Cromwell

It used to be that, for the GOP, every election was 1980: Ronald Reagan against the weak, ineffectual Jimmy Carter. With Trump, however, every year is 1968: the cities are burning; crime is out of control; the country is divided on culture war issues; and what is needed is the firm hand of authority. In that narrative, of course, Trump is Richard Nixon, which in its way, makes sense.

The difference is that we aren’t at war this time, and our cities aren’t burning. Will the voters see the difference, or will they believe Trump and Fox News instead of their own eyes? We’ll see.

I just finished reading a book called “The Broken Constitution” by Noah Feldman, a lawyer who, unlike most constitutional commentators, actually knows what he’s talking about. The book is about the evolution of Lincoln’s view of the Constitution, from his early days as a minor Whig politician to his advocacy for the Thirteenth Amendment. It provides a lot of useful detail regarding Lincoln’s suppression of constitutional rights during the Civil War, and the adequacy of his arguments supporting his actions. It is well worth reading.

The book was written in 2021. I don’t think Trump appears in its pages, but he haunts it nonetheless; I suspect he is the reason it was written. Would a newly elected Trump conflate the issue at the border, or urban demonstrations against his policies, or something else with the Civil War in order to justify using emergency powers against blue Americans? Would the judiciary accept his actions? Would he ignore court orders against him, as Lincoln clearly did, for the satisfaction of keeping us under his thumb?

These are not idle questions. Nobody can say with certainty that Trump doesn’t aspire to completely wreck liberal democracy in America using Civil War precedents, or, if you’re a real antiquarian, the decision for Charles I in the ship money case. That’s the risk we will be running if we elect him.

The RSA is just grandstanding; Israel is not engaging in genocide in Gaza. It is making some effort to spare civilians and provide supplies. It would be engaged in a far different kind of war if it simply wanted to kill as many Palestinians as possible.

However, some members of the cabinet clearly want to engage in ethnic cleansing, and it is perfectly possible that the government as a whole agrees with that, without admitting it to the rest of the world. The evolving facts on the ground thus far are consistent with my hypothesis.

Ethnic cleansing isn’t on the same moral plane as genocide–the lowest possible–but it’s on the way. Call it a lesser included offense.

Saudi Arabia’s attempt to intervene in Yemeni politics was a fiasco. Biden’s attack was not an intervention in the ongoing civil war; he simply wants to stop the Iranian=backed attempt to disrupt shipping in the Red Sea and thus increase prices all over the world, which is a completely legitimate objective under international law. The choice of targets was consistent with that objective.

This does not mean the war is about to widen. If the attacks were successful–and we were told that they were–the threat has been diminished, and there will be little reason to repeat them in the foreseeable future.

What’s interesting here is that the Chinese, who have as much to lose from the Houthi actions as we do, aren’t saying or doing anything to protect freedom of navigation. They are effectively putting their relationship with Iran and its proxies above their own economic self-interest in an effort to make life more difficult for America and the EU.

Trump has apparently criticized Lincoln for not making a deal that would have made the Civil War unnecessary. What should we take from that?

About 600,000 men died in the Civil War. Their lives have disappeared into the mist of history. Nobody alive today knew any of them. Trump is saying that, even from today’s perspective, their lives were worth more than the freedom of millions of black Americans. The end of slavery, in the long run, just wasn’t worth a war.

It’s easy to imagine someone who had suffered personal loss saying that in 1870, but today?

If you’re a black American and you are thinking about voting for Trump, you need to keep that in mind.

The DeSantis campaign is foundering, and Rich Lowry knows where to put the blame: on the MSM! Sure, DeSantis has run a lousy campaign, and yes, he avoided the MSM like the plague for most of it, but they should have embraced him as a safer alternative to Trump, anyway! Their stories about him were universally negative, and now you see the result.

The obvious objection to this line of reasoning, of course, is that Republican voters don’t trust the MSM–they watch Fox News. DeSantis has been a regular on Fox; Trump has not.

Now you see why I say Lowry is always wrong.

What will I take away from this clash of titans? “DeSantislies.com.” That’s pretty much it.

Well, there’s a little bit more:

1. DeSantis came across, as usual, as angry and charmless. He reminds me more of Richard Nixon every day. Haley wasn’t much better.
2. Presumably in an effort to hoover up the Chris Christie vote, Haley went further to criticize Trump and his views of the Constitution than before. DeSantis was more equivocal, as you would expect.
3. Most of the debate revolved around allegations pertaining to behavior while in office. It looked and sounded very petty.
4. DeSantis and Haley actually disagree on Ukraine and Social Security. That’s about it. The rest is just sound and fury signifying nothing.
5. Based on about two decades of history, anyone proposing a flat tax is showing signs of desperation. In DeSantis’ case, he wouldn’t even stand by his own idea. The whole point of a flat tax is to get poor people to pay more, and rich people less. If the rich get a huge tax cut, and the poor get a small one, who is going to pay for government? It’s practically impossible.
6. I think Haley wants to go to war with Iran. DeSantis just wants to give the Israelis the resources to fight in whatever manner they please, with no questions asked. I suppose that is another difference.
7. Both candidates are totally insensitive to the needs of the Palestinians and the Arab states. That’s terrible policy.
8. DeSantis is not a small government conservative; he inherited a tiny state workforce, thanks to Rick Scott, and expanded it some with federal money. He just plays a CL on TV for the benefit of his donors.
9. DeSantis’ disagreements with “woke corporations” are just populist rubbish he employs to justify a huge tax cut for business. He’s about as big a populist as Trump on economic issues.
10. While there was slightly more emphasis on Trump than in the past, it was overshadowed by the bickering. Trump won this debate, just as he won all of the others.

