Yeah, That's Odd and Stupid and Dangerous

 Martin Longman notes something I noted when I heard it. Yesterday's strikes in Nigeria don't make a ton of sense geographically. Most of the ISIS/Boko Haram activity has been in northeast Nigeria, not the northwest. What's more, while we coordinated with the Nigerian government, that government does not want to make this a sectarian conflict. Nigeria works very hard but only somewhat successfully at keeping the idea of sectarian violence in the background. The Muslim/Christian divisions in the country are very strong and often violent, even without the psychopaths in Boko Haram making things worse.

It seems that if you want Trump to do something - as he did in this case - you just have to get it on Fox News. We heard this in his first administration; Trump doesn't (can't?) read, so he gets most of his "information" from the TeeVee. This is...suboptimal. This is why Hague-seth is Secretary of Defense and Tulsi Gabbard is DNI: they were on Fox.

This really is the stupidest timeline.

Alexandra Petri Is A National Treasure

 I hope at some point, her trip to the Kennedy Center is to pick up her Twain Award. Still, this will do for now. It is not actually easy to be both funny and spot on with your political satire, but what she pulls off is a brilliant sketch of Trump's inherent thirstiness and his being perpetually mired in the '70s and '80s.

The Gift Of Incompetent Facists

 On this day to celebrate the return of light into the world, of finding holiness in a stable, let's talk about how we are blessed that our Wannabe Fascist overlords are basically incompetent boobs.

Merry Christmas

 Ya filthy animals.

Rats

 Somewhat in conjunction with my skepticism of the economic health suggested below are the stories that suggest that MAGA knows what's coming.  Trump is slapping his name on everything he can. At the recent Turning Point confab, the whole thing turned into a display of backstabbing, with Ben Shapiro attaching the antisemites in the room, and the antisemites striking back. The Epstein files will continue to trickle out. Trump's approval rating is hovering in the mid-30s in the Gallup and ARG polls and moving downwards. 

Republicans' great advantage over my lifetime has been obedience to the leadership. As James Carville famously put it, "Democrats have to fall in love, Republicans just fall in line." Conservatism is largely about service to hierarchies, so that tracks. However, MAGA is not "conservative" it's a revolutionary reactionary authoritarian movement, and revolutionary movements are prone to factionalism. We are already seeing Republican House members balk at some of the most egregious MAGA programs.

Keep an eye on the divisions that are creeping into the GOP. Some rats flee the sinking ship, but they will also turn on each other when cornered. 

Do We Believe This?

 The Commerce Department released economic growth numbers that seem superheated at 4.3%. As Krugman noted before the numbers came out, we have a "K-shaped" economy now, with disproportionate wealth being funneled upwards. We had a brief compression under Biden, as wages grew more robustly at the bottom of the wage scale, due to labor market constraints. Right now, we have a frozen job market, as employers aren't hiring, so people aren't leaving for a better job elsewhere. There aren't mass layoffs, but the hiring freeze - which really hits recently college and high school grads the hardest - suggests that businesses are wary of the underlying economic conditions. Wary in ways that would be hard to square with 4.3% growth.

One economist in the Times piece suggests that growth was being driven by consumption in higher income households. The problem is that there aren't enough high income households to sustain the economy. A healthy economy distributes consumption throughout the population. The economy isn't driven (pardon the pun) by the corporate lawyer buying a Lexus or the hedge fund guy buying a Maclaren. It's driven by fifteen middle class people buying Toyotas or Kias. 

The Times piece also mentions defense spending as driving growth, but that would be a legacy of Biden sending military aid to Ukraine. It's difficult to see where the new defense spending is coming from. Another source of growth might have been ICE prison construction, but that seems unlikely to have started, given the appropriations were done in the spring. Consumer spending is up - 3.9% from last year's holiday - but some of the increased spending would have to be increased prices. 

What's worrisome is that lower income households are taking on debt in order to maintain their living standards. If that's a fixed rate loan then that's just bad, but if it's variable interest rate then there is likely to be a consumer debt crisis. The national debt is exploding at a time when it should not be. That will drive up borrowing costs, and if people are putting Christmas on credit cards, that could be catastrophic in the long run.

I'd highlight this 'graph:

Lower-income families are wrestling with slowing wage growth and rising costs of various household goods, like beef, coffee and furniture. Still, even as some major corporations have announced work force reductions, the limited extent of overall layoffs is still buttressing activity. And much of consumption growth has come from spending by affluent and upper-middle-class Americans, who have continued paying for travel, recreation, restaurants and other discretionary purchases.

