Chaos

 Where to begin? The random laying off of the people who keep the Phoenix Federal Courthouse operating? Trump's entirely-not-surprising-at-all-not-really walking back of his tariffs? The blowing up of every strategic alliance? 

Trump was, indeed, "constrained" during his first term. There was a quote by someone who noted something along the lines that so many of Trump's aides - people like Kelly, Mattis, Tillerson - talked about him like was a toddler who had missed his nap. I'm also reminded again of the Fran Lebowitz quote, "You don't know anyone stupider than Donald Trump. You just don't." 

Now, Trump has the perfect, undying fealty of the GOP, who are terrified of him tweeting some shit about them, the resulting primary challenge and they are reduced to be Scott Kinzinger or Liz Cheney, which is...bad, I guess?

Businesses hate chaos. Businesses want stability. Trump is incapable of providing that, because stability requires both planning and hard work. Trump is capable of neither. He is, it appears, capable of outsourcing stripping the government for parts by allowing the unelected South African billionaire to just go nuts in direct violation of the law.

So, we may be headed for the Trumpcession, but, hey!  Maybe not!  No one knows anything anymore! Still, do we think they are really going to be able to pass a budget?

Fraud, however, does not work. Lying only works for a short span of time.

Every day there are signs we are getting closer to the "Find Out" phase of voting for this malevolent, felonious cretin. 

Begin Now

 There's a lot of caterwauling about how ineffective Democratic messaging is. Sure. Whatever. They have zero leverage at this moment so using the exact right words will I guess...something.

The one thing they should be doing right now is building party infrastructure, including candidate recruitment, especially in places where they haven't been strong recently, like Iowa. You win control of the Senate by racking up surprising wins in places that were once battlegrounds, but haven't been recently.

The farm belt, in particular, seems a fertile place to poach some seats, if Trump's plans remain in place. Democrats can, in fact, win in places like Iowa, Kansas and Montana, with the right candidate and party infrastructure. 

Lies Used To Matter

 We used to be a proper country, where a politician lying obviously and shamelessly in the People's House would bring down universal opprobrium. I have my issues with the way Matthew Yglesias too often insists on treating Trump like a normal politician who has policy positions and paper. However, he can also rightly point out that much of what Trump said last night was obviously false. Now, he does say "untrue" as opposed to "lies" and I think that matters. I read someone saying that Trump's manifestly odious personal character is now background noise, but I think some of that is that "Trump said things that were not factual" as opposed to "Trump lies all the time."

As Paul Campos notes, a LOT of American voters are, let's say, ignorant of policy and governance. Trump is already unpopular, and I have to think that tanking the stock market and causing prices to rise with a chaotic tariff policy (the Commerce Secretary suggested they might repeal the tariffs, but who really knows anything).

As Paul Krugman reminds us, the DOGE arsonists don't know shit about shit, and the first thing to break could be Social Security payments. The NRCC has already told its members not to have town halls, because while many Americans are deeply ignorant about how government works, some communities - especially farm communities and areas that have a lot of Federal workers - are already feeling the chaos. They are pissed. 

Lies matter, because you cannot make good decisions based on wrong data and facts. Trump's brazen disregard for facts combines with the sycophancy that characterizes everyone around him to create massive wellspring of ignorance. That ignorance will lead to more disastrous policy making, and the chaos that swirls around Trump is really bad for business planning. 

If we stagger around for two years with Trump actively destroying everything good about America, I have to wonder - even if we have free and fair elections in 2026 and 2028, if the current iteration of the Constitution can survive not only the abuse, but the manifestation of all the many shortcomings in that document.

UPDATE: Sweet merciful Jeebus, read through the Times' "fact checking". They label outright lies as "misleading" or "needs context". 

Wholesale Misery

Whelp. It looks like Trump is going to actually follow through on his tariff bullshit. (Or maybe not. Who the hell knows?) Krugman makes the point that Trump hates Canada for its decency. While there's a point there, it seems pretty obvious that Trump hates democracies. He certainly hates democracy here at home. I've been hesitant to give into the idea of disunion, but as a New Englander, I could think of worse fates than joining Canada. Some of the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Coast could join, too. 

Being a citizen of Canada is imminently preferable to being a citizen of Trumpistan.

What is clear, as Richardson points out, is Trump is breaking laws and committing unconstitutional acts with breathtaking rapidity and frequency. She suggests that some of what DOGE is doing is eviscerating government workers and agencies for the purpose of creating the lean 19th century government that could "survive" a government shutdown. Perhaps, and given the rank evil of Trump's minions, that could be plausible. The Stephen Millers and Russell Voughts combine in equal measures the cruelty and stupidity that are the hallmarks of fascism.

The Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta has a first quarter GDP contraction predicted for 2.8%. A few weeks ago, they predicted 2.3% growth. In other words, Trump's erratic, reactionary policy making has taken healthy economic growth and possibly turned it into a recession in just a few weeks. If these tariffs really go into effect, 2.8% contraction might be optimistic. 

There are so many ways that DOGE can and likely will immiserate Americans. I've been focusing on missed Social Security checks. However, the gutting of Medicaid will also hammer elderly Americans who rely on Medicaid to cover gaps in their Medicare. Every Federal employee who is laid off is an American who will not collect a paycheck. Every impounded dollar of Federal spending is a dollar removed from the American economy.

