Keeping Your Eye On The Ball

 The Platner thing is a perfect intramural clusterfuck - at least among the terminally online. It involves preening Bernie Bros on the one side and the women and minorities on the other, lots of hurt feelings and no clear offramps.

However...

We need to keep our eye on what's important here. Josh Marshall has been writing (here and here and here) on the corruptness of the Supreme Court and why reforming the Court and clipping its wings has to be an imperative of whenever we return to democratic rule and Democratic governance. It's the one thing that has me truly despondent about the near and long term future. In fact, we have the Court we have, at least in part because of the schisms of 2016, which might very well have pushed Trump over the finish line in the Blue Wall. Maybe a unified party win those three states, and we have no Gorsuch, no Comey Barrett and likely no Kavanaugh. 

The evisceration of the Voting Rights Act is an obvious example of the Judiciary rewriting the laws and overturning precedent to suit their ideological whims. However, we can't forget Dobbs. The decision to overturn Roe v Wade has led to restrictions across the country on women's access not just to abortion but all sorts of reproductive care.

Now, we have a Republican Circuit Court (the Fifth, naturally) banning the shipment of mifepristone across state lines. This is a classic case of the Dog That Caught The Car for Republicans. Bans on abortion drugs are pretty damned unpopular outside Trump's evangelical base. People might blanche at surgical abortions, due to decades of anti-abortion propaganda. Taking a people that expels the zygote is less offensive to some fence sitters on the issue. Why is a morning after pill worse than a morning before pill?

Republicans don't want to upset anyone any more than they have to in an electoral environment that is likely to be harsh already. If the FDA rules that mifepristone is unsafe (it isn't), then we have more people pissed at the degradation and politicization of medicine and science. If they rule that it's safe (it is), then the evangelicals walk out. They want to punt this until after the midterms, but the drug companies are pushing for an immediate ruling, not just for political reasons, but because this will legitimately sow chaos across telemedicine and the overall medical landscape. At a time when Trump's Big Ugly Bill gutted healthcare and rural health care in particular, destroying telehealth would be a disaster.

How many times to Susan Collins vote to confirm a Supreme Court nominee that helped author Dobbs? Five times - she didn't vote for Clarence Thomas, though, but only because she wasn't in the Senate. While she didn't vote for the OBBB that cut rural health care, she voted to advance it to the floor, in a classic example of strategic voting that has served her well over her career. 

Platner, for all his baggage, does not carry THAT baggage. 

Platner

 When I first saw video of Graham Platner, the now presumptive nominee to take on Susan Collins in Maine,  I thought he had something. Vibes, I guess. I do believe - very strongly - the Democrats have a vibes problem, and nominating a certain type of guy wins voters that nominating even an extraordinarily qualified woman like Hillary Clinton does not. Sucks to say out loud, but that's what my gut tells me.

Platner, however, proved to be something of an oppo researcher's dream. Incredibly bad statements in his past, a Nazi tattoo, casual misogyny (though again, in the past). Schumer saw this, too, and convinced term limited governor, Janet Mills, to jump into the race. 

She dropped out yesterday citing a lack of funds.

Platner has been gracious, his very online supporters have not. And this is the problem. As Platner's problematic past was exposed, people began to take sides. The Bernie Left loved his faux working class aesthetic (Platner grew up quite comfortable, including an unsuccessful stint at the Hotchkiss school). Those who preferred not to support someone with his past inflammatory statements or, you know, a Totenkopf tattoo saw in Platner the second coming of John Fetterman. Here was someone posing as a working class dude who was big and burly, but really was kind of playing at it. 

Both sides began to dig in. Once that happens, you lose focus on the real goal of all this, which is to finally oust Susan Collins - the only Republican elected Federal official in New England. Mills was a flinty old school Mainer who called out Trump in the Oval Office, famously saying, "I'll see you in court." Platner is several decades younger, at a time when Democrats are exhausted with older politicians. 

Where I land is here: I have some serious doubts about Graham Platner especially within the context of Fetterman's betrayal, but I have zero doubts about Susan Collins. She's objectively horrible, while pretending to be eminently reasonable. The facade of moderation covering a reliable MAGA vote.

