Today In White Supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

Not Actually Surprising

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

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

More On That Oncoming Train

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

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

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

The High Cost of Incompetency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Close, But No Cigar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hague-seth

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

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

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

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

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

Converging Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is the leading figure of the Epstein Class.

Department of War Crimes

 Since the first strikes on Venezuelan boats, there has been more than "concern" that these strikes are illegal. They seem pretty clearly to be outside international law. Recently, we have reporting that Pete Hegseth gave a "no quarters" order to kill the survivors of the initial strike. This is a black-and-white war crime. Simultaneously, we have Trump threatening to launch airstrikes on Venezuela without Congressional approval. 

The bloodthirsty drive to kill brown people is Trumpian enough, but the real cherry on top of the Sundae Bloody Sundae is that Trump is going to pardon a guy who was definitely in bed with cartels. The Times, being The Times, writes that this seems to be a contradiction in Trump's "strategy." 

The "strategy" in Venezuela is not about drugs. Venezuela is not a major source of drugs in this country. The pardon of Hernandez demonstrates that Trump doesn't give a fuck about drugs. Hell, his indifference to cocaine trafficking might be the first sign that he really loves Don, Jr. 

Venezuela has oil. Maduro is an admittedly bad guy, and it would be better if he were not in charge of that country. However, forcing him to leave under threat of imminent violence is pretty sketchy. Pressuring him to abdicate by killing Venezuelans on the high seas and then machine gunning the survivors is criminal. Still, if your desire is to return the ancien regime to Venezuela - the sort of corrupt oligarchs that used to keep the oil flowing while the people starved - then this isn't an illogical way to go about it. 

It's just illegal. 

And again, Trump being Trump, there is a very good chance that Venezuelan exiles and other forces are paying for Trump's services either upfront or with future deals once they are returned to power. The stupid part is that Trump might force Maduro from power and then a true democratic president might assume power and shut out those oligarchs, so Trump and Hegseth will have to put boots on the ground in order to get the outcome they are hoping for. The idea is simply to kill a few dozen people, threaten Maduro with military action, have him leave and then profit. I doubt it will be that linear. 

Will Congress rise from the floor and stop these criminal acts? There is quote that Richardson highlights is from a "senior Republican":

“This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened. They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.

“More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

Of course, this quote is anonymous, because they are pissed but still scared. 

Hegseth is a criminal. (OK, alleged criminal.) Trump will undoubtedly pardon him. A future Democratic president will have to expedite him to face justice overseas where the corrupted pardon power holds no sway. Pete Hegseth needs to become Pete Hague-seth.

Stripping Out The Copper Wire

 Ever since he disappeared during Labor Day weekend and subsequently altered his schedule, Trump has looked and sounded weaker and older than ever. Not a bright man to begin with, his blurting out about his "successful" dementia tests and MRI results combined with him falling asleep during meetings suggest that Trump's juice is drained. He's a lame brained lame duck.

This informs the recent spurt of news about seemingly bizarre decisions coming from the White House. The "peace plan" that Steve Witkoff produced doesn't make sense, unless we accept to conditions. The first is that Trump loves Putin. Sure, that's part of it. But Putin also dangled lucrative bribes for Witkoff and Jared Kushner. This administration can be bought.

Don't believe me? We had the outright admission from Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth that he ordered the military to shoot survivors of the attacks on those Venezuelan boats. This blatant war crime was "justified" by saying they had to keep these dangerous drugs out of the US. With almost the same press release, we learn that Trump is going to pardon Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been convicted of...wait for it...working with drug cartels. This one only makes sense as a cash grab by someone.

Trump? Maybe, but I doubt it. The fact is that he has surrounded himself with fellow grifters and grafters, and he will sign anything a hot blonde puts in front of him. Since he can't be challenged by the media, any reporter who asks him about it, he attacks. It's a perfect grift. Take a bribe from the Crypto guy or a drug runner, put the paper in front of the senile old man and cash in, especially if you believe that his days are numbered. 

There are basically two factions working together in the Executive Branch right now. You have the outright fascists like Miller and Hegseth and then the blatantly corrupt like Witkoff and probably Noem and others we don't know the names of. The fascists seize their headlines, directing attention at their violation of our laws and Constitution, meanwhile, the grifters strip the copper wire out of the White House.

Interesting Parallel

 Krugman's ongoing Cassandra routine about crypto makes an interesting parallel. Stable coins are effectively the same as 19th century banknotes. Back before we had a Federal Reserve and FDIC, banks were effectively unregulated. What's more, currency was specie - which is to say: gold and silver coins. Because those coins were limited, they were valuable...but also limited. Paper money was issued by banks, based on their own reserves of specie.

