Renewables

 I know I basically have turned this exercise into a reflection of whatever Heather Cox Richardson and Paul Krugman wrote about for today, but apparently I'm going to do it again.

Richardson is writing about how Trump's war on renewables is actually a war on workers. Krugman is writing about stagflation as part of his series on the topic and mentions rising energy costs.

There are just so, so many ways that the Trump administration is deeply stupid that trying to catalog them is pointless. The war on renewables is just so fucking pointless that it boggles the imagination. There could be a (poor) argument for withdrawing subsidies or making permitting harder. That would be within the normal parameters of political stupidity. The Right not wanting to subsidize solar and wind because budgets; the Left wanting more permitting to protect the environment from new building. It's dumb, but it's normal dumb.

Trump's killing of existing renewable projects is just stupid in ways that rival RFK Jr's assault on public health. Meanwhile, SURPRISE!, electrical costs are skyrocketing, as data centers create a building bubble and a need for massive amounts of gigawatts. Also, SURPRISE!, China is set to leapfrog the US in renewable building and use, because if Trump wasn't an agent of the Russian and Chinese he really wouldn't be doing anything differently.

It is true that these actions will make stemming climate change harder. I'll be curious to see what the impact is on rooftop solar. We are building a house, and hopefully we will get the panels in before December 31st, because the tax credit is going away. However, given rising and unpredictable electrical costs, we will be putting them in regardless. 

Richardson makes a key point. Extraction industries have always been highly plutocratic. Whatever the substance being extracted - even cotton, as she mentions - it focuses economic power in the hands of a few people. Renewables - at least solar - can be more "democratic" in their dispersal.

This could be a helpful way to counterattack Republicans on this issue. "They are raising your electrical costs to benefit their billionaire friends."

The CDC

 The assault on the Centers for Disease Control is both sadly predictable and completely baffling. What is the constituency - besides conspiracy addled cranks - for destroying the CDC? 

Yesterday, CDC workers walked out to give an ovation to the ousted administrators, and then they returned to work. I'm beginning to wonder if they should.

Generally speaking, my posture a few months ago was the seasoned public servants should keep their heads down to keep the lights on, as it were. Now, I'm beginning to think massive resignations are actually our best option. Maybe not in every public sector, but if the "CDC you knew is over" why not pull the plug on it completely?

What's more, this is a moment when asymmetric federalism can step up. A consortium of New England and Pacific Coast states can create a CDC in exile and poach the resigning CDC staff. What's the point in "keeping the lights on" at this juncture? This same tactic could be used for the EPA, FEMA and other federal agencies.

In Trump 1.0, he was protected by both the "adults in the room" and the professional civil service. As the adults are no longer there, the civil servants have no protection. What's more, if they try and abide by the law and do their jobs, they will eventually get fired by the vindictive twatwaffles in the White House.

Resign now and create a Blue State shadow government. This might actually be a moment when "heightening the contradictions" is the only play.

Empire

 There's a fashionable framework in the academic left to refer disparagingly to the United States as an imperial power. It's intended to make us seem like the prime malefactor in the world.

As Paul Krugman points out, but many others have noted, America's "imperial" power comes from the lightness with which it influences - rather than dictates to - other countries. This isn't perfect. One of the many tragedies of the Iraq war was how it squandered this presumption that America might be powerful, but it constrained itself with the same rules it applied to others. Even Vietnam was in defense of a sovereign (if malignant) government in South Vietnam.

The point of Krugman's post is to note how Trump is destroying the system of alliances upon which America's largely benign empire rested. What's darkly hilarious is that Neocons like John Bolton began the process of destroying that conception of American Empire during the Iraq War, yet they hate Trump for...accelerating that destruction? I don't think we should assume intellectual consistency from that crowd.

It's a cliche that Americans are strikingly ignorant of the rest of the world. I've written plenty about Murc's Law within the context of American politics. There's also the corollary about how only America has agency on the international stage. This is how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris become responsible for Netanyahu's war crimes. 

Trump takes this concept and warps it even further. Ignorant of everything about foreign policy concepts, he sees everything as a mafia-style shakedown. He understands power dynamics in a crude, bullying way, but he does not understand the basic idea of sharing and friendship. This has worked to cow the Republican Party and disorient everyone else, but the application to other sovereign nations is problematic.

Is this the end of "American Empire"? Rome famously governed loosely in times of peace (and was even more brutal in times of war). Rome had emperors far worse than Trump (at least so far), and they trundled along. The question is whether our allies can ever look at us as reliable partners again? There's "a lot of ruin in a nation" as Adam Smith said. We can survive this (though there are no guarantees). Whether we can see the Pax Americana survive is very much a different question.

Sea Change

 Yglesias' contrarianism can be tiresome. However, sometimes it allows him to see things others won't look at, and today that is the important shift in voting patterns.

For decades, Democratic voters tended to be low propensity voters. They were part of the working classes that suffered under Republican plutocratic policies. Higher educated voters tended to vote for lower taxes and fewer regulations. It requited preternaturally charismatic candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to mobilize those voters.

Today, Trump has upended that dynamic. His rampant destruction of American governmental institutions tends to be noticed by highly informed voters who think more abstractly about things like liberty or rights. The social changes of the last quarter century have been embraced by more educated and informed voters. 

Yglesias feels this means that Democrats need to target their voter registration drives, and that's likely true. However, I think it also means that we can't predict what will happen to the Trump coalition, absent Trump. How much are these infrequent voters going to vote without him on the ballot? We are already seeing it in the elections of 2018, 2022 and 2023. In 2020, the election was closer than polls predicted and then obviously he overperformed in 2024 again. 

It remains to be seen whether the new Trump voter will vote without Trump on the ballot. It also remains to be seen whether a Trumpist candidate could win against a male Democrat, since at least some of Trump's overperformance has to stem from this latent misogyny.

The 2026 elections will determine whether America remains a democracy. The people most likely to vote on that issue are the new Democratic coalition. If Trump's policies are the disaster that they certainly seem to be, then at best many of his voters will stay home. Some of the marginally engaged will shift to Democrats just to check his powers. 

It's incumbent that Democrats realize that this is their new base and work to only increase their margins among demographics that they know will show up at the polls for them. It's OK to bargain away some things like voter ID in return for other things

Don't Want To Get Your Hopes Up, But...

 We are flipping Iowa districts by 20 points from last November. Let's assume that this trend remains, though perhaps it is not so strong by the midterms. I can't find the Partisan Voting Index for the new Texas map, except this one. It suggests that the efforts to reduce the number of Democratic seats could actually imperil some Republican incumbents, as their districts may have gone from R+15 to R+7. If you get a ten point swing, then that district just came into play.

