Spiraling

 I've mentioned Josh Marshall's theory that all politics are unitary. If you suffer a setback on the economy, that effects the way people view your ability in other areas. Roughly speaking this is about governing legitimacy. Jimmy Carter was elected because he was bracingly honest after Vietnam and Watergate. He was undone by some of his own actions, but largely because of events in the...wait for it...Middle East, especially Iran. 

If we look at Trump's polling on Iran, we can see it's really unpopular for being in the first days of a military conflict. Perhaps - as many have argued - that this is because Trump never made the case for striking Iran. Another argument is that he's simply lost the support of the majority of the American people and no matter what he does, it will be unpopular because he's unpopular. 

Now, we have rising gas prices, and that tends to impact all sorts of prices. We also have a bad jobs report, both the number we lost in February and the revision downwards for December and January. Trump's firing of the head of BLS might get your a favorable tilt on initial reports, but the revisions will typically be downwards, when the data is more concrete. People have been worried about the economy in ways that the data suggested didn't make sense, but perhaps that soft job market that crept in after the chaos of Liberation Day tariff-palooza really was on people's minds.

The "affordability" crisis is certainly not going to be helped by Trump's war in Iran. Trump's numbers on the economy were already bad, and then he goes off in all of his speeches about how things are actually great, and have you seen these drapes? People were getting pissed about the economy before Trump launched a war that very predictably has spiked oil prices. 

Meanwhile, yesterday, Trump finally fired a Cabinet official when the overwhelming corruption of Kristi Noem became too much even for Republicans on the Hill to stomach. Of course, being Trump he nominated Markwayne Mullion, arguably the stupidest member of Congress, but a scalp is a scalp. Noem no doubt thought she could get away with cheating on her husband on the taxpayer's dime, funneling money to cronies and killing American citizens in the street, because Trump would protect her.

Surprise!

If you're Pam Bondi or Pete Hegseth, just know that once you become a liability in his eyes, he will cast you over the side before you can blink. 

Republicans are fleeing from Congress and dropping out of their re-election bids, because they can see the coming catastrophe. Trump - stupid, senile and arrogant - will refuse to accept his many setbacks. 

He's spiraling, and he will continue to spiral.

Dire Straits

 Josh Marshall has been tracking the impact of Iran's threats to shipping through the Straits of Hormuz. Basically, there was no planning and insurance carriers can't insure all these ships.

This basic level of fuck up is exactly what we should expect from an administration of Fox News rejects, podcasters and mediocre white supremacists. Any idiot could have predicted that Iran would close the Straits, just like any idiot could have predicted that American citizens (and others) might not want to be stranded in a war zone. In Afghanistan, the collapse was so fast and unpredictable that there probably wasn't anything that could be done. This was a war of choice being planned for weeks, if not months. 

And apparently no one considered the fact that Iran might strike back at the Straits or at commercial air traffic?

Fucking morons.

Talarico

 James Talarico won the Democratic primary to challenge for the Senate seat in November. Democrats have been waiting years to win statewide in Texas, but there are signs that maybe...maybe...this could be the year. 

There are a few important reasons.

- Republicans are in disarray. Cornyn and the scandal magnet Ken Paxton will go to a bruising runoff. If Paxton knocks off Cornyn, the seat can be considered a true toss-up. Paxton is super MAGA-ish, so it's entirely possible he succeeds in the runoff.

- Hispanics are fleeing the GOP. Democrats always assumed that what seemed to them to be pretty racist statements and policies from Trump and the GOP would drive Hispanic voters to Democrats. It hadn't happened. That was before Trump 2.0, with Stephen Miller's pogroms unleashed everywhere.

- Talarico seems a better fit with Texas. Crockett is a cable news star and brilliant at invective and the sort of insurgent politics that people say they want from Democrats. Her theory of the election - that there were a ton of un-mobilized Democratic votes - is almost always wrong. Talarico talks like the Sunday School teacher that he is. He's a calming presence. He believes in persuading people fed up with Trump's chaos and corruption to switch sides. This seems key in mobilizing those Hispanic voters.

- Turnout will, in fact, matter, but not in the way Crockett hypothesized. Talarico's job is to get suburban college educated voters and Hispanics to switch from the GOP to him. Democrats - and we have ample evidence for this - will crawl over broken glass to vote this November. Republicans? Especially some of those irregular Trump voters? The various factions of the Trump coalition who feel betrayed - by Epstein, by Iran, by MAHA, by the economic promises - they don't have to vote for Talarico. They just have to stay home.

This is why I think Talarico is such a good pick, because there would have been Republican voters who would have gone to the polls to vote AGAINST Jasmine Crockett, but with MAGA collapsing along with Trump's mental faculties, they can just stay the hell home. 

I think that's the key in all sorts of races, like Ohio, Iowa, Alaska, North Carolina and maybe even some surprising states like South Carolina or Kansas. If Republicans are just dispirited and don't vote, that counts, too.

The Contingency Of History

 Martin Longman runs through a connection I had not known about. A critical moment in the history of Iran was the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, as it is often difficult to retain a revolutionary ideology after the charismatic leader of that revolution dies. It's what Max Weber referred to as the "routinization of charisma" and it's hard to pull off.

The logical successor to Khomeini was Ayatollah Hossein Montazeri. He was the most senior and respected cleric in Iran, and Khomeini's ideology required that the most senior cleric by in charge of the rule by religious authority. There was an friend of Montazeri named Mehdi Hashemi who was a complete asshole and got sideways of Khomeini, and that blew up in Montazeri's face.

I knew that this had happened, but I didn't know about Hashemi's role in this.

The reason this is important is that Montazeri was not completely wedded to the idea of the velayat-e faqih or rule by religious authority. He certainly wasn't a fan of trying to export the Iranian Revolution.

Ali Khamenei was.

In the span before his death, Khomeini worked with Ali Rafsanjanah - a nakedly cynical man - to elevate Khamenei over Montazeri. Khamenei was a revolutionary ideologue and Iran continued down the path that now has it as a pariah state at war with all of its neighbors.

I believe that history is largely about big forces, but individuals matter. What would have happened, for instance, if James Comey doesn't announce his investigation in Hillary Clinton's emails and/or the Stormy Daniels story gets out in October of 2016. What happens if Clinton wins is pretty obvious. Donald Trump never sniffs public office and America and the world is in a better place.

Incoherent America

 Lots of work is being done around the realization that Americans don't hold truly ideological or even informed opinions about politics. Because the world is complicated, people's opinion of things can shift depending on how you ask them. That's how you get a slim majority rejecting "amnesty" and a sizable majority supporting a "path to citizenship." 

Perhaps one of Trump's political strengths is how well he mirrors this inchoate, unexamined, almost thoughtless approach to politics and policies. Trump's shifting explanations for war against Iran are not going to win him any real converts to his war of choice, but they DO reflect the way many Americans respond to political dilemmas, often taking a position and then retroactively finding a justification. A person could be xenophobic. Why? Jobs! No, access to public goods! No, crime! No, disease! No, actually it's jobs again!

Good policy is not guaranteed by good process. You can have a perfectly reasoned and coherent case for war and it is still likely to be a bad policy. (That doesn't mean having a terrible case will work either.)

What it does suggest is that the most ideological people have a flawed view of other people's politics. If you believe people are as ideologically focused as you are, you will presume that ideological appeals will win their votes. You just need the pitch perfect 12 point plan and suddenly everyone will vote for your program. Take Project 2025 (please). The more these reactionary ideologues wrote down what they were going to do, the less popular it was. The fact that Trump is governing from the blueprint that he expressly disavowed is one reason why he's so far underwater.

Lots of the terminally online Millennials hate Bill Clinton, but there is a reason why he was so popular. Same with Obama. They were capable and pragmatic. Yes, as partisan politicians they had Things They Wanted To Do, but they weren't eager to couch them in ideological terms.

One of the most deleterious developments in American politics has been the severe ideological sorting of the parties since the 1990s. This means that they people at the head of our politics are often captured by ideological thinking in ways that obstruct winning elections. Given that one party has dived headlong into authoritarian patrimonialism if not fascism, I'd say winning elections is important.

The Politics Of Trump's War

 It is inevitable that any discussion of the conflict in Iran turn to the impact on Trump and his political fortunes. Especially given the fact that a Democratic Wave in the November elections might be the difference between America surviving as a democracy or not.

Trump's inherent incoherence is going to work against him here. As he tosses out contradictory war aims and negotiating positions, it becomes clear he doesn't have a framework for "winning the war." What's more, Trump made no effort to "sell" the war to the American public. He did not use the State of the Union address to make the case; he only tossed out a few videos on his social media site. He did not engage Congress or the American people in this conflict. It seems that he assumed he would get a quick and clean Venezuelan outcome - neglecting the fact that Venezuela is still a mess.