The absolute imperative in 2026 is "Vote Blue, No Matter Who." That now includes Graham Platner and all his baggage. As for his embrace by the Bernie Bros and their inevitable crowing over his victory, I think this says less about Center Left vs Far Left, but rather about Young vs Old and the declining salience of rhetorical baggage in the Era of Trump. We can hope that there are no Swallwell sized revelations out there, because winning Maine is an absolute must if Dems are going to get a working majority in the Senate (especially with Fetterman being a supposed Democrat).

Platner has said the right things, even if his online mob has not. Hopefully, he continues to do so and tells that mob to win gracefully, or else we might lose catastrophically in November. 

A Most Unamerican Speech; A Most American Speech

 Donald Trump, yesterday, droned the words that Stephen Miller wrote for him about America being a racial project. He basically asserted that America was a nation-state for white, Anglo-Saxons. There's a version of this speech - delivered with the King Charles standing next to him - that might have made sense. 

In fact, Charles later gave that speech to Congress.

Where Trump spoke of some sort of racial and genetic connection - "Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage." - Charles spoke of American ideals, including the value of bringing diverse voices together in a national project. If there was a connection between Britain and America, it was in the preservation of liberty through checks on Executive power, as was written into the Magna Carta and the Constitution. (In fact, the Magna Carta is somewhat more prominent a document in America than Britain.) Where Trump intoned the idea that America was a project of white Anglo-Saxons, Charles said "the essence of our two Nations is a generosity of spirit and a duty to foster compassion, to promote peace, to deepen mutual understanding and to value all people, of all faiths, or none."

The King of England continued: “Our common ideals were not only crucial for liberty and equality, they are also the foundation of our shared prosperity. The Rule of Law: the certainty of stable and accessible rules, an independent judiciary resolving disputes and delivering impartial justice. These features created the conditions for centuries of unmatched economic growth in our two countries.”

It was telling that when he affirmed support for Ukraine, he received a standing ovation. This, while Trump and Netanyahu move closer to Putin.

Trump's virulent social media team released a picture of Charles and Trump that read "TWO KINGS." While this is a direct troll of the No Kings protest movement, it is also the agenda to destroy checks and balances and create a form of personal rule that would be indistinguishable from a monarchy.

TL;DR: The King of England - the descendant of King George - gave a more American speech than the "president" of the United States.

The Hungarian Model

 For years, conservatives have looked at Viktor Orban's competitive authoritarianism as a model for what they wish to accomplish in the US. They want a white, ethno-state with an enriched elite that buttresses a patrimonial strongman who will prevent them from having to press 1 for English.

The rout of Orban's Fidesz party a few weeks back, however, is now the model for the pro-democracy forces in America. Yesterday, the "Supreme" Court - in yet another lawless, ahistorical nullification of American law - decided to effectively end the Voting Rights Act. Florida moved quickly to change its maps in seeming violation of its state constitution. I would expect Tennessee to follow suit. (All of this is downstream from Rucho, which ruled that partisan gerrymanders were legal, which might be up there with Dred Scott as the worst SCOTUS decisions of all time.)

In order to squeeze more Republican seats out of already gerrymandered states, Texas and Florida have risked "dummymanders." These are gerrymanders that dilute the strength of "red" districts to create more "purple" ones, and in return are susceptible to being overwhelmed in a wave election. If you take an R+15, a D+7 and a D+15 set of districts and create a D+25, an R+8 and R+7 set, you risk losing that original R+15 district in a wave year.

That's what happened to Fidesz and Orban. They has so squeezed the gerrymander and rigged the map that when a true mass mobilization occurred, it carried away those +10 districts.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Democrats winning the House this fall is likely the moment where we will know if America remains a democracy. Trump is almost certain to be less popular in November than he is now. Gas prices are not going to come down. He, himself, is insulated within his fantasy ballroom and his coterie of sycophants. 

I'm not especially concerned with the generic ballot right now, because I think people don't like the Democrats but absolutely HATE Trump, and that shows up in soft support for the Democratic Party that will not dissuade people from either swinging back to Democrats or simply staying home if they are Republicans.

Still, it could require a D+10 wave to overwhelm the efforts of the Supreme Court to end American democracy.