I would personally love it, if the efforts to gerrymander a Republican majority winds up costing them even more seats.

Shameless

 We had one of Trump's periodic tongue baths from the sycophants and opportunists who make up his Cabinet yesterday. I cannot, for the life of me, understand someone who would debase themselves like that for tangential access to power, but I guess that's why I'm not a Republican.

The self-destructiveness of Trump's policies are so driven by splenetic hatred of Democrats - take the killing of Revolution Wind just as it's being completed - that I guess these people are helpless before Cleek's Law, and they will therefore do anything to gain the ability to stick it to anyone to the left of Lisa Murkowski. They will swim through a river of shit to take away a poor kid's school lunch.

Trump looks terrible, and there is all sorts of speculation about his life expectancy. I just can't see people fawning over JD Vance like this, and if it comes to it, I hope I'm not wrong.

Nope

 Trump has no authority to fire Lisa Cook. Media need to stop repeating what he says like he's a normal politician. He says he's ended seven wars? You don't need to repeat that. He says he has a trade deal with Japan? Let's see the deal. 

It is now an open question whether Trump is lying or confabulating - which is to say getting confused, because he's old and stupid. What is not an open question is whether to repeat what he says without LEADING with the context that he's lying/wrong/confabulating.

Also, firing Fed Governors was explicitly ruled out, even by the rubber stamps of the Roberts Court. They ruled it out, because while they are gleeful spectators of his destruction of the administrative state, they are not so keen on his destruction of the US economy.

What's Next With Martial Law?

 As Trump's job approval spirals near historic lows, even before the economic cost of his policies is levelled, he seems to be doubling down on military takeovers of local governments.

Much of this is performative. Unlike the masked goons in ICE, the National Guard isn't particularly juiced to become Stormtroopers for Trump. The argument that this is supposed to "normalize" armed soldiery on street corners could be true, or it could be that he's just hoping for a violent response to allow him to crack down further on any dissent. Certainly, deploying troops to Chicago would fit his blinkered view of American Carnage and the hope that some dumb gang member shoots at a Guardsman. 

This is all illegal, of course. Congress returns soon, and in addition to dealing with Epstein, they will have to address the DC takeover. Republicans have a seven seat majority today but that number falls to five by September 23rd after special elections fill empty seats in Democratic districts. That means that four Republican House members or four Republican Senators are all that's needed to end this bullshit "emergency."  In the Senate, I think this could be an issue that unites Collins, Murkowski, McConnell and Paul. A similar mix of what passes for moderates (Don Bacon?) and libertarians in the House could make a coalition to end this.

We can see the lawlessness of the Trump Administration in their moves to deport Kilmer Abrego Garcia again, even as he awaits trial. This is a blatant violation of Garcia's rights, just as the first deportation was. They arrested him after his court hearing, because of course they did. This is not about enforcing the law, but creating precedents for violating it. 

If courts rule that Trump's martial law attempts in California or possible future attempts in Illinois are illegal (which they are), what happens next? The Abrego Garcia case shows that they are unconstrained by judicial rulings. Intimidation is the only law they follow.

In all this, of course, is the supine Republican Congress.

Trump Slump And Long Term Prospects

 Professor Krugman has Part II of his primer on stagflation, and it ponders the degree to which a stagflation period under Trump will be bad or fucking terrible.

Bad looks like a temporary surge in prices caused by a combination of deportations increasing labor costs; tariffs increasing the price of consumer goods and electrical costs hitting everything all at once. This seems to be combining with a massive boost in AI data centers that has kept overall economic numbers growing, but are likely not being felt by many Americans. For most Americans, prices are rising, everything seems uncertain and they are naturally cutting back on spending.

This should be understood in terms of Keynes' concept of overall demand in an economy. It consists of Consumer Spending; Business Investments (new factories and the like); Government Spending and (Exports minus Imports). 

Now, we have good evidence that Consumer Spending is going down because of higher prices caused by Trump's policies - especially deportation and tariffs, but also electricity which is only somewhat his fault at the moment, but will grow as renewable energy projects like the one off Rhode Island are killed by spite. Government Spending is also cratering, except for the narrow band of spending on ICE agents and gulags. Business Investments are slowing because of Trump's crazy on-again-off-again economic policies. That leaves what should be a mild boost from fewer imports, but it's unclear if American exports won't also be hurt by the trade wars Trump is starting.

Basically, we look to be headed towards a real slow down in demand, with the exception of the AI boom, which feels much more like a bubble than an economic paradigm shift that its acolytes foresee.

What's more, the primary supply side boost - tax cuts - seem tailored for the wealthiest Americans who don't spend nearly as much money on goods (demand) as less wealthy Americans do. Additionally, the decimation of food aid and ACA subsidies will pull more money out of working class and poor families that will, in turn, lead to less demand.

When demand collapses, you get a recession. If you get a recession while prices are rising, you get stagflation. We sure seem to be headed towards Bad at the very least.

What does Terrible look like? Terrible is entrenched inflation. That's what we saw in the 1970s, and Krugman's first primer does a good job explaining that. With entrenched inflation, we get a self-reinforcing death spiral of businesses assuming that prices will keep rising, so they keep raising prices. With hyperinflation (WORSE THAT TERRIBLE) you get prices that rise monthly or weekly, even daily. With entrenched inflation, prices rise at 3-12 month intervals, depending on a million variables. A business doesn't want to raise its prices every other month, so it holds off and then raises its prices not to where they need to be for that moment, but to cover losses from the previous month and to anticipate rising prices in next few months.

There are a ton of signs we are entering stagflation, and if the AI and/or Crypto bubbles collapse, then we will tilt into a full blown recession. Trump's policies that are inflationary - tariffs, deportations, killing renewable energy - will come into conflict with the deflationary impact of a recession - lost jobs, lost wages, lost spending power. 

The good news - if that's the right term - is that there two of the three primary inflationary drivers are easily reversible: tariffs and deportations. The bad news is that Trump (and Miller) seem unlikely to reverse course. The collapse of the AI bubble would reduce electrical demand somewhat, but the move to more renewables can't be flipping on like a, well, light switch.

If the Trump Slump hits this fall (recessions seem to be fond of starting in the fall), then Trump's authoritarian impulses will grow bigger as his popularity recedes even further. At the same time, unpopular dictators wind up before firing squads.

How Enfeebled Is Trump?

 Richardson's daily post is about the increasing tempo of authoritarianism in the Trump Administration. It is certainly true and very troubling. We have the assaults and planned future assaults on American cities. We have the retribution campaign against anyone who doesn't genuflect before Trump and his twisted narrative.

However, there are other signs that aren't as good for the Mad King. First, there's the weakening economy that seems only propped up by an AI bubble that seems bound to burst sooner or later. All the stagflation lights are blinking. He's not popular - though polling seems all over the map. 

