Donald Trump can't decide if his new best friend is Mohammed bin Salman or Zohran Mamdani. With MBS, it's a pretty straightforward case of two kleptocrats recognizing each other. Mamdani...?
What's more let's look at two images.
When was the last time you saw Trump smile like that? Ever?
Maybe he just loves Middle Eastern guy? Guys he thinks are terrorists and should be banned from entering the country?
Or maybe he's medicated out of his fucking gourd right now.
I feel fairly certain that Trump and his lackeys will slow roll or cherry pick the Epstein information. He didn't obstruct their release because it makes him look good. At the same time, we should see stuff trickle out via leaks. All of this means he's getting weaker, and when he gets weak, he lashes out like the malignant narcissist that he is.
We perhaps saw this dynamic already play out with Trump's fascistic call for the execution of members of Congress. The crime of these members - all of whom have served in the national security services - is that they reminded military and intelligence officers that they should not follow illegal or unconstitutional orders. This is enshrined in the military code. It is not - or never has been - controversial. Service men and women should not follow illegal orders, because "I was just following orders" was not a valid defense at the Nuremburg Trials.
Impressively, none of the members made any direct references to Trump's illegal actions in Venezuela or his illegal deployments to American cities. They simply reminded people of their obligations to follow the law. This anodyne statement sent first Stephen Miller and then Trump into a rage. Labeling this as "sedition" and "insurrection" led them to call for the execution of the members of Congress. (Not for nothing, but the free debate clause protects members' speech.)
Ironically, Trump/Miller's freak out made sure that this message was amplified.
Yeah, this is bad, but it could also be a sign of Trump's increasing weakness. If internal GOP polling is as bad as the public polls, the GOP could be waking up to the idea that tethering themselves to this addled old shitbag is a bad idea, especially if that means appealing to extrajudicial killings.
The weaker Trump gets, the more outrageous he is likely to become, the weaker he will then become in turn.
Buckle up!
Krugman professes to be somewhat surprised by Trump's collapsing approval ratings on the economy and consumer confidence in general. He suggests that it might be a result of Trump's constant lying and maybe even the fact that - while we have no official numbers - the job market seems to be softening. A lot.
Trump paid a price not just for the shutdown, but the way he held SNAP benefits hostage, the fact that he demolished the East Wing to put in a Mar-A-Lago ballroom and the fact that he held a Gatsby party while people were suffering.
As Marshall reiterates, power is unitary. Trump is increasingly out of touch - or rather he is now being seen as out of touch. This is perhaps the real cost of the Epstein cover up. He said he would release them, backtracked and you can't lie your way out of those basic facts.
Bitcoin fell another 3.7% today. Things are getting shaky and the clowns running things have zero answers.
Krugman drops off a quick note that it looks like the Crypto Crash may be upon us. Bitcoin, the Cadillac of Crypto, has dropped from a high of about 125,000 a month ago to about 91,000 today. Ethereum peaked at around 4800 in August and is around 3000 today, three weeks ago is was around 3800.
David Frum points to the real peril that stable coins might pose to our broader financial institutions. The speculative frenzy surrounding some cryptos - to say nothing of the incoherent madness of meme coins - was supposed to be tempered by the stable coins. Because stable coins are redeemable in real currency, this could lead to runs on financial institutions.
Part of me is regretting not putting my money where my mind mouth is and shorting crypto. Part of me wants to jump in now and make some bucks off the venality of others. There is, however, a risk when you bet against a fraudulent system.
We are building a house for retirement, so we have a lot of cash on hand which should be safe in a crash. We are also near that retirement and a crash...won't be great! I suppose to bright side is that Trump has bound himself to crypto in such a way that when the crash comes and if it truly devastates the economy, that will combine with Epstein to drive the nails into the coffin of his authoritarian plans.
This piece is about an AI engine designed to help you "cheat" at conversations. The author found it really distracting and did not, in fact, help her with her conversation.
Meanwhile, Yglesias writes a long post about how he likes his - seemingly profound - neurodivergence. That piece definitely shores up my impressions about a certain vacantness in his analysis. He says he makes him more objective, but the AI engine kind of has the same problem that it short circuits real human connection. There is nothing wrong with being neurodivergent and aphantasia is a striking example of a specific form of being different. That does allow him to offer his spicy hot takes that keep him in business, but it also leaves something soulful missing from his work.
AI, of course, has no soul.
So, yeah, anyway, we're all doomed.
Josh Marshall has what he calls a "Unitary Theory of Power" that states that all power is unitary. A President is not powerful on one area and weak in another. This is why you see presidents' approval ratings fall across the board when they suffer a failure in one area. If Trump loses on the tariffs or the House vote on the Epstein files goes bigly against him, then he is weakened everywhere else.
The flop sweat emanating from the White House is because they very much understand this dynamic. The central idea of Project 2025 was to overwhelm opposition to Trump's authoritarianism with speed before the unpopularity of that project could be coalesced into a united front. "Move fast, break things" only works if you have sufficient mass behind the destructive force.
Marshall points to things like the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco as example of that veneer of omnipotence being stripped away. He also says that an increase in leaks (and I would argue the willingness of corporate media to report on what those leaks say) demonstrates that people are losing their fear of Trump's ability to retaliate.
Trump's verbal declaration to countenance the discharge petition is an example of this. Trump cannot lose. He certainly cannot lose when Republicans are the ones voting. He would rather give the appearance of being fine with the release so as not to lose the coming vote. Once it passes the House (and presumably the Senate) then perhaps he will find a way to delay or selective release some things. He isn't saying "Release the Epstein Files"; he's saying "I can't afford to publicly lose this vote."
The thin reed I'm hanging my current hopes on is the special election in Tennessee 7th CD. This district has no business flipping, but it is within that 10 point partisan margin that could surprise people. That might also be the reason why more and more Red States are not gerrymandering, because you could wind up with a dummymander where they turn reliably Republican districts into swing districts in a wave election.
Every loss in any arena is a loss everywhere for Trump.
Do Democrats need to embrace the sort of populist politics that elevated Donald Trump? Maybe, maybe not. But if they do, there is one really, really easy way to do so: Billionaires.
The GOP alliance with great wealth is well known and goes back to the years after the Civil War. There have been wealthy Americans who embraced progressive politics, but the vast majority of the very well off have historically trended towards the party of low taxes and less regulation.
The politics of it today are even more stark. People apparently really are pissed off about the destruction of the East Wing and the Gatsby Party that Trump threw. They really are pissed off about the evisceration of public services. And they really are pissed off about the Epstein Files.
Rumors online is that the dreaded "Democratic consultants" were urging Democrats to focus on "affordability" over Epstein, because people really are upset about the cost of living. The thing is, Epstein is about a cabal of ultra wealthy scumbags - of whom Trump is the avatar - getting their way while everyone else suffers. Millionaires and billionaires raping girls, while the Guatemalan roofer or the Salvadoran line cook gets beaten and abused on the streets of Chicago (which drives up construction and dining costs).
Richardson lays the wood this morning with a comparison of Matt Gaetz and the Andrew Mellon. Gaetz likely paid a 17 year girl for sex so she could pay for braces; Mellon funneled wealth upwards until it created the conditions for the Great Depression. In both cases, wealth and power insulated them from the consequences of their actions. Mellon appropriated millions, Gaetz committed statutory rape, because elites don't face the same consequences as you and me.
A system that engorges the bank accounts of those already rich, while depriving millions of access to health care is one that is ripe for a left wing populism. Focus on the Malefactors of Great Wealth and you can target both affordability AND Trump's deprivations with Epstein. They are the same damned thing.
Senator John Barrasso was tasked with defending the continued hiding of the Epstein Files. His argument was not about the merits of transparency - there are none - or protecting the victims - they want them released. His argument was that this was just a Democratic ploy to make Trump a lame duck. Now -technically - Trump IS a lame duck. He is barred from running for reelection in 2028. He has hinted that he might try and violate the 22nd Amendment, and it's always an open question whether this corrupted Court would let him get away with it. I've always felt that they wouldn't, because there is just no reading of the text that they could torture into a partisan decision.
