Is Trump Experiencing Dementia?

 Maggie Haberman - who has been a weird sort of insider reporter in Trumpistan - thinks that Trump is as sharp as he's ever been. Now, my position is that Trump has always been pretty stupid, especially if we are talking about higher, abstract cognitive functions. He has a base ability to bully and cajole and "sell" himself, but he is not a deep thinker. He has also spent his entire life at war with the world, and that stems from his lack of overarching intelligence. He was the not-too-bright failson of a self-made asshole from Queens, and he simultaneously craved the attention of the Manhattan set and resented them for not accepting him, except as a punchline.

As Rofer points out in the linked piece, saying that Trump is not suffering from dementia does not imply that he is operating in a productive cognitive state. Trump's business was an extremely small outfit of co-conspirators. During his first term, he was surrounded by the "adults in the room" - people who understood how government worked and what American principles generally were. 

Now, Trump is surrounded by sycophants who lavish North Korean-style praise on him. He is increasingly in a bubble, where bad news isn't really penetrating his inner bubble. The result is the Iran fiasco, the inflation, the various legal setbacks, and the complete inability to pass legislation despite having control of both houses of Congress. 

Haberman's point that Trump does not exhibit "dementia" is probably only slightly accurate. Having watched people fall into dementia, it's not a light switch. You slowly degrade in ways that can be very hard to pick up by people who are around you all the time. Still, there's a chance that we have someone who was not very smart to begin with, is experiencing normal aging and is walled off from information that might wound his fragile ego. 

This doesn't account for the falling asleep in meetings, the unexplained medical visits and his incessant bragging about passing a dementia test. As someone who felt that Biden was suffering not from dementia but from an acceleration of his speech impediment, I suppose I should extend the same benefit of the doubt to Trump.

I just don't feel like it. 

No, He's Responsible

 Yglesias writes a decent column about Trump's war on government competence, best exemplified by DOGE. He notes how cuts to various agricultural and public health programs are running into real world consequences, notably screwworm, measles and Ebola. Yet, he then says that some of this isn't "Trump's fault." His argument is that - unlike the disastrous war against Iran - these are not direct policy consequences. Trump didn't CAUSE screwworm or measles or Ebola to exist.

I honestly don't even know how you get yourself into that rhetorical space. 

Krugman - famously called "shrill" by his editors - tends to lean the other way. He makes a much more expansive case for things like the problems farmers are having because of Trump's trade policies and that same war in Iran. Of course, many of those deep rural voters are both upset with Trump's policies that have actively immiserated them, but they are also unlikely to vote for Democrats. 

Leaving aside the fact that they won't switch parties, let's look at how they won't hold Trump accountable. Elections are how you hold elected officials and indeed all the organs of government accountable. It is precisely this accountability that makes democracies more functional in the long run - even if they short run is messy as hell.

If farmers are pissed about Trump's policies, then they should vote for Democrats to force a course correction. However, if you start adopting Yglesias' framing of Trump not being responsible for shit that happens even though he gutted the institutions designed to keep that shit from happening on to your head, then you can make the easy walk to "both sides are to blame, I guess I'll just keep voting Republican."

I realize Yglesias is not a partisan propagandist, but technically neither is Krugman. They both purport to be part of the "reality based community." At school, we are urged to practice scrupulous non-partisanship, but Donald Trump IS a felon, and pointing that out - or that tariffs and wars are inflationary - is not being partisan. 

We have a measles and screwworm outbreak in this country, because Donald Trump and the Republican Party have waged war on technical expertise and government capacity. Yes, he didn't actively infect kids with measles or cows with screwworm, but his policies are making this a growing health and economic crisis.

There is simply something very strange about how Yglesias frames his political discussions, and excusing Trump for the destruction of public health measures because he didn't cause the illness is top of the list in strangeness. 

You Should Support Talking Points Memo

 Right now, they are doing impressive investigative work on the corruption by US Attorneys, beginning with the so-called Broadview Six case.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

With media like 60 Minutes falling under the sway of bootlicking lickspittles, you really need to support independent media.

Broken Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeply Weird

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

Today, however, he crossed a fucking line. 

It's the perfect example of thinking without feeling.