The bigger issue for me at this moment are the rumors of poor health. I pondered on what happened in the Alaska Summit that had his aides so rattled, but it occurred to me later that maybe Trump fell asleep or demonstrated clear signs of dementia in front of Putin. There's the recurring photos of his right hand covered in makeup to conceal the bruising that could come from IV blood thinners and other drugs. He looks like shit, he sounds like shit, he can't walk in a straight line, he has the BMI of the Stay Puff marshmallow man and he was dumb before age-related cognitive decline hit him.

What if he's in really bad health? Hell, I'm not quite 60, and I can say that I just don't bounce back like I used to. I work out rigorously, I feed my brain, I try and eat well, and I can feel it. He's 79 and in obvious decline.

How much of the authoritarian framework depends on Trump personally? That's the trillion dollar question. His bizarre fixation with tariffs seems unique to him. His vice like grip on the GOP seems unique to him, whereby he utters some stupidity about annexing Greenland and his wee toadies fall in line, then forget it when he does.

Still, the worst actors are the Miller-Vought-Patel-Noem-Kennedy-Hegseth-Gabbard-Bondi types who implement his authoritarian impulses. If he dies or becomes so incapacitated that even they can't deny it, what happens then? JD Vance has no more principles than a sea cucumber, but is that a good thing or a bad thing? Would he try and double down on Trumpism or try and seize the center? Both bring peril to a guy with the charisma of, well, a sea cucumber.

Otto von Bismarck said that "God has a special providence for fools, drunkard and the United States of America." It would be something if the thing that saves our democracy is the fickle finger of death landing upon the Mad King.

More Stagflation

 The root causes on 1970s stagflation are complicated. There was a massive increase in money going to the poor from the Great Society. There was massive military spending in Vietnam. There was a decline in worker productivity growth. There was also, perhaps most importantly from my point of view, the rolling energy crises of the '70s. 

Energy is a massive part of the cost of everything you buy and when gas prices spiked that increased the price of shipping just about everything and that led to price increases. 

Today, as Krugman lays out, we are faced with a new energy crisis centered on electricity. Because we have an AI and crypto bubble forming, we are building out massive amounts of data processing that consume huge amounts of electricity at precisely the time that Trump is killing renewables, because reasons.

I'm quite obviously not Paul Krugman, but I understand supply and demand. Demand is up and Trump is killing the cheapest form of supply.

This is going to hit people in their budgets in ways that will lead to backlash, even if Trump isn't 100% responsible for it.

The "Peace" President

 Donald Trump is aggressively thirsting after the Nobel Peace Prize. He routinely claims to have "solved" from 7 to 10 wars, primarily because those wars have ended or abated since he took office, so he must've done that. This is part of his desperate craving for validation from elite stakeholders that goes back to him being a Long Island social climber in Manhattan. 

As Richardson notes after her discussion of Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression, Trump has started moving military assets in place to strike at drug cartels. She doesn't mention that Trump has also used the American military against protestors and "crime" in American cities.

Trump clearly understands that a lot of his rural voters were burned by Bush's Global War on Terror and they are tired of American military adventurism. That was a core tenet of his first term. Trump also "gets" the bloody waste of war and seems to only want to commit to stand-off missile and bombing strikes.

However, he also seems jacked up to use military force against the broad umbrella of crime, which includes everything from the Sinaloa Cartel to muggers to the homeless to dudes throwing sandwiches to peaceful protests. 

Trump is a bully and he's willing to engage in lethal force against people who can't fight back. He's willing to turn the armed forces on American citizens, but not send military gear to Ukraine. He would sell out Ukraine and Taiwan in a hot minute if there was money in it for himself.

Peace president my ass.

But This Worries Me

 I mean, OK, a lot worries me. But in talking about how Democrats have to simply be decent and competent and - if we have free and fair elections - they should be returned to some power, I come across a troubling find: Democrats are struggling to register voters.

Now, I'm not sure I join in Longman's feelings about not having ACORN anymore. As he notes, Democrats have lost some support among Black and Hispanic voters. My point is that Trump's awfulness is not lost on them, and many are souring on Trump and Stephen Miller's version of American governance.

Still, Democrats have a fecklessness problem. Bill Clinton once said that people will choose someone "strong and wrong over someone weak and right." Right now, Democrats seem weak, because they have zero institutional levers to work, beyond some governorships. What's more, Trump is largely counting on provoking a George Floyd type protest movement, so that he can shoot some protestors and declare martial law.

The struggles to register Democrats could be offset if more people are registering as independents. Secondly, the old strategy of focusing on registering  minority voters belies the fact that Democrats are doing really well with college educated Whites in the suburbs. If those are former Republicans moving towards Democrats, that won't show up in voter registration numbers, especially if they are becoming independents.

Still, there is no question that Democrats are struggling with not having any institutional power, which makes it hard for casually invested citizens to see them as strong enough to lead. I remember back in the 2002-05 period, they had the same problem. It's one reason why they turned to a war hero politician in John Kerry and flirted with guys like Wesley Clark as standard bearers. 

There are, in fact, charismatic leaders in the Democratic Party, but without a place to demonstrate strength, they will not be seen as strong.

Ideally, we have elections in 2026, Democrats win at least one House of Congress and begin the process of doing in substance what Gavin Newsom is doing on social media.

First: Do No Harm

 One of the many disappointing aspects of Trump's election in 2024 was the surge he had among young men and Hispanic voters. I remain convinced that a lot of this is a latent (or not so latent) refusal among these groups to vote for a woman. It might be culturally insensitive to say this about Hispanic voters, but I think there's merit in this argument.

Still, we have some solid evidence that this has reversed itself after just a half a year of Trump being Trump.

According the Economist/YouGov poll, Trump's approval rating has fallen to 40%, with 56% disapproving. Dig deeper and it gets worse for him. About 57% disapprove of his attacks on universities; only 13% want to see funding for research decreased.

If you dig into the crosstabs, you see the following. Hispanics approval has fallen to 28%; 18-29 year olds have fallen to 29%. His numbers are bolstered a bit by his economic approval numbers, where those two groups are 35 and 34% respectively, yet the numbers on inflation are in line with his overall numbers. 

What's more is where Trump's approval ratings were with these groups back in January: among Hispanics he was 42-47 and among under thirty year olds he was 48-43. Black support has dropped from 29-60 to 8-85. Independents dropped from 38-41 to 20-68.

All of this is before the real impact of his terrible economic policies have really sunk in. 

