Trump's Conception of Crime

 One of the important things to know about Trump's character is how much he was influenced by lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn was infamous both as Joe McCarthy's counsel and as a mob lawyer. Trump's entire narrow world view is transactional rather than principled. Principles, in fact, are for suckers. Law do not exist as expressions of communal norms and values, but as things to be skirted whenever they get in your way.

As a result, Trump has engaged in a long career of petty and not so petty business and tax crimes. It's tough to prosecute rich people for complicated fraud and tax crimes, so he's skirted the law for a long time.

His rise to political prominence has put him in the public crosshairs, because politicians are in the public crosshairs. That's the way we as a society restrain our elected officials, and it's properly known as the rule of law. Trump cannot conceive of something like that, so when he is prosecuted and found guilty of crimes, his natural impulse is to say that his opponents are criminals. 

Where Trump and Trumpism have repeatedly foundered has been when needing to meet any sort of burden of proof. Whether it was trying to deny the result of the 2020 election or defending himself against libel, fraud charges, or felony campaign finance crimes, Trump loses when he faces the legal system and a jury of his peers. His only protection is a judiciary that that has slow walked the charges against him or made it difficult to prosecute a president for any crimes of corruption.

The humiliation and real peril of being a convicted felon have increased his appetite for lawlessness. He wants to prosecute his enemies without really caring whether they actually committed crimes. If he was convicted, why not convict Harris of something - charges to be determined at a later date. 

His campaign speeches have become increasingly unhinged and untethered to reality, so we get suggestions like this weekend when he argued that we should have a "Purge" style day of violence, where his brown shirt thugs in law enforcement can assault anyone Trump doesn't like. 

Of all the threats that Trump poses to American democracy, two stand out as being potentially damaging even after he exits the stage. The first is that elections are corrupted by...something. The second is that the adversarial court system with jury trials is somehow rigged by...I dunny, George Soros or something.

If Harris wins and Trump goes to prison or even dies, and we then enter the 2028 election with the legitimacy of our elections and courts undermined by the continuation of the Trumpist Right, then we will remain in a very perilous place even without that fatuous gasbag on the cable news.

ADDED: What Trump benefits from is the bothsides element that allow him to spout actual fascist rhetoric and be able to hide behind the legacy of the Republican Party and America's two party system.

Algorithms For Fascism

 There's a lot of deserved criticism of how the media has completely and utterly failed the American public over the last nine years when it comes to Donald Trump. Some of it is broken down here by DougJ/Pitchbot and James Fallows.

The great paradox, of course, is that journalists will overwhelmingly vote for Harris and they likely would have done the same for Biden. So why does their coverage suck?

First, there's the fear of allowing that bias of coloring their work. If you generally support Democrats you are going to be very guarded about calling Trump in the grips of fascism and cognitive decline. OK, to a point that's fine. Yes, guard against your biases, but sometimes they are right!

There's an argument that it's all about maintaining access to Republican sources. The thing is, that might explain Maggie Haberman or Olivia Nuzzi, it doesn't explain the Times as a whole.

My feeling is that it all comes back to the media landscape and the difficulty of grabbing readership, market share and ad revenues. Reporting - real reporting - is kind of expensive as it's labor intensive. In order to maintain the staff that the Times has - and that most local newspapers do not - you have to get as many "clicks" as possible. That's how you wind up with headlines that "sanewash" Trump's craziness. 

People's outrage over the Times' abdication of calling Trump what Trump is actually drives some sort of engagement. Even if you cancel your subscription, you might still click through a link on social media and that's the model they rely on.

The fundamental insight of Silicon Valley that outrage drives "engagement" just as much as intellectual interest is going to break our democracy if we aren't careful.

Last Thursday, Jonathan Haidt came to speak to the school about social media and phones and the deleterious impact on children, especially girls. I'm about to turn 58, so I can control somewhat my feeds on social media to people I mostly agree with and Moo Deng. Kids can't filter that way and many other can't either. I probably do spend too much time on Twitter, but I really try not to click on or respond to things that are driven by clickbait. 

The news media used to be about seeking big truths and holding power accountable. Now it seems to be about engaging readers via clickbait headlines that often don't match the text of the article. 

