Is There Actually A Plan, Part II

 Yesterday, I asked if there was a plan undergirding Trump's declaration of economic warfare. Maybe it's Trump being a dumb donkey, surrounded by dumb donkeys who cannot stray one millimeter from Trump Thought. Trump wants tariffs, so we get tariffs. The stupidity and economic illiteracy of the whole project including tariffs on penguins is simply a byproduct of Trump's war on elites (people who can think good). Meanwhile, I also quoted Chris Murphy who thinks this is part of his authoritarian power grab. Companies and countries will have to kiss his ass to get tariff relief.

Richardson today quotes Eric Trump (Jeebus, that's nuts) who suggests that countries better quickly lineup to give Trump what he wants. This is a variation of Trump's war on states, law firms and universities. This, perhaps, mistakes how sovereign countries operate, though. We have Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accurately saying that "American leadership is over." This is Trump acting, as Richardson notes, as a mob boss extorting concessions from neighborhood businesses. 

Paul Campos argues, on the other hand, that there is no plan. Again, this is completely plausible. Trump seems to REALLY REALLY like tariffs for reasons that people can't quite understand. In his post, he relates someone from the financial world making the case that crashing the economy has to do with resetting the bond markets or some shit. Meanwhile, I got an email from my financial advisors. Let me quote:

Today’s equity market selloff and the accompanying rally in bonds is clearly a reaction to President Trump’s reciprocal tariff policy announced last night from the White House Rose Garden. The tariff program is wide and far reaching, which has caused much uncertainty with investors. Prior to the announcement, investors hoped for a more nuanced and tactical approach with more exceptions possibly.

However, we expect the tariff rate structure announced yesterday is merely a baseline for further negotiation, and that ultimately a more strategic and beneficial policy will evolve.

As it stands, there is a gap between higher costs and consumer prices, which will be incurred immediately, and any future benefits from the onshoring of factory production. And in the interim, without tariff relief, there will be pressure on both sales and input factor costs, which will shrink corporate profit margins and lower earnings per share.
...

With mid-term elections seemingly always around the corner, it will be incumbent on the Trump administration to demonstrate economic progress in the not-too-distant future. This makes us optimistic that tariff policy will necessarily evolve in a way that is pro-growth and supportive of US based companies in the longer-run, and that will become more obvious with refinements to policy.

They also make a point that the market was overvalued and some sort of correction was inevitable and why not have tariffs be the reason the market corrects. Ok...

The bolded parts are just another version of Campos' finance guy saying this is about resetting bond rates. It's all trying to sanewash Trump's insistent demand for tariffs. They treat Trump's actions as that of a "normal" politician operating under normal political impulses. Any normal politician would, in fact, want to make policy that is good for as many voters as possible. 

Here's the crux of the matter: We really don't know which it is. It could be that Trump simply loves loves loves tariffs. He's fixated on it as a way to return America to the McKinley administration. If and when he does negotiate tariff reductions, it will be because the markets are kicking the shit out of America, and he will declare victory. The manic instability of his actions are unlikely to placate nervous markets.

Or maybe he will try and leverage tariff reductions for certain policy demands, like he's doing with law firms. If the EU pressures Denmark to give us Greenland, we will drop tariffs on the EU. That's...insane, but it's not implausible that he thinks it will work. So he could have a plan, but's a really, really dumb one.

Or maybe he will have various companies come to him, pay him actual bribes and he will relent on tariffs that impact those companies. Again, completely plausible.

Krugman seems to fall on the Mad King side of the debate, and his arguments are persuasive. There is no deeper meaning to these tariffs, as the method underlying them is just incoherent nonsense. If you proceed from that starting point - the ridiculous formula they used to create other countries "tariffs", the last minute formulation of the whole thing - then ascribing to Trump some sort of 6 dimensional chess seems ridiculous. 

This, though, seems undeniable. The market has lost trillions of dollars of wealth in the past two days. What's more, Musk is out there firing Federal workers by the thousands and cutting off grants and funding that prop up all sorts of economic activities. The Atlanta Fed is predicting that we are effectively already in a recession, but since conservative ideology says that government jobs aren't real jobs, everything's cool? 