As Krugman notes (and I've been saying), deportations are inherently inflationary. Aside from AI, most sectors of the economy are at least in stasis, if not retreat, in the face of his chaotic whipsawing of tariffs and other bad ideas. The very reason he's trying to gin up more authoritarian shit from Texas to DC is because he - or at least his political team - see the coming electoral catastrophe. 

So, for Democrats, all the hand wringing about "How will we win the trust of Hispanics?" and "What can we do about young men?" can basically be resolved by Trump being Trump. Yes, push back everywhere. Yes, stymie and thwart his agenda using the levers of federalism.

But the only thing Democrats need to worry about when it comes to 2026 is making sure the elections are free and fair. They don't need a Project 2026; they just need not to be Trump.

Small Rant

 This is about something personal, so I'm sorry to my five readers who were expecting something pithy about the world. 

We have a new Head of School, and he has a mandate to shake some things up, as we have been run mostly the same way for the history of the school, which stretches back to 1890.  Fine, we need that.

One thing that has happened this summer is that we have had a lot of renovations of administrative offices and the transitioning of a couple of classrooms into administrative offices. What we have not had - for many years - is the renovation and upgrading of classroom space. We had a small spasm of doing that over a decade ago, but there are some classrooms that are essentially what they were like either when I returned to teach here in 2000 or when I graduated in 1985. All we've really changed is the addition of a massive screen that allows us to project our laptops. 

It became clear to me many years ago that I was never going to be on the administrative track, so I dedicated myself to being the best teacher I could be. I concede that my definition of "best teacher" does not always gibe with the current pedagogical fads, but I have kids who come back and thank me for their experiences, and that strikes me as the validation for my pedagogy.

The trend since the new guy came here has been to expand the administration of the school, and there's a compelling argument that this was needed. The old Head ran everything out of his office and things got missed as a result.

However, prioritizing administrative spaces over teaching spaces strikes me as an extension of the problems facing higher education. We charge a ridiculous amount of money for a high school, and it's not going to massive pay increases for the teachers. 

Luckily, I'm hopefully about 6-7 years from retirement, but I worry about the long term viability of all this. 

What Happened In Alaska?

 Richardson updates the lay of the land surrounding the summit between Trump and Putin. The consensus from reporters was that members of Trump's team looked shaken after the meeting, which ended prematurely. One suggestion Richardson makes is that Trump's declining cognitive abilities might have come to the fore, necessitating getting him out of there. That's certainly plausible. Then there's this passage:

At the press conference following the summit, NBC News White House correspondent Peter Alexander reported that what struck him was “the looks on the faces of a lot of the American delegation here. Karoline Leavitt…, Steve Witkoff, who came into the room, then left quickly, then came back in. Leavitt appeared to be a bit stressed out, anxious. Their eyes were wide, almost ashen at times.”

This has been followed up by Zelensky and the bulk of NATO heads of government flying to Washington to meet with Trump. That's...unusual. Perhaps in the meeting, Trump suggested leaving NATO, which might have shaken his advisors. We know he floated leaving NATO last time he was in office, but was stopped by the "adults in the room" who are conspicuously absent from this administration.

Another possibility could be that Putin let Trump know that he has dirt on him that perhaps overlaps with the Epstein stuff. There has always been rumors of kompromat on Trump, though I've always thought it was about shady business dealings with Russian oligarchs, the basic contours of the pee tape was that there was damaging sexual material.

Trump likes to caterwaul about the "Russia Hoax" but Putin clearly seems to act like he has Trump's ball in his pockets. If you took all of Trump's actions and assessed them as a whole, I'm not sure what he would do differently, if he were trying to end America's global leadership. 

Stagflation

 I am not an economist, because I suck at math. I do enjoy trying to understand economics, especially in the way that pre-20th century economists did - as a form of moral philosophy combined with empirical observation. 

Krugman gives a really clear explanation of what stagflation was and is. In some ways, it's simply an economic dynamic whereby inflation becomes entrenched. Prices rise because that's what prices are doing and you see a continued upwards spiral as firms try to keep pace with not only current costs but future ones as well. Firms don't want to raise prices in a way that could jeopardize their market share, but they are also not in business to lose money. 

We've been in a state recently where firms have been reluctant to raise prices, because they assumed the tariffs were transient posturing. As it becomes clear that they are not, they are going to pass those costs along to consumers. Entrenched inflation is when the cycle of raising prices becomes the norm. It's not clear that tariffs would create entrenched inflation, but deportations could, especially in food and construction.

There is also the role of energy costs that Krugman and most economists seem to elide. (UPDATE: Krugman posts about the energy costs!) For me and my innumerate analysis, oil and energy spikes create broad based inflation because everything requires energy to move around the world markets. If we think those spikes are the new normal, then producers will build those into inflation. Yet, in 1990-1 we saw an inflationary spike in oil prices surrounding the Gulf War but that did not lead to entrenched inflation. Energy costs can be an accelerant for inflation, but the entrenchment is something else and that is stagflation.

Krugman also describes the 2021-23 inflationary spike surrounding supply constraints that occurred after Covid. Like the 1990-1 spike or even the 2008 energy spike, this inflation came and went.

However, we are also seeing rising electricity prices. The reason seems to be a combination of natural gas exports and especially the great demands from data centers. The Department of Energy predicts that data centers will use more electricity than all households next year. 

We were in Wyoming and Cheyenne is having a boom from data centers, because Wyoming is a combination open coal pit and an oil and natural gas well. Let's leave aside the potential environmental costs from all this - though they are huge - we are looking at a supply crunch in energy - not oil, but electricity.

At the same time, Trump is killing subsidies for solar and wind, which might help ease the price crunch. Presumably, in the longer term, the lower price of solar will continue to make it viable, but in the short term, people's electricity bills are going to spike. Add in EVs, and the whole thing is the same sort of supply crunch we saw post-Covid.

This means that there are several places were we should see prices rise directly because of Trump's policies:

- Food, as undocumented (and even documented) immigrants are removed from the labor force.
- Energy, as rampant speculation in data centers gobbles up electricity
- Imported goods, because of tariffs.
- All manufactured goods, because of tariffs on inputs like steel and general inflationary pressures.

Meanwhile, we are cutting SNAP and health care subsidies that will impoverish poorer Americans. This should lead to reduced overall demand even as prices continue to rise.

And THAT is stagflation and THAT is bad.

The Pantomime Presidency

 Donald Trump is a stupid person. I've said this before, and I stick by it. I saw a video (can't find it) that was Edward Teller talking about John Von Neumann, who might have been the smartest person to ever live. Teller said that what made Von Neumann so smart was that he loved to think because he was good at it, but he became even better at it, precisely because he loved to do it. 

Trump doesn't like to think.

What's more, his feeble brain has been cooked by 70 years of mainlining bad television like a junkie shooting up heroin in 1970s Times Square, a period that Trump himself seems stuck in.