Americans don't seem pleased with this. YouGov threw out a snap poll (take with a grain of salt) and only 34% of Americans supported the war. In March 2003, 71% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, largely because the Bush Administration made a relentless (and flawed and mendacious) case to the American public. Republicans naturally support Trump far more than Democrats, but while 10% of Democrats express any support for the war, only 20% of independents do. Democrats oppose the strikes at 70%, but independents oppose it at 52%. 

Trump never made the case for war, and now he's throwing off bangers like "there will likely be more (casualties) before it ends. That's the way it is." He routinely references Venezuela, "What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario." He thinks he can waltz in and out of a Middle Eastern war, the way he did in the Caribbean, which betrays an unsurprising but woeful level of ignorance.

Meanwhile, Iran's closing the Straits of Hormuz is unlikely to make people think that Trump is laser focused on affordability. It might not crater the economy the way the 1979 Iranian Revolution did, but supply chain disruptions have a way of making themselves felt. One driver of the "Biden" Inflation was the supply chain disruption to world oil and gas markets by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There is no reason to believe that we won't see another oil shock, even if it doesn't tip us into stagflation.

Trump is an idiot. Most of the people around him are idiots. They believe in performing on social media over doing the hard work of crafting policy and long term strategy. "The Venezuelan raid went great, let's do that again. It will make great TV." Except the American people are really not at all ready for this, and they made no effort to prepare them for it.

Trump has no reservoir of good will or public trust to draw on, beyond his diminishing base. He is absolutely incapable of filling the role of selfless war time president. I would be shocked if he met the caskets of fallen soldiers at Dover. What's more, it is precisely his rural voter base that is sick and tired of these wars, because they disproportionately fight them. 

Iran is playing the long game, because it must. It can launch swarms of cheap drones until America's supply of anti-missile weapons is gone. If it resorts to tactics that have served it in the past, one would have to expect terrorist attacks at some point. They merely have to hunker down and endure. 

Trump is talking about a four week war. Venezuela might be instructive here, in that we really haven't changed much about the government of Venezuela, except who sits atop it. But we declared victory and moved on. Maybe we see a bunch more dead people - American, Iranian, Israeli, Qatari, Kuwaiti - we degrade the Iranian military...and then the war just ends. It's pretty clear that Trump has no real plan to make "regime change" happen. 

I would be shocked if Trump benefits from a "rally 'round the flag" effect. 

Why?

 Why attack Iran now? 

That question is really paramount in my mind as I try and discern why we have engaged in yet another war of choice in the Middle East. Richardson runs through some of the possibilities.

The proper time to launch strikes was during the massive civil unrest that led to the Revolutionary Guard gunning down thousands of its own citizens. However, most of our military assets were tied down off the coast of Venezuela. So there was a lag between the optimal time to launch strikes and the ability to do so. (Apparently the strikes were planned for earlier, but they learned that Khamenei was going to be in a meeting, so they moved the strikes to target that meeting.)

The popular theory online is, of course, that this should be named Operation Epstein Fury. It's all just another distraction from the Epstein Files. Perhaps. More likely this could be seen as a way to "project strength" or "dominate the news" in the face of sagging poll numbers and widespread dissatisfaction with Trump's presidency. The operation in Venezuela went so well, why not try it again? Of course the operation in Venezuela did not arrest Trump's declining poll numbers, but whatever.

Timothy Snyder suggests that this could be part of the overall corruption of the Trump Administration, in particular their cozy relations with the Gulf States. This feels less like a corrupt quid pro quo ("Attack Iran and we will give you billions in crypto.") and more the corruption of shared values. Trump and his minions love the rich emirs of the Gulf, and they could imbibe their perspectives just by constant contact.

It is the opinion of this humble blog that Donald Trump is a profoundly stupid person. He has the vocabulary of a third grader, fer chrissake. Intelligence can take many forms, and Trump's feral ability to attack and lie is kind of intelligence. What he is clearly incapable of doing is looking ten steps ahead. There is a reason no American president has taken this step, despite almost 50 years of hostile relations between the US and Iran. We have no idea what will come next. Trump doesn't care. Venezuela is currently struggling through a humanitarian crisis. Same with Cuba. Trump doesn't care. Iran might collapse into a failed state, like Libya. Trump doesn't care.

Maybe everything works out. Maybe the Iranian army and elements of the Revolutionary Guard switch sides and drive the hardliners from power. Maybe we kill enough hardliners to facilitate that happening. Maybe Iran doesn't degenerate into civil war and chaos, but becomes a vibrant democracy. It's not totally impossible. What IS clear is that we have no plans or ability to shape that particular outcome.

Special Military Operation

 The seemingly inevitable attacks on Iran began a few hours ago. The two ideas need to be held together in everyone's mind. The first is that the Iranian regime is incredibly malevolent. The second is that air strikes are not going to topple the regime. 

Is there a realistic endgame for these strikes? Almost certainly not. 

Are we at war with Iran? Not technically, because Congress has been excluded from this decision. Only Congress can declare war.

Why are we doing this? This feels like the Trump Administration's incessant efforts to "create content" and "project strength" rather than any overarching strategic goal.

Would it improve the world if the Iran had a new government? Absolutely. There is no evidence that this will topple the regime. Air power can't do that.

Can't a global military power enforce it's will militarily on a weaker power? History suggests not. 

Are the adults in charge? Absolutely not. Epic Fury? We are governed by middle schoolers.

Is this a distraction from the Epstein Files? Maybe, but more likely it's a distraction from the various setbacks that Trump has been dealt recently. Military action is usually a way to restore presidential authority. This seems unlikely to do that.

This Is (No Longer) CNN

 The news that Netflix is dropping its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery paving the way for odious oligarchs in the Ellison family to acquire the parent company of CNN has real implications for the future of media independence. It's another example of the dynamic whereby Bezos bought the Washington Post, ran it competently for a spell and then burned its reputation to ashes and peed on those ashes. Except this looks like it will be more like the lightning fast collapse of CBS. 

Yes, this is how guys like Orban consolidated power. However, Krugman is right that authoritarianism often derives its legitimacy from addressing economic (or other) crises. Hell, my students are writing an essay on that very topic as I type this. 

I'm skeptical that Trump and Ellison can stamp out all media criticism. We can see what they are doing at CBS, but we also have to note that this is destroying CBS' ratings.

My gut tells me that these efforts to create a "state media" will only succeed in part and in the short run. People are sadly uncurious about the world. If they are curious, they might actually inform themselves and they can still do that. Hell, the Wall Street Journal is still out there committing journalism.

My wife watches CNN in the evening when she cooks. I cannot stomach it now, and I once considered Jake Tapper a friend. It's just insipid pablum. Making it Fox Lite isn't going to improve the quality.

Finally, Trump and Trumpism is not forever. Going back to the previous post, Democrats need to play hardball with whatever levers they can pull. States should file anti-trust suits against this particular merger. Slow it down, gum it up. Fight back.

While losing won't be great, as long as pro-democracy forces can find a way to maintain some news independence, it won't necessarily be fatal. 

However, once Democrats do have control of the government again, there must be a thorough attack on oligarchic control of the media.

Vibes v Policy

 In his mailbag, Yglesias goes off on the idea that Democrats need to moderate their policy positions in order to win the Senate seats in places like Iowa, Texas, Florida or Alaska. This is because Yglesias is locked into the idea that voters select candidates based on ideology and, especially, policy.

Coincidentally, Morris comes out today with just the opposite conclusion - based not on his priors but on a poll he ran. I'll let him summarize his findings:

In our February poll, we asked voters whether each of 10 adjectives describes the Democratic and Republican parties. Each person was asked to rank how well each word — such as “extreme”, “elitist”, “tough”, and “weak” — described both parties on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 indicating the word described the party very well.

The Republican Party’s defining traits in voters’ minds are extreme (60% agree), elitist (57%), tough, (56%) and cruel (51%). The percentage of Americans agreeing with descriptions of positive traits is comparatively smaller: just 41% say the party is competent, 41% say principled, and only 31% — less than a third — say the GOP can be considered empathetic.

The average American sees Democrats in a much different light. The top descriptors of the party are empathetic (54%) and principled (49%). Comparatively few people think of it as “tough” (31%), and nearly half the country calls the Democrats weak (48%) and ineffective (47%). Democrats’ competence rating is 46% — five points higher than the GOP’s — but it’s the weakness and ineffectiveness labels that dominate voters’ impressions and national discourse about the party.

This manifests, I think, in two ways.

The first is the fact that Democrats have for a while now been associated with more feminine values and have run two female candidates for president. Trump won both of those elections, despite the fact that I would rank Hillary Clinton's mental and emotional toughness leagues higher than Trump's. Still, I remain convinced that Trump would not have beaten Joe Biden in 2016 for instance. Or really any male Democrat. Trump benefits from gendered perceptions of "toughness", even though he's the whiniest, most petulant person to hold the office.

