As Krugman notes, Trump's (Stephen Miller's) mass deportation program is becoming less and less popular by the day. He suggests that images of paramilitary raids on Home Depot parking lots repels many Americans and I think that's true.
But - as with the Epstein stuff - the problem with MAGA and even "normie" Republicans is that what they believe is just utter bullshit. There is no army of MS-13 members terrorizing American cities.
You can't achieve a goal based on fantasy.
At least for the moment, the Epstein furor has not died down. At least in part, this is because Trump himself is screaming for everyone to stop talking about Epstein. MAGA remains furious, because they are so marinated in conspiratorial thinking that Epstein became a tentpole of their belief system. Trump's voluble defense of Attorney General Pam Bondi has only enraged people more. First of all, Bondi is transparently doing Trump's bidding. Secondly, goons like Dan Bongino have created entire personalities around Epstein/QAnon and they can't let it go that easily.
Again, my feeling is that there is not an "Epstein List" because there is zero chance that it would have remained secret all this time. Trump is all over those flight manifests, but if there really was a "list" I would wager that it would have been leaked during the recent presidential campaign.
Here's the thing I don't get, though. Trump and Bondi are serial liars. I'm kind of shocked that they simply haven't fabricated a list. I'm hardly going to credit their deep faith in evidentiary integrity. So, maybe there is some smoking gun out there, and if they release a fake "list" then the sword of Damocles falls.
Maybe.
As Richardson notes, "Epstein" has managed to overshadow the impact of cuts to FEMA right in the middle if the response to the Kerr County floods and the declining popularity of Trump's immigration gestapo. The inevitable chaos of a Trump Administration unmoored to "adult" Republicans has produced a cascading series of scandals, problems and even tragedies. Most Americans are woefully uninformed about the daily goings on in their world, but the constant drumbeat of problems is merging with the salacious nature of "Epstein".
The hope for American democracy really has been that either the Right shatters along the fault lines of its' internal contradictions or that Trump screws up so bad, that his cultists simply drop out of the political process. "Epstein" has the potential to do both: creating a schism within the MAGA ranks while also prompting others to simply walk away in disgust (as Bongino seems to be doing).
Anyway, do you like butter on your popcorn? Or maybe flavored salt?
UPDATE: Cheryl Rofer accurately describes it as not fantasy breaking against reality, but fantasy against fantasy. Maybe that was the key all along? You can't dissuade members of a cult through reason and evidence, but through the disintegration of their fantasy.
I am generally hostile to conspiracy theories, but even I am struck by what's happening with the so-called Epstein Client List. This skepticism is overwhelmed, however, by the massive schadenfreude that I'm experiencing as we watch MAGA tear itself apart.
Since I'm congenitally skeptical of conspiracy theories, here's my take: There was no "list." Epstein would have been a fool to write those names down with information like "Alan Dershowitz, January 5th, 16 year old girl." To quote Stringer Bell, "Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?" Epstein would have wanted that information kept as close to him as possible; it's existence could let it fall into someone else's hands and destroy whatever leverage he felt he had.
Also, he killed himself, because the mad, depraved world he had created was crashing down and his life in prison would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
However, two things.
First, go ahead and run with this as Trump destroying the list. I love that Democrats are hammering Trump and Bondi for covering up the list and hiding links between Epstein and Trump. Those links are absolutely real, whether the list exists or not. The absence of proof is not the proof of absence, so there is really no way for Trump to deflect these attacks. If the list never existed, then Bondi can't prove she didn't destroy it. Go to town on that!
Second, this is already creating MAGA-on-MAGA violence (sadly only rhetorically at this point). This is because conspiratorial thinking is at the very heart of MAGA. Conspiracies are the refuge of the ignorant, and, well, if the shoe fits... Take Marjorie Traitor Greene's bizarre obsession with weather machines and Jewish space lasers. Because she is not only profoundly ignorant, but also profoundly incurious, rather than learn about climate change, why not just create a scientifically impossible conspiracy?
Of course, QAnon was one of the early avenues of Trump's rise to power, which was itself fueled by Trump's embrace of the Birtherism, itself a conspiracy theory. Even the idea that globalists (read: Jews) are outsourcing jobs, importing immigrants and implementing the Great Replacement Theory is central to Trumpist politics.
Trump is the hub from which a hundred conspiracy theories radiate outwards.
All of this means that you cannot really disentangle Trump from the unfortunately large number of Americans who marinate in conspiratorial thinking. This is why the Epstein shit is potentially really harmful for him and the various minions who are already drawing the long knives for each other. I don't care if both Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi lose their jobs, but if one of them does, that's great! (It will be Bongino, if anyone.)
A central tactic of Trump that he learned from Bannon is to "flood the zone" with shit. It is a constant struggle to know which outrage to focus on from day to day. However, while the tactic might work to fluster your enemies, it is also antithetical to decent governance (which we know Trump doesn't care about, but stick with me). What's more, the chaos within Trump's inner circle is an inevitable byproduct of the people he needs around him and the batshit lunacy that they swim in.
For every ounce of energy expended in Epstein crossfire, that's energy that can't be focused on dismantling the government, expending resources on creating an American Gestapo and destroying the rule of law. It's not a perfect cure, but "confusion to my enemies" is always a good step, especially when Democrats are largely excluded from power at all levels of the Federal Government.
If Epstein leads to a full on MAGA civil war (I'm skeptical, but these people really are nuts), that will be to the advantage of the country as a whole.
UPDATE: You want to see how this brain rot plays out? Watch these bullshit.