The relentless crushing cycle of boom-bust during the Gilded Age was caused by the gold standard, but today, we are not longer wearing "golden fetters." Instead, we now have an unregulated currency in addition to a fiat currency. That, of course, doesn't make sense. The point of a fiat currency is its flexibility. You can boost inflation during a recession and spur a recovery, or restrict the money supply if inflation gets out of control. Having "digital bank notes" is completely pointless.

Krugman does point out a possible motive for this, which is that crypto can be a bit harder to trace, which of course has made it the dream currency of drug traffickers and money launderers. That also makes it a great vehicle for bribery. Allegations/revelations that Steve Witkoff is knee deep in Tether, a stable coin, combined with his clear stenography of Russian victory demands as a peace deal...man, I would not be shocked if he or Trump or both are making serious (stable)coin from all this.

Elite Impunity

 Rational people have spent year now trying to understand how a bozo who inherited a fortune and turned it into a smaller fortune could somehow become the avatar of working class and evangelical grievance politics. Clearly, in many ways it's a case of motivated reasoning. People told them their vote in 2016 was stupid and they've spent almost a decade now doubling down on that decision. 

But why did they make that initial decision?

I keep coming back to Trump's empty boast of "I alone can fix it." That seemed to resonate, especially with those who saw the system as hopelessly skewed against them. Trump was a rich insider who promised to prosecute their crusade of butthurt against "them". 

In the Trump Cinematic Universe, Trump's obvious corruption meant that he was a system insider who could take it all down for them. A decade later, it's becoming clear to them that he was never going to do that. 

Many of these grievances are not anything Democrats can leverage to their electoral advantage. The idea that elites get away with everything is one that you could attack. This whole idea is at the heart of the Epstein Files controversy. Is Larry Summers a "Democrat"? OK, whatever, he's also an asshole, so screw him. Was RFK a branch of the Kennedy clan? Yes, but the extent that benefitted from this - especially the latest soap opera with Olivia Nuzzi - is just another example of elites running interference for each other.

The idea that "There is a club and you ain't a member" is pretty powerful. I think we all have experience in our lives of people who were promoted above their talents because they were just part of the group that gets promoted above their talents. There are a lot of reasons for Democrats to embrace younger politicians, but "not being in the club" is a pretty obvious one. 

This, of course, meshes with the oligarchic takeover of our government and the rampant corruption of billionaires in and out of the Trump Administration. Anyone want to bet that Steve Witkoff personally will profit from selling Ukraine down the river?

Time to revive the idea of left wing populism without engaging in crank conspiracy theories. The fact are bad enough as it is.

More From AI Dysfunction

 First, we have Josh Marshall noting that AI is gobbling up computer memory. This goes along with the mass consumption of energy and fresh water that we already know about. This is something that contrasts - a bit - with other bubbles. The Dot Com bubble, the Real Estate bubble, the various railroad bubbles: none of them warped other sectors of the economy quite so profoundly. Railroads spiked the need for steel, but that actually just spurred the development of the steel industry that spilled over beneficially to other sectors like construction. Real Estate sucked up money, but the home building spurt didn't really warp other sectors quite so much. If you've seen your energy bill spike, you're seeing this AI effect.

Krugman speaks about how AI is largely tracking with predictions about interest rates. By comparing it to the Dotcom crash, he shows how even as the NASDAQ was bleeding out, they had rallies corresponding to interest rates changes. In short, as long as the easy money might continue to flow, the bubble might persist.

My own theory is that crypto functions as a cash flow operation for AI, as if you have access to the awesome computing power of AI chips, you could very easily find a way to raise cash off the volatility of crypto and even meme coins. As the bubble starts to get shaky, principles look for a way to salvage their balance sheets. Again - just a theory but - I thought the massive oil price spike in 2008 was finance bros manipulating the market to bring some quick cash onto their books.

There is, no doubt, some role that this massive advance in computing power will have in the future that will be beneficial to the human race. However, I'd wager in the short term we are crushing massive amounts of resources, warping the macroeconomy and creating a ticking bomb in the economy for more realistic fake porn and the ability of middle schoolers to cheat on their book reports.

Laws Still Hold

 For the most part, we have seen Trump and his ankle-biting minions fail to achieve many notable success in "lawfare" against his political enemies. The law seems to be holding, at least in part because Trump's lawyers are a pack of gibbering morons. I saw Trump Knob-Polisher Johnathan Turley noting that the charges against James Comey and Letitia James were dismissed without prejudice, because the ruling was that the appointment of Lindsay Halligan as acting US Attorney was illegal. The Department of Justice could bring new charges once they legally appoint a new US Attorney.

OK, Turley really is an idiot for missing the central fact here: Trump can't find lawyers who are A) capable and B) willing to do his dirty work. Those are mutually exclusive circles. The same goes for the bullshit threats to prosecute Mark Kelly for being in a video reminding service members that their oath was to the Constitution and not to Hair Furor. First, Kelly and the others were right on the law: servicemembers cannot obey illegal orders. Second, Kelly is likely protected by his role as a Senator. Finally, I would imagine discovery would include determining the legality of the strikes on boats in the Caribbean. 

