Cromwell

On the once-again President Trump.

Rising gas prices made him a grump.

He blusters and cries;

Then he threatens and lies;

But his poll number’s still in a slump.

“Xi Jinping Thought” is required reading in China. Trump is a far greater man, and he leads a more powerful country, so why shouldn’t he have the same privilege?

It would read something like this:

1. History is made by great men, of whom Trump is by far the greatest. Everyone else is just ballast.
2. Great men aren’t subject to the rules of morality that regulate the rest of us.
3. All relationships are about power.
4. Every relationship has a winner and a loser.
5. Real men prove themselves by winning through negotiation.
6. Negotiations are won by acquiring and using leverage and by complete ruthlessness.
7. Truth is determined purely by its usefulness.
8. Experts don’t know anything. Rely solely on your intuition. If you’re a great man, it will never fail you.
9. Never apologize, and don’t let anyone think you are retreating. If you must retreat, spin it as a victory and change the subject.
10. The only jobs that matter are performed by strong men.
11. America was built by WASPs. They have the right to run the country in perpetuity. Everyone else should just accept that and shut up.
12. The president is given unlimited power by the people for four years. He is accountable to no one but himself during that time.
13. The greatness of a country is determined by its balance of trade.
14. Where there’s a winner, there’s a way.
15. Never stop telling the world how great you are. If you say it enough times, some people will believe you.

Ron DeSantis keeps ticking off the boxes for 2028. Having long since established his bona fides as a wokeness warrior, he built up some anti-immigrant cred by funding Alligator Alcatraz last year. Now he is proposing to put CL ideology into the Florida Constitution by dramatically cutting property taxes. The voters will have the ultimate say in November.

The DeSantis amendment has two prongs. The first is a large tax cut which benefits resident property owners and, to a lesser extent, businesses; its clear objective is to force local governments to cut services. The second, and even more obnoxious, prong, prohibits local government expenditures on anything other than core services. This is the part that clearly puts CL ideology into the Florida Constitution.

The concept of “core services” is defined in the legislation but is vague enough to permit plenty of debate about, for example, whether local governments will be required by law to close parks and libraries. There is also uncertainty about how special districts whose funding is limited to property taxes will be able to function; this issue, we are told, will be resolved by the Florida Legislature in some as yet unknown way next year. It is clear, however, that public expenditures on social and cultural services will have to go. Whether it will be practically possible to even maintain the listed kinds of infrastructure is also an open question.

Can DeSantis sell this to 60 percent of the Florida electorate? More than 40 percent of the voters–and that number includes some Trump supporters–can’t stand the man. DeSantis will be hoping that a narrow view of their self-interest will pull the amendment through; he can then use it in his sales pitch to small government ideologues and wealthy business donors when he runs for president. I have my doubts, but we’ll see.

And you thought Tulsi Gabbard was a bad choice for DNI! Bill Pulte has absolutely no experience pertaining to foreign intelligence. He does, however, have impressive credentials when it comes to digging up dirt, real or imagined, on Trump’s domestic opponents.

This appointment puts a spin on the gathering of intelligence that hasn’t been seen since the Nixon years. Call them Pulte and the Plumbers.

According to a recent column in the NYT, one of the recurring themes on social media is “men are trash.” This is undoubtedly due to changes in the economy that significantly devalued the traditional male advantages in strength and physical skills. The evolution of the knowledge-based economy meant the future seemed, as they said, female. But what implications will AI have for this development?

AI is coming for your knowledge-based jobs, ladies. When it is done, you may find that men aren’t really trash. After all, we’re good at changing lightbulbs and killing the spider in the bathroom; AI will never help you with those tasks.

Bernie Sanders argues that half of the value of the AI companies should become public property and be put into a sovereign wealth fund. Unlike most of his ideas, this one has some merit and is worthy of further discussion. What are the potential pitfalls of the proposal?