What's more, the dollar is falling in value. That's the opposite of what tariffs should do to the strength of the dollar. The reason it's falling is that Trump is a chaos monkey, flinging poo around the global financial system.

My financial advisors suggest that Trump will respond to negative feedback and correct course. My gut says that Trump feels he's a very stable genius who knows that a few months of pain will be worth it in the long run and fuck the little people anyways.

Is There Actually A Plan?

 During the first sojourn in Trumpistan, Josh Marshall and John Scalzi posited something called Trump's Razor. The basic formulation is:

According to Trump’s Razor: “ascertain the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts” and that answer is likely correct.

So if we look at the absolute brain damaged nonsense of Trump's tariffs yesterday, Trump's Razor suggests that Trump has a naïve and deeply wrong idea about trade and trade deficits; he feels he was thwarted from instituting his tariffs during the first administration; he is now unbound; he has declared war on global trade.

As an explanation, that really does fit the available facts. 

However, Richardson picks up on something Senator Chris Murphy has suggested. I'll just quote from her:

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted tonight that the tariffs make no economic sense because “[t]hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” Murphy suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”

Murphy warns that “[t]he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…[s]o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”

This is also plausible. Trump is using every lever - constitutional or otherwise, legal or not - to consolidate power in the White House. This is because his basic impulse is dictatorial. Using tariffs to crush the economy and in particular force major industries to bow to his fetid will could very well be the point of all this.

I am a bit skeptical, simply because Trump is not a man of subtle plans and long term stratagems. As Krugman notes, the bizarro formula they used to calculate "tariffs" (really just a weird version of the trade deficit in manufactured goods) may have simply been fed into Grok, Elon Musk's AI program. Krugman then goes on to say that these laughable numbers are yet another dominance display. Trump will make Republicans defend his absolute nonsense. 

Yesterday, before Trump's declaration of economic warfare, four Republican Senators voted to revoke Trump's tariffs on Canada, with Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul joining Murkowski and Collins to provide the 51 votes (it's likely DOA in the House). They did this because Canada launched targeted tariffs on bourbon. 

Here's where we come to the intersection of stupid or fascist. 

Canada knew how to target their response to the appropriate Senators. The EU, China, Japan, hell the rest of the world have people in decision making positions who are smart and respond to actual facts. Trump's forcing supporters to defend the rank lunacy of his tariffs is about dominance and about the fact that Trump is always right. Maybe he really IS going to use tariffs to try and force American industry to comply with his every whim. 

It doesn't mean he will succeed. 

The US markets are open. The NASDAQ is already down over 4%, the S&P down 3%. Consumer confidence is collapsing. The Atlanta Fed is predicting we are already in an overall contraction in the economy before he created his insane clown tariffs. 

As Jon Chait notes, dictators arise when what they do is popular. Putin took on the oligarchs and corruption (eventually replacing them with his own oligarchs and corruption). Orban tapped into Hungarian anger over migration. Erdogan, too, was popular at first.

I'll give Chait the last word:

Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

Chef's Kiss

 So much of Trump 2.0 can be ascribed to venomous hatred of anything that even has a whiff of non-Republicanness to it with a healthy dash of just rank stupidity thrown in.

Now we have Liberation Day which is proving to be both a repudiation of 80 years of largely consensual opinion on trade (because it's Democratic?) and it couldn't be any more stupider. I mean aside from the whole idea of a trade war in 2025. That's pretty stupid, too. So right off the bat? Really stupid.

When you get into the weeds, it just gets stupider and stupider.

Trump had a chart at his declaration of war on the global economy today. The chart was - wait for it - stupid as fuck. Let's start with the first thing people noticed. Trump's chart had one column which was what other countries' charged us in tariffs, the second was his new tariffs. The tariffs ostensibly levied against the US are complete and utter nonsense. Just absolute fabrications. No one could figure out how he arrived at the EU having a 39% tariff on US good. It's just wildly, wildly wrong (it's closer to 3%).

