Cromwell

Regardless of what assurances he gives to the Senate, it should be obvious to everyone that Todd Blanche lacks the requisite independence to be our next AG. Will Susan Collins agree? After all, she voted to confirm Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. And, of course, she supported Bret Kavanaugh, scolding the doubters along the way. We all know how that turned out.

Collins doesn’t have any good options; she’s either going to offend MAGA supporters or the center left in Maine with her vote. My guess is that she stands more to lose by voting to confirm Blanche, but that remains to be seen. Graham Platner and I will be watching with keen interest.

Rand Paul is a CL. Logically, he should be openly advocating for Social Security cuts. After all, Social Security is just another hammock of dependency, and cutting government always expands freedom and economic growth.

But no! Paul is actually making the usual call for a bipartisan commission, so the Democrats can share the blame for the cuts. When push comes to shove, he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions.

(Trump is once again entertaining his fellow strongmen at his DC club. As usual, Putin is the first to arrive.)

T: Vlad the Impaler! Good to see you, my old friend!

P: It’s always good to be able to hang out with my peers. You’ve done a much better job of being a strongman this time than you did last time. I’m still disappointed in you, though.

T: Why?

P: Because I still have to fight the war in Ukraine, and you haven’t completely dismantled NATO yet.

T: I’ve done a lot for you, Vlad. We’re no longer giving meaningful assistance to Ukraine, and I’m pulling troops out of Europe. What more do you want?

P: Put the stake in NATO’s heart and completely change sides on the war. Pressure Ukraine to make a deal. Show those bastards you’re the boss.

T: It’s not that simple. A large part of my party supports NATO and Ukraine. They’d go nuts if I did your bidding.

P: I’m tired of the excuses. Be a real strongman and tell your party what to do. They’ll follow you off a cliff, anyway. You should know that as well as I do.

(Xi enters the room)

T: Xi-man! My favorite Chinaman! Welcome to the land of the formerly free!

X: Good to see you, Donald.

T: We’re real partners now. We control all of the world that Vlad doesn’t occupy. We make the decisions, and everyone has to live with them. That’s what power is all about.

X: So you finally admit that you don’t have the cards when you play with us?

T: I still have some. Don’t press your luck. But I won’t try to bully you the way I do everyone else, because I know you can inflict pain on me, too.

X: Damn right I can. I’ll let you do what you want in your hemisphere, but don’t tell me how to run mine.

(Kim enters)

T: Rocket Man! What’s up?

K: I’m disappointed you’re spending all of your time with Iran. I actually have nukes and ICBMs, you know. I’m a greater threat to you than ten ayatollahs, and you still don’t give me any attention.

T: I know, it’s unfair, but Bibi insists. Nobody in South Korea is demanding that I go to war with you.

K: Well, finish your war quickly and start giving me the attention I deserve. Otherwise, I may have to start threatening fire and fury again.

T: So noted.

(Erdogan enters)

T: Turkish delight! What’s happening, man? I understand the campaign is going well.

E: Yes, I’m busy putting my opponents in jail. It’s a lesson you can learn from me.

T: Kash is working on it. He’s already digging up dirt on Newsom. That’s his job.

E: Well, tell him to work faster. Word is spreading your party is going to lose the midterms even with all the gerrymandering. A real strongman never loses.

T: I’m a winner. Never forget that. One way or another, we’ll win the midterms, and then we’ll start on 2028. That’s the real prize.

(Bukele enters)

T: Trump of the tropics! How’s the prison business going?

B: You need to send me more criminals. Too many of them are going to Africa.

T: I have to deal with the court system, and you don’t seem to have much more capacity. I’ll send you all the riffraff you can handle.

B: I look forward to it. We need the money.

T: OK, folks, listen up. I have a special guest for you today. Bibi is here to show you video of Hezbollah operatives being blown up by their pagers!

P: This will be awesome! It’s even better than Novichok. It’s way more dramatic.

E: You’re always doing this to me, Donald. I’m out of here.

For many years, the default position on Social Security within the GOP was to support cuts, but to force the Democrats to share the blame for them. The relative growth of the Reactionary faction within the party may make that position untenable in 2028, however. How will the candidates react?

Donald Trump managed to avoid this divisive issue by ignoring it and kicking the can down the road. With the cliff coming in 2032, according to the most recent estimates, J.D. won’t have that luxury. My guess is that he will either call for a bipartisan commission to solve the problem without taking any positions on either increased taxes or cuts, thereby showing a complete lack of leadership, or to call for huge cuts elsewhere in the safety net in order to fill in the funding hole. Since the GOP has already savaged safety net programs in the BBB, the second approach may not be as popular as it would have been in the past.

