now. However, once Mossad and IDF start bumping off leadership that makes the leaders of groups like Hezbollah nervous enough to risk open conflict with Israel. Netanyahu might further wager that a wider war could build more support for him in some corners of the US political establishment. Iran is bad, and expanding the war to include the Iranian sponsors of Hamas could be Netanyahu's next move.

There were rumors that the US and other NATO naval forces were going to attack Houthi missile sights after repeated attacks on international shipping, but that hasn't happened yet. If this breaks out into a regional war, Biden will have a perilous choice to make. If he continues to support Netanyahu, he further erodes his standing with (somewhat delusional) supporters of Palestinians (and Hamas ferfucksake). He can't claim a mantle of peacemaker if we are dragged back into the Middle East. Frankly, I think the last thing he wants to do is get sucked back into that dysfunctional region. 

If he breaks with Israel, I'm not sure what the cost would be for him politically, frankly, except for the well-worn support that Israel has on both sides of the aisle. If Hezbollah and Iran start attacking Israel directly, there will be considerable pressure to get involved "kinetically". Hopefully, he can resist it.

Young Voters

 Jon Chait makes a bit of a thin argument about young voters being less progressive than originally thought. There are some shocking polls showing as much as a 30 point swing against Biden and towards Trump. What makes this so bizarre is that young voters tend to say they prioritize the following:

- Climate action
- Gun safety
- Tolerance towards LGBTQ
- Pro-choice policies
- Pro-Palestinians policies

On every single one of these issues, Biden is closer to what they want than Trump, so why are they moving towards Trump. Chait's conclusion is that they are actually more moderate and conservative than we think. Defying almost all other data, we have to conclude that young people are moderate and conservative despite holding more liberal positions. One data point he notes is that Black and Hispanic voters are actually a lot more moderate than White Democrats and since young people are more racially diverse, they must also be more moderate. However, most of the Black and Hispanic moderates are church folks who tend to be older. There is certainly an argument - a strong argument - that what James Carville called "faculty lounge politics" lands flat with non-college educated Black and Hispanic voters.

While I was skeptical at first, I do think Biden's embrace of Israel is definitely hurting him with young "progressive" voters. The problem is that Trump would already have us bombing Gaza alongside the IDF. A number of young voters anecdotally have said "I can't vote for Biden." The worry, of course, is that they vote for some charlatan like Cornell West.

Any campaign that depends on the youth vote is likely in trouble, frankly. They tend to be fickle and turning them out can be problematic. However, losing the youth vote would probably doom Biden. Young voters of ANY era tend to be more liberal than their older counterparts. 

My gut feeling is that this is the famous "vibes" problem. Inflation hit recent college graduates fairly hard, but as that eases the "vibes" should improve. 

The big conundrum is how to package Trump for young voters. Since being booted off Twitter, Trump has been screaming frothing nonsense over at Truth Social. His campaign events are outright fascistic calls for racial purity. He is directly responsible for Dobbs. His every utterance is a moment away from uttering the N-word. If you were to feed Trump's unhinged rhetoric to younger voters - especially those younger Black and Hispanic voters - Biden recoups his loses. (In fact, we might be starting to see some of that.)

However, we also know that the Republican Party is a cult. Anything Trump says becomes what they believe (see the 2020 party platform). Mainlining his bilious hatred into mainstream media will not turn off so-called "moderate" Republicans, it will simply become the established beliefs of tens of millions of Americans. 

The Biden campaign's strategy is apparently to use social media figures to re-shape the debate around Trump and Biden. Remind people how bad it was under Trump, point out that while you might be frustrated that Biden has not delivered your pony yet, Trump will send all ponies to the abattoir. I think it could pay off.

Still, the key to a comfortable election season will be a conviction of Trump this spring. I was a it skeptical of the Merrick Garland hate in 2021-2, but if that trial had already happened, we could settle down to a normal election with Trump safely behind bars.

The question thus becomes this: will young voters understand the stakes if it turns out to be (as it almost certainly will be) a Biden-Trump rematch? I think they will, and as for Chait, he did think DeSantis was the wave of the future so....

Debates

 Trump is - once again - skipping GOP primary debates. I've never really found debates compelling or even interesting. They are known most for "gaffes" that play on a loop on social media. You rarely learn anything interesting or positive about a candidate. For Trump and Biden, we know them. The point of a debate seems lost. Instead, it will be how well Biden stands up to Trump's verbal bullying and his speech impediment or how Trump responds to actual cross examination about his many legal woes.

Of course, if we are lucky, Trump will be in prison by next fall.

Horseshoe People

 Paul Campos reflects on a leftist friend who is slowly drifting into Trumpistan. This is part of the psychology of politics that has become a field recently. Basically, your psychological profile can help determine your politics. Are you open to new people and experiences? You're a liberal. Do those things scare or repel you? You're a conservative. Is everything fucking awful and we need to burn it all to the ground? You're a leftist OR a reactionary.

Doomerism is terrible for any number of reasons. It's not true, in that so much of the world is so much better than it has been in the past. But it also breeds either complacency or a dangerous preference for extreme solutions.

There were a bunch of pro-Palestinian protestors marching through New Years Eve celebrations in NYC last night, setting off smoke bombs and shit. That's going to convince exactly no one that Palestinians are being treated horrifically. It could engender a backlash that will bring about a revolution or some such shit. That is the logical pretzel of "heightening the contradictions" from Lenin. It's bullshit, but saying, "Trump is so bad he will bring about the revolution that I've always craved and waited for" is the default for a certain type of radical.