We have seen two instances of his TV presidency, his Pretendency, this week. The farcical, but still dangerous, military takeover of DC and his flop of a summit with Vladimir Putin. 

The DC thing is pure fascist theater. It's ridiculous and most of the law enforcement and military folks know that. It's not actually venturing into high crime areas, but rather patrolling the wealthier streets. It's part ridiculous theater and part authoritarian cowing of the DC class. They aren't patrolling Anacostia Flats, they're patrolling K Street.

Similarly, the summit was bullshit, because it was always going to be bullshit, because Trump can't be bothered with learning what he needs to learn to manage a guy like Putin. Instead, it creates optics - most of which favor Putin - as Trump vainly and in vain seeks the Nobel Peace Prize.

In other words, the main news stories of the week are Trump pretending to be strong and capable on TV, when anyone paying attention knows it's a colossal joke - just not a funny one.

AI Is Shit, Because It's Based On Online People

 AI is not actually "artificial intelligence," it's Large Language Model computing that crushes so much data that it can pass for a human, I guess. It is trained on the internet, and I don't know if you've spent any time on the internet, but boy howdy there is some fucked up shit on the internet.

The fact that it can pass for a person, at least to some extent, means that the potential for abuse is incredibly high. We had Jonathan Haidt come to campus to talk about social media and how toxic it is and phones are, but he ended by citing his worries that AI was simply going to be used for sex bots.

Well, guess what.

The fact that Meta allows AI pedophilia is something that I never thought I'd type. The fact that we are going to consume gargantuan amounts of energy to power lurid chat bots that mimic everything from children to celebrities and allow people to constantly push against boundaries of acceptable behavior is really blood chilling. I have a hunch before 15 years is out, we are going to have to decide whether you can prosecute a human being for raping a robot. I'm dead serious.

When video came out, it was amazing! You could watch all sorts of movies that you never could before. It did not take long, though, for porn to push its way to the back room of video shops. In fact, the reason we had VHS and not Betamax was because VHS was cheaper, lower quality and therefore preferred by pornographers. The internet was going to democratize knowledge and allow people all over the world to connect. It would be the death of authoritarianism by digital libertarianism. Instead, we got PornHub. 

AI will go the same direction. Yes, there are good applications for it. It makes for a superior search engine, or at least an easier one. You could Google "melanoma symptoms and Google would give you resources. Now, AI will summarize them for you.

Yay?

We've already seen Musk's AI - Grok - become a fascist (MechaHitler) because it was trained of his toxic Twitter. We will see AI become a vehicle for human depravity, not because the machines are depraved, but because we are depraved and while the tech bros will laud the miracles that AI might very well bring to us, they are going to make money off the depravity. 

I only say this because they always have.

Big City Blues

 Hitler famously lit the German Reichstag on fire to create an emergency to seize control of the government, despite not having a majority in the German parliament. There is some thought that he's using the carjacking of Big Balls in DC to create martial law there. As both Richardson and Krugman point out, Washington DC is near a 30 year low in crime. 

Today, most of my family and I drove through western South and North Dakota. It's beautiful. No, really, gorgeous. It's also incredibly barren of people. We drove for two hours or more where I don't think one person could see their neighbors houses. These were mostly ranches. After a while, we got into grain country and eventually, it got so that houses had sightlines to each other. Still, when we got to Dickinson, ND (population 25.695) the place felt really crowded. The town we come from in CT is roughly the same size and is completely unremarkable in any way, shape or form. Dickinson is the anchor town for roughly 50-100 miles in every direction.

So, Dickinson - population: not that many - felt bustling. No wonder the few residents who may have gone to Chicago or (gasp) NY think of it as anarchic. If you live in rural America, the big cities are noisy, crowded, smelly and aggressive. That means that when Faux News starts talking about the crime there and Trump wails about American Carnage, those attacks make a certain amount of sense to fearful people who just can't grok a big city.

The other thing that crops up is how these idiots constantly show a precinct or county map of the election that is saturated in red, because the Big Empty is GOP country and the Big Cities are Democratic. For all the apparent anarchy of these big cities, they work. Really well! They are the centers of America's wealth, enterprise and innovation. Big Cities are what makes America Great!

For all the nonsense about Democrats needing to reach "real Muricans" and other Trump voters, there is simply no way to reach these deep rural voters. They live on a different planet. Your best bet is that they just quit the political system out of frustration when Trump invariably craters the economy and kills their farm subsidies by accident.

The Destiny of Autocrats

 Krugman talks about the incompetence of Stephen Moore, Economists to Republicans. He quotes Hannah Arendt about how authoritarians prefer stupid loyalists to competent officials.

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

This gibes with the book I'm reading on the Return of Great Powers, with a focus on disastrous decisions like Putin's invasion of Ukraine. But if you're a dictator, you don't have people telling you the truth, so you make error after error. Trump is doing and will do the same.

The reason liberal democracy is the preferred form of government is precisely because it can self-correct, and it is for precisely this reason that I'm really worried about GOP efforts to inoculate themselves from accountability with gerrymandering.

UPDATE: Paul Campos notes Trump's manifest cognitive decline.

What Does It Mean?

 Driving through northeastern Wyoming...WYOMING...we stopped at a McDonalds in the only town for miles. There were three old coots in a booth and one of them was basically going on about how little we know about the would be assassin from Butler, PA. Now, for the record, I think he was just another alienated misfit who would've become a school shooter if Trump never came to town. 

Still, it was interesting to hear folks in the most Republican state in the Union speculating about conspiracies surrounding that event. Conspiracy theories thrive when people lose faith in normal informational channels. Almost certainly, it means nothing. Maybe it was just the one guy holding forth. The enduring stink of the Epstein stuff seems to be lingering. That has to be in part because the conspiratorial mindset that helped usher Trump into power has become unmoored from its original vessel.  

Whatever it takes to bring that orange fucker down.

AI And VC

 There's a long piece in the Times about Uber's problem with sexual assault and sexual misconduct. My wife sent it to me, because I was dismayed at how easily she came to getting comfortable in a Waymo on her last trip to California. To me, Waymo represents a terrifying venue for tech companies like Uber to fire their drivers, many of whom depend on driving for Uber or Lyft. Her point is that there are a lot of cases of Uber drivers engaging in everything from creepy behavior to rape. The Times article points out - and the Uber spokesperson argues - that statistically, the number of these incidents is small, but the absolute number of events is large. That is to say, the percentage of Uber rides that end in sexual misconduct is low, but it still happens a lot. What's more important is that the number really needs to be zero.

