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.

The Policy Incoherence Of Morons

 I'm teaching Progressivism this week, and we are looking at how there are two aspects of Progressivism that were in direct tension with each other: the desire to have experts direct policy and the desire to have more democracy to represent the "people" and not the "interests." Both were and are laudable goals, but they can work at cross purposes.

Under Trump we have the dual incompatibility of the attack on experts and the destruction of democratic norms. Part of me thinks that someone read something about Progressivism, and then decided to undo anything that smacked of it. This would certainly be consistent, for instance, with Trump's war on Jerome Powell. In fact, the new year has brought such a torrent of terrible news that it seems to have slipped the banks of a coherent narrative. But the attacks on Powell, on Minnesota, on science, and the literal attacks on Venezuela, Syria and maybe Iran or freaking Greenland are all part of the "logic" of authoritarianism.

The reason why authoritarianism is historically unpopular is because authoritarianism - with some exceptions, like maybe Singapore - typically has to business for technocrats. This gives us the darkly comical moment of Trump waging a war for oil in Venezuela and the oil companies saying, "Nah, we're good, dude."

Trump promised an economic utopia when he ran in 2024, and gullible people conflated the circumstances of 2019 with Trump's alleged business acumen. In fact, he's given is a noticeably weak and sluggish economy that Krugman argues is sluggish because of the incoherence and chaotic nature of an autocrat making shit up on the fly. It's all very noisy, but the combination of chaotic tariffs, the prospects of AI taking white collar jobs and general overall problems like firing 300,000 government workers has all led to a period of instability.

Simon Rosenberg notes that Republicans are beginning to break with Trump over issues of clear policy malfeasance. Hopefully, this becomes contagious, and they pass veto proof resolutions denying Trump the ability to invade Greenland or to protect Jerome Powell and the independence of the Federal Reserve. If Trump gets his tiny little paws on the Fed, we are well and truly cooked, and I think even most Republicans know this to be true.

Of course, on one level, the policies pursued by Trump are not incoherent. They are completely coherent with his curdled worldview. They are coherent to his own ignorance and impulses.

Famously some Bush 43 lackey said of Iraq: "We are an empire. We make our own reality." 

How did THAT work out?

Rats

 Somewhat in conjunction with my skepticism of the economic health suggested below are the stories that suggest that MAGA knows what's coming.  Trump is slapping his name on everything he can. At the recent Turning Point confab, the whole thing turned into a display of backstabbing, with Ben Shapiro attaching the antisemites in the room, and the antisemites striking back. The Epstein files will continue to trickle out. Trump's approval rating is hovering in the mid-30s in the Gallup and ARG polls and moving downwards. 

Republicans' great advantage over my lifetime has been obedience to the leadership. As James Carville famously put it, "Democrats have to fall in love, Republicans just fall in line." Conservatism is largely about service to hierarchies, so that tracks. However, MAGA is not "conservative" it's a revolutionary reactionary authoritarian movement, and revolutionary movements are prone to factionalism. We are already seeing Republican House members balk at some of the most egregious MAGA programs.

Keep an eye on the divisions that are creeping into the GOP. Some rats flee the sinking ship, but they will also turn on each other when cornered. 

Is You Taking Notes On A Criminal Conspiracy?

 I saw a clip of the Rich Eisen Show, where he's interviewing Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, where Eisen asked him where some of the characters are now. When they got to the charming but corrupt lawyer, Saul Goodman, Gilligan quipped, "I think Trump pardoned him." The set erupted in laughter.

As Simon Rosenberg points out, the Trump Administration is more accurately categorized as a crime spree. The Epstein Files released yesterday were in clear violation of the letter and spirit of the law requiring them to do so. It was 119 pages of blacked out text.

Richardson notes that are seeing some cracks in the dam. A handful of House Republicans are starting to sign on to discharge petitions that are passing and forcing the human cypher known as Mike Johnson to actually bring popular measures to a vote. Let's posit that, for instance, Republicans finally get some sort of extension of ACA premiums passed through both Houses with Democratic support. Do we really think Trump will honor that law? 