It seems that what he did was to simply calculate the trade deficit with that country and make it a percentage and call that a tariff. Is it a tariff? No it is not. It's not even close to being a tariff. And trade deficits are stupid, too. As someone put it, you run a "trade deficit" with the grocery store. You give them money and they give you stuff. You both do well by the arrangement. (Unless you shop at Whole Foods.)

Finally, the chart revealed just how fucking stupid the stupid people working for the stupid man really are. One of the countries running the mythical 10% trade surplus with us is apparently the Heard and McDonald Islands. They are uninhabited. He levied a 58% tariff on Norfolk Island. They have $2million in TOTAL exports. 

The people who made this chart for him are either brain damaged or they refuse to point out that the emperor is naked. What's more everything we know about this bloated sack of used hamburgers is that - having made these ridiculous statements - he simply will not admit that he is wrong. He cannot back down.

This, of course, is also really, really stupid. The sort of stupid shit stupid people do to cover up the fact that they just did something stupid. Trump was joking a few months ago about taking over Canada, and now there are gremlins in DC somewhere cooking up invasion plans. 

As of now the S&P 500 and NASDAQ futures are off 4% in futures trading. Shit is going to be ugly tomorrow.

Last year, the wife and I did some retirement planning. We are in great shape, they said, as long as there isn't a major depression right before you retire.  

Heh heh. Heh heh.

Green Sprouts

 The news wasn't earth shaking, but there were a few things yesterday that could give one hope. The encouraging but not wonderful news were the special elections results in Florida. Democrats were not able to win either seat, but they significantly increased their vote share in deeply Republican districts. If that trend simply stays the same, they will easily win control of the House and maybe even the Senate in 2026.

A caveat. Let's look at Florida 1. In November, Serial Sexual Predator Matt Gaetz won 274,000 votes compared to Gay Valimont's 140,000. That's 66% v 34%. Valimont ran again in the Special last night. She increased her share of the vote to 42%, but her actual vote total fell to 72,000. That's the problem comparing a special election in April to a general election in a presidential year. 

We see the same dynamic in Florida 6. In November, Mike Waltz won 66% of the vote with 284,000 votes. Fellow Republican Randy Fine saw his share of the vote decline to 56%. That's a pretty big movement, but Josh Weil, his Democratic challenger, actually got 60,000 fewer votes than the Democrat who ran against Waltz, James Stockton.

The margins got better, but these elections are not necessarily predictive of what will happen in November 2026. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that Trumpist voters don't show up when he's not on the ballot. That might not flip a deeply Red House seat in Florida, but a swing district in NY or Pennsylvania sure looks more achievable. 

If we look at the better news from Wisconsin, we see something more encouraging. In November, Trump won Wisconsin with 49.71% of the vote and 1,697,000 votes. Susan Crawford, the Democrat, won election to the Wisconsin Supreme Court with 55% of the vote and 1,301,000 votes. There about a 1,000,000 fewer votes than in November, but that's a far more robust voter turnout than we saw in the Florida elections.

Put another way, the actual swing state swung towards Democrats, and they did so despite Elon Musk trying his damnedest to buy that Supreme Court seat.

The other green sprout occurred in, of all places, the floor of the Senate. Cory Booker conducted the longest filibuster in history, erasing segregationist Strom Thurmond from the top spot. Yes, it was performative. No, it did nothing to erase the Republican advantage in either chamber. Still, Democratic rank and file voters are looking for something, anything that demonstrates some fight.

Democrats have been moribund, with a few exceptions. Booker's speech went viral. His hoarse voice at the end pleading for Americans and his colleagues to be equal to the challenge was really impressive.

Democrats need victories, however small, however symbolic. Wisconsin and Booker gave them two. Florida promised some hope. 

More Sanewashing

 The Times reported on a trade war game conducted by trade experts and economists. It starts with:

Last month, two dozen trade experts from the United States and other countries gathered at a Washington think tank to try to simulate what could happen if Mr. Trump moves ahead with his plan to impose punishing tariffs on America’s biggest trading partners.

