Protecting Myself

 As we once more enter the chaotic circus of Trumpistan, I'm taking a much more protective stance towards politics. Surviving the next four years requires public and private safeguards against total collapse.

I'm heterosexual White guy of some means, so I'm not worried about being deported or having my reproductive rights stripped away. When these things happen, I will have to temper my outrage to some degree, or I simply won't survive the coming storm. My friends who are outraged at the shit Matt Gaetz says and does are going to struggle to maintain that anger without burning out. This is about outlasting Trump.

In the private sphere, I'm trying to figure out how to navigate a country where Trump's Treasury Secretary has to bend the knee again and again to policy madness. Should I prepare my retirement portfolio for the inflation of tariffs or the recessionary impact of deportations and the slow down in trade? I'd like to retire - though my profession would allow me to work past 65 - and the timing of Trump 2.0 is really not ideal. 

So, Democrats, when you come begging for my money, just understand why I can't open my wallet except a wee bit. 

Authoritarianism IS Corruption

 I started teaching Nigeria in my Comp Gov course, and the sad history of that country - especially from 1965-1999 is a history of military regimes trying and failing to reintroduce democracy before a new set of generals overthrew everything. Nigeria does have democracy now, but it's not a great one and the reason is oil.

The presence of oil would seem to be a gift to one of the poorer countries in the world, but that oil money rarely makes it out of the government into the pockets of the people. Instead, controlling the government means controlling massive amounts of oil wealth, so democracy is rather fragile and corruption rules the day.

We tend to think of authoritarianism as one thing and corruption as another, because we can have corruption in democracy, too. This misses that the important point of most authoritarian regimes is the corruption. The reason we have elections is to self-correct. The reasons we bind our officials with rules and laws is to permit us to abate the corruption that comes with power.

You obviously see where I'm going with this. 

I feel reasonably confident that if Trump does half of what he says he wants to do, that Democrats will have a strong election in 2026. It will be chaotic, it will be dysfunctional, it will be inflationary, it will be corrupt. As long as American voters are able to freely express their will, they have shown that they don't approve of corruption. Even Trump voters who have voted for the whirlwind don't want to suffer. They don't want their kid hospitalized with measles. They want MS13 deported, not Maria, the nice lady who works the counter at the local bakery. 

Every election that Trump has not been in the ballot since 2016, Democrats have done well. He is going to be corrupt, he is going to be chaotic. His pretenses towards authoritarianism are partly temperamental, but partly about his lifelong project of evading legal accountability for his many crimes.

Enshitification

 Someone coined the term "enshitification" to describe the various mundane ways that 21st century life is just a needless hassle at the worst time. Spam emails, constantly needing a new PIN or log in information, the impossibility of opting out of things. All these little speed bumps put up to make it easier for someone somewhere to get clicks or to sell ad revenues.  The Biden administration issued a rule to make unsubscribing to subscriptions much easier as an attack on this relentless immiserating of daily life.

Right now, I have to deal with two different government websites and in both cases I can never talk to the real human being to solve my problems. Enshitification.

I have a hunch this is going to be a huge problem for the next four years. Will RFK Jr "make measles great again"? Possibly. Will the mass exodus of competent civil servants from HHS mean that insurance companies start screwing around with claims? Almost certainly. 

Democratic government - big D and small d - is about creating a counterbalance to corporate interests, and corporate interests are primarily about maximizing profits. Trump will put the regulatory state up for sale, leading to unsafe food, unsafe travel, unsafe products. But, for most of us, we won't see that impact our daily lives in terms of death and destruction. Could that happen? Yes, but more likely things will just get worse and worse in small ways, as the ability of state to create safety and even convenience in our communities will get stripped away.

This really is the New Gilded Age. We have our second non-sequential president, true, but the 1880s and '90s were a time of corporate consolidation, trammeling of workers' rights, unsafe food and water, overwhelming corruption and widespread unrest. The result was - even during the Cleveland and McKinley administration - local forms of what would become the Progressive Movement began to grow. Eventually, that movement would expand democracy and rein in the corporate behemoths that strangled the American economy.

