The Smooth Brained American Voter

 Yglesias has one of his circle-jerk mailbags, where a bunch of chin stroking "pragmatic centrists" congratulate each other on their rigorous bothsidesing of politics. In particular, he nails Obama to the cross for moving left on things like the Keystone pipeline, immigration and campus sexual assault (how does one move "left" on campus sexual assault?), and that this is what cost Hillary Clinton election against Trump in 2016. 

First of all, winning three consecutive terms is hard. Second, Clinton won significantly more votes than Trump. Third, I remain convinced that in these highly polarized, tightly contested time, sexism is an underrated explanatory factor in Trump's two victories.

However, Elliott Morris may have the definitive answer. His analysis is about 2024, but I would be shocked if it didn't apply to 2016. What's more, I don't think it's incompatible with the latent sexism factor. The reason is that a massive swath of the American electorate is profoundly ignorant. Ignorant in terms of things like "Which party currently controls Congress?" When you can't distinguish between which party controls the Senate (or likely what the Senate even does), then you are left with vibe-based shorthand that reduce people to visual signals and broad feelings about the status quo. 

Yes, in October ten years ago, you had the media conflate the Access Hollywood tape with the endless stories about Clinton's email practices, making it seem like they were fundamentally the same story. Bothsides are corrupt! These broad brush strokes are enough to let people avoid the hard work of actually learning about how the political system works and what the parties actually stand for. It's far easier to notice that suddenly the barista has changed their gender and you find that weird and upsetting, so you vote for a rapist.

If you were to ask the median voter what the impact of tariffs are, they would be unable to provide a coherent answer, though they can see that prices have gone up and so they will vote for the other party. That might be enough to save democracy in the short run, but in the long run, we will always have to worry that some new Trump will come along and leverage the profound ignorance of the electorate to launch another attack on competent and just government.

You Take The Meeting

 The Online Mob was out for Hakeem Jeffries yesterday, when a story came out that he met with Jared Kushner. Jeffries statement was:

In a statement, Mr. Jeffries did not acknowledge the meeting, but suggested that the only way Democrats would cut deals with the administration would be if Republicans were willing to come their way on cost-of-living issues, his party’s top priority.

“Throughout this Congress, Republicans have adopted a my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing that has failed the American people,” he said.

He added: “In every conversation that we have with the Trump administration, we will continue to make it explicitly clear that the affordability crisis is not a hoax, and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable. We are fighting for an affordable America. The question is whether Republicans will join us.”

The anger was that Jeffries met with Kushner at all, because...well, I was never really given a compelling reason why. There was one weird argument that Kushner wasn't really part of the administration, which is a prima facie absurdity. Kushner is Trump's Son in Law, married to the only kid he really cares about. Kushner runs around as a shadow Secretary of State. He may not have an official government title, but as someone noted, DOGE wasn't "real" either and they've still killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Maybe it was just meeting with Kushner, because Jeffries should be "fighting" more. So, I posted the picture of Trump meeting with Mayor Mamdani - not to dunk on Mamdani, but because you take the meeting.

This was met with real anger and name calling from accounts that I've had positive interactions with previously. I was called a "dumbfuck" and the like, because I really don't think this is a big deal. 

What's more, as I thought about for more than one hot second, this is a really bad story...for Jared Kushner. This is a member of Trump's inner circle looking for the lifeboats. Kushner is a little weasel, but he isn't a complete moron, and understands that Jeffries will be the next Speaker. He wasn't meeting with Mike Johnson to stop it; he's trying to get ahead of the coming Blue Wave.

There has been a lot of doomer-casting about the coming midterms. "Trump will cancel the elections." 
"Johnson won't certify the election." That sort of stuff. And after January 6th, nothing should be considered off the table. Still, the Republicans in the room seem to accept that Jeffries will be the next Speaker. That's pretty remarkable.

The seething anger against Trump, though, was transmogrified online to be directed at Jeffries. 