That's the K-shape. I confess that we have not restrained our spending. In fact, because of the sale of an inherited property, we are building our retirement home, and because the property we sold was quite valuable, we aren't having to borrow (yet). If we did not have that pile of cash, we would not be able to engage in the build. What's more, if we were relying solely on our wages - which aren't bad, but aren't high - I don't know how we could buy a retirement home. (We live in campus housing at the moment.) Left solely to our wages, we would be in trouble.

Finally, there's AI.

Spending related to A.I. contributed to almost half of “year-over-year growth in G.D.P.” in the first half of the year, according to estimates by Principal Asset Management. Most analysts expect that these investments are likely to persist. But the data from the third quarter shows that the trend may be lumpier than some have projected, as intellectual property investments declined, as well as investments in structures, compared with previous months. Other newly released numbers also showed orders for durable goods also fell in October, even as an expansive build-out in data centers marches on.

This is a distorted picture of economic health. Josh Marshall has a note about his new iPhone, which has an unwanted AI feature. Basically, it's a supercharged autocorrect/text suggestion. He says the following:

The iPhone texting overhaul is of a piece with almost everything (not everything but almost) about AI at this moment, which is overwhelmingly a supply- rather than a demand-driven revolution.

I think this is key. A lot of people don't really like AI, but they are using it because they are kind of being forced to use it. You no longer do a "Google search" but a "Gemini search." Some of that IS great. AI search engines are a real advance. Still, the primary use for ChatGPT seems to be cheating. It seems inevitable that it will lead to job loss. We are being given something we aren't asking for and it is coming at great cost. We are building this sector of the economy that we don't really seem to be asking for.

Yglesias has a piece comparing what we assumed about magazine reading versus what we know about reading online. Magazines were supposed to be a leisure time activity, yet we can see in the data that people read online content at work. The computer revolution has not really led to an explosion in productivity, because while people do work faster, they then spend their time fucking about online. 

What will happen with AI, which seems able to further speed up work? At what point does THIS become the hiring freeze? At what point do employers simply replace NEW workers with AI?

The Times piece concludes about AI:

The boom, which several skeptical financial analysts fear may transform into a bubble, has helped buoy broad-based gains in the stock market. The benchmark S&P 500 index has risen by about 17 percent year-to-date and the tech-heavy Nasdaq index has performed even better, with gains of over 20 percent.

The bubble theory is that we are building out AI at a breakneck pace providing a service that - in many ways - people aren't asking for and that might degrade the job market even further. The gains are going to the investor class, which constitutes maybe one on eleven Americans (if we define it as households that have more than $50,000 in stocks), then there is the broad swath of Americans who aren't benefitting from this boom in the stock market.

Finally, we have to consider that the likelihood of the Commerce Department juicing the numbers is pretty high. The economy isn't cratering. It feels unsound, but it's not cratering. 

One shock, though, and it could get very dicey very fast. 

Catch And Kill

 Donald Trump was an ardent practitioner of "catch and kill" through his friend at the National Enquirer. Damaging stories would be bought by the Enquirer, the sources would sign NDAs and then the Enquirer would toss them in a vault. 

Given the advances in autocracy that Trump and the GOP have made recently, we should not be surprised that unqualified hack, Bari Weiss, is now playing this game at CBS News, including 60 Minutes. 

There are two things to note here.

The first is that the story is obviously going to leak out, and it will be more popular, precisely because it was censored. However, unless it comes out on 60 Minutes proper, it's not going to reach your Great Aunt who gets her news from the TeeVee.

The second is that we REALLY have a corporate news problem in this country. I suppose it's always been a problem, but the naked attempt to cow corporate leaders via government action means that news rooms will become more and more risk-averse. 

Not great.

The Twin Horns That Will Gore Trump

 Morris looks at Trump's approval on the economy and health care, and it ain't pretty.  This is fundamentally important, because so much of what Trump is doing that is really, really bad simply does not register with most voters...UNTIL they start to see their money shrink.

All the OTHER stuff will only really land with people once they are angered at his economic policy malpractice. There are two main engines that are driving this: deportations and tariffs. A third factor is high interest rates, but his deficit spending spree means that even if the Fed lowers rates, long term interest rates will remain high. This was the situation in the early '90s, and it required some austerity to make things work.

Since Trump is an idiot surrounded by other idiots, anyone think he will do the right thing? The hard thing?