OK. How did it go?

Just before lunch, the picture did not look good. The board held a sea of red cubes, indicating that the tariffs were escalating international tensions, destroying jobs and pushing up inflation.

But what happened next was surprising and, according to the participants, a hopeful sign.

Guess what. The people at the simulation reached trade deals that reduced barriers again.

Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the think tank who played the part of Mr. Trump, said the game suggested that “there is a path to victory for a U.S. tariff-first policy.” She cautioned this would be true only if the United States focused on reaching bilateral trade agreements, a strategy she called “viable” but “high risk.”

Here's the thing. As Paul Krugman notes, there is no method to his madness. Trump is enraptured with this trade war, he thinks the experts are all wrong and he is right. We might very well climb down from the coming trade war, but it will come at a huge economic price.

The Stupidity Inside The Stupidity

 We may or may not start a trade war tomorrow. We shall see whichever way the wind blows between Trump's ears. His ostensible reason for launching this trade war and why it's at least somewhat popular among people who don't really understand how international trade works (which, to be fair, is really complicated) is that we need more manufacturing jobs in the US.

As Paul Krugman explains, manufacturing jobs have been declining for reasons that have only partly to do with things like the lack of tariffs or the strength of the dollar. As industries become more technologically advanced, fewer workers produce more goods. He makes the apt comparison to farming. We have a tiny fraction of the workforce in agriculture, but we still produce a lot of food. 

It would be nice if journalists stopped trying to sanewash this nonsense and realize that Trump wants a trade war because he's a belligerent asshole, not because he wants to "make America great again."

Hate The Player AND The Game

 This profile of Steven Cheung feels like one of those texts where you see so much more clearly after having read it. Cheung is Trump's chief online attack dog. He's the source of much of the vile and disgusting combative statements issuing from the White House.

Yet, as you read it, you learn that - in person - Cheung is a nice, soft spoken guy. People like him. People including, it seems, media figures whom he will be kind to in person but savage on social media. There is an element of Trumpism that is all this kayfabe. Cheung was out of MMA if it wasn't obvious enough for you. It's all a big joke, don't you know.

This split between the person and the persona is how you can get media types to buy into the fact that the Trump White House doesn't really mean all the things they say. They are just pushing to see what they get away with. We have Trump's normally laughable suggestion that he might seek a third term. At the moment, I do think he's just pulling our collective legs and watching people freak out online.

In time, however, I think he will come to believe it. Just like how he was originally joking about Canada becoming the 51st state, but now seems to really, really hate Canada.

There are cartoonishly evil people in the White House like Stephen Miller, but Cheung is allowed to be someone else, someone not an outright Nazi, because he's polite in person.

You want to know what the DC press corpse is helping to usher us down the road to fascism? It's because they think they're in on the joke, and it's not a laughing matter at all.

Vibes Aren't New

 One of the things I see a lot on social media are people talking about film superlatives, but they've clearly never seen a film before 2000. That's because so many of the commenters are youngish and they lack a certain historical perspective. When discussing why Harris lost, there are a lot of attempts at explaining things that really lack that historical breath of vision.

This occurred to me as I read Krugman's argument that "MAGA is bad for business." The empirical argument is pretty sound that not only are Trump's economic policies bad in and of themselves, but the way he's going about these bad policies is perhaps even worse. The tariff yo-yo is not only bad because large tariffs are a bad policy, but his constant on again, off again modus operandi means that any purported benefits of tariffs - the onshoring of manufacturing - are not likely to happen, because you can't plan a month into the future, much less three years.

However, as Krugman notes in passing, Republicans are generally considered better for business than Democrats, despite all the economic data clearly showing the opposite. There are three pillars of the GOP's electoral appeal: they are good for business, they are serious about national defense and they are tough on crime. Only the latter is true, and that's largely a product of being horrible on civil liberties.

All of these are vibes that go back well before Trump. They have some small basis in Reagan's deregulation and benefitting from the post-inflationary boom of the '80s and his massive defense build up. However, they persist today despite copious evidence to the contrary.

