Margins

 The House of Representatives has a new member. New Jersey 11th had lost their member when Mikie Sherrill was elected governor. Unsurprisingly, the district not only remained Democratic, but shifted a bit more towards the Democrats. This was a Harris 53-45 and Sherrill 57-42 district that went for Analila Mejia 60-40.

This means the current House now stands at 217 Republicans, 214 Democrats and 1 former Republican now describing himself as an Independent, but caucusing with Republicans. There are three vacancies. Republican Doug LaMalfa died in January; his seat is overwhelmingly Republican - he won with close to 66% of the vote. Eric Swallwell and Tony Gonzalez both resigned over sexual assault allegations, which is an even partisan split. 

There was a vote in the House on a war resolution to continue to support the Iran War. It passed by one vote, with Jared Golden - the most conservative Dem House member and one who is retiring - and Thomas Massie crossing the aisle. That means that several Republicans basically abstained from voting. These tight margins are important, but insufficient. 

Trump's losing it. This has to be apparent to GOP House members. Mike Johnson famously has never heard of this Donald Trump fellow's Twitter feed. He pleads an unbelievable ignorance again and again, but they all know. 

The margins in the House mean that we are now in a situation where two Republicans - I'm looking at Massie and Don Bacon - can redeem American democracy. In the Senate, Thom Tillis has said he will block any appointments, if Trump doesn't back off attacking Jerome Powell. That same sort of vigor needs to appear among a few members of the House GOP. 

The Red Line

 Republicans are apparently aware of how diminished, even insane, Trump is. His callousness, his vulgarity, his wanton cruelty - these are not unknown to the Washington GOP. His senility and the creatures who surround him - the mental midgets who engineered the Iran War, for instance - have likely given them some pause.

Anyway, Trump has shifted his belligerence back to Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve. In some ways, this is just his typical wounded-animal-thrashing-about style. However, for the Senate GOP, this is shaping up to be a huge test of their ability to put country over party. Many of them have made their deals with the devil - think Lindsay Graham - to stay on the Malevolent Orange Slob's good side. Sabotaging the Fed would be catastrophic to the US and global economy. 

Quite of a few of the people I read were bemoaning the collapse in American support for renewable energy. The world will still move ahead with renewables, because they make sense. Globally, we will continue to scale upwards. Once Trump is gone, we can try and catch up. 

If Trump ends the Fed's independence, that's the sort of catastrophe that will reverberate for a decade of decline and ruin. Are there enough sane, rational people left the Senate GOP to stop him?

I've Been Saying...

 Krugman makes the point I've been making for months: focus on the corruption.

Yes, Americans hold a dim view of the morality of their elected officials - the alleged crimes of Swallwell and Gonzalez add to this perception (though it's worth noting that Swallwell went from allegation to suspending his campaign to resigning from Congress in about 72 hours). However, they also really don't like corruption, and corruption IS the point of authoritarianism. It is the lack of accountability to the public that motivates autocrats to retain power. 

Trump is a shitty businessman, but a shrewd manipulator of graft. He didn't want to cede power on January 6th because of his colossal narcissism,  but also because it was easier to make money off being in power. Right now, there are clearly large sums being made around insider trading on prediction "markets" and outright graft through his crypto. If he were to lose power, he would be vulnerable to prosecution.

The results in Hungary are a positive development in the war against international illiberalism. We should keep an eye on how Magyar prosecutes Orban's crimes, too. What we DO know is that corruption played a massive role in motivating the Hungarian people to vote in such numbers that Orban couldn't steal the election.

Similarly, Democrats can leverage people's outrage over things as mundane as the tearing down the East Wing, to as sordid as Epstein, to as lethal as his war in Iran to paint Trump as a corrupt oligarch out to make your tank of gas unaffordable, while coddling his friends in Saudi Arabia. 

Corruption is the rug that really ties the room together, man. 

Good

 Congress finally demonstrated a miniscule amount of moral fiber and engineered the ejection of Eric Swallwell, Democrat of California, and Tony Gonzalez, Republican of Texas. Both men have been accused of fairly horrific sexual crimes. There are two other members - one Democrat and one Republican, both from Florida - who are in similar ethical crosshairs. Yes, the fact that this did not alter the balance in the House mattered. If Cory Mills and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormack were to leave, too, that would represent some semblance of the old order in American politics, whereby people who do unethical shit no longer get to represent the public.

Of all the myriad ways that Trump has warped American politics, one of the worst has been his normalization of simply ignoring these ethical constraints. His blasphemous picture of himself as Jesus healing the sick would be a normal career ending act. For Trump, nothing seems to stick in the same way it has for other politicians. 

Swallwell and Gonzalez leaving Congress is objectively good, because it reintroduces the idea that there are consequences for bad actions. 

Now if we can only apply that to the highest office in the land. 

Insanity

 Donald Trump has decided to wage rhetorical war on the Pope. 

He then posted a picture of himself as Christ. 

This is almost textbook behavior as the Antichrist. I'm sure many of his evangelical followers will swallow this whole, but some are struggling to. Obviously, quite a few Catholics are going to be upset with this. 

The combination of his failed Iran war, skyrocketing prices that simply aren't going to come back down and the failure of Orban to gerrymander his way to authoritarianism has to have him spooked. Like a cornered rat, he's snarling and snapping at everything.

Success

 Viktor Orban has been ousted as Prime Minister of Hungary. 

Orban has been the anti-democratic mole inside the European Union for years. His cultural revanchist populism became a cause celebre in the United States. CPAC moved their meetings there. 

In an absolutely hysterical faceplant, JD Vance - himself a fake populist authoritarian - was sent to shore up support for Orban and negotiate peace with Iran. He has failed utterly at both of his tasks. It would not surprise me if he was sent on these suicide missions largely because he's got the charisma of athlete's foot and the loyalty of a pit viper. 

Peter Magyar (who one wag described as having the name of a Harry Potter character who was visiting from Hungary) is not some left wing hippie. He's a right wing within the context of Europe. 

However, he ran on two fundamental issues: Russia and corruption. The history between Russia and Hungary is...not good! Orban's role as Putin's lapdog within NATO and the EU has been a roadblock to full support for Ukraine's war of survival. Russia worked hard - as did Trump because of course - to bolster Orban, but that likely worked against him. Even with most media outlets on Orban's side, he's going to lose by very large margins.

The small tip of the cap I will give to this awful creature is that - unlike Trump - he has conceded defeat.

For people like Vance and the illiberal cohort of people including Peter Thiel, Rod Dreher and Tucker Carlson, Orban was the model for what they wanted to do for the US. A country where rigging the system allowed them to stay in power regardless of the will of the people. I think we all knew that Fidesz was very unpopular and would lose a fair election, but that they might have so stacked the electoral system and coopted the media that the popular will would not be expressed. And if it was expressed, Orban would not accept it.

There is the famous quote from MLK (a man Orban would have hated): The arch of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. 

I take hope from Hungary, of all places, that democracy will win in the end. That Trump's egregious and manifest incompetence will overwhelm the efforts of Fox News and gerrymandering to maintain his own version of Orban's illiberal vision. 

Failure

 As the Times editorial board nicely summarizes, the current situation in the war against Iran is a strategic defeat. Simon Rosenberg congregates the news from the past day or so. I'll give my version:

- We start a war of choice without adequately considering what Iran could do in response, once faced with a truly existential threat. 
- Trump substituted wishful thinking for actual foresight. When Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz - which everyone with a brain knew they would - he was scrambling to avoid an economic meltdown.
- He tried to bluff his way to victory by threatening genocide - real, actual genocide - that even some supporters found appalling. 
- He climbed down off those genocidal threats with this amorphous "ceasefire" that looked very much like an Iranian victory.
- Faced with backlash from Israel and the Arab Gulf states, Trump had to renegotiate the terms of peace with Iran.
- He sent his two useful idiots, Jared Kushner and Howard Lutnick, and JD Vance, who has been leaking his disapproval of the war. Making Vance own the peace talks is a form of Trumpist ritual humiliation.
- While the peace talks were predictably collapsing, Trump and the Secretary of State were at a fucking UFC match in Miami. 
- Trump has responded by threatening to "blockade" the Strait, but no one knows what that really means or what he intends to accomplish.
- The project of torching our alliances and insulting our fellow democracies - combined with destroying global economic stability - has nations considering abandoning the dollar as a reserve currency. 

It's just an absolute clown show, but a clown show where random members of the audience are killed and tickets are $500,000. 

Did The Word Finally And Conclusively Turn?

 The week began - yes, it was just this week - with Trump's hallucinogenic appearance next to the Easter Bunny on the White House balcony. Mussolini as imagined by Luis Bunuel. This was roughly the same time he threatened one of the oldest civilizations in the world with cultural extinction. The extremity of his statements seems to have appalled so many people, that Richardson suggests that maybe this could be a moment when people finally wash their hands of him. 

Yes, a lot of the MAGA Civil War talk is overblown. Trump retains remarkable control over his base. However, there does seem to be some understanding that Trump's behavior is well and truly unhinged. 