Is You Taking Notes On A Criminal Conspiracy?

 I saw a clip of the Rich Eisen Show, where he's interviewing Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, where Eisen asked him where some of the characters are now. When they got to the charming but corrupt lawyer, Saul Goodman, Gilligan quipped, "I think Trump pardoned him." The set erupted in laughter.

As Simon Rosenberg points out, the Trump Administration is more accurately categorized as a crime spree. The Epstein Files released yesterday were in clear violation of the letter and spirit of the law requiring them to do so. It was 119 pages of blacked out text.

Richardson notes that are seeing some cracks in the dam. A handful of House Republicans are starting to sign on to discharge petitions that are passing and forcing the human cypher known as Mike Johnson to actually bring popular measures to a vote. Let's posit that, for instance, Republicans finally get some sort of extension of ACA premiums passed through both Houses with Democratic support. Do we really think Trump will honor that law? 

More accurately, do we think that the creatures that surround this empty man will honor that law? Richardson points to the role that ghoulish fascist Stephen Miller has played in the illegal strikes against Venezuelan boats. Miller is basically taking the logic of Republican rhetoric since Reagan to its gruesome conclusion. There is at least some reporting that many of the people around Trump are basically trolls; they don't really mean anything they say, they just want a reaction. Miller is not a troll, he's a monster. 

I recently enjoyed Death by Lightning on Netflix about the assassination of James Garfield. The central importance of Garfield's death was the impetus it gave to civil service reform - a reform that dramatically reshaped the capacity of the federal government to actually carry out complex tasks. The spoils system that had existed since Andrew Jackson's presidency created strong party loyalty, but it left the government without capable people able to leverage expertise for good governance. You can't have a Department of Labor with statisticians to give you the information to stop child labor. 

My hope - not, I pray, a forlorn hope - is that the awfulness of Trump 2.0 will shock the jaded sensibilities of the American public in much the same way that Garfield's death did. These are corrupt, vicious people and they aren't especially smart. They are operating as if there will be no accountability. That's the subtext of the joke about Trump pardoning Saul Goodman.

Former Special Counsel, Jack Smith, wants to testify in public about what he found out about Trump's role in January 6th. Sure, we all know that this was his doing, but he's now effectively immune from prosecution, so a public airing of his misdeeds is the best we can hope for. If, as I suspect, Trump pardons everyone as he heads out the door, then we will need these sort of "truth and reconciliation" moments to come as close to exposing the criminality of these thugs as we are likely to come.

There Is A Club

 And you aren't a member.

Jeffrey Epstein was. (These types of stories is why the NY Times, for all its faults is invaluable.)

Is Today Epstein Day?

 Theoretically today is the day that the Epstein Files are to be released to the House. I am skeptical that there won't be some sort of partial hiding of materials, but I wonder if the release of the partial files will give cover to people to leak the parts that the Department of Justice will try and hide.

What seems to be happening is that we are getting a lot more stories about what we might call the Epstein Class of billionaires and their hangers-on. Those stories can feed into Trump's overall cluelessness and detachment. If you are going to flip the Senate and create a Blue Tsunami, these stories really matter. 

One thing we are seeing is the overload of Trump Fluffing from his sycophants. The "renaming" of the Kennedy Center (yes, it's illegal) is a great example of how warped the Washington, DC GOP class has become as they reshape their whole worlds to provide a constant stream of superficial plaudits to his fragile ego. Trump's need for gilded ballrooms, vanity projects and his indifference to actual policy simply gibes nicely with this idea of an Epstein Class.

His efforts to "change the narrative" with his bizarre rant the other night isn't working. Authoritarians don't course correct easily, and Trump is stupid and a narcissist making a course correction even harder.

If the files really are damning, how quickly does he fall?

Candidate Quality

 One of the perennial questions in elections is asking whether or not the degree of candidate quality matters. How much does having a talent like Clinton, Obama or - in his own perverse way - Trump win elections? I think on the question of presidents, Democrats used to rely on low propensity voters, so having a preternaturally talented politician was necessary to turn them out. It's now Republicans who rely on those irregular Trump voters, so maybe that's changed somewhat, and that helps explain why Democrats are romping in special elections.

As long as the elections next November are reasonably free and fair (beyond the gerrymandering), I think Democrats win the House. The Democratic gerrymanders will not only counteract the Republican ones, but in a true wave, moving a district from R+13 to R+7 to help win a D+4 district elsewhere makes that R+13 district a potential, even likely Dem pick up. It's the so-called dummymander. 