One of the points Haidt made was that when we began the internet age in the '90s and early '00s, there was a lot of hopefulness about the democratization of knowledge. But my students sit in class with a lap top open and I ask a question like "What's the GDP of Canada?" and they stare at me blankly, because that's just not what they use computers for and certainly not what they use their phones for.

I'm not convinced "the Internet was a mistake" but I am convinced social media and the engagement algorithms are.

The World Is Holding Its Breath

 The President of Ukraine had to stand next to a Russo-phile Putin apologist and nod along like that idiot was making sense. As Chait notes, Trump's basic framework for understanding war is as a form of business transaction. A hostile takeover, if you will. The idea that Trump could "make a deal" an end the war is only true if "make a deal" means selling out Ukraine and the international standard that invasions and seizing another country's territory are perhaps the most egregious offense outside of genocide.

Speaking of "genocide", we have Israel's strike on Hezbollah, which is both absolutely justified by Hezbollah's actions and a demonstration that Israel really doesn't give a fuck about civilian casualties. The merits of that position - we have to kill some children to kill the really bad guys - would seem to be morally indefensible...but tactically sound. The IDF has kicked the living hell out of those that would do Israel harm. In 1943, no one would've batted an eye at this behavior.

However, the US has been working for almost a full year to prevent the spread of the war into Lebanon. They apparently had assurances from Israel that there wouldn't be anything of this scale, and Israel went ahead and did it anyway. 

Biden's prioritization of good relations with Israel - a misbehaving ally - has been blinkered, especially since Netanyahu seems to be actively working to help elect Trump. If we can somehow get to President Harris, I hope she cuts off aid to Israel as long as it's being led by a man who is both a war criminal and regular criminal.

Anyone paying attention to Trump recently can see how mentally unwell he is. He's making cognitive gaffes that would have caused the press to call for Biden's immediate resignation. He's perseverating on crowd size and other totems of his damaged ego. I have a hunch the internal polling is a lot more dire than the Times/Sienna polls. Trumpists are so invested in their Golden Calf that they can't see it, but I guarantee the rest of the world - unpolluted by Fox News, NewsMaxx and OAN - are looking at this creature and are agog that the fate of the free world is this tenuous. 

Even Trump Is Smarter Than This

 Trump advisor Jason Miller signs off on state "menstrual surveillance."

Even Trump, whose brain is a pudding pop left out in the August sun, knows this is terrible politics.

Hopefully this actual true and awful thing might get Chapelle Roan to make a decision?

This Is Where I Am

 Cheryl Rofer shares some analysis that has been my read on the election even when Biden was running.

It begins by noting that the best predictor of future voting behavior is past voting behavior. Overwhelmingly Trump voters will vote for Trump and Biden voters will vote for Harris. The Wild Card are first time voters. Trump would have to win that group by a LOT to erase Biden's 2020 edge. (We are talking about the popular vote.)

So, the question is: Who are the new voters? I concede that some of them are young voters who remember 2017-2019 rather rosily, because they were - you know - children. However, the dynamic that Harris had brought to the race is a dramatic upswing in young Black women registering to vote for the first time. That was even before Taylor Swift weighed in. 

If we look at the flagging enthusiasm, and - yes - the crowd sizes, it's really, really unclear to me where the "new" Trump voters are coming from. 

AOC's Next Move

 I've been very impressed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's political chops. She's an excellent communicator and understands that building bridges in Washington is the way to accrue power and influence. Unlike some "Progressives" she will work across ideological and even partisan lines.

As one of the three bright young stars (along with Pete Buttigieg and Wes Moore) of the Democratic Party, the question becomes what her next step should be.

Frankly, I'd love to see her take on the New York governorship and clean up the New York Democratic Party. Democrats in NY are a great example of the poison of holding power for so long that they elect people like Cuomo, Hochul and Eric Adams. It was the dysfunction of the NY Dems that cost us control of the House; they couldn't even do opposition research on George Santos for chrissake. 

If AOC could run a hostile takeover of that state party and state governance, then I really do think she's putting herself on the short list for president one day. You never get to the White House through the House, but if you clean the Augean Stables of Albany, that's a pretty good way to separate yourself from the pack.

