What Would A Democratic Trump Look Like?

 He would look like Graham Platner.

Like Trump, he would be a child of privilege who pretends to be something he's not. In Trump's case, he inherited millions, lost much of it and pretended to be a savvy businessman, when really he's just the heir to someone else's hard work. In Platner's case, he pretends to be a salt of the earth oyster farmer, when really he's just the kid of two rich parents who support him in adulthood.

Like Trump, he seems to be a rapist.

Like Trump, he projects an aura that certain people get fooled by. Trump's aura of the no-nonsense businessman; Platner's aura of the working class socialist. 

Like Trump, there's an omnivorous narcissism at work. Both men figured that they could run for office and not have all their many flaws exposed to the world. Both men seemed oblivious to their own failings, though hopefully only the Republicans are willing to ignore those failings.

Like Trump, he was protected from the consequences of his actions. Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy because he was a behavioral problem in school (many kids with learning disabilities would act out before we knew what learning disabilities were). Platner was sent off to Hotchkiss where he flamed out. In both cases, the ultimate reckoning, the consequences for fucking up, were smoothed over for them. 

There is a surface appeal to both men. Trump spent his whole life cosplaying as a hardnosed business savant. Platner looks the part of the former grunt who becomes a blue collar success. That appeal does not survive closer examination. In Trump's case, he has sailed through his many, many scandals. Platner seemed to be doing the same.

I hope that he drops out now. Hell, I hope he enters therapy, because he has some serious issues. As things stand, we have lost the Maine Senate seat, because a certain clique of Very Online Democratic Influencers saw the surface appeal of Platner and then overlooked the growing forest of red flags. Much like two years ago, we have a last minute chance to replace a flawed candidate, but that process will not  necessarily sit well with voters. The only chance of finally ousting Collins will be if the Democratic Party can do what the Republican Party didn't and shun this very "problematic" man until he retires from the scene. 

A Shame

 Martin Longman writes about his lifelong love of soccer and how shameful the last 48 hours have been for US Soccer. The first four games of the World Cup were really joyful, as those of us who love the USMNT saw them play with creativity, verve and passion. This was the "Beautiful Game" in a red, white and blue jersey.

The red card for Flo Balogun was a terrible decision. However, as soon as Trump horned in on the issue, it became something different. He is universally reviled around the world and the only president who would embrace the culture of corruption that surrounds FIFA. When he worked to overturn the suspension, that outraged not just Belgium, but the whole football world. America went from a gracious host nation and a wonderful spirited side to the Ugly American bullies who don't play by the same rules as everyone else.

The first half especially of last night's game was an embarrassing display of timidity and nerves. This was not the same team that we had seen in the previous games. To be fair, it was not the same Belgium team that seemed to struggle to start games and waited until the second half to try and put away teams. They came out firing; we came out misfiring. 

In just the same way that the only game the Knicks lost during the NBA Finals was when that bloated narcissist interjected him into the story, so, too, did the USMNT deflate when he squatted his fat ass on their heads. 

They were most likely to lose against Belgium, who are a very good team. It was the WAY they lost that leaves ashes in your mouth, and I have to think that Trump's meddling completely fucked up the vibes. 

Everything He Touches...

 Donald Trump ruined the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He insisted on making the whole damned thing about himself and his fragile ego, so he created that tacky, partisan laughably inept spectacle on the Mall. He hijacked the normal, bipartisan group created to celebrate the event and made it an ode to his corruption and narcissism.

And he wasn't done.

He apparently made a mafioso type phone call to fellow mobster Gianni Infantino to get FIFA to overturn the red card suspension of Flo Balogun, the US' leading goal scorer in the World Cup. This World Cup has been a miracle of goodwill and unbelievable games. Last night's England-Mexico match was mind blowing, but maybe not as mind blowing as the Cabo Verde- Argentina match. And then Norway beats Brazil. It's just been awesome. 

Martin Longman argues that Mauricio Pochettino should bench Balogun to honor the spirit of fair play. I understand the sentiment, though it seems a little odd at this level, as opposed to youth or scholastic sports. What's more, FIFA is corrupt as hell, so this is hardly out of the ordinary for them. 

Here's a few OTHER aspects of FIFA not exactly standing with moral clarity and fair play:

- Morocco's captain will stand trial for rape soon. He's still playing and Morocco are possible finalists.
- Ghana has a player facing rape charges, too. He's played until they were knocked out.
- FIFA has suspended other red cards during the World Cup, including one for Christiano Ronaldo. 

If I were Pochettino, I might not start Balogun but leave open the possibility of bringing him on in the second half if needed. On the other hand, Pochettino, Balogun and the USMNT have not done anything wrong. 

Trump and Infantino did. Maybe. 

This Cup finals has been glorious. Rights as it reached a crescendo of wonder and awe - Cape Verde, Norway, England at Azteca - Trump sticks his porcine snout in and tarnishes it. 

Republicans Can't Govern

 Martin Longman looks at Trump's demand that his lickspittles in Congress pass a third reconciliation bill. He notes that one issue is that the last bill defunded Planned Parenthood, but that ban has just expired. There aren't the votes in an election year that is already shaping up as a bad one for Republicans to take on a bunch of unpopular votes. 

Longman notes

This is something people on the left are familiar with. The base is angry that the Republican leadership didn’t do something they didn’t have the votes to accomplish and feels demoralized because its representatives won’t fight with every tool in the box, even if those tools won’t work.

That's a pretty cogent analysis of the state of politics in America. For years, I've noted that Republicans can't govern, they can only rule. They cannot govern, because governing involves legislating, and their caucus is fucking insane. I certainly hope that some of the loopier DSA candidates who are going to enter the House this fall won't fall into the same batshit dynamic of demanding that their every whim is made into law and if it isn't, it must be corruption. 

Still, this isn't a bothsides moment. Biden was not as historically great a president as some have decided to make him out to be in their anger at the processes and his own decline depriving them of a victory in 2024. Still, Biden was exceptionally effective at getting legislation passed. There were enough Republicans in Congress still willing to legislate that important bills made it through. The tragic counterexample was when they had a really decent bipartisan immigration bill, and Trump killed it. 

That's the ballgame, when it comes to the current GOP and their inability to govern. They are now - even more than then - the Party of Trump and legislating, a process that involves compromise, good faith and trust, is anathema to him and the creatures that surround him.

This system of compromise and working together was why the Framers established checks and balance, separation of powers. No one person, no one faction was intended to rule this country. We would have to come together to govern it. To self-govern it. 

One of the many ways that Republicans have lost the plot.

200 v 250

 Krugman reminiscences about being in Lisbon in 1976 for the Bicentennial. I have my own faded memories about that celebration: the Tall Ships in NY harbor, the simple pleasure of being a kid at a time of picnics and fireworks. It seems odd to celebrate the document that asserted that true sovereignty lies with the people and not a monarch when a large portion of the this country seems to want to install a monarchy centered on an absolute dumpster fire of a human being. The Fourth is a time of sentimental idealism and nostalgia, yet we seem trapped in a dystopian moment of corruption, authoritarianism and just rank stupidity.

Yet, Krugman notes that the Bicentennial celebration was optimistic, in spite of the rather dreadful tenor of the times. We had just lost Vietnam, inflation plagued the land, we had rolling energy crises, crime was legitimately out of control, and we had just emerged from the Watergate scandal.

Krugman argues - and I'd agree - that in fact the Watergate resolution, with Nixon resigning in disgrace, abandoned by his party, was a large part of why were proud to be American. We had confronted the lawlessness of the most powerful man in America and called him to account. We had rebuked the concentration of power in the hands of a secretive cabal of criminality acting from the halls of the People's House. 

So, I get why today feels like a broken holiday, and why it is hard to celebrate a country that allows Donald Trump more latitude than it did Richard Nixon, despite Trump's crimes being immeasurably large in quantity and scope. 

When the Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2nd 250 years ago, that same day British troops landed on Staten Island. On August 22nd, they landed on Long Island and nearly enveloped Washington's army before it made a providential escape. Defeat on Long Island led to an abandonment of New York City - an abandonment that would last until the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Washington was beaten again at White Plains in October and he limped into Pennsylvania with only the tattered remnants of his initial force. 

So, while today is the celebration and remembrance of that remarkable document that promised equality and self-government in the face of tyranny, I would point to another document, written in the aftermath of Washington's ignominious retreat from New York. Thomas Paine wrote in The Crisis:

 THESE are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: It is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to set a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated....

