The Twin Horns That Will Gore Trump

 Morris looks at Trump's approval on the economy and health care, and it ain't pretty.  This is fundamentally important, because so much of what Trump is doing that is really, really bad simply does not register with most voters...UNTIL they start to see their money shrink.

All the OTHER stuff will only really land with people once they are angered at his economic policy malpractice. There are two main engines that are driving this: deportations and tariffs. A third factor is high interest rates, but his deficit spending spree means that even if the Fed lowers rates, long term interest rates will remain high. This was the situation in the early '90s, and it required some austerity to make things work.

Since Trump is an idiot surrounded by other idiots, anyone think he will do the right thing? The hard thing?

Is You Taking Notes On A Criminal Conspiracy?

 I saw a clip of the Rich Eisen Show, where he's interviewing Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, where Eisen asked him where some of the characters are now. When they got to the charming but corrupt lawyer, Saul Goodman, Gilligan quipped, "I think Trump pardoned him." The set erupted in laughter.

As Simon Rosenberg points out, the Trump Administration is more accurately categorized as a crime spree. The Epstein Files released yesterday were in clear violation of the letter and spirit of the law requiring them to do so. It was 119 pages of blacked out text.

Richardson notes that are seeing some cracks in the dam. A handful of House Republicans are starting to sign on to discharge petitions that are passing and forcing the human cypher known as Mike Johnson to actually bring popular measures to a vote. Let's posit that, for instance, Republicans finally get some sort of extension of ACA premiums passed through both Houses with Democratic support. Do we really think Trump will honor that law? 

More accurately, do we think that the creatures that surround this empty man will honor that law? Richardson points to the role that ghoulish fascist Stephen Miller has played in the illegal strikes against Venezuelan boats. Miller is basically taking the logic of Republican rhetoric since Reagan to its gruesome conclusion. There is at least some reporting that many of the people around Trump are basically trolls; they don't really mean anything they say, they just want a reaction. Miller is not a troll, he's a monster. 

I recently enjoyed Death by Lightning on Netflix about the assassination of James Garfield. The central importance of Garfield's death was the impetus it gave to civil service reform - a reform that dramatically reshaped the capacity of the federal government to actually carry out complex tasks. The spoils system that had existed since Andrew Jackson's presidency created strong party loyalty, but it left the government without capable people able to leverage expertise for good governance. You can't have a Department of Labor with statisticians to give you the information to stop child labor. 

My hope - not, I pray, a forlorn hope - is that the awfulness of Trump 2.0 will shock the jaded sensibilities of the American public in much the same way that Garfield's death did. These are corrupt, vicious people and they aren't especially smart. They are operating as if there will be no accountability. That's the subtext of the joke about Trump pardoning Saul Goodman.

Former Special Counsel, Jack Smith, wants to testify in public about what he found out about Trump's role in January 6th. Sure, we all know that this was his doing, but he's now effectively immune from prosecution, so a public airing of his misdeeds is the best we can hope for. If, as I suspect, Trump pardons everyone as he heads out the door, then we will need these sort of "truth and reconciliation" moments to come as close to exposing the criminality of these thugs as we are likely to come.

There Is A Club

 And you aren't a member.

Jeffrey Epstein was. (These types of stories is why the NY Times, for all its faults is invaluable.)

Is Today Epstein Day?

 Theoretically today is the day that the Epstein Files are to be released to the House. I am skeptical that there won't be some sort of partial hiding of materials, but I wonder if the release of the partial files will give cover to people to leak the parts that the Department of Justice will try and hide.

What seems to be happening is that we are getting a lot more stories about what we might call the Epstein Class of billionaires and their hangers-on. Those stories can feed into Trump's overall cluelessness and detachment. If you are going to flip the Senate and create a Blue Tsunami, these stories really matter. 

One thing we are seeing is the overload of Trump Fluffing from his sycophants. The "renaming" of the Kennedy Center (yes, it's illegal) is a great example of how warped the Washington, DC GOP class has become as they reshape their whole worlds to provide a constant stream of superficial plaudits to his fragile ego. Trump's need for gilded ballrooms, vanity projects and his indifference to actual policy simply gibes nicely with this idea of an Epstein Class.

His efforts to "change the narrative" with his bizarre rant the other night isn't working. Authoritarians don't course correct easily, and Trump is stupid and a narcissist making a course correction even harder.

If the files really are damning, how quickly does he fall?

Candidate Quality

 One of the perennial questions in elections is asking whether or not the degree of candidate quality matters. How much does having a talent like Clinton, Obama or - in his own perverse way - Trump win elections? I think on the question of presidents, Democrats used to rely on low propensity voters, so having a preternaturally talented politician was necessary to turn them out. It's now Republicans who rely on those irregular Trump voters, so maybe that's changed somewhat, and that helps explain why Democrats are romping in special elections.

As long as the elections next November are reasonably free and fair (beyond the gerrymandering), I think Democrats win the House. The Democratic gerrymanders will not only counteract the Republican ones, but in a true wave, moving a district from R+13 to R+7 to help win a D+4 district elsewhere makes that R+13 district a potential, even likely Dem pick up. It's the so-called dummymander. 

Senate seats aren't exactly gerrymandered, but the states themselves are a sort of rough gerrymander. There is not a Democrat - living or dead - who is likely to win statewide races in West Virginia, Oklahoma or Idaho. The Senate map is always unfavorable to Democrats, given their strength in population centers and weakness in rural areas. The good news is that Senate terms are six years, and any Democrat who picks off a seat in 2026 will serve through the first term of whoever wins in 2028. 