The anger is the problem. I hate Donald Trump more than I've hated anything in my life. However, if I were being asked what to DO about Donald Trump, I would take my anger and my hatred and put it in a box. You cannot make your best decisions when you are enraged. You cannot strategize if all you feel is hate. You have to separate the two.

Of course, the algorithm rewards anger, it rewards hate, it rewards impulse. The Very Online people are being mad just to be mad, because that is what the internet is for. 

Politicians meet with people they disagree with or don't like all the time. Mamdani doesn't agree with Trump, but he met with him. People tried to be upset that it was a meeting two months before the midterms, but again, that just shows that Trump's inner circle knows they are about to take a beating. 

I can take my anger and hatred out of that box without losing the ability to put it back in when needed. Maybe that's what allows me not to be mad at Jeffries, since Jeffries isn't the enemy. Unless enemies is what keeps your blood flowing, in which case, assemble the circular firing squad. 

UPDATE: At the end of this piece on the Canadian trade war, Josh Marshall notes the same dynamic when discussing the issue with Canadians. It's simply impossible to have a reasoned discussion with an enraged person.

The Post-Reality Party

 A lot of pondering has gone on about whether Trump is a symptom or a cause of the decline of the GOP into a cult of idiocy. We know Trump is - by the standards of the Oval Office - a very stupid man. Josh Marshall relates how Trump made his money not through skill but through legal bullying. Trump is also incredibly unversed in the basic contours of liberal democracy as a concept. So, yeah, Trump is dumb; Trump is the center of a cult of personality; that cult of personality is super dumb. 

However, this cult of unreason does very much precede Trump. Reagan wasn't nearly as stupid, but he was also not some genius. That largely goes for both Bushes. They were...fine...in terms of intelligence compared to the average, but they also had long experience in government - unlike Trump. They were, in essence, trained in civic government. Trump is not, which is why he's an authoritarian goon.

The cult of unreason, though, can be seen in Reagan and Dubya, as Krugman points out with regards to budget math. Reagan bent a little to the reality that cutting taxes would not create so much growth as to pay for themselves. Bush 41 was even more responsible in that regards. Bush 43, however, was the same sort of spender that Trump has been. If a few hundred votes in South Florida had been counted differently in 2000, the fiscal situation in the US would be sterling. Gore would not have had a Democratic Congress, so spending would have remained low. There's a 50-50 chance that the Gore national security team stops 9/11, the way they did the Millennium bomb plot. Even so, they likely would not invade Iraq with that catastrophe hopefully avoided.

Maybe Obama and Obamacare doesn't happen in that world. Or maybe healthcare becomes such an issue it gets addressed without the collapse of support for Bush 43 from 2005-2008. 

The fiscal situation of the United States would be immeasurably better, and that really can't be debated.

A bunch of dumb ass voters, though, would continue to insist that Republicans are better for the economy, because...ugh.

Vengeance

 The Incumbency Problem has been stalking global politics since Covid, but really since 2008. The financial crisis brutalized a lot of people, but not the actors most responsible for it happening. As Krugman notes (indirectly), Democrats have let people off the hook far too often when taking power. In Obama's case, Krugman faults him for not prosecuting those who lied us into Iraq, but the stronger argument was in failing to prosecute Wall Street. 

The recovery from 2008 was solid, but tilted initially far more towards Wall Street than Main Street. Biden was not going to get caught in that, and his recovery plan from 2021 was designed to help the average person, as well as forestall an economic contraction. Even more than just "helping", it really does seem like what the average person wants is vengeance. 

Sure, the Covid checks were nice, but they want to blame someone for being afraid, for disrupting their lives. That's why we have these stupid attacks on Fauci. The problem is that there really isn't someone to "blame" for Covid. I would argue that Trump's feckless, moronic leadership made things worse, and the high death rate in the US would seem to back that up. But the virus itself can't be held accountable. It's a virus. So instead, we have the Lab Leak deadenders, the Fauci Jihadists, the Antivaxxer Brigade. None of it really makes sense looking at the evidence, but it does make sense if you understand that people want to blame other people, not the impersonal universe.