As things stand now, we have suffered a strategic defeat against Iran. The Straits are still closed, and we will have to pay Iran to reopen them in some way. Iran and the world know that the capacity to close the Straits is retained by Tehran. 

Meanwhile, it's really looking like stagflation is our current economic predicament. 

Last year, I asserted that the AI Bubble was the only thing buoying the economy in the era of Trump's economic chaos. That bubble is dependent on cheap energy and computer chips. Both of those are influenced by the closing of the Straits.

If that bubble bursts - and ideally bubbles DO burst sooner rather than later - then the country will have been driven completely into the ditch by Trump's malevolent incompetence. That might...MIGHT...get him below the 27% floor in his approval rating. 

Oh, yeah. Melania decided to declare that she had no idea who Jeffrey Epstein was. As if you thought that was going away.

Hey, just two and a half more years!

Does The Truth Matter?

 The current situation in the Persian Gulf is objectively very bad for the world. It represents a strategic defeat for the United States. Trump and Hegseth and the professional liars in their employ will assert instead a "great victory."  Oil prices will likely continue to fluctuate as global markets have to process the wild ping-ponging movement of oil out of the Gulf and the slow return of that oil to global markets.

The political question of high gas prices is a tricky question. There are likely some benefits to bringing down gas prices, and they don't really respond to actual supply, it seems, but rather the prospect of future supplies. Tankers take weeks to get from the Gulf to refineries then weeks more to get to the pump. Yet the price at the pump seems to change daily dependent on which lies Trump is spouting at any given moment.

The question of whether this ceasefire will actually lead to peace is one that Trump can't spin. If we start shooting again, that's not something he can lie about. If we capitulate, Trump will simply lie and say we won, and if gas prices fall, then the average dipshit voter might very well believe him. If energy prices stay high, and the impact of our defeat over control of the Straits grows in the public consciousness - the way the collapse in Afghanistan did - then Trump's collapse will continue to his floor of 27%. 

If he reaches that, Democrats win the Senate. Perhaps comfortably.

Oh, and Melania decided to bring up Epstein again, so that looms over everything, too. 

The Stall

 Krugman looks at the somewhat contradictory jobs numbers. Basically, job growth is slow but unemployment is low. How can that be? Well, it's because we are throttling off immigration. We are likely at or approaching negative net migration - more people leaving the country than entering.

The developed world is seeing a similar problem of a graying, shrinking demographic. We live longer and have fewer children, so whether it's Japan or Germany or the US, the replacement rate is a struggle to achieve. The US has avoided this problem by growing its population through both legal and illegal immigration. That has kept the workforce expanding. Illegal immigration helps the most, in some ways, because undocumented workers actually pay into Social Security, but they don't withdraw from it.

Trumpists will cover this looming problem up by claiming ridiculous projections for productivity and overall economic growth. Something, something AI. There is - as with all Republican policies - an extraordinary amount of wishcasting. 

What worries me is that we are headed for a reckoning on the national debt. Trump has added something like a quarter of all of America's debt. In this, he is just a bog standard Republican, albeit more so than most. America has been able to carry a huge debt for a number of structural reasons, and Trump is destroying most of them, including international goodwill towards the dollar. If the economy falls into a recession caused by economic instability from his whacko policies, a bursting AI bubble and the energy crisis his war has created, America could go from a stalled job market to a collapsing one. 

Democrats are always having to clean up Republican messes. If we dip into a recession, we might have to do so with a politicized Federal Reserve and a budget situation from hell. Trump will want to give away massive checks with his name on them. Democrats - who in this scenario easily win the House and likely the Senate - will have to put strict conditions on the money, and they are usually averse to participating in the immiseration of Americans.

The Iran War isn't over. The oil is not flowing, and even if it was it would take months to get back to normal. The labor market has stalled. The economy is sustained only by an AI bubble that is dependent on cheap energy, which we no longer have. 

If the crash is going to come, it needs to come soon, so we can take Republicans out of the equation in Congress and begin the slow process of repairing the structural damage of this awful man and his legions. 

Oh, Look

 The Straits are closed. 

Who could have predicted that the terms of the ceasefire were sham to let Trump climb down from his genocidal threats.

Where To From Here?

 Having slept on last night's news, I do think I was right. Trump's rhetorical escalation was the same as all his other verbal confabulations. If you believe he was going to nuke Iran, I presume you also believe that big, strong men with tears in their eyes routinely approach him, or that former presidents have privately praised him for starting this war with Iran.

Trump has zero credibility at this point, and Iran's current situation proves this. They called his bluff, he backed down and now negotiators have to unravel Iran's insane demands. Israel, I would guess, will have no part of Iran's demands to leave their proxies alone. Saudi Arabia won't stand for a toll on the Straits of Hormuz. The civilized world - which may or may not include the US at this point - cannot allow Iran to retain its nuclear program.

So the "ceasefire" allowed him a quick "victory" that was really a retreat. He has not, however, extricated himself from his mess. There's just no way the other regional powers can let this peace plan stand. If Trump relies on his usual cast of clowns - Jared Kushner and Howard Lutnick - to try and negotiate with Iran...yikes.  Kushner is a fully owned and operated subsidiary of the Gulf Emirs at this point, so maybe he will hold a firm line.

This has all been very stupid, very pointless and very destructive. 

TACO Time

 Trump backed down/was never serious. I think that was always the gambit, but he's such a fucking lunatic, you hesitate to make any firm predictions. The "two week ceasefire" feels like face saving bullshit from every party involved. I'm reluctant to believe that this is the end of Trump's Iranian Misadventure. Maybe they just collapse into status quo ante, but who knows? 

The leaking has started about the process that led us here, and Maggie Haberman has the deets here. My hope is that Trump really has soured on the war and that would make Hegseth the fall guy.  Good.

The war - if it is truly over and I think that's a 50-50 proposition - has been a strategic calamity for the US. We might achieve some measure of status quo ante if that looks like 
- The Revolutionary Guard are still firmly in control in Tehran.
- The Straits of Hormuz are open.
- Iran's military capacity has been deeply degraded - aside from its drones.
- Maybe there's some deal with the nuclear program?

None of that represents a "win" for the United States compared to the situation in mid-February.

Iran took a pummeling. Whoop-de-doo. They were not a serious threat to Israel, but they have established just how serious a threat they are to the Gulf States and the global commerce that flows through there. The degradation of their conventional forces doesn't really move the needle of power in the Middle East. They can shut down the Straits. They demonstrated that they CAN and they demonstrated what that means for the global economy.

Here's the true salient fact. Oil prices will remain high for some time. The Gulf will not suddenly be open and prices will fall and we will be back to $2.75 gasoline. The OTHER products from the Gulf are also unlikely to resume shipping quickly, including fertilizer and aluminum. These will be Covid-like supply chain disruptions that will continue to be felt for months. 

The war has made Trump even more unpopular. His unhinged public performances have MAGA-types calling for the 25th Amendment (sorry, not happening). He has absolutely torched his "brand" of "we need to run government like a business." His genocidal rhetoric was simply a performance, and he thankfully lacks the bloodlust to actually follow through. He's a coward, after all.

Now I'm reading that Iranian social media is saying that America has agreed to a complete and total capitulation, including withdrawing its forces from the region, lifting all sanctions and allowing Iran to control the Straits. That would be a complete and total humiliation for the US and its Gulf Allies. 

This is why the two week ceasefire is likely bullshit and Iran and the US will simply regroup, some oil will make it out and we will be at this again soon. This is the same yo-yo nonsense we saw with his trade wars now applied to shooting wars. There is no way that what Iran is proposing can be acceptable to anyone outside of Iran.

The ceasefire was a TACO from his genocidal statements earlier that managed to freak out even his supporters. He was not going to nuke Iran and he had to take the temporary climb-down, but the Iranian terms are absolutely a non-starter.

Anyway, Kamala Harris had a weird laugh, I guess. I kinda liked it. 

The Madman Theory

 During the late stages of Nixon's presidency, they hit upon a negotiating gambit called the Madman Theory. The idea was to convey to the Vietnamese that Nixon had lost his mind and could start nuking North Vietnam in his madness. The idea was to force the North Vietnamese to accept a timetable that would allow the US to leave Vietnam and not have the sort of chaos that we saw, for instance, when we evacuated Kabul. Didn't work, but there was at least a gap.

When you read Richardson or Aaron Rupar's transcription of Trump's inane babblings, it's tempting to see this as a reinvigoration of the Madman Gambit. The problem is, it seems far more likely that he really is fucking bonkers. The insane tableau of Trump mumbling about Iran with the Easter Bunny standing next to him while kids wait to do an Easter egg roll is...I don't think we have the words to describe it. If he's faking it, we can skip his quest for the Nobel Prize and give him an Oscar.

Garrett Graff and Martin Longman concur that nuclear weapons are likely not off the table. That doesn't mean that Trump's current rhetorical escalation should be taken at face value. His threats to end Iranian civilization could mean just further bluster in an attempt to bring them to the table or the crazy son of a bitch could be considering nuclear weapons. I personally doubt it, because he's expressed a certain fear of the awfulness of nuclear weapons, but he really seems deranged and certainly creatures like Pete Hegseth are not going to rein him in.

