Banana Pants Crazy

 I would like to believe that if every American had to spend 15 minutes a day reading a random transcript of Trump's remarks, we have the 25th Amendment invoked before Christmas. Richardson talks about Trump's Affordability Tour stop in the Poconos. and she includes both excerpts from his remarks and one of his Truth Social screeds.

It is worth remembering that an ailing Joe Biden had a terrible debate performance and dropped out of the race, because it was manifestly clear that he could sustain running for office. Any given Trump performance is about that level of "bad" but we know he will serve out his term, barring the actuarial table asserting itself. There are signs that some Republicans are beginning to separate themselves from him, but most will not, in fact, cannot. The saga of Indiana's Republican state senators getting death threats because they are behaving like actual conservatives and not authoritarian drones is a good example of where this is headed.

As I've mentioned before, the primary virtue of democracy is its ability to self-correct. The elections that we have seen are an example of that, and I imagine the midterms will follow suit. However, the real immediate danger that Trump poses is that his authoritarian grip on the GOP does not allow his own party to self-correct. For every Rand Paul striking out on his own, there are a dozen more like Lindsay Graham warping himself into some craven creature sniveling and whimpering at Trump's feet like an abused dog.

Trump has always been a stupid person, but that is now amplified by his age related decline and the constant river of sycophancy that rushes through the Oval Office. He's crazy stupid and things are going to get worse before they get better.

The Vilest People

 The Times ran a story that they are uniquely able to cover: the Tates. Andrew and Tristan Tate are (accused) rapists and human traffickers and pretty much proud misogynists. The story lays out how various figures in the Trump orbit - including Barron Trump - have defended and helped these two awful human beings escape justice. 

I remember in my 20s not really understanding the world and why it wasn't my oyster. I remember being lonely and depressed because I was lonely (by lonely, I mean romantically; I had good friends). I'm glad that the sort of online shit wasn't around, though I doubt I would have fallen into it. The Tates and those like them are about taking that wounded grievance that young men very often feel and turning into a poisonous broth of violence, dehumanization and sexual depravity. 

The fact that the Trumpist Legions supported them is entirely unsurprising. The raft of pardons for terrible people are indicative of the low morality of those cretins. Still, it would be nice to return to a world where being an immoral shitbird was disqualifying from holding an office of public trust.

Accommodations

 Nowhere is Yglesias' manifest "confident ignorance" more apparent than when he writes about education. In the piece above, he does make some decent points, but he begins by misunderstanding the issue with accommodations. I have seen people who had a diagnosed learning issue who probably don't really have a substantial need for that accommodation, and I have seen students who absolutely need that accommodation to do credible work. The primary accommodations typically revolve around either time, testing environment or being able to use a computer to write an essay. Some students never really use a timed accommodation, whereas others simply can't function without it.

The issue is not that universities are destroying their standards, but that we have a class system where wealthier parents can afford to get their kids tested and accommodations installed. Yglesias does touch on this when he notes the consumer-mentality that schools have to engage in. We do, at times. We jettisoned our AP program, because it "looked bad" in comparison to other "elite" schools. Pedagogically, either having APs or not really isn't a massive difference in rigor, depending on how you replace the AP, but it was a marketing issue.

Similarly, with various accommodations, we are unlikely to deny a student's parents push for some form of accommodation. We have stopped giving 100% extra time, but the reality is that parents will argue - correctly - that we have an obligation to accommodate real learning issues. Are they overprescribed? Sure. Are they inherently bogus? Nope. Dyslexia has largely disappeared as a diagnosis, and been replaced by generic ADHD diagnoses, but dyslexia pretty much does exist. The accommodation of letting someone type their essay and utilize Grammarly allows them to accurately convey what they know that would be hard without being able to type. Woodrow Wilson was dyslexic and the typewriter saved his life. He obviously went on to a Phd, president of Princeton and then the United States. I'd say that accommodating his LD issue was worth it.

There are obvious issues with college education. Whining about accommodations is missing the point.

The Senate

 Winning the Senate is harder for Democrats than winning the House, despite Republican efforts to gerrymander House districts. The reason has to do with Democratic strength in urban and suburban areas not mattering in places like Nebraska. Dems can win Omaha, but not the state at large.

Yglesias catches on to the idea that this electoral environment puts the Senate in play for Democrats, despite it being an unfavorable map. The map is always unfavorable, frankly, but it's especially tough this year. Most of the races are in the South or the western bank of the Mississippi. 

The recent lessons from special elections is that people are not at all happy with Republican rule. Whether that translates into votes for a Senate candidate in Kansas or not is arguable, but I'd look at Tennessee 7th last week as offering two lessons.

The first, obviously, is compete everywhere. Recruit good candidates and put effort into every single race. This is especially true in the Senate, where terms last 6 years. Winning during a Blue Tsunami means that seat is yours for six years.

Secondly, make sure the candidate matches the district. Aftyn Behn was not really a great match for that district. Would a more moderate, safer candidate have won? Impossible to say, but it likely would have been closer.