My own line of reasoning is to myself as straight and clear as a ray of light. Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder; but if a thief break into my house, burn and destroy my property, and kill or threaten to kill me or those that are in it, and to “bind me in all cases whatsoever” to his absolute will, am I to suffer [permit] it? What signifies it to me whether he who does it is a King or a common man, my countryman or not my countryman? Whether it be done by an individual villain or an army of them? If we reason to the root of things we shall find no difference; neither can any just cause be assigned why we should punish in the one case and pardon in the other. Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of devils were I to make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man. I conceive likewise a horrid idea in receiving mercy from a being who at the last day [final judgment] shall be shrieking to the rocks and mountains to cover him, and fleeing with terror from the orphan, the widow, and the slain of America.

Happy 4th.

The Soul Of The Party

 Yglesias leads off his mailbag with a rumination on what the ascendancy of Democratic Socialists means for the Democratic Party. Martin Longman also writes about those writing about this issue. 

In Longman's piece he notes that Jon Chait is freaking out and Krugman isn't. Basically, Chait sees Socialism; Krugman sees Social Democracy. 

To me it's more that we have a lot of Democrats who are tired of the same old tired politics. They also feel betrayed by what they see as Biden and the party's hiding of his decline. So, they are looking for people who aren't the same old same old. It's not a good time to be a long serving Democratic incumbent in a safe district. 

I do think that on the policy issues, most people are generally aligned. We want more health care coverage; we want the rule of law to cover the powerful; we want America not to be a corrupt oligarchy; we want to stand with democracies; we want to stop supporting the Israeli military. 

A lot of it is vibes. It's always vibes. 

Corruption And Affordability

 Donald Trump was never as rich as he pretended to be on TV and the tabloids. Racked by debt and constantly bankrupting companies like casinos, football, steaks and booze, Trump lived big by borrowing and exploiting his name recognition. When Mark Burnett came to him with The Apprentice, Trump was spiraling financially.

That is no longer true. 

Trump's exploitation of meme coins and crypto reads like a terrible joke, but the reality is that these essentially fraudulent vehicles are perfect for both corruption in general and bilking the rubes that worship you. Remember the Trump Phone?

Trump has benefitted from an ill-informed cynicism on the part of millions of Americans that all politicians are deeply corrupt. There is certainly corruption that predates Trump, the difference is that we used to prosecute people for it. We used to expect that criminality on the part of our elected officials would lead to consequences.

The brash, tacky extravagance of Trump's garish tastelessness is getting through to average Americans. The East Wing, the Reflecting Pool, the Trump Arch, the laughable 250th celebrations. People get it.

Can Democrats tie Trump's gilded extravagances to the fact that prices are rising and the job market is stagnant and housing is unaffordable? You have Trump literally saying he doesn't care about Americans' finances. He says "affordability" is a "made up word." 

Americans always lean into their preconceptions about the two parties. They've always known that Republicans are more favorable to the very rich. Sometimes they're OK with that, believing that Republicans will get them rich, too. (Spoiler alert: no)

The corruption is bad. The inflationary policies are bad. Americans need to be made to understand that they are the same issue and that Trump is the root of all of it.

Capture The Flag

 Yglesias writes about how tawdry it is to have the 250th anniversary of independence tarnished by a man who has no conception of what actually made America great. Take Trump's assault on birth rite citizenship. That's not a policy debate about contours of immigration policy, it's an attack on a fundamentally American Idea: America is not a single people, it's an aspirational idea.

Trump has defiled so many basic ideas - about democracy, self-government, the rule of law, America's role in a dangerous world, that "all men are created equal" - that it's totally understandable to feel robbed of the opportunity to celebrate this great and flawed nation.

I guess I disagree. I think the celebration of the Declaration of Independence is more vital this year than if Harris had won and Trump was languishing in a prison cell. 

Of all the many ways that Trump has disgraced his office and our country, none are as profound than his assault on democracy itself. Before becoming President in 2017, Trump had never taken the oath of office - either as a soldier or public official - the first person ever to assume the office without first serving the country in some other way. In fact, Trump never even had to answer to a Board of Directors for most of his career. The idea of checks and balances is as foreign to him as the Nepalese language is. The recent string of Supreme Court cases have served to largely inoculate Trump from Congressional oversight or criminal consequences. 

What's more, Trump's cultists are not the sort of people who think in abstract, ideological terms. Democracy or the rule of law in the abstract are not as important as a "businessman who gets things done." When Trump promised to "be a dictator on Day One" that was a selling point for MAGA.

It is at this historical moment that we need to revivify the language and purpose of the Declaration. "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed" isn't as famous as "all men are created equal" but it's equally powerful and important as a hallmark of American political identity. 

I get why you might not feel like waving the flag this 4th of July. What you cannot do is cede the flag to a man whose every utterance is either an attack on America's founding principles or a verbal attack on America itself. How many times does Trump talk about how awful America is? He cannot go a day without denigrating some aspect of this country in ways that no other American president would even dream of doing. 

Do not let this creature destroy your love of what actually makes America great: the ability of the people to control their political destiny; the ability to create a "more perfect union" rather than accept the current limitations; the very real opportunity that this land and people have offered millions of immigrants to build a new and better life. 

If you let the shortcoming of this country define it for you - as quite a few leftist commentators tend to do - then you are basically doing the same thing Trump does: "We're no angels."

This country is far, far from perfect - no country is. But what is good about it is worth fighting for.

The Lawless Court

 Yesterday's SCOTUS decision in the Slaughter case is another example of the Corrupt Six on the Court just absolutely Calvinballing the Constitution. It overrules a century's worth of precedent and concentrates power in the hands of Trump that shouldn't be given to an angel, much less the most corrupt, authoritarian demagogue ever to pollute the office.

It goes without saying that if we get a Democratic President in 2029, the Court will not extend the same powers to that person for reasons. 

UPDATE: OK, so the Court "preserved" the clear reading of the XIVth Amendment on birthright citizenship, but only 6-3. It should have been 9-0. Again, one of the weirder aspect of this illegitimate Court is that it is the Bush appointees (both Thomas and Alito were appointed by different Bushes) that are the most egregious peddlers of ad hoc legal bullshit.

The Court also continues to gut any campaign finance laws. Among the many things Democrats will need to contend with is the flood of money that warps our politics, especially with the rise of a new class of billionaires typified by Elon Musk.

A Frictionless World Is A Solipsitic World

MIT did a study last year on the use of AI. Unsurprisingly, they found that students who used AI a lot demonstrated very little growth as students, including the use of EEG imaging to determine brain activity. Students who used Google saw some growth, and students who used neither saw the most. Even more striking, the AI using students were helpless when asked to write without AI.

David Brooks expands on this, writing about how people who enjoy mental struggle will really benefit from AI, because they enjoy the process of thinking. For this group, AI becomes another tool, whereas for people who really hate strenuous thinking, AI will degrade their thinking more. Even his middle group, who he calls the Reluctant Optimizers, will eventually be dumbed down by AI. The example of this can be seen with previous technologies. Does anyone really remember phone numbers anymore? Can you find yourself somewhere without GPS? 

This, I believe, feeds into my argument from a few days ago. For the past 30 years, tech companies have worked assiduously to remove "friction" from technology use. If you can think back to the early days of personal computing, a handful of people used computers for things like coding or spreadsheets. Most of us used it for word processing. Then the internet comes along, and your computer is now a mailbox and crude search engine. Here come Google and they come to dominate searches. As computing power speeds up, streaming video emerges, beginning with the microfilms of Vine. 

We've now reached a saturation point where any friction feels like a tragedy. I spent the last few weeks with a Smart TV that was several years old. This effectively makes it a dumb TV, and we spent minutes - WHOLE MINUTES - rebooting, reloading and otherwise dealing with a glitchy streaming system. It was frustrating. What it was NOT was driving to a video store to see what they had in stock. We watched what we wanted, when we wanted (minus a few minutes where we had to de-glitch the TV).

I would argue that this psychological space is proving to be somewhat incompatible with liberal democracy. 

The very structures of the Constitution are designed to be frustrating to power. Among the many outrages that Trump has visited upon the country is his wholesale contempt for the basic structure of the Constitution and the need to treat the other branches as co-equal partners in governing. The President absolutely should not govern by decree; that is deeply contemptuous of the American governing system. It was designed to be frustrating specifically to frustrate imperial aspirants. 

Trump's fundamental pitch to his non-cultists is that he can "run America like a business" (despite his manifest incompetence at running his own businesses). The import of Project 2025 was the force change on a system that created endless friction in the path of change.