Is there someone around him who can impress upon him that he will become a Hitler-level monster if he launches nukes at Iran? Would he care? I think - possibly - he might. But this is a guy who wanted to nuke North Korea in 2017 and a hurricane shortly thereafter. 

If only America had a separate branch of government, say a legislature, some sort of Congress, we might be spared this looming tragedy.

UPDATE: He TACO'd. He's claiming that Iran has a workable plan. I'm skeptical until I hear it from Iran.  

I trust Iran to be more truthful than the President of the United States. Also? Two weeks? He just keeps playing the same old hits. 

In The Midst Of All This Awfulness

 I give you the crew of Artemis.

Terrorism or Errorism?

 Krugman calls Trump a terrorist, using the definition of the Department of Homeland Security. He notes that terrorism is a tactic, not a goal, and that terrorists are usually those who cannot achieve their goals via conventional conflict. Trump's threats to blow up bridges and power plants - as threats - make him a terrorist.

Richardson's view is a bit more nuanced. She notes that Trump is just careening about and this is likely just more bluster. He has a habit of making these crazed threats and then backing down. The problem is that Iran has likely clued into this pattern and will not budge. She does, however, note that early in Trump 1.0, he wanted to launch a preemptive nuclear strike on North Korea and was talked out of it by his generals. He also famously wanted to nuke a hurricane at one point. Perhaps...perhaps...he got the message that nuclear weapons are not toys or magic wands, but does anyone think there are the same sort of professional soldiers in the highest ranks of the military to tell him, no?

I don't think Trump will use nuclear weapons in Iran, but I do think it represents an escalation in rhetoric intended to scare Iran to negotiate. I also worry that while Trump does have a tendency to TACO his threats - he bullies and blusters but then backs down - he's clearly deranged in his thinking these days and has fewer constraints from those around him.

The solution to this war will not come from Washington or Tehran or Riyadh. Some other power will need to host talks to get both sides - led by crazed zealots - to climb down. China would seem to be a interesting choice. Xi has seen his primary global rival repeatedly light itself on fire by electing this dumb fucker twice. He has watched Trump blow up 75 years of American global leadership. If he could negotiate an end to this war, it would be more than the US self-immolating, it would be a positive act of Chinese global leadership.

China - unlike, say Russia - requires the global stability that the US used to provide. Their trade depends on open sea lanes and stable contract laws. While I'm sure they are enjoying America's decline under Trump, if they want to avoid being caught in the vortex of that collapse they will need to step up.

It would be hilarious if Xi - a murderous autocrat - were to win Trump's coveted Nobel Peace Prize by finding an ending to Trump's stupid-assed war. 

The President's Easter Message

 Easter, for Christians, is a moment to reflect on the sacrifice of Jesus. According to the Christian faith, Jesus was the literal son of God who willingly let himself suffer execution on the cross - a fate reserved for pretty horrible criminals - in order to redeem the sins of man. 

Trump's Easter message was to threaten war crimes against Iran. Attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime. I suppose he's stopped threatening water desalination plants, but that's likely because his Gulf allies depend on desalination more than Iran does. Josh Marshall feels that right now it is Saudi ruler Mohammad bin Salman who is perpetuating the war. If the US packs up and leaves, they will be left to handle the crisis in the Straits of Hormuz. I suppose even more cynically, high gas prices will help the Gulf states in the long run.

Trump has disappeared from the public eye and has not retreated to his safe space of Mar A Lago for the holiday weekend. He tends to do this around the start of every month. The assumption is that he is getting intravenous treatments, most likely for dementia. This is the source of the blotches on the back of his hand. Certainly, his address a few nights ago suggested a man in poor health.

Trump is facing a narcissistic decompression, as his manifest incompetence and stupidity (and the incompetence and stupidity of those around him) has created a situation that he cannot simply walk away from. 

So, Donald Trump - avatar of the White Christian Nationalist movement - threatens war crimes as his Easter message, further abasing the office of the President and the reputation of the nation that ostensibly he serves.

Chained Inflation

 There is pretty good evidence that inflation is just now getting priced into actual consumer goods. There is a lag between oil and gas prices rising and prices in food and other goods rising to compensate for those increases.

The real worry right now has to be chained inflation. The inflationary spike around Covid was clearly caused by supply chain issues surrounding closed down manufacturing and shipping. Once the Covid restrictions were relaxed, the prices stabilized. People knew that these surges were temporary. Even with the price surge with the Liberation Day tariffs were considered to be temporary and reversible. 

With the Iran War, the shutting off of the Straits is not a simple case of turning a faucet off and on. It will take many months to get supplies rolling again. That means that prices will remain stubbornly high for months and suppliers will need to price that in. They will have to assume that prices in July or October will be higher than they are now.

This is what we've managed to avoid in the previous inflationary spikes. This is also what Larry Summers missed when he predicted the need for a recession to get out of the Covid inflation.

If we are looking at chained inflation, we will need the Federal Reserve to force a recession on the economy to quell the fires burning through the economy. However, we know that Trump is already working to destroy the independence of the Fed, and we also know that his coterie of sycophants is congenitally unable to manage a crisis with expertise and wisdom.

The recession might just save democracy in America, but it's going to suck ass. 

The Purge

 As Martin Longman notes, Trump is lashing out at his Cabinet because of his own incompetence. Others in the crosshairs include Tulsi Gabbard, Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Howard Lutnick. Lutnick would be the only man removed from his position. Pete Hegseth is not apparently on the list, though he is significantly worse than some of these other fools and morons. 

As Morris notes, Trump is very unpopular. People are saying they have never seen unpopularity like this before, really huge unpopularity. As a malignant narcissist, Trump cannot be the reason why he is unpopular, it must be the people around him. Bondi abased herself over Epstein and whatever the fuck that performance was before the Congressional hearing and it did not help her. Now she is still subject to Congressional subpoenas, but without the need to protect the pedophile-in-chief. The impulse to fire people because you yourself suck might not be all that well thought out.

Authoritarianism fails because authoritarianism is brittle and inflexible. Trump's personality is brittle and inflexible. Hopefully, we will see more purges and infighting. 

"Confusion to my enemies."

Disastrous

 Look, I had better things to do than watch Cheeto Benito slur and mumble his way through some half-assed update on his Iran War. As Josh Marshall noted, it was a terrible speech that spooked ALL the markets. Krugman makes roughly the same point.

Perhaps Trump is stung in his small, craven id by the concept of TACO - Trump Always Chickens Out - and feels compelled to not wind this war down quickly.

Then again, the problem is that, strategically, Iran is winning. They are demonstrating that they can absorb far more pressure than we can. Trump never sold this war to the public, so he can't really turn around and ask for ground troops or people to buckle up for $5.00 a gallon gas. We are still going to GET $5.00 a gallon, but he can't admit that. Iran is being leveled tactically, but they are pretty much OK with that, because things were already pretty shitty and they don't have to answer to their public.

Trump cannot walk away easily from this, though I suspect he will try. It's unclear whether we are actually going to deploy the combat troops we are sending to the region. Frankly, the only defensible use of them might be to invade Yemen and degrade the Houthis to deprive Iran of one of their few remaining proxies that has any combat effectiveness. However, sending US soldiers to die killing Yemenis while Iran jacks up fuel prices is a political non-starter.

The contours of the end of this conflict currently looks like this. Trump will feel compelled to "do something" in terms of "boots on the ground." His "doing something" will be stupid and "lethal" just not in the way Hegseth wants it to be. In the end, he will climb down from this cliff, but he will leave the Iranian regime in control of the Straits of Hormuz, where they will charge tolls for transit. 

In the end, Tehran will have a revenue source that they don't have now, because this fucking idiot thought getting involved in a war on the Middle East would be easy.

Pundit Fallacy

 Yglesias says that Democratic strategists that say that Democrats need to find a straight white guy to nominate in 2028 are being dumb. His argument is that women get elected to Congress just fine. In fact, what he runs into is a data problem. There are hundreds of legislative elections every two years, so you get a robust set of examples/

With the presidency, we have basically two examples. In 2016, the least qualified person to ever be a major party nominee took on arguably the most qualified candidate ever (who wasn't running for re-election). The reality TV star who mocked Gold Star families, bragged on tape about sexually assaulting women and clearly had no idea what to do about health care managed to beat a former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State. Eight years later - having botched Covid, launched an insurrection and been convicted of 34 felonies - he again beat a well qualified woman.

Maybe Trump's brand of toxic masculinity really does appeal in ways that JD Vance (I don't think he will be the nominee) can't pull off. Maybe whomever comes after Trump won't be able to motivate latent misogyny in the same way.

But this shit is typical of the Yglesias Fallacy. He once argued for the Pundit's Fallacy, that every pundit thinks that if a candidate just adopts the same positions the pundit holds, then they will win. The Yglesias Fallacy is that the median voter really understands policy at all. That they don't just vote the vibes, but sit there and ponder over white papers.