The second is that there is an entire online discourse about Democrats not being tough. The algorithm probably boosts this, but Democrats are always "caving" or "losing" in ways that are both real and imaginary. The fall shutdown, for instance, was a "loss", in that Dems weren't able to save health insurance. They DID however amplify the issue of healthcare affordability, which is now a very favorable issue for Dems. Is that a loss or a win? 

The reason why Gavin Newsom or even JB Pritzker is popular is because they fight back. The reason Schumer isn't, is because he does appear to have the same fight in him. 

Right now there is a partial DHS shutdown over ICE. Democrats are "fighting" but the reality of shutdowns is that they rarely work to extort policy concessions. In fact, they got rolled when the Big Beautiful Bill basically funded ICE and DHS in perpetuity. Will they be able to win some concession? Maybe. Possibly. What they are asking for is popular. The structural levers that they have are not strong enough, though, to force through what they want to do.

This, to me, is a massive example of the role of gender on our politics. I think it Maureen Dowd or someone like her who talked about Democrats being the Mommy Party and Republicans being the Daddy Party. Crude, but if you look at the polling, there's some real accuracy there.

Look at the performative masculinity of Pete Hegseth or RFK posting their workout videos or Kash Patel chugging beers with the US Men's Hockey team. Hell, look at the grotesque "Mar A Lago Face" phenomenon whereby women butcher their faces with plastic surgery to reinforce gender stereotypes.

Morris' conclusion is that Democrats don't need to moderate on certain issues, so much as they need to "get tough" with the understanding that there is no magic dial that you can turn to make voters see you as tougher.  My cynical take is that means someone like Graham Platner is a better bet to win in November's Maine Senate race than Janet Mills. I think Mills makes the better Senator, and she is frankly "New England Tough" but Platner has a gravelly voice and voters are kinda stupid.

When we talk about "toughness" we are talking about vibes, not policy. Yglesias may sit there in his DC townhouse and parse white papers, but voters don't. Hispanic and Black men didn't shift to Trump because they believed he wouldn't tax their tips or even that he would save America from trans athletes. They did it because he's a "tough business man" who will lift them up from the precarious edges of poverty.

AI Freakout Of The Day

 Yglesias does one of his spicyhot contrarian takes about AI. Basically - because everything in his mind is about YIMBY v NIMBY - the backlash to AI is really about data centers. No one wants some behemoth gobbling up their electricity and fresh water to plop down in their neighborhood. 

There is certainly backlash to data centers. To simply dismiss other concerns because some data suggests people are conflicted is typical Yglesias bullshit. 

The fundamental reason to be pessimistic about AI is the general pessimism about social media and also the specific concerns about originality. We now have 20 years of internet penetration into most aspects of our lives. It can be benign. It can be beneficial. It can also be terrible in ways that human cognition hasn't compensated for. We know that tech companies goose our amygdala to keep us engaged. Are we going to add the tremendous capabilities of AI to the existing algorithmic world we live in? 

We are suspicious of tech even as we utilize it more and more. It's not a clear case of "AI is bad" or "AI is awesome." I don't like the way AI short circuits creativity and smooths over the struggle of actual learning and discovery. As a teacher, it scares me what will happen to this generation, because I've seen what social media has done to their older siblings. I still like using AI search features. It's pretty convenient.

We also have to accommodate the very real possibility that AI is massively over-hyped but simultaneously accommodate the very real possibility that it could wreck devastation on sectors of the economy. The speed at which this is happening is, in and of itself, scary.

Humans don't really like uncertainty. AI both promises and threatens changes on a scale that has people freaking out. The idea that there isn't a backlash is overdetermined from Yglesias' pre-existing obsessions. 

UPDATE: This seems pretty fucking awful. If you are an educator, that would seem to be a really bright red line.

Unitary Politics

 Krugman wonders why people are so sour on the economy when it's "meh" as opposed to "bad." It's the whole "Vibes" thing again, in some ways. However, I think Marshall's point that all politics is unitary is important. Prices ARE a problem for many people. There AREN'T a lot of job openings. It's not 2008-9, but things are kind of shitty.

However, I think the whole "Focus on affordability" tactic espoused by political strategists misses this point of unitary politics. As Morris notes, people aren't thrilled with ICE and deportations. Americans aren't monsters and generally like their immigrant neighbors. Yeah, MAGA is gonna MAGA, but most people aren't thrilled with what they are seeing out of Minneapolis and elsewhere. They aren't thrilled by the destruction of the East Wing.

What happens is you combine general attitudes about corruption or incompetence or cruelty with a soft economy and you get general backlash. I might be most outraged by the attacks on liberal democracy or the Russophilic foreign policy, but that will also show up as being upset about the economy. Biden faced this, too.

Aside from both Biden and Trump facing this conglomerated unease, they both struggled to turn the narrative around. Biden is a bad speaker, and he has gotten worse as he got older. He is not senile,  but he cannot command the bully pulpit. Trump is a bad speaker, and he has gotten worse as he has gotten older. With Trump, it is the raging narcissism that cannot allow defeat or retreat, that locks him into rhetorical boxes. I mean there were some naïfs saying that he could use the SOTU to bring the country together. C'mon!

Trump threw red meat to MAGA and the GOP last night. Polls that say people were happy with the speech only demonstrate that most people didn't watch, only partisans who were favorably disposed to him in the first place. His lies about prices are not going to change perceptions about him. 

Democracy works, not because it's efficient (it's not), but because it can correct course - or you lose the next election. Trump's continual doubling down on unpopular actions hopefully holds the seeds of his destruction.  

Epstein And Indiscriminate Allegations

 Martin Longman writes about the allegations against Trump that we know of in the Epstein Files that have actually been released. 

He makes a good point that these allegations or even simply contact between Epstein and other elites - broadly defined - tend to erode our judicial system's requirements of the presumption of innocence. Some of the people being dragged or fired seem to have been in Epstein's orbit in some manner and that alone is enough to cost them a job. The arrests in Britain actually deal with sharing classified information with Epstein, not his more lurid crimes. Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten almost certainly raped minors. He's apparently a world class scumbag.

That's the thing, though. One of the legacies of #MeToo was that men who treat women badly, tend to treat WOMEN badly. If they sexually harass one woman, they harass multiple women. Few men rape ONE woman. The crime of rape is not fundamentally about lust but about power and violence. 

Donald Trump's presence in one specific incident - the Bitten Penis, if you will - represents that power and violence. So does the Access Hollywood tape. So does the E. Jean Carroll case. So does the testimony of Stormy Daniels, where she acquiesced to sex rather than risk violence. So does the allegation of abuse by Ivanka Trump. 

Sometimes, women invent accusations of sexual assault. That happens. Rarely...never to my knowledge...do multiple women invent accusations about the same man. Deshaun Watson was a sex pest, harassing masseuses with great regularity. It wasn't just a one time misunderstanding. We have ample, ample evidence that Trump sees women as sexual hosts not romantic partners. 

We keep waiting for some final smoking gun to be discovered that definitively links Trump to raping someone. I don't think we are ever really going to have that moment of clarity. I would also argue that we don't need it. It is precisely the multitude of credible - if not always proven - allegations against him that should allow us to pass judgment on this fucking monster.  

The Coming Lunacy

 Tonight. Hair Furor will deliver what is sure to be a bizarro rant, where he cycles through the accumulated grievances of his rally screeds. Ostensibly the Constitutionally mandated State of the Union address, I would wager it will feel more like one of his Truth Social rants. 

Richardson runs down what a catastrophic few days this have been for Trump. As he weakens, his old threats seem less daunting. Foreign powers are increasingly turning away from the US; the tariff lunacy injects even more uncertainty into the US and global economy; Trump's popularity is close to the lowest that it's ever been (around January 6th). Malignant narcissist that he is, these accumulating wounds eat at him and make an unhinged performance tonight even more likely.

For what few "adults" are left in the room: do they pump him up with amphetamines to give him the energy he needs or sedate him so that he doesn't come off as a crazed lunatic? These are the questions American government officials are asking themselves.

Toxic America

 I heard an argument that as bad as everything seems to be right now, it's not as bad as the 2000s. The logic - and it's sound - is that 9/11 was so traumatic we don't even talk about the anthrax scare. We fought two somewhat pointless wars. We had the 2008 financial crisis. 

Yeah, that's a lot.

There does seem to be an accelerating toxicity to America though. Part of it is just the relentless stupidity of the people in charge. Dubya Bush was pretty thick, but these idiots are just spectacularly dumb. Kash Patel chugging beers with the men's hockey team...I mean what are we doing here?

Something else caught my eye that I think is emblematic of how awful things are. 

