The New Agenda

 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.

Waiting...Waiting...

 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.

Joe Lieberman Is Dead

 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.

Don Poorleone Wriggles Free Once More

 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.

Tantrums

 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.

Weird Times

 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. 

Tipping Their Hand

 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. 

Trump's Impending Collapse

 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.

The Unprocessed Trauma Of It All

 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.

Fascism: I Was Only Joking

 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...

Party-State

 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.  

Despair And Authoritarianism

 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.

Endorsements

 I'm reading a book on the Republican Party of the 1960s and '70s, called Rule and Ruin. In it, the prominence of newspaper endorsements is the most "foreign" thing. The dynamics of a Republican Party fighting between its moderate and ultra conservative wings is slightly different from today, if only in the sense that the ultra conservative, actually reactionary, forces have so thoroughly won.

Given the widespread collapse in trust in empirical authority of any kind, the idea that an endorsement from the Times or the Detroit Free Press would matter seems silly and largely is. However, there is a new trend in endorsements that's very real: Astonishing numbers of people who worked with Trump refuse to endorse him. That number now includes Mike Pence, but it also includes almost all of his national security team and most of his Cabinet.

This ought to be the lead story in every newspaper in America. A significant number of people who worked most closely with Trump feel he should not be president. Both Dick and Liz Cheney - about the apotheosis of American conservatism - refuse to endorse him, with Dick calling him the greatest threat to American democracy in his lifetime.

And yet...

While you have to admire the actual courage that it takes to endure the inevitable death threats from MAGAts and the end of your political career that refusing to endorse Trump entails, almost none of them will endorse Joe Biden. Sure, the Cheneys and Pence and John Kelly have almost nothing in common politically with Biden, except their abhorrence of what Trump is and stands for. I get that a second Biden term could - gasp - lead to higher taxes on the rich and more regulations on business and maybe some more assistance for the poor and middle class. It could lead to a reversal of Dobbs, which would matter to someone like Pence, I guess, though that would require an unlikely number of Democrats in the Senate. 

If Trump is who you say he is, then you have to endorse Biden. Simply withholding your endorsement is words without deeds.

In 1864, the future of the American Experiment was in grave doubt. In response, War Democrats - those who supported a victory over secession and disunion - joined with Republicans to create the Union Party. The young Republican Party temporarily ceased to exist. Something like that needs to happen this fall. Hell, call it the Union Party. It's that important. 

A Defense Of Liberalism

 As someone over 30, I admit to struggling at least a little with the increase in Trans rights activism. As a liberal, I believe in freedom and debate. As we saw on numerous yard signs and bumper stickers: We believe in science here.

Jon Chait has been a consistent critic of extremism, which is a characteristic of liberals. He has taken a position on Trans Rights that are broadly liberal: We should be cautious about transitioning children until we have more evidence. We should also be worried about how activists on either extreme hijack the debate.

As a liberal, I fully support gender affirming care for children, but care that stops short of easy transitioning. I arrive at this position after 30 years of working with adolescents. Gender affirming care that entails counseling and therapy to help someone with gender dysphoria through adolescence can then become sex reassignment when they become adults. We don't let teenagers rent a car, why should we allow them to make a potentially permanent decision? Put biologically, their prefrontal cortexes are not fully developed and they are poor judges of future consequences.

However, I do not in any way deny the right of young people with gender dysphoria to define their gender in however they wish. I admit that I don't understand it; it's completely alien to my own lived existence. But I am empathetic to the need to define one's identity for oneself. 

The extraordinary gains that Trans Rights have made have allowed more people to question gender roles and define themselves as they see fit. The idea that waiting until your 18 to transition represents an assault on their human rights is not "following the science."

Chait's crusade against activist extremism was tiresome at first. How can you complain about campus leftists when Trump and the Trumpenproletariat exist? However, he's absolutely right that extremism - which is to say positions far outside the mainstream - do tend to engender their own backlash. As I've argued before: Revolutions always fail; they snap back into the forms that existed before in slightly altered forms. 