What I see happening, though, with young "activists" is that they seem completely incapable of understanding that you simply don't get "what you want" from our system of government. You can - occasionally - get what you need, but the idea that your personal preferences will translate into policy is not just the naivete of youth, it is the defining gestalt of the internet age.

While many people have warned of AI's impact on the job market and the environment, I share Brooks'  and Krugman's concerns about what AI will do to our minds and by extension our culture.

This weekend, Scott Weiner was heckled at a trans event for not being sufficiently deferential to the desires of the Palestinian "lobby". Weiner has been a staunch ally of the LGBTQ communities, yet he was physically confronted and screamed at by people that more than one online commentator described as "mentally deranged." 

Maybe.

Or maybe we've become culturally deranged in our solipsism. We see the world as a toddler does, as lacking purpose and agency beyond the insatiable appetites of a toddler. I want what I want NOW. I will not build a coalition; I will not settle for half measures; I will not bend to time or compromise.

I want my utopia delivered to my door by Tuesday noon. 

Slip Sliding Away

 I realize everything I am about to write reeks of privilege, and that makes it some form of cringe or maybe colonialism? I lose track. Anyways. 

My great-uncle served at Otis AFB on Cape Cod during WWII. He must have fallen in love with the area, as he subsequently bought a house on Nantucket in 1960 for about $10,000. I went there about every other summer as a child. After graduating high school, I worked there for a summer, cleaning streets for the DPW.  

In 1994, I discovered that the woman who would become my wife also had a family home there. I don't know if we would have dated if we didn't share a ferry ride home one Thanksgiving. We were married on the island, and our boys were baptized in the same church. 

Moving to New England meant that the island became central to our summers. We were absolutely blessed to be able to share our summers and our boys’ summers with our families. 

After my parents died, my sister and I tried to keep the house by renting it. The house was in the heart of the town and dated back to around 1800. The upkeep, carrying costs and sporadic repairs and improvements meant we couldn’t use it during the summer months. 

Last summer we sold it. 

When we did, I promised my wife we would be able to keep her family’s house, but the island kept changing. The place I went to as a kid was weird and crusty. It still retained aspects of an old New England fishing town. It was very hard to get to with only 2 ½ hour ferries or twin engine planes able to cross the water. 

Then they expanded the airport and launched high speed ferries. The airport is the second busiest in Massachusetts during the summer. Jets began to land from NYC. 

It all changed. Local shops that served year round residents became boutiques. Traffic became snarled. Quiet out of the way beaches became choked with lax bros and influencers. 

My wife’s sister insisted on selling their home. It closes later this summer. 

We will likely come back to Nantucket. As guests, not summer residents. We’ve sold my father’s farm. My body does not work the way it used to. So much of my life feels like the past slipping away.

Yesterday would’ve been my father’s birthday. We went to a place he loved to eat, in what might be my last night on the island. Probably not. But maybe. Afterwards, we walked down to the docks to see the mega-yachts, passed a swanky restaurant rented out for a private party. Apparently, I wore my melancholy on my face.

I look more and more like my father every day, and I can feel myself losing him, too, every day.

Precarity

 Paul Campos writes about a Times story on how $130,000 for a family of four really isn't enough money to live comfortably. The Times story looks at several areas where the above average family is struggling to make ends meet. When it comes to groceries, the toughest area to make ends meet is...meat. Beef prices are indeed really high right now, having risen 33% over the past two years.

What's striking is how much of this is policy based. The screwworm infestation is a result of Trump and Musk's gutting of various programs. There's a drought - thanks global warming. There's Trump's tariffs. The piece doesn't mention it, but deportations are likely to hurt meatpackers. 

Housing remains a real chokepoint for spending, and Trump is pitching a hissy fit over Congress' inability to pass his voter suppression act - the SAVE act - so he's not going to sign the recent bipartisan bill to help bring housing costs down (or at least help arrest their growth). It might become law without his signature, which is a really perfect example of Trumpism: deny the importance of legislation in governance. He killed the immigration reform bill from 2024. He passed his one piece of legislation and now wants to govern without consulting Congress.

This is the issue that bedeviled Biden, and his administration actually tried to address it. Trump called affordability a "made up Dumocrat word" so it's going to be hard to pivot for Republicans. Then there is the visual indictment of him trying to create some sort of Roman spectacle in DC. 

Having fucking idiots in charge of economic policy is really hard.

What's interesting, and neither Campos nor the Times addressed this, is that we've had this dynamic before in the 1970s. The difference is that we had far less wealth inequality in the '70s. So we not only have rising prices, but we have an elite that is just completely out of touch with the experience of even upper middle class Americans. If Elon Musk is making decisions about policy, you have a badly distorted policy environment.

If we begin to save American democracy this fall, we will be in a situation where Democrats will have to clean this mess up. Again. The problem is that one key pillar of solving this mess will be addressing the exploding national debt and the solvency of Social Security. There are limits to the ability of raising taxes on the rich that will be hard to resolve.

Anyway, Republicans suck, in case you were wondering. 

Civic Education

 In his mailbag, Yglesias talks about "stealth democracy."

Stealth democracy is a theory that people have this idea that all that is required to solve a problem is for people of goodwill to sit down and hash out their disagreements like colleagues do. They see "corruption" as any action by a government that does not really benefit them. Sure, they can see things like Trump's desecration of the White House and DC in general as being "corrupt" for THAT reason, when the real reason is that he is accruing money to himself and his family and acting outside the cover of law. 

This misconception about "corruption" is really interesting. 

The elections in NYC are the flavor of the minute, and the factionalism expressed there is not an advantage for the Democratic Party in November. Adults - or at least people who really understand our politics and history - understand that you need a Big Tent to win elections, and what resonates in the congressional district around Columbia University does not resonate 25 miles to the north. Still, elements of the Left - and I do not really include Mamdani here - think that if a Democrat representing suburban Yonkers has a difference of opinion on, say, Israel, that isn't a difference of opinion. It's "corruption." They are corrupted by AIPAC.

(I need to take a moment and express my exasperation with the primacy of the Israeli-Palestine issue in Leftist politics at the moment. I fully support the idea that Israel has and continues to commit war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank; I do not think it is genocide, but I understand the arguments that it is. I fully support conditioning American military aid to Israel on the ousting of Netanyahu from power and Israel re-committing to a two-state solution. What I do NOT agree with, is that this is the most important issue facing this country. It is not in the top-10. Ultimately, much of the Israel-Palestine discourse feels performative, and that's just exhausting and not a path to winning control of Congress this fall. <end rant>"

Back to the issue at hand. So much of our politics - from MAGA to the DSA - seems fixated on a version of politics that is simply false. Yes, there is corruption, and Trump is so far and away our most corrupt president, that second place isn't even in the same league. You'd have to run through about 20 Trump scandals before landing on a previous scandal of similar depth. Most of those did not involve the direct participation of the president himself. Only Watergate rises to that level, maybe Iran-Contra. 

So, Trump is legit corrupt. When members of Congress disagree with each other, THAT IS NOT CORRUPTION. 

We've reached this perilous moment, because our parties are more ideological than perhaps they have ever been, and Trump adds breathless stupidity to the mix. The left of the Republican Party does not overlap with the right of the Democratic Party in any meaningful way. When they actually DO accomplish something, like Chris Murphy and James Lankford coming together to fix the immigration system, it gets blown up by Trump. The same thing could be happening with the bipartisan housing bill, but I think that has the votes to override Trump's veto. 

You've had this sort of venomous partisan discord since the '90s, but at least some of it was performative. That's the old "Senate Club" idea, where they yell at each other on CNN and then go have dinner together. Trump, because he has no saving graces or subtlety of thought, has turned that into a politics of grievance that has truly broken Congress and perhaps American democracy. Election denialism is really an offshoot of this. Democrats cannot legitimately win an election is not a position Newt Gingrich or Tom Delay would have entertained.

All of this is to say, we have to find a way out of this moment. 

People do not seem to understand the basics of how democratic governance and politics actually work. Hey, sometimes you lose an election! That's not corruption! Sometimes a good bill dies for bad reasons. That's not corruption! Sometimes there really aren't easy solutions to problems! That's not corruption! 

I've argued that we live in a consumer culture where we really don't have to compromise. You never have to go to Blockbuster only to find out the movie you wanted is checked out and then you have to compromise on whether to watch the rom-com or the action-buddy movie. You just click and stream. 

We've made much of our society frictionless and that simply isn't how politics works. Our whole system is based on friction! That's the point of the separation of powers. 

Instead, both the median voter AND the voters at the extremes simply decry the whole thing as "corrupt" because they can't get what they want all the time. 