More accurately, do we think that the creatures that surround this empty man will honor that law? Richardson points to the role that ghoulish fascist Stephen Miller has played in the illegal strikes against Venezuelan boats. Miller is basically taking the logic of Republican rhetoric since Reagan to its gruesome conclusion. There is at least some reporting that many of the people around Trump are basically trolls; they don't really mean anything they say, they just want a reaction. Miller is not a troll, he's a monster. 

I recently enjoyed Death by Lightning on Netflix about the assassination of James Garfield. The central importance of Garfield's death was the impetus it gave to civil service reform - a reform that dramatically reshaped the capacity of the federal government to actually carry out complex tasks. The spoils system that had existed since Andrew Jackson's presidency created strong party loyalty, but it left the government without capable people able to leverage expertise for good governance. You can't have a Department of Labor with statisticians to give you the information to stop child labor. 

My hope - not, I pray, a forlorn hope - is that the awfulness of Trump 2.0 will shock the jaded sensibilities of the American public in much the same way that Garfield's death did. These are corrupt, vicious people and they aren't especially smart. They are operating as if there will be no accountability. That's the subtext of the joke about Trump pardoning Saul Goodman.

Former Special Counsel, Jack Smith, wants to testify in public about what he found out about Trump's role in January 6th. Sure, we all know that this was his doing, but he's now effectively immune from prosecution, so a public airing of his misdeeds is the best we can hope for. If, as I suspect, Trump pardons everyone as he heads out the door, then we will need these sort of "truth and reconciliation" moments to come as close to exposing the criminality of these thugs as we are likely to come.

The High Cost of Incompetency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Death Of The GOP

 It's one of those days when both Richardson and Krugman seem to align, though it maybe doesn't look that way at first glance. Krugman looks at the state of the Heritage Foundation, noting that it was always a hack, far right shop, but the recent controversy over Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson has stripped away the plausible veneer. Richardson looks at the accumulating sense that the Trump Administration is just so far out of touch with the American public. The performative cruelty, the Epstein shit, the weakening economy, and while she didn't mention the various aesthetic outrages like the demolishing of the East Wing...these all create an overwhelming impression of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Back in the before times, you have that tentpole quote from Lindsey Graham saying in 2016 that if the GOP nominated Trump "We would get killed and we would deserve it." Then, of course, Trump drew to an inside straight in 2016 and won again in 2024, despite having more baggage than Delta Airlines. This has created an understanding among Republicans that Trump cannot be defied - not only because of his unexpected electoral success, but because of his petty and vindictive nature. Thou Shalt Not Cross Trump.

The problem is not merely that Trump is a flawed president along normal metrics like "understands policies" or "builds consensus" or "speaks to the concerns of average Americans." He's also an aspiring autocrat who is either empowering the fascist cruelty of people like Stephen Miller or actively directing it. Even more concerning for Republicans: He's a doddering old man whose policies are actively damaging to America.

Since 2016, the GOP has steadily remade itself in the image of Donald Trump. This can't be sustainable, because Trump's hold on the public is really a hold on the 27%. As his poor policies and temperamental flaws are shown again and again and again...it becomes harder to justify supporting him...yet the entire raison d'etre of the GOP is genuflect before Trump.

The potential does exist for the Epstein stuff to finally cause a rupture that cannot be healed.

Obviously, the Republican Party isn't going to "die." It will transmogrify into some other beast. Ideally, we get schisms and chaos, like what just happened at Heritage. Ideally, many of Trump's fervent supporters just stay home for the next two or three electoral cycles. Still, the crisis that Graham predicted is coming. The fact that he has so enthusiastically embraced Trump, too, is what makes it so delicious.

UPDATE: "Populism" was always a scam.

The Danger In Trump's Weakness

 As I mentioned yesterday, Trump has seen a substantial drop in support. One poll had him at 50-50 support among white people. Those are dire numbers for a Republican. 

The problem is that when authoritarians are weak, they tend to lash out and try to sew discord and crisis. The fundamental rationale for a strong man is to counteract chaos and lawlessness. 

Enter the Epstein scandal. 

You already have a president who's seeing his approval crater over his tariffs and deportation cruelty. Now, every action he takes seems to scream that he is at the center of even more and more damaging revelations about his links to Epstein and the rape of children. All of this makes him extremely dangerous, as his constant desire to increase division and outrage has been his go-to tactic when faced with scandal.

