Obama

 Last night, my wife and I went to see Barack Obama speak in Hartford. He had one insight that was new to me: he felt that among the many impacts of smart phones was the ability of people in poorer parts of the world to see the richer parts. In America, this led to the resentment that poorer rural areas have for the coasts but in the rest of the world, it doubtless fueled the migrant surge of the past 15 years. I had never thought of that last bit.

The rest of his comments were not especially revelatory. He remains a formidable speaker. I remember when he said something was pernicious, and I struggled to imagine Trump even being able to define that word. He speaks in measured cadences, considering every word that leaves his mouth. Going there, I resigned myself to the fact that he was too smart to say anything especially controversial, and he did couch everything in terms of "that guy" or "some people" in keeping with the norms that former presidents butt out of current politics. I do find that annoying, in the sense that one side abiding by norms while the other tears them up seems like asymmetric warfare. 

Still, his criticisms were real, and he made the unassailable argument that the members of our current government are not loyal to the ideals of American democracy that stretch back to World War II and again further back to our founding. He reiterated his position that there are two stories in America. While he didn't mention him, I would argue that it's the two stories present within the person of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, the democrat, who believed in the natural rights of all people. Jefferson, the slaveholder, who limited the universal rights because he simply could not see Blacks, Natives and women as equals.

Of course, Trump and the entire GOP are loyal to the story that there are some "real Muricans" and then there are vermin. Trump's American Carnage, his language about cities and Democrats, the rhetoric just this weekend about the assassinations in Minnesota, his ridiculous invocation of "Marxists" and "lunatics" are all part of the caste system that has always been part of the American story.

(I think Heather Cox Richardson, the moderator, asked maybe four or five questions over the course of an hour and a half. Dude can talk.)

He also echoed a thought I've had for years, which is that we have so balkanized our public life that there is no common civic language. He specifically and pointedly noted the abandonment of factual truth by Trump and the GOP, but he rightly noted that this is deeply cultural. 

In all, it was a defense of the sort of postwar and post-Cold War liberalism that has brought great good to the world, but has also led to disruption, as free trade has left some people and regions behind. It was intelligent, coherent, wise and completely at odds with the current leadership of this country. It was also, I need to say, an argument that Joe Biden simply could not make in 2024. It was an argument that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris articulated forcefully, but latent misogyny led to it falling on deaf ears.

I miss the guy.

Hiding

 Trump left the G-7 Summit early, leading many to speculate that he has returned to DC because we are about to go to war with Iran. That is certainly plausible.

However, I agree with Richardson that there might be another explanation. Trump was out of his depth and looked clumsy and foolish next to the other leaders. The DC Press Corpse has largely rolled over for Trump, and his briefings are filled with sycophants and lackeys from places like NewsMax. The international press corps has no such compunction to roll over for him. 

Trump is old. Trump is stupid. Trump is in obvious decline. Going to something like the G-7 Summit exposes this. The comical moment when Trump dropped his "trade agreement" and Prime Minister Starmer stooped down to pick them up made him look like the feeble old man that he is. (He also seemed to confuse the UK with the EU, a slip that would have dominated news coverage for a week if Biden did it.) When you place Trump next to normal people, his abnormality becomes more manifest.

Trump falls asleep in public and during meetings. He forgets things that no one who is president should forget.

I await Jake Tapper's lengthy report of Joe Biden's age.

So Much Stuff

 The argument that news networks put their fingers on the scale for Trump comes down to their motivations to have "content" that improves ratings. Trump is good for ratings! Fuck democracy.

My sojourn on foreign shores was certainly a deluge of "content." There was the Trump-Musk uncivil war; the LA protests; the police assault on Senator Padilla; the Israeli-Iranian war; Trump's laughable parade and the No Kings Protests, the assassination of Minnesota legislators. I'm sure I'm forgetting some things.

I was gone for twelve days.

Having the ability to step back and not comment immediately has led me to see Trump's deluge of horseshit as being a demonstration of his fundamental weakness. The capper is of course the massive protests that drowned out his feeble parade.  

Trump requires a steady barrage of outrage, but his manifest incompetence and rampant lying actually blunt his effectiveness at creating a true dictatorship. He's manifestly unpopular and his low-information voters aren't likely to show up to vote or they will swing against him. He's hemorrhaging support from Hispanics, independents and the young men who helped him win in November. He might not care, but at some point Republicans will have to.

This is all very chaotic and unpleasant, but I think the lesson of the last two weeks has been about Trump's inherent weakness. 

Soooooo

 Anything happen while I was gone....

When WERE We A Serious Country?

 Krugman offers up the argument that we are "no longer a serious country" as we embrace the idiocy of Trump's manic policy making. Richardson begins her piece by noting Joni Ernst's sociopathic response to Medicaid cuts being irrelevant because we all die anyway.

It is tempting to place the cascading disasters of Trump's policies at his feet alone. He is, after all, that toxic combination of moron and narcissist. But it wasn't Trump's idea that tax cuts will lead to so much growth that they would pay for themselves. It wasn't Trump's idea that cutting people off from government health insurance would make them lazy. It wasn't Trump's idea that America just needed to return to "Biblical principles."

A lot goes back to Reagan, but you can back further to the Birchers and McCarthy, to Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon.

America has never felt respect for bureaucrats, perhaps because our original bureaucracy was staffed by the spoils system (a system Trump is trying to resurrect). Other countries feel that their government is a tool to help the most people that it can; it is an instrument of the common good. We don't feel that way, and a large strain of us have never felt that way.

I understand why even center left commentators and especially bothsides types would not want to stare this fact in the face, but America has always been unserious. We have thrived, because democracy allows us to self-correct. 

Let's hope we still have democracy by 2028.

Heading On The Road

 Taking a quick trip to Yurp. Blogging will be lighter.

Where Did The New Gilded Age Come From?

 Krugman takes a look at what killed the Great Compression - a four decade period where inequality in the US was notably low. The Great Compression began in 1940 and ended more or less in 1980.

There are multiple efforts by academic economists and historians to explain this, and they roughly fall into several categories. One school that sort of supports Trumpist politics is that globalization stole all the jobs. Another says that computers and automation stole all the jobs.

The most persuasive to me has been that those two things helped create more inequality, but the real culprit was the anti-statist politics of Reagan. In fact, while Trumpist politics follows the anti-globalization, actual policy hews closer to Reagan's plan for deregulation and tax cuts.

When Eisenhower left office, the top marginal tax rate was 93%. That more or less precluded the existence of an Elon Musk or Warren Buffett. I'm not sure that a 93% tax rate is actually a good thing, but the idea of a wealth tax is something that the next Democratic trifecta - presuming representative government survives - should take a long look at.

Help Us Dopey Wan Kenobi, You're Are Only Hope

 This is a very long discussion between Paul Krugman and Joey Politano, a trade expert.

Basically, it comes down to the fact that the actual competent people are no longer on the scene, so the legal justifications for all of Trump's shit is paper thin. We are seeing this time and again, where Trump has attempted to blitzkrieg his way to authoritarianism, but the Courts have pretty routinely called bullshit. Think about how many lawyers Trump has stiffed. Think about how fucking nuts much of what he is doing is. Sane, intelligent people tried to rein him in during his first administration, but since they are gone, he's left with a motley collection of ambulance chasers and weirdos. 

This leads back to my basic thesis about Trump's first year: He's doing both incalculable damage and yet not changing things in a deeper sense. 