Yglesias writes about the need for Democrats to compete in Florida. He notes that they are heavily recruiting candidates in places like Kansas, Iowa and Alaska. I do think that they can win in those places, because a lot of Trump's tariff policies are especially damaging to farmers. Florida and Texas, though, are the biggest prizes. Flip those states and you are sending shudders of dread through Republican strategists. 

As Yglesias points out, Trump has dramatically changed his immigration policies since his first term in office. The first term was mostly about border enforcement - the big beautiful wall that Mexico would pay for. This time around, the adults are gone and Stephen Miller is furiously masturbating to images of children being ripped from their parents arms by Border Patrol goon squads - not on the border but in American cities. 

Hispanic citizens don't like illegal immigration anymore than most blue collar workers do. They are either citizens stretching back to the 19th century, or they came here legally, so they don't have any special affinity for people who may have crossed the border. However, the ICE raids are everything liberals said would happen, but really didn't happen from 2017-2021. 

As Krugman notes, Trump has unleashed all the latent nastiness in our culture. I do think a lot of working class men were tired of "You can't say that" type of scolding, which is why they shifted to Trump. However, that does not mean that they want to be racially profiled. Even the White guys don't want their buddy from the job site to be rounded up by masked goons. The whole point of "You can't say that" was prevent the sort of demonization and dehumanization that leads to things like we are seeing on the streets of our cities. Yeah, it's annoying, but it wasn't pointless.

Trump has ripped the scales from the eyes of a lot of Hispanic voters, and that could mean the final flipping of Texas and Florida in the 2026 Senate races. Personally, I am dubious that Jasmine Crockett can flip the votes of suburban and exurban Texans who might otherwise be sick of the cruelty of Trumpistan or the economic malpractice from Liberation Day. I really do think that the blander, whiter candidate is a better fit for Texas. James Talarico is the sort of guy who can articulate liberal ideas in ways that resonate with swing voters, whereas Crockett tends to play to the base. 

In Florida, though, I really think that the best candidate is a Hispanic man. I really do believe that Hispanic male voters are more steeped in a sort of machismo political culture. It's not destiny, Mexico has a female president, but when it comes to candidate quality in Red or Purple-Red states, it feels like a "First, do no harm" strategy.

Party loyalists want to "fire up the base" but in 2026 - if it is indeed a Blue Wave - the base will be there. "Fire up the base" was necessary back when Democrats relied on low propensity voters. The Democratic base IS fired up. The key to winning Florida and Texas (and Ohio and Kansas and so on) is finding the candidate that soothes the fears of those who don't usually vote for a Democrat. John Tester of Joe Manchin would be a terrible Democratic candidate in Massachusetts, but they sure were good in Montana and West Virginia.

Where I routinely disagree with Yglesias is whether a candidates positions on the issues really matters. I do think that "vibes" matter and a candidate's gender or skin color or where they're from does matter. Politics are intensely visual when you are dealing with non-ideological voters. 

After Trump's bizarre, Adderall fueled rant last night, there is more and more evidence that the wheels are coming off. Authoritarians can't course correct, because they can't admit that they were wrong. That's why I think a Blue Wave feels extremely likely. If we tip all the way into a recession, it's a lock. However winning the Senate is critical, because that would allow Democrats to stop Trump from packing the Courts, the Cabinet and the Federal Reserve with his incompetent cronies.

The Left won't like it, but it's best to remember "First, do no harm."

UPDATE: Another take on Texas.

Wagging That Dog

 Trump is going to address the nation tonight. Sometimes he hypes these event and then it's a huge nothingburger, but there is at least some evidence that involves our escalation against Venezuela. Why are we apparently on the verge of going to war with Venezuela? Maduro is objectively awful, but that's not a casus belli. The drug issue is bullshit, and also it's not a casus belli. 

One possible explanation include the fact that Trump has ceded basically all of his policy making to the various creatures in his orbit - think Miller and deportations - and Marco Rubio really wants to do some regime change in Venezuela. For Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba, Maduro is just another Latin American Marxist that needs to be deposed. The question then is: why not Cuba itself? I mean, if you're going to start (another) illegal war, why not strike at the motherlode?

Another possible explanation is that Hegseth just has his war hard-on so bad that he wants any excuse to "increase lethality" and look like a tough guy in the mirror. The combination of Maduro's leftist politics, the presence of at least some drugs and the general waddling deeper into belligerent waters puts Hegseth's curdled idea of toughness and Rubio's neo-con arrogance into common cause.

The final reason is simply the old "Wag the Dog" scenario from an old movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro about starting a war to deflect the press' attention from scandal. 

Friday is the deadline for releasing the Epstein Files.

If that wasn't enough, we have a weakening economy, the Susie Wiles disaster and the general collapse in Trump's aura of invincibility. His rancid tweet after the Reiner murders has enraged all but his most loyal sycophants. He appears increasingly old, addled and unhinged. Perhaps the thinking is that they need to escalate this crisis that they made to pressure Maduro to abdicate into a full blown war simply to change the subject from Trump's eroding power.

Or maybe he goes on TV tonight to tell us how great his new ballroom is and how Americans should stop complaining about his economic performance.