Paul Krugman did a two part video with Martin Wolf on inequality. In it, they ponder why working class people have embraced a right wing populism across the developed world. Sure, there's racial and cultural grievances, but that can't explain everything.
They focus a bit on the way information travels. Obviously, we have both Fox News and its spawn who simply place their thumbs on the scale. The other issue is social media and it's mainlining of grievance and anger into our brain.
One thing they also talk about is the decline of unions, not just as political players, but as information networks. The talk about the lack of national consensus on the news as typified by the veneration of Walter Cronkite, but how much of the decline in that consensus was because of the rise of cable news and how much was this a decline in overall trust in institutions?
Chris Murphy has talked a lot about the atomization of our culture, especially the decline in church membership. It's an interesting argument, in that if we have no real cultural consensus, then any whacko - even or especially if they are at the pulpit - can become a consensus of one or at least a few. I suppose I could go further and think about my sons' college education, where they are both pursuing professional degrees, but they aren't learning the critical thinking skills typically associated with a liberal arts education.
Ultimately, is Fox News the cause or the symptom of our polarization? Hopefully, Rupert Murdoch dies soon and we can can see if his kids take the company in a different direction. If they did, maybe the discourse changes or maybe people turn to OAN and NewsMax.
Donald Trump is a stupid man surrounded by cronies who do what he wants or just gestures at. The result is that Trump's policy agenda is a shitshow. This shitshow is demonstrated in odd ways at odd times, such as the catastrophe in Kerr County. The gutting of emergency response is not something Trump himself really ever articulated, but it's a combination of the Republican Party's long standing hostility to effective government, the fact that people like Kristi Noem have their positions because Trump thinks they look good on the TeeVee and they are skilled at kissing his fat ass. So, Trump - who's a slob - surrounds himself with those people who most assiduously kiss his ass, those people are largely ideologically extreme Republicans, and those people give us the rolling policy disasters that typify our sojourn in Trumpistan.
This is how we wind up with the burbling chaos of the Trump's tariff regime. They're on! They're off! Hey, let's put a 50% tariff on copper! Why? Fuck it! Who knows?
All of this is a well established pattern from Trump's life. His business was basically a dozen or so people working out of Trump tower. They were the people around him handling whatever branding opportunity he was pursuing at the moment. Trump wasn't running General Electric, he was running a very lean shop and everyone there catered to the whims of the boss.
Now, he's trying to run the world's second largest bureaucracy and it's gone about like you'd expect. In his first term, there was at least some "grown ups in the room" until he fired them, after which we got the botched Covid response and January 6th.
Krugman decides to give us something else to worry about, as he reminds us that Trump will be able to pick Jerome Powell's successor at the Federal Reserve.
Since its inception a little over 100 years ago, the Fed has tried as much as possible to hew to economic orthodoxy and eschew political pressure. The most obvious example of this is Paul Volcker's war on inflation in the late '70s and early '80s. Both Carter and Reagan saw the economy get drained of capital as he squeezed inflation to death with interest rates as high as 20%. It worked, and until Covid, we really didn't see inflation, certainly not like we did in the '70s.
Trump is likely to put another crony, another lickspittle, at the head of the Fed and that creature will likely cater to Trump's whims. If - as I and others predict - we are in a recession by 2026, putting some hack in charge could be catastrophic.
If Trump were to nominate some incompetent boob like Stephen Moore, do we really think we can count on Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and some other unnamed Senator to prevent the destruction of the Fed's independence?
At least since the French and American Revolutions, people have fought and died for ideologies - some good, some bad, some terrible.
What's striking about today is not that Americans are dying in a struggle to preserve or advance an ideology. They are effectively committing suicide in deference to the ideology of every Republican president since Ronald Reagan.
In this post from Richardson, she mentions the outsized role that Stephen Miller plays in the Trump Administration. Because Trump is so freaking old, stupid and now cognitively impaired - to the point where he can't speak to the press unsupervised, because he goes on bizarre tangents - there has been a lot of talk about who the "True President" is going back to Elon Musk's suzerainty over the DOGE nonsense.
Musk, however, is a malignant narcissist like Trump, and their falling out was inevitable. Miller (and to a degree Steve Bannon) have perfected the art of flattering Trump in a way that has kept these evil little toad at the center of all of the awful things Trump is doing. I've said before that I don't think Trump is a "by the book" fascist, but Miller certainly is.
I'll just quote from Richardson:
Just who is in charge of the administration remains unclear. In the New York Times yesterday, Jason Zengerle pointed to White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller as the “final word” on White House policy. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defers to him. Attorney General Pam Bondi “is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice” to him. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is concentrating on “producing a reality TV show every day,” a Trump advisor told Zengerle.
So Miller, with his knack for flattering his boss, wields power.
This would be less than ideal in any administration, but especially one so void of oversight and one that has crushed all dissent as being disloyal to Trump. How much of the paranoid governance and the North Korea style Cabinet meetings are orchestrated by Miller? He's a relentlessly vindictive cretin who has institutionalized the craven sycophancy that made him the center of White House policy.
Trump is a slob - mentally, physically, emotionally - and it seems clear that his second administration has become a perfect vehicle for Miller and likeminded assholes like Russell Vought to wage their war on American democracy. Trump is staring down the barrel of the actuarial table, but Miller will be with us for a long time.