Lucy, The Football And A Credulous Media

 "Lucy and the football" is a meme about people falling for the same lie over and over again. It was used a lot to describe some Democrats during Dubya Bush's administration who kept falling for hollow assurances that turned out to be false.

Today, it is the media that play the role of Charlie Brown, endlessly kicking at the ball that Trump pulls away at the last minute. They never seem to learn that Trump is simply the least credible source in the Executive Branch. He calls up some reporter (or they call him and he answers) and says something that isn't true, like we have a deal to open the Straits of Hormuz, they report it, markets move in response, people on Polymarket make a killing and then it turns out, no, the Straits are not open. 

This is so bizarre, because the whole gestalt of the media is to be cynical and hard edged in pursuit of the truth. Yet, again and again they parrot these statement that are so obviously going to turn out to be false, simply from the experience of a year, or a month, or a week, or a day, or an hour before. 

There is simply no reason to believe anything Donald Trump says about the war in Iran. It's unclear whether he's delusional, wishcasting or manipulating markets for a quick buck - of all of the above. 

It is professional malpractice at this point to transcribe his statements on anything, but especially the war, without independent confirmation.

The Fictive Nexus

 Trump's war with Iran is only his second most important war. The war with the truth is one that he has been waging for his entire life. As a malignant narcissist, Trump cannot be wrong. He is always right, always winning. The realities of the Iran War are intruding upon that cocoon of lies. Today, Trump said that he was close to a negotiated deal with Iran; Iran said, "Bullshit." 

The question some have asked is whether Trump's lies about the war are 
A) Part of an effort to manipulate markets.
B) A fundamental disconnect with reality.
C) Just who he is: a liar.

Reality really does get the last say. Trump, however, has created a public career where his lying has not been nearly the disqualifying character flaw that we would have hoped it would be. Trump's congenital contempt for the truth has somehow not become the defining trait when the new media reports on his utterances. When Trump says anything at this point, it should be treated as false until otherwise verified. The continuing, persistent treatment of Trump as if he were a normal human being - much less a normal president - is the height of the sanewashing that routinely occurs.

This is why Trump could only have risen to prominence in the Republican Party. The reason is because of Fox News. Fox has primed a generation or two of "conservatives" to respond in a Pavlovian way to the red meat and lies of Republican politicians. We have certified morons like Senator Tommy Tuberville decrying Sharia law in the US...which isn't a thing. But if you've marinated in Fox for decades, it might be. 

One of the theories behind John Fetterman's complete abandonment of Democratic partisanship is that after his stroke, he's become closer to his Fox News addicted brother. That would absolutely track. 

Trump is a uniquely awful human being - among the worst public figures this or any other country has produced. 

He could not have become president without Fox News.

Does Trump Meet The Qualifications For Psychosis?

 It's not exactly a specious question. He seems so incredibly detached from reality.

However, Trump's manifest and repeated lying is a personality trait. He simply cannot tell a truth that might reflect poorly on himself. The Iran war is pretty much already won, but Europe needs to send help immediately to reopen the Straits of Hormuz, which are open anyway. Tell me how that is the utterings of a sane person. Then again, he has always simply lied about everything. Prices are down! He won in a landslide! The world respects us!

At what point does his repeated inability to tell the truth reach the level of psychosis? Particularly since he has absolutely no one around him who will tell him the truth.

There has been reams written about the sanewashing that the media does for Trump. They treat his utterances as somehow true or they frame them in a way that might make sense. Trump can say something that sure seems false, but it is accorded the weight that we normally give presidential statements. Then, inevitably, the truth is different than what Trump said, but the media has already moved on. Then he says something else that, again, is treated as true.

Trump's ramblings - if not filtered through this media screen - would seem to be so detached from actual reality that it would call into question whether Trump understands what is actually real. You know. Psychosis.

We've typically understood Trump as being a liar, a profoundly ignorant even stupid man and a man clearly slipping into cognitive decline, perhaps full on dementia. I have to wonder if all those dementia tests that he passed - but that his doctors feel the need to repeatedly administer - are perhaps something that needs to be a screen for actual psychosis.

We have reached the point where we don't know if the President of the United States is capable of interacting with reality.

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.

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. 

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.

The Discontent of Content

 Let's just recap yesterday's Friday news dump with Richardson. 