HBO released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with the last episode airing last night. It's great. It masterfully moves tonally from incredibly funny to moving to tragically sad. It's "small" compared to Game of Thrones, but that's the point. Anyway, the penultimate episode was amazing and was briefly ranked on IMDB as one of the best episodes of TV...ever. OK, it probably wasn't THAT good, but who freaking cares?

Apparently fans of Breaking Bad care, because they began to review bomb IMDB to drive down the rating for that episode to preserve "Ozymandias", an ep of Breaking Bad, as the top episode of all time. When last night's show came out, Breaking Bad fans mobbed IMDB to drive down the score before the episode had concluded. 

This is all very, very silly, stupid and petty. However, it does demonstrate something about America in 2026. I would posit that the rise of the internet has created this, both by democratizing taste and elevating hostility. Democratizing taste isn't terrible, but we've seen fanbases basically revolt because the story artists are telling wasn't the story they wanted to be told. That isn't the point of storytelling. What happens is a relentless whining about the end of Lost or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos or Seinfeld. It's the dynamic of "Your Favorite Band Sucks, Actually" but amplified across a dozen online platforms.

In the end it sucks the joy out of life. It makes the incessant howling of the self-centered the medium of cultural discourse. What's more, AI is coming to force this everywhere. Didn't like the ending of Game of Thrones? You can burn 5 gigawatts and a rainforest's water supply for AI to make you an ending that suits your taste. It will suck for everyone but you, but congrats, you have made a soulless piece of crap to soothe your raging id.

I love the fact that last night I could quickly find an answer to the question "Should you feed your dog leftover pesto?" (The answer is no.) The internet can be a great facilitator of knowledge - once you know how to use it and once you are aware of its limits. The churn of social media, the imperative of the algorithm that prioritizes "engagement" is absolutely toxic, and it has its roots in the Oughts and the chatrooms. It's now everywhere and it sucks. 

Putin's Own Goal

 We are four years into Putin's invasion of Ukraine that was supposed to be days or weeks to completion. The stoutness and adaptability of Ukrainian defenders has held a much larger army, population and economy at bay. Even as Trump has essentially ended aid to Ukraine, Europe has stepped up. This suggests that the longest impact of Trump's childish and short-sighted foreign policy will be the creation of a stronger, more independent Europe. As long as we eventually return to our liberal democratic roots, that's fine. Europe SHOULD stand up.

From Putin's point of view, a unified Europe is a disaster. He could count on Trump and Xi to more or less tolerate whatever he wanted to do, but Europe - especially Eastern Europe - has no illusions about what this fucker wants to do. What's more, the Ukrainian War has demonstrated that the future of warfare is not how much you can bench press, but your ability to leverage technical know-how and financial resources to create robot armies and air forces. The future of warfare is changing in Ukraine, and the US withdrawal from that conflict means we aren't going to be able to learn as quickly or as deeply as we should.

Meanwhile, Russia seems incapable of learning. They continue to demonstrate a lack of creativity, relying on the idea of brute force and brutalizing their troops. It was long assumed that a "frozen conflict" would disadvantage Ukraine, but the way the war has become a drone war seems to benefit Ukraine, who can use their drones to enforce a frontline that Russia can't exploit with their superior numbers.

The impact of this war on the Russian economy is murky, but it is doubtful that it's good. Russia has gotten around many of the sanctions, but not all - and its economy was no great shakes to begin with. 

It is, of course, sad to realize that a President Harris would have likely given more weapons to Ukraine and allowed them, perhaps, to roll back Russian forces. Maybe there is no victory for Ukraine that returns its stolen land. But there can be no question that this conflict has been a disaster for Russia.

Trump's Own Goal

 In the face of the Supreme Court actually upholding the Constitution, Trump had doubled and now tripled down on his tariffs. As Elliott Morris notes, this is deeply unpopular. Despite the economic illiteracy of the median voter who helped re-elect him, people ARE capable of learning. With tariffs front and central in the news since April, people have learned that tariffs are, in fact, inflationary. If they are unhappy about prices (they are) then tariffs piss them off. By a margin of 19 points, people don't like tariffs. The only issues he polls worse on are government funding and health care and prices/inflation. All of this overlaps.

Defying the Supreme Court - even if technically he's using a different statute - is also unpopular. Even 82% of Republicans say he should obey Supreme Court rulings. SCOTUS offered Trump and off-ramp from his tariffs, which were already unpopular. Instead of taking it, he's attacking the Courts and being a whiny, petulant pissant. Only 23% of Americans disapprove of the striking of those tariffs, which is below the floor I projected for Trump. 

As Krugman relates, Trump is turning the laws on their heads - laws designed to reduce barriers to trade - to justify "shit he wants to do because he's the boss." It is always helpful to remember that Trump spent his whole career running a business with about ten employees, because he was doing shady shit and wanted no obstacles to his actions. He had no Board to answer to. The President is supposed to answer to the other branches and to the American people. Trump's latest tantrum shows he's not learned the basic civics lessons we teach middle schoolers. 

A sane politician - someone who was practiced in winning small bore elections - would retreat. Trump has run in three elections that basically functioned as "beauty pageants" based on vibes and latent misogyny and a poor grasp of the actual stakes by many voters. He responded to his only electoral defeat by trying to overturn democracy in America. He is incapable of understanding that he's lost and will continue to lose on this issue.

Government By Toddler

 Trump has now upped the general tariff rate to 15% from 10% and the maximum that he can without immediate Congressional approval. 

The first round of Liberation Day tariffs were almost immediately exposed as a grift and a strongman tactic. He levied high tariffs, affected companies came to him and bent the knee, contributed to his ballroom, gave him solid gold iPhones. He then relented like a magnanimous potentate. It was corrupt, it was the sort of self-dealing that typifies everything this shallow man does.

When SCOTUS (barely) reaffirmed the Constitutional prerogatives of Congress (even if they are too supine to do it themselves), Trump reacted like the whining petulant pissant that he is at the deepest core of his personality. His rambling press conference would have embarrassed any previous holder of the office of Chief Magistrate.

The reason for reinstalling tariffs at all are...not great. They can accomplish nothing, because they will sunset in 150 days. No one is onshoring a factory because of this tariff.

Instead, it only suggest one of two things. 

The first is that he is deeply committed to tariffs and transferring the tax base from income and capital gains taxes that impact the wealthy. He wants to replace them with an excise tax on imports that will affect the average American far more profoundly than they will affect the rich.

The second is that this is a tantrum. Denied his Big Beautiful Tariffs, he's just going to demand that he get MORE tariffs. Are they unpopular? FUCK YOU, I WANT MY TARIFFS. Frankly, it's the emotional logic of a domestic abuser. "Why did you make me hit you?"

It's like Veruca Salt is president.

Corruption Again

 The unraveling of Liberation Day has been replaced by blanket tariffs. These likely expire in 150 days. There is no justification for them beyond we need the revenue, because we refuse to tax actual wealth. A regressive excise tax on imports brings in some money on the backs of consumers - not the Epstein Class.

Meanwhile, we have another example of the corruption at the heart of everything this administration does. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick "handed over" control of his firm Cantor Fitzgerald to his twenty-something son. Cantor Fitzgerald then went around buying the rights to tariff refunds at pennies on the dollar. 

Basically, Firm A is being squeezed by tariffs, but should - I dunno - the Supreme Court rule those tariffs unconstitutional simply because they are, then firms might get refunds of the money that they paid in illegal tariffs. 

Might.

And that's where Cantor Fitzgerald comes. They will buy Firm A's future refund for money NOW versus the potential refund they might get later. In fact, the SCOTUS' decision to let this play out for months after oral argument probably really helped Cantor buy more potential refunds.

(Cantor denies that they are doing this, but lies don't matter anymore.)

Much of this, by the way, is legal. The degree to which Cantor Fitzgerald might have had access to inside information is unknown. Still, you have Trump's insane presser yesterday talking about how essential tariffs are, and Lutnick was right beside him, potentially raking in millions by betting against them.

SCOTUS Kills The Tariffs

 A transparently easy decision, but still three fucking idiots want to make Trump king.

For the moment, three Republican judges still put fealty to Wall Street over fealty to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yay?

UPDATE: I do find it grimly hilarious that the two most wretched jurists overly the last century were appointed - not by Trump - but by Bush 41 and Bush 43.

UPDATE II: Krugman makes an astute point: while Trump has now just blasted out a 10% tariff under "Section 122", it's global and expires in 150 days, unless Congress approves it. So, many have noted that this puts Congressional Republicans in a bind right before the midterms.

What Krugman notes is that Trump's entire foreign policy was using these bullshit "emergencies" to declare trade wars unless the other side backed down. It was also how he has been shaking down business leaders, by carving out exemptions for them. All of that is no longer available to him.

Are We About To Go To War With Iran?