What Barrasso is hinting at, to me, is the idea that once Trump sinks below a certain level of unpopularity, once he's (again) a massive anchor on the Republican Party, then and only then will they completely turn against him. The threat of a third term is about staying powerful and relevant. All lame ducks struggle to control the agenda of their last two years in office. Reagan slipped into dementia and the Iran Contra Scandal; Clinton had Lewinsky; Bush saw Iraq collapse, New Orleans drown and Social Security galvanize opposition.
Republicans have to be exhausted defending this guy. On Monday, you're defending his tariffs because they will be good for the economy and on Wednesday, he's saying he will repeal some of them to bring down the price of food. They can see the writing on the wall, but as long as Trump is "powerful" they have to kowtow to him. If the stuff in the Epstein Files is half as bad as it appears to be, that day hastens when the GOP stops defending him. When he truly becomes an addled old king wandering his Court screaming at paintings.
A running list of scandals from the past few days:
- Trump appears in Epstein's emails something like 1,400 times.
- Epstein calls Trump a degenerate. Epstein. Calls someone else. A degenerate.
- Trump then instructs his AG to investigate Democrats in the Epstein files a few months after saying that there was nothing in there to investigate.
- Trump says he will reduce tariffs on certain foods to reduce inflation...thereby proving that tariffs are inflationary.
- We've apparently funneled MORE money to Argentina than originally reported.
- Trump is authorizing a $50,000,000 payout to traitorous scumbag Michael Flynn.
- Trump continues to throw pardons around at some legitimately horrible people. In normal times, the repeated criminality of the January Sixers in particular would be Willie Horton on steroids.
- Kristi Noem is shoveling Federal funds at a shady ad firm to make ads extolling DHS. There is almost certainly a kickback going on here, either to her or Corey Lewandowski.
- The two clowns leading the FBI did not have to pass background checks.
- Talented Weirdo, Olivia Nuzzi, states that RFK, Jr. is still doing a ton of drugs.
- Marjorie Taylor Green is showing more fight against Donald Trump than John Fetterman.
- We are moving more military resources towards Venezuela without Congressional approval.
- We are replacing the Bureau of Labor Statistics with DoorDash, apparently.
- Trump keeps having MRIs, but he doesn't know why.
Seriously. This is what we've learned in just the last 72 hours. Of course, in some ways, we all knew this. Trump is an adjudicated sex offender who has boasted of sexually harassing and assaulting women for decades. We know he was quite close to Epstein. We know he threw over previous wives for "younger" women, and we know he openly lusted after his own fucking daughter.
We know that he was a corrupt businessman his entire fucking life. We know that he's a brittle narcissist who is lashing out at anyone he can to deflect from the manifest emptiness and ugliness inside what is where his soul should be.
Of course, I guess (I hope) millions of Americans decided that they didn't know this. That when Democrats pointed this out, they dismissed it as politics as usual.
If they decide that they know it now, will it finally make a difference? If even more smoking guns come out linking Trump and Epstein, will that do it? Finally? Can we bid rid of this cretinous creature?
It's one of those days when both Richardson and Krugman seem to align, though it maybe doesn't look that way at first glance. Krugman looks at the state of the Heritage Foundation, noting that it was always a hack, far right shop, but the recent controversy over Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson has stripped away the plausible veneer. Richardson looks at the accumulating sense that the Trump Administration is just so far out of touch with the American public. The performative cruelty, the Epstein shit, the weakening economy, and while she didn't mention the various aesthetic outrages like the demolishing of the East Wing...these all create an overwhelming impression of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.
Back in the before times, you have that tentpole quote from Lindsey Graham saying in 2016 that if the GOP nominated Trump "We would get killed and we would deserve it." Then, of course, Trump drew to an inside straight in 2016 and won again in 2024, despite having more baggage than Delta Airlines. This has created an understanding among Republicans that Trump cannot be defied - not only because of his unexpected electoral success, but because of his petty and vindictive nature. Thou Shalt Not Cross Trump.
The problem is not merely that Trump is a flawed president along normal metrics like "understands policies" or "builds consensus" or "speaks to the concerns of average Americans." He's also an aspiring autocrat who is either empowering the fascist cruelty of people like Stephen Miller or actively directing it. Even more concerning for Republicans: He's a doddering old man whose policies are actively damaging to America.
Since 2016, the GOP has steadily remade itself in the image of Donald Trump. This can't be sustainable, because Trump's hold on the public is really a hold on the 27%. As his poor policies and temperamental flaws are shown again and again and again...it becomes harder to justify supporting him...yet the entire raison d'etre of the GOP is genuflect before Trump.
The potential does exist for the Epstein stuff to finally cause a rupture that cannot be healed.
Obviously, the Republican Party isn't going to "die." It will transmogrify into some other beast. Ideally, we get schisms and chaos, like what just happened at Heritage. Ideally, many of Trump's fervent supporters just stay home for the next two or three electoral cycles. Still, the crisis that Graham predicted is coming. The fact that he has so enthusiastically embraced Trump, too, is what makes it so delicious.
UPDATE: "Populism" was always a scam.
Seems like this Epstein stuff is pretty bad.
Still, the idea that this - finally - will end Trump's presidency seems to misunderstand the nature of the GOP in 2025.
Krugman runs through a great false equivalency in press coverage of Biden and Trump's respective economic messages. Biden people cherry picked or massaged certain economic indicators that were 100% true, but didn't FEEL true or didn't jibe with people's lived experience. Biden was also a poor spokesman for himself. The result was Trump winning the election. While on a strictly policy front Biden did well, people didn't experience the improving economy in their actual day to day lives. This is why likely the only Democrat who could have won in 2024 was a governor.
Trump, on the other hand, is just doing what he always does, which is lie like a rug. The sheer volume of lies is nothing new; Trump lies as he breaths: constantly. However, when he gets up there and blathers on about gasoline being $2 a gallon, there is literally no one who believes this is actually true. His incredible disconnection from reality is one of the biggest reasons that his approval ratings are tanking. When you combine it with demolishing the East Wing and his Gatsby party, you really have someone who is completely detached from the lived reality of most Americans.
Look, this was always true, but now it's unavoidable.
Capitulating on the shutdown is painful, because it means that the pain of the shutdown accomplished very little in policy terms. About the best thing we can hope for is that when the Senate compromise passes, the House will have to take it up and Grijalva will be sworn in and the Epstein stuff will get released.
Richardson characterizes this as a pool table with balls careening this way and that. One of those balls is dispirited Democrats, but another is tossing the vote for ACA subsidies - written by Democrats - into the Senate for a vote. The one year extension would collapse around the midterms, so ideally, that will be the bill written by Democrats, if they can't get a permanent extension. If Republican Senators vote it down or it dies in the House, then Republicans up and down the ballot next November will be on the hook for ripping health insurance from millions of Americans.
As it is, I just got a notice that I will see a massive spike in my contributions to my employer-based insurance. This is the "bad old days" of pre-ACA insurance dynamics. Republicans will own that.
Krugman thinks that they just can't help themselves when it comes to depriving people of public goods. I wonder. I mean, yes, they don't believe that the government should spend millionaires' tax dollars on working people's health insurance, but you usually don't see parties strip away established programs. When they do, as Bush tried in 2005, they suffer for it. In fact, Bush's attack on Social Security likely led the way to a 60 seat Democratic majority over the next two cycles that enabled Obama to pass the ACA.
I think there's another dynamic at play, though. Trump HAS to be seen as strong and winning. Part of it is his brittle little ego, but another part is the self-fulfilling logic of authoritarian politics. The leader is strong, because the leader is strong. If Democrats force a compromise on Republicans - EVEN ONE THAT COULD BE POLITICALLY BENEFICIAL TO THEM - Trump would see this as a "loss", which is why he refused to negotiate.
