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.

WTF Was That?

 Donald Trump can't decide if his new best friend is Mohammed bin Salman or Zohran Mamdani. With MBS, it's a pretty straightforward case of two kleptocrats recognizing each other. Mamdani...?

What's more let's look at two images.

When was the last time you saw Trump smile like that? Ever?

Maybe he just loves Middle Eastern guy? Guys he thinks are terrorists and should be banned from entering the country?

Or maybe he's medicated out of his fucking gourd right now.

Thrashing About

 I feel fairly certain that Trump and his lackeys will slow roll or cherry pick the Epstein information. He didn't obstruct their release because it makes him look good. At the same time, we should see stuff trickle out via leaks. All of this means he's getting weaker, and when he gets weak, he lashes out like the malignant narcissist that he is.

We perhaps saw this dynamic already play out with Trump's fascistic call for the execution of members of Congress. The crime of these members - all of whom have served in the national security services - is that they reminded military and intelligence officers that they should not follow illegal or unconstitutional orders. This is enshrined in the military code. It is not - or never has been - controversial. Service men and women should not follow illegal orders, because "I was just following orders" was not a valid defense at the Nuremburg Trials.

Impressively, none of the members made any direct references to Trump's illegal actions in Venezuela or his illegal deployments to American cities. They simply reminded people of their obligations to follow the law. This anodyne statement sent first Stephen Miller and then Trump into a rage. Labeling this as "sedition" and "insurrection" led them to call for the execution of the members of Congress. (Not for nothing, but the free debate clause protects members' speech.) 

Ironically, Trump/Miller's freak out made sure that this message was amplified.

Yeah, this is bad, but it could also be a sign of Trump's increasing weakness. If internal GOP polling is as bad as the public polls, the GOP could be waking up to the idea that tethering themselves to this addled old shitbag is a bad idea, especially if that means appealing to extrajudicial killings.

The weaker Trump gets, the more outrageous he is likely to become, the weaker he will then become in turn.

Buckle up!

Vibecession

 Krugman professes to be somewhat surprised by Trump's collapsing approval ratings on the economy and consumer confidence in general. He suggests that it might be a result of Trump's constant lying and maybe even the fact that - while we have no official numbers - the job market seems to be softening. A lot.

Trump paid a price not just for the shutdown, but the way he held SNAP benefits hostage, the fact that he demolished the East Wing to put in a Mar-A-Lago ballroom and the fact that he held a Gatsby party while people were suffering.

As Marshall reiterates, power is unitary. Trump is increasingly out of touch - or rather he is now being seen as out of touch. This is perhaps the real cost of the Epstein cover up. He said he would release them, backtracked and you can't lie your way out of those basic facts.

Bitcoin fell another 3.7% today. Things are getting shaky and the clowns running things have zero answers.

Has It Started?

 Krugman drops off a quick note that it looks like the Crypto Crash may be upon us. Bitcoin, the Cadillac of Crypto, has dropped from a high of about 125,000 a month ago to about 91,000 today. Ethereum peaked at around 4800 in August and is around 3000 today, three weeks ago is was around 3800.  

David Frum points to the real peril that stable coins might pose to our broader financial institutions. The speculative frenzy surrounding some cryptos - to say nothing of the incoherent madness of meme coins - was supposed to be tempered by the stable coins. Because stable coins are redeemable in real currency, this could lead to runs on financial institutions.

Part of me is regretting not putting my money where my mind mouth is and shorting crypto. Part of me wants to jump in now and make some bucks off the venality of others. There is, however, a risk when you bet against a fraudulent system. 

We are building a house for retirement, so we have a lot of cash on hand which should be safe in a crash. We are also near that retirement and a crash...won't be great! I suppose to bright side is that Trump has bound himself to crypto in such a way that when the crash comes and if it truly devastates the economy, that will combine with Epstein to drive the nails into the coffin of his authoritarian plans.

The Human Connection

 This piece is about an AI engine designed to help you "cheat" at conversations. The author found it really distracting and did not, in fact, help her with her conversation.

Meanwhile, Yglesias writes a long post about how he likes his - seemingly profound - neurodivergence. That piece definitely shores up my impressions about a certain vacantness in his analysis. He says he makes him more objective, but the AI engine kind of has the same problem that it short circuits real human connection. There is nothing wrong with being neurodivergent and aphantasia is a striking example of a specific form of being different. That does allow him to offer his spicy hot takes that keep him in business, but it also leaves something soulful missing from his work.

AI, of course, has no soul.

So, yeah, anyway, we're all doomed.