The Coming Crypto Crash

 Driving down to our son's graduation, my wife had a podcast on (actually multiple, but that's my cross to bear) that I think was Ezra Klein interviewing Zeke Faux, author of Number Go Up, which is about the crypto "industry." Faux went into as much detail as public information allows about the unprecedented corruption from the Trump Family and crypto.

Basically, crypto is not an actual thing. There's no physical presence. You "make" some crypto and then people buy it like a stock, hoping it will go up. If you had bought Bitcoin in 2009, you'd be pretty well off today. So it behaves very much like a security, but it also functions as a currency. However, as a currency, there is literally nothing crypto can do that is better than what existing currencies do.

Except crime.

As Krugman notes, crypto behaves very much like the bank notes of the 19th century. Banks issued private notes that were of variable value, based on the reliability of the bank. The First Bank of Louisville might be a reputable bank or it might not, and a citizen of Memphis might not know which it was. The result was repeated panics and bank runs and a financial system that repeatedly faced depressions and rampant instability. 

So, to recap, crypto provides no function that existing money provides, except to do crimes. It is basically an unregulated industry that has billions or trillions in assets. It is "worth" nothing real. 

This seems set for a crash, and I've been predicting that Trump's naked corruption and - as it turns out - deep ties to crypto has set us up for a bubble and subsequent collapse.

Before "Liberation Day" my thinking was that this crypto bubble would be the thing to launch us into a recession. Now, with tariffs already roiling investors, how many will put money into crypto - perhaps to circumvent tariffs? 

In the end, bubbles always burst and crypto seems a perfect storm. It's disappointing that Democrats can't see that, but they probably feel like they can't alienate donors in Silicon Valley. No one should vote for this bill, because the bubble will burst. When it does, though, it will be the president's party that suffers, I suppose.

If the bill does pass, we could see the bubble expand this summer and then crash as early as this fall.

It's The Sexism

 Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump - twice - because men can't see a woman as president. The data are a bit murky on the causation (I added mine), but it's pretty clear that when Democrats nominate a woman, she loses to Donald Trump. As Cohen notes, Trump himself probably adds to that gender shift, as he's a caricature of "masculinity." However, Democrats are the party that relies on women's votes, but when they nominate a woman, you get a lot of "Well, there's just something about her..." which is really just "Men are supposed to be president and women aren't."

I wish to hell that were not true, but it seems pretty clear to me that the road to Democratic success in presidential politics is to nominate a guy.

(facepalm gif)

 This article about Donald Trump and aging is...Jesus wept. Yes, there are good points in there that might make sense for anyone else other than Trump, but how do you write about him like he's normal in 2025?

TACO Thursday

 Trump was asked about how Wall Street types have a shorthand: TACO for Trump Always Chickens Out. Basically, it has been the stock guys way of looking at Trump's tariff's clusterfuck. Sure, he talks big, but in the end, he chickens out. 

A few hours later, a US court ruled that he has no emergency powers to levy the tariffs in the first place. Then an Appeals court stayed THAT decision. Are there tariffs? Who knows! Yes, I guess.

And that's...fine. As Marshall notes, Trump's poll numbers collapsed during the chaos of Liberation Day. Then, some of the tariffs went away: TACO! Then China's went through the roof. Then they came back down to merely terrible. TACO! His numbers stabilized. 

The combination of the actual legal status of his tariffs being in limbo (he has no legal authority) and the existing collapse in ocean going shipping means that we should still be headed to what we need to be headed for: empty shelves this summer. It is going to suck, but the only way the American people are going to learn something is by ramming full speed into the side of a cliff that has been painted to look like a Walmart checkout lane. We have always been somewhat of a prisoner to FAFO, and we need to wait for sentence to be carried out.

Still, my point from yesterday still seems germane. What has this festering orange goblin actually accomplished? I mean, he's definitely destroyed some stuff, some important stuff. America is weaker now than it was yesterday and a LOT weaker than it was last year. His capacity for destruction is immense.

However, what has he built? Without legislation to back his moves, how permanent is any of this crap? The courts are shooting his shit down with almost hilarious regularity. Of course, the capacity of the president to ignore the judiciary is an as yet untested strength. Trump is an authoritarian; he will defy court decisions he disagrees with.

I think at that point, it becomes necessary for the people to rise up.

On a mixed note, we are travelling. We stayed in exurban North Carolina last night and this morning one of those vapid morning show was on in the background of the complimentary breakfast. There was an ad by the local House member lying about protecting Medicare from something something Joe Biden. Seriously, Biden screwed Medicare...somehow. It was a classic Trumpian move to make every weakness an attack. This member is clearly spooked by the budget he just voted for and felt the need to start dropping ads.

This is a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that he is clearly shitting his pants, if he's running ads in May of 2025. The bad news is that I simply cannot conceive of a Democratic Party that is going to run ads in May of 2025. Republicans have learned how to hack the smooth brains of the disengaged voter. That's how they won.

Democrats need to start attacking and more importantly defining the issue. Medicare is their baby. People trust them. But they won't if they don't see them speaking up.

Trump's sort of drowning right now.

Stick a hose in his mouth.

UPDATE: This is a decent argument that ends with the real possibility that Trump - a walking sack of fat and gristle held together by seething grievances - may decide NOT to chicken out during his next showdown. So as shelves empty and he would normally retreat, he doubles down, because TACO!

Do These Losses Matter?

 Richardson lays out the fact that Trump and his minions have suffered a really remarkable sustained string of court defeats. It doesn't really matter if the judge is a Republican or a Democrat or even if Trump appointed them. His actions are so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional that courts have little problem ruling against him.

In Congress, the Big Ugly Bill is waddling into the threshing blades of the Senate, a process that I would guess a few House Republicans are hoping will strip the bill of some of its uglier aspects. The reality in Congress though is that Trump has passed almost no significant legislation. While the Republican Congress has obliged him with approximately zero oversight, they aren't willing to address or pass laws to validate some of his worst decisions. 

In short, despite the flurry of executive orders, despite the DOGE assault on governance, despite the outrageous corruption of his pardons, despite the evisceration of our role in the world...Trump really hasn't changed much. Not in a permanent way. 

Let's posit a hypothetical. Ten House Republicans die from drinking raw milk at RFK's bear barbecue. That makes Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House. 

Trump chokes on a Big Mac and Vance - attempting to give him the Heimlich - is crushed when Trump falls on him.  Jeffries becomes President.

Immediately, all of Trump's EOs are rescinded. Like within 24 hours. All the threats, all the attack dog bullshit...gone. Yes, it will take years maybe decades to restore the world's faith in US governance. There is real lasting damage there. But so much of what Trump has done - while awful and truly terrible in equal measure - is not lawful and is therefore not permanent. 

Which is why we are all worried about the 2026 midterms. If they happen, Democrats win the House.  They might even win the Senate if we are in a recession then, despite the map.  

The worry remains whether we will have free and fair elections. However, given current Republican contempt for legislating, maybe they just don't care. 

We Said Goodbye To Our Dog Today

 A million years ago - or maybe 15 - we lost a truly great dog, Garp, to congestive heart failure. He was to my eyes the perfect dog: docile, loving, a bit lazy. We had to let him go in late August. I was not ready for another dog.

By late October, my wife suggested we "go look at" some rescues. I should've known what that meant. We came home with Heffley. (We name our dogs alphabetically after literary characters.)

She was part Lab, part...something. A bit skittish, especially at first. It took me about a day to fall in love with her. For my eldest son, who was struggling in school, Heffley was home; she was loyalty with a wet nose and soft eyes. The world of school kept kicking him in the teeth and Heff kept licking his wounds and laying her head in his lap.