Partisans have ideological positions; that's why they are partisans. The voters that decide elections are feckless rubes without a complicated thought to pollute their beautiful spotless minds. When it comes to female candidates, "There's just something about her...:"

Unitary Power

 Richardson' daily catalog of the atrocities is particularly redolent of flop sweat coming from Trump. There were a host of court decisions against him, including his precious ballroom project. He issued an Executive Order on mail-in voting that is just blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. He's floundering on Iran and the resulting economic pain it's causing.

All of this is to say that Trump's tight grip on power seems to be slipping. The ultimate sign will be large fissures between the White House and Congressional Republicans. I would guess that this would only happen after primaries are over and incumbents feel secure enough to distance themselves from him in order to stave off defeat in the general election.

April Fool's Day has lost its luster in a world with so much lying, but maybe some small semblance of reality will bring this nattering buffoon back to earth.

Shrill

 Krugman paints the worst case scenario in continued oil disruption. The current price of a barrel of oil - as he explains - is largely speculative. The oil that left the Gulf at the start of the war is only now getting to East Asia. In other words, the actual reduction in the supply of oil really hasn't hit yet. The price increases we are seeing are based the mostly reasonable assumptions about what the price of oil will look like if the war continues. 

There are two looming problems.

The first is that even if Trump could extract himself from this problem of his own making, the supply of oil would remain reduced for months, as damaged Gulf facilities come back online. Additionally, that transportation lag means that the weeks it takes for Gulf oil to get to Asia means that the current void in shipping will last weeks. 

The second is that Trump appears to be doubling down on this insanity by sending just enough troops to make it worse without resolving anything. If he launches an attack on Kharg Island, the disruption in oil supplies will continue well into 2027. 

Once that happens, we could be looking at chained inflation. That was the condition in the 1970s, whereby the price of, well, every output was set in anticipation of where the price of inputs would be. During this latest inflationary period around Covid, everyone assumed that conditions would return to normal, so they didn't want to raise prices too much and drive away customers. If you learn that prices will remain high for months or possibly years, then you raise prices by a lot in June in anticipation of the higher prices in November. 

The problem is that this creates the upwards spiral of inflation that can only be cured by recessionary monetary policy. 

Great job, Donnie. 

Green Shoots

 Krugman notes the unsettling affection that Trump and the creatures around him have for Viktor Orban, Hungary's authoritarian leader. Orban and Putin represent a certain form of autocrat that tends to rely on racial nostalgia to legitimize the destruction of democratic norms. In Orban's case, it was the migrant crisis of a decade ago, where the trauma of the Arab Spring and the civic violence that arose around it spurred a mass exodus of migrants into Europe. In Putin's case, it's nostalgia for the Soviet Union and its ability to dominate the ethnic minorities within its border, minorities that now have their own countries.

In Trump's case, it's nostalgia for an imagined America where white men could dominate everything and "those people" knew their place. There's always fiction in nostalgia, and Trump's version is especially fictitious. Still, the very fact (and it is a fact) that America's president is openly siding with these authoritarian regimes against the democratic regimes of our erstwhile allies is deeply, deeply wrong on a strategic, moral and historical level. 

Trump's rolling disaster of a war in Iran has him silent while Russia provides Iran with targeting data to strike American military assets. He has let Russian tankers supply Cuba, because he simply cannot break with Putin, it seems. Trump routinely insults our allies and neighbors, but have you ever heard him insult Putin? Or even Xi? Is this just a deep seated affinity or does Russia, in fact, have the Epstein Goods on Trump?

Hungary will be a clear test of the long term success of Orbanist politics. He has thoroughly corrupted a young democracy, but if they can vote him out, then the odds of success here in America for a November Blue Wave would seem to be higher. Our institutions are older and more decentralized. Ideally, a Democratic House or hopefully a fully Democratic Congress will be able to investigate Trump's ties to autocrats, whether in Moscow, Budapest or Riyadh. 

Cursed

 Krugman makes a clickbaity argument that the US might be suffering from the resource curse. The resource curse take two forms. The one I'm most familiar with is that poorer, developing countries that have abundant mineral wealth are usually autocratic. The reason is the inverse of the old revolutionary slogan, "No taxation with representation." In a resource state, there is no need for taxation so there is no representation. Additionally, control of the government means control of the resource (usually oil), and that means losing control of the government means losing access to all that wealth. 

Krugman does not seem to be argument that for the US, and I would agree, we aren't in that state. Yesterday's No Kings rallies may have had 8,000,000 attendees. I would say that they one I attended was not necessarily better attended than the one in the fall, but that supportive honking by passersby was higher. Protesting is...weird. It does however stand in for civic engagement. 

The reason why the US is not likely to rely on resources to become a petrostate is twofold. The first is that despite being the world's largest oil producer, oil is still a relative small part of our overall economy. If you want to get rich in America, you go to Wall Street or Silicon Valley, not to Washington, DC to extract rents from the oil industry. 

The second reason is that America already has a well-established democracy. Yes, Trump is waging wholescale war on our democratic institutions and norms, but just like his war against Iran, his tactical wins do not mean strategic victory. Part of the "logic" of authoritarianism and the heart of Project 2025 is that you can simply overwhelm the opposition through "strength" and speed of action. Trump has achieved speed of action - again, in both his assaults on America's democratic institutions and Iran's military infrastructure. However, he cannot understand that the opposition gets its say, too. 

American history is not a triumphal march of progress. It is a long and painful conflict between our ideals and our baser instincts. It is messy. Right now, it seems like everything is unravelling. However, as I said a few months ago, as a political scientist, I would argue that you should be afraid. As a historian, I would argue that you should be patient.

No Kings

 I am off to - I think - the third protest I've ever been to. The second one was No Kings this fall. I am not a protest guy, I am not a crowds guy, but this shit is so fucked up and bullshit that it's prompting me to overcome my previous scruples.

Meanwhile, CPAC was sparsely attended and riven by factions. Factionalism is rare on the right, but common within revolutionary movements, which sums up the basic friction between Trumpism and institutional conservatism.

The House Republicans have rejected the bill to reopen DHS except for ICE. Senate Republicans caved because the TSA situation was getting out of hand and perhaps some of them secretly wanted to rein ICE in a bit, too. The House catering to Trump's diktats over not funding TSA means that it could not be any clearer who is behind the chaos in America's airports.

We will see how many people take to the streets to protest Trump's corruption, war mongering, incompetence and authoritarianism. I'm guessing that the numbers will be large (providing people can afford gas to get there). If it's as big as the fall protests - or even larger - then I think it's pretty clear where the energy rests going into the midterms. I think the key to a Blue Tsunami is a combination of extremely motivated anti-Trump voters and dispirited Trump voters who stay home. 

So if you can go today, go.

Could Trump Accidentally Do Some Good?

 Trump's war is a slow rolling disaster at this point. However, there might be some positives.

The first, obviously, is that if this trajectory continues, Democrats win the House and the Senate.

The second is that rising energy costs will nudge more and more people to renewables. It will be interesting to see if the GOP Congress decides to make things easier on consumers by rolling back the regulatory and fiscal attacks on renewable energy. I know I certainly would like a return to solar tax credits.

The third is that maybe this war explodes the AI bubble. Now this is "good" in a narrow set of ways. Bubbles have to burst, it is in their nature. Best to get that over with. Second, anything that slows down AI and gives us time to adapt to it is good. Third, crashing AI companies means fewer data centers and, again, lower energy costs. Data centers are being built out beyond requirements, and stopping that would be helpful before it gets out of hand.

Of course, we could very well be looking at a 2008 scenario. The AI boom is pretty much the only thing keeping America out of a recession, and once that bubble bursts, we should expect things to get very panful. It could lead to a full blown financial crisis, as many financial firms are knee deep in AI debt.

Luckily, we have a crack team of crisis managers in charge of the federal government, so I'm sure we will sail right through. 

Democrats Win One

 Republicans have caved on the TSA standalone funding. I saw someone online predictably say that this was less a Democratic win than a Republican loss, because Democrats can never win. Bullshit. Democrats laid out a clear line, they held to it and Trump, then Senate Republicans caved. That's a clear "W."

This doesn't really stop the depredation of ICE, but it does begin the process of isolating ICE's budget within the debate over DHS.

Iran Isn't Going To Back Down

 Krugman has a cryptic post about a security briefing that left him depressed. My guess is that Trump's latest movements bringing Marines and the 82 Airborne "online" has people more or less assuming that we will commit ground troops at some point. We know that Trump's war and his deployment of ICE to airports is not popular, but with the latter, how much of that is simply disgust with Trump personally? What could Trump do that would make 55% of the country approve of his actions (besides resigning and fleeing the country).?

Trump seems to realize that he's shitting the bed in Iran or at least that the oil markets are giving him feedback that he knows will be painful for him politically. What's also clear is that Iran understands this, too. Trump can ask for a ceasefire or a peace plan, but Iran has no incentive right now to give him anything. In fact, Iran has denied any talks with the US and has only engaged - it seems - with other regional powers. We have reports that Saudi Arabia wants to keep the war going and is basically on the same page with Israel in that regards, but other Gulf states may want an off ramp and might be willing to negotiate separate deals with Iran.