Unitary Theory Of Power

 Josh Marshall has what he calls a "Unitary Theory of Power" that states that all power is unitary. A President is not powerful on one area and weak in another. This is why you see presidents' approval ratings fall across the board when they suffer a failure in one area. If Trump loses on the tariffs or the House vote on the Epstein files goes bigly against him, then he is weakened everywhere else.

The flop sweat emanating from the White House is because they very much understand this dynamic. The central idea of Project 2025 was to overwhelm opposition to Trump's authoritarianism with speed before the unpopularity of that project could be coalesced into a united front. "Move fast, break things" only works if you have sufficient mass behind the destructive force.

Marshall points to things like the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco as example of that veneer of omnipotence being stripped away. He also says that an increase in leaks (and I would argue the willingness of corporate media to report on what those leaks say) demonstrates that people are losing their fear of Trump's ability to retaliate.

Trump's verbal declaration to countenance the discharge petition is an example of this. Trump cannot lose. He certainly cannot lose when Republicans are the ones voting. He would rather give the appearance of being fine with the release so as not to lose the coming vote. Once it passes the House (and presumably the Senate) then perhaps he will find a way to delay or selective release some things. He isn't saying "Release the Epstein Files"; he's saying "I can't afford to publicly lose this vote."

The thin reed I'm hanging my current hopes on is the special election in Tennessee 7th CD. This district has no business flipping, but it is within that 10 point partisan margin that could surprise people. That might also be the reason why more and more Red States are not gerrymandering, because you could wind up with a dummymander where they turn reliably Republican districts into swing districts in a wave election. 

Every loss in any arena is a loss everywhere for Trump.

A Democratic Populism

 Do Democrats need to embrace the sort of populist politics that elevated Donald Trump? Maybe, maybe not. But if they do, there is one really, really easy way to do so: Billionaires.

The GOP alliance with great wealth is well known and goes back to the years after the Civil War. There have been wealthy Americans who embraced progressive politics, but the vast majority of the very well off have historically trended towards the party of low taxes and less regulation.

The politics of it today are even more stark. People apparently really are pissed off about the destruction of the East Wing and the Gatsby Party that Trump threw. They really are pissed off about the evisceration of public services. And they really are pissed off about the Epstein Files.

Rumors online is that the dreaded "Democratic consultants" were urging Democrats to focus on "affordability" over Epstein, because people really are upset about the cost of living. The thing is, Epstein is about a cabal of ultra wealthy scumbags - of whom Trump is the avatar - getting their way while everyone else suffers. Millionaires and billionaires raping girls, while the Guatemalan roofer or the Salvadoran line cook gets beaten and abused on the streets of Chicago (which drives up construction and dining costs).

Richardson lays the wood this morning with a comparison of Matt Gaetz and the Andrew Mellon. Gaetz likely paid a 17 year girl for sex so she could pay for braces; Mellon funneled wealth upwards until it created the conditions for the Great Depression. In both cases, wealth and power insulated them from the consequences of their actions. Mellon appropriated millions, Gaetz committed statutory rape, because elites don't face the same consequences as you and me.

A system that engorges the bank accounts of those already rich, while depriving millions of access to health care is one that is ripe for a left wing populism. Focus on the Malefactors of Great Wealth and you can target both affordability AND Trump's deprivations with Epstein. They are the same damned thing.

The Dog That DID Bark

 Senator John Barrasso was tasked with defending the continued hiding of the Epstein Files. His argument was not about the merits of transparency - there are none - or protecting the victims - they want them released. His argument was that this was just a Democratic ploy to make Trump a lame duck. Now -technically - Trump IS a lame duck. He is barred from running for reelection in 2028. He has hinted that he might try and violate the 22nd Amendment, and it's always an open question whether this corrupted Court would let him get away with it. I've always felt that they wouldn't, because there is just no reading of the text that they could torture into a partisan decision.

What Barrasso is hinting at, to me, is the idea that once Trump sinks below a certain level of unpopularity, once he's (again) a massive anchor on the Republican Party, then and only then will they completely turn against him. The threat of a third term is about staying powerful and relevant. All lame ducks struggle to control the agenda of their last two years in office. Reagan slipped into dementia and the Iran Contra Scandal; Clinton had Lewinsky; Bush saw Iraq collapse, New Orleans drown and Social Security galvanize opposition.

Republicans have to be exhausted defending this guy. On Monday, you're defending his tariffs because they will be good for the economy and on Wednesday, he's saying he will repeal some of them to bring down the price of food. They can see the writing on the wall, but as long as Trump is "powerful" they have to kowtow to him. If the stuff in the Epstein Files is half as bad as it appears to be, that day hastens when the GOP stops defending him. When he truly becomes an addled old king wandering his Court screaming at paintings.