Sensible moderation does not let you fundraise off outrage. It tends to reject outrage as emotive and unreasoned decision making. Yet sensible moderation - Let kids define their gender as they see fit and if they ultimately define themselves in a way that requires transition, they can do so as adults - is a position that makes the most sense, given what we know today.

Drivers, Start Your Engines

 It's time for Alvin Bragg and now Fani Willis to bring legal accountability to Donald Trump. Ideally two convictions in NY and GA will finally move the needle away from "Biden is old" to "Trump is a criminal".

I saw a video of a social scientist arguing that the most important person of 2023 was Jerome Powell, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. His argument was that he was able to quell inflation without triggering a recession. He further argued that "inflation causes revolutions" which is a provocative but compelling argument.

Yet low levels of inflation remain problematic at over 3%. The best case for Biden was that inflation was under control and people begin to see real wages turn into greater economic security. That does not seem to be happening, even accounting for the lag between good economic news and people's gut level understanding of that good news.

So...yeah...jail.

Hey, Anarchists?

 Do you want to know what happens when your vision of a stateless society comes to fruition?

Haiti.

The Slow Drumbeat Of Doom

 Obviously, one of the drumbeats of doom is for Democrats with a lot of early public polling showing a dead heat with a slight Trump edge. However, the predictive power of polls this far out is historically weak. There's also the trend for shitty GOP pollsters like Rasmussen to flood the zone and warp the polling averages. Lots of polls have Biden losing huge amounts of ground to Black and Gen Z voters that seems...dubious. 

Still, it remains sadly possible that Trump wins in November. I can't believe that's true, but the data suggests it is. I don't think it will happen, but it could.

One other thing that looks very likely is that Democrats should gain control of the House. In fact, that could happen sooner than you think. Ken Buck's retirement next week was done for two reasons. The first was that this will lead to a special election in his district that a Republican will likely win, but that will create an incumbency advantage for whomever wins over feral howler monkey, Lauren Boebert who is switching to his district. Basically, he's retiring to fuck over Boebert, who he understandably loathes as an avatar of the chaos and idiocy of the Republican House. 

TL;DR: Everyone in the House GOP hates each other and doesn't even want to be around each other.

Buck's retirement also further reduces the razor thin margins in the House. Right now, there are 218 GOP members and 213 Democrats. There is a special election coming up that could boost Democrats to 214. Still, the House GOP caucus is a Covid outbreak from losing their majority. As Chip Roy (R-TX) put is, there is no reason to reward the GOP with control of the House. 

If there was some way for the Democrats to have control of the House for a few weeks this spring you could get the Ukraine package passed, a new budget and maybe a Roe bill (which would die in the Senate, but whatever, it would lay clear stakes for November).

The topline story of Trump possibly being reelected is depressing as hell. It's depressing because of how manifestly unfit he is for dogcatcher, much less president. However, the GOP itself is pretty toxic, too. Hopefully, that will seep in before the real polls open.

I Hate That Guy

 There are SOOOOOO many reasons to hate Donald Trump, I'm not sure I landed on this one, but it really bugs me. Trump is an idiot, which is not a reason to hate him. He's an idiot who thinks he's a genius, which is also not a reason to hate him, but makes him especially annoying. 

In Jon Chait's latest anti-anti-anti-Trumper screed, he takes to task a writer at the WSJ who makes a nonsensical claim that Trump and Biden are effectively the same on Ukraine. It's an obviously bullshit argument. However, when Chait quotes Trump, it brings to mind one of his many rhetorical tendencies that I absolutely freaking loath. It's the "It's so easy, I could do it in 24 hours.?" 

This is a straight pull from the populist playbook. Ross Perot was another practitioner. The idea that complicated problems have simple solutions is incredibly corrosive of good government. There might be simple things that could improve a complex situation - say removing the cap on the Social Security tax - without completely solving them. 

There is no simple solution to Ukraine beyond one side emerging victorious. There is no simple solution to Gaza either. "Permanent ceasefire now" is just stupid. A permanent ceasefire is called "peace" and again both sides need to agree to it. 