Theda Skocpol notes that the massive resources given to ICE in the OBBB as being an opportunity to create a sort of stormtrooper/Gestapo force in America. The billions of dollars lavished on ICE will allow them, presumably, to hire and resource themselves in ways that might overwhelm other institutions that might otherwise check them.
Richardson notes that ICE showed up for a media-centered raid on MacArthur Park in Los Angeles that seemed designed more to send a message to both LA and anyone whose skin tone is lighter than Trump's makeup. The combined idea is that most law enforcement is trained to, you know, follow the law. While there were always breaches of that covenant, the majority of LEO see themselves as custodians of the law.
By giving ICE all this money, it could enable them to create a cadre of shock troops to overwhelm and cow existing law enforcement agencies.
I suppose it could and we should all be on guard and watch this. I do wonder, however, how many people really want to be a part of this? The number is not zero, I know. I remember the election. But to staff the new Brownshirts, you need to accommodate the following facts:
- If you were already so inclined, I would wager you'd already joined ICE. They were already the law enforcement agency most tolerant of abusive persons.
- A lot of the online Nazis that flood Twitter are lazy, cowardly losers who can't be bothered to go out and do work like this. Or they have a job, and joining the Brownshirts seems superfluous. I mean, after all, they've already poasted Pepe the Frog, what more do you want?
- The masking of ICE agents seems blatantly illegal, but the rationale is that they face threats from doxing. More likely, they are masked so that they won't face doxing or prosecution in the future. Is that a work environment you want to join?
The OBBB and the various Trumpist goons and fascists can appropriate the money to hire people, but who are they going to hire who hasn't already signed up? We are already seeing opposition to Trump's mass deportations from Trump voters who wanted to rid the country of MS13, not Maria down at the bakery or Manuel at work. It was always a stupid choice, but it does represent the idea that an American Gestapo isn't going to be super popular.
I'm reading a biography of John Lewis, and his commitment to satyagraha and nonviolence - not as a tactic, but as a governing philosophy - led him and others to shame the forces of Jim Crow. I would argue that Jim Crow was a lot more popular in 1960 than Trump's pogroms are today, and it could be that we could see principled nonviolence return as a way to thwart Trump's malignant attempts to destroy American civil society and social cohesiveness.
Of course, in the end, SCLC and SNCC did rely on a sympathetic federal government to protect them. That ain't happening. Still, I believe there are more of us than there are of them, even if there are far too many of them.
UPDATE: I mean stuff like this is brilliant.
UPDATE II: I should have added: Every fucker who joins ICE basically outs themselves as a fascist and that makes identifying and marginalizing them easier, when we finally defeat these Children of Darkness.
Cynics will say that "All politicians lie" or "Both political parties are the same."
They are wrong, especially on the second point, which should have become obvious even before the OBBB passed.
There are two ways in which Republican governance is actively hurting the country - today and in the long run.
The first is that, as Krugman notes, the OBBB guts clean energy funding and tax breaks. This is so manifestly bad policy that it staggers belief. Clean energy is more cost effective than the dirtier forms of energy, while being far more environmentally sound. It's difficult to tell whether this is simply a matter of Cleek's Law or an inefficient and somewhat corrupt giveaway to fossil fuels industries.
The second is simply bad governance, which is a hallmark of Republican rule. Because the post-Reagan GOP has decided that "gubmint bad, taxes worse" we get hollowed out and poorly run public services. In our town, the corrupt/incompetent ruling Republicans decided not to pay the nearby city from which we get our water the market rate. For years. Just didn't pay. Now the town owes tens of millions of dollars after two court losses, and the Republican plan seems to be "appeal the case again, while not setting aside money for when they lose again." Rather than raise water bills a few years ago, they simply plugged their fingers in their ears and stomped their feet hoping the problem would go away.
A far more lethal example just played out in the horrific floods in Texas. As Richardson summarizes, the local officials did not put in flood sirens, because it was expensive. Now, maybe a 100 or more people are dead. Maybe the Trump cuts to NOAA and NWS are also responsible, but the official position of Kerr County officials on installing a flood warning system was "Taxpayers won't pay for it."
Further in the article, you get this perfect GOP response to a tragedy:
Current city officials on Sunday did not discuss the earlier deliberations over warning systems. Dalton Rice, the Kerrville city manager, sidestepped a question about the effectiveness of local emergency notifications, telling reporters at a news conference that it was “not the time to speculate.”
This is the response to school shootings, floods, any crisis that occurs, because GOP policies facilitate them happening, "Don't politicize it!" "Thoughts and prayers."
Of course, the two themes come together. The floods are "historic" and "once a century" which seems to happen a lot, and most climatologists have been saying that crazy weather is exactly the immediate impact of global warming.
But, by all means, let's gut clean energy.
The proper role of government is to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves. This is more or less what Lincoln said many year ago. Even then there was an understanding that government action could be more than the libertarian limits of public safety. Governments could actively improve things, usually be aggregating resources. If Kerr County was too poor to put in a warning system, the state government could have helped.
Guess who runs the state government.
In the end, the solution would likely have been that federal funds - voted into the budget by Democrats and paid for by wealthier blue states - would have been needed to build a system that might have saved those people's lives. Everything Republicans do - from Reagan to Dubya to Trump, from Gingrich to Delay to McConnell to Johnson - stands in opposition to the idea that government can save and improve lives and Trump and Congressional Republicans are bringing this theology to our national government.
Everything now is about saving American democracy. It's about slapping patches on a sinking boat, trying to keep it afloat until we reach a safe harbor.
