Month: July 2024

On its face, the Trump economic agenda will be devastating for American agriculture. His universal tariffs will invite universal retaliation against American farm products, which will dramatically reduce exports. In addition, the mass deportation campaign will deprive American farmers of their primary labor source. There will be no one left to pick crops. Food prices will soar, and many farms will simply go out of business.

None of which will cause the farmers to vote against Trump, since he is viewed as the only man who can save them from godless liberalism. And he will hear them. He will use the proceeds of the tariffs to write them giant checks. They will survive as entitled wards of the state while the rest of us struggle to deal with the higher cost of food.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

And to the Republican for which it stands.

One nation, under Trump

With no immigrants, and with misery and death for all liberals.

George Washington, in Freudian terms, was all superego. His superpowers were patriotism and self-discipline. He aspired to be a gentleman, a leader of men, and a figure similar to the heroes of the Roman Republic. By force of will, he succeeded in all of these things. The America of today would be unrecognizable without him.

Lincoln’s superpowers, on the other hand, were empathy and a form of simple eloquence that still touches the hearts of Americans today. The price he paid for his empathy was written all over his face. You’ve seen the pictures, so you know what I mean.

When Trump looks at America, on the other hand, he sees only himself. Unlike Washington, he is pure id. Unlike Lincoln, he has no feeling for anyone but himself. We will see the fruits of that if we are crazy enough to elect him.

Happy Independence Day! Enjoy it, because next year, we may be “celebrating” something completely different.

I don’t exactly feel sorry for Rishi Sunak; after all, he supported Boris and Brexit. Given his party’s dismal record in government over the last 14 years, however, selling himself to the electorate was an impossible job. No one should be surprised that he couldn’t do it.

After tomorrow’s bloodletting, what’s left of the Conservative Party will have to decide where it goes next. Recent history tells us that the party is malleable enough to accept leadership from any of the factions; after all, Boris was a Reactionary, David Cameron, Theresa May, and John Major were CDs, Mrs. Thatcher and Liz Truss were CLs, and Rishi is clearly a PBP. So what will happen this time around?

My guess is that, in the short run, you will see an alliance of CLs and Reactionaries running the party. When that doesn’t work, the Conservatives will turn back to the center.

Donald Trump just invents things out of thin air. He’s a used car salesman on a bad day. He spontaneously takes credit for “accomplishments” that clearly have nothing to do with him. But you can’t say he undersells himself.

On the other hand, the public consistently tells us it has no idea what Biden has done in 3+ years in office. It gives him no credit for expanding the welfare state, or growing the economy, or keeping unemployment low, or cutting student debt, or reducing inflation. It insists that we are in a recession, and that things are far worse than they were when both unemployment and inflation were actually much higher. How can this be?

The absence of a compelling and energetic salesman for the administration’s accomplishments has always been the hole in the middle of the campaign. After the debate, we now understand why.

Creating immunity for former presidents out of thin air creates the danger of a president completely out of control. To the Chief Justice, however, that is only a minor concern. The real problem that needed to be addressed was the potential harassment of the president after he leaves office, which could force him to govern without the requisite energy.

Roberts probably thinks he can keep Trump within the guardrails, but he doesn’t have any power–only the rapidly diminishing public respect for his office. He stands to be the American Von Papen the way things are going.

Oh, and by the way, Trump reposted some items on Lying Psycho yesterday calling for Liz Cheney and other political opponents to face military tribunals. I wasn’t kidding when I talked about Trump’s Michael Corleone moment; he’s already warning us it’s coming.

If the RN wins an absolute parliamentary majority in the second round, it will be entitled to govern, but only within the limits created by Macron. There are two possible results to this unsavory cohabitation: either the RN will make a mess of it, in which case they will be punished during the next presidential election; or they will find success in enforced moderation and have an incentive to continue with it. Either way, the Macron training wheels will keep them under control.

I suspect that was Macron’s thinking when he opted for the snap election. Let’s hope he was right.

The French left and right come from very different places. The left is urban, cosmopolitan, anticlerical, and anti-capitalist; the right is rural, anti-immigrant, Catholic, and culturally conservative. The two sides have common enemies, however; they hate Macron and the liberals, and they are deeply suspicious of change and powerful foreigners.

It is highly likely that the next French government will try to open the spending taps, which will provoke a strong reaction from both the markets and the more frugal countries in the EU–most notably, the Germans. Then what? Will there be riots in the streets? Will there be an EU constitutional crisis? If the latter, will the French electorate stumble into a Frexit that even the RN didn’t support during the campaign?

All of these are real possibilities, and right before the Olympics. Hang on to your hat.

As I predicted after the oral argument, the supposedly originalist Court ignored the text of the Constitution, all of the relevant legislative history, and case law and created law out of thin air. The Court doesn’t want to follow the will of the Founding Fathers; it wants to be the Founding Fathers. As a result, there is no chance the Trump case will go to trial before the election. The Court has put its thumb on the scale for purely partisan reasons.

But, believe it or not, that’s not the worst part of this opinion. At this point, we need to worry more about a future Trump dictatorship than the madcap attempt to overturn the 2020 election. There is plenty in this opinion that will make sure he has never held accountable for any such hypothetical future actions.

The Court correctly finds that the president has a few core powers under the Constitution which can be exercised without any meaningful review. None of them have any relevance to the facts of this case. The opinion goes on to say, however, that all other presidential actions that are plausibly official in nature are presumptively immune from prosecution, and that the presumption can only be rebutted if the intervention is not “intrusive.” That is a completely new standard, and a frightening one.

Based on the opinion, any attempts by Trump in office to, as he put it, “terminate the Constitution” will most likely be immune from prosecution if they involve communications with the AG and the military that have some plausible nexus to national security or law enforcement. The trick will be to make sure that the interactions leading to the coup only involve officials who are answerable to the president. Trump screwed up last time by involving private parties in his plotting; next time, we won’t be so lucky.