Right now, Iran's chokehold is on the Straits of Hormuz. That is going to be painful for months maybe years even after it opens. It's not a faucet that you simply turn on and off. At some point, I would expect some sort of terrorist attack on a military or political target in the US. Iran basically has nothing left to lose. Even if they are wiped out tactically, strategically they have some very powerful cards and are playing them. 

The US military under Trump has been a series of tactical triumphs without any coherent strategic goals, beyond "make things go boom" and "exploit the chaos to make money." Iran's strategic goals would include any pain that they can inflict on the US plus keeping their regime basically intact. If they do so, their prestige would rise in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein got his ass kicked in 1991, but because he survived, he actually improved his reputation. That's where Iran is right now and there is no amount of shitposting that Trump can do to alter that fact.  

The Polls That Matter

Special elections are just that: special. Still, the Democrats have been crushing special elections since Trump took office, and last night they flipped two seats in Florida's legislature. One of the districts includes Mar A Lago. Trump, of course, voted by mail, which he's trying to kill with the SAVE Act. 

There are examples of interviews and posts of people decrying their vote for Trump. Anecdotes, though, are not data. The elections we have seen with Democrats overperforming by around 10-15 points, suggest that those anecdotes represent something real. Reuters has his polling collapsing even further and there's clearly some flop sweat in the GOP today.

Ideally what we see in November is that Democrats are prepared to crawl over broken glass and swim through lemon juice to vote whereas many MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans just stay home, dispirited by the shitshow their orange god has unleashed on America and the world.

I really think there will be competitive Senate races in Ohio, Iowa, Alaska and even Kansas. There is going to be a Senate seat that flips Blue that will have people surprised. Not because MAGA is abandoning Trump personally, but because they have soured on politics althogether. 

Not Brilliant

 The Times runs down how RFK has gutted public health.

Brilliant

 Read this on Iran. 

It's all just insane.

Corruption: Once More With Feeling

 It has been my position that the single most consistent line of attack against Trump should be his corruption. Everything that he does can likely be tied back to some interest - usually including himself - that profits from his actions. Recently, he decided to pay a French company $1,000,000,000 to cede their lease to a wind farm off the East Coast. Why? Why would the US government deprive a private company the opportunity to build a wind farm? There is the usual Republican friendliness to petrochemical companies, but this seems so obviously self-defeating. When it all comes out, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that there is money changing hands under the table.

In Iran, we now have pretty compelling circumstantial evidence that Trump and the people around him are conducting insider trading around futures markets. Krugman is being little - it has to be said - shrill in calling this treason, but it sure as hell seems like a crime. I don't think he engaged in this very unpopular war simply to make a buck, but once begun and especially since it started going poorly, he has done what he always does, which is to find a way to personally benefit from the destruction that he and his policies caused.

Perhaps the reason why the oil shock from Trump's War has been somewhat muted is because markets aren't necessarily following the TACO rule so much as not wanting to invest in an obviously rigged market. Trump has now said we are negotiating with Iran. Iran says this is bullshit. There is some evidence that Trump's new timeline of five days is just to get Marines in theater, but not attack until markets close on Friday. 

I remain guardedly optimistic that Trump's corruption and incompetence will undo him. Fraud doesn't work in the long run, and the man is the walking personification of fraud. When his hold on power is wrested away from him, the creatures that have gorged themselves at this trough of corruption and self-dealing might be surprised that he did not pardon them on the way out. 

The challenge for whomever restores American democracy will be to hold those who have violated the public trust accountable, despite the inevitable caterwauling about "lawfare" from Fox and Fiends. Trump was prosecuted because he's broken the law. This has given Republicans cover for when Trump demands spurious investigations into his opponents, based on political malice. There needs to be a Truth and Reconciliation committee, only without the reconciliation. 

Someone said that the 48th president of the United States (unless it's Vance because of the actuarial table) will spend an entire term cleaning up Trump's mess. That process has to start by driving the money changers from the temple. 

The Fictive Nexus

 Trump's war with Iran is only his second most important war. The war with the truth is one that he has been waging for his entire life. As a malignant narcissist, Trump cannot be wrong. He is always right, always winning. The realities of the Iran War are intruding upon that cocoon of lies. Today, Trump said that he was close to a negotiated deal with Iran; Iran said, "Bullshit." 

The question some have asked is whether Trump's lies about the war are 
A) Part of an effort to manipulate markets.
B) A fundamental disconnect with reality.
C) Just who he is: a liar.

Reality really does get the last say. Trump, however, has created a public career where his lying has not been nearly the disqualifying character flaw that we would have hoped it would be. Trump's congenital contempt for the truth has somehow not become the defining trait when the new media reports on his utterances. When Trump says anything at this point, it should be treated as false until otherwise verified. The continuing, persistent treatment of Trump as if he were a normal human being - much less a normal president - is the height of the sanewashing that routinely occurs.

This is why Trump could only have risen to prominence in the Republican Party. The reason is because of Fox News. Fox has primed a generation or two of "conservatives" to respond in a Pavlovian way to the red meat and lies of Republican politicians. We have certified morons like Senator Tommy Tuberville decrying Sharia law in the US...which isn't a thing. But if you've marinated in Fox for decades, it might be. 

One of the theories behind John Fetterman's complete abandonment of Democratic partisanship is that after his stroke, he's become closer to his Fox News addicted brother. That would absolutely track. 

Trump is a uniquely awful human being - among the worst public figures this or any other country has produced. 

He could not have become president without Fox News.

MAGA Is A Cult

 Morris looks at the viral poll from CNN that says that 100% of MAGA supports Trump's war in Iran. Of course, MAGA supports the war, because Trump could literally give their kid measles, the kid could die and they would eat that tragedy up with a spoon. It is absolutely a cult, and trying to care about MAGA is pointless, unless you're Trump.

The critical numbers to look at are who is self-identifying as MAGA and self-identifying as Republican. MAGA has slipped from 36% to 30%. That's significant. We need to keep an eye on people moving from Republican to independent, as well. Typically, people don't identify as Republican and vote from Democrats. They stop identifying as Republicans first.

Trump is such a uniquely awful human being that he continually repels people. Many Republicans keep returning to him like an abused dog hoping this time will be different. Some, though, start to fall away. As they fall away, it really doesn't matter in November if they vote for Democrats or just stay home. Either one works.

Oil Vey

 Oil markets are experiencing real pain right now. Krugman tries to contextualize them, but when he makes a video on Thursday, the situation changes by Saturday.

Gas prices - as distinct from oil prices - have already exploded. Before the war, local gas was about $2.85, not it's $3.99. I've already felt that there is a fair amount of skullduggery in oil markets, but this all seems to make sense. Markets are beginning to realize that Trump can't simply TACO his way out of this mess, as critical facilities are simply gone and will take years to replace. Farmers may not be able to fertilize their fields.

The appalling decision by Trump to open the spigots to Russian and Iranian oil is because he's legitimately and properly concerned by the spike in oil prices, but with so many other critical commodities passing through the Straits of Hormuz, all he's really doing is putting money in Iran and Russian coffers.

Fucking lunacy.

Strategic Incoherence

 If you are thinking either tactically or especially strategically about something, you have to consider multiple outcomes of every action you take. If you do X, what are the potential outcomes? Which of those outcomes is particularly catastrophic, and are there factors that can remove those catastrophic outcomes? 

You absolutely cannot "wing it" or go with your gut.

Unless you're Donald Trump and the gaggle of sycophants and fools that constitute his inner (and outer) circle.

The goal - such as it is - was apparently regime change. The best opportunity for that was when the people of Iran were being gunned down in the streets in early January. Even then, it was primarily wishful thinking, even magical thinking. The ease of Venezuela clearly influenced Trump, as did the need to reassert dominance domestically and internationally.

The result, so far, has been pretty catastrophic. Apparently, no one really expected Iran to do the thing that we all knew Iran would do: throttle oil supplies. For someone so locked into the world view of the 1970s, Trump's ignorance on this is striking. 

To be clear, this is not about national security. Iran did not pose an immediate threat to the US. We've been mostly containing them for half a century. By threatening regime change, we've removed any constraints on Iranian behavior, as this is an existential conflict for them. Yet, apparently, we went into a war with our goals - regime change on the cheap - completely inadequate to the ability to influence events in Iran.

The final expression of just how unbelievably fucked up the "thinking" is on Iran is this: We are letting Iran export oil and reducing sanctions. We are bombing their country, but we absolutely cannot allow them to stop selling oil to China or China might fuck with us and our plate is kinda full right now. Allowing Iran to sell their oil - hell, allowing Russia to sell their oil - is not in America's national security interest. When you are in a conflict - directly or indirectly in Russia's case - you throttle their economy. You have a PLAN to throttle their economy. 

In World War II, America flew a dangerous and costly mission to bomb the oil facilities in Ploesti, Romania. It was the primary oil facility in Nazi occupied Europe, and it was critical that we use oil as a weapon to deprive their military of a critical resource. Today, we are letting Iranian and Russian oil on the market because Trump knows that rising oil prices are politically perilous for him. The war started out unpopular and it will only get more unpopular as the cost of the war and the price of oil soars ever upwards. 