But, yeah, the next four years are going to suck.

The Hammering

 With the latest outrage Trump's nominating process is visiting on the idea of competent, nonpartisan governance, it's almost as if he was specifically trolling the 50% of the country that hates him and voted him out last time. Putting a quack like Kennedy at HHS is designed to outrage. The point is to flood the zone with so much lunacy that there is no single target to focus on.

As Josh Marshall notes, we can't simply accede to his attempts to erode American democratic governing institutions. Some of this can be seen on the breathless takes about his "landslide" victory, when he's likely to have less than 50% of the popular vote. Some of this is a pre-surrendering on a lot of issues. I've basically reached some version of that, in that I am not going to forfeit my mental well-being reacting to every outrageous thing he does. 

My goal is to survive the next four years. The way he's staffing his administration I think we can expect either a war, a plague or a financial crisis. At the very least, we are going to discover exactly how much the government does or doesn't do in our daily lives. The degree to which I can insulate myself and my family from the fallout is important. 

Still, when January 21st rolls around, at that point it will be time to get back in the fight. Right now, I just can't.

Tea Leaves

 Yglesias offers his predictions - of a sort - as to what Trump 2.0 could look like. I was worried it was going to be some version of "This is the day Trump truly became president" to some form of sanewashing.

There is at least some evidence from 2017-2021 what we might expect from Trump with the huge caveat that his loss in the 2020 election seems to have unhinged him even further. 

He notes that Trump actually did moderate some 2012 GOP positions. He's not a zealot on abortion, but he appointed the judges that were. He didn't want to touch old age entitlements like Paul Ryan wanted. This is narrowly true, but I think it's simply a matter of what Trump actually cares about right now. I simply don't think he's going to expend a lot of political capital on a nationwide abortion ban, but he will appoint people who will make mail-order birth control much harder to come by. Will he starting enforcing the Comstock Laws against distributing birth control? I have no idea, but I could see him not caring and it happening anyway.

It's clear that his priorities are coming into focus and they are

- Persecuting his enemies
- Driving any dissenters from the Executive Branch
- Tariffs
- Deportations

The first two are really bad, but it is unclear what that will mean to the average low-information voter that elected him. The orgy of corruption that is headed our way is not likely to land with these yokels, because "all politicians are corrupt" is a reflexive, if uninformed, position that they hold.

The latter two are the really known unknowns of the Restoration. The expert consensus as to the economic effects of these two programs - combined with a stimulative tax cut - would be highly inflationary. The questions are A) How far will he go? and B) What will he do when the pain starts?

If he's dead set on trade wars - which he promised but largely avoided the first time - then maybe he digs his heels in and tanks the economy. Same with deportations. At what point does he respond to real world feedback in the form of inflation and economic contraction?

Then there's the whole menu of conservative jihads that he can take or leave. Getting rid of the Department of Education is a pretty freaking awful idea, but will he actually do it or simply use the threat of it to gut any form of DEI or even SEL learning?  As Yglesias notes, there are a lot of weirdos on the far right who don't believe in public education at all. How much leeway will they have?

Of course, there's another aspect of all this that is beyond our ability to predict. Trump is showing signs of age related mental decline, and he was not a smart man to begin with. Is there a point where he gets the 25th Amendment invoked, especially if he tanks the economy in the short term and Republicans somehow think Vance is the answer? Or does he simply have a massive stroke?  We know Vance seems to have very few principles of his own. If Trump were to die or become incapacitated, does he become Paul Ryan? Does he remain Trumpist? 

Trump's volatility as a person and as a chief executive makes all of this really hard to predict.

There is a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is seeing a bear running towards you. Anxiety is hearing something in the dark woods, but not knowing what it is. Right now are anxious times, because he's manifestly temperamentally unfit to be president and yet he's likely going to be even less constrained by norms and personnel than last time. 

The new Age of Anxiety.

Gaetz, Gabbard and Hegseth

 I mean...holy crap. I am so old, I remember when Jeff Sessions was a terrible Cabinet pick.

