Month: July 2024

It will happen in three ways. First of all, the far left will be at the front of the battle against the excesses of Trumpism; the center will follow out of loyalty and admiration. That’s what happened in 2020. Second, while legislation won’t be at the center of Trump 2.0 for the reasons I set forth in a previous post, there undoubtedly will come a time when Trump will be demanding the end of the filibuster. Since Mitch will no longer be in charge, it could happen, which would make the approval of progressive legislation much easier when the left is back in charge. Third, Trump’s likely refusal to comply with court orders with which he disagrees will establish a precedent that the left can use in subsequent years to “reform” the Supreme Court. The Court will no longer be an obstacle to radical change if the government can get away with ignoring its decisions.

Ross Douthat once again makes the argument that the Democrats really aren’t that worried about a Trump presidency, because they refuse to move to the center to win swing voters. Is he right?

My question is, what unpopular left-leaning positions could Biden eschew in order to win over centrists? On policy, he is almost perfectly aligned with the preferences of a majority of the American people, if the polls are to be believed.

The Democrats aren’t losing because they want to protect the environment, or because they want to tax rich people, or because they support abortion rights. America agrees with them, not the GOP, on all of those points. The Democrats are losing because the public is pissed off about inflation and immigration and because Biden is too old, not because the left is viewed as being in thrall to wokeness. If you don’t believe me, ask Trump and DeSantis; the latter ran on the wokeness issue and lost, while the former is saying nothing about it in his campaign.

Biden has lost ground after the debate, but he hasn’t completely cratered. Why? Because the blue team is far more motivated by its fear of Trump than by its feelings for him. People like me will vote for him in spite of his increasingly obvious infirmities because the alternative is so awful. No imaginable set of facts can change that.

But the election will be decided by a few million independent voters who are motivated primarily either by the state of the economy or by their perceptions of which clearly dreadful candidate is less unacceptable. Biden lost a large percentage of the latter category by his performance at the debate. It is unlikely that he can do anything to win them back. That means his only chances of winning the election are some sort of complete Trump meltdown or a remarkably positive change in the condition of the country. Will lower interest rates do the trick, by creating euphoria among investors? How about a cease-fire in the Middle East? I doubt it, but maybe.

A documentary on the New Testament that I was watching a few years ago made the point that there was no real documentary or archaeological evidence to support the account in the Gospel of Matthew regarding the Massacre of the Innocents. The commentators acknowledged, however, that the story couldn’t be completely written off, because the record showed that Herod was perfectly capable of ordering the massacre.

I think about this frequently when I project the path of Trump 2.0. I don’t know for certain that Trump would use his emergency powers and his control of the military to destroy liberal democracy in America. The likelihood is that he won’t try to send me and other people who despise him to a concentration camp. The one thing I can’t say, however, is that he is incapable of it. In addition, there will be no adults in the room to discourage him this time around, and he now knows there will be no legal consequences for him if he acts illegally. We will all be living normal lives purely at his sufferance.

That’s why I will vote for Biden if he is my only plausible alternative in November even though I have grave doubts about his ability to do the job. What else can I do? It’s literally a matter of life or death.

About his style of governance, nothing. Trump is too much of a crazed autocrat to permit anyone in his administration to tell him what to do. If you don’t believe me, just ask Mike Pence.

But it will tell us where, if anywhere, he thinks his vulnerabilities are in the coming election. If he picks Rubio, he’s concerned about keeping the Haley voters on board. If Vance is the choice, he wants to fire up the base, as usual. If he chooses a woman, he’s still worried about how he is perceived by over half the electorate.

If it’s Burgum, he doesn’t think he needs any help to win the election; he just doesn’t want someone who can ever outshine or criticize him.

In case you hadn’t noticed, wokeness is the dog that isn’t barking in the Trump campaign, which has focused primarily on revenge and illegal immigration. Why?

For two reasons. First, Trump correctly sees that wokeness is too remote from the lives of his base to make much of an impact. Second, the man on golf cart is primarily focused on revenge; to my knowledge, no trans people served on the January 6 committee or attempted to prosecute him.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that fighting wokeness won’t be a priority once Trump takes office. The reactionaries around him will see to that even if he doesn’t care much about it.

A column in yesterday’s NYT made the interesting point that public perceptions of the war in Ukraine are being largely dictated by analogies to World War I and World War II. The World War II proponents see Putin as Hitler, and any attempt to negotiate with him as Munich; the World War I supporters, on the other hand, think the most important task is to avoid stumbling into a wider conflict. Which analogy is better?

The origins of the war, which is an exercise in naked unprovoked imperialism, much more closely resemble World War II than World War I. The war itself in every respect looks more like World War I. By my calculation, we have reached the 1917 stage of the war; neither side is capable of gaining much ground, but the possibility of outside intervention looms. In 1917, the Russian government was collapsing, but the US was entering the war; today, the issue is the American election, and the possibility of Trump changing sides.

The other part of the analogy that matters now is Putin’s ultimate objective in starting the war. Is he more Hitler or Hindenburg? The question is less significant than you might think, because under the pressure of the British blockade, the Germans were becoming more and more aggressive in their war aims by 1918. The Brest-Litovsk treaty was not far removed from what Hitler would have demanded in 1941, and the Germans probably would have turned France into a Vichy-like state if their 1918 offensives had been completely successful.

In other words, whether Putin is a figure from World War I or World War II, he cannot be trusted to stop with Ukraine.

I have often compared John Roberts to Mitch McConnell, and with good reason; the two are the twin architects of the McConnell Project, which prohibits the left from exercising real power even when in office. With the death of Chevron, their work is essentially done. The federal bureaucracy, workers, and consumers will see their rights eroded over the coming years, with the approval of the judiciary; the big winners will be wealthy businessmen.

