Trump’s assault on American democracy. Democracy struck back this week, as chronicled in the featured post. Some pundits may be tempted to claim Trump’s overwhelming defeat means that the assault-on-democracy theme was always overblown. But while Trump’s attempts to cheat may have come to little or nothing, that’s because they were beaten back in the courts and by a motivated electorate. When police stop a gang from robbing a bank, you don’t say “No harm done” and send them home to plot their next attempt.
Climate change. Climate change wasn’t a big issue in this campaign, but Trump’s wide-ranging assault on reality was. Climate change denial/minimization is one of the many ways the regime lies to us. Going forward, Democrats need to connect obvious lies like “the economy is booming”, “prices are going down”, and “Iran has been defeated” to claims that climate change is a hoax.
Israel/Palestine. Israel used to be admired by nearly all American voters, and any hint that a candidate might not like Israel or the current Israeli government was quickly punished. That’s not true any more. In Israel itself, the anti-Netanyahu coalition has been given the first chance to form a new government, but that will be a heavy lift. If successful, the new government will also be right-wing, but possibly less inclined to commit war crimes.
Ukraine.Phillips O’Brien points out that new Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is one of the most pro-Putin anti-Ukraine voices in the administration. “Trump is trying to get many of his most terrible priorities, including helping Putin, achieved as soon as possible, to pre-empt the powers of the new Congress.” He also points out that the long-predicted manpower crunch may be hitting — in Russia. Russian casualties rise every month, and are now outrunning recruiting rates.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about the Blue Wave
I don’t talk about any specific races in that post, but one that gave me particular joy was watching Abdul El-Sayed win the Senate race in Michigan by 7 points. El-Sayed is such an obviously talented communicator. Millions of dollars spent on raising bigotry against him did not get under his skin. He stayed focused on his message: Money out of politics. More money in your pocket. Medicare for All. Even the last-minute betrayal by Haley Stevens (God knows what she was thinking) couldn’t throw him.
And in the end, neither the money nor the bigotry could prevail with Michigan voters.
El-Sayed’s win also blew up a number of myths, including that progressive candidates can’t win in battleground states. It’s true that El-Sayed ran about 4 points behind the Democratic governor candidate Jocelyn Benson, but Benson is a pretty attractive candidate herself, and didn’t face nearly the money-and-bigotry headwinds El-Sayed saw.
I also enjoyed seeing James Talerico and Adam Hamilton win big. These two campaigns might reset how the media covers the relationship between religion and politics, and maybe even how the public thinks about that relationship.
Since Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority to support Ronald Reagan, “religious” and “conservative” have been almost synonymous. And yes, White Evangelical Christians still went 80-20 for Republicans. But Talerico and Hamilton clearly ran on the liberal Christian message — the message Jesus actually gave in the gospels rather than the message that has been manufactured and put in his mouth more recently. Jesus talked at length about healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and welcoming the stranger, but the gospels don’t bother to record anything he might have said about abortion or homosexuality.
Plenty of conservative ministers described Talerico and Hamilton as “fake Christians”. But I think they’ve got that backwards.
Democracy Defenders Fund’s Norm Eisen takes offense at the WSJ editorial board pooh-poohing the threat Trump posed to the elections.
The reason “Trump didn’t steal the elections” is because we & the pro-voter coalition stopped him EIGHT times over the past 21 months.
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Jobs reports continue to be good. The unemployment rate is 4.1%.
Local communities have been fighting data centers, so corporations may start putting them in places where no one lives: the Great Lakes.
A Microsoft project set up off the coast of northern Scotland in 2018 found that after two years, server failures were reduced by 87% compared with on-land datacenter equivalents. Microsoft executives saw the project, which ended after two years, as an unmitigated success.
Computing throws off heat, so cooling is a constant issue. Underwater data centers, especially in cool climates, all but solve the cooling problem.