Which brings me to Texas. The promise of flipping Texas has been out there for over a decade. The last time we came close was in 2018 during Trump's first midterm shellacking. Otherwise, it's like Florida: tantalizing but perpetually just out of reach. Still, we are seeing real cratering in support for Republicans among Hispanic groups. Yesterday, Democrats flipping the mayor's office in Miami for the first time in 30 years, because Cubans and other Hispanics are pissed.

Now, maybe that's good enough to flip Texas with any Democrat, but Jasmine Crockett seems like a candidate to rile up Democrats and alienate exactly the sort of middle of the road, low information, small-c conservative voters that you are going to need to win in Texas.

Yes, because she's a Black Woman. Sorry. It's not something you're supposed to say out loud, but Crockett's strength as a back-bench, mediagenic brawler makes for great news clips, but isn't going to flip the Houston and Dallas suburbs. What's more, most voters make decisions on pretty dumb metrics.

In her piece, Richardson talks about the Morris piece I wrote on yesterday. She goes further and looks at how Roger Ailes manipulated that irrational tendency of voters to respond to negative imagery. Democrats keep thinking that they can win with bold policy papers, when people really just react to things like how a candidate looks or talks. What makes Crockett so appealing to Democratic voters is how she taps into the outrageous racism, sexism, corruption and stupidity of the Trump Administration.

The problem is that the majority of voters in Texas are Republican voters - at least in the immediate past. Does she give them permission to swap allegiances? I just doubt it. 

I want to be clear, I'm not endorsing the racism and sexism that exist deep in the brains of American voters. I would note that Harris lost Biden voters who were Black, because it's buried THAT deep.

Leftists will argue that we need candidates like Crockett or Platner that excite the base. I think Trump has done all the partisan motivating we need. The 2026 election will be a persuasion election because we will be competing in R+10 districts and states.

I'd rather elect a White Guy Democrats who will vote for things that help minorities than nominate a candidate that represents those minority groups and loses.

No Wars But The Culture War

 Elliott Morris (behind a paywall) talks about a new academic paper that looks at how cable news broke out brains and made us - particularly on the Right - obsessive culture warriors. The interesting link is that we all know how social media algorithms prey on our outrage. Stories that anger you engage you more than stories that inform you. It is not at all surprising to me, because I grew of age in the era of Rush Limbaugh and the emergence of Fox News.

There were no algorithms back then feeding us outrage inducing clickbait. There were just radio and TV ratings that showed what played and what didn't. Limbaugh's culture war got listeners; NPR did not. 

Cable news, as such, really begins with Ted Turner's - at the time - fantastical idea that we somehow needed 24 hour access to the news. Before that, we waited for the 6 or 11 o'clock news and then waited again for the morning paper. ESPN was crazy, because you could find out if your team won without waiting for the morning sports page. 

Early CNN coverage was pretty dry. It felt a lot like the BBC World Service does today. The pivot was during the 1991 Gulf War, with Bernard Shaw and Wolf Blitzer describing the bombs falling on Baghdad from their hotel window. The sensational always sells better than information. Over time, dramatic stories were not only prioritized, but sought out. One staple of cable news is Missing White Girl, because it stokes a certain amount of interest and outrage in a population that devours true crime stories. 

Culture war issues are natural hot button topics. Arguments about trans girls in sports are engaging people in ways that are disproportionate to their actual impact on society. What I find interesting and disturbing is not just the prevalence of these stories, but the way they short circuit whatever reason and logic people possess. I've written before about how the Madisonian theory of government is dependent on people being rational about their interests - at least in theory. 

We have abandoned reason for outrage, and I'd like to blame it on Rupert Murdoch, but I fear it's simply how we are wired and how we are being catered to, not how we are being led astray. 

Killing The Atlantic Charter

 Donald Trump and his myrmidons are attacking the fundamental American foreign policy since 1941: the Atlantic Charter. The Charter was an expression of British and American goals for World War II, agreed upon even before the US had formally entered the war. It proposed liberal institutions like the UN and free trade impulses that would become Bretton Woods. It eschewed imperialism and right of conquest and supported freedom of the seas.

Trump wants to make America Hungary, and Hungary's politics is based on racial resentment of immigrants that underpins Orban's authoritarianism. The new national security document is basically a nakedly white supremacist document with all sorts of assertions of the Great Replacement Theory. The attacks on Europe are simply the echoes of Orban's own arguments, and we know Orban is a perverse figure of admiration on the American Right.

There is also, of course, the support for Putin and the criticism of Ukraine for...defending itself from invasion. Trump wants to retreat into a regional hegemony where we can murder Venezuelans with impunity while winking and nodding at Putin doing the same to Ukrainians, Netanyahu doing the same to Palestinians and Xi doing the same to Uyghurs. It is nakedly authoritarian, yes, but it's also deeply, deeply reactionary and opposed to the entire Pax Americana that has brought stability to the world.