That allows a demagogic troll to eviscerate our national institutions, just in time for the 250th anniversary of republican self-government. 

UPDATE: Slightly different take on the same issue of "corruption" from Martin Longman.

UPDATE II: Yet another take on the rise of "dirtbagism."

Anti-System Politics

 Richardson has a throw away line in the middle of her recap, where she suggests that the unexpected victories of DSA candidates in NYC has Republicans worried. Conventional wisdom, as typified by Yglesias, suggests moderating the Democratic party's stances in order to win enough races to save democracy in America. The extremist rhetoric of people like Chevalier muddy that message, and there are real concerns that Michigan and Maine's Senate races could be thrown away by unsuitable candidates.

As David Nir and Jeff Singer point out, there is a broad anti-incumbent mood out there. Some of this on the Democratic side is being upset with an older generation of politicians. I don't think this is entirely about "fight", but rather lingering issues with Biden's age and even Trump's. It's about Democratic House members who have died in office in a razor close House, depriving Jeffries of votes. Sure, there's some of Biden's old "we can work together" ethos being repudiated, but really they are just old, and don't seem equal to the moment. 

Also, whether Trump, Milei, Magyar or any other number of politicians, we are looking at a broadly anti-incumbent climate. While I am deeply disturbed by Graham Platner's idiocy and impulse control issues, he DOES represent that anti-politics politician. Maybe that's enough to carry him to victory over one of the strongest electoral overperformers in the Senate. OTOH, Roy Cooper seems to be coasting to a Senate victory in North Carolina, and Sherrod Brown seems to be leading in Ohio. 

In the end, the 2026 elections will be a referendum on a very unpopular president. I don't think that things are going to improve for Trump, especially since he can't seem to extricate himself from his Iran catastrophe. Nominal prices remain high, inflation isn't likely to abate, he's corrupt as hell and people see that. 

It may very well be that Trump's massive unpopularity carries the day, but the stake are high, and I think we can all worry. I certainly thought that 2024 would go differently, so I can't take anything for granted.

DSA On The March

 A slate of candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries in NYC last night. As per usual, these results will be flogged to death by everyone who is too invested in internecine conflicts and Republicans looking to scare the rubes.

First, Mamdani is a remarkable political talent. Effusively charismatic and with a keen insight into how to be a visible symbol of effective governance. The scare-mongering that Republicans have tried to inject into coverage of his tenure hasn't worked, because the guy just seems jolly.

That isn't true of each of the candidates he endorsed, especially Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is almost a caricature of leftist politics. She has a history of saying inflammatory things on social media, including "Fuck Kamala Harris" which was a standard position for those on the farther reaches of the Israel-Palestine issue. 

If there was a theme from these elections, it was a dissatisfaction with the Old Guard of NY politics and a rejection of anything even remotely pro-Israel. Chevalier beat incumbent Adriano Espaillat, the Chair of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. Chevalier won the wealthier areas of the district around Columbia University, whereas Espaillat won the the Bronx. This is the paradox of DSA support: Much of it comes from upper middle class college educated liberals, not the working class voters it purports to serve.

Presumably, these candidates will win their indigo blue districts. The question is whether Republicans will be able to tie someone like Blake Gendebien, a dairy farmer trying to flip the conservative NY 21, with the statements of the leftist candidates from the City. If we have learned one thing, it is that Fox News viewers will believe any rancid bullshit placed on their plates. These are people who still believe Democrats are the ones hiding the Epstein Files.

Midterms are referenda on incumbent parties. People are pissed and supporting someone like Chevalier is a good way to express that anger. It may not be the best way to flip marginal seats, but Republicans already believe that Democrats want to require gender reassignment surgery in elementary school, so what will be the movement at the margins?

More interesting, I suppose, is what impact these DSA candidates will have if they win and Democrats win the House, but by a reasonably narrow margin (I think they win a 20-25 seat majority, but gerrymandering could impact that). Will they behave like AOC, another impressive political talent, or like Rashida Tlaib, who doesn't seem to understand that you have to work within the party, even if you sometimes disagree with it. 

Republicans have been calling Democrats communists since the New Deal. At some point that attack falls apart from overuse. However, Democrats do keep nominating people like Platner and Chevalier who seem to be engineered for opposition attack ads. Hopefully a Blue Wave carries everyone along, because, well, we HAVE to have a Democratic Congress by January. 

Peace Likely Won't Help Trump

 The surrender to Iran has largely been understood as Trump desperately needing to turn things around before the midterms. He needs the oil to flow again and bring prices down. As Krugman explains, though, that's unlikely to happen for a lot of reasons. Among them are the fact that even if the war was really over - and the ceasefire keeps collapsing because Trump keeps threatening Iran - it would take weeks and months to restore the flow of oil, urea and other goods through the Strait. We would also have to replenish reserve stockpiles that we have been drawing down to reduce the impact of the loss of the Gulf oil on world markets. Finally, there are baked in inflationary effects from this war that we really haven't seen yet, but almost certainly will.

So, Trump seems to be flailing around. You have weathervanes like Tucker Carlson blowing away from Trump. Leaving aside whatever pathologies are surrounding Trump psychologically and neurologically, he is facing collapsing poll numbers and rumblings among his base that portend even more ominous signs. The MOU is simply another sign of this flailing. His desperation for a favorable peace deal is more palpable than the load in his Depends, and Iran knows it.

There are a host of things going wrong, all of which create a gestalt of incompetence and corruption. While I think a lot of what Yglesias writes about politics is suspect, he's right about persuadable voters. This is really just another way to describe the Ariana Grande Voter Theory, and we have to acknowledge that partisanship has left American democracy at the whims of people who do not understand American democracy. 

This should redound to Democrats' favor in November, because things aren't great now and are going to stay bad. Trump can't help but make some of these things worse - the Reflecting Pool is a good example of how he simply cannot admit a mistake - and so the question for the midterms is pretty simple.

Democrats will turn out. They are motivated. Even if many of them have qualms about the party, they are going to show up. They will hold their noses and vote for people like Graham Platner. The questions are about what will happen to Republican turnout? And where will the feckless middle land? If a lot of Republicans just sit out the midterms, that's important. If angry Ariana Grande voters show up to vote for Democrats, that's important. 

We need both Houses to really correct things. I don't think surrendering to Iran is going to help Trump prevent that.

UPDATE: We are in the midst of a market correction. That seems an especially likely outcome over time. The stock market seems disconnected from the world at large. 

When we have market crashes, typically we get some foreshadowing in the spring and the real collapse in the fall. Is this foreshadowing or just a small correction?

Can America Lead Again?

 This thread is an interesting one, where Bret Devereaux makes the case that future democratic leaders around the world will, in fact, be eager to make friends with a post-Trumpist United States. I think it's broadly true on the merits. The US remains an impressive country. The gleeful reactions of international visitors to the World Cup is a helpful reminder that Americans - if not their government - retain a lot of goodwill, because Americans are generally nice and welcoming and generous. 

I think that the malignant forces that launched Trump into a position of power are not unique to the United States. Britain is losing another Prime Minister to what is fundamentally the dysfunction created to British government by Brexit. 

Brexit preceded Trump and was a herald of the anti-globalization, anti-international movement that benefits backwards powers like Russia. Fears of immigrants and the loss of status of "native" whites is a common thread running through British and American politics since 2016. This anti-integrationist populism was roundly defeated in Hungary recently, but only after two decades of non-democratic corruption and cruelty. 

We need to get past this faster than that.

As Trump's ridiculous tariffs and his defeat in Iran have shown, even the a superpower can be defeated if it's left isolated. Trump isolates America further and further every day. His beef with Georgia Meloni is great example of his crass belligerence undermining what SHOULD have been a productive relationship with another right wing populist. The idiot just can't help himself as he tries to protect his whiny assed fragile ego.

Meanwhile, Vance is being humiliated at peace talks, because Trump continues to undercut him and give him jobs that would be difficult in the best of circumstances, not counting for the fact that ANY agreement with the US while Trump is president is effectively useless. 

America will shamble along, a concussed giant stumbling across the world stage, until Trump finally dies or leaves power.  When that happens, I do believe that the world will be wary of the post-Trump US, but not hostile. 

We need each other. That's what Trump and Brexiteers don't understand.

Trump's War On Competence

 Krugman makes the case for how Trump and Hegseth's racism and misogyny have undermined military competence and readiness. The case against Trump is that he sees the military as a form of brute strength that he can use as an extension of his personal whims. It's not just the success of the Venezuela raid, but the need to surround himself with men in uniform. (Happy Pride Month, Donald.)