Are Republicans better on national defense? I'd argue that Iraq was the greatest unforced error in the history of American defense policy, even more so than Vietnam. Vietnam was at least the illogical extension of a logical policy - containment. Iraq was just a massive own goal. Now we have an administration actively working to destroy the alliances that we created to make us and the world safer, while the morons in charge create massive gaping holes in our operational security. The use of Signal for the Houthi strikes was not the first or last time they have violated secure communications.

Are Republicans better for the economy? The massive deregulation and tax cuts led to the grueling recession of 1991-3. Bush explicitly created the deregulation and loose money policies that led to 2008. Now Trump - who has inherited two booming economies from Obama and Biden respectively - is actively working to destroy that.

In other words, the actual Republican policies, when looked at objectively, are contrary to how people think about Republicans. Yet these vibes persist.

From a political point of view, this clearly matters. Yglesias' blind faith that people actual look at policies is present in his defense of Obama's record with the banking industry after 2008. He argues, somewhat persuasively, that Obama tried to bring a few cases against bankers, but they were all moot because the law doesn't really allow easy prosecutions of white collar crime. Therefore, passing Dodd-Frank was a way bigger deal than symbolic prosecutions that would have failed.

The problem is that we did bail out the banks and not the people who lost their homes - often through no fault of their own. Banks were paying out bonuses by Christmas of 2009, while average Americans struggled to stay afloat. Whatever the merits of the policy - and saving the banking system was essential - the vibes of "Democrats only care about the banks" was at the heart of the Tea Party revolt.

When people talk about Harris' loss, it is difficult to avoid coming back to "vibes." Objectively, the Biden performance on the economy was the best in the world. You can measure it compared to other countries and he did the best he could with the facts on the ground. However, it was not the actual inflation rate that had people upset, but the fact that prices had risen (bad) and they weren't going to go back down (good actually, deflation is bad) and the increase they had seen in their wages was not Biden's work (arguable). Inflation, as an economic condition, was largely over by late 2023, with some exceptions. The vibes surrounding inflation were, however, still bad.

None of this is say there couldn't have been better choices made by Democrats from 2021-2024. Certainly Merrick Garland's slow rolling of Trump's prosecutions looks like a massive, perhaps fatal mistake. The Harris campaign probably should never have stopped talking about Project 2025.

Still, vibes persist beyond the ability of evidence to make a dent in them. There is no media strategy like going on Joe Rogan or social media outreach than can easily divest people of their prior beliefs.

This is why embracing FAFO is still the Democrats best bet. Trump and Republicans are fucking things up. The Signal scandal has left a mark, and we are seeing massive anger at townhalls directed at Republicans who have abandoned their oaths of office to supplicate before Trump.

Again, I don't like "rooting" for hard times, but only hard times will drive a wedge between people and their a priori beliefs; beliefs that have no roots in reality. 

Tesla Stock

 I skimmed this Motley Fool article about the potential for Tesla's stock price to rebound. The basic argument seems to be that, historically, stocks that fluctuate like this usually bounce back.

Now, I'm NOT a finance guy. Stonk picking ain't my thing. However, I've spent some time studying economics from a non-mathematics perspective; I look at the people and ideas that underlay all the very fancy math that finance people use. I'm not a quant, I'm a qualitative guy.

So, with that caveat out of the way let's look at Tesla. The Price/Earnings ratio basically compares how much revenue the company has to the price of its stock. As I write this, it's Price/Earnings ratio is around 130. Generally speaking, the P/E ration is preferred to be about 20-25. If it's under that, chances are that stock is undervalued. If it's above that, the stock is either in a bubble or - sometimes - it represents hopes for future growth.

It's not really unusual for a tech company to have some insane P/E. Apple's P/E is around 34, I don't think that means Apple is overvalued. Even a high growth, speculative stock like Nvidia is at 37. How in the holy hell can you look at 130 and think the stock is anything but wildly overvalued.