Senate seats aren't exactly gerrymandered, but the states themselves are a sort of rough gerrymander. There is not a Democrat - living or dead - who is likely to win statewide races in West Virginia, Oklahoma or Idaho. The Senate map is always unfavorable to Democrats, given their strength in population centers and weakness in rural areas. The good news is that Senate terms are six years, and any Democrat who picks off a seat in 2026 will serve through the first term of whoever wins in 2028. 

Yglesias writes about the need for Democrats to compete in Florida. He notes that they are heavily recruiting candidates in places like Kansas, Iowa and Alaska. I do think that they can win in those places, because a lot of Trump's tariff policies are especially damaging to farmers. Florida and Texas, though, are the biggest prizes. Flip those states and you are sending shudders of dread through Republican strategists. 

As Yglesias points out, Trump has dramatically changed his immigration policies since his first term in office. The first term was mostly about border enforcement - the big beautiful wall that Mexico would pay for. This time around, the adults are gone and Stephen Miller is furiously masturbating to images of children being ripped from their parents arms by Border Patrol goon squads - not on the border but in American cities. 

Hispanic citizens don't like illegal immigration anymore than most blue collar workers do. They are either citizens stretching back to the 19th century, or they came here legally, so they don't have any special affinity for people who may have crossed the border. However, the ICE raids are everything liberals said would happen, but really didn't happen from 2017-2021. 

As Krugman notes, Trump has unleashed all the latent nastiness in our culture. I do think a lot of working class men were tired of "You can't say that" type of scolding, which is why they shifted to Trump. However, that does not mean that they want to be racially profiled. Even the White guys don't want their buddy from the job site to be rounded up by masked goons. The whole point of "You can't say that" was prevent the sort of demonization and dehumanization that leads to things like we are seeing on the streets of our cities. Yeah, it's annoying, but it wasn't pointless.

Trump has ripped the scales from the eyes of a lot of Hispanic voters, and that could mean the final flipping of Texas and Florida in the 2026 Senate races. Personally, I am dubious that Jasmine Crockett can flip the votes of suburban and exurban Texans who might otherwise be sick of the cruelty of Trumpistan or the economic malpractice from Liberation Day. I really do think that the blander, whiter candidate is a better fit for Texas. James Talarico is the sort of guy who can articulate liberal ideas in ways that resonate with swing voters, whereas Crockett tends to play to the base. 

In Florida, though, I really think that the best candidate is a Hispanic man. I really do believe that Hispanic male voters are more steeped in a sort of machismo political culture. It's not destiny, Mexico has a female president, but when it comes to candidate quality in Red or Purple-Red states, it feels like a "First, do no harm" strategy.

Party loyalists want to "fire up the base" but in 2026 - if it is indeed a Blue Wave - the base will be there. "Fire up the base" was necessary back when Democrats relied on low propensity voters. The Democratic base IS fired up. The key to winning Florida and Texas (and Ohio and Kansas and so on) is finding the candidate that soothes the fears of those who don't usually vote for a Democrat. John Tester of Joe Manchin would be a terrible Democratic candidate in Massachusetts, but they sure were good in Montana and West Virginia.

Where I routinely disagree with Yglesias is whether a candidates positions on the issues really matters. I do think that "vibes" matter and a candidate's gender or skin color or where they're from does matter. Politics are intensely visual when you are dealing with non-ideological voters. 

After Trump's bizarre, Adderall fueled rant last night, there is more and more evidence that the wheels are coming off. Authoritarians can't course correct, because they can't admit that they were wrong. That's why I think a Blue Wave feels extremely likely. If we tip all the way into a recession, it's a lock. However winning the Senate is critical, because that would allow Democrats to stop Trump from packing the Courts, the Cabinet and the Federal Reserve with his incompetent cronies.

The Left won't like it, but it's best to remember "First, do no harm."

UPDATE: Another take on Texas.

Wagging That Dog

 Trump is going to address the nation tonight. Sometimes he hypes these event and then it's a huge nothingburger, but there is at least some evidence that involves our escalation against Venezuela. Why are we apparently on the verge of going to war with Venezuela? Maduro is objectively awful, but that's not a casus belli. The drug issue is bullshit, and also it's not a casus belli. 