This is why incumbent parties lost power all over the world since Covid. People need to blame someone, so they blamed those in charge. Sadly for Democrats, people don't seem to remember who was in charge in 2020. If Covid 19 had been Covid 18, I think Democrats win in 2024. 

All of this brings us back to Trump and his brazen lawlessness. Elliot Morris notes (paywall) that Trump is obviously hated by Democrats, but increasingly hated by Independents, too. What's more, his own supporters are getting more and more disillusioned by him. All of this points to another Blue Wave election - even with the gerrymandering. 

If Democrats do win both Houses, they cannot try and "govern" in the way they typically do when there is divided government. They have to go medieval on Trump's diapered ass. The reason why insurgent candidates are cleaning up in primary elections is not a deep and abiding love for "socialism" whatever that might mean to voters. It's a deeper feeling that Democrats have spend far too much time trying to repair the damage Republican policies have wrought and not enough time putting heads on spikes. Why trust that cadre to do anything different this time?

Even More Idiocracy

 When Trump was inexplicably returned to the White House by a feckless American electorate, I remember a conversation with a colleague about what might be the worst outcomes of Trump 2.0. He and I both agreed that losing the Federal Reserve's independence was high on the list of bad outcomes. 

I'm reading Aaron Ross Sorkin's 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History - And How It Shattered a Nation. I'm only about a quarter way through it, and I've already learned a lot, including how the Fed tried to rein in the speculative bubble on Wall Street in March of that year. That was news to me. Wall Street kicked back against that effort. I am anticipating that this was a major fuel to the conflagration that erupted in October.

When Jerome Powell retired and was replaced with Kevin Warsh, that was a really troubling development. He's a partisan hack rather than a dispassionate economist. As Krugman notes, Warsh made a statement on Wednesday about the decision to leave rates where they are and that tanked the bond market. Some of that was that there were three dissenters - and that's unusual. Some of it was that Warsh was placed on the Fed to give Trump what he wants, and Trump wants low interest rates. We are experiencing inflation from Trump's misguided tariffs and mishandled war, so we need to get ahead of inflation - the way we did in 2021. In that instance, the Federal Reserve was able to quickly address the Covid inflation and quell that fire without shoving us into a full blown recession.

Now, we have Warsh who is part of the Legion of Dumb surrounding Trump and his statements reinforced the perception that he is not interested in shepherding the economy through an inflationary period, but rather he just wants to assuage the Toddler in Chief with the binkie of low interest rates.

Can we come back to our old role in the world once Trump is gone? Kind of. It will be different, as Europe and the rest of the democratic world has seen that we can no longer be completely trusted. Still, we are a critically important country, and if we return to sanity, that will be welcomed in most corners of the world. 

If Trump really can corrupt the Federal Reserve, though, we might be headed for another economic catastrophe, which will take decades to crawl out from under. 

A Unified Theory Of Trump

 Tim Kreider wrote this exceptional piece on Donald Trump. I really, really recommend reading it, because it captures the whole media failure of the past decade. 

He starts by talking about the movie Psycho that starts as a crime thriller, and everyone - especially the investigator Arbogast - thinks they are in a crime story. In fact, they are in a horror/monster movie, and that tension is what makes Psycho one of the greatest films of all time.

Anyway.

Kreider's point is that journalists think that they are covering a politician, when in fact, they are covering an idiotic monster. This is the crux of it:

If you’re writing an op-ed or political analysis, or appearing as a guest on a podcast or discussion panel, you feel a professional obligation to try to come up with a novel insight, a “hot take”—ideally, something smarter than whatever all the other smart writers and speakers are saying that day. Something other than the obvious. The problem is, the object of so much of that labored ideation, Donald Trump, is obvious. He is not a complex figure of Nixonian contradictions. There are no depths to plumb; his biographers are going to have to pad out their books with a lot of background information and photo sections. He does not engage in subtle Machiavellian maneuvering; the only moves he knows are the playground rudiments: brag. Deny. Bully. Bribe. There’s nothing there for a smart person to figure out; they’re writing think pieces about a guy who doesn’t. His operating principles, the only rules you need to remember to understand absolutely everything he does, are simple:

1) He is a very stupid person who has never read or learned or ever been really interested in anything that didn't directly benefit him and (not unrelated)

2) He genuinely doesn't give a shit about anything other than himself - not his voters or his party or his allies in Congress or his "friends"/business associates or his own family. I have no doubt he would sell his daughter to a Saudi prince if he could negotiate a good price.