In a sane world, Gaetz's nomination dies in the Senate. The pressure, though, is that this is a double loyalty test for Republicans.

The first is that Trump is going to pick awful people who are loyal to him. Shit, Gaetz wants to get rid of the FBI and ATF. Explain how that makes sense. We finally got "defund the police" and it's Trump who wants to do it. The ATF? More like WTF.

The second is that this is the equivalent of Caligula putting his horse in the Roman Senate. It's a test of how much he can push the Senate to bow to his whims. It's also why we really do need a miracle in Pennsylvania to preserve Casey's seat. Murkowski has shown backbone to Trump before and even the legitimately maligned Collins has strayed on occasion. If you have Casey, Murkowski and Collins, you only need one lone Republican with principles to scuttle these nominations. I would think Gaetz, in particular, will be denied, because Republicans hate him, too. 

Hegseth and Gabbard are concerning for different reasons. Whereas Gaetz is the Himmler in this scenario - running Justice as a Trumpist militia - Hegseth and Gabbard have the potential to directly damage American and global security. Gabbard is a pro-Assad, pro-Putin stooge. Hegseth is a TV personality who's expected to run the largest part of the government?

There is another, funnier outcome of all this. Gaetz has already resigned from the House, because he's under an ethics investigation that now has to end, because he's no longer a member. Elise Stefanik and Michael Waltz are already tapped for positions in the Executive.

The GOP has the absolute minimum of seats right now. You can subtract three to get them to 216. Democrats have 208 and are currently leading in five races. If they win those, they get to 213. Meanwhile there are two GOP House seats with under a 1,000 vote margin. Flip those and it's 215-216.

In some ways a one seat GOP House majority is OK, though a one seat Dem majority would be hilarious. It neuters Johnson's ability to control the agenda and things that require legislative action could be DOA in the House.

Trump's nomination process is already a perfect encapsulation of his chaotic management style. Nominating those three manifestly unqualified lackeys will sow chaos on the various departments. Potentially denying his party a clear House majority is another.

First Guess At Trump 2.0

 After the first round of nominees for various positions in the Executive Branch, I'd begin to wager what I think the second Trump term will look like. It's instructive but not conclusive looking at his first term, because who knows the degree to which the incompetency and failures of that first term will be addressed by the Project 2025 crowd and the unprecedented control Trump has over the GOP.

Still, it's pretty clear he's prizing loyalty over competence and kissing the ring to Beltway Clout.

I think the deportations will happen on a frightening scale, but not the degree to which Stephen Miller masturbates to at night before he crawls into his coffin to sleep. State and local officials will throw up roadblocks, and I think Trump and his Brown Shirts will relish the fight more than the need to deport all the migrant workers in California.

We will get a tariff war, which will be inflationary, but as soon as it becomes painful, I could see Trump switch course. More likely, he will use the tariffs to extract bribes from industries and countries in return for lowering tariffs on their sector.

They will make some gestural nods towards abortion bans and birth control restrictions, but Trump won't want to push this through. Same goes for ACA repeal. The point of these efforts will be to outrage people and keep their focus on these "soft" issues.

No, the big focus of Trump 2.0 will be massive, open graft. This is going to be a plutocrats' wet dream. Deregulation, cronyism, backroom dealings: this will be the hallmark of the next four years. Even if Democrats crush the next midterms, there will be no way to get around Trump's pardon powers. 

I would also look for a financial crisis to occur in the next four years, most likely in the crypto scam industry. Crypto is the latest iteration of "this time will be different" that plagues our Very Smart Financial Overlords, and I would expect a bubble and collapse - hopefully sooner rather than later. We know the pattern, Republicans wreck the economy; Democrats reform it, but don't get the credit. No reason to think that won't happen again, given how Trump seems eager to staff his government.

The next four years will be about saving what we can. In some cases, this will be institutions. In others, it will be literally your money.

Personnel Is Policy

 The next few months we will be treated to the horror show of Trump's Cabinet appointees. Josh Marshall looks at what he calls the "non power positions." Tapping Rubio for State and Stefanik for the UN are to tap people who are basically lapdogs. There's the odd dynamic of Trump wanting to have recess appointees and acting secretaries that have people staggered at the idea that Trump is considering people so extreme that they can't even be confirmed with a 53 seat Senate majority. 