It's true, as Krugman points out, that Republicans have no policy chops and no policy shop on health care, beyond stripping it away. This is the famous "concept of a plan" that should have sunk Trump's candidacy. Marshall sees this as an emerging new Democratic caucus that "gets it" when it comes to fighting not just Trump but Trumpism and the entire autocratic GOP.
Looking at the Traitorous Eight, Fetterman will likely lose his primary. Kaine, too, though the he has time to recoup his lost standing. Durbin and Shaheen are not running for re-election. Shaheen's own daughter - running for a House seat - has blasted the deal. Enjoy Thanksgiving! If Stefany Shaheen loses her primary, you can chalk that up to voter anger over her mother's capitulation. King is likely safe and I have no read on the Nevada landscape.
While Schumer blasted the deal, I think anger with him is justified, as he cannot whip his own caucus and having exactly the eight votes needed to reopen the government suggests that he gave clearance to guys like Durbin and Kaine. As I said, unequal to the moment.
This isn't over yet, and obviously there is both the (possible) vote on ACA extensions in the Senate and another looming deadline after the holidays.
However, Republicans are trapped by Trump's insistence that there be zero negotiations and that instead they just scrap the filibuster. Maybe it was smart to bring back SNAP and air travel for the holidays. Personally, I do think we are going to have to pass through hell in order to escape it.
The Republican strategy for the shutdown was clear from the first week: make Americans miserable. The efficacy of this strategy was borne out last Tuesday, as voters rewarded Democrats with victory after victory. Republicans responded by ramping up the pain on the American public. The specter of snarled air travel for Thanksgiving loomed alongside the growing hunger for many Americans.
It was, in fact, very painful. I get that.
However, the Traitorous Eight who capitulated last night - and it was very much a capitulation - have made sure that the suffering that did happen was for nothing. What seems to have gripped their (mostly old) brains is the idea that the Senate Club will insure that the deal will be honored and vulnerable Republicans will have to take a vote on ACA subsidies at some point in the future.
This misunderstands the politics of 2025. First, let's assume that Thune actually does call a vote on ACA subsidies. Maybe it does pass, but I have my doubts. Does anyone think Mike Johnson will even allow that Senate bill to come to a vote in the House?
What's more, this moment is a fight with emerging dictatorship. If you can't see that, I have no idea what blinders you are wearing. Autocrats are bullies, by definition. Bullies thrive on weakness. What the Traitorous Eight have demonstrated to Trump and his ghouls is that bullying, starving and immiserating the American people is a sound strategy. This capitulation largely empowers Trump at precisely the moment that Democrats were handed a victory in the off year elections.
It's a fascinating rogue's roll of hacks, too. There are Very Sensible Centrists in King, Shaheen and Hassan, then you have both Senators from Nevada for some reason. You have Senator Shrek who's become the new Sinema - a worthless toady of the worst impulses. Tim Kaine I guess wanted to protect his constituents who are Federal workers, but still...Finally there is Dick Durbin who took whatever reputation he may have clung to and lit it on fire and pissed on the ashes. He should resign and let Pritzer select his replacement.
Needless to say, in the overheated moment, people are blaming the entire Democratic Party for this and that's both unfair, unfortunate and unsurprising. Durbin's participation suggests at least some tacit approval from Schumer, even he personally voted against it. They needed eight votes and got eight votes, and it's not clear that Schumer really whipped against it.
A great example of where this is heading is that Mike Lee, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson - three of the absolute worst in that awful chamber - were not going to vote for the measure until Trump told them to. Not EVERY Republican Senator is completely supine to Trump - Rand Paul is a no on the CR - but enough are that even if Democrats get a vote to extend the ACA subsidies and EVEN IF IT PASSES, it's folly to expect Trump to follow it, if he feels it manifests weakness.
I think it was Josh Marshall who coined the term Senate Brain to describe a certain mindset held by Senators that theirs was a cozy club of like minded public servants who only had a few partisan differences, but the institution was all that mattered in the end. Certainly in the background of this fight was Trump's threat to end the filibuster, which would have been a positive development in the long term health of democracy in this country, even if it would have ended the shutdown without getting ACA back.
Josh Marshall suggests that this isn't the end of the world. Of course it isn't, and he does have a point that the CR only goes through January; that this has focused attention on the ACA subsidies and who is killing them. What he also notes is that we need a new Democratic Party in the Congress. We can't be the fucking doormats that we have been in the past. Some - like Chris Murphy - get that. These mealy mouthed losers - and that is the name for those who lose - don't get that. If this pushes us further down the road to a Senate caucus without people like Dick Durbin or Shrek, then so much the better.
I'm a Big Tent Guy, and I think heterodoxy is important. Healthcare, though, is not one part of the Democratic Party's beliefs; it's the central tentpole. That's why Republicans want to kill it. If you can't understand what you're fighting for or what the stakes are, you have no purpose being in Congress in 2025.
There are contradictory reports of a deal to end the shutdown. One has a pretty comprehensive cave from Democrats - basically, we will give you a brief CR in return for the promise of a future vote. The other seems to be better - a one year extension of ACA subsidies and one of those tiresome "Gangs" that they put together to solve an issue. I think the last Gang was to solve the amnesty issue in immigration and Trump promptly threw Lankford under the bus after he negotiated a pretty good deal.
A one year extension of the subsidies is a win for Democrats. Full stop. First, you have had people stare numbly at the coming catastrophic increases in their ACA bill, then you can claim to have reversed it. Hurrah! Even better, the extension will lapse right before the midterm election. So, the GOP can either make the reversal permanent or make it a massive electoral issue in 2026.
Right now, the Republicans are feeling the wrath of voter anger from the shutdown and rightly so. However, we are now staring down the face of widespread hunger and the complete implosion of air travel for the Thanksgiving holiday. That's a recipe for a "curse on both your houses."
The one year extension is good on the merits - people keep their insurance - and it's good politics, as it tosses a very good issue for Democrats into the heart of the midterms. It's also a clear "win" for Democrats and a loss for Republicans - which is why Thune and Trump are currently saying no.
That's OK, let them say no! The Democrats have a reasonable compromise on the table. Let the GOP veto it.
For all the Conventional Wisdom about how bad the Democrats are at political messaging, the fact is that Democrats have handled this shutdown really well. Now, we have a reasonable compromise from Chuck Schumer to end the shutdown in return for a one year extension of the tax cuts. The logic is that voters have seen what those increases look like. Democrats will have saved them from that increase for one year, tossing the issue into next fall's midterm elections.
What we have now is Trump and the GOP making the following argument. "We are going to starve children and old people; we are going to snarl air traffic; we are going to deny soldiers pay...unless you allow us to take health insurance from millions of Americans."
Brilliant. Please proceed.
Derek Thompson argues that last Tuesday gave the Democrats a winning theme - if not quite a winning platform. By focusing on "Affordability" they can focus voters' ire about rising prices, the same ire that turned Democrats out of power last November. A year is eternity and Thompson does acknowledge that there are a few problems, but I'd expand on them.
First, the primary driver of rising costs in 2022 was the post-Covid supply chain issue. That was an exogenous event that had little policy roots. In 2025, the primary cause of inflation is a combination of tariffs and deportations. By raising the prices of imported goods and raw materials and also restricting the labor supply, Trump seems bound and determined to create a stagflationary spiral. The problem for Democrats should they win in 2026 is to actually reverse many of those problems, and that will be very hard to do with Trump in the White House. You probably will be able to reverse the tariffs, but the workforce issue will not improve as long as Stephen Miller has an office in the West Wing.
Secondly and relatedly, even where you can and could act today or in 2026, it takes a long time to turn an economy around. In 2021, inflation was at 4,7%. High but OK. In 2022, it was 8%. No bueno. In 2023, it was at 4.1%, which would suggest it was calming down and in 2024, sure enough, it was at 2.9%. That rate would have been fine, if it wasn't for the fact that prices had been rising for three years. That almost 3% increase was happening to an already elevated number. The policies pursued by the Federal Reserve and Biden Administration were good and working, and if the election had happened a year later, I bet the result might have been different.