With Hegseth, you get a bully's understanding of military strength: How many pushups can you even do, bruh? As Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated during the Ukraine War, drones are the future of warfare, but Hegseth being dismissive of that threat is largely how we stumbled into a humiliating defeat against Iran (and how Russia is sliding into defeat against Ukraine).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post remembered that it used to be an excellent newspaper and did a deeply researched story on outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard's membership in a cult. (The Post does still suck, as it puts its' stories behind a paywall; a smart paper would give that article away.) Gabbard was always rumored to be pro-Putin and pro-Assad puppet, but I wonder how much of that was because of the cult she was in. It's a weird Hindu cult, where the leader does not appear to be Hindi. Yet there are strains of Hindutva in the virulent anti-Islamic bigotry. India has also had an unusually close relationship with Russia over the decades, though Russia's behavior in Ukraine has strained that.

Gabbard and Hegseth got their jobs because Trump liked the way they looked and spoke on TV. Gabbard is photogenic, and I guess Hegseth is, too. (Your mileage may vary.) Gabbard was a "Democrat" who spoke ill of Democrats, and Hegseth was a blustering bully from Fox. They had very little qualifications for the actual jobs that they hold and now we have lost a war to Iran and we have no idea the damage Gabbard has done to American intelligence operations and capacity.

Elect a stupid clown, get a stupid circus.

Happy Father's Day

 As you age, you realize that your children - if you are so blessed - are the best thing to ever happen to you. It's a lot of "work" but damn is it worth it. 

Everything He Touches...

 Some MAGA commentators online have decried the media focusing on the gross incompetence demonstrated by the Reflecting Pool shitshow. "Why do you care about this, when Trump just signed a triumphant peace agreement that re-opens the Straits of Hormuz!?" (As of the moment I'm writing this, the Straits are closed again.) 

The reason the Reflecting Pool - like the destruction of the East Wing of the White House - is such a good story is because it so compellingly visualizes the greed and corruption of the Trump Administration. With the Reflecting Pool, it's also the appalling incompetence. My favorite commentary is by some sun-leathered pool guy who comes out and stands by the pool and says exactly what went wrong. The average pool guy knows what's up, but Trump doesn't, and his every utterance has become Gospel to MAGA.

Anyway, I bring this up, because we can see that everything Trump touches turns to shit.

Case in point, Netanyahu made a wager a few years back to align himself with the Republican Party generally and Trump specifically.  It's a natural alliance, because they are both racist and corrupt. Game recognizes game. What Netanyahu failed to understand is that everything Trump touches turns, as I said, to shit. He also burns the reputation of everyone who comes in his orbit. He's basically sending JD Vance out to be the face of this Iran "peace deal" in case it fails. 

Trump's popularity in Israel was really high. It was basically the only country in the world that really liked this guy. His conduct in this war, especially the "peace deal" has soured Israelis on him.

The good news is that perhaps this is the final nail in Netanyahu's political coffin. He has to hold elections soon, and despite overseeing the catastrophic failure of 10/7, he could point to persuading the American president to wage war on Iran. 

Only now, Iran has won the war, because the president is a feckless idiot who hires people like Pete Hegseth to manage a war, when he can't manage a one car parade.

If the result of the Iran War is the death of much of Iran's leadership, the defeat of Netanyahu and Likud in the coming elections and the defeat of Republicans in the midterms, that would be objectively funny.

Regime change begins at home. 

It Doesn't Have To Be Like This

 As Trump slides further into senescence and mental incompetency, his once feared ability to hang a demeaning nickname on opponents feels tired and listless. Jon OssJackOff? WTF? His speech is narrowing into a handful of elementary school level diction and playground insults. The trailer park aesthetics that he has brought to the South Lawn and the Reflecting Pool are just a visual manifestation of the garish, childish nature of the mewling man-baby in the People's House.

Meanwhile, yesterday gave us another vision, a reminder of public rhetoric that soared rather than demeaned, that tried to draw us together rather than tear us apart. 

Zohran Mamdani is a legitimate political talent, and his speech at the Knicks celebration was not only expertly crafted, but delivered with an optimistic brio that was incredibly infectious. Meanwhile, the dedication of the Obama Presidential Library reminded us of what it was like to hope and come together. That many attendees wore tan suits to remind us of how petty and mean-spirited the criticisms were of Obama - criticisms rooted the refusal to believe a Black man could be president, including Trump's birther movement - and how far we've fallen in terms of the standards to which we hold the Chief Magistrate of the land.

Mamdani is sadly unable to pursue the White House, but there are others who can try and point us to a better, more wholesome future than the degraded troll squatting in the Oval Office. Biden was a good "prime minister" working his thin majorities to pass important legislation, but he was simply not the man to rally people to a great cause. 

We can find that person again and be that country again.

Speaking Of Idiocy

 You really have to read David Roth on the Reflecting Pool fiasco. 

A taste:

Specifically, the water is more or less the color of a sour apple Jolly Rancher now. It looks like they're brewing Yodas in there. It is so uncannily green and visibly slimy that it feels inevitable that video will soon surface of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. splashing around in it with jeans on. It looks like the aftermath of Boston Tea Party-style political action involving matcha. 

And:

Disfiguring public spaces on a whim fits within Trump's program of relentless, reckless literalism. Claiming, as an administration spokesperson did earlier today, that the algae bloom has been "successfully destroyed" when the reflecting pool still looks like someone recently boiled spinach in it, reflects, among other things, how thoroughly he has already moved on. As far as Trump is concerned, the problem was solved when he decided upon a solution; it immediately and irrevocably became everyone else's problem the moment he stopped thinking about it. Other people will be charged with doing the dirty work of cleaning up his mess for some time to come, and life will go on in the stink and shadow of this ruinous and tossed-off fix until then. Not much of a metaphor there, either.

Secretary Of Losing A War

 So, indeed, we lost the war to Iran. If the Memorandum of Understanding is the terms of the peace deal, then we undeniably lost this war. It was a war of choice on terms of our choosing, where we established a broad set of terms for the end of the war and fundamentally achieved none of them. The global economy has taken a hit and Iran has emerged in a stronger geopolitical position than when it began,

China has also emerged much stronger. What we have learned from Covid and Trump's War is the primary importance of trade routes. Trump may hate trade, but the reality is we rely on it. Iran proved (or rather re-proved) how important the Strait of Hormuz is, but China enjoys a similar chokehold not only on the goods it produces, but they can easily choke of trade by attacking Taiwan. America's erratic, feckless and moronic leadership under Trump has made China look wise and the stabilizing force that the US once was. 

Will the Chinese learn the lessons of 2022-26, though? It's pretty clear Pete Hegseth has not.

If the past four years have taught sentient people anything, it is that the nature of war in 21st century has changed. It is no longer recognizable to the warriors that invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-3. The US military overthrew the Taliban with a combination of Special Forces, airpower and local militias. A much heavier force overthrew Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks. 

What happened next was not necessarily "new." Both countries degenerated into insurrections and civil war, conflicts that would not have seemed dissimilar to the French in Algeria or the US in Vietnam. In the end, Iraq became something that was not quite a victory but not quite a defeat, whereas Afghanistan can reasonably and clearly seen as a failure. (Some of this was that the terms of victory we established in Afghanistan were obviously not met. If the terms of victory there had been the destruction of Al Qaeda, then we won that war.)

The "old" war of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism required intelligent leadership combined with brute force of arms. To a certain degree, what Pete Hegseth was trying to create was the brute force of arms. He wanted every soldier, sailor and airman to be Rambo. His juvenile obsession with pushups and waistlines was part of this hopelessly buffoonish vision of what military strength looked like.

What he missed - because he's an idiot - is that the nature of war is now completely changed and continues to change at a lightning pace. 

War has always been fundamentally a competition between political and economic systems. If your economy is weaker and smaller, you are unlikely to win a conventional war. The advent of insurgencies was a response to this fact. The idea was to bleed out the superior power to the point where the war became unsustainable. The US in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan. 

Now, drones allow the weaker power to exert force beyond an insurgency. They can even exert force beyond their own borders. 

Drones don't care how many pushups the Secretary of Defense can do.

During the waning years of the Civil War, European military observers must have looked at the miles of trenchwork around Richmond and seen the future. In the intervening years, the machine gun made trenches the new form of warfare and World War I extracted a brutal price for those generals unable to see the new reality. Countries then sank resources in the interwar years into the emerging technologies of tanks, airplanes and mobility warfare. 