I just returned from our local grocery store. While I was there, I discovered that Pepsi had jacked up the price of a two-liter bottle again without any justification relating to increased costs. Their product isn’t even competitive with Coke on price anymore. This is a classic example of greedflation.

On a related note, it seems the French grocery store Carrefour is putting up signs identifying products that are the subject of greedflation, and is even refusing to sell Pepsi products at their current elevated price.

This is the way you resist greedflation. The government can’t do it, but retail stores and consumers can.

In 2020, Biden stayed in his basement and let Trump be the center of attention, believing that the incumbent would destroy himself. It worked. The public got tired of Trump’s antics, particularly with regard to the pandemic, and voted him out.

The plan is the same this year. The problem is that Trump–completely inadvertently, as he loves being the center of attention–is avoiding public scrutiny; he only makes news through his almost daily courtroom martyrdoms. Not debating, and so not subjecting his ideas to criticism, also helps. That makes the election a referendum on Biden, not him.

This will change. The courtroom dramas help Trump with the base, but probably not with swing voters. In any event, his behavior and unconventional policy ideas will get a lot more attention once the primaries are over and the MSM starts to focus on him rather than DeSantis and Haley. If the election is a referendum on him, not Biden, he will lose.

There is nothing in the text of the Constitution that supports the notion of absolute presidential immunity. There is no case law to support it, and no favorable legislative history. The practical impacts of it would be devastating. As a result, I think the Supreme Court as a whole will have no problem disposing of this argument; in fact, it may choose not to hear the issue in an attempt to look nonpartisan.

But my analysis does not apply to the two extremely reactionary, partisan justices: Thomas and Alito. What will they say? Will Thomas figure out some way to reconcile the creation of a dictatorship with his supposedly originalist beliefs? Can he somehow scrape up some loose language from, say, Hamilton to justify turning our president into a man on horseback?

We’ll see. Thomas is really hard to embarrass, so I’m guessing he will find a way to support Trump in every issue that comes before him even if it makes him look like a complete hypocrite.

The NYT is doing its best to persuade us that Trump is not inevitable. It’s true; he isn’t. The polls have always shown him to be more unpopular that not. The reactionary base only represents about a third of the electorate. Finally, of all of the elections in which Trump was directly or indirectly on the ballot, he only won one, and that by a handful of votes in a few swing states.

So he can be beaten. But there is a good reason for those feelings of learned helplessness; we know perfectly well that Trump and his followers don’t play by the same rules of liberal democracy that we do. Their sense of entitlement is so strong that they are willing to do practically anything to seize power. They have guns, too, and we don’t.

We are looking at either four years of fascism or a renewed insurrection by the same bizarre coalition of pagans and Christian nationalists after November. If that isn’t reason to be depressed, I don’t know what is.

Netanyahu has always been passive-aggressive in the West Bank. On the one hand, he does just enough for the Palestinians to keep the Americans off his back, and when prominent reactionary politicians call for ethnic cleansing, he denies that it is government policy. On the other hand, he quietly approves settlements and physical improvements that make a two-state solution more difficult. It’s a tightrope act, but in his eyes, it has worked; the idea of a Palestinian state is farther off than it was 30 years ago.

We may be seeing some of the same dynamics in Gaza. Extremist members of the cabinet are openly calling for ethnic cleansing and Israeli settlement. The president of Israel denies that is government policy. In the meantime, the Israeli military is pounding Gaza to ashes. Soon, the world will be hearing from Netanyahu that the only humanitarian response to the situation is to encourage the Palestinians to leave. We and the Arabs, as the story will go, have a moral obligation to clean up Israel’s mess. Facts on the ground prevail over justice.

It won’t work. The Palestinians won’t want to leave; the Arab states won’t accept them; the Saudis and Americans won’t pay for it; and no Israelis will want to settle in Gaza. It’s not exactly the land of milk and honey even when it hasn’t been reduced to rubble.

The Hamas attack is often compared to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. How do the two stack up?

Here’s my analysis:

1973/2023

AGGRESSOR: Egypt/Hamas

MODE OF ATTACK: Conventional War/Terrorism

VICTIMS: Soldiers/Civilians

OBJECTIVE: Retake Land/Boost Morale and Isolate Israel

ISRAELI COUNTERATTACK: Yes/Yes

And the winner is . . . the 1973 war, which both boosted Sadat’s prestige in the Arab world and convinced him that a military victory was a chimera. It ultimately led to a peace agreement. From all of the evidence I have seen, 2023 is going to lead to nothing but misery, destruction, and ethnic cleansing, as Bibi’s desire to cling to power will drive him further and further to the right, American opposition notwithstanding.

He made his reputation as a strong supporter of tariffs. He insisted that tariffs would increase the wages of workers even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Fortunately for him, the nation was experiencing difficult economic times for other reasons, so his tariffs were not the political poison they should have been.

Is it McKinley in 1896 or Trump in 2024? Time will tell.

With her inept performance before Congress and her plagiarism issues, Claudine Gay loaded the pistol and handed it to her opponents. It was center-left former supporters who pulled the trigger. But it was the right that made her a target, because, as Christopher Rufo explained, she was the very personification of DEI. She was an affirmative action baby. She lacked “merit.” She had to go.

This is the very Christopher Rufo who, with his reactionary trustee friends at New College, decided to recruit male athletes with low test scores in order to create a more conservative, “balanced” student body.

I guess “merit” and DEI are kind of elastic concepts for the right.