Does anyone really think that the Senate won't confirm Lee Zeldin at EPA or Kristi Noem at Homeland? Of course they will. That these people are incompetent goes without saying. What matters is not that they are MAGA ideologues like Stephen Miller. What matters is that they will do whatever Trump says. Keeping them out of Senate confirmation is to keep them on the shortest of leashes. 

As I've said, I really think Democrats' best chance - aside from the close margins of the electorate and the thermostatic nature of our elections - is that Trump actually does what he says he wants to do. With him, that's always a question.

Ideally, he launches his trade war with the entire world; deports millions causing real trauma both economic and personal; and oversees another chaotic incompetent administration. Staffing his administration with lickspittles and lackeys will accelerate this process.

My main concern, I suppose, is that he so destroys the US currency through massive deficits and then subverts the independence of the Federal Reserve so that the American economy - currently the strongest in the world - takes a potentially deadly hit that it never truly recovers from. At least not in my remaining lifetime. He's bankrupted every other business he's run, why not the country?

The American people voted for Trump. I can't fathom that, but they did. Trump cannot run for reelection in 2028, but he can discredit Trumpism - especially if he's unrestrained. 

(Also, please, Donald, keep appointing House members to your Cabinet. The margin will be razor thin in the House again, and they have not demonstrated an ability to manage that well. I know you don't care, but preventing the passage of shit laws is a worthy goal for the short term.)

Maybe It Was The Misogyny

 Martin Longman relates the experience of a guy who called people up trying to convince them to vote for Kamala Harris. A sizable number of male voters simply can't see a woman president. This is weird, given that Mexico - a supposedly "machismo" culture - just elected a female president in a landslide. Yet Latino voters in the US felt that she wasn't a leader, because women can't be leaders.

Of course, it wasn't just the misogyny. She was seen as too liberal and too conservative, depending on who the guy talked to. Longman also lands where I landed:

The reality is was it is, and too many Americans felt worse off financially and were worse off financially. Taming inflation, producing robust, historic job growth, and a booming stock market didn’t change that enough, and many people found arguments in support of the administration to be insulting and out-of-touch. Another factor was the focus on student debt relief. It was a godsend to many people, including some of my closest friends, but I always knew it was a political albatross to relieve debt for the college-educated and not for people who borrowed to buy a home or truck. It definitely contributed to the continuing trend of Democrats losing support in rural and small-town America, which was once again deadly for the Democratic nominee for president.

The disconnect between the macroeconomic conditions, the economic conditions of people with existing household wealth and those low information voters who are inexplicably drawn to Trump was not something that Harris likely could have ever adequately resolved. Biden was terribly unpopular for reasons that were not strictly rational but were also not strictly false. Of course, there is the disconnect with the Consumer Confidence Index, but...whatever. 

After Hillary Clinton lost, I felt that Democrats should not nominate a woman in 2020. Trump's persona feeds directly into that misogynistic strain in America. For various understandable reasons, Harris was the only plausible nominee and likely kept losses to a minimum. Still, if the next four years unfold the way they very well could, Democratic control of the White House will be critical, and taking a gamble on someone like Gretchen Whitmer could be a huge gamble.

A Democratic Populism

 There are so many exasperating parts of this election, it's hard to catalog them all. The Bernie Sanders' critique is one of them.

Biden ran one of the most pro-union, pro-worker administrations in the country's history. He opposed tech and corporate mergers that lead to monopoly. He produced an economic recovery that is measurably the best in the world. 

There are two arguments: One is that Democrats have a message imbalance in the new media landscape. There's some merit to this, but it really seems like this is more of a vibes issue than a communication strategy. Trump's weird cult of personality stems from his unearned reputation as a "business man" who lives in a gilded penthouse. The economy was "bad" because people said it was bad. There were "invisible" issues in the electorate that Dems missed (credit card debt), and they may have made messaging mistakes, but if you're arguing against people's "gut" you are going to lose that argument.