However, at some point you start heating up the lake, which changes the eco-system in unpredictable ways. Thinking of Lake Erie as an inexhaustible source of cooling is similar to the way polluting factories used to think of the air or the rivers as nothing more than vehicles for taking pollution “away”, as if “away” never had to be accounted for.
Tesla built its Texas lines for a planned capacity of 250,000 trucks a year, and Musk once talked about doubling that.
But the Cybertruck never sold more than 40,000 units in a year, and many of those were internal purchases by SpaceX, another Musk company. So Musk essentially was juicing the numbers by selling Cybertrucks to himself.
Remind me why we’re supposed to believe this guy is a genius.
and let’s close with with a victory lap
On Saturday, the real James “Talifreako” got to interrupt SNL’s Trump imitator during the cold open.
What happened. My main predictions/observations last week were:
The polls look good for Democrats.
No pollster can estimate what the last-minute deciders will do, either in terms of who they vote for or whether they vote at all.
Probably the last-minute deciders will all do the same thing.
That doesn’t make me Nostradamus, but as far as those predictions went, they look pretty good: The late deciders who voted, voted for Democrats, resulting in a victory far larger than the polls had predicted. I thought one party or the other would take at least 6 of the 7 Senate races that Cook Political Report rated as toss-ups. Not only did the Democrats take 6, but the seventh (Alaska) is leaning their way, and seats that were thought to be leaning Republican in South Carolina and (apparently) Mississippi also flipped. (Expect a final vote total in Mississippi tomorrow. Recounts are not a thing in Mississippi unless a court orders one for a specific reason. Tomorrow is also the day for a final first-round Alaska vote, which will lead to a ranked-choice-voting second round, which shouldn’t take long.) So while Democratic optimists were hoping for 54 Senate seats, 56 is now the most likely outcome.
Just about everybody expected the Democrats to come out with a House majority, but the size of it (259 seats out of 438) is big surprise. Democrats now have 29 of the 50 governorships, and flipped a number of state legislative bodies, including the Texas House.
What it means. There has been a surprising amount of post-election consensus about what this means. Everyone left of Ted Cruz understands that the election was a triumph for Democrats and a disaster for Republicans. The exit polls made the message of the voters clear: They were angry about the cost of living, the war, and the corruption of the Trump regime.
The question is how Democrats should respond. One thing missing from the exit polls is any groundswell of support for specific Democratic programs. Americans are worried about the cost and availability of health insurance, and Medicare-for-All is one way to address that concern, but voters were not specifically asking for it. They want the war to end so that gas prices can come down, but there’s not a widespread call for a war-powers resolution or defunding the forces in the field. They’re upset about corruption, but it’s not obvious that another Trump impeachment would be popular.
Some pundits spin this as “Democrats should be cautious and try to work with Trump as much as they can, rather than antagonize him.” On the other hand, Indian sci-writer Shiv Ramdas observes:
nobody gives you a sweeping mandate like this because they want you to work with the people they just ran tf outta office
I think a more precise interpretation is that the sale is not complete yet. If Democrats are going to address voters’ concerns at all, they’re going to have to do specific things. But all those things will have to be backed by strong messaging that connects the proposal-at-hand to what the American people need and want and asked for. And while some bills may get passed just for the sake of staking out a position (on health care or voting rights, for example), knowing either that Republicans in the Senate will filibuster them or that Trump will veto them, the public also needs to see a few clear accomplishments.
The model here, I think, is the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Trump opposed it, but it was so popular with the American people that some Republicans were willing to back it, and Rep. Thomas Massie was even willing to co-sponsor it. Once it became clear that there would be enough Republican defectors to pass the law, the rest of the party caved. It passed nearly unanimously and Trump signed it. (Then his Justice Department blocked implementing it, which is still playing out in court.)
Another model is the bipartisan housing bill that Congress passed during the summer, which became law even though Trump refused to sign it. Democrats shouldn’t restrict themselves to bills Republicans will support, but finding a few proposals too popular for Republicans to oppose would be a good way to start.