Still, if your Sherrill or Spanberger or even Mamdani, you are very unlikely to effect wholesale reductions in prices. Whereas Trump has pursued inflationary policies because he's a fucking idiot, you could try and reduce some regulations and that would be a really good policy outcome, but it might not rein in prices for two reasons. First, making it easier to build housing should be a priority in every Blue polity, but that will take 2-4 years to actually show up as places for people to live. Second, Trump's policies will supersede what you are doing. If you make it easier to generate electricity in your state, that won't help if unregulated data centers gobble it all up. If you reform housing codes, it won't matter if Trump deported all the Latin American tradesmen.
Of course, who cares. If Democrats can win control of both house of Congress next November running against Trump's terrible economic policies, then democracy might be saved. Voters will still blame his party in 2028. Hopefully, the AI/Crypto bubble bursts and data centers wither on the vine, freeing up electrical generation for consumers. Maybe we finally get a comprehensive and humane guest worker program and more legal immigration in 2029.
Paul Campos refers to our era as the Age of Unhappiness, which I think is accurate. That has political repercussions, but we need to recall how well Democrats did in 2022 relative to expectations. If Trump continues to immiserate the population, then any breath of fresh air in 2028 could reshape political coalitions.
Joe Biden's age was not a question of infirmity, so much as it rendered him incapable of making his case to the American voter. Making a case for abundance as a formula for affordability is something that doesn't require a politician to have the charisma of a Mamdani.
Trump stands aloof as someone faints behind him.
One advantage Trump has had is that - as Troll in Chief - he's pretty good at "driving the narrative" via visuals. Between his Gatsby Ball, demolishing the East Wing and now this...Yeah, not so much, Donny.
Nancy Pelosi was certainly the best and most effective Speaker of my adult lifetime. Especially in the 19th century, but even in the 20th, the Speaker was probably the second most powerful person in Washington. The nature of the House requires keeping the kittens herded together, and this became even more true as ideological partisanship increased during the last 40 years. Pelosi proved herself far superior to the Republican men who couldn't count votes, couldn't extend flexibility to their vulnerable members. Pelosi more than any other Speaker, at least since Tip O'Neill, knew how to count votes. She was Old School like that. "Czar" Reed never called a vote that he didn't know he could win. Same with Pelosi. Even as the House has slipped in power, Pelosi fought back to try and preserve it's historic role. (Also kudos for stepping down from the Speakership and for knowing the time was right to retire.)
Compare her to Mike Johnson:
Nancy Pelosi is 5'5", but she towers over the men who tried and failed to replace her.
Josh Marshall likes to say that the DC corpse is wired for Republicans. Here he notes how they are scrambling to understand the ass whupping the GOP got on Tuesday. What he points out is all the breathless articles about how Trump seems to be unpopular were true on Monday, but no one was writing that then (aside from filthy bloggers and Substackers).
Part of the "logic" of Project 2025 was to "move fast and break things" because that creates its own theory of power. It's not only about "flooding the zone" but creating a certain momentum that allows you to run roughshod over institutions. I would wager that even some Trump loyalists are surprised at how quickly some of those institutions caved.
The No King Rallies, the electoral rout and now the apparent limits of SCROTUS tolerance when it comes to tariffs have all begun to strip this imperial presidency of some of its momentum. This leaves aside Trump's seeming rapid aging that has him falling asleep at weird times. I'd wager that one reason Trump hasn't sat down with Schumer and Jeffries to negotiate an end to the shutdown is that his aides realize he's simply not up to the task.
These small victories add up. Acquitting "Sandwich Guy" matters. It's not just that "hope matters" but that Trump has asserted that he has dictatorial powers in a country with very elaborate structures to prevent that. The more toxic he becomes, the less ability he has to assert this, but the weaker he becomes, the more obvious that is.
ADDED: There's a strong argument that we should hope that the Court rules his tariffs illegal but that he tries a new rationale to keep them in place, forcing yet another round of court cases. The worse the economy gets, the better, but him losing is also good.
G. Elliot Morris is a Data Guy. His takeaway from the election is that we are likely looking at a D+8 environment in 2026. I could argue that Trump is so bad, so chaotic, that we could see something along the lines of a D+12 environment. I could also see a bigger movement towards Dems in rural areas, since Trump seems to be doing everything he can to punish farmers.
Still, as Dems approach the midterms, I don't think that simply relying on Trump's toxicity is enough to win by margins large enough to counteract voter suppression. Good candidates matter. It sucks that Jared Golden isn't going to run, because he's a really good candidate for that district. (It wouldn't shock me if Maine elects to redraw that district in the face of Republican efforts to do the same elsewhere.)
You can even see this in the White Elephant case of Mamdani. He's a really impressive politician, especially when it comes to messaging. Ideally, you can find some really well-tailored candidates for their districts. I'd love to see Mary Peltola run for the Alaska Senate seat.
An underrated flip side to this is that the Republican Party increasingly is made in Trump's image. Nancy Mace is mentally unwell, but she could win her primary for governor and lose because she's insane. As he remakes the party in his twisted image and his approval rating dips into the mid 30s, candidate quality could cut the other way. Running a dipshit like Markwayne Mullen will work in Oklahoma, but it might not work in Kansas or Iowa.
After a long year of soul searching and self-flagellation, Democrats finally racked up some huge wins across multiple elections last night. Electing Mamdani in NYC is getting the headlines, because New York, but the more significant elections happened elsewhere. Democrats romped not only in the Virginia governor's race, but in the House of Delegates. Mikie Sherrill was supposed to be in trouble in New Jersey, but she romped. In Georgia, Democrats won seats on the public utilities commission for the first time in decades. In Pennsylvania, three Democratic Supreme Court justices were retained with 60% of the vote. In California, Newsom's gambit of submitting Prop 50, which will create a partisan gerrymander in California to match that in Texas, passed with 63% of the vote. Even the Democrat running for Virginia Attorney General who had been hit with a scandal won easily.
If there are common threads that run through these elections it looks like the following.
People are upset with corruption. Some of this is local - Georgia, the NYC mayoral race - some of this is Trump - California. The general Trump fatigue with his self-dealing bullshit is getting noticed. Hispanics apparently swung back to Democrats because of the Gestapo shit that ICE and Border Patrol are doing to anyone browner than an Irishman in February.
People are upset with rising prices. Obviously this applies to Mamdani, but it also applies to Sherrill across the Hudson. It applies to the Georgia election. Most of the Democrats ran on some variation of the "abundance" agenda. Mamdani is going to make things free. Sherrill is going to declare an emergency over utility bills. Colorado voted to give school kids more free food.
People should pump the brakes on reading too much into one particular candidate or result. Mamdani is not a model for Democrats to win the Senate seat in Iowa next year, except to the degree that he is a very skilled politician, very charismatic and very attuned to people's concerns about affordability. Is it more important that Sherrill and Spanberger are women or that they are fairly moderate? Or that they won in pretty blue states?
Sadly, here in our town, we saw what factionalism can still do. We elected four of the nine members of the Town Council, and voters can vote for three candidates, with each party putting up three candidates. Republican one party rule has been the norm here for as long as I can remember, and the local GOP completely screwed up a water issue that is going to cost taxpayers $31 million to escape. Last night, the Republican candidates each won about 40% of the vote.
However, we have an Independent Party as well as a Democratic Party. They each got around 30% of the vote for their slate of candidates. That means 60% of voters wanted to turn the GOP out of office but instead they will continue to run the town into the ground.
I voted for the Independents, because I didn't think people in our town would vote for Democrats. Because they wouldn't cross list/cross endorse, they blew it.
I still think that creating a Farm-Labor party in the Great Plains states to replace the Democrats is a smart move, but it obviously requires Democrats to stand down completely.
Still, the good news is that we saw about a 4% shift towards Democrats in NJ and VA. That trend is great for Senate candidates in Maine and North Carolina. It opens the door for candidate quality in Ohio and Texas and even Iowa. If things get worse, things get better.
