Author: hamilton1788

Left-wing and right-wing populists agree that the apparently unbroken list of American failures over the last few decades are the fault of a self-serving and corrupt elite class that needs to be overthrown. To them, Jeffrey Epstein is the very personification of this class. Hence the need to make the entire record public.

The Epstein emails apparently show lots of trivial and bipartisan efforts at networking, which is hardly surprising; building and maintaining connections has been a staple of cultural and political systems since the ancient Sumerians. It doesn’t account for the supposed elite failures. But is the record really that bad? Is America really the failure that the populists say it is? I will be addressing that issue in a series of posts over the next week.

Marco Rubio may or may not still aspire to be president; I’m really not sure. If he does, he will have to juggle his responsibility to be Trump’s pro-establishment foreign policy good cop with his need to build bridges to the far right. It’s a tough job.

As a result, we see episodes like the one we had last week, when he allegedly told GOP senators privately that the very pro-Putin Trump peace plan wasn’t really an American plan, while he insisted in public that it was.

This won’t end well for him unless he has political skills we haven’t seen yet.

She may well be back, but for now, this is MTG’s political obituary. What did she stand for, and how did this come to pass?

1. She has a coherent, if odious, vision for America. I have called it the New Confederacy. The idea behind it is to let red states be as beastly as they want to be relative to racial and religious minorities–most notably, Jews.
2. She genuinely believes in her vision, and wants to use the state to help white Christians thrive.
3. Until recently, she did not understand that Trumpism isn’t really about that vision; it is about increasing Trump’s powers to behave arbitrarily in order to show the world he is the boss. Usually, but not always, these powers are used to punish people reactionaries hate. That is why the red base supports Trump so passionately.
4. To be a true Trumpist, you have to be able to change your positions on a dime, because that is what the man on golf cart does.
5. MTG was unable to do this. She finally became aware that her vision was not always compatible with Trumpism. When that happened, she had the wisdom and the integrity to jump ship.

Yesterday’s NYT contained a Ross Douthat interview with Yoram Hazony, a right-wing Israeli who is one of the intellectual leaders of the national conservative movement. His views regarding nationalism and right-wing antisemitism make for fascinating, if hardly persuasive, reading.

There are three enormous problems with his views on nationalism:

1. Nations aren’t created; they evolve. America, the land of recent immigrants, is only an extreme example of this phenomenon. The UK, just to use one example, was created by Celts, Romans, Germans, Vikings, Normans, and immigrants from the British Empire. Its culture, language, and religious views are in a state of constant change. Trying to stop that process is a fool’s errand.
2. Identifying a group of people within a nation as legacy members of a tribe means everyone else is, at best, a second-class citizen. Once you have established a right to discriminate against some members of the nation, there is no obvious place to stop. Not every nationalist movement leads to Hitler or Franco, but there is nothing except memory and self-restraint to prevent it from happening.
3. A world of nations motivated purely by self-interest will, by definition, be violent and chaotic. Given today’s military technologies, the consequences of that are too grim to contemplate. That’s why we have the international institutions the national conservatives despise so much.

Trump and Bernie Sanders agree that America has been run into the ground by its elites, who need to be brought under control. Where do they disagree?

Trump thinks the elites in question are cultural and intellectual, and their failings are moral. Sanders thinks they are billionaires, and their sin is greed. As a result, the two have different solutions to our problems. Trump despises experts of all kinds and gets his information from his gut and the internet; he uses the legal and financial power of the federal government to crush the MSM, the bureaucracy, universities, and cultural institutions that refuse to support MAGA. Sanders has no issue with experts; he simply wants to use regulations and taxation to wipe American billionaires from the face of the planet.

They’re both wrong, but based on the numbers, Sanders has the better case. The one percent has become vastly wealthier over the last few decades; the top ten percent is only slightly better off.

Trump is now supporting a peace plan that gives Putin virtually everything he wants. In exchange for territorial concessions that the Russians haven’t earned yet, unreciprocated limits on Ukraine’s military, and a commitment to hold new Ukrainian elections in the near future, Trump is offering American security “guarantees” which are vague to the point of meaninglessness, which was undoubtedly what he was trying to accomplish.

Zelensky and the Europeans can’t possibly swallow this proposal, which makes Neville Chamberlain look like a savvy negotiator. Then what? Does Trump walk away from any kind of support for Ukraine–even the kind that makes American arms manufacturers money–and open the door to a complete Russian victory?

The Ukrainians and the Europeans will try to forestall this by slow walking the new proposal rather than outright rejecting it in the belief that Trump will ultimately either lose interest or change his mind. Let’s hope they are successful.

Viciousness somewhat mitigated by incompetence.

Trump meets with Lindsey Graham in the Oval Office.

T: Linseed! How are you doing?

G: Fine, Mr. President. Wow, there certainly is a lot of gold in here. I didn’t remember that.