He also does not have what you would call a hidden agenda. His goals are as crude and basic as a flatworm's. He wants:

A) to make as much money as possible any way he can
B) to have everyone pay attention to him all the time
And - increasingly a priority the past few years -
C) to stay out of prison

(His conspicuous cognitive decline complicates all of the above, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental principles at work.)

The fallacy’s derivation notwithstanding, I’m not arguing that Donald Trump is psychotic; he’s not that interesting. He has the conscience of a toddler and the ethics of a tick but he isn’t mentally ill. He’s just a soft, spoiled, weak, mean rich kid who no one’s ever said no to and no one’s ever loved. He inhabits a sterile inner landscape of panicky, fragile vanity and unappeasable, suppurating resentment.

Josh Marshall once talked about Trump's Razor. The idea was based on Occam's Razor that - all evidence being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. With Trump's Razor, the stupidest and most venal explanation is usually the accurate one. 

"Why doesn't Trump try and address Democratic attacks on affordability?" 
Because he's a big dumb donkey.

"Why does he keep screwing up the situation with Iran?"
Because he's a big dumb donkey.

"Why does he harp on his vanity projects in DC as opposed to kitchen table issues?"
Big. Dumb. Donkey.

Weider continues (the format seems to work here):

“Sanewashing” is what critics call the journalistic tendency to try to describe and explain Trump in the language of conventional politics, presuming that it’s a media conspiracy to normalize his pathology and gaslight us all into thinking we’re overreacting. There may be some truth to this, but I think the explanation is more complicated; people who have spent their careers covering politics simply don’t have a vocabulary for what’s happening now; they’re like noir detectives in a slasher film. There’s no real precedent for someone who wields more power than any other individual in human history simply having no idea what he’s doing, or behaving with such naked, shameless self-interest. They can’t not report on what the President said or did that day; but it’s too terrifying, unimaginable, to acknowledge that the guy with access to the nuclear codes knows much less about geopolitics than your fourth-grader, or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is way lower on his to-do list than building that bigass arch. Two days ago, after Trump dismissed the Iranian leadership, whom he’d earlier called “smart, strong people” as “scum,” I got to listen to a White House correspondent halfheartedly float the notion that the abrupt contradiction might’ve been a bargaining tactic, struggling to avoid the conclusion that nothing the President of the United States says really means anything much at all.

If we ever have a clear understanding of this era, we have to grapple with the fact that Trump is a reasonably stupid person who has one skill - selling "Donald Trump" - and we have tens of millions of Americans who are also dumb enough to believe in what he's selling. That latter point is not one Weider makes, but I think is important. If you're a political junkie, how do you reconcile your years of study and passion with the realization that millions of your fellow countrymen - this bedrock of democracy - are fucking just as stupid as Trump is?

Read the whole thing.

A Frictionless World Is A Solipsitic World

MIT did a study last year on the use of AI. Unsurprisingly, they found that students who used AI a lot demonstrated very little growth as students, including the use of EEG imaging to determine brain activity. Students who used Google saw some growth, and students who used neither saw the most. Even more striking, the AI using students were helpless when asked to write without AI.

David Brooks expands on this, writing about how people who enjoy mental struggle will really benefit from AI, because they enjoy the process of thinking. For this group, AI becomes another tool, whereas for people who really hate strenuous thinking, AI will degrade their thinking more. Even his middle group, who he calls the Reluctant Optimizers, will eventually be dumbed down by AI. The example of this can be seen with previous technologies. Does anyone really remember phone numbers anymore? Can you find yourself somewhere without GPS? 