In general, an Epstein/housing path might work like this: A few Republican defectors make a bill likely to pass. If it’s going to pass, more Republicans want to be on the right side of it. If it passes with super-majority support, Trump signs it because he doesn’t want to see his veto overridden.
That path might work for things like raising the minimum wage, an ethics bill to stop members of Congress from trading stocks, repealing some of Trump’s least popular tariffs (like the ones aimed at Canada), universal background checks on gun purchases, and a follow-up Epstein bill that insisted on full release. Restoring Medicaid subsidies might get through this way. Voters were not specifically asking to get aid flowing to Ukraine again and to stop favoring Russia, but Ukraine is more popular than Russia, and a number of Republicans in Congress would defect from Trump on this issue.
Trump might veto all this, but those vetoes would be unpopular. Not a week should pass without Democrats sending to his desk a law that would improve the lives of American workers and families. None of these bills should be show ponies; they should all be things that Democrats genuinely believe in and would be happy to see Trump sign.
Where can a modern national agenda begin? Picture a parent who can afford a child’s medicine without dread. Picture families who can raise young children without drowning in costs. Picture a generation that can once again own a home. Picture an economy in which those who have prospered most, including the titans of artificial intelligence, help build a bountiful future for everyone else. Every idea Democrats advance should pass three simple tests: Will it work? Will it reach as many Americans as possible? Will people feel it?
This focus avoids a trap that Trump will be eager to spring. For many years, discontent has been brewing in the electorate, because many people believe politicians don’t really care about them. This time, that discontent focused on Republicans, because Trump was obsessed with his golden ballroom while they were deciding which bills they could afford to pay this month. But the discontent itself is non-partisan, and Harris paid its price in 2024. It could turn against Democrats again if the public just sees them scoring political point against Trump while continuing to do nothing that helps ordinary people.
Trump is already gearing up to say: “They don’t care about you. They just want to get Trump.”
Investigations. That’s what makes investigations tricky. The public does care about corruption and wants to see people held accountable for it. But it doesn’t want a lot of finger-pointing that leads to nothing. Trump’s pointless persecution of his enemies, where he has repeatedly had his Justice Department investigate and try to indict people on evidence that can’t get past a grand jury, has increased public skepticism.
So investigations, especially at the beginning, need to quickly expose real crimes or shady deals that should be crimes. There should be no equivalent of the James Comey shells-on-the-beach indictment.
There’s already bipartisan support for a Pete Hegseth impeachment. I would focus on the attacks against fishing boats that Hegseth claims were smuggling drugs, because these are basically murders on the high seas. Wikipedia reports:
As of 27 October 2026, at least 243 people had been killed (including 17 who are missing and presumed dead) in at least 80 strikes on over 81 vessels
A simple analogy makes the point: Imagine a bank had been robbed, and a car was seen speeding away from the bank immediately afterward. Police believe the robbers and the money are in the car. No innocent people are known to be in the car. The car is being tracked and police can easily stop it and arrest the people inside. Instead, they blow it up with a bazooka, killing everyone. Is that how American justice should work?
The 243 dead people from these boats were suspects. Even if they would all turn out to be guilty — and nobody was a hostage or just along for the ride — they deserved their day in court and whatever punishments are set out in laws. Instead, Hegseth had them killed.
Other investigations: Why hasn’t anybody been held to account for the murders of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, or Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE agents? How did companies associated with Eric Trump and Don Jr. get so many government contracts? How much taxpayer money got spent on partisan ads like the “public service announcements” lauding President Trump? What are conditions like in those ICE detention camps?
Overreach? A lot of the national-media center-right punditry is wringing its hands over the idea that Democrats might actually try to do something with their new majorities. The same people who thought Trump’s 49.8% vote total in 2024 gave him a mandate to do whatever crazy thing came into his head are now worried that Democrats’ 56%-43% victory will lead to hubris.