However, the second iteration of Trump is so nakedly corrupt, we need to examine that phenomenon, as simply winning control of Congress in 2026 and the White House in 2028 would only slightly bring consequences to the corrupt. Maybe can prosecute those who have looted American government, but I'm sure Trump will pardon everyone on his way out.
Instead, we need to look into campaign finance reform again. For years, I was skeptical that money from wealthy donors really made a huge difference in policy. Yes, Republicans funneled wealth upwards and some Democrats obliged them. The story of Trump 2.0, however, is far more naked corruption and the outright alliance between billionaires and the White House. That has been a frequent theme going back to William McKinley, as Paul Krugman points out in his latest in a series on wealth inequality.
The Democrats road back power, even just relevance, is to ride outrage over the OBBB and Trump's rank authoritarianism. That will include aiming at the billionaire class and their outsized leverage in our political system.
Campaign finance reform will obviously be tricky, as the Supreme Court gutted the very idea of regulating money in politics with Citizens United, a case that along with Shelby basically deeded American democracy to oligarchs. Since we now know from painful experience that elections in America are now won and lost by voters who simply don't know what the fuck is actually going on, we have to deal with the fact that low information voters are especially susceptible to a flood of corporate and billionaire money. While the cowing of media by Trump's authoritarianism is really concerning, it's really only the natural progression from the increased role of the fantastically rich like Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch controlling important outlets in the first place.
Our first Gilded Age led to the Progressive Movement and the Progressive Amendments, which led to the direct election of Senators, an income tax and woman suffrage. It will likely require a similar set of new amendments to heal the wounds to American democracy, and it will start with money in politics.
Paul Krugman talks with Jonathan Gruber, the health care economist who helped design the ACA, about the impact of the OBBB. What will the impact of this shit sandwich be on American health? The short answer is that we kind of won't know until it settles out.
The biggest hurdle is that they have made really stringent and frequent paperwork to stay on Medicaid. Since Medicaid covers a lot of people at the lower ends of the socio-economic ladder, that's a lot of people who simply won't be able to navigate the Byzantine paperwork. (One suggestion they make is for someone like Mamdani to propose a corps of people who will go through poor neighborhoods and help people fill out the forms.)
One underreported hurdle that I had not heard about was that they are going to hit states with hurdles to prevent them from using taxation of health care providers to smooth some of the edges off gaps in coverage. Basically, blue states have been playing a shell game with state taxes to cover up some flaws and the bill will end that.
The whole dynamic of rural hospitals is getting noticed, but what about urban hospitals in poorer communities? Waterbury, Connecticut is a poor town and they have two hospitals that serve this corner of the state. I could certainly see one of them closing soon, despite being a teaching hospital for Yale Medical School.
One stat Gruber noted was that for every 800 people that you cover with insurance, one fewer person dies. If we see people losing health care at the rates that are predicted, then 25,000 people will die per year that would not have otherwise died.
Another statistic that they discuss is the role that government funding has made in creating the American economy. Obviously, I'm typing this on a computer and posting on the internet, two things created from the seeds of government spending. The Human Genome Project, for instance, cost the government $3 billion. Today, the biotech economic activity that was generated from that creates $6 billion in tax revenue every year. Another study suggests that for every $1 the National Institutes of Health spends, it prompts $8 of private spending and $3 of stock market value.
Among the most deeply engrained ideas on the right - the thing that unites Trump even with Thom Tillis or Mitt Romney - is that somehow government spending doesn't count. Sure, there's the bogus "waste, fraud and abuse" line, but that's just cover for "none of that stuff is legitimate in the first place." The problem is that Keynes' basic formula for total demand includes government spending as being equal to consumer spending or business investment. In fact, it's probably more efficient in generating overall demand.
Both the OBBB and the Trump-Musk assault on the federal workforce and the impounding of funds by Trump all create a void in the heart of the American economy. The recent jobs report somehow says that government payrolls increased in the last quarter, which seems...dubious, and we should not assume that the current Executive Branch is telling the truth. Pulling all of this government spending out of the economy: Medicaid cuts, R&D cuts, firing public sector workers, the knock-on effects at the local level from all of the above: this is going to retard economic growth.
Republicans can decry the fact that our economy is reliant on some level of government spending, but being peeved does not alter the math.
Between the slowdown in trade prompted by Trump's tariffs, the impounding of existing funds for everything from education to medical care, the reduction in almost all government spending except for immigration enforcement and the overall instability in capital markets from the careening nature of policy under Trump, I again can't see a scenario where we don't enter a recession sooner rather than later.
As we "celebrate" this Fourth of July, it's worth looking at the Declaration that was published this date in 1776. The stirring preamble said more than Jefferson perhaps knew, when it created the concept of universal rights. Later generations, including Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, pointed at the Declaration - not the Constitution - as the basis for their calls to end slavery. The right of self-government is also a critical part of that preamble.
The rest of the document is largely lawyers Jefferson and perhaps Adams listing the crimes of King George III against the people of the American colonies, now states. Some are worth repeating in 2025.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
Yeah, he's a criminal and his administration routinely breaks laws with the acquiescence of the Supreme Court.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
Trump is making every effort to subsume local government and civil society to the whims of his will. While many states are resisting him, the assault is real.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
The OBBB is going to pass, because the "principled opposition" is and always was bullshit. It will be really bad, a return to a place, especially with regards to the working poor, that we thought we had left behind. Many voices online wonder "if we can ever recover" from this.
That's absurd.