Here's an immediate question: What does this mean for the shutdown? Will Republicans look at these results and begin to worry about how their voters will treat them next November? Especially if they don't address exploding health care costs?
Right now, Trump's position is that he is going to starve kids and grandparents until Democrats agree to let him strip health care from millions. That ain't a great message. Last night confirmed that.
Dick Cheney had a stranglehold on "Worst Republican Elected Official In My Lifetime" until Donald Trump came along. The fact that he cared enough about the Constitution to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 is like a form of deathbed conversion. The blood of thousands is on his hands in a war that was disastrously conceived and fought under his leadership. You could argue that without the Iraq war Donald Trump never really gains a foothold among a certain group of Republicans who saw the Grand Old Party betray them by sending their sons and daughter off to fight an elective war. Russia predicated its invasion of Ukraine on the Iraqi precedent.
We are a worse country today, because Dick Cheney was Vice President under a weak and feckless president and maneuvered us into one of the three worst foreign policy misadventures in the long history of the Republic. Glad he saw through Trump, but it's not like that even helped.
Yglesias likes to take one or two ideas and beat them into a fine powder. One of his "ideas" is that Democrats should eschew unpopular ideas and promote popular ones. Really brilliant insight there.
The problem with this post is that it once again fails to grapple with the fact that Democrats DON'T talk about unpopular issues. Republicans do and mischaracterize Democratic positions. Yes, as he notes, the other side gets to campaign, too, but he points to Andy Beshear who has done a good job sticking up for Democratic values without being labeled as too extreme or "woke".
It's because he's a white dude from Kentucky.
Harris and Hillary were naturally assumed to be further left on cultural issues than the were because they were women. Harris even more so as a Black woman from San Francisco. Voters are pretty freaking dumb when you get to the middle of the electorate. Sorry, but they are - at least about politics. So they use easy short hands like how the candidate physically looks. Or aspects of their biography.
If voters were voting their policy preferences, Democrats would be winning all 50 states. Trump's OBBB is toxic and getting worse, but it's basically the GOP wish list going back 60 years.
I could make an argument that the most damaging thing to the Democratic Party in the last decade was the demagoguery of one man.
No, not that one.
The decision to punish stores for making it easier on people to receive food assistance while Trump withholds SNAP benefits is genuinely monstrous. Yglesias lays out the many ways that SNAP is a genuinely impressive policy. OK, it's not 100% perfect, but the basic difference between the two parties can be distilled to Republicans being outraged that one person on five hundred is abusing SNAP benefits and Democrats working to make sure the other four hundred and ninety nine don't go hungry.
Meanwhile, Trump's approval among 18-29 year olds is 75% disapproval. Turns out dismantling the Great Society and New Deal isn't actually popular among people who have no memory (or historical context) for the world that existed before.
Yesterday, SNAP benefits were shut off despite there being $6B in emergency funds that courts have ruled the administration has to spend to preserve food security. Around the same time, the rate increases to ACA insurance came out, highlighting the massive explosion in premiums. The House has not met in a month and a half.
Meanwhile, Trump is posting pictures of the renovation desecration of the Lincoln bathroom. He's squeezing other plutocrats to build a ball room desecrate the East Wing of the White House. He's going golfing again. He's holding a Gatsby themed party at Mar a Lardo.
The most baffling aspect of Trumpism is how working and middle class people convinced themselves that this scion of wealth, this tabloid plutocrat was their champion. As I've mentioned, we have a Republican Party in our town that has dominated the town for decades. They have recently screwed the pooch on a water dispute that is going to cost the town $36,000,000. They adhere to the politics of personal destruction.
And they look like they might lose on Tuesday. If they do, it will be because some of the Trumpier households in town are displaying Independent Party signs. That screams to me that lots of support for Trump was because he wasn't a "normal politician" and he was going to "shake things up." I heard the same from my friend in Argentina about Milei. Normal politics wasn't helping them so let's vote for the chaos agent.
I don't know if these stories of Trump's Gilded Age excesses will break through the conservative stranglehold on the media, but if they somehow do, what is the breaking point? At what point do these voters realize that they have been played? And even if they do have this epiphany, what's the best outcome? Do they switch parties? I doubt it. That's why the Independent Party is a great alternative for voters in our particular town. That's why I'd love to see a Great Plains Farm-Labor Party.
Or maybe they just stay home. In our close electoral landscape, not voting is as important as voting.
Trump is doing everything that he possibly can to rip the scales from people's eyes. He's doing everything he can to govern poorly.
Will it matter?
Trump has threatened to end the filibuster to get a continuing resolution, in case you were wondering what the White House polling is showing on the shutdown.
As Josh Marshall points out, please proceed. There's a common thread among Republicans Who Should Know Better, which is that - despite being an absolute scandal machine and an actual convicted felon - Trump does seem to have some bizarro electoral juice. "He keeps winning when he should lose, so maybe we just need to roll over and pee on our bellies."
I do think Marshall is right that there are enough Senate Republicans who understand that the filibuster is a structural advantage for their party and it won't happen. But I hope it does. The filibuster is about 66% of the reason why Americans say that "government is broken." As Democrats are the only party that wants to govern (as opposed to reign) that hurts their ability to actually pass laws.
Let it die.
Yglesias is very much the "Manhattan Private School/Yale Philosophy Major" type of Smart Guy. However, I keep reading him because he does occasionally have some nice nuggets and I don't want to silo my reading too much.
He has a Six Point Plan for Democrats to run on in 2026:
Ban congressional stock trading (+34)
Expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing (+31)
Raise the minimum wage to $12 (+22)
Crack down on tax evasion (+18)
Spend on reducing lead pollution (+14)
Guarantee abortion rights nationally before 12 weeks (+13)
You’ve got some economic populism in there, some progressive social policy, some environmental policy, some good government reform, and a link to Trump’s corruption and abuses of power via tax evasion.
That's a good plan. He goes on to say that other planks are less popular and therefore you shouldn't include them. Climate actually polls poorly - don't touch it. Even background checks, which poll well, don't poll well enough, though a few mass shootings could nudge that into plank seven.
He notes that a 12 week right to abortion isn't popular with abortion rights groups, but that it needs to be understood as a floor rather than a ceiling. Raising the minimum wage to $15 isn't quite as popular, but again: floor.
I think you have to throw in some stuff about protecting democracy, just on principle and checking Trump's unbridled power and corruption, because I think that's going to poll well by next autumn.
Still, picking a few things to win a majority sounds like a really solid plan. Once you have the majority, then you can do more.
Central to the Ghouls surrounding Trump and intent on devouring the brains of American democracy is their plan to militarize police functions. Central to this is utilizing or threatening to utilize the Insurrection Act. That might actually have run into a legal problem that even the Scotus Six might notice. The Insurrection Act was always bullshit, but this might give the Republicans on the bench a chance to save democracy, a prospect I'm not willing to completely cede.
As Richardson notes, and others have noted, the GOP is increasingly in an untenable situation with the shutdown. People are going to lose SNAP tomorrow at exactly the time that they are getting letters about their ACA premium increases. People going hungry when the Agriculture Department is sitting in $6B and we are sending at least $20B to Argentina (a direct competitor in agriculture output) is not a great look! Especially with Trump behaving more and more like the Central Asian despot he so clearly aspires to be. The destruction of the White House to put up a gilded ballroom is just...I dunno man, seems pretty easy to understand, even for the dipshittiest of dipshit voters.
Democratic backsliding and emerging autocracy requires that that the would-be dictator be popular. Trump really isn't, and if anything his policies are less popular than he is.
Krugman is right when he says that the Republicans were wise to push off many of the worst impacts of their terrible agenda until after the 2026 midterms. What Democrats have done with this shutdown is accelerate the timeline of when the inevitable pain will be felt. All the Very Online Experts who decried the feckless Dem strategy last spring and even this fall ("They will cave, because Schumer sucks.") were wrong. This is really sound strategy that puts the Democrats on their strongest ground.