We are at a similar tipping point where technology has changed the nature of combat and the profoundly unserious men that surround Trump are congenitally unable to understand this or adapt to it. 

What's more, the shallow, gasping narcissism of Trumpism means that they cannot do the first, more important step: admit they lost and understand WHY they lost. The success of the US military from 1989-2001 was built on understanding the lessons of Vietnam as being the lessons one learns from defeat. Rumsfeld and Cheney forgot those lessons and we lost any chance in Afghanistan when we pivoted to Iraq. Subsequent military decisions have been made from the understanding that we lost the political nature of those conflicts. 

Trump and Hegseth ignored those lessons and ignored the lessons from Ukraine, and we lost another war. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of billions we spend on defense, we lost to a second rate power, because we have leaders who are morons, dangerously unable to learn from failure because they can't even admit when they failed. (Want to know how ignorant they are? Trump signed his surrender at Versailles. Macron knows history, if Trump does not.)

Welcome to the Post-American World Order.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall suggests something interesting. That much of this deal will likely not come to pass, as both sides need to get out of this. Trump never releases the money, Iran never agrees to nuclear inspections...not exactly a victory for Iran, but not a loss either.

Musky Odor

 Amazon was not profitable for many years. Today it makes most of its money off cloud storage, not sending you a three-pack of tighty-whiteys in 24 hours. The point being that you never know when the next huge company will emerge. 

Krugman looks at the IPO for SpaceX. (First of all, NVIDIA is now the company with the largest market cap. More than Alphabet (Google), Apple and Microsoft.) SpaceX jumped ahead of Amazon, making Musk the world's first trillionaire. All of these companies are - more or less - IT companies. Apple, I guess, actually makes physical products, as does NVIDIA. There's a tangible "thing" there. SpaceX seems to be in the same space, in that they have a lot of shitty IT stuff (Twitter, Grok) but they do have a good satellite system.

What's crazy about these IT companies is that most of them were not profitable for years. Eventually, they found a way, like Google did, of monetizing their product. Amazon moved into cloud storage, because being the world's largest retailer wasn't profitable enough. If you look at the most profitable companies in the world, the usual suspects are there, but so are Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway and a bunch of banks.

The valuation of SpaceX is entirely a valuation of Elon Musk. Microsoft - whom no one loves, and that includes freaks like me who actually use an MS system - has $125B in profits off $318B in revenue. SpaceX has $4B in LOSSES off $19B in revenue. How are there market caps the same?

Ultimately, it's a bet on Musk. He's this crazed, ketamine fueled weirdo whose manifest strangeness is presumed to represent genius. Yes, Tesla makes an amazing battery and Starlink is very impressive. But Grok?  The Boring Company? His purchase (and destruction) of Twitter? You can hand-wave away these flops as the price of genius, or you could look at Musk and see a nine year old boy rattling off dreams ("I'm gonna go to MARS!") and mistake that for vision, because was right about lithium batteries. He's so fucking strange that he must be a genius, right? So let's buy into SpaceX, because...space is profitable?

Silicon Valley is all about hype, and sometimes that hype pays off. Sometimes it very much doesn't. Musk, sadly, has largely accumulated so much speculative money that even if his endeavors crash and burn, he will likely blithely sail along on his riches. 

The plutocratic freakshow this diminished age deserves.

Also

 I haven't written about the Iran Memorandum of Understanding, because there is nothing to write about. This all feels like more bullshit that Trump gave himself as a birthday present. 

We shall see in the coming days, but at best this ends the war with Iran in a largely improved strategic positions, even if their regular military capacity is badly degraded. They have learned the lesson that that simpering idiot Pete Hegseth has not: 21st century warfare belongs to cheap drones.

Iran controls the Straits. That is a new geopolitical reality created by Trump's stupid war. The MOU is an attempt to move past this with some handwaving, but it's the truth. What's more, oil prices are unlikely to fall to pre-war levels for quite some time, so I'm not even sure this works to his benefit.

But, Yes, Right About This One

 If I felt that Krugman was a little too easy on the First Gilded Age yesterday, today I think he gets it right. The real issue with the super-rich is their shamelessness. Certainly, Trump is the great pioneer of all this - his tabloid persona cultivated throughout the '70s and '80s was designed around the Yuppie culture, but it was more depraved than that. The obvious punctuation mark of this was Epstein. 

Back in the 90s, as I referenced yesterday, there were efforts by Ted Turner to shame people like Bill Gates into philanthropy. It worked in Gates' case, but there have been other efforts by the emerging billionaire class to have at least SOME charitable work, even if it's something as trivial as the Google Money trying to preserve "Old" Nantucket.

With the rise of Trump in 2016, we saw the destruction of so many political norms. He insulted a Gold Star family, people with disabilities, he used slurs, he refused to release his tax returns, he was caught in tape bragging about sexual assault...and he still "won." The lesson that so many people - rich and poor - took from this was that the norms that had largely existed for years, decades or even centuries were now moot.

We recently saw this on Twitter after Trump's re-election, with people using the slur "retarded" with virulent gusto. It's juvenile and the very definition of "punching down" in ways that any normally emotionally adjusted person would find gross and cruel. Look, I don't think I need to put my pronouns in my email signature; I think my gender presentation is pretty straightforward. Having to do so was annoying for a few moments, but I got over it, because I'm an adult. There are, however, people who made opposing these actions their whole personality. Bullying became an act of rebellion against the norms that have arisen over the last few decades.

For the superrich, they've always been more constrained by norms more than laws. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt were sons of bitches. Rockefeller, though, pretended to piety in ways that eventually moved him towards some charitable work. Certainly the example of someone like Carnegie pricked the sensibilities of other very rich men. Today, our leading philanthropist is likely MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos' ex-wife, who has given roughly $26 billion in gifts. Bezos himself has given "only" $4 billion; Musk really hasn't given anything. Those sorts of billionaires have the capacity to change the world for the poor, but instead they spend lavishly on themselves and their hobby horses.

When we finally de-Trumpify America, one of our priorities has to be writing stronger rules to constrain the rich. Trump has taught them a lesson that Rockefeller or even Vanderbilt never learned: When you're rich, they let you do it.

Not So Sure About This One

 Krugman makes the case that today we have more oligarchic politics than the last Gilded Age. He uses a few crude numbers to argue that we have more wealth concentrated in the hands of a few individuals now than we did 140 years ago. I think that is probably true, because the nature of wealth overall has changed. I also agree with him that there were some cultural guardrails that encouraged men of great wealth to fund some form of charitable work. In fact, I remember Ted Turner working to shame people like Bill Gates into throwing some of his wealth into charity - and it worked!  The Gates Foundation does great work.

Some of the comparisons Krugman makes are not very apt. The Gilded Age did not see a president as corrupt as Trump - no such figure has ever existed. However, just about every other level of government was absolutely saturated with a depth of corruption that is just inconceivable today. This corruption launched two broad political movements: Populism and Progressivism. 

These two movements were demographically dissimilar, but they shared ideological DNA: namely that American democracy had become a corrupted oligarchy. This was why the Progressive Amendments were addressing. The income tax, the direct election of Senators, even woman suffrage and Prohibition, were all efforts to redeem American democracy. 

Why Prohibition? Because alcohol and the saloon were at the heart of vote-buying and machine politics. You think partisanship is bad today (it certainly is), but in the Gilded Age the parties largely existed to distribute graft rather than public services. This was at the heart of Garfield's assassination. In order to win elections and control the distribution of graft, votes were bought with alcohol. Additionally, the parties were not ideological but rather demographic. Violence often attended elections, as mobs roamed the streets looking for people from the opposite party. Voting was not done by secret ballot, so people knew who you voted for. 

Finally, while we have more wealth inequality than we had back in the Gilded Age, we also have more overall wealth. Every vice of poverty that we can imagine today existed back then. The poor of 1890 were crushingly poor. Tuberculosis would cut through tenements like a scythe carrying off children by the hundreds. Farmers were so burdened by debt that they stormed the Kansas capital with guns trying to get relief. 

There was no food assistance, no public health, no income tax, no worker safety measures, no medical care for the young or elderly, no protections against child labor, no protections against monopolies, no civil rights for anyone but white men, no protections for women...it was grim.

I don't think things are going great. However, the one restraint Trump is facing is the fact that there are still laws in this country and they still have force. Go look at the tarps on the Kennedy Center. 

Things are bad. The Gilded Age was crushingly awful.