Turns out having imbeciles running your government is a bad idea.

It's Not The Crime, It's The Cover Up

 The refrain of "it's not the crime, it's the cover up" from the Watergate Era, refers to Nixon's role in covering up the White House involvement in the Watergate Break In. In order to protect the White House in general, Nixon authorized criminal actions to thwart the investigation.

Today, we have something that in many ways is far worse than Watergate, with the Epstein saga. Here, again, we have a clear cover up that creates a visible effect without actually being visible. We don't know what was in the investigation that Senator Wyden uncovered (that Richardson references at the link). What we do know is that there are only two possible explanations for the DOJ's contempt of Congress.

The first and most obvious one is that Trump and/or other members of his administration are all over the files. Wyden's discoveries relate to drug trafficking and money laundering (in addition to the human trafficking that we have been discussing). We know how Trump was always kind of short of money. We know that Trump laundered bribes through his properties - renting or selling above market prices to Russians and others. 

The second, but still plausible explanation is simply that Trump and Bondi and others obstruct for the sake of obstructing. Deny, attack, deny, attack. That's pretty much the single playbook that they use. Never admit weakness, never admit you were wrong. Know that Fox and similar organizations will smooth out the rough edges of your lies. If you cave into Wyden on the money laundering and drug trafficking issue, then you might have to cave on other redacted files.

The problem is that by constantly covering up whatever is in the files, you're allowed for the worst possible information to become plausible. The cover up becomes confirmation of the crimes.

It's The Corruption - An Ongoing Series

 It is a daunting task to try and create a singular line of attack on Donald Trump and MAGA. There is just so much that they do that is transgressive, incompetent, cruel and self-defeating that finding a single tack to take - a central narrative - can be really hard. You can focus on ICE's murderous behavior...but here comes Epstein. Focusing on Epstein? Here comes some racism!

I've argued that corruption needs to be a powerful unifying thread in attacks on Trump. First, because he's easily - and I mean by far - the most corrupt president in the history of the Republic. Harding, Grant, Nixon...they didn't really personally enrich themselves. Trump is making money for himself and his crime family. 

As Krugman points out, there are very, very extensive ties between Trump and the petrostates of the Persian Gulf. There has been a lot written about whether Israel forced us into war, with a lot of that discussion veering quickly into antisemitism. However, the role that Saudi Arabia played has been less focused upon. 

"We went to war for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and the result is that oil companies and oil producing states are going to reap a massive windfall" is a decent line of attack. The "forever wars" rhetoric could founder on the fact that at some point Trump will simply declare victory and go home. I don't think Iran is a "forever war"; it's the expenditure of tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars to make oil producers rich - just like his ban on renewable energy is to make oil producers rich.

Anger at rising gas prices will translate into anger at Exxon and Shell and Gulf. Link that to Trump via the corrupt self-dealing that is exemplified in everything that orange fucker does.

Does Trump Meet The Qualifications For Psychosis?

 It's not exactly a specious question. He seems so incredibly detached from reality.

However, Trump's manifest and repeated lying is a personality trait. He simply cannot tell a truth that might reflect poorly on himself. The Iran war is pretty much already won, but Europe needs to send help immediately to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, which are open anyway. Tell me how that is the utterings of a sane person. Then again, he has always simply lied about everything. Prices are down! He won in a landslide! The world respects us!

At what point does his repeated inability to tell the truth reach the level of psychosis? Particularly since he has absolutely no one around him who will tell him the truth.

There has been reams written about the sanewashing that the media does for Trump. They treat his utterances as somehow true or they frame them in a way that might make sense. Trump can say something that sure seems false, but it is accorded the weight that we normally give presidential statements. Then, inevitably, the truth is different than what Trump said, but the media has already moved on. Then he says something else that, again, is treated as true.

Trump's ramblings - if not filtered through this media screen - would seem to be so detached from actual reality that it would call into question whether Trump understands what is actually real. You know. Psychosis.

We've typically understood Trump as being a liar, a profoundly ignorant even stupid man and a man clearly slipping into cognitive decline, perhaps full on dementia. I have to wonder if all those dementia tests that he passed - but that his doctors feel the need to repeatedly administer - are perhaps something that needs to be a screen for actual psychosis.

We have reached the point where we don't know if the President of the United States is capable of interacting with reality.

Back Home

 Anyone volunteer to help Donny Small Fingers out of his jam in the Straits of Hormuz?

The Board of Peace?

His friend Putin?

Anyone?

Bueller?

Maybe shitting on all our allies and then launching a war of choice was a bad idea, actually.

Healthy Lifestyle

 There are a lot of heath benefits to living in Europe/Spain. Certainly, we have walked A LOT. We eat smaller meals. The food is less processed.

But I've also been consuming less news, and that's been a blessing.

Of course, come tomorrow or Tuesday, I'll be back at it. I do wonder about the Ariana Grande Voter - that lump of barely sentient clay who tunes into elections every four years and votes their feelings. These are people who are going to be surprised when food prices rise because the Strait of Hormuz are closed and that will have a massive impact of fertilizer prices which will be passed on to consumers by the fall.

Everything is a genuine surprise to these people, but even in my relative cocoon the war is on the background.

Greeting From Spain

 Once again, it is striking how much more beautiful Europe's urban public spaces are than ours are in the United States. I'm not 100% sure if this is a legacy of imperial grandeur and therefore inherently anti-democratic or a values system that prioritizes public goods that is inherently very democratic.

Anyway, Spain is beautiful even in March.

The Adults In The Room

 In 2016, many Republicans - when faced with the grotesquerie that is Donald Trump - assured themselves that the "adults in the room" would restrain his worst, most venal impulses. Every time Trump did something egregious, this concept of "adults in the room" was widely mocked.

When he ran again in 2024, many warned that Trump 2.0 would not have even those few voices of reason that had apparently constrained him during his first term. 

What we are seeing in Iran is a vivid example of what happens when you put people like Pete Hegseth in charge of a massive bureaucracy like the Pentagon and then have him running around doing workouts with the troops rather than soberly (ahem) considering the impact of military policy. Trump Unleashed was catnip to his cultists, but it's already resulted in the murders of three Americans by state security forces, crashing the post-Covid recovery with tariffs and macroeconomic uncertainty, measles outbreaks, widespread, staggering amounts of corruption and the wrecking of a global system of alliances that has largely prevented Great Power conflict.

This was, of course, predictable and predicted. 

I'm going to be moving around a bit, not sure how much content I'll be providing for the next week. 

Surprised By The Unsurprising

 Anyone with the sense Dog gave a Labrador retriever would have known that Iran would strangle the Straits of Hormuz. Anyone with the sense that Dog gave a guinea pig would have known that there are thousands of Americans and other nationals in the Gulf and they might want to be evacuated.

When people say that we "rushed" to war with Iran, we do know mean that this was a last minute decision. it certainly seems like this was weeks in the planning. It is precisely the incoherence and incompetence of this "plan" that has sober people concerned. Iran has likely been planning for this since last June, but really for decades. It is not clear that Trump and his crew of podcasters and Fox News personalities have done anything but dust off some old Pentagon contingency plans.

This has led to Trump apparently brow beating oil executives to bring down prices of a global commodity that he has just imperiled. "I've cocked things up, but I'm relying on you guys to fix it." Apparently, he didn't even bother to refill the strategic oil reserve before launching this war.

If anything, our latest foray into the chaos of the Middle East should remind us that renewable energy is not just environmentally sound, but it makes sense in terms of economics and national security.

Spiraling

 I've mentioned Josh Marshall's theory that all politics are unitary. If you suffer a setback on the economy, that effects the way people view your ability in other areas. Roughly speaking this is about governing legitimacy. Jimmy Carter was elected because he was bracingly honest after Vietnam and Watergate. He was undone by some of his own actions, but largely because of events in the...wait for it...Middle East, especially Iran. 

If we look at Trump's polling on Iran, we can see it's really unpopular for being in the first days of a military conflict. Perhaps - as many have argued - that this is because Trump never made the case for striking Iran. Another argument is that he's simply lost the support of the majority of the American people and no matter what he does, it will be unpopular because he's unpopular. 

Now, we have rising gas prices, and that tends to impact all sorts of prices. We also have a bad jobs report, both the number we lost in February and the revision downwards for December and January. Trump's firing of the head of BLS might get your a favorable tilt on initial reports, but the revisions will typically be downwards, when the data is more concrete. People have been worried about the economy in ways that the data suggested didn't make sense, but perhaps that soft job market that crept in after the chaos of Liberation Day tariff-palooza really was on people's minds.

The "affordability" crisis is certainly not going to be helped by Trump's war in Iran. Trump's numbers on the economy were already bad, and then he goes off in all of his speeches about how things are actually great, and have you seen these drapes? People were getting pissed about the economy before Trump launched a war that very predictably has spiked oil prices. 