As I and Erik Loomis have argued, we are not likely living in a repeat of 1934 Germany. We are living in a repeat of the 1890s United States. The Gilded Age was awful in all the ways that this is awful. The result was the Progressive Era, which - combined with the New Deal, itself an offshoot of the Progressive Movement - reordered American government.
If there is a real threat to America's long term prospects, the most immediate is the Republican war on democracy, which is real and frightening. However, a lot of this seems wrapped up in the perverse "charisma" of Donald Trump, and he is already quite old and clearly mentally diminished. I don't see JD Vance being able to capture the same enthusiasm Trump elicits from his cult. Americans do actually value democracy, and if Democrats can win the midterms (which OBBB makes exceedingly likely) then we have a chance of saving our democracy. Again, democracy is not a toggle switch that flips between on and off. It's a spectrum. We weren't very democratic in the Gilded Age - Blacks, women, Natives, none could vote.
The real peril for America from this monstrous and noxious regime is to the full faith and credit of the United States government. As Krugman points out, the national debt is not an absolute evil or an absolute good, it's relative to other conditions. Republicans' war on taxes have largely been constrained by a deficit hawk wing of the party and the basic fiscal responsibility of the grownups in the Democratic Party. Deficits - and thus the debt - rise during Republican administrations and declines during Democratic ones.
The two pronged attack on both taxes and tax collection will blow up to debt during a time of relatively high interest rates, relatively high employment and - up until the last quarter - economic growth. This is the time to get deficits under control, precisely so that during emergencies - recessions, war and pandemics - we have the credit space to deficit spend.
We still seem on a course for a stagflation episode, as economic growth is shrinking, inflation remains stubborn, as food prices seem to continue to rise - a dynamic sure to be made worse by Stephen Miller's pogrom against immigrants - before tariffs have really and truly hit the American and global economy.
If the coming Crypto Crash happens, while we reduce our workforce and immiserate the poor, a true depression is not out of the question.
If Democrats hold the trifecta in 2028, they can roll back a great deal of Trump's evil plans surrounding immigration, executive abuse of power, corruption, tariffs, environmental degradation and so on. If America does truly enter a sovereign debt crisis...that will be bad beyond living memory and won't be easy to recover from.
I had a long running argument on Twitter (that was mostly civil) about the fact that three Democratic House members died since the election last November, and that allowed the OBBB to pass the House by one vote. My counterpart assured me that the GOP would have simply held the vote until some absent members returned. One GOP member voted present, which strongly suggests that they were not a "yes" on the bill, but didn't want to attract fire.
This will all be put to the final test soon. The It Would Be Funny If It Weren't Tragic episode of Lisa Murkowski voting FOR the bill before saying she hated the bill and hoped the House...THE HOUSE?...would fix it.
So, we shall see. Speaker Moses has to reconcile a lot of vulnerable Blue State Republicans who want the SALT deduction back and others who have axes to grind, plus the lunatic fringe of the Freedumb Caucus who think it's not cruel enough. Then there might be a few principled deficit scolds who will follow Rand Paul's lead.
Who knows? Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the GOP doing the worst thing possible, but we shall see.
Richardson flags several Senate Democrats' speeches that makes the case that not only is the OBBB fiscally irresponsible, it's immoral. Krugman amplifies this by pointing out that Medicaid is really popular.
Both note that the Republican Party has been on a decades long quest to destroy the New Deal and the Great Society. The very idea that government should provide benefits beyond public order is tyranny according to GOP ideologues. The problem for them is that this ideology is unpopular. When Newt Gingrich went after Medicare, it was unpopular. When George W. Bush went after Social Security, it was unpopular. As Donald Trump goes after Medicaid, it is unpopular.
At the moment, the bill does not have the votes in the Senate to pass. Rand Paul says it's fiscally irresponsible, which - you know -it is. Tillis won't vote to gut his constituents' health care. Collins and Murkowski also apparently can't vote for the final bill. I would not put it past the GOP to find a way to force them into line, but if they do, I really think it will deliver the Senate to Democrats in 2026.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis's speech in which he announced his intention not to run again in the face of a primary challenge by a True Trumpist will be a fascinating document for future historians. A current historian, Heather Cox Richardson, excerpts from it:
In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”
Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?... [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”
What Tillis, in effect, admits to is that he has NOT represented "the great people of North Carolina to the best of (his) abilities." He has warped his principles in service of the malignant Baal encamped in the White House.
You hear this from Democratic Members of both the House and Senate. There are Republicans who are also somewhat aghast at what Trump says and does, and they admit is much when the mics are off. Yet, time and time again, they shut up and toe the line, afraid of Trump using his social media bullying to level a primary challenge against them. Yes, sure, there are feral weirdos like Markwayne Mullin or Marjorie Traitor Greene. There are moronic bigots like Tommy Tuberville and Lauren Boebert.
Right now, the fate of millions of Americans hinges on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Tillis and Rand Paul - of all people - have signaled that they will not vote for this OBBB. Meanwhile, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis are wavering because it's not cruel enough.
Almost exactly 8 years ago, Collins and Murkowski saved the Affordable Care Act - with a dramatic late assist from John McCain. They have been subsequently re-elected, so that vote absolutely did not hurt them. Still, Trump's improbable win last November has imbued him with some sort of magic that has so many Republicans fearful of saying anything that might cross him.
I remain hopeful that one day a hamburdlar will do its patriotic duty and rid us of this evil man. When that happens, what becomes of the Republican Party? What becomes of a Lindsay Graham, who has contorted himself into something hateful and stupid to appease Baal? There is no way that JD Vance can inspire the same fear that Trump does. Vance is evil in his own way, but it's as much his lack of true principles as opposed to Trump's bedrock character that makes Vance evil. Trump is evil like Sauron; Vance is evil like Grima Wormtongue.