Put another way, misinformation is not about changing people's minds, but reinforcing their prior beliefs. The economy really did suffer through a period of bad inflation for about 16 months. That was real. Misinformation simply fed into that.

The other argument is that this was a policy problem. I think there is one area where this has real merit: college debt forgiveness.

Yes, I think it was a solid policy, especially when linked to forgiving loans for sectors like health care and education. It was pretty bad politics though, because of how and when it was structured. Democrats did well with college graduates, but I don't really think that was because Biden forgave their loans. Dems did well with that demographic because college graduates are probably looking at the abstract implications of Trump's restoration as opposed to the bread and butter issues. 

Still, in the middle of a period of economic instability wrought by inflation, Democrats prioritized helping out a demographic that - generally speaking - is doing OK. College loans are structured terribly. The way we pay for an increasingly expensive college education is nuts. However, simply giving money to college graduates and not other groups of people is bad politics. Of course, giving people money during inflation isn't optimal in the first place.

Of course, Biden DID give money to other groups of people back in 2021-22, but they were not touted as "Biden Bucks". Trump insisted his signature go on the 2020 stimulus checks. There should have been more overt propaganda around Biden's economic stimulus. Dems ARE pretty bad at that, bound as they are by norms. 

There is, of course, the whole "cultural Left" thing. I don't think Harris' loss is (entirely) because she's a Black Woman, but more because she's a San Francisco Liberal. That's why the incessant hate mongering around Trans people worked. I really don't think people wake up hating Trans people. Those ads worked because they made it seem (falsely) that Harris' animating principle was Trans Rights, rather than economic issues. You never want to be "out of touch" with the electorate's priorities. 

The problem is that all the White Papers in the world cannot change people's minds on this. Especially the low information voters who swung this election to Trump and the GOP. Some of this will be resolved either by Trump's death/term limits or a Trumpist economic collapse. There was not secret message that Harris left in the drawer that would've unlocked those votes. 

In the end, Democrats' strongest message in 2026-28 will be an anti-billionaire message. That should line up well with people's preconceptions about both parties. Yes, there will be a need to run on reproductive rights and who knows what horrors the Trumpist GOP will unleash. Some we can imagine, some we fear won't come to pass and others we haven't even considered. 

Still, whatever economic program Trump lands on, it is likely to help Elon Musk more than you. This will require running less as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren and more as FDR. 

The defection of large numbers of Latino voters should remind us the two-edged sword of relying on identity politics. Identity is dependent on context. If - as I imagine - Trump focuses on the welfare of the very rich, we should be able to recapture all sorts of working class voters once Trump's uniquely distorting effect on low income voters is spent.

Legacy

 I've seen a number of takes that Joe Biden's legacy is similar to LBJ's. Very impressive progressive legislation with one huge mistake. As Campos notes, Johnson stumbled into Vietnam and Biden let Merrick Garland fritter away the chance to put Trump behind bars. While both likely had misgivings, they likely could not conceptualize either losing in Vietnam or the American people re-electing Trump after January 6th.

We shall, indeed, see what the next 2-4 years brings. My worry is that a great deal of what Biden did is easily erased by Trump in ways that LBJ's accomplishments were not. Hell, the Affordable Care Act remains the most durable and important Democratic reform since LBJ. Biden expanded it, but we shall see if that expansion survives.

There's a rumor going around that right before he dropped out, Biden's internal polling showed him losing New York. A true Red Wave. Whether that was caused by the debate or not, the strongest reason Harris lost is because Biden was quite unpopular. There were voices - especially after the disastrous debate performance - arguing that he was the "best President of my lifetime" because he came through on a few progressive agenda items. I'd argue that one of them - relieving college debt - likely hurt Democrats electability. It felt than and feels truer now, that some online Democrats rallied around a beleaguered standard bearer, refused to see what was happening and then kept defending him. 

Harris ran a great campaign. Biden really can't campaign effectively. She saved us from a true Red Wave and I'm afraid Biden's legacy will be poor, even if that's mostly Merrick Garland's fault. 