 Seems like it. But as Cheryl Rofer notes, it's quite difficult to graft rational decision making onto Trump's governance. I have been struck by how out in the open these military plans are. The movement of massive amounts of airpower to the Middle East has not been subtle. Surprise is not apparently the operative word here.

Maybe he is just trying to bully Iran into some form of concession on...something. It certainly seems like his fundamental demand is that Iran no longer be a sovereign power hostile to the United States. As with so much of Trump's blinkered grasp of the world, he seems mired in the '70s and '80s where Iran is this supreme villain that must be squashed, perhaps by Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone. Iran does have a terrible regime, but as with Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, that seems insufficient for embarking on a land war in Asia.

Why?

Is it Epstein Distraction 2,853? Maybe.

I do wonder if Trump is so clearly declining that the creatures around him are basically running wild through the Executive Branch like toddlers jacked up on sugar and, for some reason, Red Bull. That particular cadre of retrograde Republican militarists who just like to explode shit and think it's realpolitik are basically free to do what "common sense foreign policy" says they should do: drop a few million dollars worth of bombs and cruise missiles, which will make the Ayatollah abdicate in fear. I think their inspiration was a Twisted Sister video from 1984.

The Iranian military is mostly a decrepit joke at this point, though they might luck into shooting down an American airplane and that won't be bad at all. A ground invasion? Good lord.

A reminder that Very Savvy Journalists felt that Trump was the "Peace Candidate" in 2016.

UPDATE: Looks like we're effectively at war with Cuba, and I didn't even know it. This has Rubio all over it.

UPDATE II: Given that SCOTUS has just show down his tariff bullshit, I would expect him to channel his rage into missile strikes.

Hunh...

I guess in some places, if the president tries to overthrow democracy, they can toss him in jail. 

I guess in some places, if a well connected insider cavorts with Jeffrey Epstein, they can arrest him.

Well done Britain.

Billionaires Are (Mostly) Sociopaths

 Krugman recaps the rise of the "Centi-Billionaires" who dwarf all human wealth from previous eras. He notes that this era compares unfavorably with the Gilded Age in terms of wealth inequality. That's certainly something. This ties into the Citizens United ruling that unlocked the ability of the super-rich to exerts incredible influence on our elections. Would Trump have won had Musk not bought Twitter and turned it into a Nazi echo chamber? What are we to make of Bezos destroying the Post? The Ellisons destroying CBS?

Krugman notes that this is not solely about making money. The utility of spending all that money is not to make marginal gains. Destroying the Post and CBS is NOT good for their bottom lines. It has to be about the deep howling void in the center of their souls. Compare Bezos or even Gates to their ex-wives, who using their divorce riches to actively work to better the world.

When we look at the depredations of Trump and his cronies, it's not simply about getting more loot. Today, I start teaching authoritarianism in Comparative Government and one of the hallmarks of authoritarianism is (the poorly named) phenomenon of rent seeking. Elites use the government to exploit money and other forms of wealth for their own benefit. The make the government buy jets or house them, like Kristi Noem does. They rake in billions in crypto in return for gutting oversight - creating a potential time bomb in the heart of the economy.

When that happens - when Trump makes the IRS pay him $10 billion to settle a meritless lawsuit - the incentive, in fact the prerogative, is to never give up power. You can afford to leave office, because you will lose access to that money and potentially be prosecuted.

For the billionaires who support Trump, they simply cannot accept democratic control of their fortunes. They are self-identified Uber mensch. The rabble cannot touch them or thwart them. For Trump and his ilk, democratic accountability could lead to a reckoning from his many crimes. 

Can they put this into action and end American democracy? We will know in about seven months.

Yes, Corruption

 Richardson is a far better historian than me, researching and cataloguing events in greater detail. She, too, used her post about yesterday to look at corruption and compare it to the restraint that Washington showed during his presidency. 

Some details:

- Trump has filed a trademark for any airport named after him. Palm Beach Airport is currently in the process of being renamed for him, but he wants Dulles. If that happens, he gets all profits from the merchandise and to license his name. This is basically the bulk of his career before entering politics. Trump is a poor businessman when it comes to  building properties and developing products, but he can slap his name from his tabloid driven celebrity onto any old shit and make a quick buck. 

- The Trump Crime Family has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $4 billion because of his presidency. Much of this comes from crypto-laundered bribes, but it also comes from crap like Trump sneakers, bibles and those stupid fucking hats. Because everything is a lie with this asshole, Trump's mouthpieces like to blabber about how he is only putting hard working Americans' needs above his own. This is bullshit, and, yes, that should be the message for Democrats. Everything else works off of that.

- Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion and sycophantic weasel Scott Bessent will almost certainly cut him a check. If this happens, this has to be the biggest story of the year, even bigger than Minneapolis, and - yes - even bigger than someone's elderly mother being kidnapped. A president who loots the treasury for his own enrichment is so far from any other presidential scandal that we have ever had as to beggar the imagination. Even if - as I predict - he "settles" for $2-3 billion and thus claims he saved billions, this is clear graft. This is a scandal the likes of which are usually reserved for Gilded Age hacks like the Whiskey Ring. Never - and I do mean never - has corruption on this scale reached the Oval Office.

The "Epstein Class" of billionaires is as popular as syphilis right now. Hang that around Trump's neck. Billions for him, no health care for you. Billions for him, no housing for you.

Corruption

 When the Whigs - both American and English - talked about corruption, what they meant was not necessarily outright bribery or quid pro quo relationships, but rather the overall rot at the heart of monarchical politics. I think that's why "corruption" in this archaic sense is really so apt to describe Trump's maladministration. 

When you look at something as facially absurd as actively blocking green energy, you have to balance the supreme idiocy of Cleek's Law (oppose whatever Democrats support) but also the naked financial relationship between hydrocarbon extraction industries and the Republican Party. There is absolutely zero reason to support coal, except to enrich coal mine owners. Solar, wind and battery technology are cheaper and more sustainable, and the lies Trump tells about it are just another example of the rot of corruption in our government.

To be clear, it's not just Trump. If you look at the fall of Marco Rubio or JD Vance from bog standard asshole Republicans to Trumpist creatures actively destroying America's place in the world, you can trace this to Josh Marshall's Authoritarian International. Whether it's the techno-libertarian/post-liberalism of a Peter Thiel or the petrostate autocrats of the Persian Gulf or the cultural revanchists of the post-Soviet world, you are talking about a fundamental corruption and rot at the heart of everything. All of this, by the way, was made possible by the corruption of the Supreme Court and decisions like Rufo and Citizen's United.

Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in so many ways, but when you look at the naked enrichment and entitlement of people like Kristi Noem, it's pretty apparent that Trump is not just the largest practitioner of corruption, but the vessel through which others enrich themselves. 

When a culture becomes corrupt enough, it seems foolish to be honest. 

One of the largest problems Democrats have is trying to focus on one outrage, because Trump commits so many. You can't message against the farrago of horseshit coming from the GOP. As we enter the celebration of our 250 years of independence, we should look to revivify the old Whiggish language of corruption.

It fits to a tee. 

Tariffs

 Krugman has a long, wonky post about why the impact of Trump's tariffs on prices is only about a 1% increase in overall prices. If you want to dig into the weeds of that, be my guest.

Prices rose 2.4% last month (if we believe the government data, which in this case we probably should). Absent tariffs, prices would - presumably - have risen by 1.4%. If I'm right - and I very much might not be - I think that there are two possible impacts of tariffs.

The first is that 2.4% is still on the high side. That makes it unlikely that we will see dramatic interest rate cuts. Inflation is not galloping ahead, but it's not quelled either and people are still upset about prices.

The second is that if prices might hypothetically have only risen by 1.4% without the tariffs, then we might be seeing a slacking in consumer demand. While the economic data are generally positive, consumer sentiment is in the toilet. That might just be the overall unpopularity of Trump. I do believe that people will complain about "the economy" when they are really just unhappy overall. 

The only thing buttressing Trump from hitting the Crazification Factor of 27% approval is that the floor has not fallen out of the economy. My guess is that it was going to happen at some point this year, but maybe it won't. Maybe the US economy is just too resilient to be knocked off course by these corrupt idiots. 

I Hate My Job, I Love My Job

 Working at a small independent school has been my life's work. I am not a perfect teacher or coach, but I care deeply - very deeply - about my student's growth.

Increasingly, though, it has become apparent that I no longer work for a small, community-based institution where we all labor, laugh and struggle together. 

I work for a corporation.

This makes believe in the mission of the school so much harder when I am not longer treated as a respected teacher with the independence to act on my own expertise and experience. As if things couldn't get any worse, yesterday we had a consultant firm come in and tell us that we will be instituting a radical new schedule next year. As he himself admitted, this will be very disruptive and we will struggle for at least one year, more likely two, to adapt to this new schedule.