At some point, too, the House will have to reconvene and Adelita Grijalva will be sworn in, which should prompt the release of House files related to Epstein. Trump's team's preference for "Move Fast, Break Things" is a shitty governance strategy and not much better politics. It works best as a media-dominance ploy, but that dominance isn't always good, when your positions are inherently bad.
Richardson's Catalog of Atrocities is longer than usual, but one thing stood out. It's the layoffs.
Amazon laid off 14,000. UPS has laid off 48,000 this year. Target laid off 1,800 corporate jobs. Molson Coors is also laying off corporate workers. General Motors and Rivian are laying of workers in their EV sections.
The loss of white collar jobs might be a harbinger of the coming AI assault on corporate jobs. It may also be a combination of AI displacement AND a weakening overall economy. The Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates in the face of still high inflation, which can only mean their estimation of the job market is pretty bad.
Now, we are about to get apocalyptic news for SNAP and ACA recipients in the face of these strong "headwinds" in the economy.
Usually, we should see a market crash about now in the calendar year. For whatever reason, the fall is when the markets collapse. So far it hasn't happened, but the overall signs are pretty dire.
Given Republican efforts to gerrymander themselves out of electoral consequences, a massive economic collapse might be the Republic's only hope.
The operating assumption of Trump during the shutdown has been that the longer it goes on, the more people suffer, the more likely Democrats are to cave.
However, SNAP benefits expiring doesn't "hurt" Democrats, in the sense that everyone "knows" that Democrats support SNAP and Republicans don't.
Now, we have the ACA subsidies expiring and the letters going out informing people of what they are going to have to pay next year. This is happening while Democrats are refusing to vote for a CR until those subsidies are restored. In other words, these two news stories are going to flow into each other.
Again everyone "knows" that Democrats want you to have health insurance and Republicans want you to earn health insurance. The GOP doesn't understand that both ACA and SNAP help working families. They are so wedded to the idea that all "welfare" is a scam that they are about to face the coming train head first.
I don't think that an up-or-down vote on extending the ACA subsidies would fail in a vacuum. Trump has decided that Democrats can't "win" this showdown, so people are going to suffer rather than have both parties work to solve the issue. All for the whims of the Mad King.
Trump has been bragging about how he's acing his "IQ Test" at Walter Reed.
It's a dementia test.
Marx argued for heightening the contradictions. What he meant was that efforts like labor unions actually hurt the proletariat by improving their living and working conditions. What was needed, he argued, was the full cruelty of bourgeoise capitalism to be felt by the working masses. This was "heightening the contradictions." Things had to be terrible for "the revolution" to happen.
Well, we are about to heighten the hell out of those contradictions.
The coming devastation of SNAP is the first thing that will be felt all over the country. Then, the exploding health care premiums will devastate the middle class.
Which brings me to the Democrats endgame on the shut down. Lot of Republicans seem almost gleefully eager to immiserate their own voters. If they ram through a CR by eliminating the filibuster for it, and the health care increases kick in - does that matter? If all these rural voters lose SNAP benefits - does that matter?
I've always been skeptical of this argument, because it seems to me that people have picked their parties based on things besides tangible policy positions. I wager we will see a lot of "I'm really disappointed Trump has increased the price of groceries, killed my SNAP benefits and made my insurance unaffordable, but at least he's not a Democrat."
What's more, do you even want to win? Like on tariffs - which are all clearly illegal - do you want the Court to rule that they are illegal? Or does it serve to benefit you electorally when the economy finally sputters and dies?
In a few days, SNAP benefits will expire. The level of pain this will cause Americans - rural and urban, young and old - is going to be profound. People are going to go hungry. People are going to miss debt payments to pay for food, which will accelerate the usual debt crises among the working poor.
A "normal" government - even a Republican one - would not want to see Americans suffer. There were competing visions on how to help the poor and the near-poor, with the GOP offering up bullshit "bootstraps" ideas, but at least they cared in the abstract.
Trump is a sadist or at least a narcissist for whom other people's pain is not "understandable." The cuts to USAID have led directly to the deaths of children. We're murdering people in the Caribbean. Those are foreigners. These are Americans, and he's showing the same callous disregard for their well being as he would for people on the other side of the world. Both are bad, but the latter is literally his fucking job.
The Very Online Doomerism has a point when they look at things like the destruction/desecration of the East Wing of the White House and say that Trump has no intention of leaving office. Democracy is doomed, because he's behaving as if democratic checks on presidential power no longer exist.
I don't think that's right, because it buys into the same idea that Trump is pushing: that he can create a reality with the stroke of his pen. However, the needless and immediate pain that he is foisting upon the people that he is supposed to be serving (not that he has the slightest idea what "service" means) is pretty strong evidence that he is not planning to have elections ever again.
If he keeps this up, even gerrymandering won't protect him or his acolytes in the House.
Krugman looks at the economic reasons why renewables have exploded in the last 15 years. It's obviously clear that the Trump Administration is waging a mostly pointless, pique-filled war against solar and wind, for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Sure, there are the arguments that this is just naked corruption by making coal mines more profitable for the next few years. That's normally a strong argument with these mooks. The other argument is that this is just Cleek's Law at work. Democrats support renewables, so Republicans must oppose them. There's also the argument that Trump has a stick up his diapered ass because he doesn't like the way windmills look from his Scottish golf course.
It still doesn't add up.
Renewables are an absolute economic positive in multiple ways. There's the obvious climate change mitigation, but renewables are cheaper in the long run than hydrocarbons. Once you build a renewable facility, that cost is largely "it." You don't have to pay fuel costs.
Trump and Republicans have stripped out tax credits for solar, even on residential buildings. We are currently building our retirement home, and we want to get solar on the roof, but we won't be able to before January 1st, when the tax credits expire because of the OBBB.
At the same time, the cost of electricity is spiking, almost entirely from AI data centers. Yes, it will be more expensive to put PV panels on our roof in 2026 than it would have been in 2025, but we can budget around that, especially since otherwise our long term electrical bills would be a real burden. I'm even looking into residential wind - it's not supposed to be great, but it's really cheap, about $3000 for a 5000 watt turbine. We will need a battery, and those credit, too, are expiring.
This is among the thousands of outrages committed by the Trump administration against American citizens and their economic interest.
I do wonder, though, how much renewables will continue to grow simply because they are so economically efficient now. It made sense and was necessary to subsidize renewables a decade ago or even five years ago. While it still makes sense to do so today, I wonder if it's economically necessary.
In the long run, the real issue is climate change, and it's heartening that other countries are picking up some of the slack. If Americans aren't going to be buying solar and wind and batteries, other countries will. It will make us poorer, it's stupid and it's shortsighted, but I don't think it's reversible.
Josh Marshall looks at the failure of civic elites to stand up to Trump. He references the concept of "civic virtue" that was central to the earliest vision of republican rule immediately after the Revolution. The assumption was that - in a Republic - citizens, especially elite citizens, would subsume their personal ambitions into the national project. This largely failed under the Confederation and was why the Constitution was written: to replace voluntary virtue with a government strong enough to enforce laws. Ironically, the Framers still thought some civic virtue would remain, which is why they didn't think political parties and the attendant partisanship would exist. How can their be an "opposition" party in a Republic?
Back to Marshall, I heard Obama speak at the CT Forum, where he said that elites need to risk a little comfort to preserve democracy. The results since then have been mixed. Universities are finally fighting back against efforts to destroy academic freedom, but corporate media seems more and more supine in their coverage of Trump. The Times currently has a piece about the changing architectural plans for the East Wing, rather than screaming about the fact that every bit of what he's doing is a violation of the red letter of the law. He's breaking the law in plain sight and they want to discuss his aesthetic vision?
Krugman has one of his weekend talks with Erica Chenoweth, where they discuss the relative success of both protests and civil resistance (which Chenoweth argues are not synonymous). Chenoweth famously noted that if 3.5% of the population joins protest movements, the regime usually falls.