Meanwhile, yesterday, Trump finally fired a Cabinet official when the overwhelming corruption of Kristi Noem became too much even for Republicans on the Hill to stomach. Of course, being Trump he nominated Markwayne Mullion, arguably the stupidest member of Congress, but a scalp is a scalp. Noem no doubt thought she could get away with cheating on her husband on the taxpayer's dime, funneling money to cronies and killing American citizens in the street, because Trump would protect her.

Surprise!

If you're Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth, just know that once you become a liability in his eyes, he will cast you over the side before you can blink. 

Republicans are fleeing from Congress and dropping out of their re-election bids, because they can see the coming catastrophe. Trump - stupid, senile and arrogant - will refuse to accept his many setbacks. 

He's spiraling, and he will continue to spiral.

Dire Straits

 Josh Marshall has been tracking the impact of Iran's threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz. Basically, there was no planning and insurance carriers can't insure all these ships.

This basic level of fuck up is exactly what we should expect from an administration of Fox News rejects, podcasters and mediocre white supremacists. Any idiot could have predicted that Iran would close the Straits, just like any idiot could have predicted that American citizens (and others) might not want to be stranded in a war zone. In Afghanistan, the collapse was so fast and unpredictable that there probably wasn't anything that could be done. This was a war of choice being planned for weeks, if not months. 

And apparently no one considered the fact that Iran might strike back at the Straits or at commercial air traffic?

Fucking morons.

Talarico

 James Talarico won the Democratic primary to challenge for the Senate seat in November. Democrats have been waiting years to win statewide in Texas, but there are signs that maybe...maybe...this could be the year. 

There are a few important reasons.

- Republicans are in disarray. Cornyn and the scandal magnet Ken Paxton will go to a bruising runoff. If Paxton knocks off Cornyn, the seat can be considered a true toss-up. Paxton is super MAGA-ish, so it's entirely possible he succeeds in the runoff.

- Hispanics are fleeing the GOP. Democrats always assumed that what seemed to them to be pretty racist statements and policies from Trump and the GOP would drive Hispanic voters to Democrats. It hadn't happened. That was before Trump 2.0, with Stephen Miller's pogroms unleashed everywhere.

- Talarico seems a better fit with Texas. Crockett is a cable news star and brilliant at invective and the sort of insurgent politics that people say they want from Democrats. Her theory of the election - that there were a ton of un-mobilized Democratic votes - is almost always wrong. Talarico talks like the Sunday School teacher that he is. He's a calming presence. He believes in persuading people fed up with Trump's chaos and corruption to switch sides. This seems key in mobilizing those Hispanic voters.

- Turnout will, in fact, matter, but not in the way Crockett hypothesized. Talarico's job is to get suburban college educated voters and Hispanics to switch from the GOP to him. Democrats - and we have ample evidence for this - will crawl over broken glass to vote this November. Republicans? Especially some of those irregular Trump voters? The various factions of the Trump coalition who feel betrayed - by Epstein, by Iran, by MAHA, by the economic promises - they don't have to vote for Talarico. They just have to stay home.

This is why I think Talarico is such a good pick, because there would have been Republican voters who would have gone to the polls to vote AGAINST Jasmine Crockett, but with MAGA collapsing along with Trump's mental faculties, they can just stay the hell home. 

I think that's the key in all sorts of races, like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, North Carolina and maybe even some surprising states like South Carolina or Kansas. If Republicans are just dispirited and don't vote, that counts, too.

The Contingency Of History

 Martin Longman runs through a connection I had not known about. A critical moment in the history of Iran was the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, as it is often difficult to retain a revolutionary ideology after the charismatic leader of that revolution dies. It's what Max Weber referred to as the "routinization of charisma" and it's hard to pull off.

The logical successor to Khomeini was Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri. He was the most senior and respected cleric in Iran, and Khomeini's ideology required that the most senior cleric by in charge of the rule by religious authority. There was an friend of Montazeri named Mehdi Hashemi who was a complete asshole and got sideways of Khomeini, and that blew up in Montazeri's face.

I knew that this had happened, but I didn't know about Hashemi's role in this.

The reason this is important is that Montazeri was not completely wedded to the idea of the velayat-e faqih or rule by religious authority. He certainly wasn't a fan of trying to export the Iranian Revolution.

Ali Khamenei was.

In the span before his death, Khomeini worked with Ali Rafsanjanah - a nakedly cynical man - to elevate Khamenei over Montazeri. Khamenei was a revolutionary ideologue and Iran continued down the path that now has it as a pariah state at war with all of its neighbors.

I believe that history is largely about big forces, but individuals matter. What would have happened, for instance, if James Comey doesn't announce his investigation in Hillary Clinton's emails and/or the Stormy Daniels story gets out in October of 2016. What happens if Clinton wins is pretty obvious. Donald Trump never sniffs public office and America and the world is in a better place.

Incoherent America

 Lots of work is being done around the realization that Americans don't hold truly ideological or even informed opinions about politics. Because the world is complicated, people's opinion of things can shift depending on how you ask them. That's how you get a slim majority rejecting "amnesty" and a sizable majority supporting a "path to citizenship." 

Perhaps one of Trump's political strengths is how well he mirrors this inchoate, unexamined, almost thoughtless approach to politics and policies. Trump's shifting explanations for war against Iran are not going to win him any real converts to his war of choice, but they DO reflect the way many Americans respond to political dilemmas, often taking a position and then retroactively finding a justification. A person could be xenophobic. Why? Jobs! No, access to public goods! No, crime! No, disease! No, actually it's jobs again!

Good policy is not guaranteed by good process. You can have a perfectly reasoned and coherent case for war and it is still likely to be a bad policy. (That doesn't mean having a terrible case will work either.)

What it does suggest is that the most ideological people have a flawed view of other people's politics. If you believe people are as ideologically focused as you are, you will presume that ideological appeals will win their votes. You just need the pitch perfect 12 point plan and suddenly everyone will vote for your program. Take Project 2025 (please). The more these reactionary ideologues wrote down what they were going to do, the less popular it was. The fact that Trump is governing from the blueprint that he expressly disavowed is one reason why he's so far underwater.

Lots of the terminally online Millennials hate Bill Clinton, but there is a reason why he was so popular. Same with Obama. They were capable and pragmatic. Yes, as partisan politicians they had Things They Wanted To Do, but they weren't eager to couch them in ideological terms.

One of the most deleterious developments in American politics has been the severe ideological sorting of the parties since the 1990s. This means that they people at the head of our politics are often captured by ideological thinking in ways that obstruct winning elections. Given that one party has dived headlong into authoritarian patrimonialism if not fascism, I'd say winning elections is important.

The Politics Of Trump's War

 It is inevitable that any discussion of the conflict in Iran turn to the impact on Trump and his political fortunes. Especially given the fact that a Democratic Wave in the November elections might be the difference between America surviving as a democracy or not.

Trump's inherent incoherence is going to work against him here. As he tosses out contradictory war aims and negotiating positions, it becomes clear he doesn't have a framework for "winning the war." What's more, Trump made no effort to "sell" the war to the American public. He did not use the State of the Union address to make the case; he only tossed out a few videos on his social media site. He did not engage Congress or the American people in this conflict. It seems that he assumed he would get a quick and clean Venezuelan outcome - neglecting the fact that Venezuela is still a mess.

Americans don't seem pleased with this. YouGov threw out a snap poll (take with a grain of salt) and only 34% of Americans supported the war. In March 2003, 71% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, largely because the Bush Administration made a relentless (and flawed and mendacious) case to the American public. Republicans naturally support Trump far more than Democrats, but while 10% of Democrats express any support for the war, only 20% of independents do. Democrats oppose the strikes at 70%, but independents oppose it at 52%. 

Trump never made the case for war, and now he's throwing off bangers like "there will likely be more (casualties) before it ends. That's the way it is." He routinely references Venezuela, "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario." He thinks he can waltz in and out of a Middle Eastern war, the way he did in the Caribbean, which betrays an unsurprising but woeful level of ignorance.

Meanwhile, Iran's closing the Straits of Hormuz is unlikely to make people think that Trump is laser focused on affordability. It might not crater the economy the way the 1979 Iranian Revolution did, but supply chain disruptions have a way of making themselves felt. One driver of the "Biden" Inflation was the supply chain disruption to world oil and gas markets by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is no reason to believe that we won't see another oil shock, even if it doesn't tip us into stagflation.

Trump is an idiot. Most of the people around him are idiots. They believe in performing on social media over doing the hard work of crafting policy and long term strategy. "The Venezuelan raid went great, let's do that again. It will make great TV." Except the American people are really not at all ready for this, and they made no effort to prepare them for it.

Trump has no reservoir of good will or public trust to draw on, beyond his diminishing base. He is absolutely incapable of filling the role of selfless war time president. I would be shocked if he met the caskets of fallen soldiers at Dover. What's more, it is precisely his rural voter base that is sick and tired of these wars, because they disproportionately fight them. 

Iran is playing the long game, because it must. It can launch swarms of cheap drones until America's supply of anti-missile weapons is gone. If it resorts to tactics that have served it in the past, one would have to expect terrorist attacks at some point. They merely have to hunker down and endure. 