UPDATE: Apparently he's going to be boasting about what a great job he's doing, two weeks before millions lose their health insurance. I do hope he continues to try and square the circle of "The economy is great, but it's all Joe Biden's fault."

After Trump

 Yglesias does one of those fucking things that he does, where he looks at Trumpist politics as somehow being normal. Trump is sui generis. He is a creature of tabloids and reality TV that exists in direct defiance of the actual way politics as supposed to work. He lies with every breath that he takes, and we are supposed to take his utterances on policy as somehow relevant? 

Compare that analysis with Elliott Morris, who noted back in the spring that opposing Trump's immigration brutality WAS good politics, even as Yglesias said you shouldn't "raise the salience of an issue that benefits Trump." First, many missed at the time that Trump's "immigration" polling was soft, even if his "border security" numbers were and remain strong. 

All of this goes back to Josh Marshall's dictum that "all power is unitary." Opposing Trump EVERYWHERE, degrades his power EVERYWHERE. Yes, you risk losing message discipline, but we've already reached a breaking point with the public. As Ray Kroc said, "When your opponent is drowning, stick a hose in his mouth." 

Trump is cruel, depraved. In fact, his egregious tweet about Rob and Michelle Reiner is SO over the top, that even his usual defenders are walking away from it and calling him out. That was a common refrain from people like my cousin during his first term: "I like him, I just wish he wouldn't tweet so much." They don't want to be exposed to the actual cruelty. My cousin isn't evil, she just wants to believe in the strong man sent by Jesus to make the world safe and cozy for her. When he vomits forth his hateful bile, she knits her brow and wishes he could be more disciplined.

But it's the lack of discipline that is ultimately the point. Trump violates every norm we have. He has a scandal a week that would have sunk any of his predecessors. 

That, however, is the point; that is his strength. 

Trump is the disrupter. The bully on your side. JD Vance can't pull that off. Ron DeSantis failed at it. They both may be sociopaths or at least cyphers with no core convictions, but they aren't as viscerally stupid and evil as Trump, and that means that their cruelty arises from calculation, not impulse and fails to thrill the herd.

Disgusting Is The Only Word For It

 Trump vomited forth something unusually vile, even for him, in the wake of Rob and Michelle Reiner's murder. Seth Abramson makes an important point. Yes, everyone is right to see this as the fundamental brokenness within Trump's shriveled soul. When Trump heard that Reiner - a prominent critic of his - was killed, he assumed one of his supporters had done it, and then he basically blamed Reiner for it. If Reiner hadn't have been a Trump critic, he wouldn't have been killed, so basically it's his fault for not loving Trump enough.

Of course, it appears as if their disturbed son killed them, and Trump is - again - wrong. However, Trump knows in his bloated guts that his supporters are ready to commit violence on his behalf and he's willing to exonerate them. It's the same logic that has him pardoning crook after crook. As a crook himself, he wants to make sure everyone knows that being crooked is OK.

It is very sad that we have to share our brief time in the planet with this shitstain of a human being constantly dropping his pants and waving his withered hatred around. It's concerning, though, how quickly he excuses violence that he thinks we committed on his behalf.

Monopoly Money

 There are two ways to look at the proposed merger of Netflix and Warner merger. One is to look at purely as a business exercise of the relative merits of media consolidation, as Yglesias does. When you do that, it becomes purely an issue of market share and relative competition. Interestingly, it the the economist Paul Krugman who looks at the political angle, which is the increased consolidation of news sources under the control of tech broligarchs. 

There is, I suppose, some utility in allowing Netflix to take over Warner and HBO, in that you are reducing the number of streaming services that you can reasonably sign up for. This landscape is changing so fast, that I can't keep track. We moved to YouTubeTV which also gives us access to HBOMax, but I think we might also have a separate account with HBOMax. Then there is however many accounts we have with Disney/Hulu/ESPN...it's a mess.

The problem is that Warner owns CNN. Now, CNN ain't what it used to be and it used be pretty flawed. It's greatest utility is for breaking news, yet most breaking news is wrong. We are seeing this in real time with the fluid situation with both the Brown shooting and the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner. CNN isn't expanding our understanding of the news, merely the access to it. 

If a broligarch gets his hands on that, it's objectively bad for the country. In fact, as Krugman notes, we can look at Jeff Bezos' takeover of the Washington Post as a model for all that can go wrong here. Bezos came in as a White Knight to save the ailing paper and restore it as a voice of independent reporting. Trump comes along, puts the squeeze on him and he folds like a lawn chair. Really, in terms of true reporting, the only real independent outlets among papers are the New York Times and, seemingly, the Wall Street Journal (yes, their editorial page is terrible). 

We have seen the impact of letting broligarchs take over the media, too, with the CBS disaster. What was once the premier news network - Murrow, Cronkite, 60 Minutes - is now hosting a second rate right wing podcast of Bari Weiss tongue-bathing Erika Kirk.

Jefferson once said he would prefer a country with newspaper but no government to a country with government but no newspapers. Jefferson could be a bit of an idiot. Still, a free press is essential to a free government, and the media consolidation under the control of tech lords is as big a long term problem for liberal democracy as the lawless Supreme Court.

Thanks, SCOTUS

 The Kavanaugh Stops - Brown skin is probable cause - are having exactly the sort of effect that one would imagine. Bovino is one of the full on fascists that Trump has empowered through Stephen Miller. I wish I was sanguine that these blatantly unconstitutional efforts would actually move voters, but maybe it will only be when so many Brown people stop coming work that the country slides further into recession that people will realize that terrorizing people is economically counterproductive. Enough people clearly do not care about the human suffering involved.