While that is actually optimistic - No Kings mobilized about 2.3% of the population already - my concern is about one aspect that we are truly deficient in, if we are going to use mass movements to defeat fascism in America: civil society. When Chenoweth looked at the most successful mass movement, she was especially taken with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Those happened despite crackdowns on civil society, but those crackdowns actually made civil society important. When you repress something, you get a counterreaction.
Our problem is not that civil society has been repressed, but that we have largely let it atrophy and perish.
The Big Event that has yet to happen is Trumpist shock troops shooting protestors. What made No Kings so impressive was how peaceful it was. Chenoweth and Krugman talk about how important that is. Still, Trump has hired a bunch of unqualified goombahs to staff his Deportation Force. It's only a matter of time before one of them fires at and kills a protestors. I know I kept a wary eye towards every pickup truck that drove by our protest.
If - or more likely when - Trumpists draw first blood, the response of the American people will be critical. I have no idea what that response will be.
As Krugman notes, Trump's desecration of the White House is not just sad, but it's a direct assault on republican (not Republican) aesthetics. Washington DC is supposed to represent classical virtues, but Trump's aesthetics run to Tin Pot Dictator. His obsession with gilded shit is an expression of the howling void in his soul that needs to be propped up by vanity design.
It all feels part of the complete collapse of American morality under Trump. He trades pardons for cash and all the other things we could list forever. It does not end with Trump though. We have the NBA gambling scandal, which was as predictable as the sunrise. We have the crushing of creativity under an assault of AI "slop".
Everything just feels worse and it starts from the man millions of Americans felt was worthy of the public trust, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary.
Krugman notes the wide disparity between what rural Americans need and what they vote for. It's not just the crude dynamic of how tax money moves around the Federal Republic, but that's an easy way to look at it. Krugman's larger point is how much Trump hates his voters, and that's largely true. The problem is that rural voters are in an abusive relationship with the Republican Party, where they plead to be a good if Daddy just stops hitting them.
Even has Trump spends tens of millions to destroy the East Wing of the People's House; even as he sends tens of billions to bail out Argentina; even has he talks about buying Argentine beef; even as he guts the ACA tax credits; even has his Medicaid cuts imperil rural hospitals...they STILL SEEM TO FUCKING WANT HIM TO BE PRESIDENT.
At the heart of this is the epistemological bubble that much of the country lives in, courtesy of Faux News. I had an interaction on Facebook over a local election that hinges on Republican complete mismanagement of our water supply that now leaves the community on the hook for a $34M settlement. My counterpart said it was still better than the "radical Marxist demoncrats who have destroyed the country." It was like he was playing Fox News Mad Libs.
These bubbles are really problematic, and we see that in how people - especially rural people - see our cities. Chicago is one of the absolute coolest cities in the world. It does have a gang problem that showed up for years in very localized murders. Many Americans, however, think of it as a blood soaked hellscape.
There IS a problem that Democrats absent mindedly promulgated, which is the overly censorious character of a lot of what Carville calls "Academic Break Room Politics." The basic thing is "You can't say that." Now a lot of things you probably shouldn't say! And apparently if you point out that Charlie Kirk was a racist, sexist demagogue, you should lose your job. Still, the culture war priorities were often counterproductive.
I would argue that Republican culture war priorities are arguably MORE counterproductive for them.
Still, the media landscape makes every Democrat Rashida Talib or Ayanna Pressley.
I'm not sure how you counteract an entire media ecosystem created to stir outrage over small things. That's what conservatives and some leftists have learned from the Age of the Algorithm. Anger drives engagement.
For Democrats to save democracy next November, I almost think that they have to allow for the creation of a regional party - a Farm-Labor Party like the one in Minnesota, but with the word "Democratic" excised. You can't fight against preconceptions, you just can't. Trump won Nebraska with almost 60% of the vote (and now he's killing their agriculture). Deb Fischer won the Senate seat with 53.3% against Dan Osborn who ran as an independent. I almost have to think that Osborn wins that today if there were a special election.
The "Democratic Brand" is toxic in large parts of the country. Creating a regional party that appeals to working class voters without being associated with the cultural liberalism of the national party seems a way out. Democrats chose to not run a candidate in the Nebraska senate race to clear the field for Osborn. Some tacit agreement could work here. (It would have to be guarded against someone like Platner running as a third party candidate in Maine.)
In my town, Republicans routinely get 66% of the vote. However, the anger of that water issue I mentioned earlier is leading many normally Republican voters to switch their votes. They are not, however, switching their votes to the Democrats, but to a local Independent Party. Hopefully it works, but we shall see.
I was intrigued by Graham Platner when he started showing up on my social media feed. I was worried that he was giving off subtle Fetterman vibes. Unlike a lot of people who run for higher office, Platner has not been exposed to the microscope of a campaign.
Well, the microscope wasn't necessary. You don't even need a magnifying glass. It's visible to the naked eye. Nazi tattoos are a bright red line.
The worst part of this is not that it cedes the seat to Collins, because Mills is a strong candidate. The worst part is that the Very Online, Very Pod-based Bros are all decrying the fact that they were supporting this burly, bearded dude and now people with political instincts are basically saying, "It's over."
The typical whining leftist isn't simply arguing that their positions are right. They are arguing that any questioning of them or their agenda is class treason.
Platner seems to be an idiot. That should be that.
The No Kings Protests were remarkably successful (far more successful than the relatively much smaller Tea Party protests of 2009-10). The next question though is: So what? A bunch of middle aged and retired Old White People showed up to rallies.
The team at TPM draws attention to a loose "3.5% Rule." This was postulated by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan by looking at protest movements from 1900-2006.
The first rule was that non-violent protests were more successful than violent protests. When protests use violence they unleash the far greater violent capacity of the state. This is why Trump kept harping about the No Kings movement being full of Antifa or terrorists or whatever. It's also why it's so important that it was, in fact, a bunch of Old White People.
Once a nonviolent protest movement was able to mobilize 3.5% of the population, it almost always leads to a collapse in the regime. A lot of these recently have been the so-called Color Revolutions that swept through former Soviet Republics and several Middle Eastern countries. There are 340 million Americans. Let's say that the larger estimates of the rallies was right at 8 million. That's about 2.3% of the population. To get to the magic number, you'd need about 12 million protestors.
The economy is soft as hell, but has not yet collapsed. If that in fact happens, Trump's unpopularity will explode, especially since he's currently building himself a ballroom, bailing out Argentina and extorting his own Justice Department for more money.
Could America be headed to its own color revolution?
Krugman continues to lay out a theme he started talking about yesterday: Trump's break with reality. The crux of the argument:
Does Trump actually believe that (the protests were small)? I suspect that he does. In the grip of delusion, a powerful person will dismiss and destroy anything that challenges their self-aggrandizing alternate reality. This explains why there is no one in Trump’s inner circle who dares to tell him that his poll numbers are, indeed, very bad; or that it’s a bad look to commute George Santos’ prison sentence for fraud and identity theft. When people try to tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he gets angry.
I would even take this a step further. The reason why democracies succeed in the long run is that you cannot remain in an autocratic bubble when you have to face the voters. You have to adjust and explain your actions. Trump feels no such compunction. He continues to do things that are self-evidently damaging to the United States because he thinks that eventually - or even right now - he will be proven right. It's one thing to believe that tariffs will make us richer by 2028, but Trump may very well believe that they are making is richer today. Who, exactly, is going to tell him differently?
I still believe that the great mass of Americans do not want to slide into Trump's form of authoritarianism. I am up in the air as to whether we have the tools to prevent it, but I think we generally prize our democracy. If Trump retreats further into his narcissistic delusions and he has no one around him to correct those delusions, I would guess that this will further erode him standing even with some of the people who voted for him.
The protests were large and peaceful, despite assertions by Republicans that they were going to be lawless and small. Trump even said on Saturday that they were pathetic and small, despite obvious photographic evidence to the contrary.