Trump's "I could solve Gaza in 24 hours" schtick just fucking infuriates me, perhaps precisely because it feeds into the Dunning-Kruger effect that so many of his cultists have.

Is The Worm Turning?

 Recently, we've seen somewhat better showing for Biden in some polls. There are still so weird ass shit results, like Biden and Trump being almost tied among Blacks and young people in some states. Still, it's a dead heat apparently, for reasons that elude logic.

The Biden counteroffensive began with a vigorous State of the Union address and the lunatic response by Katie Britt. The simple fact remains is that the "vibes" somehow favor Trump, because people have fond memories of low inflation in 2019. When it comes to policy and actual governance, oh boy howdy.

Josh Marshall lays out a case that Trump's cognitive decline has been hiding behind his rage. Back in 2016, Trump had the salesman's instinct to tell his audience what they wanted to hear. He'd meander about and then talk about Hillary's emails, the chant of "Lock her up" would begin and he would bask in the waves of approbation from the crowd. 

As Marshall notes, he's lost the thread. Some of that is because of the epistemic closure of Trumpistan. In 2016, he was speaking to Republicans; in 2024, he's speaking to Cult 45. He's so deep up his own diapered ass that normal people listening to him would be shocked at the babbling nonsense that dribbles from his piehole.  

The latest example of this is his offhand remarks about cutting Social Security and Medicare. That's likely something he's picked up from the Claremont Institute freakshows that populate his orbit. On some level, he likely understood "Wait, I'm not sure I meant to say that" but he's incapable of admitting that he was wrong, so he will likely double down on that in coming days. His cultists will fall dutifully in line, but the few remaining normies in politics will be deeply concerned. Trump's feedback loop as become dark and threatening, but also incoherent and cryptic. 

The GOP response (not Britt's weird drama camp monologue) to Biden's speech was that he was too shouty, TOO energetic. As so often happens, they believe their own bullshit. (Yes, leftists are the same way, but whatever.) They thought Biden was senile. I just read excerpts from the Hur depositions and he does not demonstrate senility at all. 

Back in the halcyon days of 2010-12, the GOP coughed up some deeply weird people like Christine O'Donnell, Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. O'Donnell seemed to believe in witches and Akin thought a woman's body could "shut that whole thing down" if she became pregnant from rape. The GOP has so committed itself to Trumpist extremism that they are nominating a similar slate of whackjobs. Check out the GOP nominee for governor in North Carolina, if you don't believe me. 

As the GOP falls deeper and deeper into its own Trumpist navel, the disconnect with the American public should become clearer and clearer.

Paying The Piper

 David Graham at The Atlantic has a good rundown of why Trump's impending fines are a very real problem for him. Basically, Trump has maintained a secretive, closely held business model for the Trump Organization. It's opaque; we don't know who he owes money to or how much. This is obviously not ideal for someone who got security briefings for four years. Trump's indebtedness would have disqualified him for a normal security clearance.

Trump's legal standing is weak, but he might get a temporary or partial reprieve as he tries to scrounge up the money. However, there's another chance that Letitia James starts seizing and auctioning off his properties. The first proceeds from that auction go to lien holders. So if she auctions off a building for $60m and there are $30m worth of liens on it, he's lost a property and only had half the value applied to his fines.

Graham ends by noting that Trump has seemingly managed to go his whole life without paying for the consequences of his many misdeeds. Doomerist progressives will complain that he will likely get away with again.

I'm not so sure. The money people don't fuck about.

Bye Kristen

 Kirsten? Christine? Kyran? Karen?

David Roth and Albert Burneko give Sinema the political obituary she so richly deserves.

I didn't LOVE Joe Manchin, but I understood that he was from West Virginia and had to represent them somewhat. I think he largely did what he believed was right and I disagree with what he thinks is right.

As Roth and Burneko point out, what distinguished Sinema was her complete absence of principles.

There's Something Happening Here

 But what it is ain't exactly clear.