Speaking of Brown people, glad to see that there are no negative consequences to letting any asshole own weapons of war.

No War But The Culture War

 Krugman has a long conversation with Adam Tooze about the challenges and strengths that Europe has, especially relative to the United States. One thing that struck me - there's a LOT there - is the idea of the NSS that basically divides the world into Great Power spheres of influence. That's how I read it, with Trumpist nostalgia for the 19th century reducing the world to this old idea of regional hegemons: the US in the Americas, Russia in Europe and China in Asia.

What was striking to many was the racist and antagonistic language that the NSS used to describe Europe. Tooze points out that this is really just an extension of MAGA's culture war ethos. We know how moony-eyed Trumpists get when talking about Hungary and Orban; that sort of competitive authoritarianism is their goal for America. Orban also fits into that Culture Warrior model, as much of his appeal is his anti-immigrant - really anti-Islamic - focus in European politics.

For the MAGAts, Europe is just Woke America with funny accents. I would argue that this is part of the overall lack of curiosity about the world that typifies a certain type of arrogant ignorance. What's fascinating about the Europe v US debate is how both sides of the Atlantic have such different priorities, yet they are fundamentally wealthy and successful societies. If you're from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia or Latin America, you would want to live in the US or Europe, but if you're from the US or Europe, you'd probably only want to live in either of those places. This isn't to say either place doesn't face significant problems, rather that they are very much First World Problems.

To denigrate Europe - as the MAGAts do - is exactly the same as denigrating New York, Chicago or San Francisco. The same as hating Berkeley, Cambridge or Austin. 

Mark Twain said "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." MAGA is service to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness. 

Banana Pants Crazy

 I would like to believe that if every American had to spend 15 minutes a day reading a random transcript of Trump's remarks, we have the 25th Amendment invoked before Christmas. Richardson talks about Trump's Affordability Tour stop in the Poconos. and she includes both excerpts from his remarks and one of his Truth Social screeds.

It is worth remembering that an ailing Joe Biden had a terrible debate performance and dropped out of the race, because it was manifestly clear that he could sustain running for office. Any given Trump performance is about that level of "bad" but we know he will serve out his term, barring the actuarial table asserting itself. There are signs that some Republicans are beginning to separate themselves from him, but most will not, in fact, cannot. The saga of Indiana's Republican state senators getting death threats because they are behaving like actual conservatives and not authoritarian drones is a good example of where this is headed.

As I've mentioned before, the primary virtue of democracy is its ability to self-correct. The elections that we have seen are an example of that, and I imagine the midterms will follow suit. However, the real immediate danger that Trump poses is that his authoritarian grip on the GOP does not allow his own party to self-correct. For every Rand Paul striking out on his own, there are a dozen more like Lindsay Graham warping himself into some craven creature sniveling and whimpering at Trump's feet like an abused dog.

Trump has always been a stupid person, but that is now amplified by his age related decline and the constant river of sycophancy that rushes through the Oval Office. He's crazy stupid and things are going to get worse before they get better.

The Vilest People

 The Times ran a story that they are uniquely able to cover: the Tates. Andrew and Tristan Tate are (accused) rapists and human traffickers and pretty much proud misogynists. The story lays out how various figures in the Trump orbit - including Barron Trump - have defended and helped these two awful human beings escape justice. 

I remember in my 20s not really understanding the world and why it wasn't my oyster. I remember being lonely and depressed because I was lonely (by lonely, I mean romantically; I had good friends). I'm glad that the sort of online shit wasn't around, though I doubt I would have fallen into it. The Tates and those like them are about taking that wounded grievance that young men very often feel and turning into a poisonous broth of violence, dehumanization and sexual depravity. 

The fact that the Trumpist Legions supported them is entirely unsurprising. The raft of pardons for terrible people are indicative of the low morality of those cretins. Still, it would be nice to return to a world where being an immoral shitbird was disqualifying from holding an office of public trust.

Accommodations

 Nowhere is Yglesias' manifest "confident ignorance" more apparent than when he writes about education. In the piece above, he does make some decent points, but he begins by misunderstanding the issue with accommodations. I have seen people who had a diagnosed learning issue who probably don't really have a substantial need for that accommodation, and I have seen students who absolutely need that accommodation to do credible work. The primary accommodations typically revolve around either time, testing environment or being able to use a computer to write an essay. Some students never really use a timed accommodation, whereas others simply can't function without it.

The issue is not that universities are destroying their standards, but that we have a class system where wealthier parents can afford to get their kids tested and accommodations installed. Yglesias does touch on this when he notes the consumer-mentality that schools have to engage in. We do, at times. We jettisoned our AP program, because it "looked bad" in comparison to other "elite" schools. Pedagogically, either having APs or not really isn't a massive difference in rigor, depending on how you replace the AP, but it was a marketing issue.

Similarly, with various accommodations, we are unlikely to deny a student's parents push for some form of accommodation. We have stopped giving 100% extra time, but the reality is that parents will argue - correctly - that we have an obligation to accommodate real learning issues. Are they overprescribed? Sure. Are they inherently bogus? Nope. Dyslexia has largely disappeared as a diagnosis, and been replaced by generic ADHD diagnoses, but dyslexia pretty much does exist. The accommodation of letting someone type their essay and utilize Grammarly allows them to accurately convey what they know that would be hard without being able to type. Woodrow Wilson was dyslexic and the typewriter saved his life. He obviously went on to a Phd, president of Princeton and then the United States. I'd say that accommodating his LD issue was worth it.