The Bad Joe

 Joe Manchin came out and said he couldn't endorse Harris because she wants to gut or completely get rid of the filibuster to reinstate Roe. In the process, he said that the filibuster was the "holy grail of democracy."

This is so profoundly stupid, I don't know what to say. 

I never hated on Manchin, because I understood that he was a critical vote during Biden's razor thin legislating. He represents arguably the Trumpiest state in the union. He's not Sinema, who seemed to glory in performative contrarianism. However, if there is any way that the Republican coalition collapses and we get the trifecta, not having to kowtow to that guy will be a welcome change.

Is This Behavior A "Tell"?

 In poker, "tells" are nonverbal hints as to what your opponent is thinking. We all have them. Trump - as a not terribly sophisticated person - has many of his own. The question is: Is his behavior a "tell" that he knows he's lost?

Trump is endlessly measuring himself against other rich people. He always has the "biggest" and "bestest" stuff and money and so on. His desperate need for external validation is well documented. So what are we to make of the collapse of his Truth Social stock? He was unable to sell off his shares until this week, as early investors wanted to avoid a pump-and-dump stock scam. Now that he's able to sell his shares, the demand for this meme stock will likely collapse. Hell, Twitter isn't worth anything, how can Truth Social be worth anything? How does this loss of (on paper) billions affect Trump?

We are also seeing him increasingly hawking bullshit like Trump crypto currency and Melania's "book". We've already seen the Trump bible and the Trump sneakers. I feel like there's one more desperate product that Trump and his family will foist upon the rubes who still think he's their divine champion. 

One thing Trump is really NOT doing is campaigning. When he does go out amongst the unwashed masses, he says increasingly untethered things like making John Deere pay a 200% tariff, claiming he will be "women's protector" despite being an adjudicated rapist, claiming other countries wouldn't fight without his permission when he was president or claiming that he's actually running against Obama or Biden. Still, he has far fewer events this year than he had in 2016 (obviously in 2020, there were fewer rallies). 

His behavior - hocking cheap bullshit, not campaigning - is not the sign of someone who is vigorously competing for the presidency. It's someone who wants to soak every penny he can out of his flock before his "Sell By" date hits. What's more, his family is a pack of similar creatures who are looking to get as much money as THEY can, too. Does anyone think Lara Trump isn't soaking up every unaccounted for penny at the RNC? They sure aren't spending it on campaign stuff.

I think that there's an excellent chance that if Trump gets his ass handed to him on Election Day - the 2020 result, plus North Carolina and maybe a state like Florida or even Texas - he flees the country  before his sentencing. 

Times/Sienna

 Throughout this cycle, Times/Sienna has been the most Republican friendly "reputable" pollster. There are a host of pollsters who are just objectively terrible (Trafalgar, Atlas, Rasmussen) and designed to skew polling averages. The Times, however, is unlikely to be doing that. It feels instead like they are really, really wary of repeating the polling errors of 2016 and even 2020. 

Every poll has always had a sampling issue and today it has gotten much, much worse. When people actually answered the phone, you could get a good, random sample. Today, who answers a call from an unknown number? So a pollster has to make an educated guess about the composition of the electorate. The Times has taken the position that there are those "shy Trump voters" who need to be sampled more heavily than other pollsters are doing. 

This can lead to some head scratching results. Today's poll has Trump +5 in Arizona. The previous poll had Harris at +5 there. They are suggesting that the result of the debate is a...10 point swing to Trump? Meanwhile, the same pollster has Ruben Gallego's senate run at 49-50% while Trump ranges from 48-50%.  That's a LOT of Trump-Gallego voters in an era of very little ticket splitting. If you look at all the polling from Arizona, it very much looks like a tied race. Arizona is a true toss-up. The Times somehow has a better result for Trump than Trafalgar. That's odd.

Meanwhile, most of the polling from Pennsylvania shows Harris building a steady but narrow lead of about 2 points. Same with Michigan. In Wisconsin, you have results like MassINC and Morning Consult that show Harris up 6 and Emerson showing Trump up 2. That's a significant discrepancy. 