This coming Friday, he graduates from college. He was tied up in his final project, so he couldn't come home to say goodbye, as she rapidly declined from kidney disease and just being very old. Saturday, she could hobble a bit. Sunday, she could barely stand. Monday, we had to hold her up to pee. This morning, she couldn't even stand. To watch her slowly fade from this world, until the vet came to ease her journey, was both crushingly sad and sadly beautiful. 

She came into our lives when our boys were boys. She left it, as they became men. Her job was to always be there for them, but especially our eldest, who so desperately needed her. Her work was done, and she needed rest.

To try and ease our son's anguish over the phone was probably even more heartbreaking. We could see her decline. We could see her slowly dim, her confusion, her steady thinning in this world. All he wanted to do was to hold her once more.

To have a dog is to know love in about as pure a form as it gets. To have a child is to have a constantly exposed nerve, sensitive to every blast of cold air life throws at them - and thus at you.

Yet for all that heartbreak, I can't help but feel blessed for having that love in my life. The cost is dear, only because the reward is so precious.

Trump and Hitler

 My working thesis is that Trump is not really a fascist, but many of the elements of MAGA and his administration are. Miller and Vought spring to mind, but all the "anti-woke" crusaders who want to programmatically destroy any vestige of cultural liberalism would qualify.

Martin Longman makes an interesting argument that Trump's similarities to Hitler are largely stylistic. He shares with Hitler a combination of "table thumping" ability with few core ideas beyond the roar of the crowds, which then becomes his core ideas. The wall with Mexico, for instance. Did Trump really believe that? Almost certainly not. But as we've seen time and time again, Trump says something stupid or false and that becomes the new litmus for MAGAts. 

Now, my reading of Hitler's rise is incomplete, but I don't think this tracks. Hitler very much had a program - some his, some from the others in the nascent Nazi Party. Both Trump and Hitler played the demagogue perfectly, but Trump's "policies" are really just the weird combination of prejudices he retains from the 1970s and '80s and whatever his crowds cheer to. My central critique of "Trump is a fascist" is precisely that fascism is programmatic and Trump is impulsive. The horrid people around Trump, however, absolutely have a program: Project 2025.

It's disorienting not knowing if America will rediscover its democratic spirit or even if we will be allowed to express that spirit in 2026. What happens if Trump and his minions actively try to end democratic elections? Not impede, but end? What happens as he continually defies court orders?

Trump can be horrific without being Hitler.

Subtlety and Nuance

 Today we graduated another Senior class, and now my final task is to write end of term comments on my underclassmen. I teach at a very good school and have very good students, but the difference between very good and excellent is usually how well a student can grapple with and convey nuance in their writing. Not a reflexive bothsides, but real nuance and qualification in their arguments. 

On a side note, that's why I hate Debate Club type of academics. They seek not to understand complexity but to "win" their maximalist position. There are important skills involved in debate, but the idea of winning warps an appreciation of how few issues really are black and white.

I was thinking of that, also, while reading Paul Krugman talk about how deindustrialization is not simply a product of globalization and outsourcing. America is the second largest manufacturing country in the world, even if our total number of workers in manufacturing is smaller than it used to be and much smaller as a percentage of the work force. The biggest culprit is automation. 

If you understand deindustrialization as a process whereby many jobs are made much more efficient because of machines and robots, you see a process whereby America does still make things, we just don't employ as many people to do it. 

His argument is actually about AI and what that will do to service and skilled workers. Basic economics says that if AI makes a bunch of jobs obsolete, then we will just create new jobs. I worry more about AI making us even stupider than we already are, but if I'm worried that "this time will be different" I need to remember that rarely is that actually true.

All of which is to say, navigating the modern world successfully requires people who can understand and grapple with those subtleties. Trump and MAGA deal only in certainties. 

Yesterday, Trump "delivered" a rambling incoherent speech at West Point that would have had the press calling for Joe Biden - if he had delivered it - to resign by Monday. At the same time, we have the MAGA war on Harvard, a war designed to impoverish the country of the sort of critical thinkers that the modern world requires.

I'm old enough to remember when Japan was going to eclipse us. It didn't happen, because Japan has too few children and refuses to let immigrants come into their country. Recently, it has been China that was going to eat our lunch, but I felt that they insular, corrupt government and business environment of China would eventually fail. 

What I did not expect was for the US to shut itself off from immigrants and embrace clannish, corrupt politics - importing the worst aspects of Japanese and Chinese weaknesses.

As others have noted: If Donald Trump was a foreign agent intent on destroying America's place in the world, what would he be doing differently?

The Importance of Cognitive Decline

 CNN is working overtime to sell Jake Tapper's book about Biden's age and the 2024 campaign. This has engendered some backlash from people who are obviously more concerned about (waves arms at everything happening). What's more, it's pretty clear that every attack on a Democratic candidate applies so much more to Trump than it ever could to the Democrat.

Hillary Clinton had a "scandal" involving her email server. Donald Trump's team shares top secret information over Signal.

Hunter Biden's laptop...something something...he sold some paintings...something. Trump accepts outright emoluments from foreign governments and figures. Hell, you had the president of South Africa subtly teasing Trump about not having a plane to gift him and Trump was basically "Yeah, give me a plane."

Joe Biden was, indeed, old. His physical decline, including a worsening stutter and fatigue made him incapable of campaigning, especially in the years 2022-24, when he could have set the agenda better. There is some accuracy in Tapper's book about needing to add to the historical record on that issue - though it does seem to be getting some pushback from people who worked with Biden. Again, I don't think Biden has dementia; I think he was too old. He should have announced that he would not run again in the fall of 2023 and let the party move on to a fill primary.

Donald Trump is also very old. The evidence of his mental decline is abundant. The White House will not release copies of his remarks in transcript form, because he spouts gibberish every time he opens his puckered piehole. As HCR notes, Trump then launches into another trade war, this time with the EU, and then his office has to clarify that what the president very forcefully said in public - 50% tariffs on Europe - is not in fact policy. Trump has always been a profoundly stupid man whose wealth has bought him a patina of status. Quite a few MAGAts will say that we should trust him on the economy, because "he will run this country like a business" when in fact he will ruin this country like one of the many businesses that he bankrupted.

Tapper's book may or may not be entirely accurate on the details, while still capturing the fact that Biden really was too old to run for reelection. 

Super.

Where are the articles on Trump? Why are we treated to breathless reporting about Biden when it is Trump whose demented derangement is creating massive instability in global markets? What's more, we know Trump's organization leaks. Hell, at some point one of his staff will likely invite a reporter into a group chat about how Trump can't remember any staffer's names.

There is a frightening chance that American democracy or the cohesiveness of our nation is slipping away. I don't think we've reached a tipping point, but it could happen. 

The way the media covered this moron will be chief among the leading causes of its death.

All Of The Above

 Richardson points out something that I think really needs to resonate with those who are trying to oppose Trump and his cabal of fascists. There's a question as to whether to focus on the oligarchic concentration of wealth, the authoritarian anti-constitutionalism or the racism. As HCR notes, they are mutually reinforcing. You could argue that one could not exist without the other. 

The rather blatant racism - like the kind exhibited in the Oval Office the other day - is not popular beyond the base, but threatening demagoguery about immigrants works, right up until someone's friend gets deported. Same with the corruption, few people think it's OK. 