The time we have with our students is precious and all most of us really want is the tools to teach them as well as we can. The Covid year of 2020-21 was so hard not simply because it was hard, but because we couldn't teach well. We knew we weren't teaching well, and it was soul crushing. Now, we are going to voluntarily teach poorly for a year or two to institute a new schedule that the consultant firm basically implements wherever they go. There really is no solid evidence that it's better, but they get paid to "disrupt" the "paradigm."

My wife and I are a few years from being able to retire. I would have liked to make it to 30 years here, but if I had the money, I would retire now. To paraphrase a political expression: I didn't leave the school, the school left me.

The Damage Done

 The sheer amount of damage that Trump and Republicans are doing to the world is tough to keep track of. Certainly, millions of people - many of them children - are going to die because they killed USAID. Other outrages - putting his name on the Kennedy Center - are easily fixed. Reversing his budgets are done in 2029 (presuming we still have a democracy by then). He is increasingly toxic, and as Minnesota demonstrated, when the people stand against him, he loses.

There are two areas that were especially galling yesterday. 

Trump basically went all in in dragging the power grid back to 1947. By repealing every single piece of constraint on emitting greenhouse gases, he is paving the way for massive amounts of pollution. The question, though, is really whether companies will actively move backwards on this. Yes, the massive open coal pits of Wyoming will continue to feed the data centers being built there. However, some tech companies are more eager to build small scale nuclear plants, because they have to know that once Trump is gone, coal will no longer be viable. It's not viable now, due to cost, not "woke."

Why is he doing this? To pwn the libs? In return for payoffs from hydrocarbon companies? However, if you're Ford or GM, do you really want to fall behind the rest of the world as they spring towards more hybrids and EVs? 

We also have the baffling (but not baffling) decision to simply not review the efficacy of mRNA flu vaccines. This is RFK, Jr's war on vaccines that everyone with half a brain saw coming. The US already takes longer than Europe to approve new drugs and treatments. Now, we have a really promising new form of vaccine and it's being killed to placate the roughly 20% of Americans who are skeptical of vaccines, a 20% that resides overwhelmingly now in the Republican Party.

Europe will no doubt plow ahead with medical advances, but the US is ceding that ground and it has been the US that has usually been at the forefront of medical breakthroughs, which is really the only possible defense for our expensive health care system. Our medical care costs too much in order to fund medical research and treatments. Now, we are destroying that, too. 

All of this is just an inconceivably stupid catering to unbelievably stupid people. 

Providing Democrats win in November, businesses will have to evaluate what the end of Trump and Trumpism might mean for them. I can't imagine the executive that will greenlight a coal burning power plant, knowing that it will never be profitable and won't even come online before Trump is out of office. Hopefully, medical research will simply relocate overseas so that science can progress during our sojourn in the America where race science is more popular with the government than actual science. 

So much awfulness everywhere you look. 

Global Oligarchy

 Josh Marshall has been running a series of posts on what he's calling the global oligarchy or the Authoritarian International. Here and here. 

Normally, I would dismiss this as somewhat conspiratorial, but at the same time, I do think he's on to something. He ties it, interestingly, to the various petrostates of the Middle East rather than Russia, though Russia is also emblematic of its politics. Basically, the new Axis of Evil is the oil states of the Gulf, Silicon Valley anti-democrats and hedge fund billionaires. 

The basic thread holding them together is the desire to escape democratic accountability, which is at the heart of democracy: the powerful must answer to the people. 

There have been a host of articles this week about the coming apocalypse in white collar jobs from AI. Some of these are coming from people working in AI who are seeing how efficient and fast it is becoming, especially at coding. There is a school of thought that this is all hype to elevate their stock price, but if it's even a little true, I think we need to see AI as part of this Authoritarian International (yes, also AI). The purpose of AI might be to change the world, but the practical impact will be to divorce knowledge skills from scarcity and therefore disempower the broad swath of middle and upper middle class workers. 

If you own a company, why not employ an AI bot rather than three humans? Why not maximize your profits this way? Why answer to the bothersome people that work for you, when you can have a compliant digital workforce? 

Democracies will, at some point, have to address AI and its potential deprivation of livelihoods among important constituencies. If you can destroy democracy, you can prevent that from happening. 

Bondi Beeyotch

 Pam Bondi's performance yesterday was...woof. Performance is the right word for it, as it was calculated to appeal to the gelatinous rage mass in the Oval Office and him alone. It was more than "combative", it was unhinged.

Kevin Kruse put it best:

So, to wrap up today's insanity: President Trump, who is deeply implicated in a pedophilia scandal involving his best friend, the sex trafficker, sent Attorney General Bondi -- who only has that job because Trump's first choice was also implicated in a separate pedophilia scandal -- to the House to stonewall releasing the full files about the president's pedophile friend, relying there on the friendly support of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan, who was himself implicated in the coverup of a *third* sexual abuse scandal at a college.

And as others noted, Bondi also helped cover up Epstein's crimes as Florida AG!

Corruption

 Yglesias looks at the kind of bizarre way that Americans look at public corruption. The whole thing is bizarre, as it usually is when you ask Americans about policies and specifics. For instance, 86% of respondents say that public officials who take cash in return for votes is corrupt. That means 14% are either unsure or think that's not corrupt.

Anyway.

Some of the things that people think are corrupt really aren't. If you get speaking fees for a group that has any political agenda (which is most groups), 62% think that's corruption. If a politician votes with "social elites" over constituents, 78% think that's corruption. In other words, if a politician votes for climate legislation that his constituents disagree with, then - rather than being just a policy disagreement - respondents see that as corruption.

All of this is to say, that this is why Donald Trump's unprecedented corruption seems to sail under the radar. Sure, there are things like his demolition of the East Wing that have landed in public opinion, but overall, people seem inured to Trump's really unprecedented corruption. Yglesias says it's the most corrupt in decades, but I think it has to be considered the most corrupt of all time. Certainly no president has engaged in such naked corruption. Grant and Harding had men around them who were corrupt, but they engaged in very little themselves. Trump is engaging in the outright sale of his office.

Because Americans think "all politicians are corrupt" - and they think that because they define corruption so loosely - then Trump is able to get away with unprecedented corruption because "they all do it."

We see this in the fact that Trump basically won in 2024 by carrying low-information voters. This tends to show up in the fact that they just weren't aware of things like "tariffs lead to higher prices" or "deportations won't increase jobs." It also shows up in things like being surprised that Trump would pursue vendettas against his enemies - something he admitted to on the campaign trail. Low information voters tend to blame the president for higher prices, even if - like Biden - it's not particularly his fault. They are less upset with inflation than with nominal prices. Because prices aren't coming down (which would actually be bad), they think it's corruption. In this case, it's incompetence and malevolence. 

Morris gives us this graph:

Trump won in 2024 in large part because ~one-quarter of the electorate wasn’t paying enough attention to his promises to know much about what he’d do as president. Now that they are seeing the results — especially on prices — they are just as anti-Trump as voters who spend all day consuming political news.

The corruption thing is part and parcel of the striking ignorance of the American voter.  Evidence seems unimportant, because evidence cannot contradict certain dearly held positions, and we are cooked because of it. 

What The Hell Was That?

 Two head scratchers.

Yesterday, Pete Navarro went on the TeeVee to prep viewers for a bad jobs report. Basically urging markets not to freak out over a bit of bad news. Everyone was preparing for an absolutely apocalyptic jobs number. We got a good one.  While my first impulse was that they cooked the books (and maybe they did), why send out Navarro to warn of a bad one? Maybe they did cook the numbers, Navarro saw the real numbers and no one told him about the fudged numbers. Navarro IS a complete idiot, but it still didn't make any sense.

Then we had the closing of El Paso's airspace ostensibly for days. Then, nope, it was re-opened. Why? Something to do with drones at Fort Bliss, but the original order was for ten days. El Paso is not close to anything (except Juarez). It needs an airport. Maybe the Defense Department wanted it closed and it was pointed out to them that they can't just seal off a small city because they want to. Maybe the original order was for ten hours and those complete fucking morons can't read. The official reason was that they were testing new counter drone technology, except, no, Transportation Secretary MTV Real World says that cartel drones violated the airspace. That's almost certainly bullshit.

Krugman spent some time ripping apart Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for lying about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Richardson has a fuller run down of the Epstein developments. TL;DR: The Trump administration is lying at a rate that science cannot measure. They are lying about small things and big things. The thing about lying is that it's hard. You have to remember the truth AND the lie. So you get the weird El Paso situation. Someone is lying - likely Real World - and that will lead to cascading series of other lies.

It is tiresome at this point to note that if Scandal X had happened in any other administration then yadda yadda yadda. What's apparent is that MAGA has now dug itself so deeply into a world of outrageous fictions that they cannot go back. What's more, they cannot admit it. MAGA is never wrong, even when it is, in which case, it's Joe Biden or the Crooked Media's fault. 