There are obvious issues with college education. Whining about accommodations is missing the point.

The Senate

 Winning the Senate is harder for Democrats than winning the House, despite Republican efforts to gerrymander House districts. The reason has to do with Democratic strength in urban and suburban areas not mattering in places like Nebraska. Dems can win Omaha, but not the state at large.

Yglesias catches on to the idea that this electoral environment puts the Senate in play for Democrats, despite it being an unfavorable map. The map is always unfavorable, frankly, but it's especially tough this year. Most of the races are in the South or the western bank of the Mississippi. 

The recent lessons from special elections is that people are not at all happy with Republican rule. Whether that translates into votes for a Senate candidate in Kansas or not is arguable, but I'd look at Tennessee 7th last week as offering two lessons.

The first, obviously, is compete everywhere. Recruit good candidates and put effort into every single race. This is especially true in the Senate, where terms last 6 years. Winning during a Blue Tsunami means that seat is yours for six years.

Secondly, make sure the candidate matches the district. Aftyn Behn was not really a great match for that district. Would a more moderate, safer candidate have won? Impossible to say, but it likely would have been closer.

Which brings me to Texas. The promise of flipping Texas has been out there for over a decade. The last time we came close was in 2018 during Trump's first midterm shellacking. Otherwise, it's like Florida: tantalizing but perpetually just out of reach. Still, we are seeing real cratering in support for Republicans among Hispanic groups. Yesterday, Democrats flipping the mayor's office in Miami for the first time in 30 years, because Cubans and other Hispanics are pissed.

Now, maybe that's good enough to flip Texas with any Democrat, but Jasmine Crockett seems like a candidate to rile up Democrats and alienate exactly the sort of middle of the road, low information, small-c conservative voters that you are going to need to win in Texas.

Yes, because she's a Black Woman. Sorry. It's not something you're supposed to say out loud, but Crockett's strength as a back-bench, mediagenic brawler makes for great news clips, but isn't going to flip the Houston and Dallas suburbs. What's more, most voters make decisions on pretty dumb metrics.

In her piece, Richardson talks about the Morris piece I wrote on yesterday. She goes further and looks at how Roger Ailes manipulated that irrational tendency of voters to respond to negative imagery. Democrats keep thinking that they can win with bold policy papers, when people really just react to things like how a candidate looks or talks. What makes Crockett so appealing to Democratic voters is how she taps into the outrageous racism, sexism, corruption and stupidity of the Trump Administration.

The problem is that the majority of voters in Texas are Republican voters - at least in the immediate past. Does she give them permission to swap allegiances? I just doubt it. 

I want to be clear, I'm not endorsing the racism and sexism that exist deep in the brains of American voters. I would note that Harris lost Biden voters who were Black, because it's buried THAT deep.

Leftists will argue that we need candidates like Crockett or Platner that excite the base. I think Trump has done all the partisan motivating we need. The 2026 election will be a persuasion election because we will be competing in R+10 districts and states.

I'd rather elect a White Guy Democrats who will vote for things that help minorities than nominate a candidate that represents those minority groups and loses.

No Wars But The Culture War

 Elliott Morris (behind a paywall) talks about a new academic paper that looks at how cable news broke out brains and made us - particularly on the Right - obsessive culture warriors. The interesting link is that we all know how social media algorithms prey on our outrage. Stories that anger you engage you more than stories that inform you. It is not at all surprising to me, because I grew of age in the era of Rush Limbaugh and the emergence of Fox News.

There were no algorithms back then feeding us outrage inducing clickbait. There were just radio and TV ratings that showed what played and what didn't. Limbaugh's culture war got listeners; NPR did not. 

Cable news, as such, really begins with Ted Turner's - at the time - fantastical idea that we somehow needed 24 hour access to the news. Before that, we waited for the 6 or 11 o'clock news and then waited again for the morning paper. ESPN was crazy, because you could find out if your team won without waiting for the morning sports page. 

Early CNN coverage was pretty dry. It felt a lot like the BBC World Service does today. The pivot was during the 1991 Gulf War, with Bernard Shaw and Wolf Blitzer describing the bombs falling on Baghdad from their hotel window. The sensational always sells better than information. Over time, dramatic stories were not only prioritized, but sought out. One staple of cable news is Missing White Girl, because it stokes a certain amount of interest and outrage in a population that devours true crime stories. 

Culture war issues are natural hot button topics. Arguments about trans girls in sports are engaging people in ways that are disproportionate to their actual impact on society. What I find interesting and disturbing is not just the prevalence of these stories, but the way they short circuit whatever reason and logic people possess. I've written before about how the Madisonian theory of government is dependent on people being rational about their interests - at least in theory. 

We have abandoned reason for outrage, and I'd like to blame it on Rupert Murdoch, but I fear it's simply how we are wired and how we are being catered to, not how we are being led astray. 

Killing The Atlantic Charter

 Donald Trump and his myrmidons are attacking the fundamental American foreign policy since 1941: the Atlantic Charter. The Charter was an expression of British and American goals for World War II, agreed upon even before the US had formally entered the war. It proposed liberal institutions like the UN and free trade impulses that would become Bretton Woods. It eschewed imperialism and right of conquest and supported freedom of the seas.