Upon Further Review

 I've been thinking about the stuff I wrote about in Shibboleths for a few days, but I also haven't really slept since Tuesday so I don't think I made a coherent point.

Back in 2008, Adam Serwer famously said, "It's not that every Trump voter is racist, it's that racism isn't a deal breaker." You can add sexism and LGBTQ bigotry to that, too.

The problem with a great deal of the cultural left's argument is the opposite. It's the bigotry. 

I'm not saying they are right or wrong, it's a big country and the bigotry is a huge part of his appeal.

I'm saying that the shift we saw since 2020 - which will likely be smaller than we saw on election day, but is very real - is about people who just don't prioritize bigotry, at least not in this election. How else do you explain the substantial shift in the Latino vote? The argument about Trump and MAGA's bigotry just isn't a big deal to them, the way it is to college educated voters.

I think the Bernie Sanders critique is kinda bullshit, precisely because Biden was substantively good for workers. The vibes, the fucking vibes, are what dragged Biden and then Harris down. 

Once again, the Democrat's best hope is that Trump does exactly what he says he wants to do with deportations and tariffs and he tanks the economy. He largely failed in his first term, but then again, he's a notable failure in everything but conning people into thinking he's a business genius.

Shibboleths

 I do not think that Harris lost because of "woke" but it sure as hell didn't help. She was a woman of color from California. Her primary run in 2020 had her move to the left as so many did. She tried to distance herself from that this time, but she was kind of trapped when Trump used the trans issue as a wedge. It's silly to be obsessed with gender reassignment surgery for prisoners, but she stepped on that rake and felt she couldn't engage on that issue.

The other issue is the Young Man Problem that we are going to be rehashing for the next four years. 

Working in academia, I've been steeped in some of the new paradigms of culturally left social mores. I remember the seminar on microaggressions. Basically, don't be a dick, especially when you don't really know the other person. However, I didn't think it was necessarily worth spending a professional development day on it. Didn't hurt, but didn't help.

I remember when I was told, not suggested told, that I had to put pronouns in my email signature. Again, not a big deal, but anyone who knows me is unlikely to be confused by my gender. I get that this was to model for students who might be gender nonconforming, but it wasn't entirely clear just how big a deal it was to them.

Shibboleths were words and practices that were only known by certain in-groups. By saying words in a certain way, by wearing clothes in a certain way, you were known to be part of the group without saying it aloud, and this would be invisible to people not in your group.

Much of what passes under the umbrella of "woke" are shibboleths. I'll give an example.

We torture English to come up with "people experiencing homelessness" instead of "the homeless." I'm smart enough to understand the reasoning for this, if it was laid out before me, but I honestly don't know what the difference is supposed to be. I referred to Harris in the second sentence as a "woman of color", because "colored woman"...boy howdy. I don't understand what "people experiencing homelessness" is supposed to mean.

What's more important is I don't understand what it's supposed to accomplish, except as a shibboleth. If I genuinely care about the homeless, but don't call them by the proper terminology, I am understood be outside the group that cares about the homeless in the proper way.

Circling back to young men, there is a lot of this stuff in academia, as academics tend to be thinking about correcting centuries of scholarship that centered white men. It can come across as blaming an 18 year old for the crimes of slavery or Jim Crow. It's an observable sociological fact that young men are the most likely to commit crimes, but pointing that out can feel targeting in ways that would be unacceptable if it was directed at any other group. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes than wealthy people (Trump excluded), but saying that could be considered "racist" or "colonialist" or some other stupid shit. 

So much of the nonsense coming from the Gaza encampments fit into this frame. America is absolutely not responsible for the crimes of Netanyahu. That would be like saying that the Black population of America was responsible for the Rwandan genocide. Yet I get this shit from my own son. Of course, "America bad" seems a lot more defensible when you elect a demagogic charlatan like Trump.

Was this the determinative factor in Harris' loss? I don't think so. Why did the Tories lose in Britain? Le Marche in France? The BJP losing its majority in India? Why did the German coalition collapse? Why did Milei win in Argentina?