Freddie The German

 The World Cup is off to a great start, with compelling victories, heroic losses, honest draws. However, the star of the Cup so far is not Messi, Mbappe or Yamal; it's a German tourist who has won over the country and social media. During his travels - which are mostly narrations of food he has eaten and normal American shit that he's done - he has earned the attention of sports teams and American stars. JJ Watt hooked him up with a hotel room and a bunch of swag, including a signed jersey.

There are a few things about Freddie that have people embracing him. 

First, he blanks out his face (or rather covers it with his favorite player Renaldo's). Anyone else - any American - would likely be seeking to grab those fifteen minutes of fame. They would be trying to seize their monetized moment, like the Hawk Tuah girl. This guy is just looking to have a blast and largely succeeding.

Second, I think Freddie is seeing us the way we would like to be seen. America is going through some shit right now. Trump turning the White House into a trailer park is just deeply shameful. Our politics - especially online - has degenerated to Trump's level of invective nastiness. Lies and insults shape our public discourse.

But Freddie is simply reminding us that BBQ tastes great. That Buc-ees are both hilarious and impressive. That this really is a beautiful country and that most Americans are really nice. 

People are good. A person - some more than others - can be bad, but people are generally good and most of the damage they do to the world comes from fear, pain or ignorance. This World Cup is already full of moments like Freddie's that remind us that the best way to live is with open hearts and open arms. 

What A Lovely Evening

 Last night, we saw the best half of soccer that a USMNT has probably ever played - given the stage. 

We also saw them start to chisel Trump's name off the Kennedy Center.

Small victories, maybe, but we will take what we can.

Blood For Oil

 WAAAAAY back in 1990, as the United States gathered together a coalition backed by the United Nations to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty after Saddam Hussein invaded that country, the antiwar Left held rallies crying "No Blood For Oil." That never seemed persuasive to me, as we could have bought oil from Iraq as easily as Kuwait. In fact, I guarantee that's what Trump would have done. Bush 41 was a true internationalist and institutionalist, and he wanted to restore the purpose to the UN and the luster to American arms. He more or less accomplished both. 

However, now that Trump is president, we have a clear case of him moving towards a literal "blood for oil" scenario. Trump really got a kick out of his video game heroics in Venezuela, and a bunch of cronies and Netanyahu convinced him that a similar outcome was in the offering in Iran.

It was not.

This has now led us into a dangerous impasse. America has struck more or less what it could strike and damaged a lot of Iranian leadership and military hardware. Iran, however, has already placed many of its eggs in the drone basket that is changing 21st century warfare. Iran also has decided that it can weather the very real economic pain that the war if creating in Iran, whereas the Americans cannot. A lot of this is because this war was never explained to Americans and never supported by us. You can ask people to sacrifice, but there must be a Glorious Cause to enlist their sacrifices. 

Trump, meanwhile, has of course telegraphed his next move, because he's a senile old dipshit that can't resist opening his festering gob. He is considering an attack on Kharg Island. This would certainly hurt Iran, but it will lead to significant American casualties. 

In Venezuela, he was able to pull off an almost bloodless operation that deposed a dictator and replaced him with a dictator that will follow Trump's lead. It is completely plausible - almost inevitable - that we find out that Americans close to Trump and Trump himself are profiting off Venezuelan oil. Sending US ground troops to Kharg would be another oil grab. Pure and simple.

Now, this operation could conceivably force Iran to negotiate in earnest - if they felt they could trust the US, which they do not. More likely hundreds of Americans will die, thousands will be wounded, Iran will hunker down, oil will spike to $150 a barrel, Americans will be pissed, no one will bail Trump out from a quagmire of his own making and...Yeah, that's the most likely outcome. America takes the island with many dead and it solves nothing in the short term.

Trump was sold another Venezuela: quick strike, profit! Instead, he's being mugged by reality. He's too dumb (with a "b") to understand that, so he's liable to be manipulated by the evil and stupid people around him to make this even worse.

The Party of Bill Clinton

 The Big Dog has taken some reputational hits in the past decade. The #MeToo movement was not kind to his serial infidelity and the unequal nature of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Balancing the budget - an extraordinary achievement in many ways - was largely derided in left wing economic circles amid the lunacy of Modern Monetary Theory. The wreckage of 2008 argued, correctly, for Keynesian deficit spending. If you want to see what the wrong thing to do in 2008-2010 was, look at Britain's austerity program.

All of which brings me to the debate about what Democrats should do if they win in 2028 (which they almost certainly will if we have free and fair elections). The problem is that, much like Clinton, this hypothetical Democratic president and Congress will face fiscal realities arguably more dire than Clinton faced.

This includes Social Security.

The problem, as I see it, is that we have an ideological schism in everyone to the left of Mitt Romney. Right now you have a vague sort of Bernie Bro, DSA type of leftist and they have been countered by a technocratic prioritizing of "abundance." The argument is fiscal policy, which is taxing and spending. There is a broad acknowledgement that we need to tax the rich more, but when it comes to Social Security, something like Elizabeth Warren's "wealth tax" might not work. To shore up Social Security, you need to increase the steady stream of revenue. 

Some of that might come from moving from a payroll tax to more of an income tax. As Krugman notes, the explosion of the wealth gap comes not from a divergence in salary, but in equities. A CEO might have a large salary, sure, but he also has a ton of stock options that are taxed differently than salaried income. 

Capturing that will piss off a lot of people, though doing it subtly - a scalpel rather than a battle axe - might ease some problems.

By the time Trump is finally forced off the national stage, America will be facing multiple crises of his and the Republican's making: a galloping climate crisis, America's diminished standing in the world, poisonous divisions within the body politic, an AI movement largely unfettered from public accountability, a degraded military from numerous misadventures, a need to re-attract immigrants to a place that doesn't feel as safe as it once did, widespread public corruption...the list goes on.

The fiscal crisis will not be a "Trumpist" crisis; it's a Republican crisis. It's the old "starve the beast" form of governance that will require the next government of adults (ie Democrats) have to clean up the mess. 

American politics really went off the rails after the 2000 election. Some of that was 9/11, but if Nader doesn't run and Gore actually wins, the track of American history might not include 9/11. It certainly wouldn't include Iraq. It wouldn't include Bush's wasteful tax cuts. Gore was as exciting as a Saltine cracker, but his governance could have built on Clinton's and created a financially solvent country that felt no need to elect the charlatan from the tabloids and reality TV.

If Democrats swarm back into power in 2028, they will have to make actual hard governing decisions on boring shit like how to shore up Social Security, how to reduce the deficit. When Clinton did it, interest rates fell, businesses expanded and the economy boomed - and not just at the top. 

The question is: Would an angry Democratic primary electorate vote for this candidate?

No, He's Responsible

 Yglesias writes a decent column about Trump's war on government competence, best exemplified by DOGE. He notes how cuts to various agricultural and public health programs are running into real world consequences, notably screwworm, measles and Ebola. Yet, he then says that some of this isn't "Trump's fault." His argument is that - unlike the disastrous war against Iran - these are not direct policy consequences. Trump didn't CAUSE screwworm or measles or Ebola to exist.

I honestly don't even know how you get yourself into that rhetorical space. 

Krugman - famously called "shrill" by his editors - tends to lean the other way. He makes a much more expansive case for things like the problems farmers are having because of Trump's trade policies and that same war in Iran. Of course, many of those deep rural voters are both upset with Trump's policies that have actively immiserated them, but they are also unlikely to vote for Democrats. 

Leaving aside the fact that they won't switch parties, let's look at how they won't hold Trump accountable. Elections are how you hold elected officials and indeed all the organs of government accountable. It is precisely this accountability that makes democracies more functional in the long run - even if they short run is messy as hell.

If farmers are pissed about Trump's policies, then they should vote for Democrats to force a course correction. However, if you start adopting Yglesias' framing of Trump not being responsible for shit that happens even though he gutted the institutions designed to keep that shit from happening on to your head, then you can make the easy walk to "both sides are to blame, I guess I'll just keep voting Republican."

I realize Yglesias is not a partisan propagandist, but technically neither is Krugman. They both purport to be part of the "reality based community." At school, we are urged to practice scrupulous non-partisanship, but Donald Trump IS a felon, and pointing that out - or that tariffs and wars are inflationary - is not being partisan. 

We have a measles and screwworm outbreak in this country, because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have waged war on technical expertise and government capacity. Yes, he didn't actively infect kids with measles or cows with screwworm, but his policies are making this a growing health and economic crisis.

There is simply something very strange about how Yglesias frames his political discussions, and excusing Trump for the destruction of public health measures because he didn't cause the illness is top of the list in strangeness. 