The genius of democracy is its ability to self-correct. Democracy assimilates information and reacts accordingly. Maybe not always well, but it acknowledges the reality of the situation. If you don't, you lose the next election. MAGA - as a deeply authoritarian movement - cannot self correct. They also cannot tolerate a "loss" so they don't fire hacks like Hegseth or Lutnick. The hackery is the point. 

When a truly shattering crisis comes - and it will come - these idiots will hold the fate of our country and our world in their palsied hands. 

Does Moving To The Center Work?

 Morris argues that - contrary to the narrative - Bill Clinton's tack to the center in 1992 was not responsible for his victory in the election. I do think there's some truth to that, in that 1992 was clearly a "change" election with Bush becoming very unpopular due to the economy. Ross Perot's unusually robust third party campaign took from both Bush and Clinton among voters simply fed up with the whole system. This sort of free range anger is pretty typical when the economy is bad. Trump in 2016 presented as both the Republican candidate AND the third party candidate, as he was so far from any previous type of candidate.

I certainly agree with Morris that 1992 was largely about the poor economy and the 12 years of rampant wealth transfer up the tax brackets.

However, the Democratic Party was in pretty poor shape nationally 1990. Morris notes that Clinton was perceived as being further left than Michael Dukakis, but I have to wonder how much of that was his draft evasion and libertine reputation. Clinton spoke centrist, but vibed left. I also agree with Morris that most voters aren't making ideological decisions when they vote. Every election is a vibes election when you start talking about the politically disengaged.

Here's where I have questions. I do think perceived centrism matters simply as a way to allay swing voters concerns. The critical test case this year might be the Senate race in Texas. Democrats have been trying to flip Texas for quite some time. It's a diverse state with a lot of metro areas, but it's also a deeply conservative rural state. Having a majority of Democratic House members in the Texas delegation seems like a pipe dream. Winning statewide has always been out of reach for reasons that excite the center v left debate.

Obviously, this is playing out in 2026 with the Senate race. Republicans seem intent on nominating scandal factory Ken Paxton and ousting normal Republican John Cornyn. If they do that - if MAGA eats its own - then Texas would SEEM to be ripe for an important pick up in what could be a close contested race for control of the Senate. 

For Democrats, they are going to choose between the firebrand partisan in Jasmine Crockett and the choirboy in James Talarico. The argument Crockett can make is that she will "fire up the base", but previous candidates have tried that and it hasn't worked. Beto O'Rourke ran multiple times as a stalwart of the Progressive Left and came away empty every time. Maybe if he tacked to the center he might have lost by less or won....or maybe Texas simply wasn't going to elect ANY Democrat.

Talarico is betting that he can win statewide by not scaring the swing voters. That anger and dissatisfaction with Trump will not - in an of itself - carry the day. You need to give space to allow someone who typically votes Republican to shift to a Democrat to check Trump. 

Yes, race and gender play into this. Crockett is a brilliant communicator on MSNow and as a House back bencher. She's lacerating and on point, but she is also a Black woman in a state that leans pretty consistently to the right, especially culturally. The "Angry Black Woman" attacks will be relentless, especially if they GOP runs the sewer rat that is Ken Paxton. 

However, it also seems evident that elections are simply not playing out along those lines. If voters in Texas are significantly outraged at Trump, at ICE, at the corruption, at the cost of living, then the candidates themselves might not matter.

In the end, even the election results themselves won't answer this question. The context of every state and every election cycle is different. Let's say Talarico beats Paxton by 5000 votes. Was that because he didn't scare the normies? Was that because Paxton is awful? Was that because Trump is awful? Was that because of 3% inflation? Switch out Talarico for Crockett and the questions are roughly the same.

I do think that Crockett's argument that she will motivate non-voters is pretty weak, simply because this myth of latent progressive voters has been pretty thoroughly debunked. She might be able to ride outrage and disgust but the winning margins are going to come from the Texas suburbs, not some mythical wellspring of people who don't usually care.

Ironically, only one candidate has been able to pull that off has been Donald Trump, but I don't think you can pull off his crudeness, his cruelty, his norm violating, his simmering rage and grievance, his racism, his sexism...and still be a Democrat.

Privilege

 An interesting and slightly odd confluence of columns by Yglesias on DoorDash economics and Krugman on the coddled lives that Trumpists have carved out for themselves at the public's expense. What's the link? The idea of what constitutes comfort and privilege is always changing - both for the general public and individuals.

I've felt this was true, when I look at how unbelievably comfortable life has gotten and yet how unhappy everyone seems to be. The DoorDash thing is a good example. As Yglesias notes, food delivery was formerly restricted to pizza and Chinese food. The idea that you could get a Big Mac or a Starbuck calorie bomb or Lamb Vindaloo delivered to your home in a frictionless transaction is something we couldn't have dreamed of fifteen years ago. As that becomes commonplace (along with Amazon delivering anything you want in a few days) your experience with the world becomes incredibly easy in a way that only the VERY affluent of a couple of decade back would have been able to access. 

As things get easier, our natural hard-wiring about threats and hardships get recalibrated towards whatever the most frustrating or upsetting thing in our lives actually are. 

At this point, you can add in comparison being the thief of joy. As unbelievably coddled as many of us are (historically and globally speaking), we have access to a tiny fraction of the privileges of true wealth. This is where Krugman talks about JD Vance bringing food to Milan. Food.  To Milan.

What he does is link this (and Kash Patel and Kristi Noem's abuse of federal resources) to the "Epstein Class." We rapidly become accustomed to the perks that life offers us, and we become blind to how we got them in the first place. We also become blind to the work that goes into providing them to our every whim. (I don't use DoorDash, because I find it extravagant, but I also know that people rely on working for DoorDash to make ends meet. I'm conflicted.)

With Epstein, we have hundreds of names of prominent people (almost all men) who, at best, looked the other way. Epstein was an extraordinary suck up to rich and powerful men, I would guess especially those rich and powerful men who had a yawning void of insecurity in their core. How many of them actually abused girls? I do hope we find out and hold them accountable. How many of them turned a blind eye to his depravity? I would guess that number is the considerably larger one. 

Pedophilia is a psychological pathology; expecting beautiful girls to fawn all over you is too. Seeing this go on from the corner of your eye and excusing it or denying what your eyes tell you is part of the pathology of privilege. "Epstein is such a great guy, I can't be seeing what I'm seeing" is precisely the mindset of men who have risen to a point where they just don't fucking care about the Little People. (There was an interview with Melinda Gates who attended one of those parties, was creeped out, told her husband and he ignored her concerns.)

As has been said, there are two Epstein scandals. There are the crimes specific to Epstein himself and his cohort like Maxwell. We don't know yet, for sure, who is in that circle. Then there is the second scandal of everyone who saw, who understood, who said nothing. 

Super Bowl Sunday

 As the Team I Hate The Most vies with the Seattle Seahawks for the championship, my miserable, wretched, cursed team decided that they should take one of their most controversial decisions from last year's draft and have it explode in their face. Meanwhile, a co-owner of the Giants is in the Epstein Files, less as a pervert and more as an enabler. 

Even the Olympics are now so riddled with professionals that it saps what used to be so compelling about amateurs competing when anything could happen. 

Meanwhile, my phone keeps telling me I need to get on FanDuels or Kalshi and become a degenerate gambler.

Yeah, He's A Racist

 Yesterday, Trump retweeted an incredibly racist "meme video" of the Lion King that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. (There are no apes in the Lion King.) For those of us not in the cult or not in the Very Serious Media that cannot fathom that Donald Trump (Central Park Five, firing Black dealers at his casino, Birtherism, Charlottesville, yada yada yada) might actually be a seething racist this was hardly a surprise. 

Somewhat surprising was the host of usually sycophantic Republican legislators saying "This is racist, take this down." When a Republican Senator from Mississippi say, "I dunno, but this is pretty racist" then it's a pretty good bet that it's racist.

Also less surprising was the inevitable journey that the White House embarked on when called on this. 

"This video isn't racist. You woke snowflakes in the media can't tell a joke."

"OK, this racist video was actually posted by a staffer who has access to the President's social media accounts at 12:30AM."

Then they ask Trump: "Yeah, I posted it. So what?"

A-plus work everyone. 

This feels similar to the Alex Pretti video where they initially went into attack mode, realized it wasn't playing well AT ALL and then actually seemed to lose support in certain segments of MAGALAND/GOP.

Again, I feel like pointing out that the GOP does not have to actually put up with this shit. When Nixon went off the rails, they cut him loose, because the country and even the party came first. This bloated narcissistic racist piece of shit does, indeed, seem to win elections that he should lose, but this iteration is WAAAAAAY worse that the last time - and getting worse by the day.

They own this fucking guy.

Will It Work?

