Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

 Kirk's assassination was immediately pinned on the Left by Republicans, because Republicans have moved so far from a deference to actual facts that waiting even a day or two is irrelevant. Why constrain yourself and wait, when you have a political movement that routinely and repeatedly lies about known events? 

The behavior by the media is more troubling. It's not just the weird hagiography you get from people like Ezra Klein, rather it was reporting falsehoods from a politicized FBI without waiting to check them. The early reports of "pro trans markings" on the bullets were either wildly wrong or a misinterpretation. Meanwhile, there are reports that Robinson himself has said he's part of the Groyper movement. As someone said, Kirk should be seen as a victim of gang violence between his faction and Fuentes's.

The logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc seems to have warped press coverage. Because Kirk was an important conservative voice his death must be a boon to liberals and the left, therefore the liberals and the left killed him. As some calmed voices pointed out, most political violence comes from the right. What's more, the sordid deep swamps of things like 4Chan and Groypers have all been quietly erased from coverage in fear of appearing "unbalanced" or Dog forbid "woke." 

The inevitable corrections that will follow - if Robinson's leaked confession is true and not another internet rumor - do not erase the first narrative that often defines these moments. The power of a logical fallacy is that it often overrides more reasoned reflection. This is something Trump has really seized on. If you can lie before the truth is established, then the lie will have grabbed hold and created the dynamic of competing truths rather than truth vs falsehood.

It is difficult to catalogue all the ways in which institutions are failing us and have failed us in the Trump Restoration and Vengeance Tour. The failures of the news media are high on the list.

In Other News...

 There are a number of ironies surrounding Charlie Kirk's death. (He was being asked a question on gun violence when he was shot, for instance.) One of them is the baying of Trump and Trumpets about law and order. This is rich. Trump is, after all, a convicted felon.

The contempt for the law permeates so much of Trump's actions. Now we have a perfect example of Trump's rampant lawlessness: His intention to remove Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve Governor.

The case for removing her was that she falsified mortgage documents for tax purposes. Subsequent investigations have shown that members of the Executive Branch have done this.

Recent revelations show that Cook did NOT claim her second residence as a primary residence (the "crime" that she was accused of). 

Removing a Fed Governor is a startling aggregation of power in the Presidency. The Fed is walled off from this sort of pressure by design, and even the Roberts Court, when it gave Trump power to fire other protected members of the Executive Branch, denied him the power to fire Federal Reserve Governors.

Again, this would have been a major scandal before Trump. Like so many things, Trump's vulgar disdain for democratic checks and balances and his assumption that laws don't apply to him only his enemies is a fraught moment in American democracy. Just as fraught, I would argue, as some Groyper, 4Chan asshole shooting a public speaker.

The Shooter Was Turned In By His Family

 The FBI didn't "get him" because they were running around spreading false shit about trans stuff on bullet casings. 

There will be a lot of bullshit, lies and misconceptions in the next 24 hours as they piece this guy together and figure out why he did it. The early returns appear to show at...wait for it!...highly confusing set of beliefs and actions. There are rumors he's a registered Republican who donated to Trump's campaign. There are rumors he's a groyper, which is a fringe neo-Nazi group led by Nick Fuentes and famous for the Pepe the Frog meme. Fuentes and Kirk were enemies for a time.

We see all the usual signs: excessively online, too many guns and a valorization of gun culture, at least a little alienated.

What we do not see is a trans person, a blue-haired bisexual barista, a cringey liberal wine mom, a Democratic official, an immigrant or a racial minority. 

I would not be at all surprised if we find out he had some left wing views on something like wealth inequality. Horseshoe theory and all that. However, the disgusting smear by just about every member of the Trump Administration that this was "radical left lunatics" is - at first blush - completely untrue.

UPDATE: It seems that there's a very, very good chance that this guy was indeed a Groyper. My worry is that a politicized FBI will not allow that conclusion to reach the living rooms of the average American.

Not The Same

 We still don't know who assassinated Charlie Kirk, and given the rank incompetence of Kash Patel's FBI, we might not catch the guy. At this point, we have to hope some local police make the case. The leak of lies that there were "trans markings" on the bullets shows where the priorities are from the top of the FBI and whatever remains of the rank and file after Trump's purges.

As Marshall points out, the simple fact is that the MAGA Right is deeply steeped in and tolerant of violence. The obvious example is January 6th, but Trump's language is always infused with violent imagery and threatening language. That does not limit his appeal in certain segments of the Right, but increases it. The poll Marshall cites says that only 39% of Trump supporters agree with the statement that political violence has no place in American society. For non-Trumpers, that number is 66%. 

