Cromwell

First, always bully weaker but historically friendly countries. They pretend friendship in order to take advantage of you. Make sure they only receive services from you–market access, resources, and security–at the market price. If they don’t like it, who cares? They have nowhere else to go.

Second, suck up to dictators with nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, you have little leverage over them except the threat of overwhelming force, which is too dangerous to use. Your only hope of influencing them is to openly admire them, so make a display of treating them as equals and colleagues and see what happens.

The irony of SCOTUS during the Trump years is that the Trumpiest justices are the conservatives he didn’t appoint. Thomas and Alito are passionate culture warriors who support the entirety of the Trump agenda and consistently vote that way. If the man on golf cart decides to become a full-fledged military dictator, you can be sure they will be cheering him on as long as they believe the ultimate objective is to annihilate wokeness.

Brett Kavanaugh, by contrast, is merely Trump-adjacent. Like Justice Jackson, but from the other side, he writes opinions that sound like political manifestos. He ignores the facts in the record and legal principles supporting judicial restraint in order to get the outcome he wants as quickly as possible. When he votes against Trump, as he occasionally does for practical reasons, he typically does so on very limited grounds that provide hope for Trump in the future. That’s what he did with the birthright citizenship case and with the mail voting rule.

Don’t expect this to change any time in the foreseeable future.

Assume for purposes of argument that Trump concedes to Father Time and the Constitution and passes the torch to J.D. How would a J.D. presidency compare with Trump 2.0?

It would be more consistent, predictable, grim, and ideological, as opposed to personal, arbitrary, ego-driven, and despotic. It would be less militaristic and focus less on imperialism. Instead of making ephemeral short-term deals with opponents and issuing bogus executive orders, J.D. would emphasize creating rules through regular processes. He would take fighting the culture war to an entirely new plane in order to get to the Godly Society.

It would look more like a DeSantis presidency than one run by Trump. On one point, however, there would be continuity–J.D. likes trolling the left as much as Trump.

Donald Trump is an old man; even he has to see that. In addition, the Supreme Court has immunized him against virtually all legal perils after he leaves office. Surely, it’s time to retire, right? He can just go home to Mar-a-Lago and dominate the political scene through his use of Lying Psycho without enduring the burdens of office. It’s a good deal for him.

Not so fast! Trump thrives on attention, and he loves being the boss of the world. Even if J.D. is a sock puppet president, he will get the perks of office and most of the attention from the media, and Trump will look like yesterday’s man. The band won’t play “Hail to the Chief” for him anymore. Giving up office will be painful.

What if the latter argument wins the day? Trump has to know he has no chance of being re-elected through legal channels. Even the Green Bay sweep wouldn’t be enough to keep him in the White House.

The answer, of course, is the invocation of a bogus emergency and a military coup. Everything will be in place to make it happen. The closer we get to November 2028, the more peril to the republic.

Trump’s UN speech apparently was calculated to offend the sensibilities of as many people–friends and adversaries alike–as possible. Why would he do that? What was the point?

To send the message to the entire world that he’s the boss, of course. You already knew that. American economic and security interests don’t even enter into the equation for him.

I’ve got those dirty, lowdown, lost midterms blues.

You have to be aware of it; it’s all over the news.

Some right-wing friends have lost their way, and now I’ve got to choose.

If we aren’t strong and unified, we’re surely going to lose.

_____________

Our record has been mixed at best; I’m not going to lie.

I asked the base to stand and fight; they sit and wonder why.

We haven’t failed at everything; we deserve another try.

If we fail, then hope is gone; the dream will surely die.

______________

I’ve got the blues.

The lost power blues.

We’ve got a big agenda

But the left is not enthused.

Lots of things are left to do;

More promises to keep.

If legal means won’t do the job

We’ll try the Green Bay sweep.

Theodore Roosevelt, to his intense later regret, chose not to run for a third term in 1908. When his handpicked successor, Taft, won the election, he left the country and hunted game in Africa for over a year. Upon his return, he found that Taft was running the country in a manner not exactly to his liking. The two fell out, Roosevelt ran in 1912, and the rest is history.

By comparison, Trump is going to demand that J.D. agree to be his lap puppy in exchange for the GOP nomination in 2028. If J.D. wins, Trump is going to Mar-a-Lago, not Africa, from whence he will continue to blast out angry posts in all caps on Lying Psycho on a regular basis. It is a burden from which J.D. will never be able to escape. It will be a constant plague on his presidency.