I concede that looking at P/E is very old fashioned, and you would have missed out on some real buy low/sell high opportunities if that's all you looked at. On the other hand, it's very real.

So at one point, Tesla was selling for 488 and now it's at 260, AND STILL THE P/E IS TOO HIGH. The assumption has always been that Musk some sort of Tony Stark Supergenius who is going to write the future, like Henry Ford and Edison/Tesla combined. It is difficult to look at DOGE and conclude that this guy has a handle on competence. How do you look at him swinging a chainsaw around at CPAC and think, "yeah, this guy is the future."

The real question is not why the price of Tesla has fallen. In my mind, the question is why hasn't in fallen further?

This is yet another way in which Musk overlaps with Trump. He is likely another example of the Golden Age of Fraud we are in. My question is to what degree are foreign entities, but especially governments, propping up this stock? His sales are tanking. He's clearly distracted. He's likely addicted to ketamine. He's showing his ass daily. 

Tesla has always made somewhat crappy cars with really awesome batteries. The assumption was that Tesla would replace legacy automakers. Instead, we are seeing legacy automakers begin to capture more and more of the EV market. Tesla as a brand is increasingly associated with a guy who makes Nazi salutes while campaigning for AfD. 

The stock price should be lower.

But, if I'm China, wouldn't it be worth propping up the stock in return for whatever information Musk could give us? For access to Starlink? This is Musk the Overmighty Subject being a massive security risk. 

Here's the other thing. Musk's purchase of Twitter was kind of pegged to the health of that Tesla stock. He financed so much of the purchase off the back of the elevated price of Tesla that if it dips too low, all of that debt - which was backed by Tesla stock - becomes a massive problem. At this point, who are what is propping up Tesla stock is preventing banks from doing something they REALLY don't want to do, which is repossess Twitter, which is itself a largely money-losing venture.

Here's my concern and my question. Tesla's stock price is absolutely critical for the rest of Musk's empire, but especially Twitter, which is massively important for his fragile little ego. Musk has carved a really important role for himself with Starlink and SpaceX that has dire implications for national security. Is anyone looking at foreign governments striking deals with Musk to prop up his overvalued stock price?

Since this is Trumpistan and the Golden Age of Fraud, I have to assume that no one is. However, markets ultimately figure this stuff out.

Make It Make Sense

 Yesterday, RFK Jr's brain worm forced out the head of vaccine regulations, Dr. Peter Marks, in favor of someone who was is not a doctor and was in fact cited for practicing medicine without a license. David Geier is, of course, a vaccine "skeptic" who thinks vaccines cause autism. 

Vaccines do not cause autism.

Meanwhile, Trump is rolling back regulations with regards to mercury pollution. Mercury - like most heavy metals - is a neurotoxin. It absolutely causes birth defects and brain damage. 

So...fuck I can't believe this is real life...Trump is firing a doctor to put in place a charlatan to push the lie that vaccines hurt your kids, while simultaneously allowing industry to pump an extremely poisonous chemical into the air and water.

Again, if his sole purpose was destroy America, what would he be doing differently?

Government By Cable News Host

 Trump has appointed something like 23 Fox News personalities to his government. I did not know that there were 23 Fox News personalities in total.

However, when you think it about, this all makes sense. The egregious incompetence of a Pete Hegseth makes perfect sense, if your main job qualification is to go in the TeeVee and rant about the libtards so that the senile old fool watching from the Oval Office can get the slightest tingle in his withered loins.

The whole cruelty is the point schtick is about what plays on Fox. Fox is about punching down, about "no war but the culture war." The performative nature of so many of these illegal acts is partly about Project 2025's "move fast, break things" tactics, but it's also about playing well on Fox. Picking fights with Canada and Denmark/Greenland is about the bullying climate of NewsCorp. 

If you can shitpost or play "right wing grievance MadLibs" then you, too, could be the Undersecretary of State for South Asia or something similar.

Why are they stupid? Why are they cruel? Because it's all about how it plays on a network dedicated to stupid cruelty. 