Decline Without A Fall

 The farcical charges against James Comey are the latest attempt by the Trump GOP to create a climate of fear and intimidation amongst their "enemies." As Josh Marshall and Heather Cox Richardson point out, these actions - and so many others - need to be understood not as expressions of Trump's strength, but as weakness. Trump is losing bigly. His approval ratings are cratering, and as they sink further, more of his base start to question whether they made the right choice. His policies are, of course, terrible. The Iran War and the tariffs are stoking inflation, and when you add in deportations and the general chaos of his rule, you get slowing growth. 

I never really thought that Trump's wholesale assault on American freedoms was going to resonate with the sort of swing voters who voted for him in 2024 because of nominal prices. They are pretty linear in how they think of politics, and abstractions like "freedom" were never going to move them, or they would have been moved in 2024. That's not to say that they can't see the absurdity of him focusing on his ballroom when people are losing their health insurance and the cost of gas is high and going to get higher.

We are six months from the midterms. Farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing. Interest rates are more likely to go up than down. The chaos will only intensify. Democrats' lead on the generic ballot is not as big as Trump's negative approval ratings. That typically changes as we approach a midterm election. What's more, this is where candidate quality matters. Mary Peltola and Sherrod Brown have already won their states before. People should trust them more than "Generic Democrat." 

Expect the crashing out by Trump to continue.

No, Seriously. F*** Your Ballroom

 Krugman notes that the REAL oil crunch hasn't arrived yet. Prices are bouncing all over the place based on Trump's erratic statements and the yo yo-ing of plans and statements by the US and Iran. Countries and companies are drawing down reserves to compensate for the reduced flow of oil. Presumably production is ramping up, too. Even if there was a real peace deal agreed to today, it would take many months to get oil production to return to pre-war levels.

Krugman concludes with this observation:

Translation: So far, despite much higher oil prices, demand for oil has fallen by only a fraction of the loss of supply. Instead, the world economy is running by taking oil out of storage. Since there’s only so much oil in the tanks, this can’t go on. So if the Strait doesn’t reopen, prices will have to soar high enough — and inflict sufficient economic damage — to destroy another 11 or more million barrels a day of demand. That’s a lot.

But Trump is talking about his ballroom.

This may seem weird, but it makes sense if you view it psychologically. Trump is clearly dissociating. His fragile sense of self-worth depends on constantly believing that he’s a winner while others are losers. Now he’s faced with the reality that he, more or less single-handedly, led America to humiliating strategic defeat.

So, viewed through the lens of his narcissistic wound, the immediate pivot from the assassination attempt to talking about how he HAS TO HAVE A BALLROOM is really about narcissistic supply. 

F*** Your Ballroom

 The single most idiotic thing to come out of the  half-baked assassination attempt on Trump's life were the immediate - and I mean immediate - calls to drop all opposition to Trump's ballroom.

First of all, security worked exactly as it should. The security perimeter held and no one was killed, including the would be shooter. There is at least some rumors swirling  that the Secret Service agent who was shot in the vest was shot by another agent. 

Second, the WHCD is not a presidential event. This is the first time that Trump has gone, in fact, because he's a WATB whose skin is so thin a gnat could pierce it.

Finally, what they are proposing (it's not really a serious proposal) is that presidents no longer interact with the public. Like the Japanese emperor, he should hide away in the imperial compound like a distant god. 

Basically, Trump will turn any random event into a way to sate his impoverished ego.

Broken Politics

 The...whatever it was that happened at the White House Correspondent's Dinner last night...is yet another simply bizarre moment that have become common place since Trump came down the escalator. Yes, I'm "victim blaming." Trump has been targeted previously by people who fit more in the school shooter or John Hinckley/Charles Guiteau category of assassin. Disturbed men who found meaning in killing someone famous or simply wanting to "die famous" themselves. We don't know anything about the motives of the man in custody, but he went to Cal Tech, wasn't a registered Democrat, but gave money to Harris' campaign. He was apparently staying at the hotel, which suggests a degree of planning. Yet the actual attack was hardly a well-thought out plan.

Lots of online voices have suggested that this - like the Butler attempt - were "false flag" actions designed to bolster Trump's sagging popularity. As Paul Campos argues, that's highly improbable. Some of this is post hoc ergo propter hoc, in that the Butler attempt really did give him a boost, and might have tilted the election in his favor. As I said at the time, his defiant fist as he was being rushed off stage was the only time I could see him behaving in a way that would suggest an actual virtue. From the effect, the cause is assumed that the shooting was staged.