Ultimately, "the system" broke down for so many people during Covid. There was the economic deprivation, the social isolation and subsequent erosion of social norms, and that was followed by inflation, which was tame by historical standards, but a forgotten dynamic in much of the developed economies. 

The "woke" issue is not that people are (necessarily) racist, though they are perhaps tired of "everything being racist". The extremes on this issue are positions like "being on time is racist." No Democrat, least of all Harris, was campaigning on this nonsense.

To the degree it mattered, it might have created a perception that Harris was "out of touch" with people's economic concerns. She couldn't differentiate herself from Biden (who actually did an objectively good job on the economy) and Trump's hammering her on trans issues (which she didn't rebut) made her seem like she didn't care about people's economic situation. Hell, paying off college loans and not other forms of household debt probably didn't help.

The Biden Administration was one of the most pro-worker administrations in all of our lifetimes, but inflation hit them hard. Harris was pinned in a frame where she couldn't say "Biden screwed up on inflation" - which isn't actually true - and distancing herself from a few statements that the Trump team hung around her neck. 

Having said all that, most of these social issues are in Democrat's favor. People support abortion rights, they support minimum wage increases, they support marriage equality. Republicans flogged the one issue that they could to make it seem like Harris was a Berkley gender studies professor rather than a San Francisco prosecutor. 

Democrats, going forward, just need to not step on rakes and not be cruel and the pendulum should swing back.

UPDATE: This is making largely the same point.

Gaza

 I don't think Gaza led to Harris' defeat, but there will be those who feel that way.

However, news from Israel that Netanyahu has fired Yoav Gallant, his Defense Minister, suggests that Netanyahu might be ready to embrace an extreme response now that his ally, Trump, will be in the White House. Biden has been working to both support Israel and restrain Netanyahu, and I would wager that Netanyahu is feeling unconstrained at the moment.

As the piece notes, there are a number of reasons why Gallant was fired. Some of them are unique to internal Israeli politics, like exempting the Ultra Orthodox from the draft. Gallant, though, was an advocate for empowering the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. That's another red line for Netanyahu, whose primary goal is preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state.

It will be interesting to see if Netanyahu takes the leash off before or after Trump's inauguration, but it is coming. It will be tragic. It will be a dark foreshadowing of Trump's foreign policy that will countenance any oceans of blood, as long as it benefits him.

Wrong, But Worth Reading

 Conor Friedersdorf has a typically obtuse story at The Atlantic about treating Trump like a "normal president." He is, of course, not a normal president, never was. The potential he has to make things so much worse for so many people is very real. I think we can safely lay 200,000 unnecessary deaths during Covid at his feet, and he didn't even intend to do that.

One reason that I think Trump was able to return to power - aside from inflation and misogyny - is that people tended to forget - or simply not know - the level of corruption and chaos that attended his previous administration. I would wager that shockingly high number of his voters don't know that he is a convicted felon. An even higher number don't know about the E. Jean Carroll case. I don't think people really remember the policy incoherence or governing chaos that was Trump 1.0. 

Oddly, I am now kind of counting on Trump's many pathologies making Trump 2.0 similarly as dysfunctional. The running joke was Trump's "infrastructure week" or his "concept of a plan" for healthcare. This is why somehow winning control of the House is so critical. If he has the trifecta, he will likely try and kill ACA again. If he doesn't, he can't. If he has a two seat House majority, I don't think he'll even whip for it. WTF does he care?

The obvious weak links in Freidersdorf's piece and this line of thinking is twofold.

The first is that Trumpworld sees the inability to foist some of their agenda on the country the first time as a failure of staffing. They won't repeat that mistake. That doesn't mean they will be competent, but they will sure try. Trump promised tariffs the last time, but largely avoided ruinous trade wars. His rhetoric suggests that he will try for a bigger tariff that might trigger that inflationary trade war, but we shall see. The deportation camps are happening, how many they ensnare is another question.

The second is that Freidersdorf suggests that the proper cure for Trump's excess is winning future elections. The fact that this is in contention seems an important point.