Trump wants to make America Hungary, and Hungary's politics is based on racial resentment of immigrants that underpins Orban's authoritarianism. The new national security document is basically a nakedly white supremacist document with all sorts of assertions of the Great Replacement Theory. The attacks on Europe are simply the echoes of Orban's own arguments, and we know Orban is a perverse figure of admiration on the American Right.

There is also, of course, the support for Putin and the criticism of Ukraine for...defending itself from invasion. Trump wants to retreat into a regional hegemony where we can murder Venezuelans with impunity while winking and nodding at Putin doing the same to Ukrainians, Netanyahu doing the same to Palestinians and Xi doing the same to Uyghurs. It is nakedly authoritarian, yes, but it's also deeply, deeply reactionary and opposed to the entire Pax Americana that has brought stability to the world.

Few Americans vote foreign policy. Trump's mishandling of the economy is going to weigh him down more than his killing Venezuelans or even kowtowing to Moscow. However, as Marshall notes, we can likely repair a lot of Trump's damage domestically, beginning in the midterm elections. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, and we have survived worse than Trump's corruption and malevolent incompetence. However, the destruction of the world created by the Atlantic Charter and the postwar liberal institutions might not be so easy to repair. Ideally, Europe learns to support itself without leaning on us, and then when (we hope) non-fascistic leadership returns to the White House, the Atlantic relationship will be one of equals.

It's also worth remembering Marshall's dictum that "all power is unitary." Trump's dismal approval ratings on the economy will - I think - get worse as the economy contracts. Small business are shedding employees, and that's a canary in the coal mine. As Trump fulminates against the Fake News of growing stagflation, his approval will fall further. He might even crack his previous floor. If so, that will actually make his pro-Putin, pro-Orban foreign policy less popular, especially among people who don't really follow the news much. (Hell, I teach International Relations and my students don't even follow the news.)

It's not too late. It almost never is. I'm sure it felt "too late" when Hitler invaded Poland and France and Britain could no longer avoid war. I'm sure it felt "too late" when Paris fell or Pearl Harbor burned. 

Still, this is...bad.

The Other Information Economy

 The superpower of Trumpism is the shameless lying. The weakness that they use is the press's inability to ask a meaningful follow-up question. For Trump, you'd have to have someone in your ear saying something like, "Mister President, you just said that 46% of Somalia-Americans are child rapists, when in fact there were only three Somali-Americans arrested for statutory rape over the past four years."

When it comes to the Clown Caucus, the big dodge is "I haven't seen/heard that" when asked about the latest Trump outrage. Mike Johnson apparently lives in a hermetically sealed chamber 23 hours a day, only venturing forth to say how hard he's been working and that he can't possibly be expected to know what the President of the United States and leader of his party has said or done.

If you have some bobble throated slapdick like Tom Cotton on your show, and you ask him about killing people without due process, and he says he knows nothing about that, then show him the clips of Hegseth bragging about it. 

The utility of bothsides never was good journalism, and I understand that it can inoculate you against some of the more vengeful actions from Trump's DOJ and Commerce department, but there's no reason to allow lies and evasions to keep happening.

"Affordability"

 A few months ago, the Democratic buzzword was "abundance," based on the book of the same name. Mamdani and other's victory this fall has shifted the lexicon to "affordability." Krugman has been doing a primer on Affordability as a concept, and he has another entry today (paywalled). He's noted that in general ways, wages have kept pace with prices, and so while people feel that price inflation was "done to them", wage inflation was something they earned. Still, wages and prices have generally jumped together. 

So why are people unhappy?

He mentions Adam Smith, and Smith's idea that prosperity if fundamentally cultural rather than absolute. The passage he quotes notes that in some places, it's OK for the poorer classes to be barefoot, but in other places, everyone who doesn't have shoes is considered desperately poor. In 21st century America, Krugman argues, homes are the equivalent of Smith's shoes. Even if the price of groceries has been matched by wage increases, it doesn't FEEL that way, and because everything is expensive, a home purchase feels like a fantasy.

His conclusion is most important, though. It's not just that people feel like housing is too expensive; it's who they blame for it. Generally, they blame the rich and powerful. In a Politico poll, Krugman relates the following:

(T)the poll asked respondents who found health care difficult to afford who they considered most responsible (they were allowed to choose more than one.) Some 48 percent named the Trump administration — clearly bad news for the G.O.P. But almost as many, 45 percent, named insurance companies — there’s a reason there’s so much sympathy for Luigi Mangione, who murdered the CEO of United Healthcare. Another 19 percent named “billionaires,” while 15 percent named “businesses.”

On high housing costs, 42 percent named the Trump administration, but 34 percent named landlords, 19 percent billionaires and 17 percent businesses.

That's bad news not only specifically for Trump, but more generally for Republicans, because Republicans are typically considered more friendly to the wealthy. The great political triumph of Trump was somehow convincing people who hate billionaires that he was their champion. His destruction of the East Wing, his current argument that affordability issues are a "hoax" and the coming surge in ACA costs...none of these are going to make him more popular, especially with certain segments of his voting base. As Elliott Morris notes, maybe a third of Trump voters are not committed, lifelong Republicans. They are perhaps younger, less politically informed and likely more fluid in their loyalty.

This CNN story looks at how we are in one of our eras of wild swings in who controls government. From 1930-1994, Democrats held the House for all but about 4 years. They held the Senate, too, for much of that period. That's no longer the case, as control of Congress swings wildly back and forth. There have been numerous - and wrong - predictions about "emerging, permanent majorities." 