There has been a consistent - remarkably consistent - pattern of primary polling consistently undercounting Nikki Haley's support in the primaries. Part of the reluctance of pollsters to really address this comes, I think, from failing to look at Trump as a de facto incumbent. Off the top of my head, the last time an incumbent president lost, then ran again, was Grover Cleveland. That was well before polling existed. So pollsters are really struggling with how to model a primary electorate where you have a de facto incumbent (Trump) who is not the actual president.

Josh Marshall tries to make some sense from the general polling landscape, but one observation he makes that I think is important when looking at polling right now is that a LOT of polling is a referendum in March on Joe Biden. Now, I am on the record with thinking that Biden is doing a great job, with the exception of Israel, and even there, I think my disagreement is a matter of degrees rather than a difference of principle. However, the "vibes" are bad and Biden takes the brunt of that as president. 

In a fundamentally uncontested primary, Biden is racking up huge wins against Generic Challenger and a small but real protest vote. Trump is also running against Generic Challenger in Haley who is a bog standard Republican in a lot of ways: she's anti-abortion, pro-tax cut, pro-deregulation. The fundamental difference between someone who voted for Haley and someone who voted for Trump is whether they believe the 2020 election was legitimate. 

If "the GOP is a failed state and Trump is its warlord" then a consistent third of Republicans are in revolt against the warlord. This also fails to capture the independents, including (often but not always) GOP leaning independents. In a closed primary, if you still have Trump facing a considerable revolt, that is fundamentally a revolt over January 6th and Trump's anti-democratic agenda. 

Elliot Morris at 538 has a breakdown of why polling primary voters is hard. One thing he notes is that getting people to respond at all is hard, but especially now. Here's his take:

My theory is that most of these primary polls pulling samples of voters from voter registration lists are missing moderate crossover partisans and first-time voters. Additionally, we know that people who are highly motivated to participate in polls (the "weirdos") also happen to be the most politically and ideologically extreme Americans. That's a recipe for polling bias in primaries, where weighting to party, past vote and polarized demographic benchmarks does not control for the partisan consequences of overrepresenting politically engaged Americans.

That highlighted bit is key. The most polarized, ideological voters in the country are Trumpists and Biden's Leftist critics. However, we also know that the new Democratic coalition includes a LOT of college educated voters, who tend to vote in "off" year elections - this has been the go-to explanation of why Democrats have outperformed since 1/6 and Dobbs. College educated voters tend to be frequent and engaged voters, but they are also not necessarily the sort of engaged ideological voter that Morris is describing. 

Biden's path to victory absolutely runs through winning the normie voter. We know Trump's cultists will crawl over molten lava to vote for their Mango Mussolini. We also know that in a perfect world every single Democrat and Democratic leaning voter would prefer that Biden were a decade younger. However, we also can see that Trump has real liabilities even within a normally compliant party.

Here's the most important thing, I think, to look at. Haley has suspended her race without endorsing. There are still more primaries to come. She will still be on the ballot. How many Republicans will still vote for her out of protest over Trump's insurrection? It's not Dobbs that has Republicans upset (maybe a few, but not 30%), it's Trump's criminality both on 1/6 and <gestures wildly at everything>. 

Yesterday on Twitter, Nate Silver - who's on a "Joe Biden is old and losing" jihad - flagged Biden saying that "his last five polls showed him winning." Silver said this represented a complete misunderstanding of what the polling was saying and showed the public polling that has shown Biden to be consistently a few point behind. Except Biden said "his polling" not the Times or Fox or freaking Rasmussen. "His". Unless he was committing a gaffe, that suggests that their internal polling is showing something different than the public media polls.

Our wretched cable nets continue to post things like "85% of Trump voters would still support him if he was in jail." Of course they would. It's a cult!

Trump won't win by winning his cultists, and there is some evidence that he is really struggling to hold down even what few normie Republicans still exist. 