What you wind up relying on is the authoritarian forms of government. Yesterday's assault on Harvard is a good example of this dynamic. This can't possibly be legal, but by attacking with the resources of the Federal government, they hope to cow other institutions. Browbeating opponents creates a reflexive crouch that they can exploit to do really, really unpopular things. In the end, too, they are cruel people; cruel people are usually stupid but arrogant. 

It all goes together. 

Gerontocracy Cost Us America's Solvency

 The exceedingly awful bill to destroy America's debt, credit worthiness, currency and civic governance has passed the House.

By one vote.

Meanwhile, three Democratic House members have died since January, because both the voters and the party can't seem to understand that anyone in poor health and advanced years needs to step aside. They are not indispensable.

If it takes some sort of Party Retirement Program whereby they can still advise the caucus (and draw an income, I guess) then let's make that happen.

But all our hopes now move to the Senate, which is a terrifying idea.

Today in the TV Administration

 Richardson notes that it was a bad day for Cabinet officials on Capitol Hill. The clip that got the most airplay on social media was Gestapo Barbie and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem not knowing what habeas corpus is. Habeas protections go back to the Magna Carta are a bedrock tenet of civil liberties. Noem's answer was not only off, it was the exact opposite of what habeas is. If we lived in any sort of system with the ability to actually hold people accountable, she would be impeached and removed by the weekend.

We had Secretary Brain Worms being challenged on the savage cuts to health care funding, and his plan was either to lie or to claim ignorance of decisions made by his own department. Marco Rubio was excoriated for abandoning whatever principles he may have once espoused. Trump's nominee for IRS Commissioner was exposed to be the sort of person who should have absolutely zero control over the IRS.

Donald Trump is a deeply stupid man experiencing steep and notable cognitive decline (from an already low baseline). He says and does things that are not just contentious, but empirically wrong. China doesn't pay the tariffs; we can't build a "Golden Dome" missile defense system; the Qatari Pimp Plane was not a gift; markets are not fine with his moves. It should be noted at this point, that Joe Biden is also old and that if an old man falls and hurts himself he might need a wheelchair, but this is only really true about Joe Biden.

Trump, being stupid, has assembled a Cabinet and an administration full of people he has seen on TV defending him. Fox News "personalities" litter his administration. Noem, Hegseth, Kennedy, Gabbard, their main qualification seems to be that they are photogenic. They clearly have no idea how to actually do their jobs. Josh Hawley complaining to Noem that FEMA is absent from his state is deeply hilarious, because how can someone whose only job qualification is a certain plastic hotness have any idea about disaster management? The TeeVee Administration is going to make the FEMA response to Hurricane Katrina look like the Apollo Lunar program. 

Trump's former lawyer, Alina Habba, who would rather be hot than smart, because you can fake being smart, brought charges against a member of Congress who was visiting an ICE detention center. This is blatantly contrary to existing law, similar to charging the judge in Wisconsin. I would strongly suggest that these cases will not make it past summary judgement. In fact, it is precisely in the Courts where being photogenic rather than knowledgeable and competent is going to be a real detriment to Trump's plans to destroy America's civic democracy, economy and standing in the world.

Of course, this all barely matters, because the median American voter is pretty dumb when it comes to government policies, too. 

Will It Pass?

 If you had asked me in January if the "Big Beautiful Bill" (Jesus wept) was going to pass, I would have said, "no." In fact, I think I did. MAGA has proven spectacularly unable to pass actual laws; this is why they rely so much on theatrical Executive Orders and executive overreach.

Looking at the bill now, I'm less certain it will fail, but I'm not convinced it won't pass. As Martin Longman lays out, they have settled on a "kick the can" strategy that simply moves the bill along to the next step, even though no one actually loves the bill. As Richardson points out, "moderate" Republicans are uncomfortable with how deep the cuts go and extremists hate how shallow they are. The bill absolutely explodes the national debt in ways that have led Moody's and likely others to downgrade America's credit rating. 

Still, the bill keeps passing certain hurdles. It goes to the Rules Committee in the middle of the night tonight to try and hide this grotesquerie under cover of darkness. It might pass. In fact, it likely will. 

The question is what will happen when Johnson has to bring the final shitball to the House floor for a vote. Don Bacon just saw the popular Republican mayor from Omaha (his district) lose her reelection bid. Johnson can only lose three votes (it would be narrower if a handful of superannuated Democrats had stepped aside last November). 

The idea that House Republicans in Florida will vote against the bill to protect Venezuelans from being deported seems like a fantasy. Still, this is one real opportunity for Republicans to demonstrate actual principles. 

The same goes for the Senate, where long term concerns about the debt might actually resonate.

The strategy for this bill has been to force everything into one big omnibus bill - including raising the debt ceiling to the ionosphere - which will presumably force Republicans to fall in line or the whole thing collapses. That's... not the worst strategy for dealing with Congressional dysfunction.

Maybe they fail tonight. Maybe they fail in the subsequent vote in the House. Maybe the Senate.

Anyway, Joe Biden is old and someone should write a story about that, I guess.

Cruel AND Dishonest

 In the wee small hours of the morning, the House GOP finally advanced the Big Beautiful Bill out of committee. It is a moral and fiscal atrocity. It explodes the deficit to the point where Moody's has downgraded America's bond rating in the fear that this explosion of debt passes. We will add a tremendous amount of debt for the sole purpose of giving billionaires more money.

None of this will help the American economy, because we've tried this before. We are perpetually stuck in this loop of Republicans running up massive amounts of debt, crashing the economy and then having Democrats clean it up in ways that lead to hardships that lead to people voting for Republicans again.

What's impressive is how dishonest this bill is. It creates all sorts of draconian cuts in Medicaid, but waits until 2029 to enact them. This allows them to give a bunch of money to billionaires while theoretically reducing spending. However, we all pretty much know that those cuts to Medicaid are unlikely to happen. So we get massive debt and the subsequent downgrading of America's credit worthiness and no trade offs.

That Republicans would embrace Donald Trump - a serial liar and plutocrat - is a real mystery. 

Our Old Dog

 We have three dogs, including one 15 year old rescue. She's very infirm, can barely heave herself up off her bed (and not at all off a smooth floor), has accidents in the house and seems genuinely unhappy more than happy. In a few weeks, we are leaving for a celebratory trip to Europe for our son's graduation. We have a house/dog sitter, but leaving her to be watched over by a stranger seems wrong. On the other hand, when the boys went off to college 9+ months ago, we told them to say goodbye to her, because she was unlikely to live until Christmas, and she continues to trundle along.

Making the decision to euthanize her is really hard, because she still does have happy moments and does not appear to be in an immediate health crisis or real pain. She is not, however, going to "get better" from her kidney disease and advanced arthritis. She's absolutely skin and bones right now. 

I think we find ourselves hoping that one morning we will come down and she will just have faded away in her sleep, but that seems unlikely to happen. We are going to have to make a very, very hard decision both for herself and what feels like a selfish decision for ourselves. 

Lots of things suck right now in our immediate personal lives (it's not all bad), but this is the shit cherry on the sundae of suckage.  

The Narrative

 Richardson does her usual nice job of laying out how the broad MAGA-sphere has been adept at changing the subject  by seeding the media with various outrageous stories. The fundamental insight of Bannon and Cheung and the whole Trump media apparatus is that most Americans have the attention span of a fruit fly. Some of them revel in the "content" of the reality TV show that Trump has turned America into. There's always drama!

At some point, this exhausting ability to keep flinging poo at the walls of American governance comes back to haunt them. Trump's approval rating is falling in spite of their ability to "flood the zone" with outrage after outrage. That's the crazy thing. It works in short bursts, but it's fundamentally dysfunctional.