His release of the FBI MLK files is just...bonkers. The House going on recess so that they won't have to vote on measures to release the "Epstein files" is...laughable. Listening to Trump is like listening to someone decompress in real time.

“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They're the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it's the most unbelievable thing I think I've ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn't have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”

Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.”

How can you listen to that insane drivel and not be convinced that he's in charge of his faculties?

Krugman notes that Trump and his Gestapo are likely to launch an attack on New York similar to the one he launched on LA. He seems to think that - because everyone in MAGA thinks NYC is a hellscape - that images of ICE attacking immigrant neighborhoods will redound to his political benefit. It will give him an excuse to nationalize the Guard again and militarize American streets. 

The problem with this is that his efforts in LA made him distinctly less popular on the very issue of deportations and immigration in general. Trump knows about five musical notes on the Wingnut Wurlitzer and he will keep pounding on them in a discordant cacophony like a meth-addled chimp, because in the end that's the only tune he knows.

Maybe if armored cars show up in the streets of NY, Jake Tapper can stop flogging his "Biden is old" book and pay attention to what's actually happening now.

The Coming Chaos

 It is worth noting that we are only now coming up to the six month mark of Trump's second term. He has been rampaging through our institutions like rapid gorilla and done real damage to all sorts of democratic institutions. He has also made efforts to destroy basic competency. Again, I defer to Richardson.

Among the outrages to good government that are occurring this week:

- The immolation of 500 metric tons of famine relief foodstuffs.
- The incoherent and often contradictory policy towards Ukraine.
- Epstein.

With regards to destroying food enough to feed 1.5 million children, that's obviously wasteful in ways that defy calculation. Anytime some fucking Republican talks about "waste and fraud" this needs to be thrown in their face. Republicans do not care about "waste and fraud" they just want to hurt poor people.

The Ukraine issue was that the Trump White House is so fundamentally dysfunctional that some undersecretary basically cancelled military aid to Ukraine because Pete Hegseth is too busy making videos for Faux News and Marco Rubio is both an empty suit AND has too many jobs. There is no policy direction from the West Wing. It's just MAGA lunatics freelancing.

As for Epstein...who knows where this will go. Perhaps the slow rise in inflation that Krugman explains here is beginning to have an impact. What's notable - really notable - is that polling has Trump underwater on every single issue, even ones like immigration and "the economy" that have been his and Republican strong suits. When you're riding high, scandals don't bruise you as easily. Ask Bill Clinton. When people actually are angry with other stuff, then things like Epstein become shorthand for the general gestalt. Specifically with Epstein, it becomes "I didn't vote for this!" (You, in fact, voted for this.)

Again, we aren't six months in. Inflation is burbling up as markets try and figure out what will actually happen with tariffs. In Krugman's explanation, the combination of TACO and wholesalers stockpiling goods before "Liberation Day" has buffered prices from steep inclines. Sellers can eat a little profit to keep prices low, if they think the tariffs are going to go away. 

However, the real crisis is likely still to come. A government and economy increasingly built on fraud and incompetence will both create a crisis and be unable to cope with it. Texas' embrace of terrible governance both created the conditions of the Kerr County tragedy and then was unable to respond quickly to save anyone. That sort of tragedy is the collapse of institutions. It took five years for Bush to gut things like FEMA. Trump has done it in five months.

Stay safe out there. No one is coming to save you.

How Long To Recover From Trump?

 The OBBB is going to pass, because the "principled opposition" is and always was bullshit. It will be really bad, a return to a place, especially with regards to the working poor, that we thought we had left behind. Many voices online wonder "if we can ever recover" from this.

That's absurd.

As I and Erik Loomis have argued, we are not likely living in a repeat of 1934 Germany. We are living in a repeat of the 1890s United States. The Gilded Age was awful in all the ways that this is awful. The result was the Progressive Era, which - combined with the New Deal, itself an offshoot of the Progressive Movement - reordered American government.

If there is a real threat to America's long term prospects, the most immediate is the Republican war on democracy, which is real and frightening. However, a lot of this seems wrapped up in the perverse "charisma" of Donald Trump, and he is already quite old and clearly mentally diminished. I don't see JD Vance being able to capture the same enthusiasm Trump elicits from his cult. Americans do actually value democracy, and if Democrats can win the midterms (which OBBB makes exceedingly likely) then we have a chance of saving our democracy. Again, democracy is not a toggle switch that flips between on and off. It's a spectrum. We weren't very democratic in the Gilded Age - Blacks, women, Natives, none could vote.