This, I believe, feeds into my argument from a few days ago. For the past 30 years, tech companies have worked assiduously to remove "friction" from technology use. If you can think back to the early days of personal computing, a handful of people used computers for things like coding or spreadsheets. Most of us used it for word processing. Then the internet comes along, and your computer is now a mailbox and crude search engine. Here come Google and they come to dominate searches. As computing power speeds up, streaming video emerges, beginning with the microfilms of Vine. 

We've now reached a saturation point where any friction feels like a tragedy. I spent the last few weeks with a Smart TV that was several years old. This effectively makes it a dumb TV, and we spent minutes - WHOLE MINUTES - rebooting, reloading and otherwise dealing with a glitchy streaming system. It was frustrating. What it was NOT was driving to a video store to see what they had in stock. We watched what we wanted, when we wanted (minus a few minutes where we had to de-glitch the TV).

I would argue that this psychological space is proving to be somewhat incompatible with liberal democracy. 

The very structures of the Constitution are designed to be frustrating to power. Among the many outrages that Trump has visited upon the country is his wholesale contempt for the basic structure of the Constitution and the need to treat the other branches as co-equal partners in governing. The President absolutely should not govern by decree; that is deeply contemptuous of the American governing system. It was designed to be frustrating specifically to frustrate imperial aspirants. 

Trump's fundamental pitch to his non-cultists is that he can "run America like a business" (despite his manifest incompetence at running his own businesses). The import of Project 2025 was the force change on a system that created endless friction in the path of change.

What I see happening, though, with young "activists" is that they seem completely incapable of understanding that you simply don't get "what you want" from our system of government. You can - occasionally - get what you need, but the idea that your personal preferences will translate into policy is not just the naivete of youth, it is the defining gestalt of the internet age.

While many people have warned of AI's impact on the job market and the environment, I share Brooks'  and Krugman's concerns about what AI will do to our minds and by extension our culture.

This weekend, Scott Weiner was heckled at a trans event for not being sufficiently deferential to the desires of the Palestinian "lobby". Weiner has been a staunch ally of the LGBTQ communities, yet he was physically confronted and screamed at by people that more than one online commentator described as "mentally deranged." 

Maybe.

Or maybe we've become culturally deranged in our solipsism. We see the world as a toddler does, as lacking purpose and agency beyond the insatiable appetites of a toddler. I want what I want NOW. I will not build a coalition; I will not settle for half measures; I will not bend to time or compromise.

I want my utopia delivered to my door by Tuesday noon. 

Civic Education

 In his mailbag, Yglesias talks about "stealth democracy."

Stealth democracy is a theory that people have this idea that all that is required to solve a problem is for people of goodwill to sit down and hash out their disagreements like colleagues do. They see "corruption" as any action by a government that does not really benefit them. Sure, they can see things like Trump's desecration of the White House and DC in general as being "corrupt" for THAT reason, when the real reason is that he is accruing money to himself and his family and acting outside the cover of law. 

This misconception about "corruption" is really interesting. 

The elections in NYC are the flavor of the minute, and the factionalism expressed there is not an advantage for the Democratic Party in November. Adults - or at least people who really understand our politics and history - understand that you need a Big Tent to win elections, and what resonates in the congressional district around Columbia University does not resonate 25 miles to the north. Still, elements of the Left - and I do not really include Mamdani here - think that if a Democrat representing suburban Yonkers has a difference of opinion on, say, Israel, that isn't a difference of opinion. It's "corruption." They are corrupted by AIPAC.

(I need to take a moment and express my exasperation with the primacy of the Israeli-Palestine issue in Leftist politics at the moment. I fully support the idea that Israel has and continues to commit war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank; I do not think it is genocide, but I understand the arguments that it is. I fully support conditioning American military aid to Israel on the ousting of Netanyahu from power and Israel re-committing to a two-state solution. What I do NOT agree with, is that this is the most important issue facing this country. It is not in the top-10. Ultimately, much of the Israel-Palestine discourse feels performative, and that's just exhausting and not a path to winning control of Congress this fall. <end rant>"

Back to the issue at hand. So much of our politics - from MAGA to the DSA - seems fixated on a version of politics that is simply false. Yes, there is corruption, and Trump is so far and away our most corrupt president, that second place isn't even in the same league. You'd have to run through about 20 Trump scandals before landing on a previous scandal of similar depth. Most of those did not involve the direct participation of the president himself. Only Watergate rises to that level, maybe Iran-Contra. 