In a related way, we have the media's current feeding frenzy over the latest "autopsy" of Biden's abortive 2024 reelection campaign. As an historical accounting...I mean it might be accurate. I personally saw the physical decline more than the mental decline, though they are linked. I think there is a fair assessment that Biden should not have run at all and the party could have had an open primary. I would wager a governor would have run the strongest campaign against Trump, simply because of the anti-incumbency bias that has existed post-Covid. 

Whatever, hindsight is 20/20. The story - in this particular moment - feels like another distraction. This is not the Trump people flooding the zone with outrages, this is the media falling comfortably into a story that they love to tell: Biden is way too old. Maybe he was, but I would argue that if you care about the mental acuity of an aging president, the most important story is likely to be the current occupant of the Oval Office, whose public statements are gibbering idiocy. 

This all feels like the Covid Lab Leak story. Is that an important story? A little bit, I guess, for China to analyze and make sure it doesn't happen again. Does that really have anything to do with the course of the disease once it spread through the Wuhan market? Not really. But "China Bad" is a nice story and it has "controversy" and...sure, that should be reported on. But that has zero to do with the millions who died.

I have been obsessed with season two of Andor, the Star Wars show that is miles better than anything Star Wars has ever produced. The text of the show is about how revolutions start, and it does a great job analyzing how authoritarian regimes try and squeeze control of a population. There's one arch about propaganda and misinformation that looks like it could be torn from today's copy of the Columbia Journalism Review. The Galactic Empire is more fascist than the Trump Administration, but all the same tools are being used.

Seems like that's a more important story than the age of a former president or Trump's latest beef with Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.

Our Failed (Business) Media Experiment

 Trump has not called off his trade wars. As Krugman notes, we have gone from certifiably insane tariffs to merely crazy ones. At some point, someone must've gotten through to Trump that 145% tariffs on China would cripple the economy in ways we can't fully grok.  The thing is, a 30% tariff on China would have a devastating impact, too. This is a really, really high tariff and a tariff that comes at a time when America's economy is deeply integrated with the rest of the world.

It sounds like mid-June is when we will see shortages start to hit American stores. That or a massive spike in many products.

The stock market and business media seems to think that Trump has called off his trade war, when he hasn't. What will happen when the real burdens of this benighted policy start to become apparent.

Normal Republicans Also Suck

 There has been an effort (and I get it) to reach out to "normal" Republicans in order to create a schism between the old GOP and the MAGA cancer that is eating at American civil democracy. As long as MAGA controls the GOP, we are at the mercy of a handful of voters as to whether we careen into authoritarianism.

However, the recent budget that has emerged from the House GOP is a reminder that the normal agenda of the Republican Party is terribly cruel.

There is an argument that people like Yglesias won't let go of: that Trump moderated on some of the worst and least popular ideas of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I suppose there is truth that those low information Trump voters are primarily concerned that Republicans won't cut their Social Security and keep their farm subsidies flowing. To a certain degree, Trump has kept a few of those red lines, but that has created a budget structure that is untenable. 

The fiscal wreckage that they are about to unleash is really catastrophic. Despite the Doomerism, I really think that much of what Trump is doing actually can be undone fairly quickly - a couple of years. Wrecking America's credit might actually produce the collapse of America that Trump claims to be trying to avert.

Federal workers are really, really important. Most Republicans disagree with that basic premise of public service. They have turned Reagan's quips about government being the problem to an organizing philosophy that is incompatible with 21st century society.

There are no "good Republicans."  The ones who might be are fast becoming independents. 

Which Way Does The Wind Blow?

 Krugman engages in some climate doomerism. He notes that the most promising approach to climate change is the increasingly cheap access to carbon zero energy like solar and wind. He also notes that externalizing the cost of climate change via a carbon tax of some kind is politically toxic. The solution, therefore, is simply to subsidize various green energy technologies with tax credits. Buy a hybrid or EV and get a tax credit. Put solar on your roof, get a tax credit.

However, the Republicans want to repeal all that, because they are awful people. Sure, there's the fealty they owe to a few deep pocketed fossil fuel types, but honestly, it really seems to be because Cleek's Law demands that they do it.

I disagree with Krugman on two point. First, I think plenty of people and places will continue to adopt renewables, because they have gotten so cheap. Second, the rest of the world will still move in the renewables direction. We aren't going to be taking solar panels off of roofs the way Reagan did. The real issue right now is China's existing carbon emissions and India's potential ones. That has nothing to do with us, and oddly, a small retreat from solar and wind might actually make it cheaper for a country like India.

Still, as with everything, Trump and his minions' malevolence is really breathtaking.

Corruption

 In this Thomas Edsall piece, he quotes quite a few historians and political scientists about Trump's corruption. (Or as the Times headline writers would have it: "norms flouting behavior.")

The point of the piece is that Trump's brazen assault on every single idea we have about presidential self-dealing is its own defense. It's "flood the zone" tactics designed to obscure that he's accepting billions in gifts and emoluments. 

One of the scholars notes that "corruption" has a deeper meaning, especially in earlier eras. Corruption was not simple graft. Corruption was rot. It was the rot that existed in a closed system of cronies and favorites that surrounded a monarch. Corruption was not an act, it was a state of being. The piece goes on to note that MAGA believes the "real corruption" is Democrats rigging the game in favor of transgender immigrant gang members. That this perception is largely a creation, a fiction, remains the insurmountable obstacle Democrats face as they claw themselves back to political relevance. 

However, hammering the overall corruption issue - not just the Qatari "flying palace" but the idea of a corrupted system - will resonate once the GOP budget hits.

Hammer the corruption. Hammer it.

Re-Focus

 The critical line of attack against Republicans really can't be solely on Trump. It has to be against Congressional Republicans.

Given the tragic circumstances in terms of where power lies in Congress, there is little that Democrats can actually do to stop the orgy of corruption and the general incompetence of the Trump Regency. Congress has every tool at its disposal to stop what he's doing and they won't. In fact, their budget is probably too extreme even for Trump.

Whatever bad outcomes are headed our way belong to them, too. 

Arsonists Posing As Firefighters

 Paul Krugman makes this analogy when discussing how Trump is posing as the savior when it comes to tariffs. He broke international trade and now he's posing as the savior when he breaks it a little less. These reductions in tariffs are only reductions from the perspective of where we were on Friday. Compared to where we were on March 31st, they are still ridiculously high. What's more, the empty shelves are not going to refill quickly, for two reasons. The first is that global supply chains take a while to heal. The second is that Trump's erratic behavior makes it impossible for businesses to plan long term. In fact, this "reduction" is nothing more than a pause, which is itself unreliable.

We are likely seeing the same dynamic with air travel. The air traffic control system was working pretty well, though it needed upgrades and maintenance. Then DOGE shows up and Newark goes down. Elon Musk will use this as an example of why we need Starlink, when in fact, the old system works fine as long as it's being maintained.

Things rarely break so dramatically that we can see the moment it happens. Things don't so much break as erode. They crumble not collapse. Trump's massive incompetence and corruption will test that hypothesis. Hopefully, the literal body count is small. 

Murphy's Laws

 It took me multiple days to get through Ross Douthat's interview with Chris Murphy. I've been impressed with Murphy since he was our congressman who came and spoke at our school. He's very bright and conceptualizes politics in clear and easy to understand ways.