The real peril for America from this monstrous and noxious regime is to the full faith and credit of the United States government. As Krugman points out, the national debt is not an absolute evil or an absolute good, it's relative to other conditions. Republicans' war on taxes have largely been constrained by a deficit hawk wing of the party and the basic fiscal responsibility of the grownups in the Democratic Party. Deficits - and thus the debt - rise during Republican administrations and declines during Democratic ones. 

The two pronged attack on both taxes and tax collection will blow up to debt during a time of relatively high interest rates, relatively high employment and - up until the last quarter - economic growth. This is the time to get deficits under control, precisely so that during emergencies - recessions, war and pandemics - we have the credit space to deficit spend.

We still seem on a course for a stagflation episode, as economic growth is shrinking, inflation remains stubborn, as food prices seem to continue to rise - a  dynamic sure to be made worse by Stephen Miller's pogrom against immigrants - before tariffs have really and truly hit the American and global economy.

If the coming Crypto Crash happens, while we reduce our workforce and immiserate the poor, a true depression is not out of the question. 

If Democrats hold the trifecta in 2028, they can roll back a great deal of Trump's evil plans surrounding immigration, executive abuse of power, corruption, tariffs, environmental degradation and so on. If America does truly enter a sovereign debt crisis...that will be bad beyond living memory and won't be easy to recover from. 

The House

 I had a long running argument on Twitter (that was mostly civil) about the fact that three Democratic House members died since the election last November, and that allowed the OBBB to pass the House by one vote. My counterpart assured me that the GOP would have simply held the vote until some absent members returned. One GOP member voted present, which strongly suggests that they were not a "yes" on the bill, but didn't want to attract fire.

This will all be put to the final test soon. The It Would Be Funny If It Weren't Tragic episode of Lisa Murkowski voting FOR the bill before saying she hated the bill and hoped the House...THE HOUSE?...would fix it.

So, we shall see. Speaker Moses has to reconcile a lot of vulnerable Blue State Republicans who want the SALT deduction back and others who have axes to grind, plus the lunatic fringe of the Freedumb Caucus who think it's not cruel enough. Then there might be a few principled deficit scolds who will follow Rand Paul's lead.

Who knows? Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the GOP doing the worst thing possible, but we shall see.

Tell Us, Tillis

 Republican Senator Thom Tillis's speech in which he announced his intention not to run again in the face of a primary challenge by a True Trumpist will be a fascinating document for future historians. A current historian, Heather Cox Richardson, excerpts from it:

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?... [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

What Tillis, in effect, admits to is that he has NOT represented "the great people of North Carolina to the best of (his) abilities." He has warped his principles in service of the malignant Baal encamped in the White House. 

You hear this from Democratic Members of both the House and Senate. There are Republicans who are also somewhat aghast at what Trump says and does, and they admit is much when the mics are off. Yet, time and time again, they shut up and toe the line, afraid of Trump using his social media bullying to level a primary challenge against them. Yes, sure, there are feral weirdos like Markwayne Mullin or Marjorie Traitor Greene. There are moronic bigots like Tommy Tuberville and Lauren Boebert.

Right now, the fate of millions of Americans hinges on Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Tillis and Rand Paul - of all people - have signaled that they will not vote for this OBBB. Meanwhile, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis are wavering because it's not cruel enough.

Almost exactly 8 years ago, Collins and Murkowski saved the Affordable Care Act - with a dramatic late assist from John McCain. They have been subsequently re-elected, so that vote absolutely did not hurt them. Still, Trump's improbable win last November has imbued him with some sort of magic that has so many Republicans fearful of saying anything that might cross him.

I remain hopeful that one day a hamburdlar will do its patriotic duty and rid us of this evil man. When that happens, what becomes of the Republican Party? What becomes of a Lindsay Graham, who has contorted himself into something hateful and stupid to appease Baal? There is no way that JD Vance can inspire the same fear that Trump does. Vance is evil in his own way, but it's as much his lack of true principles as opposed to Trump's bedrock character that makes Vance evil. Trump is evil like Sauron; Vance is evil like Grima Wormtongue.