Gordon Wood

 Gordon Wood died yesterday at the age of 92, amazingly struck down by a car and not his advanced age. Wood was one of the finest living historians of US History and certainly the Dean of Historians when it came to the American Revolution. Himself a student of Bernard Bailyn, Wood argued for the essential revolutionary nature of the American Revolution. He stood against some - and I occasionally include myself - that argued that it was more a War of Independence than a true "revolution," especially if compared against the French or Russian Revolutions. In this telling, the Civil War and Reconstruction Era is much more of a revolution than replacing the monarchy with a representative government.

But of course, establishing a Republic - over so large an area no less - was a revolutionary act. It was fraught with pitfalls and dangers that the generation that framed the Constitutions was very much aware of. 

None more so than James Madison.

It was Madison who spent years thinking about how to preserve liberty and self-government. Today, we think of them as being reinforcing, but it was understood at the time that self-government tended to degenerate to anarchy, which led to the rise of a dictator. As Madison wrote in the Federalist: 

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This framework is at the heart of our long practice in representative government, of combining democracy and republicanism to create something truly new over 235 years ago when the Constitution was written. 

As Richardson notes at the link above, Madison was also the author of the Bill of Rights. Initially reluctant, he came to see how writing down fundamental rights was part of the needed constraints on those who governed, especially the desire of those who - once in power - might wish to restrict the freedom of the press to blunt criticism of themselves, or perhaps ban public assemblies and petitions to the same purpose. 

It also extended to the free practice of religion, which had been pioneered by Roger Williams of Rhode Island in the 17th century, but then picked up by Virginians like Madison and Thomas Jefferson. If a government could dictate religious belief and practice, what couldn't they dictate? The free exercise of conscience preceded all other rights.

As we begin to mark the commemoration of the Declaration of Independence, we can see these "inalienable rights" under assault from a cabal of wicked people who surround a fundamentally ignorant and weak bully who would destroy those very rights that the Revolution was fought over. Pete Hegseth wants to tell servicemember how to worship. Various creatures wish to destroy the free press and outlaw protests. This is not hyperbole. 

Wood's death - just a few weeks before the 250th anniversary of the declaration of universal, inalienable rights - should help us reflect on how those rights which were so revolutionary 250 years ago are not self-enforcing. Wood reminded us that we are heirs to a revolutionary tradition, and at the heart of the revolution was the belief that government must belong to the governed. 

The Upside Down

 Among the more infuriating thing about living in Trumpistan is that basic reality is upside down. Yeah, sure, there's the lying, but I'm not even talking about Trump's incessant falsehoods. Trump largely benefits from "vibes" in terms of his being a "businessman" and "dealmaker" when his track record is quite the opposite.

No greater example of this upside down dynamic exists than "Trump is a tough guy." To recap:

- Trump avoided Vietnam by getting the family doctor to write up his bone spurs.
- Trump wears a LOT of makeup.
- Trump is fastidious about his hair.
- Trump refused to go to a veteran's service in France, because it was raining, and it might make his hair look bad.
- Trump rolls over on his back and piddles on his belly anytime he's around a dictator.
- He has a child's conception of what strength is.
- He, like all bullies, is a physical coward.

Yesterday, Meet the Press aired part of an interview with Trump. Only part, because Trump got pissy and red in the face and then walked off the set when called out on his lies. Not even "called out", Kristen Welker pressed him to provide evidence for his farrago of falsehoods. He of course has no evidence for electoral fraud or FBI complicity on 1/6 or any of the bullshit he spews forth all over the national discourse. Welker, unlike the usual sycophants he surrounds himself with, continued to press the man-baby on the lack of evidence. He lost his shit.

If you ever wondered what a decompressing narcissist looks like in real time, watch the clip. He gets rid in the face. He blusters. He hurls more lies. He hurls insults. He uses spurious ad hominem attacks to try and change the subject. He storms off in a pissy little huff. He even lays hands on Welker in a way that was likely meant to intimidate her, but it honestly looked like he was unsteady on his feet as he rose to pout his way off camera. 

Trump moral unfitness for office has been explained away by his cultists by saying, "Sure, he's a bit rough around the edges, but that's because he is a tough as nails businessman."

Bull.

Shit.

Finally Too Far?

 Whiskey Pete Hegseth has been a national embarrassment since he was plucked from Faux News to lead the biggest, most important bureaucracy in the country. (Technically, he was an embarrassment before that, but only to his friends and family.)

Recently, his remarks at the D-Day commemoration seemed to suggest that he's a Nazi. Or that he would have, at least, been manning a pillbox overlooking Omaha Beach (O-MAGA beach?). The sad thing is that this is not, by any stretch of the imagination a disqualifying statement in the Trump Administration.

No, what might finally rid us of this bothersome pest is his decision to strip Mormonism from the approved list of Christian religions serviced by Christian chaplains in the military. This is a BIG deal for Mormons. Mormons have always been unusually skeptical of Trump for a deeply conservative group of people. Despite - or perhaps because of - their pious religiosity that have resisted MAGA. They still largely vote for him, but with deep misgivings.

If the Mountain West had a competent Democratic Party, they would be flooding the airwaves with this. Not just Utah, but Idaho, Wyoming and Arizona, where there are a lot of Mormons. Again, maybe you just get them to stay home in November, but this is not a brick that Republicans can let slip from the coalition.

Or maybe Trump (or the people telling him what to do) will finally fire this foolish asshole. 

Good Take On Platner

 As is so often the case, Josh Marshall expounds on a point I've been trying to make.

In this case, what Graham Platner says about the factional divisions within the Democratic coalition.

Markets

 The jobs report was unexpectedly strong yesterday. It wasn't historically good or anything close to it, but it was a solid report. As Krugman points out, the stock market - especially the NASDAQ - fell off quite a bit. Why would the stock market fall on a decent jobs report?

The answer is interest rates. Tech companies are highly dependent on debt and that's why the NASDAQ fell. Given that we have not entered a cratering job market BUT prices are continuing to rise because of Trump's Iran Misadventure, the Federal Reserve is not going to cut rates. This is the '70s oil shock dynamic, and if inflation becomes an expectation then you will have to see a Fed Recession to kill it. Not a good dynamic.

So, the Fed won't cut interest rates. Secondly, the budget deficits are growing so incredibly large that government borrowing is going to start squeezing out private borrowing, if it hasn't already. That will make interest rates rise, too. This cost of borrowing is going to bite everywhere: credit card interest rates, meeting payroll, mortgages, college loans...And as inflation heats up, people will need to borrow more simply to meet their living expenses. That will happen in a lending environment that will be quite tight.

The real question is whether a Fed increase will burst the AI bubble. Sure, some of those companies are likely in decent shape, but there are a LOT of AI start-ups, and they aren't making money, they are living off their perceived future value and operating off of borrowing. If that tanks, then we are possibly in the stagflation dynamic.

You Should Support Talking Points Memo

 Right now, they are doing impressive investigative work on the corruption by US Attorneys, beginning with the so-called Broadview Six case.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

With media like 60 Minutes falling under the sway of bootlicking lickspittles, you really need to support independent media.

Vandalism

 Buried in Richardson's "documentation of the atrocities" is this nugget:

Aligning with Project 2025, which criticizes federal science programs for paying too much attention to climate change, the Trump administration is also tearing out a $368 million deep-ocean observation system along the Pacific Coast that monitors marine ecosystems, coastal environments, and the ocean currents that affect climate change. Eric Niiler of the New York Times reported that the U.S. began operating the system in 2016 and expected it to continue for 25 years.

The system is in place. It is not a budgetary drain, and I would guess tearing it out will cost money. As we enter a "Super El Nino" cycle, monitoring these ocean currents is really important to understand what the weather will be for the next two years.

There are countless other examples of this rampant vandalism, of which the destruction of the East Wing of White House and turning the reflecting pool on the National Mall into an aboveground pool are only the most obvious physical examples.

We are building our retirement home, and as we have a decent sized pile of money to pay for the build, we wanted to place solar panels on the roof to reduce our monthly bills, once we become fixed income retirees. There had been in place a sizable tax credit for installing solar, and because we want to have as robust a solar array as possible, we could really have benefitted from that. Without getting into details, the difference in cost between what these panels would have cost us last year versus this year is enough to buy a small car.

The only reason to do this is from an ideological obsession with hurting the plans of anyone to operate independently of large utilities and petrochemical companies. It hurts Americans who just want to control their (spiking) energy costs. 

These are policies, and policies are easily changed by future Democratic administrations (providing we have democratic elections), but man, this is going to hurt, ironically because the median voters was upset over nominal prices.