He makes some interesting arguments. He echoes calls made by Yglesias and others to "grow the coalition" of the Democratic Party, especially in order to win the Senate. I actually like Yglesias' idea of creating something akin to the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party that exists in Minnesota. Yes, we have some independents from Maine and Vermont who are really just cantankerous Democrats, but a Democrat simply can't win in the Dakotas, and having a third party (with no Democrat running) that isn't associated with some of the Democratic Party's cultural stances on guns or other cultural issues would be helpful.

He has been making another argument that is kind of strange to my ears about "church." He's not arguing specifically for religion or religiosity. He's arguing that we've lost that connective communal experience, and that alienation and isolation that we feel is an opening that Trumpist visions of decline exploits. In the abstract I agree with him, but I have no idea what that looks like as a form of political action or a plank in a party platform. In fact, if Trump eviscerates universities and Democrats ever win power again, I almost think you have to attack the tax exempt status of these megachurches.

Where Murphy makes the most sense is in arguing that Democrats do have to return to kitchen table issues. One thing he alludes to and a concern I share is that Kamala Harris did not run on trans rights. Trump rather successfully did make enough voters feel that Harris cared more about trans rights than economic issues. It wasn't HER campaign that botched that, it was Trump's campaign that exploited, perhaps, latent feelings among many voters about a women of color from San Francisco. Her identity was shorthand for her priorities, regardless of what she said. People don't believe politicians - especially in the Age of Trump - so they rely on cultural shorthand. That's why I'm all on board with a male Midwestern governor in 2028.

Douthat pushes Murphy on the basic Democratic rhetoric of Trump's assault on democracy. It obviously did not work for Harris, so why should it work going forward. I agree that the sort of voters who tilted the election to Trump do not have sophisticated understanding of Constitutional Law, democratic norms or abstract principles regarding separation of powers. However, there is a huge and easy to understand opening.

Autocracy is almost always about the corruption. You destroy democratic accountability in order to enrich yourself. Trump's corruption is absolutely off the hook. Just this morning, Trump basically received an emolument from Qatar in the form of a luxury jet. Since the jet will be Trump's after he leaves office (though technically belonging to his presidential library) this is a pretty clear case of a foreign country buying friendship with Trump. The corruption surrounding his crypto is almost impossible to measure.

Finally, we have the many America companies and law firms who are bending the knee and funneling money and services to him.

Once the GOP Budget is finally produced the depths of cuts in the service of reducing taxes on the very rich - combined with the diminished standard of living tariffs should  create will make it easier to paint Trump and the GOP as servants of the very rich.

Some Dem strategist noted that few people know what the word "oligarch" means. I would argue that Democrats should spend the next 18 months drilling that word into everything they talk about: the corruption, the way the game is rigged for the rich, the billionaire boy's club.  

That's Murphy's fundamental argument and I think he's right.

The Shart of the Deal

 Trump announced a "deal" on tariff reductions with Great Britain. It is not a deal. It is the "concept of a deal." Trump rolled back tariffs on British steel (is there a lot of British steel?) and cars. Britain makes primarily luxury cars. Britain will drop some tariffs - benefitting British consumers who have been hurt by Brexit. America will leave most of our tariffs in place. This is - maddeningly - being reported as a tariff reduction by our persistently gullible press. Markets - those stupid, stupid markets - are reacting favorably to this news almost entirely because they desperately want for tariffs to go away.

We get ridiculously credulous headlines like "Trump willing to reduce tariffs on China" but you have to read it to find out he wants to reduce them from 145% to 80%. But 80% is really, really bad. What's more, would you trust that 80% rate? It could go back up or further down. Why import things when the tariff could be much lower or higher when the ship docks than when you ordered those goods?

Anyway, none of this makes any freaking sense. Markets are trying to force some structure and logic on this nonsense. It does not.

I suppose it doesn't matter, because crypto will still destroy us all when it crashes.

Pope Bob

 Wow. Did not see that coming: an American Pope. 

There is a natural (and fallacious) instinct to squeeze the new Pontiff into the frame of American politics. He does, indeed, have opinions on issues that are roiling American politics. Some of those positions are what we might call liberal and others conservative. He is compassionate towards the poor, towards migrants, towards other faith traditions. He is less understanding of modern sexual mores, divorce and LGBTQ issues.

The result from both side (bothsides?) is to wedge him into one camp or the other. Because he called out JD Vance's poor understanding of Catholic theology, he's actual - as Laura Loomer screeched - a "WOKE MARXIST POPE." The problem is that he is neither and both. 

The fact that conservatives are freaking out more than liberals are gloating is indicative of the current dynamic of the American Right. There can be no distance between anyone and Trump if you want remain in good standing within the cult that is the contemporary GOP. Pope Bob/Leo is, in many ways, a conventional Catholic in his embrace of some aspects of economic justice and the dignity of all, while also being pretty retrograde on things pertaining to penises, vaginas and how they interact. They simply cannot tolerate heterodoxy.

There is a smaller concern that various left of central people who are currently embracing Bob/Leo will turn on him, when he inevitably behaves in a bog standard papal way. 

However, I think if we want to look at an important dynamic that I think will really define the next decade in American political life, we have to look at whether we - as in Democrats and the Democrat Adjacent - have to expand the tent. We especially have to expand the tent in places where it might be hard to win on the national "brand."  Embracing someone like Pope Leo makes sense, even though his position on abortion is awful. 

Trump and Republicans did have some success painting Democrats as a party that cared MORE about Trans Rights than they cared about "you" but that wasn't actually true. Fighting falsehoods can be tricky, especially with "vibes" against you. However, while I do think that Democrats will benefit from the absolute shitshow that is President TeeVee's maladministration, they do need to grow the party.

Embracing someone like Leo - rather than reject him like conservatives are doing - is one way to expand that tent.

Breaking: America

 Richardson takes her usual meander through the day's news, but she focus this time on the Doge/Musk Axis. In particular three interrelated things.

First, these is the massive violation of privacy that Musk is committing by downloading and centralizing personal data within Federal computers. Second, there is the degradation of air traffic control, which is going to be a huge issue as soon as we have another plane crash. These narratives start to spin up and they become unstoppable. Third, there is the way Musk is enriching himself by doing the first two parts. (I do hope that if we have democratic elections again and Democrats win a landslide, they go after Musk and seize Starlink and SpaceX as compensation for his crimes.)

Obviously, the most immediate concern would be air traffic control, as people could die. My sister flew through Newark last week and she had a 5 hour delay. We have a trip planned in early June to Europe to celebrate our son's college graduation and I'm not a little worried about getting on an airplane again.

At the moment, we are balanced on a precipice. Trump is blowing up global trade and we are likely a few weeks from emptier shelves. Air traffic control seems to be in some sort of crisis. India and Pakistan are on the verge of war that could kill millions. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is laser focused on harassing trans people and "ending woke" whatever that means in the moment.

The summer is usually a quieter time in politics and economics. I can remember though in 2008 how unsettling all the background noise was - the collapse of some banks, weird fluctuations in gas prices - in anticipation of the true collapse in the fall. We are already in the unsettled time, waiting for the whole thing to crumble down. 

Owning The Calamity

 Joe Biden was not responsible for the inflationary period from 2021-23. That was a global trend related to supply chains. However, probably no other factor explains Trump's victory last November (except maybe some unexplored misogyny). He owned, because he was president. Sucks, but that's kind of the way it works.

So, when you see stories about the US Navy losing F-18s, Trump has to own that, too. It's not his fault - though the increasing number of SNAFUs in air traffic control seem to be linked to Musk's screwing about with those systems - but he owns it. Yes, the tariffs are his fault; yes, the anti-constitutional goonery that he is visiting upon Hispanics, universities and anyone else who crosses him - those are all his fault.