Thom Tillis is simply the latest Republican to be defeated by Trump's malevolence. He joins Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy and more than I can relate here. Men and women of different ideological positions, all of whom were destroyed by Trump. HR McMaster, John Kelly and Rex Tillerson are gone, replaced by evil, mendacious creatures.
I dunno, maybe we shouldn't have let the absolute worst people in this country run the Executive Branch, especially since the other two branches are run by the craven, the cowardly and the sycophantic.
Richardson compares the OBBB to the McKinley Tariff that largely fueled the growing agrarian populist movement of the late 19th century. The tariff - which grossly shifted wealth upwards during a time of already growing inequality - led to massive Republican losses in the subsequent election. It is worth noting that McKinley himself lost his seat in the 1890 midterms, but then won the presidency in 1896. The wild swings in control of the House during the period aren't likely to occur, though we are in a similar period where control of the House - if not the margins - is similar.
The Senate advanced the monstrosity with two Republicans - Thom Tillis and Rand Paul - siding with Democrats in opposing advancing it to the floor. Collins and Murkowski are not firm yesses on the final bill, which is interesting, but while they have done the occasional right thing in the past, I'm not sure this environment lends itself to principled stands against King Donald I.
This leads one to wonder what, exactly, the GOP thinks it's doing. As always, the question is now whether we have free and fair elections. States - not the Federal government - run elections, and there are hopefully enough Republicans like Brian Kemp who are not willing to end American democracy. The actions of many Republicans in Washington seems to be that they won't have to face electoral consequences for their actions. Perhaps gerrymandering has rendered them safe. Or maybe those in purple seats will follow Don Bacon's lead and retire.
As long as elections happen, the House seems sure to flip. Flipping the Senate could be tougher, but not impossible, if this grotesquerie becomes law.
Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling is deeply troubling in multiple different ways, but the near term effect will be to sew chaos in the legal world. The implications are that you cannot have a national injunction from a local or district court, which seems reasonable at one level while being absolutely chaotic in the real world.
If you are being deported because you were born here but your parents were undocumented, then you would have to sue as an individual to get relief. Needless to say, most people cannot afford lawyers. This is, as Justice Jackson notes, an assault on the fabric of the law.
This ruling is ostensibly about stopping people from shopping for favorable judges - a tactic the right used a lot during Biden's term - that then apply nationally until a higher court can rule on it. This would seem to mean a patchwork of local rulings will take hold.
Meanwhile, the Shit Sandwich working it way through the Senate could also sew chaos into Medicard, Medicare, various Federal agencies...just mass pandemonium.
I suppose Republicans have, in the past, governed in a way to make the government terrible, then turned around and said, "Look, see! We were right! Government is terrible."
I'm skeptical it will work, and it backfired in places like Kansas under Sam Brownback. If it can backfire there, I'd say it will backfire in Florida, North Carolina and even Ohio.
What is the long term plan in destroying so much and creating so much chaos?
Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Kegsbreath...Hegseth...went on a feral rant during a press conference. Perhaps he's drinking again, but just as likely is that he was performing his job using the qualifications that got him the job in the first place. Hegseth, like so many others, was hired because Trump saw him being a tough-guy asshole on Fox. He wanted more tough guy assholes than he had last time, which is why he staffed his Cabinet with people he saw on Fox.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans seem intent on making Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Santa Claus. Their budget bill is amazingly worse than the House version, which was incredibly terrible. It always seemed to me like the House was passing a terrible bill in order to please Trump and their worst members, hoping that the Senate would force some sanity on the process. The Senate, however, is making the bill even worse.
Luckily, Majority Leader Thune has said they won't overrule the Parliamentarian, so some of the awful non-budgetary stuff should get axed. Still, this sort of performative cruelty probably plays well in the corner offices at Fox, but it's a remarkably unpopular bill.
There are a lot of reasons why Madisonian democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Resurgent racism and sexism, the normalization of Trumpist lying and the psychological trauma of Covid. You have to say that one of the main pillar - perhaps THE main pillar - in this fascist edifice is Fox News and the ugliness that it has injected into our political life.
Politico sucks, as it always sucked, but then was bought by a right wing German billionaire. However, that may give them some access into the GOP.
They are reporting that the atrocious Big Beautiful Bill is running into real trouble. This is a draconian attack on the social safety net that will deprive millions - tens of millions - of Americans health insurance and lead to the closing of rural hospitals. There's also a host of awful things in there that will make America weaker, poorer, sicker and dumber.
My worry is that we have these sort of moments where vulnerable GOP members stroke their chins and worry about the impact of a terrible piece of legislation and then cave and vote for it anyway. See Susan Collins.
In some ways, gutting Medicaid could be Democrats path back to a Senate majority, as whether Tillis votes for it or not, Republicans will get blamed.
Best case scenario is that their efforts to pass the massive bill fails and they have to basically just extend the 2017 tax cuts. Not great, but not as painful as it could be.
OK. More insane.
Trump, for whatever reason, hitched his brand to being anti-war in some vague notional way. The problem is that authoritarians are always violence prone, and while he seemed content to visit violence upon American cities like Los Angeles, he seemed unable to help himself when Israel started bombing Iran.