By November 2028, everything required to run the Green Bay sweep will be in place. Trump will have control of the military, ICE, and the DOJ, and there will be plenty of election deniers in key positions in swing states. Given the quirks in his personality, there are no boundaries he won’t transgress to protect his own interests and his fragile self-image. But what about J.D.? If he’s the one on the ballot, not Trump, should we have the same concerns?

J.D. is an extremely ambitious politician and, at least for the moment, a committed reactionary. Unlike Trump, however, he is not a narcissist, and I think he retains some respect for liberal democracy. The thought of going down as the most odious villain in American political history will trouble him far more than Trump. That potential legacy may be all that stands between us and disaster in 2028.

The Saudis are crying out for American military help against the Houthis, who are threatening the Red Sea escape route for their oil. Trump can’t make up his mind, and with good reason; doing nothing will result in significantly higher oil prices and cause the Saudis to look for security alternatives, while simply bombing the Houthis hasn’t worked in the past and probably won’t work now. What should the man on golf cart do?

There are no good alternatives. The only military option with any real chance of success is a ground invasion of Yemen. Such are the consequences of launching a stupid war.

He should have thought of that six months ago.

The NYT wants the US government to create a regulatory system for AI that mirrors the one created for nuclear energy after World War II. Does that make sense, and can it work?

Yes, but it will be much harder, because the bomb was purely a government project, while AI labs belong to incredibly wealthy tech titans with powerful incentives to escape regulation. In addition, the US government had the trust of its citizens after the war; do you really trust Trump to regulate AI wisely? Finally, adding layers of regulation would probably slow innovation and would expose the regulators to criticism about falling behind the Chinese. That will be a political football if there ever was one.

Of course, falling behind in the race to exterminate mankind is not necessarily a bad thing.

AI is software, not hardware; it only exists and operates in computers and cyberspace. That being the case, how can it destroy civilization as we know it today?

Here are three scenarios:

1. ECONOMIC DISASTER: A large portion of the world’s population is dependent on the internet in one way or another. Our economic system and our infrastructure rely on it. Rogue AI agents could essentially take over the internet without any help from humans; we would have to adjust by returning to the world of, say, 1990. The costs of doing so would be immense.
2. AI KILLS ALL OF MANKIND: To use one example here, AI can identify a way to create a bioweapon that would destroy humanity, but it can’t actually do it by itself, because it doesn’t have a corporeal existence. For this to happen, it would have to operate through collaborators (either robots tied to the internet or disgruntled humans) or be so intelligent that it could turn itself into matter. The last scenario here would make AI truly godlike.
3. AI ENSLAVES HUMANITY: Same as #2–it would require collaborators or the ability to escape cyberspace and become corporeal.

Ted Cruz is concerned about the impacts of AI, but he wants to regulate with a light touch, because he wants the killer robots of the future to be American, not Chinese. Does he really understand the problem?

No. The ultimate regulatory issue is whether AI can escape human control. If it does, the “American” killer robots of Ted’s imagination are far more likely to kill Americans than Chinese.

You can make a pretty strong argument that Trump 1.0 was better than Bush. Yes, his rhetoric was obnoxious and divisive, he sucked up to dictators, his response to the virus was shambolic, and he tried to overthrow the system in his last days, but he didn’t initiate an unsuccessful Middle East war, constantly threaten us with the use of emergency powers, or drive us into a massive recession through inept deregulation. The economy was running strongly prior to the virus. That, along with some collective amnesia about the events of 2020 and January 2021, is why he won in 2024.

You can’t make the same argument about Trump 2.0. As I predicted, his economic plans were not designed to return us to the glory days of 2019. He has started his own ridiculous Middle East war, attempted to wreck more American institutions than I can count, and generated unnecessary inflation with his tariffs. The threat of pure autocracy through the use of emergency powers hangs over us every day, and a serious recession caused by a popping of the AI bubble is a real possibility.

It’s as if we combined the worst elements of both Bush and Trump 1.0 and amplified them.

When I listed the boxes DeSantis is checking off in his effort to prove himself to the reactionary base, I neglected to mention his new zeal for executing prisoners. Florida may or may not be the state where woke goes to die, but it certainly has become the place where criminals do.

Hey, it worked for Bill Clinton. Why not DeSantis?

Donald Trump and Kash Patel think Flock cameras are just awesome. The base disagrees, and other reactionary politicians are listening. Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are taking action to limit the use of the cameras. Are there any lessons to be learned here?

Two. First of all, Trump never felt any obligation to follow the Constitution or the law; if he no longer cares about the opinions of the base, what obstacles remain to fend off a purely personal autocracy? Second, having profited from widespread cynicism about government, Trump is having trouble turning it off when it no longer suits him.

Call it Epstein Syndrome.