Thom Tillis is simply the latest Republican to be defeated by Trump's malevolence. He joins Rob Portman, Mitt Romney, Kevin McCarthy and more than I can relate here. Men and women of different ideological positions, all of whom were destroyed by Trump. HR McMaster, John Kelly and Rex Tillerson are gone, replaced by evil, mendacious creatures. 

I dunno, maybe we shouldn't have let the absolute worst people in this country run the Executive Branch, especially since the other two branches are run by the craven, the cowardly and the sycophantic.

Waddling Into The Abbatoir

 Richardson compares the OBBB to the McKinley Tariff that largely fueled the growing agrarian populist movement of the late 19th century. The tariff - which grossly shifted wealth upwards during a time of already growing inequality - led to massive Republican losses in the subsequent election. It is worth noting that McKinley himself lost his seat in the 1890 midterms, but then won the presidency in 1896. The wild swings in control of the House during the period aren't likely to occur, though we are in a similar period where control of the House - if not the margins - is similar.

The Senate advanced the monstrosity with two Republicans - Thom Tillis and Rand Paul - siding with Democrats in opposing advancing it to the floor. Collins and Murkowski are not firm yesses on the final bill, which is interesting, but while they have done the occasional right thing in the past, I'm not sure this environment lends itself to principled stands against King Donald I. 

This leads one to wonder what, exactly, the GOP thinks it's doing. As always, the question is now whether we have free and fair elections. States - not the Federal government - run elections, and there are hopefully enough Republicans like Brian Kemp who are not willing to end American democracy. The actions of many Republicans in Washington seems to be that they won't have to face electoral consequences for their actions. Perhaps gerrymandering has rendered them safe. Or maybe those in purple seats will follow Don Bacon's lead and retire.

As long as elections happen, the House seems sure to flip. Flipping the Senate could be tougher, but not impossible, if this grotesquerie becomes law.

What Is The Goal Of The Chaos?

 Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling is deeply troubling in multiple different ways, but the near term effect will be to sew chaos in the legal world. The implications are that you cannot have a national injunction from a local or district court, which seems reasonable at one level while being absolutely chaotic in the real world.

If you are being deported because you were born here but your parents were undocumented, then you would have to sue as an individual to get relief. Needless to say, most people cannot afford lawyers. This is, as Justice Jackson notes, an assault on the fabric of the law.

This ruling is ostensibly about stopping people from shopping for favorable judges - a tactic the right used a lot during Biden's term - that then apply nationally until a higher court can rule on it. This would seem to mean a patchwork of local rulings will take hold.

 Meanwhile, the Shit Sandwich working it way through the Senate could also sew chaos into Medicard, Medicare, various Federal agencies...just mass pandemonium. 

I suppose Republicans have, in the past, governed in a way to make the government terrible, then turned around and said, "Look, see! We were right! Government is terrible."

I'm skeptical it will work, and it backfired in places like Kansas under Sam Brownback. If it can backfire there, I'd say it will backfire in Florida, North Carolina and even Ohio.

What is the long term plan in destroying so much and creating so much chaos?

TV Nation

 Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Kegsbreath...Hegseth...went on a feral rant during a press conference. Perhaps he's drinking again, but just as likely is that he was performing his job using the qualifications that got him the job in the first place. Hegseth, like so many others, was hired because Trump saw him being a tough-guy asshole on Fox. He wanted more tough guy assholes than he had last time, which is why he staffed his Cabinet with people he saw on Fox. 

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans seem intent on making Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Santa Claus. Their budget bill is amazingly worse than the House version, which was incredibly terrible. It always seemed to me like the House was passing a terrible bill in order to please Trump and their worst members, hoping that the Senate would force some sanity on the process. The Senate, however, is making the bill even worse. 

Luckily, Majority Leader Thune has said they won't overrule the Parliamentarian, so some of the awful non-budgetary stuff should get axed. Still, this sort of performative cruelty probably plays well in the corner offices at Fox, but it's a remarkably unpopular bill. 