(Somewhat off topic, this Atlantic piece on the Murdochs is just...woof. What a moral sewer. Still, hopefully Rupert dies soon.)

The Breaking Point For The Deep State

 The reckless abandonment of America's allies and global role in promoting peace and security has got to have people within America's national security apparatus freaking right the hell out. As I said this morning, we are in the grips of a culture war jihad that is taking a scorched earth approach to all of our institutions. The idea being that they can recreate America along their largely theological lines - with theology mixed in with oligarchy and white supremacy. It's all one big stew.

If Hollywood was writing this script, there would be a cabal of CIA, FBI and military figures plotting to overthrow Trump. The precedent would be the middle to late Roman Empire, when the Praetorian Guards would periodically kill the empire and replace him with someone else (who they might later kill). The fundamental check on the emperor's power were the swords of his personal bodyguards.

I should stop to say that this is really, really unhealthy for a Republic (not that Rome was a republic at that point).

However, Elon Musk is not elected to anything, and as Josh Marshall has been explaining, Musk has historical parallels with the "overmighty subjects" of the late medieval, early modern period in Europe. These were nobles whose power and wealth rivaled the monarchs, the sovereign. The rise of the modern state in Europe was partly the eradication of these overly powerful challenges to the sovereign. 

Musk's control of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Twitter and his attempts to buy elections outright have put him beyond the reach of laws. Trump, too, has largely exceeded the reach of laws at this point, but Trump - inexplicably - is still in the mid to high 40s in job approval. Musk, however, is increasingly unpopular, and he lacks the cultish hold over tens of millions of Americans. 

What's more, we have a situation where Musk (apparently) went to the Pentagon for a briefing on US war plans for China - all while having meetings with people like Putin and Xi. 

The Signal scandal would pale in comparison to the revelation that Musk is trading American secrets for access to Chinese goods and markets. The Signal scandal also makes clear that normal means of holding people accountable are defunct for the moment. At what point would the so-called Deep State feel compelled to move against this "overmighty subject?"

No War But The Culture War

 Early in Trump 1.0, Adam Serwer offered a pithy line that still encapsulates a lot of Trumpism: The cruelty is the point. Now, as we find ourselves between the hammer and anvil of Trump 2.0, Jon Chait offers a new maxim: There is no war but the culture war.

Ostensibly keen observers of American politics are baffled by the chaos of Trump's tariff zig zags, the lawlessness of his Executive Orders and his contempt for the global order that America has established and preserved for almost a century.

Richardson today offers a nice summary of WHY the priority of Trump - and especially the Brown Shirts that surround him - is to dismantle everything good that America does. She returns, as one should, to Project 2025. (The news media's failure to adequately cover this was perhaps its biggest failure of the last election.)

It's actually JD Vance who offers up the rationale for this assault on basic decency.

In place of those structures, today’s MAGA leaders intend to create their own new institutions, shaped by their own people, whose ideological purity trumps their abilities. As Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, he and his ilk believe that American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

This is the crux of the matter. These are not "conservatives"; they are counterrevolutionary extremists. The point of Project 2025 and everything they have done so far is to overwhelm opposition and create so many targets for this outrage that they overwhelm everyone and everything.

This is not popular. Not even with Trump voters. There's a sense that they might be getting just how unpopular they are. They've withdrawn Elise Stefanik's nomination to be UN Ambassador. They did so because they legitimately fear losing the special election in Florida to replace Mike "Wanna Join My Secret Group Chat" Waltz. Trump won that district by 30 points. That would mean Stefanik's district is up for grabs. 

Losing the House this early would be extremely damaging to their plans. However, as Josh Marshall has often noted, the federal government is only one locus of power. The states are another, the people a third. There is no guarantee that the American people will continue to let the republic end to placate a handful of religious extremists. 

My dad and I would argue politics all the time. He was a Southern Democrat who moved right, and he would complain about why the Democrats were so focused on culture war stuff like abortion and gay rights. That sort of person isn't going to like the same dynamic from Republicans.