Ultimately, I think the difference very well could be the old school get out the vote operations. We know that Harris has a massive cash advantage. Trump's campaign money comes from oligarch's PACs and they typical funnel money to consultants who make expensive ad buys. Campaigns are won by getting your voters to the polls. The GOP simply does not have that machinery at the moment and voting has begun in some states. 

The hollowing out of the RNC should have very real consequences in this election, if the race really is this close. 

Ukraine Is Still In The Fight

 Adam Silverman puts together these daily updates about the Ukraine war. The most recent developments are surrounding Ukraine's attacks inside Russia. There was the ground offensive into Kursk which - to my surprise - remains active. I had assumed they were simply creating a diversionary attack and would withdraw once Russian troops were diverted from Ukraine, but they are still there.

The other is that Ukraine has hit two massive Russian arms depots inside Russian territory. Even with NATO aid, Russia can generally outgun Ukraine. These strikes destroyed tons of munitions that would otherwise have been brought to bear in Ukraine. 

For much of the war, Ukraine has been limited in its ability to use Western weaponry within Russian territorial boundaries. The fact that those restrictions seem lifted - even if only in part - is a positive development. 

The lack of a Ukrainian ground offensive within Zaporizhia Oblast to sever the land connection between Russia and Crimea has been frustrating, even if the Ukrainians feel that attacking into the teeth of Russian defenses is foolish. Ultimately, Ukraine is going to need to return to 2014 borders at the very least to drive home the folly of Russia's invasion. Perhaps the Kursk and munitions strikes will soften the Russians up enough for Ukraine to get in one more push before winter, but I also don't think Ukraine has the manpower to force the issue.

And so the meatgrinder goes on.

How Many Damned Dominos Are There?

 The end of the week saw sex scandals surrounding Mark Robinson, RFK Jr, Christopher Rufo and possibly Matt Gaetz. The GOP Senate candidate in Wisconsin may have been a money launderer for a Mexican drug cartel. Over 100 Republican national security officials have endorsed Harris, as have a number of former elected Republicans like the Cheneys. As some wag said, because of climate change, the October surprises are blooming in September. One has to wonder what sort of oppo research the Harris campaign is sitting on for October, if this is what's coming out in September.

There simply aren't any good reasons for anyone who isn't a part of Cult 45 to vote for this guy. His statements on policy are increasingly deranged. Yet, you can see the so-called Never Never Trump right contorting themselves into knots rather than confront the fact that the Republican Party has become infested with people like Mark Robinson precisely because it has becomes a cult of personality around Donald Trump.

The only way forward for the GOP is to see the MAGA movement crushed brutally in this election. Lose all the 2020 states, plus maybe Florida, Iowa and even Texas. Lose the House. Fail to retake the Senate, despite a very favorable map. Then and only then can they reconstitute themselves as a Center-Right party. Hell, even JD Vance saw it that way after 2012, but now he's a full-on MAGAt. 

It very much feels like the Trump campaign is in something of a death spiral, using the normal metrics and dynamics of a presidential campaign. It also seems likely that the Democrats are going to have some sort of scandal ready to drop every 4-5 days from now until election day. 

When does the dam break?

The Coddling of the American Mind

 Jonathan Haidt is coming to our school next week, and somehow I landed on his piece the Coddling of the American Mind independently of that visit. I'm generally skeptical of the latest pedagogical fad, because I simply am not that impressed with the sort of scholarship that goes on in education programs. It seems an intensely ideological field with few of the sort of "challenge everything" mindsets you see in other disciplines.

Haidt and Greg Lukianoff are not education professors. Haidt is a social psychologist and Lukianoff a lawyer. They attack the principle that students are so delicate in their feelings that things that might upset them should be avoided. Thus, we get mandates about microaggressions. I remember my microaggression workshop. It was largely helpful in the "don't be as asshole" toolbox that we should all seek to enlarge.

However, we are now being told what language we should not use in written comments. "Suzy appears not to care and has demonstrated little work ethic" is now considered loaded language that contains some sort of "trauma" that we need to shield Suzy from. It might even be considered racist if Suzy is non-White. Suzy's actual engagement with the work is secondary to the need to protect her from language that she might find distressing. 