There is an opening here for an economic populist to call for increased taxes on the affluent to fill in the gap. This could cost J.D. the support of a large portion of the base. Will someone like Josh Hawley, or even Ron DeSantis, take it? TBD.

Here’s where the factions stand on the Social Security cliff, which is currently scheduled to occur during the next presidency:

1. CLs: Our seniors having been lounging in the hammock of dependency for too long. Cutting Social Security will reduce the cost of government and increase freedom and economic growth.
2. PBPs: Everything is on the table except raising taxes on businesses.
3. CDs: Social Security is part of the national fabric. It reduces poverty and binds the generations together. It should not be cut. If taxes need to go up, so be it.
4. Reactionaries: Many of us are elderly white Christians whose sole source of income is Social Security. Cuts are consequently off the table. Increase taxes if that cannot be avoided.

As you can see, this is an extremely divisive issue for the GOP. How will that play out in the presidential primaries? For that, see my next series of posts.

From about 1990 to 2020, the American political system acknowledged the appalling impacts of climate change in the abstract but resisted taking meaningful action to mitigate them because the problem was too remote. Once the problem actually started to manifest itself in more and more powerful hurricanes, the system then threw up its hands and said it was too late–the damage had already been done. Changes to conditions on the ground overpowered the system’s ability to direct them.

The same could well happen with AI regulation. All the tech barons need to do is jam up the system, make idle promises about sharing wealth, and run out the clock. By the time we better understand what the policy implications of AI really are, it will be too late to stop the juggernaut.

The Israeli government has been trying desperately to prod America into attacking Iran for decades. Bibi finally persuaded Trump to be his yard guy in 2025 and then followed it up with a second, more important success this year. Life for Israeli hawks was good, it seemed.

But now it appears that Trump will sign a Gaza deal that could ripen into an Obama deal over the objections of the Israelis. The Israeli public has noted that the ceasefire takes the immediate military pressure off the Iranian government, and if Phase II becomes reality, the war will have accomplished exactly none of the government’s objectives. They’re right. The lawn guy is calling the shots now, and he is following his own interests, not the homeowner’s.

Does anyone in this country feel sorry for Bibi? Apart from Lindsey Graham, I mean?

A UFC fight at the White House on the great man’s birthday. It’s a perfect metaphor for what America has become in the Trump era.

Ross Douthat, unlike many of his deluded right-wing compatriots, will concede that Jefferson was not an orthodox Christian. Nevertheless, he argues that the reference to a creator God in the Declaration is the root of liberal democracy in America. Is that accurate?

It is undeniably true that strongly committed Christians were very prominent in the fight for social justice in both the 19th and 20th centuries. It is equally true, however, that strongly committed Christians were on both sides of those battles, and that liberalism is rooted in the failure of Catholics and Protestants to impose their views on their opponents in the 16th and 17th centuries. Liberalism is based on ideas of toleration, and toleration was born of exhaustion, not idealism. The relationship between Christianity and liberalism is, therefore, a mixed bag at best.

An Obama deal is a mutually acceptable agreement with Iran over the Iranian nuclear program; its elements include the disposal of nuclear assets for a specified timeframe, temporary limits on enrichment, economic benefits for Iran, and an enforceable system of inspections. It does not include meaningful and genuinely enforceable limits on missile production, a permanent commitment to eschew a peaceful nuclear program, or a promise not to fund proxies. A Gaza deal, on the other hand, is a ceasefire agreement that puts off the major issues to a second phase which may or may not ultimately bear fruit.

If the deal that is being discussed right now is signed, it will be a Gaza deal. It may or may not eventually evolve into an Obama deal. If it doesn’t, we will be back at war, the entire exercise to date will have accomplished none of Trump’s apparent objectives, and we will have even less leverage than we did at the beginning of the year. If it does, we will have a product with some value, but it probably could have been achieved without a war, and the absurdity of recreating a deal that Trump destroyed in his first term will be exposed for the entire world to see.

Either way, the costs of the war will far exceed the benefits.

Everyone knows Trump lies all of the time. On occasion, he does it to deceive the public; sometimes he thinks it creates leverage; sometimes he does it to pump himself up; every now and then, he wants to force his supporters to prove their loyalty. The bottom line here is that nothing he says about the war can be trusted; his actions will speak much louder than his words.

But the Iranian regime lies, too. It needs to prove to its subjects that their suffering has been worth it. As a result, it makes statements about the negotiations and potential agreements that no reasonable person can believe, as they do not reflect the actual conditions on the ground. Its actions will speak louder than words, too.