- Millions of Epstein files were released, with Trump's name prominent in many of them, and many with his name were the then subsequently scrubbed. Among the allegations were forcible and statutory rape by Trump and beating up a girl. 

- They arrested journalist Don Lemon for recording a protest at a church. They had to venue shop in order to find a grand jury willing to indict, as judges turned them down.

- Massive protests in subzero weather, which barely registered in the media.

- Trump threatened military action against Iran.

- Trump announced his candidate to head the Federal Reserve...and his name was in the Epstein files.

- We have a partial government shutdown, though Republicans and Democrats agreed in funding for everything but DHS, while they try and rein in the abuses there. Because Mike Johnson is a toady, he has the House in recess, but we shall see if they come back and keep the lights on.

- Oh yeah, Catherine O'Hara died, but that's not really relevant to this.

Among the many lenses through which to view Trump and his cronies is the lens of "Content Creator" - itself a vacuous designation of "just some idiot with a camera." Bannon and Trump have seized on the micro-attention spans of America and provided a firehose of "content" that thwarts efforts to grasp and understand (and counter) all of his awfulness. You think shooting a VA nurse in the back is bad? How about we go ahead and arrest a journalist? You like that? No? How about we bomb Iran?

The thing is, it gets old after a while. It gets exhausting. Those of us who are slaves to following the news have been exhausted since this time last year. For most Americans, it's background noise...until you shoot a VA nurse in the back ten times. 

I saw my conservative cousin paste something on Facebook, which is the usual nonsense about Trump. "I wish he didn't tweet so much. I wish he wasn't so verbally mean and crude. But, gosh darn it, he's authentic and I just can't quit him." The thing is, unless you are part of the 27%, you simply get exhausted. This shit ain't OK.

Anyway, we probably are going to war with Iran to distract from the evidence in the Epstein files that Trump may have killed someone.

One Year In

 It's been a year. We are going to be subjected to a bevy of Cleetus Safaris as the news orgs all send reporters to places that voted for Trump and ask Trump voters if they still like Trump. I've already seen one before I brushed my teeth. 

Here's the thing. First, few people who voted for Trump and feel abandoned by him are going to go on camera and say, "Whelp, I fucked up." The people on camera are hardcore partisans. The other group are people who voted for Trump, are upset but simply aren't going to talk about it. Anyone eager to go on camera and admit they were wrong about Trump is not going to admit that they were wrong on camera.

There was one Trump voter - a farmer - who was dismayed by the collapse in prices. He "doesn't know who dropped the ball in Washington." Yeah, it was Trump. It was the tariffs. This is rudimentary stuff. I don't know if that guy is reachable. I would guess things would have to get much worse before he would realize that it is, in fact, Trump who has screwed him and most other farmers in pursuit of his 19th century economics. There was one woman who said she thought Trump was doing great because of her 401K. Again, things would have to get a lot worse for her to switch.

Except she won't switch. OK? The best you can hope for is demoralizing these rural, white, hardcore Republicans so that they sit out the 2026 election. Having invested their emotions and reputations in him, they cannot easily abandon him publicly without triggering massive cognitive dissonance. They can, however, stay home. 

Trump's job approval is terrible, but he hasn't yet crossed enough lines with enough voters to get to 27%, which is the Crazification Factor that no Republican can fall below. Even the worst possible revelations from the Epstein Files would only take him to 27% or thereabouts.

We are a quarter of the way through a terrible time in the moral history of our country. I'm not sure why interviewing the people who enabled that makes for good journalism.

Catch And Kill

 Donald Trump was an ardent practitioner of "catch and kill" through his friend at the National Enquirer. Damaging stories would be bought by the Enquirer, the sources would sign NDAs and then the Enquirer would toss them in a vault. 

Given the advances in autocracy that Trump and the GOP have made recently, we should not be surprised that unqualified hack, Bari Weiss, is now playing this game at CBS News, including 60 Minutes. 

There are two things to note here.

The first is that the story is obviously going to leak out, and it will be more popular, precisely because it was censored. However, unless it comes out on 60 Minutes proper, it's not going to reach your Great Aunt who gets her news from the TeeVee.