But the problem, as I see it, isn’t that Democrats will try to do too much but that they will try to do too little. The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky makes a very good point:
The intra-Democratic debate that I despise above all others is the one that holds that Democrats must either do X or Y but cannot possibly do both X and Y. It has made me insane for years. … Think of it this way. Have you ever, once in your life, heard conservatives and Republicans engage in an argument like: Well, we can cut taxes, or we can prosecute the culture wars, but we surely can’t do both! I hope you’re laughing, because the idea is laughable on its face.
Obama had ten months of filibuster-proof majorities in Congress, and what he got out of it was the Affordable Care Act. That was his top priority, so he thought it eliminated doing anything else. It was a wasted opportunity.
Overreachy things like Medicare-for-All or a Trump impeachment are only a problem if they crowd out achievable smaller things like raising the minimum wage or keeping rural hospitals open.
Trump’s likely response. If you watched the 60 Minutes interview that aired yesterday, you may have been encouraged. Trump sounded conciliatory, and talked about working with Democrats on a number of issues, including immigration. But between the interview itself and its air date, he appointed Stephen Miller his new chief of staff.
Miller is one of the most polarising figures in the administration and one of Trump’s closest and longest-serving advisers, having joined his 2016 presidential campaign as a speechwriter. He is a former aide to the former senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who would go on to serve as Trump’s first attorney general. In Trump’s first term, Miller was the driving force behind policies such as family separation and a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries. More than a hundred Democrats in Congress signed a letter to Trump calling Miller a “documented white nationalist” and demanding his removal.
If you were thinking: what could Trump do to push his approval rating down even further and open up the possibility of a 1964/1980/2008 style victory for Dems in 2028? The answer is: put Stephen Miller in charge of everything. And guess what?
My personal reaction: I want Stephen Miller in front of TV cameras as much as possible. His physical presence makes his message sound just as creepy as it actually is.
Mr. Miller has been the driver of the president’s most muscular actions, including the use of increasingly hostile tactics to capture immigrants across the country and the bombing of small boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that he and Mr. Trump declared constituted a foreign invasion.
Apparently “muscular” is a new synonym for “criminal”.
And one more thing. Black turnout was up, particularly in the South. But we should not conclude from that fact that Republican attempts to suppress the Black vote were harmless. Apparently, Black citizens felt so strongly about this election — partly because of the suppression efforts — that they overcame the obstacles that were put in their way. But the obstacles still exist, and in less motivating elections they will make a difference.
“So much of what this administration has done has been to roll back the protections that give us access to the ballot, while simultaneously flooding us with propaganda that tells us that it doesn’t matter,” said Nadine Smith, president and CEO of Color of Change, which worked to mobilize voters across the south before the election. “What you saw was Black voters showing up in the face of an administration that has spent two years attacking our rights, weakening voter protections and redrawing maps specifically to diminish Black political power.
This is just one example of the many ways Trump tried to cheat, but came up short. I haven’t seen a clear what-if-we-had-used-the-old-maps assessment of the US House races, but Trump’s push to gerrymander did not gain all the seats he thought it would, and the redistricting war he started may have been won by the Democrats, whose gerrymanders were fewer but more successful.
The courts blocked Trump’s attempts to set aside ballots that his Justice Department claimed (probably falsely) were being cast by non-citizens. His efforts to turn Alaska’s two-Dan-Sullivans ballot into a criminal case has fallen flat, because no one can name the law it supposedly violates. (I can’t remember who said it, but my favorite assessment is: “If confusing voters is a crime, all politicians should be in jail.”) Trump’s claim that all votes for the “other” Dan Sullivan should be counted for the incumbent senator also goes nowhere, because in Alaska’s ranked-choice-voting system, voters have already said where they want their votes to go if their first candidate can’t win. Trump may claim to know their intentions, but they have already stated their intentions in a legally binding way.