However...if Trump continues to screw up as badly as he has screwed up so far...if we enter the Crypto/AI recession...if he continues to prioritize his ego over voters concerns...maybe this time, we will actually get a realigning election.

Today In White Supremacy

 The 2025 National Security Strategy document came out and...boy howdy. It's a fevered wet dream is racism and imperialism. It's one of the many instances during Trump 2.0, when it feels like a policy decision was made with the sole purpose of pissing people off. As Richardson notes, it's full of the sort of racial and ethnic panic that Stephen Miller has put at the center of American government. It abandons NATO in fundamental ways. It suggests that we will be doing some incredibly unsavory things in Latin America, that the Venezuela Boat Murders are only hinting at.

Not racist enough for you? The National Parks are - and amazingly this is true - no longer offering free admission on MLK Day and Juneteenth. Instead, Trump's birthday will be a fee holiday in the park system. This really combines the two of the three themes of Trumpistan: Trump's narcissism and Trump's racism. (Trump's corruption is the third.) Let's denigrate Martin Fucking Luther King and elevate Trump. I guess MLK's Nobel Peace Prize isn't as good as Trump's FIFA Peace Prize.

It is difficult frankly to completely catalog how awful the petty stuff is. The Park stuff is just lame. The NSS document is way more concerning, and I wonder how much that stuff is coordinated. Do they pair idiotic nonsense like the Park stuff with the NSS in order to hide the manifest evil in the former?

Anyway, if Congress was alive right now, they might have been angry at this. The reality is that no one votes on the issue of defending NATO, but they do vote the economy. When the economy is bad, they tend to turn on the foreign policy stuff ex post. Power is unitary and so on.

Let's hope the stirring of Congress will arrest this abject surrender to Putin.

Not Actually Surprising

 The man arrested in the January 6th pipe bombing case is both an anarchist and a Trump supporter. He sounds a bit...deranged, but then again, he's a Trump supporter and an anarchist. 

The idea that someone who loves Trump might also have anarchistic impulses is a reminder that Trump himself is an arsonist to our institutions. For millions of Trump supporters, the destruction is the point.

More On That Oncoming Train

 Two more commentators have looked at Trump's cratering support. Krugman looks a bit more deeply at the coming crisis in ACA. For me personally (even though I made up my mind about Trump in the 1980s) I am now probably looking to postpone retirement until I can go on Medicare, and that sucks for me. And it's absolutely HIS and the GOP's fault. 

It also strikes me that a certain segment of Trump voter will be really slammed by this. That small town entrepreneur who generally supports Republicans because "business" is going to find it impossible to insure themselves. It will also slam people like me - the moderately well off who want to retire a few years before 65. That's a generally "conservative" demographic, though as Paul Campos notes, opposition to Trump should rightly be considered "conservative."

Elliott Morris looks at the numbers and see where Trump could easily lose another 3 points of popularity/job approval. Morris notes that Trump is being shored up by Republicans who don't think he's doing a good job on the economy. Think about that. They don't like his performance on the single most important issue that people vote on. In one sample, if you're a Republican who thinks he's done a bang up job on the economy, you give him a 94% approval rating. Delusional, but it still makes sense. If you don't think he's "achieved his goals on the economy", approval falls to 64%. If economic anger grows, that number goes down. What's more - though Morris doesn't address this - if Trump becomes more and more toxic, then people will simply stop identifying as Republicans. Or if they can't switch parties, they will simply drop out of the electorate.

The High Cost of Incompetency

 The only important attribute in Trumpistan is loyalty - absolute, blind loyalty - to Hair Furor. This means that you get an administration full of incompetent bozos like RFK, Jr.,  Pete Hague-seth, or Kash Patel. As Paul Krugman notes, the assumption that Trump will name simpering moron Kevin Hassett to head the Federal Reserve is pretty awful.

We are already seeing some impacts of this massive concentration of morons in things like new outbreaks of measles, the constant roiling scandals around military strikes in Yemen and the Caribbean and investigations compromised by the need to get "content" onto social media. If Hassett becomes Fed Chair, Dog only knows what impact that will have on the global economy. 

Back during the shutdown, my wife and I differed one whether Democrats should re-open the government, given how many people were getting hurt. I've come around the idea that it was probably best that the did end the shutdown, as they had probably wrung as much benefit as they could from the situation.

However, we are going to have to learn to live with a country where people get hurt, as long as Trump empowers the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet to run complicated public services. It's going to get worse. At best, we get the Habba/Hannigan legal fuck ups that actually make things better. Or maybe it's the impending collapse of Trump's stupid tariffs. 

Millions of people are about to lose their health insurance. Trump and Republicans did that. I wish it weren't happening, but it is. The fact that it is terrible has to be the point. Kludges and patches that push this beyond next November are politically counterproductive, even if they are the humane thing to do.

The American people keep voting for the reality TV star who's congenitally stupid and cruel and also slipping quickly into senescence. The lesson has to be driven home that there is a cost to this.

UPDATE: Martin Longman reminds us of another matrix of incompetence: The GOP war on Obamacare is about to start claiming victims. As people lose their health insurance - and even those of us who still have it may more for it - at precisely the same moment all other sorts of expenses increase (Affordability!) they are going to focus their anger on the GOP. 