I don't think, frankly, that a depression is off the table. Federal spending is roughly a quarter of GDP, and that includes Social Security, Medicare and defense spending. A depression is a 10% drop in GDP. Trump and Musk are apparently working this way: gut the government and THEN give the tax cut. The problem is that Republican majorities are so slim in the House, that passing an actual budget seems far fetched. 

What's more, Federal spending has a multiplier effect. A dollar spent on education or infrastructure improves the overall efficiency of the economy. You wind up improving overall GDP with spending like that. Eliminating it will make America poorer.

It is 9:00am as I write this. We will see what the Dow does today. It certainly was unhappy yesterday. However, in October of 1929, it was not a complete downward spiral. There were rallies, there were sell offs, there were good days and bad. It will be in the interest of finance to prop up the markets a bit. The Dow will tell us something, but it is not a light switch that flips and creates a recession. It will be a data point.

It's possible that a huge sell off could prompt Trump to change plans. I remain skeptical of how hands on Mr. Golf is in the running of his administration. He is also a vindictive prick, who might not waver because he's a vindictive prick.

As the Chinese curse goes: "May you live in interesting times."

The Worm Turns Slowly, But It Does Turn

 Trump has been president for six weeks. That's it.  Six weeks. He was, as he said, a Dictator on Day One. People of my persuasion have been disheartened by his victory in November, and by the breakneck speed with which he has trampled constitutional governance. One reason that the election was so much worse this time was because he actually won a plurality of the vote, unlike last time.

However, we are seeing broad pushback, especially on Elon Musk's hostile takeover of the executive branch.

Friday's Oval Office disaster will, I think, begin the process of turning heads about just how far Trump has aligned himself with Russia. Europe has gotten the message, and I think Americans will, too.

People don't usually vote foreign policy, but Trump is actively taking Russia's side on any number of issues, and that will cause opinions to shift. Most Americans are some form of patriotic; most Americans side with Ukraine. There is a non-trivial number of Republicans in Congress for whom this might be the bridge too far. That, or when Musk breaks Social Security.

Ideally they would break with Trump on their own, but if Democrats were to win the special House elections coming up that would send a stark message. Right now, many Republicans are doubtless horrified by the increasing mountains of evidence that the President of the United States is actively collaborating with our enemies. However, because they are craven little sacks of shit, they are more fearful of a primary challenge. If it looks like R+10 districts are in play, that calculus changes.

UPDATE: And let's not forget his dementia and overall stupidity. 

Why Did Trump Win Again?

 Lots of takes on this throughout the late fall, but I keep coming back to five things I think are critical.

One: Partisanship creates a very high floor. There were people who were going to vote for the Republican because he was a Republican and there were people who were going to vote for the Republican because he wasn't the Democrat. Which leads to...

Two: Incumbency is a burden from 2022-today. Covid fucked us up and we haven't recovered our equilibrium. We also have no one to blame, so we blame those in power. This has been true across the globe.

There are specific things to this race though:

Three: Trump wins over women and loses to men. OK, it's a tiny sample size, but everything about Trump stands in opposition to women in positions of authority. The young men who voted for him? Even some women? They just don't trust women in leadership roles. There's a million things to be said about why that is, but it seems pretty clear that it is true.

Four: Butler mattered. When Trump stopped as he was being rushed off stage and shouted "Fight" that was the only moment in my observation of the man that he displayed anything that might be considered a virtue. It was on camera and it was real, unlike so many of his stunts.

Five: The media still does not know how to cover a compulsive liar. Project 2025 was unpopular then and it is unpopular now. TPM is keeping a running tally of GOP congressfolk who are being ripped to pieces by constituents who are furious that Trump is doing exactly what we knew he would do if we were paying attention to Project 2025. The problem is, that Trump said he had nothing to do with it...and everyone dropped it. Remarkable.

Some of this is the willful ignorance of huge swaths of the American electorate, but the media knows he lies, but after he said he had nothing to do with the plans that he is now implementing everyone shrugged and moved on.

America As A Rogue State

 Yesterday's embarrassment performance in the Oval Office, where a petulant Trump parroted Putin's talking points and went off on Zelensky for not being a lapdog, raises the question - along with everything else Trump has done - as to whether the US is a rogue state.

The US has always played by its own rules when it suited us. We take and leave compliance with international agreements as we see fit. In most cases, we try and abide by rules we helped write, but every once in a while, an administration comes along that flouts those rules. Dubya flouted them both with the invasion of Iraq and the torture of Al Qaeda operatives.

Trump has done more than flout or ignore those rules; he has lit them on fire and pissed on the ashes. He is nakedly aligned the country with other rogue states like Russia and - one could make a case - Israel. Trump is a career criminal, and international law is terribly weak. There is effectively no coercive power to enforce those laws. That's why we take and leave them as we need to. International laws both protect and bind weaker countries. Trump - again a career criminal - has realized that there is very little that truly binds America, so he is going to do whatever he thinks is best within the requirements of the moment for him.

L'etat c'est moi. Patrimonialism.

Of course the reason America has largely abided by these agreements is that there are all sorts of advantages of having allies and setting a good example. It has been in our interest, most of the time, to live by our word.

Trump, a man who cannot help by lie, has no honor, no sense of obligation to anyone but himself.

And so, America, the world's most powerful country, is now behaving as a rogue state, unbound by the rules she helped write. 

What will follow, most likely, is the sort of international instability we haven't seen since World War II.

All because some voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin didn't like the price of eggs and were weirded out by the idea of a female president.