There are a lot of reasons why Madisonian democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Resurgent racism and sexism, the normalization of Trumpist lying and the psychological trauma of Covid. You have to say that one of the main pillar - perhaps THE main pillar - in this fascist edifice is Fox News and the ugliness that it has injected into our political life.

Hope?

 Politico sucks, as it always sucked, but then was bought by a right wing German billionaire. However, that may give them some access into the GOP.

They are reporting that the atrocious Big Beautiful Bill is running into real trouble. This is a draconian attack on the social safety net that will deprive millions - tens of millions - of Americans health insurance and lead to the closing of rural hospitals. There's also a host of awful things in there that will make America weaker, poorer, sicker and dumber.

My worry is that we have these sort of moments where vulnerable GOP members stroke their chins and worry about the impact of a terrible piece of legislation and then cave and vote for it anyway. See Susan Collins. 

In some ways, gutting Medicaid could be Democrats path back to a Senate majority, as whether Tillis votes for it or not, Republicans will get blamed.

Best case scenario is that their efforts to pass the massive bill fails and they have to basically just extend the 2017 tax cuts. Not great, but not as painful as it could be.

When WERE We A Serious Country?

 Krugman offers up the argument that we are "no longer a serious country" as we embrace the idiocy of Trump's manic policy making. Richardson begins her piece by noting Joni Ernst's sociopathic response to Medicaid cuts being irrelevant because we all die anyway.

It is tempting to place the cascading disasters of Trump's policies at his feet alone. He is, after all, that toxic combination of moron and narcissist. But it wasn't Trump's idea that tax cuts will lead to so much growth that they would pay for themselves. It wasn't Trump's idea that cutting people off from government health insurance would make them lazy. It wasn't Trump's idea that America just needed to return to "Biblical principles."

A lot goes back to Reagan, but you can back further to the Birchers and McCarthy, to Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon.

America has never felt respect for bureaucrats, perhaps because our original bureaucracy was staffed by the spoils system (a system Trump is trying to resurrect). Other countries feel that their government is a tool to help the most people that it can; it is an instrument of the common good. We don't feel that way, and a large strain of us have never felt that way.

I understand why even center left commentators and especially bothsides types would not want to stare this fact in the face, but America has always been unserious. We have thrived, because democracy allows us to self-correct. 

Let's hope we still have democracy by 2028.

Do These Losses Matter?

 Richardson lays out the fact that Trump and his minions have suffered a really remarkable sustained string of court defeats. It doesn't really matter if the judge is a Republican or a Democrat or even if Trump appointed them. His actions are so blatantly illegal and unconstitutional that courts have little problem ruling against him.

In Congress, the Big Ugly Bill is waddling into the threshing blades of the Senate, a process that I would guess a few House Republicans are hoping will strip the bill of some of its uglier aspects. The reality in Congress though is that Trump has passed almost no significant legislation. While the Republican Congress has obliged him with approximately zero oversight, they aren't willing to address or pass laws to validate some of his worst decisions. 

In short, despite the flurry of executive orders, despite the DOGE assault on governance, despite the outrageous corruption of his pardons, despite the evisceration of our role in the world...Trump really hasn't changed much. Not in a permanent way. 

Let's posit a hypothetical. Ten House Republicans die from drinking raw milk at RFK's bear barbecue. That makes Hakeem Jeffries Speaker of the House. 

Trump chokes on a Big Mac and Vance - attempting to give him the Heimlich - is crushed when Trump falls on him.  Jeffries becomes President.

Immediately, all of Trump's EOs are rescinded. Like within 24 hours. All the threats, all the attack dog bullshit...gone. Yes, it will take years maybe decades to restore the world's faith in US governance. There is real lasting damage there. But so much of what Trump has done - while awful and truly terrible in equal measure - is not lawful and is therefore not permanent. 

Which is why we are all worried about the 2026 midterms. If they happen, Democrats win the House.  They might even win the Senate if we are in a recession then, despite the map.  

The worry remains whether we will have free and fair elections. However, given current Republican contempt for legislating, maybe they just don't care. 

Will It Pass?

 If you had asked me in January if the "Big Beautiful Bill" (Jesus wept) was going to pass, I would have said, "no." In fact, I think I did. MAGA has proven spectacularly unable to pass actual laws; this is why they rely so much on theatrical Executive Orders and executive overreach.