There have obviously been cases of left wing violence, but the volume and intensity from the right is higher across the board. The Butler would-be assassin was not apparently driven by political beliefs, but the whacko in Florida who tried but never got off a shot has some amorphous left wing views but is mostly just nuts. (He's representing himself in his trial that just started and it's going about as well as you might expect.)

Just recently, we had the assassination and attempted assassination of two Democratic state legislators in Minnesota and the fire bombing of the governor of Pennsylvania's house. 

Because the appeal to violence is so much more prevalent on the right, we really do have to hope that Kirk's assassin has either crazy views or far right views (but I repeat myself), not so much for partisan advantage, but because it will derail (though not end) the calls from violence on the right. 

It's Utah. It's not just Utah but Provo, which is REALLY conservative. Idaho ain't that far away. The shooter clearly was adept with a rifle to hit Kirk in the neck from that distance. He's a white dude. The only clear sign that he might be to the left is the target. Kirk, however, had enemies to his right. 

In much the same way that Butler was perpetrated by some cookie cutter school shooter type which led to Trumpists being somewhat impotent in their anger, we had better hope that whoever shot Kirk is not a dyed in the wool leftist, because Trump and his myrmidons are baying for blood and perfectly willing to engage in slaughter in their holy war against pronouns and windmills.

The Gathering Dark

 The assassination of Charlie Kirk is morally abominable. He was, it must be said, an asshole provocateur, and he was literally trolling his questioner with a smirking remark about gun violence when he was shot. This in no way justifies anyone killing him.

There were a few voices online who went for Edgy Internet Asshole at his death. Essentially every elected Democrat or prominent Democrat spoke out in horror at the events in Utah. I doubt that will matter, as Trump has already vowed vengeance on Kirk's killer or killers, despite not knowing what the motives of the shooter were, as the shooter is still at large.

Trump and others have escalated the rhetoric of violence around this act for two reasons. The first is that they tend to do that reflexively. Trump's every instinct is to attack and dehumanize. His opponents are "scum" and "animals" not people with whom he disagrees. 

The second is that they see this to their advantage. One commentators lacking in rudimentary self-awareness said that Democrats were to blame for calling Republicans Nazis, and then immediately said that they could use this as their Reichstag Fire to destroy their enemies.

The increasing sense that the other side is not just wrong but inhuman is impossible to maintain in a civic democracy. It is also difficult to avoid, when the other side is engaging in behavior that seems antithetical to everything you believe. However, the job of an American President should be to calm things down, and we only have a Republican President, not one interested in healing or bringing together the diverse peoples of this country.

We will no doubt see some Edgy Internet Asshole become the True Voice of Democrats when portrayed on Faux News. But hopefully we find the assassin soon. My guess is their politics will be weirder and more confusing than we imagine right now.

UPDATE: I don't think quoting Kirk's actual words constitute being an Edgy Internet Asshole.

This Is Terrible

 I know. It requires context.

Russia has made a major encroachment into Polish airspace. This has happened in small ways before, but this is clearly a major event. It might have been caused by drones getting "disoriented" by Ukrainian electronic warfare efforts, or it might have been just a stupid mistake. However, it's Putin, so maybe he's probing the resolve of a NATO that cannot rely on the United States under Donald Trump. 

The Poles, it must be noted, are not shy about thinking the worst about Russia, and they only do so because of centuries of history.  The only time Poland and Russia got along was when Russia dominated Poland and denied them self-government.

What happens now? Poland has invoked Article IV, which requires NATO to take up the issue. What will Putin's Bitch in the Oval Office do?

More to the point, where is Putin's head right now? Presuming that this was NOT a deliberate provocation, the problematic logic of dictatorship is that he cannot admit a problem. We see this all the time in Trump, but it's a consistent thread throughout dictatorial rule: The Leader Is Never Wrong. Maybe he sacks some people as scapegoats; I don't know if he can blame it on Ukrainian electronic warfare, because that might require him to acknowledge that the Ukrainian defenses are improving. What he absolutely cannot do is say, "Hey, wow, our bad. We're really sorry."

I think we've all been disgusted by the saccharine sycophancy of Trump's Cabinet meetings and the lapdog nature of the Republican Congress. It's appalling. 

It's also dangerous. 

Leaders have to be able to receive contradictory input. They can't just get there and suck up the praise. This is the fundamental advantage of democracies. Trump's brittle ego and vindictive nature has ended the ability of those around him to give him bad news. Putin is in the same boat.