However, the argument that Waymo will save women from sexual assault or misconduct seems to miss the problem, which is that Uber has tools to dramatically reduce this problem, and they have often avoided implementing them. One tool is to record every trip, but if they do that, then they are admitting that their drivers are employees, and that has been a bright red line for them. They do not want to be responsible for providing health insurance or other benefits for what they term "independent contractors." 

They also had a plan to allow female riders to select only female drivers, but they shelved that when Trump was elected, in case you want to know where the heads are of major corporations today.

There is the problem of sexual assault, which predates Uber obviously. Then there is the problem of how Uber was run - it was a classic tech bro startup under Travis Kalanick. They wanted to grow, grow, grow, and efforts to preserve passenger safety were downplayed in order to grow the company and prepare for the all-important IPO.

That dynamic in some way, shape or form will be present as Waymo scales up. What's more, it will be present as AI scales up. We may already be seeing it.

Here is a chart of browsing searches for OpenAI. It collapses when school gets out. For all the hype and hoopla about what AI can do, it fundamentally is being used - at best - as a shortcut around the rigors of learning. The idea that AI will be able to cure cancer is appealing (especially since RFK is killing cancer research). The reality is that it's a cheating machine, and it is in the best interests of the people running those companies to insure that no restrictions occur when using their machine until it gets profitable.

The logic of Silicon Valley Venture Capitalism is an aggressive form of capitalism that is dedicated to rapidly scaling up a product, issuing an IPO and then cashing out. You can go from rags to riches pretty damned quick, but eventually you get to enshittification and poor customer experiences.

Waymo will cut corners if it means quick profitability. Not the BIG corners, because they have to show that they are viable. The little corners, the one that causes a problem once every 2000 rides. These are the same incentives that Uber faced, and Waymo is not special.

As for AI, it's painful as an educator and a parent to realize that what we think of as learning, the way we have learned for thousands of years, is going to be altered to suit the venture capitalists who want to leverage AI into billion dollar paydays. They could create safeguards - digital watermarks - that lets a teacher know if a student has used AI to generate their answers, but they won't, because they want to crush their IPO.

AI Utopianism is just rhetoric covering for AI Venture Capitalism.

It's Not The Ease Of The Work

 I haven't linked much to Yglesias recently (in part because I now seem to link almost exclusively to Richardson and Krugman). Today, however, he's so deep on his bullshit that I need to.

His argument is that people have devalued the Humanities because they are too easy. Now, there is absolutely grade inflation, and that grade inflation has hit Humanities harder than other disciplines. But nowhere does he offer a shred of evidence that these courses are easier than they used to be.

As a teacher and the parent of college students, I think the answer is far more about how you perceive your job prospects after you graduate. We have turned post-secondary education into a commodity that you develop in return for better job prospects when you graduate. One reason why STEM majors are more respected is not just that they are hard, but you will find a job after graduating and it will pay well.

If we just look at the Ivies (which is an outlier demographic), over a third of students are majoring in Computer Science, Econometrics or Applied Math. Our "adopted" Ukrainian son is at an Ivy and majoring in Applied Mathematics. He was looking at the Humanities BUT THEY WERE TOO HARD. He's ridiculously intelligent, and his intelligence is wired for math in a way that makes the difficulties of math more appealing to him. Roughly 15% of Ivy leaguers are majoring in History, International Relations or Political Science. Ideally, that number would be around 25%, but if you compare that to the 4% that are English majors, that says something, too.

Lets rack focus back to all US universities. Of all degrees awarded, 19% were in Business, 13% in "health professions", 7% in social science and history, 7% in biological and medical science, 6% in psychology and 6% in engineering. The key numbers there are the top two. The reason almost a third of college graduates are getting Business and Health Professions (not pre-med) degrees is that that is where the money is. These majors are not especially rigorous in the way that Engineering is. That doesn't stop kids from signing up.

At no point in Yglesias' argument does he offer evidence. It's all a priori assumptions.

Typical of a philosophy major.

Young Men

One group that broke for Donald Trump and allowed him to ooze back into the Oval Office was young men, aged 18-29. A lot has been written about Gen Z turning towards Republicans. I think that misses the point. Joe Biden won 18-29 year olds with 60% of their vote; Harris won it with 54% and actually lost men aged 18-29 by a single point. Her erosion among young voters - and I can't find the data, but I think it was mostly with young men - is what cost her the White House and plunged us into the orgy of corruption and incompetence that Trump brings with him like locusts.

This has naturally led to a million think pieces about how Democrats need to reach out to young men and go on Joe Rogan and Theo Von. I think that misses the point.

Author Jason Pargin makes the point that one thing that has young men upset is that we have de-masculinized work in so many ways, and this has an effect on certain groups of young men. Think of it this way: you're 24, you hated school and who were your teachers? Mostly women. You then want to get a good job, ideally doing manly things. Those jobs - construction, manufacturing - are tough to get, but you can get a retail gig. Who's your manger or HR director? Probably a woman, especially in HR. I'm sure there are male HR directors out there, I just haven't come across any.

Your whole life, women have been in significant positions of authority over you, and if you are stuck in a McJob, then you also aren't exactly prime dating material unless you're really charming. 

Resentment builds up, especially against women in positions of authority.

I don't think this is necessarily full-on misogyny. Sure, there are incels out there being venomous towards women, especially online. Overall, though, I think it creates a simmering undercurrent of resentment against women in authority and the way they exercise that authority. 

One thing I hate at work are these broad based emails that seem to suggest that everyone is making this one mistake and we all need to stop doing that. In fact, it's likely a couple of people but rather than deal with them, we get these mass emails. Now, I'm old and I'm less likely to take it personally, but it's still annoying and for young men, it feels oppressive.

Many of them will outgrow this. I did. I was - not quite resentful of women, but hurt by them when I was young. I tried to articulate it, but I was confused. It was just there and I doubt it made me more appealing to them.

I think a lot of young men carry some sort of anger about women controlling their lives until they grow up and realize it's not women doing that, it's just part of having a job or whatever. 

So, Democrats. If you want to win back young men, nominate a man. Unless you think Biden's strength with young voters was because of his youthful charisma, there seems to be a lot of evidence that young male voters just don't want to have a female president. I think they can grow out of it, and I understand not catering to a level of bigotry, but that's my suggestion. I don't like it, but I think it's true.

Great News

 Sherrod Brown is running for the Senate in Ohio. Let's hope Jon Tester joins him in Montana.

If these old war horses can find their way back to the Senate, then you are looking at Maine, North Carolina and possibly Alaska, Iowa and Kansas being the battleground. Yeah, yeah, I know...Texas and Florida.  I'll believe that when I see it. 