This is the reality of our stupid politics. The incumbent is judged not by their actual actions, but by the gestalt, by the vibes. 

The vibes are about to get very bad, as store shelves empty out. 

That he will very much deserve to own. 

President Television

 Donald Trump is not a bright man. Donald Trump has suffered obvious cognitive decline since his last tenure in the Oval Office. Donald Trump's small, smooth brain has been eroded by a steady diet of television and social media. The only reason this repellant asshole is president is because he was a reality TV star, which created a wholly fictitious image of him as a business savant.

This TV Poisoning is likely the motivation behind his most recent brain farts - re-opening Alcatraz as a prison and levying a tariff on movies. The movie tariff is just absurd, impractical and likely illegal. His rambling announcement about the Alcatraz move is possibly tied to the fact that the Clint Eastwood movie was playing on South Florida television. Is that stupid? Why, yes. It is! But that's Trump for you!

The Problem With "Fascism"

 I've seesawed back and forth over whether to call Trump himself a fascist. I know that Stephen Miller and his ilk are cut and dried fascists. That's clear. Trump is a patrimonial strongman, but that's not fascist, strictly speaking.

I think there's another problem with calling Trump a fascist that Yglesias gets at. One of the reason to constantly call Trump a fascist is that it helps motivate your base and energize resistance. That seems to be the theory. Of course, there are legitimately fascist policies surrounding the idea of what constitutes a real American and the racial panic surrounding immigration. 

However, if you call Trump a fascist long enough, you create something a self-fulfilling prophecy - not for Trump and his minions who are irredeemable - but for certain otherwise neutral actors like business lobbies. Trump is a legitimately petty and vindictive asshole, but you can absolutely fight him in court and usually win. That's the whole game! You fight Trump and you will likely win. The problem is that, yes, it's expensive to fight, but how is going along with his tariff bullshit good for your bottom line? The other problem is that casting Trump as Hitler suggests that you won't only have to fight Trump in Court, but if you lose (or even if you don't), he will send you to a gulag.

In a related way, I see friends absolutely despairing and acting a bit...odd, because of this idea of him being a Hitler-level tyrant. Deleting apps and chats when they pass through customs, for instance. He's just not THAT powerful! Using the fascism frame makes him more powerful, which is ultimately the root of his actual power. It's this perception that he's a true dictatorial strongman that creates the political reality that Jeff Fucking Bezos has to react to.

I like the term "tyrant" to describe Trump because of the Revolutionary War parallels, but I also think focusing on the unbridled corruption is helpful. 

The point of authoritarianism IS the corruption. The autocracy is simply to avoid democratic oversight and consequence. 

The Budget

 One of the things that seemed apparent was that DOGE was doing the ugly work of killing popular programs because Congress doesn't have the nerve for it. Let Musk be the Sin Eater who kills the NIH. 

The problem is that eventually the GOP has to pass a budget. Josh Marshall seems to think that they are engineering a crisis whereby the accumulated pile of money that was not spent (because Musk gutted the federal government like a junkie stealing copper piping) gets validated by Congress. Basically, you have to agree to this or you have to agree to this. Honestly, I think that's the logic behind forcing what's called a rescission bill to validate the idea of impoundment. "We didn't want to violate the Constitution, but you made us."

It seems all very stupid and ill-conceived to me.

Paul Krugman looks at the actual budget they are trying to shove down the throats of the Lapdog Caucus. Basically, Trump wants to make his tax cuts "permanent" but he needs spending cuts - massive ones - to offset that lost revenue. He will not touch Social Security and Medicare; he wants to increase Defense spending. There are a few other areas that he wants to keep or expand upon. The FAA is apparently one. 

The problem is that all the money is in Defense and the broad umbrella of health care. If Medicare is off the table (and there is an actual waste issue with Medicare payments under Medicare Advantage), then you are basically left with gutting Medicaid. Poor people, amirite?

The problem is that 78,000,000 Americans are on the combined programs of Medicaid and CHIP. What's more, a lot of those people are Trump voters.

This is the inherent coalitional problem that Trump's coalition faces. They have brought a ton of low information, low propensity voters into the Republican Party. The central dynamic has its own meme: The Leopards Eating Faces Party. Still, while hard core cultists will gratefully embrace losing their health insurance, I think that many actually won't. I may be naïve, I admit it. 

The reason Trump took over the GOP is that he was able to bring in voters who were fired up for "The only war is the culture war" and who hated the Paul Ryan-led wing of the GOP. Trump promised to preserve THEIR government benefits while cutting THOSE PEOPLE'S benefits. 

Yeah, it doesn't really work that way. 

This year's budget will be a true acid test for those GOP members who are in anything worse than a GOP+10 district or state. It looks brutal, but can they defy Trump? I didn't think they would pass an earlier CR, but they did. Barely, but they did. 

How much pain are they willing to inflict? And what happens when the US economy enters the recession that sure seems imminent. What happens when you cut spending for the poor while actively making more poor people?

I'd like to believe that it would result in a 1932 style rejection of the GOP, but I simply do not trust the American electorate anymore.

Staffing Is Policy

 How you staff an administration very much drives how that administration functions as a policy making instrument.

Today, Marco Rubio is the Secretary of State and the acting head of USAID and the National Archives. He is about to become acting National Security Advisor. 

Rubio is one of the few "normal" appointees in this administration. He is not some Fox News Bot; he is not some half-hot woman who can pull of institutional cruelty. He was a Senator.

The idea that he could plausibly hold all of those jobs is an indictment of the overall competency of everyone else in that Clown Car.

The Coming Reckoning

 So, even before the tariffs have really taken a bite out of the economy, we have entered an economic retraction. Trump inherited a great economy and through several forms of bad policy making (the policy itself was bad and the way he went about it was perhaps worse) he has driven the economy off the road and into a ditch.

Paul Krugman (who links today's NY Post's hilarious headline) notes that Trump is going to try as hard as he can to blame this on Biden. This is, of course, insane. However, what is coming into clearer focus in Trump 2.0 is the reliance the movement has on outright falsehood.

Trump obviously lies all the time, which is par for the course for a malignant narcissist. However, his ability to get his base to believe those lies has - I think - surprised even him. In fact, they seem to glory in the very absurdity of their lies. As Ann Coulter (!) of all people noted, why is every Cabinet meeting something from North Korea? When Pam Biondi says that the amount of fentanyl they have seized has saved the lives of over 200,000,000 Americans...I mean, she can't believe that. They may have inflated the amount seized, then divided into a certain number of lethal doses and then made the case that they saved exactly that many lives. 

It's nuts, but that seems to be the point. First, normal people will point out how absurd that number is, which gets us talking about that rather than the Trump Administration's rebuke in Court over the seizing of Mohsen Mahdawi. Second, it simply normalize the lying as a litmus test. How much can you lie? If you can't really commit to the craziest of lies, do you really deserve a Cabinet position?

Finally, they desperately need to destroy the idea of objective truth. First, because the loyalty needed as noted above. Second, because objective truth is coming for them. 

Since early February, Trumpists have been trying to prepare the ground for the coming economic hard times. Now, we have Trump saying people should prepare for fewer toys for their children. 

Sure, yes, the Cultists won't mind. Shit, pretty soon they will probably stop giving their kids toys out of fealty to their Orange God.  Most people are not OK with this crap. 