That's why looking at the special elections which are around a +11 Democratic shift is premature. It's just as likely to get worse before next November.

Close, But No Cigar

 Yesterday, the special election in Tennessee's 7th District was intended as a bellwether for the coming midterms. Democrats ran an unapologetic progressive in an R+22 district and lost by 9 points. The usual circular firing squads were out on Twitter arguing about whether a candidate more suited to a deep red district might have won. I doubt it, and Republicans did come home when they nationalized the election in the last few weeks. It was unlikely that anything about Behn herself that alienated voters, aside from the D next to her name.

Still, the interesting pre-election hubbub was that a single digit GOP victory would set off alarm bells in the GOP caucus and might trigger a wave of retirements. That 9 point margin is juuuuuust at the edge of single digits. Maybe a Generic White Dude gets the margin to 5 points, and you get a bigger freakout, but this was never a realistic shot. It was a chance to see how competitive Democrats had become, and the answer is: pretty darned competitive.

Basically, elections have swing 11-17 points towards Democrats since Trump took office. At the link, Morris argues that a national ballot of D+6 gives the House to Democrats next year with about 235 votes. If it's a D+8 election, then they could very easily win the Maine, North Carolina and Ohio Senate seats and be competitive in Texas and Iowa. In the Senate, I do think candidate quality matters, and someone like Jasmine Crockett is a poor choice for Democrats in Texas, because she's a Black Woman and that's just not going to be appealing to swing voters. You don't have to like that to acknowledge that this is true.

What I would add is that the environment is pretty much locked in at D+8, maybe D+12. It's almost a full year until the midterm election and it's pretty unlikely that Trump will become more popular. If - as I suspect - we are teetering on the edge of a sort of stagflationary slump, then that number gets worse for Republicans. 

If it really becomes a D+10 election next fall the following Senate seats could be in play based on Partisan Voting Index: South Carolina, Alaska, Nebraska, Montana, Florida and Kansas. 

The key thing to keep an eye on is Republican retirements. Watch and see if the rats flee the sinking ship.

Hague-seth

 There is a growing feeling that maybe Pete Hegseth may have finally gone too far. He's on record as basically endorsing war crimes and trying to meme his way to immunity. He's a fucking idiot who stands out for his idiocy in an administration full of idiots. 

Not only is he facing Congressional anger - bipartisan Congressional anger - but he and the White House may have also blinked. Both Hegseth and sentient butthole Karoline Leavitt have started to shift the blame for the strikes on Admiral Mitch Bradley. If Bradley is as competent as most admirals and generals - and that is miles more competent than the average Trump official - then he has notes. Copious notes. 

The basic ethos of Trump 2.0 is A) commit crimes B) commit those crimes in the open C) know that the DOJ won't investigate D) if someone does, Trump has demonstrated that he will pardon you. For whatever reason, Hegseth is now worried about not getting a pardon or perhaps being sacrificed to the President's critics, similar to the way Donald Rumsfeld was sacrificed after the 2006 midterms. 

Trump is a mentally unfit old man who doesn't know what's going on beyond what he sees on Fox News. I doubt that he even knows who Juan Orlando Hernandez is, yet he signed the pardon thrust in front of him.  If Susie Wiles tells him to jettison Hegseth, he just might do it. There is the counterargument that Trump cannot show weakness, but he might need to placate his own party by getting rid of this blithering idiot at Defense.

My guess is that  it could depend on the results of the special election in Tennessee's 7th CD today. It's a solid, deep red district, but the Democrat is running surprisingly strongly. (I would wager the Republican ekes out a win.)If she wins...Hegseth's firing would be the step a normal administration. But a normal administration would have fired him after SignalGate. 

Converging Narrative

 I read Richardson, Krugman and Yglesias every morning. One reason is that they often offer very different viewpoints or stories. Yglesias, in particular, writes about some weird shit. 

Today, there was a rare instance of them all converging on one big narrative: the corruption of the Trump administration and its impact on international affairs.

For Yglesias, he wrote about the "bizarre march to war with Venezuela"  which is only bizarre if you ascribe normal policy making or political instincts to Trump. He describes it as "intra-coalitional management" of both Latin American and immigration hawks, but he also notes how corrupt Trump has been in dealing with all issues surrounding foreign policy.

Krugman takes this a step further by linking Trump's avid support for crypto to his criminality. What's more, the seemingly contradictory actions of killing Venezuelans and pardoning Juan Orlando Hernandez and other drug figures. How can you justify war crimes against drug traffickers while simultaneously pardoning the kingpins? Because you are corrupt. The intra-coalitional service being done here is between the people like Rubio who want to depose Maduro because they hate Latin American socialism and the whacko libertarian techbros who want more drugs and love Hernandez.

Richardson adds a term that really ties the room together. She summarizes all of the above but then talks about the "Epstein Class" - a group of very wealthy men for whom the rules simply don't apply. 

That's...brilliant. The need for a "Democratic Populism" that doesn't abandon minorities or retreat to naive protectionism makes sense electorally, but it's been hard to come up with a frame that works for that. "The Epstein Class" works brilliantly to remind people of how much they hate those rich fuckers who skate through life without consequences. Especially as AI grows increasingly unpopular because of energy bills and the potential for job losses, saddling Republicans with defending the predatory billionaire class could be exactly what Democrats need to not only win next fall - I think that's close to a lead pipe cinch at this point - but win decisively.

Trump is the leading figure of the Epstein Class.