Yes, the Signal Scandal is bad and has legs. However, the markets are freaking out and Americans are waking to the fact that Trump lied to them again. Trump is not an engine of American Greatness; he is a chaos agent acting to destroy everything that is even close to something that might be considered "the other side" of the culture war.

Who's In Charge?

 Woven through some of the commentary about the Signal Scandal are questions about what the hell Trump was up to during all this. This was a principals discussion about using military force. People were going to and did die. Maybe Trump should get off the golf course and social media and be present for this. Instead, we have Pee Wee German (Stephen Miller) saying that "As I heard it, the president was clear: green light." 

When he's been asked about the whole thing, his responses are the usual meandering Trump bullshit word salad. It feels almost like this has been baked into coverage: Trump will say some stupid shit and the press will interpret it like Roman Augers looking at bird entrails. Meanwhile, four US soldiers on a training mission in Lithuania have gone missing, and Trump was apparently not even briefed on it.

Concerns about Joe Biden's age were not meritless. In particular, Biden's preexisting difficulty with a speech impediment was clearly worsening as he aged. Trump's preexisting difficulty with being a dumb stupid fucking donkey has also clearly worsened as he's aged.

Luckily, the hamfisted ways that these absolute bandbags have handled this scandal has allowed the press to keep the story alive. A fundamental hack that Trump has enjoyed over the media is that they are always hungry for new "content" and he could be relied upon for a new scandalous act every 24 hours. A tough thing to do for Trump's opponents have been to focus on just one thing and hammer that. Now, we have the original scandal, the lying about it before Congress and now legitimate questions about who is actually running things at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Right on cue, Trump has resurrect his tariff two-step and also decided to fire a a bunch of people at HHS and, oh, what the hell, let's gut FEMA. That's the Trump churn we knew was coming. However, the stupidity and obvious venality of the scandal and the cover-up has insured that it's staying at the worst "meme-worthy."  (Oh, the memes. The glorious memes.)

A competent administration run by competent people and helmed by a competent president would've handled the original story this way: "This is obviously of great concern to the president, and we will get to the bottom of it." Then you fire a few people and convene a Blue Ribbon panel on communications security that largely confirms existing protocols (that Waltz and Hegseth violated). 

Instead, the fact is that authoritarianism is brittle means that they cannot allow ANY weakness to be shown. If they were to throw Waltz overboard, that would just mean that Dear Leader made a mistake and that can't even be conceived of. So, we get the recurring Feats of Strength that dig deeper and deeper into obvious lying that even some people on Faux (some) can't stomach. 

Meanwhile, Democrats need to amplify the aspect of this scandal that calls into question who is actually in charge at the White House. Trump is a doddering old fool, but he's also extremely prickly. I confess, I thought he would have a falling out with Musk already, because they are both show boating narcissists. It is in the national interest that Pete Hegseth not be Defense Secretary. Getting Trump to fire him should be a priority and suggesting that Hegseth is doing dumb shit behind his back could be the lever to get Trump to actually fire the guy. 

Attack Trump's pride.

It does very much seem like Trump is completely checked out. He won and avoided prison, but he's never had any real appetite for doing the hard work of governing and, especially, understanding stuff that you need to understand to govern. 

They basically prop him at a desk with a bunch of poorly crafted Executive Orders to sign in much the same way you give a toddler and iPad to play with so they will be quiet and let you finish your work destroying the American State.

"Trump is a senile old man who doesn't know that his Cabinet is off planning wars on private apps, because he's a senile old man who is old and senile." His reaction will, of course, to be to overreact. 

Change the game. We aren't winning the current one. 

Rumblings

 It's a small thing, but might oaks from small acorns grow. Yesterday, a Democrat won a state Senate seat in Pennsylvania. Trump won that district by 15%.

We have some special elections coming up. These are mostly in deep Red districts, but not so deep red that they can necessarily cover up a 15% swing. Winning either or ideally both of the special elections will wake up quite a few Republicans in the House and maybe even the Senate that while they have been worried about keeping their jobs safe from primary challenges, they should also worry about losing the general.