What's more, as Richardson shows, the GOP actually leaned into the monarchical aspects of Trump's rule. They posted some of their AI slop videos of Trump placing a crown on his head and flying a jet over American cities and dropping literal shit on people. This is simply crazy behavior from a party that has to contend in elections (raising the prospect that they have no intention of allowing elections to proceed fairly).
Krugman makes a good point about all this by referencing the concept of "flattery inflation" that builds up around autocrats. Here's the quote from Henry Farrell:
How do you show your loyalty? By paying the costs of humiliation. The more grotesquely over the top your praise, the more credible it is as a signal of support for Dear Leader.
Apparatchiks’ willingness to degrade themselves will hurt their reputation with other people. But for exactly that reason, it serves as proof of loyalty to the one man who counts, Donald Trump. The more appalling the self-abasement, the more effectively it will serve this purpose.
That dynamic explains a lot of the behavior around Trump. The bigger the lie you are willing to tell in his service, the more loyal you are. Since loyalty overrides competence, we get a messaging team that shows Trump literally shitting on Americans. That is not - or at least should not be - a very good message. Democrats get slagged for saying things like "Why don't rural Americans vote for their economic self-interest?" and then Fox runs a million hours of content about how Democrats are calling rural voters dumb. Trump depicts himself shitting on people and...shrugs.
However, this is exactly why these protests might actually matter. Trump and his voters exist in what Krugman calls "bubble autocracy" in which almost every Republican and much of the media extol his power and greatness. Mockery - especially the mockery by millions of Americans - helps puncture that myth. Trump is not all powerful - not yet. Arresting the slide into autocracy has to begin with eroding the lies that infect our Republic and that are coming from the White House. The visuals of protest are the way to start.
Trump is an 80 year old man who spent his whole life running a closely held company where he made personal relationships the key to his branding exercises that made him his money. As President, he has basically extended that worldview to his foreign policy. "Are you my 'friend' and can we work together in a way that will ultimately benefit me?" He is not capable of learning a new trick.
This led him to negotiate the temporary cease fire in Gaza that has - unsurprisingly - already broken down. His relationship with the Gulf States allowed him to pressure Hamas to give up the hostages, but Hamas is not ready to cede Israel's right to exist or certainly to rule Gaza and Israel still wants to kill every last member of Hamas. Since Trump has no personalist relationship with Hamas, there is no way to keep them in line and Israel won't let Hamas sneeze without bombing a refugee camp.
The credulity with which the news media treated this "peace deal" was disgusting.
Now, we have Martin Longman laying out the same dynamic in the Caribbean. As he notes, Trump seems to be inching us towards war with Venezuela based on trumped up (ahem) charges that Maduro is in league with Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan narco-gang. At the same time, it seems pretty clear that Trump is fine with the actual close relationship that his friend Bukele has with the Salvadoran narco-gang MS13.
It doesn't matter which gang is more deadly or more responsible for drug trafficking. All of that is noise. What matters is that Bukele has cultivated Trump and Maduro hasn't (or more likely can't). You can also see this dynamic with the bailout for Javier Milei.
Put another way: The United States no longer conducts foreign policy on the basis of principles or long term strategic needs; it conducts foreign policy based on how well a foreign head of state kisses Trump's diapered ass. This presents real problems for global stability. We have seen this for quite some time with Trump's treatment of Ukraine. Zelensky has finally learned to kiss Trump's ass, and that has led to Trump softening his hardline towards Kyiv, but we should be supporting Ukraine because it is a fledgling democracy under assault by an imperial autocratic regime.
Principles matter, because they are fixed and predictable. Trump has no principles beyond personal aggrandizement, so America has no principles beyond what he requires from any given moment or circumstance.
The protests yesterday were great. There was a lot of sentiment about how it was only about 9 months of this shit. The list of degradations by Trump is very, very long. We are already seeing some of his policies create real problems - killing renewable and higher electricity prices; tariffs and deportations leading to inflation; trade wars leading to a collapse in American agricultural exports; personal vindictiveness weaponizing the Justice department against his critics; rampant corruption - both within his family and his administration; forcing media and other conglomerates to kiss the ring or suffer the consequences. The list seems endless.
The reason 7,000,000 Americans took to the streets yesterday (and judging by the reaction of passing cars, many millions more supported them) is that we are seeing the real time effects of having a fucking moron make economic policy. We are seeing what happens when a petty little tyrant has unconstrained access to power.
We haven't yet seen how this personalist foreign policy will play out. There's always a lag with these things as old systems slowly change.
I'm willing to bet that before long, we will blunder into a shooting war.
One of the aspects of Trump's presidencies is the scattershot nature of them. There are a few policies that create the appearance of a throughline, but because there were still adults in the room, his first administration was incoherent. The second one, sadly, is far more coherent.
Still, who exactly is the constituency for pardoning George Santos?
The constituency for going to war with Venezuela is Florida Republicans - Cuban and Venezuelan - who hate communism and Maduro. It's a bad idea and we shouldn't do it, but I can at least see the point from an ideological and political point of view.
But Santos? As Josh Marshall has noted, the peace deal - whatever it's actually worth in the long run - was possible, because Trump is the same sort of corrupt oligarch as the Gulf monarchies. They just occupy the same wave length.
I guess the reason to pardon Santos is to let all Republicans know that their corruption and lawlessness will be pardoned. Do whatever you like, Trump will pardon you, as long as you're loyal to him.
That's the overriding point of Trump 2.0. The policy cohesiveness from tariffs to Gaza to selective prosecutions is loyalty to Hair Furor.
If you can, too, you should.
The only thing we have on our side is growing numbers. In a democracy, that should mean something. We shall see if it does.
Steady State, a group of former US intelligence and defense officials, has stated that America is moving towards "competitive authoritarianism." In this system, there are elections, but important democratic checks don't exist and power resides almost exclusively in the Executive. Hungary and Türkiye are prime examples of this.
Perhaps the most important paragraph:
Among the key indicators of democratic decline identified in the report: the expansion of executive power through unilateral decrees and emergency authorities; the politicization of the civil service and federal law enforcement; attempts to erode judicial independence through strategic appointments and “noncompliance” with court rulings or investigations; a weakened and increasingly ineffective Congress; partisan manipulation of electoral systems and administration; and the deliberate undermining of civil society, the press and public trust.
Tell me what's inaccurate about that statement.
For those of us who care about democracy and America, we have all looked towards the 2026 midterms as the critical moment for discovering (as opposed to deciding) whether of not we still live in a democracy. If elections return a Democratic Congress, then we can still claim to be a democracy. If voters prefer a Democratic Congress, but gerrymandering and the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act returns a Republican House, I can't help but wonder if that's just the end of the line for "America."
In her "Letter" today, Richardson talks about the sentiments of the Revolutionary generation regarding where true power should lie, and they placed it, very consciously, in the Legislative branch. Republicans in Congress have abandoned legislative prerogatives to placate the dictator in the White House. The Supreme Court - not the lower courts - have abandoned all principles to rule randomly in favor of Trump whenever possible. The American "Revolution" is more accurately understood as a secession movement within an imperial system that denied them representative government.
In the decade before the Civil War, Daniel Webster argued that - unlike in 1776 - secession made no geographic sense. The Atlantic separated the colonies from Britain, but as Webster put it, the mountains and rivers all run the wrong direction. Indeed, looking at the electoral map from 2020, trying to map out a country where Biden won more than 50% of the vote creates a very odd map.
From Maine to Virginia would be part of the new country, but we would have to merge with Canada, because Minnesota and Illinois would want in. What to do with the former Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin is a big conundrum. Colorado and New Mexico are Blue, but Arizona is Purple, and that's the bridge to the Pacific Coast.
Drawing those lines would be hard, but I'm not sure why we should persist in the fiction of living in an America that is no longer recognizably American. We do however need to be having these discussions. The SCOTUS and Congressional Republicans cannot think there are no consequences to abandoning democracy.