So, Trump is legit corrupt. When members of Congress disagree with each other, THAT IS NOT CORRUPTION. 

We've reached this perilous moment, because our parties are more ideological than perhaps they have ever been, and Trump adds breathless stupidity to the mix. The left of the Republican Party does not overlap with the right of the Democratic Party in any meaningful way. When they actually DO accomplish something, like Chris Murphy and James Lankford coming together to fix the immigration system, it gets blown up by Trump. The same thing could be happening with the bipartisan housing bill, but I think that has the votes to override Trump's veto. 

You've had this sort of venomous partisan discord since the '90s, but at least some of it was performative. That's the old "Senate Club" idea, where they yell at each other on CNN and then go have dinner together. Trump, because he has no saving graces or subtlety of thought, has turned that into a politics of grievance that has truly broken Congress and perhaps American democracy. Election denialism is really an offshoot of this. Democrats cannot legitimately win an election is not a position Newt Gingrich or Tom Delay would have entertained.

All of this is to say, we have to find a way out of this moment. 

People do not seem to understand the basics of how democratic governance and politics actually work. Hey, sometimes you lose an election! That's not corruption! Sometimes a good bill dies for bad reasons. That's not corruption! Sometimes there really aren't easy solutions to problems! That's not corruption! 

I've argued that we live in a consumer culture where we really don't have to compromise. You never have to go to Blockbuster only to find out the movie you wanted is checked out and then you have to compromise on whether to watch the rom-com or the action-buddy movie. You just click and stream. 

We've made much of our society frictionless and that simply isn't how politics works. Our whole system is based on friction! That's the point of the separation of powers. 

Instead, both the median voter AND the voters at the extremes simply decry the whole thing as "corrupt" because they can't get what they want all the time. 

That allows a demagogic troll to eviscerate our national institutions, just in time for the 250th anniversary of republican self-government. 

UPDATE: Slightly different take on the same issue of "corruption" from Martin Longman.

UPDATE II: Yet another take on the rise of "dirtbagism."

Talarico

 I generally find Yglesias' takes on politics to be blinkered. He really does seem to think that swing voters care about policy. I think evidence has demonstrated over time that that really isn't true. Swing voters are vibe voters, and even if those vibes are downstream from policy, they really aren't digging into those policy specifics. Trump ran on "bringing prices down on Day One" and tariffs. That's incoherent, but didn't matter.

I do think, though, that Yglesias is right in this column about Talarico. In many ways, the Texas situation is the inverse of the Maine race. In Maine, you have a Democratic challenger who has more red flags than a May Day parade, whereas Talarico just gives off endlessly sincere and thoughtful energy. Meanwhile, Ken Paxton would immediately become the worst Senator in America if elected. He's endlessly corrupt and malevolent. 

The hope is that about 1,400,000 Republicans voted in the runoff and Paxton got 886,000 votes. In 2024, Ted Cruz got almost 6 million votes in the general election, whereas Colin Allred got a hair over 5 million. Can Talarico draw enough independents who voted for Cruz to get closer to 5,500,000? And will Paxton lose - either because they are voting for Talarico or not voting at all - enough votes to drop below that 5.5 million number? 

Yglesias notes that Talarico is taking somewhat heterodox positions on things like oil and gas that will play well in Texas, but might upset Democrats in California. While there remains a certain segment of the censorious Left that might challenge Talarico on this - including perhaps bitter-enders from Crockett's campaign - I do think most Democrats understand that Talarico can't take the same positions that a candidate running in Oregon might.

Where this gets interesting is that Platner is taking roughly all the right positions, and for the moment he seems to be winning, even with massive amounts of personal baggage. Paxton is not, I think, an electoral overperformer the way Susan Collins is, but then again Texas is not Maine. Platner is VERY unpopular with online Democrats, precisely because his baggage is very real and very troubling about the sort of person he truly is. He does not have a long track record of public service to evaluate him on, so you have to look at character and personality. The personality seems suited to the moment, but the character looks toxic as hell.