I see three major counterarguments:

1. THE AI DEVELOPERS WILL ARGUE THAT PUBLIC OWNERSHIP WILL CREATE A DISINCENTIVE FOR RAPID IMPROVEMENT OF THE MODELS AND WILL CAUSE US TO FALL BEHIND THE CHINESE: This position doesn’t impress me much, because half of a potentially vast pile of wealth is still a huge amount, and the CCP is going to keep tight reins on AI in order to maintain control of the country. All of the available evidence suggests that the Chinese government simply doesn’t view the AI race in the same way Trump and our capitalists do.
2. GIVING TRUMP THE POWER TO CONTROL A FUND THAT COULD BE WORTH WELL OVER A TRILLION DOLLARS SOUNDS LIKE SUICIDE: The obvious way to run the fund would be to make its governing body bipartisan, but the Supreme Court has probably put an end to that kind of organization with several recent decisions. Permitting Trump, or any future president, to use the fund as a slush fund would be a disaster. The workings of the fund would have to be prescribed in great detail through legislation to avoid creating a monster.
3. THIS IS A TAKING OF PROPERTY THAT PUTS ALL PRIVATE PROPERTY AT RISK OF GOVERNMENT CONFISCATION: Sanders maintains that the raw material of all AI models is the accumulated wisdom of humanity from the beginning of time, relatively little of which was added by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. That argument provides a reasonable basis for a degree of public ownership. As for the slippery slope, AI is a unique form of property that deserves a unique kind of ownership and regulation. The real question is whether John Roberts will accept that kind of logic. I have my doubts.

Hurricane season starts today. According to Politico, FEMA is not ready; its budget and staff have been cut aimlessly, its leadership is a shambles, and its mission is unclear. Trump wants to reduce its footprint and throw more responsibility to the states, but he hasn’t decided exactly what comes next. It is a recipe for disaster.

Trump presumably is gambling on El Nino to reduce hurricane impacts this year, but as the meteorologists love to tell us, it only takes one. If his guess is wrong, we will be flooded with TV images of deaths and desperate refugees shortly before the midterms. That won’t exactly endear him to the voters in Florida, Texas, and North Carolina.

As I’ve noted before, J.D. Vance is the Republican bridge to everywhere; he has intellectual connections that run from Silicon Valley to the Vatican. In addition to reverse engineering Trump’s impulses into some sort of coherent ideology, J.D.’s job is to keep the various factions of the GOP together. For the most part, he does this by urging them to focus, not on their differences, but on hating the left. Will this approach work with AI?

The Reactionaries and the CLs have mutually exclusive opinions about AI. I predict that Vance will try to square this circle in 2028 by insisting that AI will be the magic bullet that vastly improves the lot of white workers, tariffs having failed in this task. AI deregulation is therefore consistent with his dream of the Godly Society.

Will the Reactionaries buy it? To extend the use of initials one more time, I suspect they will think it is bs.

Trump has been using primaries to get rid of GOP incumbents whom he considers to be inadequately loyal even if they are stronger general election candidates than their challengers. This is another reason some commentators have decided he has no interest in the outcome of the midterms. Is his position reasonable?

From his perspective, yes. There is nothing Trump dislikes more than disloyalty. In the ordinary course of business, the power of a lame duck over his party wanes as he approaches his sell by date. The midterms are Trump’s last opportunity to demonstrate his dominance over the GOP before his party inevitably turns its attention to the succession. Hence, the purges.

There is a lot of speculation that Trump doesn’t care if the GOP fares poorly in the midterms. This has been fueled, in part, by comments made by Orange Jesus himself about his indifference to public opinion and the forthcoming elections. Should we take them seriously?

Here are my reactions:

1. Trump’s comments were made in the context of the war and the ongoing negotiations. He correctly perceives that the Iranians view the midterms as leverage against him; his objective is to eliminate the leverage. Whether the Iranians will take him seriously is another question.
2. Trump never viewed Congress as any sort of an equal partner. He wants GOP majorities to keep the Democrats off his back while he expands executive power; significant legislation beyond the tax and benefit cuts in the BBB were never part of his plan. In that sense, he genuinely has little interest in the outcome of the midterms.
3. But Democratic majorities would certainly attempt to put limits on his autocratic plans. That is why he pushed so hard for premature redistricting.