Cognitive Dissonance

 Both Richardson and Krugman look at the implications of Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn't like the employment numbers. As many have noted, this is a classic authoritarian move, something straight out of 1984:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command... And if all others accepted the lie, which the Party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

It is among the more remarkable ironies that Trump keeps screaming about "communists" in the Democratic Party, when his tactics most resemble Stalinist leanings. Lots of "conservative intellectuals" talk about a march through the institutions that was first suggested by Mao. Still, as we know, every accusation is a confession.

Ultimately, Orwell's statement has been taken to mean that the lies of an authoritarian regime become truth. I'm not sure how accurate that is. Soviet Russia had a ton of black humor about the difference between official statements and reality. In the end, the Soviet Union relied on extremely coercive controls to maintain their grip on power. This weakened them, to the point where the only way forward was to embrace openness, what Gorbachev called glasnost. Something Khrushchev was pushing in the mid-'60s, which is what led to his "retirement."

These closed systems don't work. They might work for a while if you're a New York builder/socialite who can lie and scam his way from one bankruptcy to the next, but the bankruptcies are the important thing. In the end, Trump's lying came face to face with reality, and reality won.

There are certain things we take as being fundamentally true in American politics. Often they are anecdotes that stand in for more complicated concepts. During the 1992 presidential campaign. George H. W. Bush was startled to discover the scanners used at grocery store checkouts. The guy had been Vice President or President for the previous 12 years. Of course he never did his shopping. Yet this became evidence that he was "out of touch" and was a reason he lost the election.

Maybe that's true? Or maybe there were macroeconomic events and the presence for a strong third party candidate that made Clinton's victory possible. 

Trump seems increasingly "out of touch." No figure, for instance, is keeping Epstein in the news than he is. You can fire all the statisticians and economists you want, but people are still noticing that prices for groceries are going up. People are going to notice when the price of manufactured goods goes up.

Trump, being Trump, is going to be SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS that the economy is the best in the history of the galaxy. If that's not true (and I don't think it will be) then that might even get through to the poorly engaged voter, who doesn't follow the news but does know that stuff is expensive.

Genuinely Scared

 Early on election night, I realized that my optimistic appraisal of the American electorate was badly flawed and that Trump would likely win. I drove out into the woods and screamed in rage and despair into the darkness. I wasn't sure how bad it would be, but I knew that the country had rejected decency and law in favor of a flawed view of the economy of 2019. 

So far, it has been objectively bad, but bad in a way that I think we can recover from. Yes, the Big Ugly Bill is a horror show; yes, people are being hurt; yes, the economy is being skewed even more towards the rich. You can point to dozens of terrible things this administration is doing or planning on doing. 

Yet, those actions can be undone. Bad bills can be replaced with good bills. America and the world will be worse off because Trump was returned to office, but the world is a resilient place and given time and the opportunity, we can return to a better state of affairs.

The gerrymandering plan being forced on Texas is shaking me up.

Abbott has always struck me as a less charismatic version of Trump. He lacks the gonzo appeal Trump apparently has for many, but he has the same anti-democratic impulses. When Trump asked him to redistrict, he rushed to do so. Texas Democrats have fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum, and now Abbott is talking about stripping them of their seats. Is that legal? I don't know, but I doubt that will stop him.

As Krugman notes, this is a sign of Trump's desperation. Republicans in Trumpistan do measurable worse when he's not on the ballot. The House is razor thin anyway, and every seat could matter in 2026. Forcing mid-decade redistricting on Texas, Florida and Ohio is a blatant attempt to short circuit democratic accountability. 

If it succeeds, that's the ball game. Seriously. I don't see how the country hangs together. We either become a dictatorship or the country fractures. Democrats have to win control of at least one house of Congress in order to exercise a check on the Mad King. If they fail to win either the House or Senate, then all the malevolent bullshit will become the new American normal. I doubt very much whether we would have anything approaching free and fair elections in 2028.

Now, there is another possibility. The descent into authoritarianism has - at least nominally - stayed within the bounds of law. So far, we don't have evidence of tampering with the counting of ballots. Putin and Orban didn't skew the counting, they just shaped the elections in ways that insured their victories. Gerrymandering is from that playbook. 

The Supreme Court enabled this with the Rucho decision that forbid Federal courts from overturning partisan gerrymandering. Even in that decision, they agreed that gerrymandering  might be undemocratic, but that they had no power to intervene. The Texas gerrymander almost certainly violates the Voting Rights Act, but does anyone expect the Courts to uphold that law? Roberts has been trying to overturn it since the the 1980s.

Now, as of this writing, California is thinking about changing their laws to gerrymander that state out of Republican hands. Illinois could do the same. New York...well, they are making the proper noises, but the NY Dems always fuck up, and in fact, fucked up a gerrymander attempt in 2021. 

A gerrymander war could preserve the chances of a Democratic House. There is even the chance that Republicans will create a "Dummymander" (a phrase I just heard) whereby they take districts that Trump won by 10 points and make the 5 point Trump districts. In a wave election, Democrats might win those seats. Right now, Republicans have gerrymandered Texas to create their partisan map. Texas' 3rd, 12th, 15th, 21st, 23rd, 24th, 26th, 31st and 38th districts are all already R+11 or closer. Dilute those at all and a backlash election could tilt the map to Democrats - even in Texas.

However, the gerrymander war or even the dummymander would mean that Republicans could reach for more extreme measures to preserve their rule. Krugman's conclusion is scary, but accurate:

And what if these actions aren’t enough? Remember, Trump supporters, with his clear encouragement, already tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The important point is that right now Trump has immense power, thanks in large part to the cowardice of many of the institutions that should be holding him in check. But he’s also rapidly bleeding support, in large part because he’s completely failing to deliver on his economic promises.

That combination makes this an extremely dangerous moment. And if authoritarianism does come to America, don’t count on it being soft.

They are telling us how little respect they have for democracy. They said it when they refused to vote for impeachment after January 6th. They said it when they renominated Trump. They said when they rolled over for his awful legislation and illegal power grabs. They are saying by launching this gerrymander war. 

If they succeed in gerrymandering Texas, Florida and Ohio even more, and Democrats match them or they dummymander their way out of the majority in a wave election, why should we imagine that Trump and his fascist hangers on will accept that result peacefully?

The Remaining Guardrails

 As Trump's popularity declines, he lashes out more and more. Some of this is the stink coming off the Epstein mess, but the "Wrong Track" polling is also grim. For many center and left analysts, looking at how Trump has "governed" since he regained power, this is hardly a surprise. Tariffs, his budget, his deportations...these are all really unpopular. Also, he's just an asshole.

At the moment there are few guardrails to constrain him, but not none. The Courts have been at least somewhat reluctant to go along with his most egregious acts. The Supreme Court, however, has been less a restraint on him than many of us had hoped, even if we knew that hope was slim.