The second is that we REALLY have a corporate news problem in this country. I suppose it's always been a problem, but the naked attempt to cow corporate leaders via government action means that news rooms will become more and more risk-averse. 

Not great.

Monopoly Money

 There are two ways to look at the proposed merger of Netflix and Warner merger. One is to look at purely as a business exercise of the relative merits of media consolidation, as Yglesias does. When you do that, it becomes purely an issue of market share and relative competition. Interestingly, it the the economist Paul Krugman who looks at the political angle, which is the increased consolidation of news sources under the control of tech broligarchs. 

There is, I suppose, some utility in allowing Netflix to take over Warner and HBO, in that you are reducing the number of streaming services that you can reasonably sign up for. This landscape is changing so fast, that I can't keep track. We moved to YouTubeTV which also gives us access to HBOMax, but I think we might also have a separate account with HBOMax. Then there is however many accounts we have with Disney/Hulu/ESPN...it's a mess.

The problem is that Warner owns CNN. Now, CNN ain't what it used to be and it used be pretty flawed. It's greatest utility is for breaking news, yet most breaking news is wrong. We are seeing this in real time with the fluid situation with both the Brown shooting and the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner. CNN isn't expanding our understanding of the news, merely the access to it. 

If a broligarch gets his hands on that, it's objectively bad for the country. In fact, as Krugman notes, we can look at Jeff Bezos' takeover of the Washington Post as a model for all that can go wrong here. Bezos came in as a White Knight to save the ailing paper and restore it as a voice of independent reporting. Trump comes along, puts the squeeze on him and he folds like a lawn chair. Really, in terms of true reporting, the only real independent outlets among papers are the New York Times and, seemingly, the Wall Street Journal (yes, their editorial page is terrible). 

We have seen the impact of letting broligarchs take over the media, too, with the CBS disaster. What was once the premier news network - Murrow, Cronkite, 60 Minutes - is now hosting a second rate right wing podcast of Bari Weiss tongue-bathing Erika Kirk.

Jefferson once said he would prefer a country with newspaper but no government to a country with government but no newspapers. Jefferson could be a bit of an idiot. Still, a free press is essential to a free government, and the media consolidation under the control of tech lords is as big a long term problem for liberal democracy as the lawless Supreme Court.

No Wars But The Culture War

 Elliott Morris (behind a paywall) talks about a new academic paper that looks at how cable news broke out brains and made us - particularly on the Right - obsessive culture warriors. The interesting link is that we all know how social media algorithms prey on our outrage. Stories that anger you engage you more than stories that inform you. It is not at all surprising to me, because I grew of age in the era of Rush Limbaugh and the emergence of Fox News.

There were no algorithms back then feeding us outrage inducing clickbait. There were just radio and TV ratings that showed what played and what didn't. Limbaugh's culture war got listeners; NPR did not. 

Cable news, as such, really begins with Ted Turner's - at the time - fantastical idea that we somehow needed 24 hour access to the news. Before that, we waited for the 6 or 11 o'clock news and then waited again for the morning paper. ESPN was crazy, because you could find out if your team won without waiting for the morning sports page. 

Early CNN coverage was pretty dry. It felt a lot like the BBC World Service does today. The pivot was during the 1991 Gulf War, with Bernard Shaw and Wolf Blitzer describing the bombs falling on Baghdad from their hotel window. The sensational always sells better than information. Over time, dramatic stories were not only prioritized, but sought out. One staple of cable news is Missing White Girl, because it stokes a certain amount of interest and outrage in a population that devours true crime stories. 

Culture war issues are natural hot button topics. Arguments about trans girls in sports are engaging people in ways that are disproportionate to their actual impact on society. What I find interesting and disturbing is not just the prevalence of these stories, but the way they short circuit whatever reason and logic people possess. I've written before about how the Madisonian theory of government is dependent on people being rational about their interests - at least in theory. 

We have abandoned reason for outrage, and I'd like to blame it on Rupert Murdoch, but I fear it's simply how we are wired and how we are being catered to, not how we are being led astray. 

The Other Information Economy

 The superpower of Trumpism is the shameless lying. The weakness that they use is the press's inability to ask a meaningful follow-up question. For Trump, you'd have to have someone in your ear saying something like, "Mister President, you just said that 46% of Somalia-Americans are child rapists, when in fact there were only three Somali-Americans arrested for statutory rape over the past four years."