The bottom line here is that Trump really does care about the midterms—just not for the reasons that most presidents do.

On its face, if anyone has a right to be an arrogant jerk, it’s Paul McCartney; after all, he is a musical genius–one in a hundred billion, maybe. And yet, by all accounts, he’s not one. Why? Because he finds it inexplicable that an otherwise unremarkable lad from Liverpool was given an unbelievably rare gift, and some of his lyrics suggest he believes he channels music from the other side. That will make you humble really fast.

Compare this with Donald Trump, who thinks his unfortunate ability to mobilize a dissatisfied element of society gives him the right to bring chaos and destruction to the entire world. Not exactly the same thing at all.

An Israeli election is coming in the reasonably near future. Bibi and his wars will take center stage. How successful have they been?

Here’s the record:

1. OCTOBER 7: Israel was caught unprepared, as Bibi’s government, which had supported Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority, did not take the threat seriously. Bibi refuses to accept any blame for his mistakes, which only makes matters worse.
2. GAZA WAR: Very few hostages were returned alive. Hamas has lost most of its military capabilities for the short run, but it still runs the part of Gaza that the Israelis don’t occupy, thanks largely to the government’s failure to see the war as an exercise in counterinsurgency. The entire strip is rubble. Phase II of the peace deal is a sham. The rest of the world is appalled.
3. JUNE 2025 CAMPAIGN: This was both a tactical and strategic success, largely due to Israel’s willingness to stop short of a Gaza-style annihilation approach. Both Hezbollah and Iran were badly damaged, but neither surrendered.
4. THE 2026 WAR: Dissatisfied with the outcome of the 2025 war, Bibi grabs for the marshmallow and gains nothing. Regime change does not happen in Iran. The best prospect for peace is an updated Obama deal–you know, the one Bibi persuaded Trump to rip up. A new and ultimately fruitless occupation of south Lebanon appears to be in the cards.

In short, the various campaigns have bought Israel some time, but have not extinguished the problems, and have cost the Israelis the permanent support of its only reliable diplomatic backer. Is that a good tradeoff? The Israeli public will have to answer that question.

Aristotle famously defined man as “rational animal.” If he was right, where is humanity after AI?

With the dogs and cats. Fortunately, the “rational” part of the definition has not aged terribly well over the millennia. The uniquely human brain is much more complicated that that.

The other critical race in Ohio is for the Senate seat formerly held by J.D. Vance; Jon Husted, an unremarkable normie Republican, was appointed to it by Governor DeWine. The challenger is Sherrod Brown, a rumpled economic populist who held the other Ohio Senate seat until he was defeated by a car salesman in 2024. What should we expect from this race?

Brown was a protectionist before protectionism was cool, so his position on Trump’s tariffs will have to be somewhat nuanced. That’s a negative. Ohio is also a scarlet state at this point, which doesn’t help, either. The Iran war, however, will help him. He is also an experienced campaigner who knows better than any other Democrat how to push the buttons of Ohio voters. He ran well ahead of Harris in 2024.

This race will probably be determined by the extent of the swing against Trump. At this point, I would call it a toss-up.

The North Carolina Senate race pits Roy Cooper, a popular Democratic former governor, against Michael Whatley, a veteran Republican bureaucrat who, as far as I can tell, has never actually run for office himself. A PAC supporting Cooper is already running ads slamming Whatley for his failures as Trump’s Hurricane Helene “recovery czar.” What can we expect from this race?

Cooper starts with plenty of money in the bank, a large advantage in name recognition, and a host of issues to run on. It is highly unlikely that invoking the sacred name of Trump is going to help Whatley much with swing voters in a purple state under today’s circumstances. Whatley will wind up talking endlessly about how Cooper is soft on crime and trans people because, well, what else can he say?

Barring events between now and November that move the needle substantially on Trump’s popularity, this is Cooper’s race to lose. He had better not lose it if the Democrats have any realistic hope of flipping the Senate.