 Democratic leadership has settled on a set of demands for funding DHS. It is simultaneously ambitious and insufficient in many ways. Personally, I would ban Border Patrol from being anywhere that isn't the border. That will both reduce the gun-slinging cowboy dynamic within cities but also deny DHS a LOT of their foot soldiers.

Still, what Democrats have landed on is pretty popular with the public at large. The most popular reforms are making ICE/BP wear body cameras; independent investigations of ICE shootings; requiring a judicial warrant to enter homes; allowing people to video ICE; banning racial profiling; ban ICE from entering schools and churches; focusing efforts on deporting criminals, not just anyone who looks Brown.

This is where the upside-down nature of American politics in 2026 comes into play. The requested reforms are popular. They really aren't THAT controversial - or wouldn't have been before Trump came on the scene. Yeah, you should have a warrant to enter someone's home. Yeah, we shouldn't have a masked secret police dressed in paramilitary costumes yanking people off the street. 

However, there can be no distance between Republicans and Trump. You cannot defy Dear Leader. Even if Democrats are able to pass these reform bills, there's little chance Trump will actually sign them. Shutting down the government - even just part of the government - has rarely worked to extract concessions from the majority.

Of course, if and when it doesn't work, we will be told it is because Democrats are feckless and won't fight for things. Even as FEMA and TSA close and things get dicey, and Democrats will once again face the fact that closing the government hurts people, they will be expected to cave, because no one expects Republicans to care about people beyond their base. Even though the reforms are very popular, Republicans will simply double down on cruelty in the service of Trump and his hateful legions. 

Broken

 Last night, the lead story on CNN was the disappearance of a media figure's mom. She has dementia, it's a sad story as most stories surrounding dementia are. 

If you think that this is the most important story, I don't know what to tell you.

The Washington Post, as an organization, has largely ceased to exist. I cancelled my subscription after Bezos killed the Harris endorsement, but it has largely been gutted by other decisions Bezos made. The reality is that a regional newspaper really needs to be loss-leader for a wealthy person. It's basically a charitable institution at this point. 

That Post story is more important to the media itself than the disappearance of Ms Guthrie. Still, the media cannot seem to adequately grasp the moment we are in. 

Which is why we are in the moment we are in. I'm sure Bezos thought that re-electing Trump would be good for circulation. Instead, the Trumpification of the paper that brought down Nixon is now complicit in bringing down our Republic.

Democracy dies in Bezos' hands. 

Real vs Hypothetical Dangers

 Trump has threatened to "nationalize" elections. 

This is exactly the sort of bullshit that outlets like the Times or CNN are just completely unequal to covering in a normal way. "Nationalizing" the elections is blatantly, clearly unconstitutional. I know Bannon has been pushing that, too, but that doesn't make it more legal. There is functionally no way that I can see where he could even begin the process of pulling this off. He will not get a bill through Congress, for instance. 

Yes, there are legitimate concerns about Trump and Bannon and Miller using their Brownshirts in ICE to intimidate people at polling stations. I worry about states like Georgia that have a massive, concentrated city of Democratic votes and what Trump might try to do to deter voting. Generally speaking, Georgia Republicans have been pretty solid on election integrity, but Florida? Texas? 

We are sitting here nine months from what should be a Democratic wave that delivers at least the House, but possibly the Senate. That election remains the single most important event in preserving American Constitutional government, and Trump is threatening that. 

The question for "The Resistance" is how much energy to put into fighting something that might be the functional equivalent of his threats to make Canada the 51st state or, yes, annexing Greenland, 

Simplest Demand

 Democrats are going to try and reform ICE in the coming weeks, as they have a two week CR on DHS funding to try and hammer out some guardrails for the increasingly lawless agency.

Some of these suggestions are well and good, but I think one thing they HAVE to demand is that Border Patrol returns to the border. 

The "Border" is arguably the one issue that Trump still has positive approval ratings, as crossings have indeed decreased. Still, Alex Pretti was shot by two BP agents, not "ICE" agents. We have largely conflated the two for ease, but Border Patrol is really where the worst, trigger happy assholes reside. Long time ICE agents don't want to ride with them, because they are the ones most likely to pull their service weapon. They are routinely arrested for various violent crimes like spousal abuse.

The quickest way to both de-escalate what's happening in places like Minneapolis and deprive the purges of needed manpower is to deny Border Patrol from operating more than 15 miles from the actual border.

Consequences

 The central, depressing fact of the Epstein Files is the sheet amount of horrific and criminal behavior seems to have been carried out with full impunity. We see this time and again. The Watergate burglars went to jail, Nixon didn't. The soldiers who tortured people at Abu Ghraib went to jail, the architects of the torture regime didn't. 

Donald Trump has been found in a court of law to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Donald Trump is all over the Epstein shit. 

Donald Trump will never see the inside of a jail cell. 

All the people who say he "should"...that's true but not relevant. What's more, legions of his horrific creatures will be pardoned, most likely, on his way out the door. Trump is famously disloyal, so maybe he lets certain figures dangle in the wind, but major figures can and will be pardoned preemptively in order to enforce loyalty until the last minute.

The idea of impeaching and removing Kristi Noem is appealing on multiple levels... but it's not happening. However, should Democrats really hit a massive series of Blue Waves - Blue Tsunamis - that get them a Senate majority near 60 votes, they need to start thinking about impeaching various Trump figures after the fact. 

Take this story. This is naked corruption, which has its own clauses in the Constitution. Trump will most likely pardon Witkoff and his sons, but impeaching them and convicting them in the Senate should be still on the table, as that bars them from public office ever again. Ideally, as the Trump Era shudders to some wretched close, there will be a handful of Republicans who will want to slam the door on it. Impeaching will be easy, convicting hard. We saw that after January 6th. However, the MAGA base doesn't give a shit about Witkoff or Miller or Bondi or Noem. 

It's unsatisfying, but likely the only consequences for these creatures that we will ever see. 

Moral and Professional Failure

 I checked on the digital front page of the Times. The lead stories are about the Supreme Court's secrecy, some stuff about Gaza reopening, Minneapolis/ICE, the Grammys and a state visit from the President of Colombia. Only after those clusters of stories do you get anything on Epstein, and that is about the Justice Department "accidentally" posting pictures of victims' faces and nude bodies.

Now, those are all pretty important stories and exactly the sort of things I hope the Times continues to cover.

However, there has been no massive front page story on the actual contents of the released files. Some of that is because they released so much and some of that is because a lot of what they released are anonymous tips and unsubstantiated allegations -  perhaps not false, but not substantiated. Hopefully, the Times (and their lawyers) are simply combing through the files and trying to corroborate what is in them.

The thing is, what was in there is a story. Maybe THE story. We also know that Trump won't sue, because that would entail discovery.

Trump is floundering, when your opponent is drowning, stick a hose in his mouth.

There's Something Happening Here

 Yesterday, there was a special election in a Texas state Senate race. Trump carried the district by 17 points in 2024. Yesterday, the Democrat won by 14 points, a 31 point swing. Democrat Taylor Rehmet spent almost no money compared to his well-funded and Trump-endorsed opponent and still won a landslide. Rehmet is an Air Force veteran and union leader and the sort of male-coded candidate that I personally think will overperform, due to vibes about Democrats being too female, too minority centered. 

Fox News actually does respectable polling, and they have Democrats winning the generic ballot by 6 points, the highest they've ever recorded. As Morris notes, generic ballot polling doesn't tell us what will happen this November, but the party that doesn't control the White House usually picks up about 6 points between January polling and November voting. They start this cycle in the strongest position that they have ever been in. 

Republicans are doubling down, in many ways, on the racism of their immigration policies. Even Americans who might support tighter border controls are not thrilled with the images coming from Minnesota. Trump (or Miller) thinks that they can just change the optics by firing Bovino and his Nazi wardrobe, but that's actually not the imagery that has people enraged. It's five year old Liam Conejo Ramos being arrested for the crime of being brown. 

Meanwhile, with Republicans falling further and further underwater, the slow leak of Epstein files show that that story isn't going away either. As I wrote on Friday, Trump's policies are even less popular than he is himself. Oddly, with Democrats it's usually the opposite. Democratic policies are generally pretty popular - healthcare, taxing the rich, actual infrastructure spending, better education - but Dem pols usually poll worse. Once Trump's personality cult has to assimilate the fact that he really is a pedophile and rapist - if they even can assimilate that information - then the bottom truly does fall out. 

The prevailing fear many of us have right now as we look at the political dynamic is that Trump will throw everything at the wall to try and subvert the midterms in nine months. As of now, he has been largely confined to more or less "legal" attempts like gerrymandering mid-decade. As America rejects him, he will grow more and more dangerous, Stephen Miller will get more and more fevered in his assault on the Constitution. 

However, last night's election results could mean that they won't be able to pull it off.