The Crazy

 Donald Trump has said some crazy shit over the years. He's now mainlining absolute lunacy. Now, he's talking about denying federal funds to schools that require ANY immunizations. The idea that MMR or measles or Whooping Cough vaccines are damaging is, of course, lunacy. However, one thing Trump is good at is telling his cultists what they want to hear. He picks up on the rhythms of his Volksturm rallies and regurgitates it back. As Trumpistan falls further and further into its own navel, you get increasingly bonkers positions like this.

It's time for - maybe, just maybe - this to get as much media attention as Joe Biden's age. There was a poll out showing that Donald Trump, who was found to have committed sexual assault and created the conditions to overturn Roe v Wade, is effectively tied with women. I would guess that wider coverage of Trump's insane ramblings MIGHT have an impact on that.

Rodents Of Unusual Size

I haven't been paying much attention to the Hunter Biden saga, because it pretty clearly looked like bullshit from the jump. Biden fils is an addict and his behavior has often been problematic because of that. As many others have said, the inquisition of Hunter Biden has convinced me not to vote for him. His father's dedication to his troubled son has improved my opinion of Joe.

Yesterday, Hunter appeared before the clown show that is the House GOP. His answers were credible, specific and would have resolved an honest inquiry, especially in conjunction with the revelations that most of their "dirt" on Hunter came from Russian sources. 

However, I also realize that the lockstep nature of the Right means that the screeching nonsense from Russian assets like Gaetz and Comer, plus the rank idiocy of most House GOP members will be imbibed fully and completely assimilated by our Fox-addled fellow citizens.

I'm not 100% sure how representative democracy can survive a post-factual, post-truth landscape. Destroying the very idea of facts and truth is the first step towards authoritarianism and it sure seems like we are on our way.

This Is Alvin Bragg's Moment

 The indefensible decision for the Supreme Court to hear Trump's bullshit immunity case in late April rather than yesterday (if at all) means that the most consequential case facing Trump - Jack Smith's January 6th case - will not go to trial before July at the very earliest. This is really bad news, as the ability to prevent a nakedly dictatorial caudillo from winning the election sure seems to hinge on a felony conviction. The reason that this is so is...insane, but here we are.

Which brings us to the two state cases against Trump. At the moment, of course, Trump has been found guilty of fraud in three separate incidents: Trump University, the Trump Foundation and now the Trump family business. He has been found by a jury to have committed sexual assault and defamation. Colorado and possibly Illinois are trying to kick him off the ballot for being an insurrectionist. The Supreme Court's decision to short circuit the trial about his attempts to launch a coup means that there are three remaining cases.

One, the Georgia case, is tied up in the poor judgment of Fani Willis, but that one could go to trial sooner rather than later. The classified documents case is under the supervision of Trump's de facto defense attorney, Judge Loose Cannon. Sneaking under the radar is the NY case that Alvin Bragg brought.

The case drew some harumphs from various legal scholars, because it has a novel theory at the heart of it. Basically, Trump falsified financial documents to hide his hush money payments to Stormy Daniels (and I think others). This constitutes a violation of federal campaign finance law, but by falsifying documents in New York to cover up a federal felony, Trump committed a felony under NY law. This mixing of federal and state law is now being evaluated by the judge. 

Providing the prosecution can prove that Trump falsified those records (and there's some worry that Michael Cohen is too central to their case), and the legal theory holds up, then Trump could be convicted before Memorial Day. 

However, it IS the weakest of the three felony cases, because of the somewhat novel legal doctrine. Bragg is stretching a bit. 

This is like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion, but on the other hand, they really did put Capone in jail. 

The most hilarious result would be a Trump conviction, but with a minimal prison sentence of 6 months. This would put him in jail through the election, releasing him just in time to face the more serious charges.

Ideally, the Georgia case gets fast tracked and attains a conviction, but Bragg's case has the clearest route to a trial. In fact, Trump's team is hoping to win an acquittal, which would be be damaging to the overall message that Trump is a massive crook. Hopefully, a New York jury can find a way to overturn the disastrous decision of the Supreme Court to effectively preclude a federal trial before election day.