There is a school of pundits who praise dictatorships for their ease of action. "Look at what China has done in high speed rail." The problem for dictatorships is not whether they can make hay while the sun shines. The problem is that they will refuse to acknowledge that it's raining.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

 Both of my muses, Krugman and Richardson, write about the possibility that Trump and his legions will end American democracy in the next fifteen months. Neither, I fear, are being alarmist. With Trump, there is always the dynamic of "kidding on the square" where he throws out some outlandish thing - annexing Greenland? - and then sees what happens. With the Greenland thing, he hasn't followed through on that and his attention wandered to other things, but his current outward musings about using emergency powers in American cities seems to be a clear precursor to interfering in the 2026 midterms.

Trump knows that if he does not radically disrupt the democratic process, he will lose the House and possibly the Senate, even with a favorable map. As he did in 2020 election, he is musing about extralegal measures to make this happen. The difference is that in 2020 there were a handful of Republicans willing to stand up to him. That is simply not the case now. 

Was the ICE raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia a warning sign to Governor Brian Kemp? Maybe. If you cross Trump, you will feel his wrath. (This is one way that Trump's death and replacement with Vance would - I think - be an improvement. Vance has no principles, but he lacks that feral vindictiveness that is the core of Trump's being.)

Trump is manifestly unpopular. Trump's sinking deeper into the Epstein scandal. The economy is weakening. This makes him more dangerous, not less. Something I hope that Democratic Senators understand.

All Of The Strawmen

 Yglesias makes a point about how "National Conservatism" is deeply un-American. In his piece, though, he nods at a reality that hampers Democrats. He does a reflexive attack on some Leftist frame of American history as being representative of Democratic politicians. This is the same frame that has a questionnaire that Harris filled out about Trans rights becoming the entirety of her governing priorities. Even more so, it's taking something a fringe academic might have said and making it the Democratic Party platform.

The asymmetry here is that at this moment the very most extreme fringes of "movement conservatism" are pretty much running the Republican Party. Yes, the trend of calling every little thing racist definitely blunts the impact of that word. However, the actual GOP is pretty damned racist right now.  

To make your point to be about how Democratic politicians have to embrace American patriotism is just a weird place to plant your flag in September 2025.

From Danger To Danger

 This moment in American history is rife with danger, and not always from Trump's current actions and the current state of our weakened and battered democracy. What he has done in the seven and a half months in office is really bad, but if every Republican in Congress were to be killed in a tragic blimp accident where Trump and Vance were piloting, then we could probably recover fairly quickly. As Adam Smith said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation, which means that we can absorb a lot of terrible things, but we can still bounce back. 

There is not, however, an infinite amount of ruin in a nation.

Krugman, for instance, lays out the potentially catastrophic impact of politicizing the Federal Reserve. Trump's - and really any Republican's - budget is a fucking mess. It pays for tax cuts with deficit spending. Cynically, this means that when Democrats regain power, one of the things that they have to do is rein in the fiscal mismanagement that they inherited. This means they can't do all the things they might like. 

Side note: Our town has almost always been run by Republicans, and they incurred a massive debt to the nearby city who supplies our water. Waterbury raised their rates after building a new water treatment plant, raised the rates for everyone to whom they supplied water and we just decided not to pay the new rates. Two court cases later, and we have to issue a bond to cover tens of millions in debt. People are pissed and this could lead to Democrats winning control of the Town Council...just in time to face the massive tax increases needed to pay off the bonds. This is GOP governance 101.

If Trump succeeds in politicizing the Fed, then he could really punish the American economy in ways that could take a decade to recover from. If we take the inflation of the 1970s as an example, it took a punishing recession to finally snuff it out. For both fiscal and political reasons, Trump wants to inflate the currency. It will make the debt smaller and give a boost to a faltering economy. The problem is that we have a faltering economy because of inflationary uncertainty. Reducing interest rates will add fuel to the inflationary fires that were created by tariffs and deportations.

The other important factor is that - despite his wild and easily falsifiable boasting - Trump is becoming more and more unpopular. A new NBC poll has him at 43-57 approval. 

If you dive into the actual policy stuff, he has approval rates of 41% in trade and significantly 39% on inflation. Even on border security, he's at 47%, and that's his strongest issue. The two most important issues for Americans are the economy and threats to democracy, followed by health care. In other words, these are all issues which Democrats could see people turning to them, if Trump's actions tank the economy. When you break down the economy, it's inflation that has people most concerned. 