I heard some idiot Trump voter talk about how at least Trump is "getting stuff done" even if maybe not all of it is great, because Biden didn't get anything done. In fact, Biden did a LOT of really impressive stuff! Inflation was real, however, and he paid a price for that. Trump is going to crater the global economy and there is no amount of Faux News spin to hide that fact.

Pacific Coast ports are already empty. That means longshoremen and truckers are about to feel the hurt first. Those are Trump people. Let's see what happens.

Morons

 Among the more disturbing trends over the past 25 years has been the movement of Moron-Americans into one political party. Given the way our elections and politics works, this means that we are always one election away from having just the stupidest fucking people in the world running things.

If there's anything more depressing than reading the thoughts of Trump voters, I don't know what it is.

Perhaps, once Trump is done erasing the New Deal framework and these morons are face to face with the fact that government programs have protected them from their own mouthbreathing idiocy, they might...might...rethink their hostility towards things like having actual doctors advise on public health or actual economists advise on trade policy. I have my doubts, but again it comes down to the fact that in the past we had morons distributed amongst both parties. Now they seem to all be gravitating towards the Trumpist Republican Party.

It's also been exasperating over the past 13 years watching people gleefully support the guy who cannot open his mouth without lying. Then, once they started supporting him, they embrace all the lies as truth.

Not sure there's a "media strategy" for dealing with that.

Whatever

 Looks like Flavor of the Month, Gretchen Whitmer, is finished as a Democratic contender in 2028. I don't care. She's photogenic and not devoid of some political chops. But basically she was a contender because she's from Michigan.

Also - I know, I know - Democrats can't nominate a woman. Not entirely because men are misogynistic, but because so many women are. 

I never really got the Whitmer fandom, so I guess I'm glad it was strangled in the crib.

Fight Everywhere

 There's a fascinating interview and article at The Atlantic where they interview Trump within the context of his political comeback. As they accurately note, Trump was deservedly left for dead after January 6th and then he claws his way back to actually winning a plurality of the popular vote. It's remarkable and deeply disheartening. 

One of the insights from the interview was Trump's basic style - deny everything, attack everywhere - does seem to legitimately have fueled his political resurrection. He still won't or can't admit he lost in 2020. He hasn't fired Hegseth. He won't climb down from the tariffs. 

Never apologize, never back down, dominate the narrative with a firehose of outrages. 

Trump's assault on democracy is less a coherent plan than an attempt to overwhelm America's natural defenses against autocracy by sheer mass and repetition. Listening to Trump lie repeatedly and shamelessly is really hard for people like me to even respond to. How can that be OK in an American president? Hell, I wouldn't accept it in a real estate developer.

In the shocking aftermath of his election victory, the natural question became "How can Democrats resist him?" He has seemingly - once again - violated the political laws of gravity. In fact, he had won more votes than the Democratic candidate for the first time.

The Very Savvy take was to focus on a few economic issues that were most likely to resonate with swing voters. That's why you had so many Democratic politicians talking about the price of eggs.

Then came "Liberation Day." 

While this did some of the heavy lifting of convincing American voters that Trump's plans were both bad and erratic, what's fascinating is that it is not solely on the economy where his numbers are tanking. You also have speeches like the stemwinder that Illinois governor JB Pritzker delivered (in New Hampshire, of course).

Pritzker makes the point that you have to oppose Trump when he does something wrong like the Abrego Garcia case. The Savvy Consultant will tell you - and not without reason - that any discussions of Trump and immigration helps him, because that issue is where he's strongest. What Pritzker and others, including AOC, are saying is that you have to attack him when he does something as transparently awful as that and you can't be solely reactive.

And it seems to be working. 

Marshall reminds us that public opinion matters, even in a would-be dictatorship. Trump can only be dictatorial as long as he remains somewhat popular. I think the recent attacks on the Judiciary will combine with tanking approval ratings to embolden the Courts to stand up to him. Yes, the Republican Congress is a weak, weak reed, but at some point they will get the message that this guy is toxic - again.

It's not that denying January 6th is a popular position, nor were the pardons. People legitimately hated that (not his cult, but most people). Denying that it was bad over and over again did give a permission structure for many Republicans to support him again. It was still bad and leaning into the pardons made him less popular.

Because Trump only knows how to attack and deny, his tariff fiasco is likely to continue - at least for a little while. We shall see what Trump does when store shelves start to empty. Yes, again, his cultists will proudly embrace the economic pain as the price of MAGA. Most people will not. It will suck and he will be 100% responsible for it. Biden contributed at the margins of inflation, but it was a global phenomenon. Trump is the sole reason for the coming freeze in global trade.

Because all he knows how to do is deny and attack, though, he will struggle to change course. The "adults in the room" are largely gone. 

There's an old saying that "personnel is policy." The people you staff your government with will determine how and what you actually do. Biden staffed his administration with a people from the Progressive "groups" and that moved his policy to the left of where Biden likely was himself. Trump has staffed his government with sycophants and cultists. 

There will be no easy retreat from the aspects of MAGA that America hates and fears, but that is actually our hope. 

The show Andor is about how rebellions happen (within the Star Wars canon). It seems perfect for this moment. One of the characters writes

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction.

Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And then remember this: The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

And know this: the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. 

Remember this. Try.

After Winter, There Will Be Spring

 Richardson lays out all the ways that Trump is selling American governance to line his own pockets. My guess is the actual tally is much, much more extensive. The corruption of Trump 2.0 is an underreported story, given all the other outrages, but I do think it's something intrepid reporters should be working on.

As Krugman reminds us, all power is unitary. Trump's disastrous economic policies are going to really start biting soon. Trump's approval ratings are plunging. As he quips, did Peter Navarro save democracy?

Richardson's comparison to Gilded Age corruption is informative. Public outrage over the corruption helped usher in the Progressive Era. That could certainly happen again, if the public is suitably informed.

The doomsayers about Trump have proven both right and wrong. He has, indeed, launched a full bore attack on American democracy; he is ceaselessly corrupt; he is cruel and vindictive; Project 2025 is real. However, it is the very cruelty, corruption and authoritarianism that will - I hope, I believe - limit his ability to destroy America.

Cul de Sac

 Paul Krugman makes the same point many others are making, especially with regards to the bonkers Time interview with Trump. Here's the excerpt he shares:

Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We're now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There's zero deals so far. Why is that?

No, there’s many deals.

When are they going to be announced?

You have to understand, I'm dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We're meeting with China. We're doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I've made all the deals.

Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?

I’ve made 200 deals.

You’ve made 200 deals?

100%

Let's start with the fact that there are not 200 countries in the world. As always at moments like this, we have to contend with the question, "Is the president of the United States lying or stupid?" Krugman goes on to note that almost every country that has tried to talk to the Maladministration leaves, frustrated by the incoherent demands and false premises. There are no deals to be made, because the very premises about trade that these tariffs seek to remedy are confabulations. 

We are seeing Trump's approval rating plummet even before the worst impacts of the trade war are being felt. Lots of companies ran up inventories just in case and those inventories will deplete. Container ship traffic in the Pacific has all but dried up. 

Even on immigration - Trump's strongest issue - his cruel and illegal overreach is turning people against him. 

Put more succinctly, all those dumb libtards were 100% right when they warned about what Trump 2.0 would be.

The problem, as Krugman reminds us, is that we live in a presidential, not a parliamentary, system. We are stuck with this stupid, demented, cruel old man. Unless his arteries close, we have little recourse. However, as Josh Marshall reminds us, Trump is term limited (and old). Congress is not. 

If the tariffs really do tank the economy and Trump's approval plummets to the Crazification Factor, when will the cowards of the GOP take a stand?