I wrote that the mission seemed a tactical success but a strategic failure. It seems now that it wasn't even really a tactical success. Iranian nuclear capabilities have been damaged but hardly "obliterated" as Trump keeps shouting into whatever social media feed he can shove his greasy maw into.
What's more, Trump's bizarre "ceasefire" announcement seems kind of deranged. Like so many of his bullshit screeds, Trump seems to think he can just repeat an untruth until it becomes true. Certainly for his cult, that is accurate, but that's not the way reality works. Most Americans seem to be unsupportive of the strikes, because America seems to be justifiably wary of another Middle Eastern war.
Look at it this way:
- His big beautiful birthday parade was upstaged by millions of Americans protesting his policies.
- He's underwater on every issue, including deportations.
- His big beautiful bill looks to be in some trouble, but I'm not hopeful that it will die. Republicans always rally to do the worst thing possible.
- He launched attacks on Iran that appear not to have worked and according to multiple reports occurred because he liked what he saw on Fox News about the IDF strikes and wanted to piggyback on that success.
- He's bizarrely fixated on winning the Nobel Peace Prize (because Obama won it) and the idea is so laughable that it has to drive him insane.
Basically, we have a man whose baseline state is stupidity and malignant narcissism, who is experiencing cognitive decline. He thought his re-election would lead to every pony he could possibly imagine, and that isn't happening. He's suffering from repeated public embarrassments and humiliations that typically do not go well for narcissists.
He wants to be king, but he has to actually do the job of being president every once in a while and that's hard.
Seems to be sort of decompensating before our eyes.
Yglesias does one of his "radical centrist" takes on the movement of the Democratic Party towards cultural leftism. There are a few nuggets in there that have some merit, but I remain convinced that the turn of white working class voters away from Democrats is mostly about "vibes" and the poisoned media landscape, rather than real policy issues.
Paul Krugman writes today about how Silicon Valley turned against Democrats, when Democrats tried to rein in the worst abuses of tech companies - especially the pernicious influence of social media.
Seems to me there's an opening here.
People generally are favorable towards technological advances in theory. What Krugman notes is that tech companies are following the model of enshittification. He quotes Cory Doctorow's definition:
First, companies are good to their users. Once users are lured in and have been locked down, companies maltreat those users in order to shift value to business customers, the people who pay the platform’s bills. Once those business users are locked in, the platform starts to turn the screws on them, too – extracting more and more of the value generated by end-users and business customers until all that remains in the meanest residue, the least amount of value that can keep everyone locked into the platform.
I think we've all seen that dynamic when a new technology or app comes along and it's great! Then it gets slowly worse. The best example of this is Facebook, which started out fun and is not so choked with ads that you really can't connect with your friends, many of whom left. The same is doubly true with Twitter, though often for different reasons. (Nazis. The reason is Nazis.)
Secondly, the real villains are not the engineers and inventors. The villains are Silicon Valley, which is less a cradle of innovation and more an ecosystem of venture capitalism. There's no better example of this than Elon Musk. Musk isn't some genius inventor. He's a rich guy who got into a growth industry - batteries - at the right time after being involved in PayPal - which is also didn't invent. He's a venture capital dudebro who knows enough about engineering to seem like Tony Stark. He's not.
Yes, the oligarchs of Wall Street are bad. Some are really bad. But per capita, the "bad billionaires" really seem to be concentrating in Silicon Valley - Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks. OK, those are just the South African broligarchs, but still. There's a hard right turn among a cohort of these guys that is nakedly anti-democratic and makes them natural enemies not only of the Democrats but of democrats.
Running against Silicon Valley will not be easy, as many Democrats are cozy with the overall tech community - many of whom still support Democratic policies. There is a lot of money there.
Still, we have Musk mining American's personal data to feed his AI monster. We have the rise of AI itself, which figures to have incredibly disruptive impacts on Americans. We have the coming crypto crisis, which figures to be for Silicon Valley what 2008 was for real estate and Wall Street.
There strikes me as being a real opportunity here for Democrats to get right with working class voters, especially as the economy teeters from the effects of Trump's trade wars and deportations. Tie it to these authoritarian, nerdy techbros.
No one really like the idea of billionaires. No one really like the state of tech, including social media. Focus some of your energy there.
Paul Campos relates an argument about how hippies and evangelicals actually represent a sort of horseshoe theory when it comes to what the author calls "intuitionist" thinking. This is at the root of what passes for populism in 2025. Some people believe in science and reason and some people don't.
As Campos notes, you can't argue with someone whose beliefs are based in spiritual belief. That means that the entire edifice of Madisonian governmental theory and practice are largely helpless to resolve these issues.
I'll give an example.
I saw my cousin - deeply religious - post some MAGA shitbird complaining about the No Kings protests and the argument went something like "How dare they complain about 'kings' when they shut down schools and made me wear a mask. They are the real tyrants."
Look, Covid killed around 1,100,000 Americans. For about a year and a half, we had strong distancing measures in place that attempted to mitigate that, but even those measures struggled to work, because freedumb. The idea that public health measures are at all equivalent to ignoring the Constitution, ignoring court orders, militarizing police to attack American citizens...How do you even argue with that?
And if you tried, the retreat into faith and "what I know to be true" would deny you any ground to establish an argument on.
Both sides of the debate are relying on abstractions to order their world, but they are so fundamentally opposed to one another, that I don't see how you reconcile them.