For that matter, 78% of Americans support vaccines. This is a poll of over 30,000 people. This is a high confidence poll. We are already seeing slackening in demand and economic uncertainty lead to an uptick in unemployment and employment for recent college graduates is terrible. 

The reason this is bad - beyond the fact that it is prima facie bad - is that as Trump becomes more desperate, he will take more and more desperate actions. Yesterday, he seemed to threaten war against Chicago, which should be impeachable. JD Vance applauded the war crimes that America seemed to commit this past week against that Venezuelan boat. Needing to retain the support of MAGA as his support elsewhere collapses, he will double and triple down in illegality and cruelty. 

"Democratic backsliding" is helped by the autocrat being popular. Putin was at first. Orban was. Erdogan was. By the time they destroy the last few remnants of democracy and become unpopular, it's too late. The good news is that Trump is not popular. The bad news is that this will likely accelerate his most lawless instincts. 

Epstein, Epstein, Epstein

 Josh Marshall has read some reports and come up with an interesting theory. We had Mike Johnson's bizarre statement that Trump was actually the informant that worked with the FBI to take Epstein down.

What?

Marshall looked at Michael Wolff's previous interviews about what he claims to know about Epstein. I'll just let him cook:

Wolff said that Epstein suspected that Trump was the guy who ratted him out to the authorities. So maybe some version of Johnson’s claim isn’t that far-fetched. But of course this isn’t actually exonerating at all. In fact, it implicates Trump about as badly as anything we’ve heard to date. You can’t tell what you don’t know. Trump was in a position to rat out Epstein because he knew all about his operation and had for years.

So, why did Trump rat out Epstein? Especially if it implicated him?

The timeline looked like this:

Epstein was trying to buy a South Florida estate. He brought Trump along to see it one time. A short time later Epstein found out that Trump had gone behind his back and placed a higher and ultimately successful bid on the property. He’d snatched it out from under him with a much higher bid. The problem was that Trump’s entire empire in 2004 was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It made no sense that Trump was coming up with $41 million to buy this property. Epstein suspected that Trump was acting as a front for a Russian oligarch as a money-laundering scheme. And in fact Trump did purchase and flip the estate two years later to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, or a profit of over $50 million dollars.

Epstein was pissed for his own reasons (he wanted the estate). But he also suspected the money laundering scheme. So he threatened Trump that he would bring the whole thing out into the open through a series of lawsuits. Right about this same time authorities got a tip about Epstein’s activities which started the investigation that led to his eventual 2008 plea deal.

Now, if this is true, then we have a number of stories converging:

- Trump knew about Epstein's crimes, because he was at least somewhat a participant. At the very least, he knew about them for years and only came forward when he was trying to kneecap Epstein.

- We are pretty sure that he was laundering money for the Russians. This could be damning in its own way. You're basically tying together the "Epstein hoax" and the "Russia hoax" in one big ugly ball. 

Whatever is in those files has certainly got Donnie spooked.

Lighting Money On Fire

 There are a lot of ways to oppose the actions of the Trump administration, because they are so indefensible. "They're wasting money" seems too mild considering the full bore assault on constitutional governance, but still...

Two examples of simply lighting money on fire:

- The idiotic move to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. This seems less than it appears (as so much of Trump's blather is) but it will still cost millions of dollars. If Congress approves it, it will cost billions.

- They are trying to kill a couple of satellites that report on climate change for the obvious reason that they don't want to report on climate change. This will basically flush away the millions of already spent money.

There are a thousand ways that Trump is causing problems with the national fiscal situation. His OBBB will explode the debt, which will require massive interest payments. His cratering the economy will then explode the debt even more.

Still, directly spending millions, even billions, on bullshit vanity culture war shit would seem to be a way to appeal to so-called fiscal conservatives.

He Can't Hide

 Trump may have fired the BLS head, but the bad news is still the bad news.

There is certainly the "vibes out there" of a poor labor market, especially for young college graduates. I've written ad nauseum about the demand constraints that Trump is imposing on the economy. If you A) put tariffs on lots of goods B) reduce the labor force via deportations C) introduce massive uncertainty in the economy D) hammer tourism as a sector by being an absolute prick to the rest of the world E) prioritize the rich over the working classes with your fiscal policy F) fire large numbers of public sector workers..

...then you should probably not be surprised by slackening overall demand leading to less hiring. 

Krugman noted something called Dornbusch's Law: The crisis takes longer to happen than you can possibly imagine, then happens quicker than you can possibly imagine."

Just saying.