There are two remaining ways to bring this country back from the brink. When it comes to his tariff policies, it's worth noting that they are blatantly illegal. He simply doesn't have the power to do what he has been doing. What's more, the "agreements" he says he has are not really agreements. Going further, why should any country believe that Trump will honor the "deals" he makes, since he won't honor the existing treaty obligations? The supine Republican Congress won't take their constitutional powers back, so it's left to the Courts.

We haven't seen the Courts rein him in, but - and I concede I may be wishcasting here - these tariffs are not in the interest of American industry, especially the lunatic tariffs on raw materials like aluminum and steel. Yes, the red letter of the law is against Trump and the Supreme Court doesn't care about that, but this may be a case where the pro-plutocrat impulses of the Court overrule their fealty to the Mad King.

More troublesome is the gerrymandering issue. Trump is urging Texas to further gerrymander their state to deprive Democrats of perhaps five seats. California has threatened to retaliate. New York and Illinois are considering their options, while Florida does the same.

Gerrymandering is incredibly corrosive to our politics. Perhaps more corrosive than Trump himself, who will die in the next decade. Gerrymandering makes representatives more extreme, in order to placate their base and avoid a primary challenge. It deprives people of democratic choice in what is supposed to be the People's House. 

At the moment, we are relying on both the restraint of Texas lawmakers - yikes - in the face of retaliation. If they decide to go through with this, then we come back to the courts. I don't have much faith that the Roberts Court will uphold the shattered remains of the Voting Rights Act, but...maybe?

Maybe, again wishcasting, if Texas and other states go through with additional gerrymandering, that will create a backlash that swamps even R+10 districts. We are seeing something like that in special elections. 

Krugman has a long post about tariffs and their impact on GDP and it will actually be minimal (the costs come elsewhere besides GDP). Still, add that to deportations and the chaotic policy whims of the Mad King (like firing the head of BLS) and there are no significant headwinds. Any shock like a crypto crash could tip the country into a bad spiral. If that happens, R+15 districts might not be safe.

Still, the implications of a Supreme Court that refuses to enforce the actual law and constitution and a Republican Party hellbent on depriving voters of actual choice does not bode well for the future of American democracy, which - bruised and battered as it may be - is still clinging to life.

El Caudillo de Mar A Lago

 Surprise! The American economy, which had been the envy of the world last summer, is now seeing some noticeable signs of stagnation. The jobs report yesterday was not only weak, but the revisions downwards were striking. The expectation was 115,000 new jobs, but the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates it was 73,000. While that's notable, the real news was that - having access to more data - they revised downwards their previous estimates. The May estimate was 144,000 and the new number is 19,000; June was 147,000 and now is 14,000. If that trend holds, the July number should be revised down to negative job growth.

In some ways, the declining job growth is completely to be expected. Yes, tariffs have created a great deal of instability into the economy, so why would an employer expand her workforce when she might be looking at layoffs by the fall? Or if he's having to eat tariffs under the assumption they will be transitory, that means cutting back on wages by not hiring. Additionally, deportations have to depress economic activity, especially in the trades. Again, less aggregate demand. Throw in anecdotes of a decline in tourism and it would make sense that the only sector to see job growth is health care providers. 

Inflation, meanwhile, is a bit on the warm side at 2.7 - 2.9. That's not high, though it also means prices are still rising from the already inflated prices of the post-Covid supply crunch, so it feels like high. Additionally, if you really are seeing around 2.8 inflation during a possible contraction in hiring: well, hello stagflation. 

So, yeah, a bad report. 

More noteworthy than the bad report, though, is that Trump immediately fired the head of BLS for producing the report. 

This is basic Dictator 101 stuff. Any news that reflects badly on Dear Leader is to be suppressed and the best way to suppress it is to fire the experts who produce the bad news and replace them with toadies who will produce shiny, happy news. The problem, obviously, is that modern economies run on accurate news, not good news. On a fundamental level, markets are exchanging information before they are exchanging goods and services. The information moves first, and if Trump destroys some of the accuracy of the information, that will distort markets. 

If - as most economists believe - the softening economy is caused by the uncertainty of Trump's tariffs, adding uncertainty about governmental economic statistics, which were the gold standard, is simply injecting a lot more uncertainty into the markets.

The logic of TACO is that Trump did respond to bad news, like market crashes, and he changed course. If you censor the ability of people to get bad news, he won't course correct. That means any effort to count on him making a better decision in the face of contrary evidence is increasingly doomed.

This is exactly the reason why dictatorships fail. The question for us is the degree to which he drags us all down with him.

No, We Don't Have Any Tariff Deals

 It's the same bullshit every time. Trump launches tariffs, says he's going to force people to make "a deal." Then he announces a deal. It's not a bilateral statement by trade negotiators. It's Trump announcing a "deal" that almost immediately turns out to not be the actual deal. When we have Trump saying that he's ended six wars, it becomes an open question as to whether he's just incapable of not spewing bullshit everywhere or completely divorced from reality. (Cheryl Rofer makes this point, too)

That same cognitive frame applies to tariffs. What does he know or not know? What does he understand or not understand? If we take his words at face value - and I concede that's very problematic, as he is a compulsive liar - then he really does seem to think that other people pay the tariffs. I don't think that's spin, I think he believes that. 

Of course aside from his misguided understanding of trade and tariffs, which appears to be a sort of bone-deep ignorance, there is his basic personality trait of behaving like a mob boss.  Krugman points to his illegal tariffs on Brazil as an example of this.

If we look at Trump's long career in business, we see a guy who often was able to bully small contractors and suppliers by constantly suing and such. He declared bankruptcy to escape from consequences for his mismanagement. If it wasn't for the fucking Apprentice, he would have disappeared from the public eye completely. (I swear, between Mark Burnett and Rupert Murdoch, maybe Trump has a point about immigrants.) 

Trump would have to assume based on his entire career as a bully that being president allow him to be the biggest bully of them all. I mean, if he could coerce people as a marginal real estate developer, why wouldn't he be able to coerce the whole world as president? 

The reality - and we have no idea to what degree he understands reality at this point - is that sovereign nations are, indeed, sovereign. He has presumed he could threaten and bully and coerce countries, but when he couldn't "settle out of court" he just blatantly invents victories. 

Finally, if you were China or the EU or any other country, why should you believe that Trump will abide by the "deals" (more like concepts of a plan) that he says he's struck? He's breaking US law to wage these trade wars, and then he ping pongs crazily from one rate to another. There's zero reason to trust him because he is fundamentally untrustworthy.

UPDATE: It will be interesting if the Courts rescue the economy/capitalists from Trump's tariff insanity, but it will require them to read the clear letter of the law and apply it consistently to the way they have in the past so who knows?