Maybe Hegseth tries to prosecute Kelly, but does anyone really think he's getting good legal advice? John Cole recently put it: "When everything you do is performative, performance is everything." All of this - the entire bullshit thing - is about what it looks like on the Fox News feed that is mainlined into that old fucker's "brain." His administration is full of Alina Habbis and Lindsay Halligans: dumb hotties from the Lionel Hutz School of Law.

I suppose we should be worried that Trump will find competent lawyers to do his dirty work, but I think this is where his manifest decline kicks in. Do you really want to hitch your wagon to this guy? It made sense when he was ascendant for any ambitious, amoral tool to sign up. Do a few years for Trump, then become a Fox News Personality. Does that still make sense?

The looming conundrum for Democrats is this: When they retake power, there will be dozens upon dozens of Trumpist capos who committed real and serious crimes that need prosecuting, but prosecuting them will be seen as more "vengeance" when really it's just the fact that Trump is a criminal who has surrounded himself with other criminals.

Clowns Playing With Dynamite

 The worry about the various clowns that Trump has empowered in his second administration is that they would eventually cause some sort of irreversible calamity. Adam Smith's quote that "There is a lot of ruin in a nation" suggests (and I agree) that a lot of short term disasters can be overcome because states are largely resilient and "sticky" institutions. That doesn't mean that there won't be absolute disasters, just that the US might survive as something still vaguely recognizable as the US.

However, we are seeing one of those moments, perhaps, where the damage done could be truly catastrophic, and that is with Trump's embrace of Putin's "peace" plan.

These are transparently ridiculous and maximalist demands from Putin. Some AI studies (sigh) suggest that the text was written in Russian and then translated into English. Would anyone be surprised? There seemed to be some conflict within the administration with Vance supporting the deal and Rubio undermining it, but it's all chaos and clown shoes, so who knows. The "deal" was apparently "negotiated" by Trump's idiot friend Steve Witkoff, who has taken Jared Kushner's place as lickspittle errand boy and bagman. It would absolutely not shock me, if Witkoff, Kushner and others were not being paid off by the Russians to push this capitulation on Ukraine.

This, however, is another area where there are real divisions within the GOP. A few Republican Senators are already outraged over this. As deep as their heads are buried in Trump's diapered ass, they still know that Russia is our enemy. Trump's declining power and poll numbers might make it more likely that some Republicans might defect and support Ukraine.

Can Ukraine survive with just European support? That's the impossible question that Zelensky has to face right now. What's more, it's not clear that Ukraine can survive these surrender terms. 

As for Europe and the rest of the world, they have relied for decades on a United States that could be relied on to speak with one foreign policy voice. Sometimes that voice was toxic (rot in hell, Dick Cheney) but it was always consistent. Now, you seem to have various factions vying for supremacy that have positions wildly at odds with each other.

Absolute disaster, if it goes through.

Ignorance Is Amiss

 G. Elliot Morris writes about how people in polls tend to move towards Democrats once voters are informed about Republican policies. This is a variation of push polling, but in push polling, you often get inflammatory priming statements. "If you knew that Kamala Harris personally wants to perform gender reassignment surgery to third graders, would you be more or less likely to vote against her?"

With Morris' survey, he could say something factual about tariffs or ICE or bailing out Argentina, and then ask for respondents' opinion and they move left. This raises the question: Why don't they know this shit already?

There are a legion of infuriating things about the 2024 election, but the refusal of the media to cover and the Democrats to stop talking about Project 2025 is pretty high up there. The public learned about Project 2025 and largely couldn't believe that it was real, so they actively discounted it when making their voting choice. Could that have swung the election? Morris' work seems to suggest that if more people had an accurate understanding of what Trump was promising to do, that might have moved the electorate 2-3 points toward Harris. That would have moved Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin into Harris' column.

Krugman has been trying to figure out why people are so pissed about the economy over the past two years, when the US did about as good a job as possible getting out of Covid. Inflation as a discrete economic event ended in late 2022 or early 2023. However, because prices remained high and because people had little lived experience with inflation of this sort - you'd have to go back to the '70s to find anything similar - they tended to be angry that prices didn't snap back into place. Trump benefitted from a honeymoon period on the economy, but inflation isn't THAT bad right now and he's getting hammered on the economy.

IQ is not a terribly good measure of intelligence, but it does measure "something." The fact that IQ in general increased is a result of increased wealth as a society. The fact that it's reversing and declining is fodder for a thousand hyperventilating think pieces. For the health of our civic democracy, though, it could be a catastrophe.