One possible explanation include the fact that Trump has ceded basically all of his policy making to the various creatures in his orbit - think Miller and deportations - and Marco Rubio really wants to do some regime change in Venezuela. For Rubio, whose parents fled Cuba, Maduro is just another Latin American Marxist that needs to be deposed. The question then is: why not Cuba itself? I mean, if you're going to start (another) illegal war, why not strike at the motherlode?

Another possible explanation is that Hegseth just has his war hard-on so bad that he wants any excuse to "increase lethality" and look like a tough guy in the mirror. The combination of Maduro's leftist politics, the presence of at least some drugs and the general waddling deeper into belligerent waters puts Hegseth's curdled idea of toughness and Rubio's neo-con arrogance into common cause.

The final reason is simply the old "Wag the Dog" scenario from an old movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro about starting a war to deflect the press' attention from scandal. 

Friday is the deadline for releasing the Epstein Files.

If that wasn't enough, we have a weakening economy, the Susie Wiles disaster and the general collapse in Trump's aura of invincibility. His rancid tweet after the Reiner murders has enraged all but his most loyal sycophants. He appears increasingly old, addled and unhinged. Perhaps the thinking is that they need to escalate this crisis that they made to pressure Maduro to abdicate into a full blown war simply to change the subject from Trump's eroding power.

Or maybe he goes on TV tonight to tell us how great his new ballroom is and how Americans should stop complaining about his economic performance.

UPDATE: Apparently he's going to be boasting about what a great job he's doing, two weeks before millions lose their health insurance. I do hope he continues to try and square the circle of "The economy is great, but it's all Joe Biden's fault."

After Trump

 Yglesias does one of those fucking things that he does, where he looks at Trumpist politics as somehow being normal. Trump is sui generis. He is a creature of tabloids and reality TV that exists in direct defiance of the actual way politics as supposed to work. He lies with every breath that he takes, and we are supposed to take his utterances on policy as somehow relevant? 

Compare that analysis with Elliott Morris, who noted back in the spring that opposing Trump's immigration brutality WAS good politics, even as Yglesias said you shouldn't "raise the salience of an issue that benefits Trump." First, many missed at the time that Trump's "immigration" polling was soft, even if his "border security" numbers were and remain strong. 

All of this goes back to Josh Marshall's dictum that "all power is unitary." Opposing Trump EVERYWHERE, degrades his power EVERYWHERE. Yes, you risk losing message discipline, but we've already reached a breaking point with the public. As Ray Kroc said, "When your opponent is drowning, stick a hose in his mouth." 

Trump is cruel, depraved. In fact, his egregious tweet about Rob and Michelle Reiner is SO over the top, that even his usual defenders are walking away from it and calling him out. That was a common refrain from people like my cousin during his first term: "I like him, I just wish he wouldn't tweet so much." They don't want to be exposed to the actual cruelty. My cousin isn't evil, she just wants to believe in the strong man sent by Jesus to make the world safe and cozy for her. When he vomits forth his hateful bile, she knits her brow and wishes he could be more disciplined.

But it's the lack of discipline that is ultimately the point. Trump violates every norm we have. He has a scandal a week that would have sunk any of his predecessors. 

That, however, is the point; that is his strength. 

Trump is the disrupter. The bully on your side. JD Vance can't pull that off. Ron DeSantis failed at it. They both may be sociopaths or at least cyphers with no core convictions, but they aren't as viscerally stupid and evil as Trump, and that means that their cruelty arises from calculation, not impulse and fails to thrill the herd.

Disgusting Is The Only Word For It

 Trump vomited forth something unusually vile, even for him, in the wake of Rob and Michelle Reiner's murder. Seth Abramson makes an important point. Yes, everyone is right to see this as the fundamental brokenness within Trump's shriveled soul. When Trump heard that Reiner - a prominent critic of his - was killed, he assumed one of his supporters had done it, and then he basically blamed Reiner for it. If Reiner hadn't have been a Trump critic, he wouldn't have been killed, so basically it's his fault for not loving Trump enough.

Of course, it appears as if their disturbed son killed them, and Trump is - again - wrong. However, Trump knows in his bloated guts that his supporters are ready to commit violence on his behalf and he's willing to exonerate them. It's the same logic that has him pardoning crook after crook. As a crook himself, he wants to make sure everyone knows that being crooked is OK.

It is very sad that we have to share our brief time in the planet with this shitstain of a human being constantly dropping his pants and waving his withered hatred around. It's concerning, though, how quickly he excuses violence that he thinks we committed on his behalf.