When it comes to the Clown Caucus, the big dodge is "I haven't seen/heard that" when asked about the latest Trump outrage. Mike Johnson apparently lives in a hermetically sealed chamber 23 hours a day, only venturing forth to say how hard he's been working and that he can't possibly be expected to know what the President of the United States and leader of his party has said or done.

If you have some bobble throated slapdick like Tom Cotton on your show, and you ask him about killing people without due process, and he says he knows nothing about that, then show him the clips of Hegseth bragging about it. 

The utility of bothsides never was good journalism, and I understand that it can inoculate you against some of the more vengeful actions from Trump's DOJ and Commerce department, but there's no reason to allow lies and evasions to keep happening.

Elite Impunity

 Rational people have spent year now trying to understand how a bozo who inherited a fortune and turned it into a smaller fortune could somehow become the avatar of working class and evangelical grievance politics. Clearly, in many ways it's a case of motivated reasoning. People told them their vote in 2016 was stupid and they've spent almost a decade now doubling down on that decision. 

But why did they make that initial decision?

I keep coming back to Trump's empty boast of "I alone can fix it." That seemed to resonate, especially with those who saw the system as hopelessly skewed against them. Trump was a rich insider who promised to prosecute their crusade of butthurt against "them". 

In the Trump Cinematic Universe, Trump's obvious corruption meant that he was a system insider who could take it all down for them. A decade later, it's becoming clear to them that he was never going to do that. 

Many of these grievances are not anything Democrats can leverage to their electoral advantage. The idea that elites get away with everything is one that you could attack. This whole idea is at the heart of the Epstein Files controversy. Is Larry Summers a "Democrat"? OK, whatever, he's also an asshole, so screw him. Was RFK a branch of the Kennedy clan? Yes, but the extent that benefitted from this - especially the latest soap opera with Olivia Nuzzi - is just another example of elites running interference for each other.

The idea that "There is a club and you ain't a member" is pretty powerful. I think we all have experience in our lives of people who were promoted above their talents because they were just part of the group that gets promoted above their talents. There are a lot of reasons for Democrats to embrace younger politicians, but "not being in the club" is a pretty obvious one. 

This, of course, meshes with the oligarchic takeover of our government and the rampant corruption of billionaires in and out of the Trump Administration. Anyone want to bet that Steve Witkoff personally will profit from selling Ukraine down the river?

Time to revive the idea of left wing populism without engaging in crank conspiracy theories. The fact are bad enough as it is.

Ignorance Is Amiss

 G. Elliot Morris writes about how people in polls tend to move towards Democrats once voters are informed about Republican policies. This is a variation of push polling, but in push polling, you often get inflammatory priming statements. "If you knew that Kamala Harris personally wants to perform gender reassignment surgery to third graders, would you be more or less likely to vote against her?"

With Morris' survey, he could say something factual about tariffs or ICE or bailing out Argentina, and then ask for respondents' opinion and they move left. This raises the question: Why don't they know this shit already?

There are a legion of infuriating things about the 2024 election, but the refusal of the media to cover and the Democrats to stop talking about Project 2025 is pretty high up there. The public learned about Project 2025 and largely couldn't believe that it was real, so they actively discounted it when making their voting choice. Could that have swung the election? Morris' work seems to suggest that if more people had an accurate understanding of what Trump was promising to do, that might have moved the electorate 2-3 points toward Harris. That would have moved Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin into Harris' column.

Krugman has been trying to figure out why people are so pissed about the economy over the past two years, when the US did about as good a job as possible getting out of Covid. Inflation as a discrete economic event ended in late 2022 or early 2023. However, because prices remained high and because people had little lived experience with inflation of this sort - you'd have to go back to the '70s to find anything similar - they tended to be angry that prices didn't snap back into place. Trump benefitted from a honeymoon period on the economy, but inflation isn't THAT bad right now and he's getting hammered on the economy.

IQ is not a terribly good measure of intelligence, but it does measure "something." The fact that IQ in general increased is a result of increased wealth as a society. The fact that it's reversing and declining is fodder for a thousand hyperventilating think pieces. For the health of our civic democracy, though, it could be a catastrophe.