Trump is talking about a four week war. Venezuela might be instructive here, in that we really haven't changed much about the government of Venezuela, except who sits atop it. But we declared victory and moved on. Maybe we see a bunch more dead people - American, Iranian, Israeli, Qatari, Kuwaiti - we degrade the Iranian military...and then the war just ends. It's pretty clear that Trump has no real plan to make "regime change" happen. 

I would be shocked if Trump benefits from a "rally 'round the flag" effect. 

Why?

 Why attack Iran now? 

That question is really paramount in my mind as I try and discern why we have engaged in yet another war of choice in the Middle East. Richardson runs through some of the possibilities.

The proper time to launch strikes was during the massive civil unrest that led to the Revolutionary Guard gunning down thousands of its own citizens. However, most of our military assets were tied down off the coast of Venezuela. So there was a lag between the optimal time to launch strikes and the ability to do so. (Apparently the strikes were planned for earlier, but they learned that Khamenei was going to be in a meeting, so they moved the strikes to target that meeting.)

The popular theory online is, of course, that this should be named Operation Epstein Fury. It's all just another distraction from the Epstein Files. Perhaps. More likely this could be seen as a way to "project strength" or "dominate the news" in the face of sagging poll numbers and widespread dissatisfaction with Trump's presidency. The operation in Venezuela went so well, why not try it again? Of course the operation in Venezuela did not arrest Trump's declining poll numbers, but whatever.

Timothy Snyder suggests that this could be part of the overall corruption of the Trump Administration, in particular their cozy relations with the Gulf States. This feels less like a corrupt quid pro quo ("Attack Iran and we will give you billions in crypto.") and more the corruption of shared values. Trump and his minions love the rich emirs of the Gulf, and they could imbibe their perspectives just by constant contact.

It is the opinion of this humble blog that Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid person. He has the vocabulary of a third grader, fer chrissake. Intelligence can take many forms, and Trump's feral ability to attack and lie is kind of intelligence. What he is clearly incapable of doing is looking ten steps ahead. There is a reason no American president has taken this step, despite almost 50 years of hostile relations between the US and Iran. We have no idea what will come next. Trump doesn't care. Venezuela is currently struggling through a humanitarian crisis. Same with Cuba. Trump doesn't care. Iran might collapse into a failed state, like Libya. Trump doesn't care.

Maybe everything works out. Maybe the Iranian army and elements of the Revolutionary Guard switch sides and drive the hardliners from power. Maybe we kill enough hardliners to facilitate that happening. Maybe Iran doesn't degenerate into civil war and chaos, but becomes a vibrant democracy. It's not totally impossible. What IS clear is that we have no plans or ability to shape that particular outcome.

Special Military Operation

 The seemingly inevitable attacks on Iran began a few hours ago. The two ideas need to be held together in everyone's mind. The first is that the Iranian regime is incredibly malevolent. The second is that air strikes are not going to topple the regime. 

Is there a realistic endgame for these strikes? Almost certainly not. 

Are we at war with Iran? Not technically, because Congress has been excluded from this decision. Only Congress can declare war.

Why are we doing this? This feels like the Trump Administration's incessant efforts to "create content" and "project strength" rather than any overarching strategic goal.

Would it improve the world if the Iran had a new government? Absolutely. There is no evidence that this will topple the regime. Air power can't do that.

Can't a global military power enforce it's will militarily on a weaker power? History suggests not. 

Are the adults in charge? Absolutely not. Epic Fury? We are governed by middle schoolers.

Is this a distraction from the Epstein Files? Maybe, but more likely it's a distraction from the various setbacks that Trump has been dealt recently. Military action is usually a way to restore presidential authority. This seems unlikely to do that.

This Is (No Longer) CNN

 The news that Netflix is dropping its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery paving the way for odious oligarchs in the Ellison family to acquire the parent company of CNN has real implications for the future of media independence. It's another example of the dynamic whereby Bezos bought the Washington Post, ran it competently for a spell and then burned its reputation to ashes and peed on those ashes. Except this looks like it will be more like the lightning fast collapse of CBS. 

Yes, this is how guys like Orban consolidated power. However, Krugman is right that authoritarianism often derives its legitimacy from addressing economic (or other) crises. Hell, my students are writing an essay on that very topic as I type this. 

I'm skeptical that Trump and Ellison can stamp out all media criticism. We can see what they are doing at CBS, but we also have to note that this is destroying CBS' ratings.

My gut tells me that these efforts to create a "state media" will only succeed in part and in the short run. People are sadly uncurious about the world. If they are curious, they might actually inform themselves and they can still do that. Hell, the Wall Street Journal is still out there committing journalism.

My wife watches CNN in the evening when she cooks. I cannot stomach it now, and I once considered Jake Tapper a friend. It's just insipid pablum. Making it Fox Lite isn't going to improve the quality.

Finally, Trump and Trumpism is not forever. Going back to the previous post, Democrats need to play hardball with whatever levers they can pull. States should file anti-trust suits against this particular merger. Slow it down, gum it up. Fight back.

While losing won't be great, as long as pro-democracy forces can find a way to maintain some news independence, it won't necessarily be fatal. 

However, once Democrats do have control of the government again, there must be a thorough attack on oligarchic control of the media.

Vibes v Policy

 In his mailbag, Yglesias goes off on the idea that Democrats need to moderate their policy positions in order to win the Senate seats in places like Iowa, Texas, Florida or Alaska. This is because Yglesias is locked into the idea that voters select candidates based on ideology and, especially, policy.

Coincidentally, Morris comes out today with just the opposite conclusion - based not on his priors but on a poll he ran. I'll let him summarize his findings:

In our February poll, we asked voters whether each of 10 adjectives describes the Democratic and Republican parties. Each person was asked to rank how well each word — such as “extreme”, “elitist”, “tough”, and “weak” — described both parties on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the word described the party very well.

The Republican Party’s defining traits in voters’ minds are extreme (60% agree), elitist (57%), tough, (56%) and cruel (51%). The percentage of Americans agreeing with descriptions of positive traits is comparatively smaller: just 41% say the party is competent, 41% say principled, and only 31% — less than a third — say the GOP can be considered empathetic.

The average American sees Democrats in a much different light. The top descriptors of the party are empathetic (54%) and principled (49%). Comparatively few people think of it as “tough” (31%), and nearly half the country calls the Democrats weak (48%) and ineffective (47%). Democrats’ competence rating is 46% — five points higher than the GOP’s — but it’s the weakness and ineffectiveness labels that dominate voters’ impressions and national discourse about the party.

This manifests, I think, in two ways.

The first is the fact that Democrats have for a while now been associated with more feminine values and have run two female candidates for president. Trump won both of those elections, despite the fact that I would rank Hillary Clinton's mental and emotional toughness leagues higher than Trump's. Still, I remain convinced that Trump would not have beaten Joe Biden in 2016 for instance. Or really any male Democrat. Trump benefits from gendered perceptions of "toughness", even though he's the whiniest, most petulant person to hold the office.

The second is that there is an entire online discourse about Democrats not being tough. The algorithm probably boosts this, but Democrats are always "caving" or "losing" in ways that are both real and imaginary. The fall shutdown, for instance, was a "loss", in that Dems weren't able to save health insurance. They DID however amplify the issue of healthcare affordability, which is now a very favorable issue for Dems. Is that a loss or a win? 

The reason why Gavin Newsom or even JB Pritzker is popular is because they fight back. The reason Schumer isn't, is because he does appear to have the same fight in him. 

Right now there is a partial DHS shutdown over ICE. Democrats are "fighting" but the reality of shutdowns is that they rarely work to extort policy concessions. In fact, they got rolled when the Big Beautiful Bill basically funded ICE and DHS in perpetuity. Will they be able to win some concession? Maybe. Possibly. What they are asking for is popular. The structural levers that they have are not strong enough, though, to force through what they want to do.

This, to me, is a massive example of the role of gender on our politics. I think it Maureen Dowd or someone like her who talked about Democrats being the Mommy Party and Republicans being the Daddy Party. Crude, but if you look at the polling, there's some real accuracy there.

Look at the performative masculinity of Pete Hegseth or RFK posting their workout videos or Kash Patel chugging beers with the US Men's Hockey team. Hell, look at the grotesque "Mar A Lago Face" phenomenon whereby women butcher their faces with plastic surgery to reinforce gender stereotypes.

Morris' conclusion is that Democrats don't need to moderate on certain issues, so much as they need to "get tough" with the understanding that there is no magic dial that you can turn to make voters see you as tougher.  My cynical take is that means someone like Graham Platner is a better bet to win in November's Maine Senate race than Janet Mills. I think Mills makes the better Senator, and she is frankly "New England Tough" but Platner has a gravelly voice and voters are kinda stupid.

When we talk about "toughness" we are talking about vibes, not policy. Yglesias may sit there in his DC townhouse and parse white papers, but voters don't. Hispanic and Black men didn't shift to Trump because they believed he wouldn't tax their tips or even that he would save America from trans athletes. They did it because he's a "tough business man" who will lift them up from the precarious edges of poverty.