The ultimate outcome of the negotiations, if they succeed, has been known for months. The only real questions involve a few of the details, particularly about the treatment of the nuclear material. Both sides will have to be able to spin an agreement as a victory; in Trump’s case, he will also have to make a plausible argument that he didn’t make an Obama deal. The need to save face is the real sticking point in the negotiations–not the contents of the deal itself.

Reactionaries hate AI because it potentially threatens the economic interests of average white Christian workers. The left hates AI because it figures to vastly increase the wealth and power of techno-aristocrats and capitalists in general, while making the lives of millions of workers more precarious. Is an alliance between the two possible in 2028?

Yes. It would most likely be aimed at the candidacy of J.D. Vance, who will have to defend both Trump’s laissez-faire policies and his own strong ties to tech barons, but it would have an impact on the primaries in both parties. Look for the Democrats to be divided; some will call for the taxation and regulation of the goose that lays the golden egg, while others will demand more drastic action, including lengthy moratoria.

Quite apart from the legal and fiscal issues associated with it, nationalizing AI companies comes with plenty of risk. Do you feel comfortable giving Donald Trump a stake in tech companies? What would he do with it? And what happens if AI, in the short and medium term, is a bubble? The American taxpayers would lose, bigly, under those circumstances.

But leaving AI unregulated is dangerous, too. That will result in a wide range of dangers to American workers and vastly increased inequality. Tech barons could effectively be more powerful than the president, because they could use their model to shut down the country. They could even threaten to sell it to the Chinese. In this scenario, regardless of what the public wants, Elon Musk could wind up as the true ruler of the country.

The obvious answer is to control AI through taxation and regulation. But the AI companies will invest many millions of dollars in the political process to see that doesn’t happen. And even if their efforts fail, they have the Supreme Court and the filibuster on their side. The tech industry runs at 100 miles an hour; the government crawls, and it doesn’t even know how to regulate AI at this point. By the time the answers become clear, it will be too late; the techno-aristocrats will already be in charge, and we will be their subjects.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Lindsey is back in the Oval Office after his victory in the primary.

T: Linseed! What are you doing here? Why aren’t you out campaigning?

G: Haven’t you heard? I escaped the runoff. With your help, of course. I couldn’t have done it without you.

T: Of course. I’m a winner. Everything I touch always turns out OK.

G: Which brings us to the war. You aren’t thinking about making an Obama deal, are you? That would make the war a disaster. It wouldn’t have accomplished anything.

T: Of course not! Obama made a terrible deal. Mine will be much, much better. Obama didn’t know how to negotiate. I do.

G: You understand leverage better than anyone.

T: Absolutely. That’s the key. The damage I can do with tariffs and the military is my leverage. No one else has that.

G: But the Iranians don’t seem to understand that. They aren’t giving up. In fact, lots of people are arguing they’re winning.

T: It’s just because the price of oil has spiked. That will end soon. Trust me. Didn’t I say everything I touch turns out right?

G: But there is speculation that world reserves are running low, and the price of oil is about to skyrocket again. What if the Iranians try to wait you out? Can you really ignore what that will mean to American voters? Won’t that force you into an Obama deal?

T: The voters love me. They know how great I am. They’re willing to live through a little turbulence. Anything to the contrary is fake news.

G: But the polls say otherwise, and Republican candidates are starting to get nervous.

T: The polls are fake news, and I control my party. Just ask Ken Paxton.

G: You may need to start bombing civilian infrastructure in Iran to gain more leverage if the Iranians don’t capitulate soon.

T: I hope I don’t have to do that, but if I do, I do. Putin would understand. The strong do what they have to do, and everyone else has to live with it. That’s the way the world works.

G: So I hear. I hope you’re right about the polls. Things are going to get really ugly around here if you’re wrong. You could even get impeached again.

T: I’m always right. You should know that better than anyone. (Graham leaves)

One of the few issues that unites the American right and left is contempt for the current Iranian regime. Boomers hate it because of the events of 1979; right-wing Christians despise all Muslims; and liberal democrats have issues with a repressive, reactionary, autocratic state. Everyone here would like to see it go.

The divisions in this country are purely pragmatic. The left, and the genuinely “America First” faction of MAGA, think the costs of regime change outweigh the benefits. Trump, Bibi, and Lindsey obviously don’t agree, but they have been unwilling to match the objective with the means necessary to accomplish it–namely, a massive ground invasion. As a result, the regime will conclude the war stronger, not weaker.