Trump never goes to the WHCD because he hates the press. He decides to go, and there's a shooting attempt. This naturally lends itself to conspiracy theories. I would argue that his plan was to pick a nasty fight and give a vitriolic speech as a way to divert attentions from his cratering approval. Picking fights with the press is red meat and it always plays well with MAGA. That makes more sense than some sort of staged attempt on his life.

I think we have to consider two things. The first is that this is an administration that invited a reporter into a war planning chat. It's a president who launched a war against Iran without considering what Iran might do in response. It's an economics team who seems to think foreign countries pay tariffs, especially those damned penguins on the Heard and McDonald Islands. The idea that these clowns could pull off three false flag attacks and the meticulous attention to secrecy and planning that this would require strains belief.

The second is that Trump is a chaos agent. That's a large part of his selling point to the disgruntled people who adore him. They don't care if he can build a better society, they just want the old one torn down. That sort of personality will inspire violence. He will inspire to people to kill him. He will also inspire his followers to assassinate Minnesota legislators, to beat Paul Pelosi nearly to death with a hammer and to stage an insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States. 

Violence - political violence - is a sign that our politics are completely broken. It doesn't mean irrevocably broken, but currently very much broken. Again, we don't know if the shooter was thinking clearly, but he could very well be in the Luigi Mangione camp of a radicalized person who simply snaps and resorts to violence. We know death threats against public officials are on the rise, and we know that Trump uses dehumanizing language to speak about anyone who stands against him. Stochastic violence leads to actual violence, including violence directed against himself.

One more reason this is unlikely to be a false flag, besides the difficulty and danger in pulling it off. This story will largely disappear by Wednesday.  Quick, who was the guy who laid in ambush for Trump at his golf course? What was his name? Hell, I'm only vaguely sure of the name of the Butler shooter. Crooks, I think?

The dysfunction of our political life -  a dysfunction that Trump took and dialed up to a hundred - has led us to this point, where violence is more and more common, and will remain that way until we finally put the era of this malevolent orange creature behind us.

Hey, Are We At War With Iran Again?

 Or is Trump just manipulating markets again? 

Maybe the problem is sending these real estate failsons to negotiate an end to the war?

Going Down With The Ship

 Morris has the tale of Trump's truly abysmal approval ratings. He's underwater among almost every demographic except "people who voted for him 2024" and "men over 65." Even "white, non-college" is basically 50-50. Even his voters - and I think over time, people will not admit to voting for him - are at only 84% approval. Even the motivated reasoning of justifying your choice isn't enough.

My general feeling as an historian is that - as Adam Smith said - there's a lot of ruin in a nation. We will come out of this period weakened, fractured, degraded, but over time, we can recover - as long as we put it behind us.

However, our school has been hit roughly every year with an instance of hate speech. It's anonymous, it's racist and/or homophobic and/or sexist. In other words, it's like so much of the vile corners of our internet culture. But more significantly, it has happened every year since 2017. 

Since 2017.

Look, the racism, sexism and homophobia were always there. I'm not naive. What this villain has done is brought that language, that hatred, that bigotry out of the shadows and made it acceptable. I would point to his video that depicted the Obamas as monkeys, as just one of a million examples that - in a moral nation - would be the end of this guy.

Broken People

 Trump is a "broken person." He is fundamentally a bad person because something in him broke, making him the malignant narcissist we see today. We can certainly bemoan the emotionally manipulative parenting or the malign influence of wealth that made him this way, but there is simply something broken in the man.

What's crazy is how other broken people have flocked to him and staffed his administration. I mean, Pete Hegseth? Hegseth, though, was a Cabinet appointment. He appealed to Trump via Fox News. He "looked" like someone who was a "war fighter" whatever that means.

Now, we have someone like Julia Varvaro, who is apparently in the soft edges of prostitution. She became Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism, despite having few qualifications. Now she's accused of soliciting money in return for her company.

"How does Trump attract these people?" isn't the right question. The right question is why we elected the sort of cretin that attracts these people. 

Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

 Virginia voters narrowly passed the new gerrymandered maps that benefit Democrats. Objectively speaking, gerrymandering is bad for democratic governance. It should not be allowed.