T: Do you know why I put all the gold on the walls?

G: Because you want to be Louis XIV?

T: No, because gold is the color of winners, and I’m a winner. It reminds me of how much I’m winning.

G: Well, you certainly are owning the libs. You’ve wrecked the institutions they controlled. You sent troops to their cities to show you’re the boss. Those are wins, to be sure.

T: You bet. Wait until you see what I have planned for New York.

G: But you lost the elections.

T: Don’t be silly. I won the elections.

G: How? We got killed in New Jersey and Virginia, and Mamdani won in New York.

T: I wanted that to happen. Particularly Mamdani. It gives me something to run against next year.

G: You said you supported Cuomo.

T: Did you really believe that? I play chess when everyone else plays checkers. Just like Putin.

G: And then there is the Epstein thing.

T: Another win.

G: How did you win that one?

T: I fought off a Republican split. Everyone voted with me. That’s a huge win.

G: Of course, you tried to stop it for months.

T: The end is all that matters. It was another win.

G: What about your slumping polls?

T: Fake news. Everybody loves me, except the radical Marxist fascists and the press. That’s the real story.

G: What are you going to do about health care now that you won the shutdown?

T: Work on my concept of a plan. It’ll be great. Everyone will love it. Trust me on that.

G: It didn’t work out so well last time. Are you going to invade Venezuela?

T: Maybe. You never know. We’ll have to see.

G: You won’t even tell me?

T: Never question the great and powerful Oz, Linseed. (Graham leaves)

From his gold-plated aesthetics to his love for fossil fuels to his random interventions in the economy to his attempts to exercise power in his neighborhood to his authoritarian mindset, it is clear that Trump views MBS as a role model for his administration. What can we learn from the analogy?

First, given that the PIF has lost a lot of money, according to the NYT, Trump’s desire to direct the economy probably won’t end well. Second, it is worth noting that MBS is attempting to use his arbitrary power to bring Saudi Arabia kicking and screaming into the 21st century; Trump, on the other hand, prefers the society and the economy of 1950. Finally, Trump hasn’t ordered the killing of journalists or locked his oligarchs in a hotel and demanded money from them, but as he says, things happen.

If you view massive campaigns against immigrants as political acts rather than pure demonstrations of personal dominance, it makes sense for Trump to target places like Portland or Chicago. After all, ostentatious displays of law and order thrill the base, and Trump has little to lose in such bright blue cities. But what about Charlotte?

North Carolina is a purple state, and Charlotte has a long history of underperforming for the Democrats. Riling up the population there is likely to help Roy Cooper in 2026.

A charismatic, and apparently successful, strongman is a tough act to follow. He had some political skills of his own, and he did his best. But as the economy slumped and opposition mounted, he had to become more authoritarian to remain in control. In this, he succeeded, but in nothing else; the country’s economy collapsed, and a large percentage of the population left for greener pastures, leaving him in charge of an ash heap.

That’s Maduro. Could it also be J.D. Vance? TBD.

Bret Stephens, who never saw an American war he didn’t like, is predictably advocating for one in Venezuela. As I noted in a previous post, there is a reasonable case for intervention. Is it as compelling as Stephens thinks?

Leave aside the impact on world opinion, particularly in South America. Ignore the message it sends to Xi about Taiwan. How do you think the American people will react if Trump starts an unprovoked imperialist war–and that’s what it will be–on a transparently flimsy pretext and without strong public support and authorization from Congress? Does Stephens think that raising the national temperature by a few hundred degrees at this already volatile time is a good idea for American liberal democracy?

I certainly don’t. It’s easy to imagine the GOP describing any opposition to the war as treason. Where do you think that will lead?

Byron Donalds has already won the one-man Republican primary in Florida. Under normal circumstances, that would be enough. But will it be this time?

Not necessarily, for two reasons. First, Ron DeSantis desperately wants to maintain control of the GOP in his state in order to remain relevant for 2028, so a bitter proxy battle with Trump is probably on the table. Second, while a large segment of the GOP electorate enthusiastically supports black conservative candidates in order to prove (at least to themselves) that they aren’t racist, the Carlson/Fuentes episode establishes that there are plenty of open bigots within the party. How many, and does this mean DeSantis could become the preferred candidate of the extreme right element of the base? TBD.

What is a caudillo who can’t force his followers to support him? A man on golf cart, of course.

Obviously, the prospect of losing control of his party in a very public way was worse than anything in the files.

Tariffs are doing plenty of damage to the economy and Trump’s polls. Does that mean the Democrats will come out as dogmatic free traders in 2028?

No, because protectionism will probably remain popular in a number of swing states, and the worst of the impacts of the tariffs will probably be over by then. Americans will be used to them by 2028. You can, therefore, expect the Democrats to get rid of the worst ones in order to drive down prices, and to put the remaining ones into a conceptual framework that actually makes sense, but free trade as we knew it is gone for the foreseeable future.