Few Americans vote foreign policy. Trump's mishandling of the economy is going to weigh him down more than his killing Venezuelans or even kowtowing to Moscow. However, as Marshall notes, we can likely repair a lot of Trump's damage domestically, beginning in the midterm elections. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, and we have survived worse than Trump's corruption and malevolent incompetence. However, the destruction of the world created by the Atlantic Charter and the postwar liberal institutions might not be so easy to repair. Ideally, Europe learns to support itself without leaning on us, and then when (we hope) non-fascistic leadership returns to the White House, the Atlantic relationship will be one of equals.

It's also worth remembering Marshall's dictum that "all power is unitary." Trump's dismal approval ratings on the economy will - I think - get worse as the economy contracts. Small business are shedding employees, and that's a canary in the coal mine. As Trump fulminates against the Fake News of growing stagflation, his approval will fall further. He might even crack his previous floor. If so, that will actually make his pro-Putin, pro-Orban foreign policy less popular, especially among people who don't really follow the news much. (Hell, I teach International Relations and my students don't even follow the news.)

It's not too late. It almost never is. I'm sure it felt "too late" when Hitler invaded Poland and France and Britain could no longer avoid war. I'm sure it felt "too late" when Paris fell or Pearl Harbor burned. 

Still, this is...bad.

The Other Information Economy

 The superpower of Trumpism is the shameless lying. The weakness that they use is the press's inability to ask a meaningful follow-up question. For Trump, you'd have to have someone in your ear saying something like, "Mister President, you just said that 46% of Somalia-Americans are child rapists, when in fact there were only three Somali-Americans arrested for statutory rape over the past four years."

When it comes to the Clown Caucus, the big dodge is "I haven't seen/heard that" when asked about the latest Trump outrage. Mike Johnson apparently lives in a hermetically sealed chamber 23 hours a day, only venturing forth to say how hard he's been working and that he can't possibly be expected to know what the President of the United States and leader of his party has said or done.

If you have some bobble throated slapdick like Tom Cotton on your show, and you ask him about killing people without due process, and he says he knows nothing about that, then show him the clips of Hegseth bragging about it. 

The utility of bothsides never was good journalism, and I understand that it can inoculate you against some of the more vengeful actions from Trump's DOJ and Commerce department, but there's no reason to allow lies and evasions to keep happening.

"Affordability"

 A few months ago, the Democratic buzzword was "abundance," based on the book of the same name. Mamdani and other's victory this fall has shifted the lexicon to "affordability." Krugman has been doing a primer on Affordability as a concept, and he has another entry today (paywalled). He's noted that in general ways, wages have kept pace with prices, and so while people feel that price inflation was "done to them", wage inflation was something they earned. Still, wages and prices have generally jumped together. 

So why are people unhappy?

He mentions Adam Smith, and Smith's idea that prosperity if fundamentally cultural rather than absolute. The passage he quotes notes that in some places, it's OK for the poorer classes to be barefoot, but in other places, everyone who doesn't have shoes is considered desperately poor. In 21st century America, Krugman argues, homes are the equivalent of Smith's shoes. Even if the price of groceries has been matched by wage increases, it doesn't FEEL that way, and because everything is expensive, a home purchase feels like a fantasy.

His conclusion is most important, though. It's not just that people feel like housing is too expensive; it's who they blame for it. Generally, they blame the rich and powerful. In a Politico poll, Krugman relates the following:

(T)the poll asked respondents who found health care difficult to afford who they considered most responsible (they were allowed to choose more than one.) Some 48 percent named the Trump administration — clearly bad news for the G.O.P. But almost as many, 45 percent, named insurance companies — there’s a reason there’s so much sympathy for Luigi Mangione, who murdered the CEO of United Healthcare. Another 19 percent named “billionaires,” while 15 percent named “businesses.”

On high housing costs, 42 percent named the Trump administration, but 34 percent named landlords, 19 percent billionaires and 17 percent businesses.

That's bad news not only specifically for Trump, but more generally for Republicans, because Republicans are typically considered more friendly to the wealthy. The great political triumph of Trump was somehow convincing people who hate billionaires that he was their champion. His destruction of the East Wing, his current argument that affordability issues are a "hoax" and the coming surge in ACA costs...none of these are going to make him more popular, especially with certain segments of his voting base. As Elliott Morris notes, maybe a third of Trump voters are not committed, lifelong Republicans. They are perhaps younger, less politically informed and likely more fluid in their loyalty.

This CNN story looks at how we are in one of our eras of wild swings in who controls government. From 1930-1994, Democrats held the House for all but about 4 years. They held the Senate, too, for much of that period. That's no longer the case, as control of Congress swings wildly back and forth. There have been numerous - and wrong - predictions about "emerging, permanent majorities." 

However...if Trump continues to screw up as badly as he has screwed up so far...if we enter the Crypto/AI recession...if he continues to prioritize his ego over voters concerns...maybe this time, we will actually get a realigning election.

Today In White Supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

Not Actually Surprising

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

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

More On That Oncoming Train

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

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

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

The High Cost of Incompetency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Close, But No Cigar

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hague-seth

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

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

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

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

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

Converging Narrative

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is the leading figure of the Epstein Class.