However, Republicans have made a consistent practice of not only gerrymandering their states, but doing some in between the normal redistricting. Texas has done it twice. Nevertheless, the whining and caterwauling from Republicans is deafening. "How dare those dastardly Democrats do the same thing we've been doing?!" As someone noted, Trump has perfected the art of starting wars without considering the fact that your opponent has moves to make as well. Trump's narcissism prevents him from seeing the other side of a conflict as having equal agency.

Democrats should introduce legislation to ban the practice. Hell, make it a constitutional amendment just to make sure. They should keep introducing it and making Republicans vote against it until it passes. American democracy would be better off without gerrymandering, but it might not exist if Democrats don't fight fire with fire in the short run.

Decency

 Martin Longman has a sort of "Inside Baseball" post about the economics of writing in the internet. Basically, he was one of the OG Bloggers back in the day and built a solid readership. I read him religiously, and he does his best to bring rigor and insight into his analysis. 

One thing he rarely, if ever, does is troll.

His point is that trolls make money. Trolls gather attention. Trolls can monetize that attention in ways that being thoughtful and decent cannot. Twitter has gone down the shitter (though I still find it easier to use than BlueSky), in large part because you get this rampaging race to the bottom. Nakedly racist, misogynistic and bigoted content draws attention - positive and negative - in ways that ten tweet analysis does not.

It is tempting - but I think wrong - to blame this on "the algorithm." The algorithm is simply predicting what you want to see based on what you engaged with. In other words, the problem is...us. We are training the algorithm to outrage us, and as things become more outrageous, we lose a little bit more of the milk of human kindness. 

It's similar to Trump. He's awful, truly awful, but there are people who vote for him BECAUSE he's truly awful, and the most dispiriting part of all this is that our neighbors are not only OK with that, but seem to crave it. 

I am hopeful that the Democratic nominee in 2028 is the one who embraces basic human decency as their calling card. Newsom is great in this moment going toe to toe with Trump's troll army, but I want to rally around someone like Obama or even Biden who makes me feel proud of my country again. I want to believe that we are not that cruel and awful. 

Deeply Weird

 I've been reading Yglesias for a while now. I read him because I don't always agree with him and I don't want to silo myself away from contrary takes. When he said he had been a philosophy major, I thought, "Well, that makes sense. He seems more in love with abstractions than people." When he said he had a strange neurological quirk that made it hard for him to picture things in his mind, I thought, "Well, that makes sense. He seems more in love with abstractions than people."

Today, however, he crossed a fucking line. 

It's the perfect example of thinking without feeling.

GOP v MAGA

 Morris flags a YouGov/Economist poll that estimates that the Republican electorate is about 50-50 between MAGA and "normal" GOP. What's more, non-MAGA Republicans are finally breaking with Trump over Iran and prices. I'll quote Morris:

Trump’s 2024 coalition was built on four pieces. The core is the roughly 30–35% of Americans who are MAGA on any given policy. But the base alone doesn’t win elections. Trump won by adding three other groups: non-MAGA Republicans who are negatively polarized against Democrats and would never vote for them; swing voters who soured on Kamala Harris for ideological or personal reasons; and voters who were simply fed up with the economy and wanted the other party in charge.

Looking at the polling, Trump has lost a little ground with his base and with the reluctant Republicans. But he’s losing real ground with the Harris-skeptics and the economy voters — and he’s losing it on the issue those groups say matters most.

I think that the narrative is too focused on the last two groups. Yes, Democrats need to win back the Harris-skeptical (misogyny, anyone) and the "but muh eggs r espensive" voters. 

My gut, though, says that the Blue Wave that we need in November has to also benefit from both MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans just staying home out of despondency. 

This, by the way, is why I hate people dunking on people on social media who are saying, "Trump lied to me, I'm ashamed I voted for him." I get it, I do. But the key to saving democracy is getting those people to just stay home and not drag themselves to the polls to vote AGAINST those mean old Democrats who keep pointing out that they were stupid for supporting Trump. 

Just let them sulk and maybe stay home. In close races - and control of the Senate will be defined by close races - 10-15% of MAGA or non-MAGA Republicans just sitting it out is the difference between Sherrod Brown and Mary Peltola winning or losing.