But the Trump immunity case suggests that Roberts has moved on. He wasn’t in the tank for Trump before; now he is. My guess is that his plan is to play the insider game with Trump; he believes he can keep the man on golf cart within the guardrails of liberal democracy by building credibility with him on other issues. Under this theory, Trump won’t openly defy the rule of law if he has reason to believe he will get most of what he wants by complying with it.

In other words, Roberts wants to be Lindsey Graham. How well has that worked in the past?

People around Trump are starting to suggest that the “secret plan” to end the Ukraine war will include an ultimatum to Putin: accept my terms or watch me send even more arms to the Ukrainians. Is that plausible?

It is conceptually possible that Trump might threaten both sides, but it won’t work, because Putin wouldn’t regard an ultimatum from him as being credible. He knows that Trump genuinely hates Ukraine, and it is doubtful, as a practical matter, that the pace of arms transfers could be accelerated very much. Threats to unleash NATO or use nukes would be even less credible. In the end, Trump will give him what he wants. He may just have to wait a bit.

I frequently made the point during Trump’s first term that the man on golf cart viewed the presidency as a prize to be enjoyed, not a job, let alone a public trust. Biden’s comments about his fitness and his candidacy during the ABC interview had a similar smell to them. Biden appears to think that he earned the nomination, so the rest of us just have to get on board. If he does his best and loses, he can live with that.

That attitude is just wrong. The objectives are to save liberal democracy from Donald Trump and to nominate a candidate who is capable of serving for the next four years, not to give Biden a reward for four positive years in office. To keep him as the nominee means forfeiting the blue team’s best argument against Trump–his manifest lack of fitness to serve. The public has already told us consistently and resoundingly that throwing that card away costs us the support of undecided voters and thus the election. It cannot stand.

The center and the left far outperformed expectations in the second round of the French election yesterday. You might think I’m celebrating today, but I’m not. Why?

For two reasons. First, even though the culture war hostility between the right and the left is very deep, hence the outcome of the election, the extremes actually have more in common on issues such as taxation, spending, and the EU than they do with the center. How is France to be governed for the next year under those conditions, particularly since Macron is in no position to negotiate with the right? Second, the right will not have any responsibility for the success or failure of the government, and it will have a plausible argument that it was deprived of power by a corrupt deal between the center and the left. That will put it in an even better position to win the presidency in 2027, without any constraints on its use of power.

Pay me now or pay me later. Short-term gain for long-term pain. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The overwhelming victory of the decidedly not populist Labour Party should alert you that right-wing extremists are not invincible. What is going on here is a revolt against incumbency, not a massive turn to the far right.

But why is that? Macron and Biden have done a good job keeping unemployment down. Inflation is falling, even in the UK. Why is everyone so pissed off?

The unfamiliar impact of inflation is part of the story. I think the rest of it is attributable to the virus. You see it on the roads and on t-shirts as well as during elections–the survivors of the virus are angry and frustrated and want someone to blame.

If the populist right wins power in France and the US and delivers nothing but incompetence, chaos, and pain, which is far more likely than not, what happens then? Will the voters treat them with the same disdain they show for Biden and Macron? TBD.

Donald Trump thinks America has interests, but no permanent friends. He doesn’t believe in anything like a community of values. He argues that our supposed allies do nothing but rip us off. As a result, he will go out of his way to offend them after he takes office. He will once again withdraw from the Paris agreement, impose universal tariffs for spurious national security reasons, and treat NATO as a protection racket.

The problem is that America needs allies in its struggle for predominance against China. How does Trump square this circle? By assuming that America has the military and economic power to force its former allies to toe the line. By behaving as a bully, in other words.

This tactic reminds me of the plan designed by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tirpitz to bully the UK into alliance with the German Empire prior to 1914 by building the German “risk fleet.” How did that turn out?

Biden’s hole card has always been Trump’s manifest unfitness for office. Realizing that, the man on golf cart and his party have been struggling to find reasons to argue that Biden was equally unfit over the last few years. The most obvious example of this was the abortive attempt by House Republicans to get enough votes to impeach the president. None of it succeeded with anyone except the Fox News crowd until the debate.

Today, when Biden argues that Trump is a criminal and a potential dictator, the GOP can credibly respond that Biden is not physically or mentally up to the job. Expect to see commercials to that effect on regular rotation between now and November. As of today, the voters seem to agree; don’t expect that to change anytime soon. A dictator, in the eyes of swing voters, may be a safer bet in a dangerous world than a man whose lucid periods reportedly end in the late afternoon.

If Biden remains in the race, which seems inevitable at this point, his argument on fitness will fall on deaf ears, which will only leave him with differences with Trump on policy. An energetic candidate might be able to win on that alone, given the obvious weaknesses in the Trump agenda. Is Biden up to that task? Given that he plans to cut back on his schedule in order to avoid more public senior moments, the obvious answer to the question is no.

The president of Heritage was quoted yesterday, I believe, as saying that a Trump victory would result in a “Second American Revolution,” which would be bloodless if the left did not resist it. The Trump campaign, justifiably worried about the inflammatory language, tried to put distance between itself and Heritage without actually disavowing anything specific in the Project 2025 agenda.

Given Trump’s erratic behavior and thought patterns, it is reasonable to assume that Heritage will not be dictating terms to him. However, the organization is full of friends and true believers, so anything it says must be taken both literally and seriously. In light of that, you have to wonder if the fragment of the electorate that will vote for Trump purely out of concern about Biden’s health, or out of a misplaced desire to bring back the economy of 2019, knows that it is actually giving its consent to a “Second American Revolution.” And what about the “bloodless” part? Is Heritage telling us that legal dissent to its program will be met with force?

I can’t read it any other way.