Tucked into her discussion of Trump's shifting position on war with Iran, Richardson notes that Tulsi Gabbard - whose job seems to be on a death watch - considered delivering the Presidential Daily Briefing as a video, because Trump doesn't read. compare that to Trump's listless, fumbling speech the night of the strikes on Iran. He seemed both half asleep and read as if he had never seen the words before.
Trump is not "illiterate" in the sense that he cannot read. He's illiterate in the sense that he doesn't or won't. Again, this makes him a perfect avatar for so many Americans in the first quarter of the 21st century.
When we saw Obama speak the other night, he made an off the cuff remark about reading that he then circled back to and amplified. Reading, more than any other activity, expands our minds. Reading, he said, requires us to slow down and consider what we are seeing. Reading narratives forces empathy upon us. I'm reading Percival Everett's James, and I have to place myself inside Jim's perspective, hear his voice in my head and feel what he's feeling. The same was true of the last narrative non-fiction books I've read about 18th century mariners. I have to imagine the seas, feel the hunger, taste the awful food.
Reading is dying. Of course, it's been dying. The 1984 film, Ghostbusters, features a throwaway line from Egon: "Print is dead." In the same ways that American education has always been failing, reading has always been on the decline.
Yet this era feels different. My students don't read for pleasure (except the brightest ones). Sometimes they don't even read for class. Many use various apps to have the text read to them. This passivity simply doesn't work for learning. Combine this with the prevalence of ChatGPT, and students are simply abandoning the foundations of real learning.
Trump, therefore, really IS representative of America in that way. The reality TV star and tabloid feature reflects a country that is slowly watching its critical thinking wither away. Trump is stupid. However, I do think he has a reading based learning disability. That's why he was shipped off to New York Military Academy. That's what rich folks did with kids with learning disabilities back then. Having a reading disability is NOT being stupid. However, if you don't work around your ADHD or dyslexia, then it's like just giving up walking when you can drive. It's like becoming a shut-in.
Anyway, that guy - who is not bright, has a learning disability, hasn't worked to compensate for that LD issue, has used wealth instead to make sure he never has to work around that LD issue - is now having to make sophisticated and nuanced decisions of national security.
We were told that we wiped out the Iranian nuclear program.
Surprise, that was a lie!
We shouldn't be surprised by this, but we should worry if they are lying to themselves. I struggle to think that Trump's minions are giving him the unvarnished truth.
I don't agree with Yglesias most of the time, but I think his points here are very strong. Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, but that was precisely what the JCPOA had done: prevented them from getting a nuclear weapon. Trump pulled out of the JCPOA because Obama and now has resorted to bombing Iran to stop them from acquiring the weapon that the JCPOA prevented them from having before he tore it up.
Someone noted about Netanyahu that he has enjoyed multiple tactical successes since 10/7. The decimation of Hamas and Hezbollah; the brutal cowing of Gaza; the fall of Assad. What he has not achieved is anything like strategic success. He hasn't created long term security for Israel.
This feels very similar to what we have just done in Iran. Israel has largely destroyed Iran's air defenses, so dropping the bombs on the three nuclear sites was actually fairly low risk/high reward - if all you care about is delaying their nuclear program. Not ending it, mind you, just delaying it again. This all feels like something we are going to have do again and again, as long as Iran is a rogue state.
Yglesias also notes that Netanyahu played Trump perfectly with this, because Trump is stupid and vain. What's more, there is a stunning lack of experience in the entire national security apparatus right now. These are not 12 dimensional chess type people. Do we really think the president and those around them are looking weeks and months and years down the line?
The initiative now shifts to Iran. Trump has said that Iran has to "negotiate" - which I think means capitulate - in order to avoid more strikes. Iran, however, is in an existential crisis. The regime HAS to strike back. The Straits of Hormuz and various oil sites around the Middle East would be a natural target to retaliate. Driving up oil prices is their most immediate tools available. Certainly various terror attacks against soft targets should be expected. Or, given the state of their air defenses, they simply lay low and wait. Strike next fall.
The strikes on Iran were unconstitutional and illegal, but LOL nothing matters. The next step will be taken by Iran. They are in a precarious place, but I don't think capitulation is something that they can entertain. At some point, I could see a decapitation strike against Khamenei, but I could also see Iran strike at American politicians, too.
I suppose they could shoot up a school, but Republicans don't seem to care about that.
Terror attacks in the US would further enflame Trumpist assaults on civil liberties and would be the worst outcome for the US and accelerate our descent into authoritarianism. Blowing up some oil tankers and attacking some embassies...that's probably a best case scenario at this point.
Strategically, this doesn't make us safer in the long run.
And for other would-be Irans, the lesson is clear: get a nuclear weapon before the US can blow your program up.
In the past few weeks, we have said goodbye to our 14 year old dog; driven to Georgia for our son's graduation; driven back; flown to Europe; spent 12 days driving around the Alpine region; flown back; gotten an offer on an old house that has been in our family since 1962; driven there to empty the house of items before the sale; and driven home. We will close in the next ten days.
That's...a lot.
We think certain things will always remain the same. The dog will never die; the child will never grow up; the four walls around us will stay the same. Obviously they don't.
Trying to make sense of the gulf between one way of looking at the world and another - between stasis and change - isn't easy. However, we are looking at a global politics that also struggles to accommodate that dynamic. Some people simply can't fit change into their world. I think putting my pronouns into my email signature is a bit silly, but whatever. I can accept that. Obviously tens of millions of Americans and billions of humans cannot.
The problem for them is that change is going to come. It doesn't care if you don't like it. It's indifferent to your preferences. I'm not sure how we find a way to drive that point home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