Last year, when I was gone, the school more or less but a kibosh on discussing the Gazan War. The raw feelings and intensely complicated nature of this conflict has created feelings that many students - here and at universities - simply cannot process effectively. Some of the screaming about this comes from Bad Actors simply looking to leverage their outrage for attention. That's a separate issue. The inability of young people to argue passionately and then when it's over walk away with being traumatized has largely disappeared.

What makes Haidt's argument interesting is that he points out that this approach has NOT led to better mental health outcomes. That, ultimately, is why this sort of "coddling" needs to stop. 

Did Harris Just Win North Carolina?

 North Carolina Lieutenant Governor and GOP gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson was always a freak. His various statements about women not being allowed to vote and so on made him a drag on the Republican ticket.

Then there was the release yesterday of some...hooboy. As Jon Chait said, The Republican Party could have found a more sober-minded candidate than Robinson even if it had confined its recruitment entirely to the NudeAfrica posting community.

It's unclear how much local dynamics are playing out in the presidential race, but it sure seems to me that two things are happening.

- Purple states with GOP control seem to be trending Blue, a potential fallout from Dobbs. The implications for Dobbs for me in Connecticut are few, but it has been an immediate issue in places like Arizona and Wisconsin. North Carolina seems like a state where median voters might be turned off by GOP extremism...especially since the GOP nominated just about the most extreme candidate they could. A self-proclaimed "black Nazi"?!?! 

- Trumpist chaos is contagious. The ascendancy of Trump has been linked in some Republican minds to his steadfast refusal to apologize for anything. This began with the Access Hollywood tape and has continued for 8 years. It's why Vance can't apologize for lying about Haitians in Springfield. The MAGA party never apologizes for anything. As a result, you get nominees like Kari Lake and now Robinson who are just freaking lunatics. Like mentally unwell.

Neither of these are sustainable in the long run. An extremist party is not a viable party in a two party system. It does endanger the entire system, because Republicans are going to win eventually in some places and they have abandoned reason. However, since the GOP is the party of Trump, it's become the party of JD Vance, Mark Robinson and Kari Lake. 

If I'm right and the average normie voter is sick and tired of all the drama, the Robinson story is just another example of where the GOP is right now. It draws attention to the mountainous hypocrisy of GOP politicians who try and leverage anti-trans panic while engaging in sexual transgressions that are honestly even shocking to a jaded old fool like me.

North Carolina was very much in play on Wednesday. What's more, recent polling from the Blue Wall has been pretty good for Harris suggesting that where she's actively campaigning, she's able to improve on her national numbers. My guess is that she will throw more resources into NC, because it's a hedge against a bad result in Pennsylvania. The Robinson story is a national story, but it's a huge local story and that could have an impact on November and the future of the country.

The Conversation

 What's striking about this latest sojourn in Trumpistan is how the attempts on his life have not boosted his popularity. People associate Trump with chaos and - after 1/6 - violence. For his cultists, that's a feature, not a bug. They crave the chaos and the violence, because they think it will never blow back on them. For most people, I truly believe that they just want him to go away.

Similarly, there are some people flogging the story about the lies about Haitian immigrants as being good for Trump, because immigration is his strongest issue. In fact, the story is not about immigrants at this point. It's about Trump's incessant cruelty and Vance's relentless lying. Yes, abortion and democracy are Harris's strongest issues, but I really think the Springfield pogrom is going to erode Trump's standing in immigration, as it reminds people of his cruelty and racism.

Bullshitter v Liar

 Donald Trump is a bullshitter. He does not care about the truth. Ever single human interaction for him is an exercise is backscratching or fist fighting. Do something nice for Trump and Trump will do something nice for you. If you don't, he will try and destroy you. He does not care how an abstract concept of "truth" enters into this. This is why journalists have - sadly and predictably - given up trying to fact check Trump or even subject his statements to scrutiny. That's why he can say, as he did, that the crowd loved him during the debate, when there was no crowd, and the press just rolls with it.

JD Vance, on the other hand, is a liar. He knows what the truth is and has spoken it in the past. However, his avaricious ambition means that there are no rules that he won't violate to slake his thirst for power and adulation. 

The question: Which is worse? is beside the point.