Would the Censorious Left be better off simply ignoring Platner's baggage in the way that they seem to be ignoring Talarico's policy stances? Technically, Platner is not the nominee yet, so they can make the case for Mills to jump back on and there is a third candidate on the ballot. I see people vehemently hating on Platner, largely because they hate the people - the Pod Bros and the Bernie Bros - who foisted him on us. 

Personally, where I draw the brightest line is simply if the person is a Republican or not. Talarico can carve out space that fits Texas, even if it doesn't gibe with the overall Democratic policy suite. Platner can prove that he's growing into the role, as long as he gets rid of Susan Collins. 

Democrats have to "hold serve" everywhere - Michigan looks dodgy - and then pick up enough seats to not only take the majority, but neutralize Fetterman. That means North Carolina, Maine, Texas, Ohio and maybe some surprises like Iowa, South Carolina, Montana or Nebraska. 

That means swallowing candidates that don't fit your personal preferences, and you have to be OK with that.

Another Failure

 In some ways, Donald Trump represents what happens if Republicans actually governed on what they say they want to do. "I believe in American manufacturing" becomes ruinous tariffs. "I believe Iran is an outlaw nation" becomes the current fiasco in the Gulf. "I oppose abortion" becomes Dobbs. "I believe in a color blind America" becomes naked white supremacy.

Nowhere is this truer than in Trump most orthodox Republican policy: massive tax cuts for the rich. Reagan famously (or maybe not) raised taxes when the Laffer Curve proved to be laughable. Bush 41 raised taxes in the face of a significant debt crisis. Clinton balanced the budget largely via increasing taxes, and then Bush 43 blew that all to hell.

Trump's tax cuts and overall chaotic stewardship on economic issues is creating a massive debt problem. Roughly half of the entire $39,000,000,000,000 debt was accrued under Donald Trump, a man whose business practice consisted largely of running up debts, then declaring bankruptcy and walked away from the wreckage.

Sadly, we know exactly what is required to solve this issue, and no one is interested in doing the hard work of restraining spending and raising taxes. "Tax the rich" is a nice bumper sticker and we absolutely need to tax capital gains more aggressively. However, you cannot do the things liberals and progressives want to do simply by taxing the rich more aggressively. One reason is that skyrocketing debt crowds out private borrowing and makes interest on the public debt more burdensome. 

Clinton's economy was really good. I know there's a whole whining culture about how nothing is affordable, because they can't DoorDash 7 nights a week. The permanent unhappiness about the economy is both real and also imagined. In a lot of ways, things are pretty good, especially compared to 2008 or 2020. It does FEEL worse, and that's before Trumpflation really digs into our wallets. 

The spiraling debt will make everything - and I mean - everything more expensive, by driving up borrowing costs for everyone. Economic stagnation caused by trade wars and deportations means that we won't be able to grow out of our debt situation very easily, but that's going to be a requirement of the next administration.

I'm sure that the American people are super duper eager to sacrifice to make that happen.

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.

Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

 Virginia voters narrowly passed the new gerrymandered maps that benefit Democrats. Objectively speaking, gerrymandering is bad for democratic governance. It should not be allowed.

However, Republicans have made a consistent practice of not only gerrymandering their states, but doing some in between the normal redistricting. Texas has done it twice. Nevertheless, the whining and caterwauling from Republicans is deafening. "How dare those dastardly Democrats do the same thing we've been doing?!" As someone noted, Trump has perfected the art of starting wars without considering the fact that your opponent has moves to make as well. Trump's narcissism prevents him from seeing the other side of a conflict as having equal agency.

Democrats should introduce legislation to ban the practice. Hell, make it a constitutional amendment just to make sure. They should keep introducing it and making Republicans vote against it until it passes. American democracy would be better off without gerrymandering, but it might not exist if Democrats don't fight fire with fire in the short run.

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.

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.  

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.