Lethal Stupidity

 IRL friends or long time readers may know that I had a very serious case of Covid during the Delta wave. I was hospitalized, then went home, then re-hospitalized, then airlifted to Mass General, then nearly sent to the ICU before I spent three days laying prone to avoid being intubated. For whatever reason, when I got the Pfizer vaccine I did not have the typical reaction of feeling like shit for a few days as my immune system adapted. Since then, I've had a few cases that have responded well to Paxlovid, but today I got my booster because Covid sucks and because it has a serious impact on my colleagues when I'm out of work for a week.

When I went in, I had to have an "existing medical condition" in order to qualify, since I'm not 65. I guess luckily I have borderline high cholesterol, so they gave me the shot.

As we know, Florida has ended required vaccines for school children; RFK has crippled the CDC and attacked the idea of vaccines in general. All of this was, of course, predictable. RFK is a vaccine skeptic who lied to the Senate in his confirmation hearing and then did exactly what he always wanted to do: eviscerate arguably the most successful health measure in human history - rivalled only by antibiotics. 

(Let's pour one out for irony, as Florida is saying that people shouldn't have vaccine mandates because "their body, their choice" as they strip abortion rights away from people.)

This extends beyond Covid. Childhood vaccines - a literal health care miracle - will be reduced in uptake in red states like Florida. This will lead to a return in measles and many older people have declining immunity from their own childhood vaccines, so they will be vulnerable. Measles, mumps, rubella will all spread from Florida to other states as herd immunity declines. It would be just if this was simply a case of FAFO, but people who can't take vaccines or people with compromised immunity or people with reduced immunity because it's been decades since they were vaccinated are all at risk.

I'd like to believe that there will be consequences for people like RFK but the best I can hope for is that he dies of a treatable disease, because he won't face consequences in our corrupted court system.

Not Dead, But Not Well

 Trump is not dead. He appeared (late) to a press avail flanked by his minions in the Oval. Given his atypical disappearance, there was perhaps more parsing of his words and actions than usual. He was not drooling, but it was still deeply unhinged. Of course, most of his public utterances are just...nuts. He sounds like a fourth grader who was called on in class, but who didn't do the reading. The absolute blathering stupidity is just breathtaking for those with eyes to see. Trump's feral grip on his supporters and the presumption of expertise he has as a "business man" has hidden the fact that two-thirds of what he says is either false or bonkers or both.

On policy, we already have one state compact on vaccines on the Pacific Coast (and I hope soon in the Northeast). Richardson notes the fact that Courts are starting to be heard on a lot of his lawless actions and it's going poorly for Stephen Miller's plans for a fully fascist America. Epstein stuff exploded in the House today.

I try to live in a guarded hope for the future. My gut and experience tells me that there is a reckoning coming for the corruption and incompetence. I was watching the Spike Lee documentary on Hurricane Katrina, and it just feels like we are ripe for some catastrophe that will be made worse by the idiots running our government.

What seems especially clear is that Trump's diminished physically and cognitively. Maybe the media won't report on it, but it sure seems apparent to the naked eye. As that happens, it empowers people like Miller and Russell Vought. And they truly are odious creatures whose ideas are toxic. This past week suggests that Trump - whose one skill is "dominating the discourse" - could be losing that ability as he declines. 

Oh, Look. Corruption

 One of the funniest things I know is that Martha Stewart has spent more time in jail than her BFF Snoop Dogg. The reason was because she engaged in insider trading. We had an insider trading scandal with members of Congress during Covid. Most- but not all - of the apparently guilty were Republicans, but the idea that someone like Nancy Pelosi may have used some insider information about the economy in general to make investment decisions was treated as a scandal. It probably helped sink Kelly Loeffler in her Georgia Senate campaign.

We are getting some REALLY juicy insider trading stories running below the surface. This one is crazy.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used to run Cantor Fitzgerald, a notably mercenary Wall Street law firm. His crotch spawn "runs" it while he's in government "service." Now we have news that Cantor Fitzgerald has been buying tariff refund futures. Basically, if DynaCorps paid $40 million in tariffs and the tariffs are ruled illegal, the government would have to refund that money. Cantor is going in and buying that future refund at about 20% of its' worth. They pay $8 million today against $40 million if the tariffs are illegal.

The tariffs are illegal.

Still, the bullying nature of the Trump Administration means that companies cannot be sure about retribution or simply ignoring the Supreme Court if it rules according to the letter of the law. This presumes the corrupt SCOTUS still cares about the letter of the law.

As hedges go this seems normal. The fact that it's Lutnick is just brazenly corrupt. It might not be the most corrupt thing to happen this week, but it would be the most corrupt thing to happen under almost every American president.