Looking at the bill now, I'm less certain it will fail, but I'm not convinced it won't pass. As Martin Longman lays out, they have settled on a "kick the can" strategy that simply moves the bill along to the next step, even though no one actually loves the bill. As Richardson points out, "moderate" Republicans are uncomfortable with how deep the cuts go and extremists hate how shallow they are. The bill absolutely explodes the national debt in ways that have led Moody's and likely others to downgrade America's credit rating. 

Still, the bill keeps passing certain hurdles. It goes to the Rules Committee in the middle of the night tonight to try and hide this grotesquerie under cover of darkness. It might pass. In fact, it likely will. 

The question is what will happen when Johnson has to bring the final shitball to the House floor for a vote. Don Bacon just saw the popular Republican mayor from Omaha (his district) lose her reelection bid. Johnson can only lose three votes (it would be narrower if a handful of superannuated Democrats had stepped aside last November). 

The idea that House Republicans in Florida will vote against the bill to protect Venezuelans from being deported seems like a fantasy. Still, this is one real opportunity for Republicans to demonstrate actual principles. 

The same goes for the Senate, where long term concerns about the debt might actually resonate.

The strategy for this bill has been to force everything into one big omnibus bill - including raising the debt ceiling to the ionosphere - which will presumably force Republicans to fall in line or the whole thing collapses. That's... not the worst strategy for dealing with Congressional dysfunction.

Maybe they fail tonight. Maybe they fail in the subsequent vote in the House. Maybe the Senate.

Anyway, Joe Biden is old and someone should write a story about that, I guess.

The Narrative

 Richardson does her usual nice job of laying out how the broad MAGA-sphere has been adept at changing the subject  by seeding the media with various outrageous stories. The fundamental insight of Bannon and Cheung and the whole Trump media apparatus is that most Americans have the attention span of a fruit fly. Some of them revel in the "content" of the reality TV show that Trump has turned America into. There's always drama!

At some point, this exhausting ability to keep flinging poo at the walls of American governance comes back to haunt them. Trump's approval rating is falling in spite of their ability to "flood the zone" with outrage after outrage. That's the crazy thing. It works in short bursts, but it's fundamentally dysfunctional.

In a related way, we have the media's current feeding frenzy over the latest "autopsy" of Biden's abortive 2024 reelection campaign. As an historical accounting...I mean it might be accurate. I personally saw the physical decline more than the mental decline, though they are linked. I think there is a fair assessment that Biden should not have run at all and the party could have had an open primary. I would wager a governor would have run the strongest campaign against Trump, simply because of the anti-incumbency bias that has existed post-Covid. 

Whatever, hindsight is 20/20. The story - in this particular moment - feels like another distraction. This is not the Trump people flooding the zone with outrages, this is the media falling comfortably into a story that they love to tell: Biden is way too old. Maybe he was, but I would argue that if you care about the mental acuity of an aging president, the most important story is likely to be the current occupant of the Oval Office, whose public statements are gibbering idiocy. 

This all feels like the Covid Lab Leak story. Is that an important story? A little bit, I guess, for China to analyze and make sure it doesn't happen again. Does that really have anything to do with the course of the disease once it spread through the Wuhan market? Not really. But "China Bad" is a nice story and it has "controversy" and...sure, that should be reported on. But that has zero to do with the millions who died.

I have been obsessed with season two of Andor, the Star Wars show that is miles better than anything Star Wars has ever produced. The text of the show is about how revolutions start, and it does a great job analyzing how authoritarian regimes try and squeeze control of a population. There's one arch about propaganda and misinformation that looks like it could be torn from today's copy of the Columbia Journalism Review. The Galactic Empire is more fascist than the Trump Administration, but all the same tools are being used.

Seems like that's a more important story than the age of a former president or Trump's latest beef with Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.

Re-Focus

 The critical line of attack against Republicans really can't be solely on Trump. It has to be against Congressional Republicans.

Given the tragic circumstances in terms of where power lies in Congress, there is little that Democrats can actually do to stop the orgy of corruption and the general incompetence of the Trump Regency. Congress has every tool at its disposal to stop what he's doing and they won't. In fact, their budget is probably too extreme even for Trump.

Whatever bad outcomes are headed our way belong to them, too.