But just because Trump failed to cheat this time doesn’t mean we should ignore the effort. This is part of a general pattern where Trump wants to be treated like a five-year-old, whose cheating attempts can be laughed off because he’s so bad at it. But those politically and racially gerrymandered districts are still standing, waiting for future elections. The myth of non-citizen voters is still widely believed by MAGA cultists. The restrictions on early voting and mail-in voting continue, along with the closing of polling places convenient for non-White voters. The corrupt Justice Department is still in office. The Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a done deal.
It didn’t work this time, but there’s still a lot to clean up before we can have truly fair elections.
On a typical Monday morning, I write the Teaser to let you know what I’ve been thinking about this week, and what you’ll see in the posts that will appear later. That seems unnecessary this week, because I’ve been thinking about the same thing the rest of you have: the Democrats’ huge win on Tuesday and what they should do with quantity of power they’ve managed to claw back from Trump. Sure, there were a couple of other things that happened this week, like Netanyahu’s challenger being given the first shot at organizing a new government in Israel, but mainly all eyes have been on American politics: how big the win will turn out to be, what Democrats will do next, how Trump will respond, and so on.
So the featured article will be called “The Blue Wave came. What now?” I’ll try to get it out by 10 EST, but it has a lot to cover, so it might slip.
The weekly summary will probably be fairly short this week, because I haven’t had a lot of attention to give to the rest of the world. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
Peace will come someday, but not from cutting support for Ukraine. The war will end when Putin gives up his dream of absorbing Ukraine into Russia, when he understands that he cannot win.
Trump’s assault on American democracy. Trump has tried to interfere in the midterms in a variety of ways, most of which the courts have beaten back. His outrageous lawsuit to prevent Alaska from certifying its Senate race if Trump’s candidate loses got thrown out, though it may reappear after the election. The attempt to get states to put aside ballots from people Trump claims (on flimsy grounds) are not citizens has also not succeeded. Expect shenanigans to continue, and hope the courts are up to the challenge.
Climate change. Natural gas is often touted as being better for the environment than other fossil fuels like coal. But that’s only if methane doesn’t leak during the drilling and transportation process. The Biden administration increased controls on methane, but Trump is rolling those rules back.
Gaza. The Gaza genocide seems not to have had much traction as an issue in Israel’s recent election.
Ukraine. Over the last few weeks, Trump has largely dropped the pretense that his administration is either an ally of Ukraine or a neutral arbiter seeking peace. The “deal” he keeps pushing Ukraine to accept is to surrender territory to its invader. More below.
This week’s developments
This week’s biggest story is tomorrow’s election
The featured post is a watch guide if you plan to spend Tuesday night in front of a television, as I do. Apparently most of my friends consider this a form of torture, so my envisioned watch party isn’t happening. Maybe you’ll have more luck.
Trump has been holding rallies in all the red states that threaten to defect from his coalition, and he is getting increasingly unhinged. The American public is like the frog that doesn’t realize it’s slowly being boiled: We’ve watched Trump’s mental deterioration happen gradually, so it doesn’t shock us the way it should. He tells the story of a simple dementia test where he repeated back five words they gave him, and claims doctors were wowed that he could do it. “Almost no one can do it. But I can because I’m a freaking genius.”
In his blog The Farce, Jason Sattler offers a message for any of his fellow Jews who happen to live in Michigan: Religious bigotry, even if it takes the form of Islamophobia, will eventually hurt Jews. He asks them to reject Mike Rogers’ campaign of hate and vote for Abdul El-Sayed.
We know that Islamophobia feeds the same beast as Jew hatred for the same cruel, senseless aims. We know this even as our community struggles to come to terms with even how to discuss the horrors of October 7 and the war crimes that followed. And we know this tidal wave of hate is only coming because Mike Rogers can’t run on anything else.
Corruption is a big issue in this campaign, but it should be bigger. Trump’s net worth has more than doubled since he started his second term, and that doesn’t count how much his sons and son-in-law have made.
Elon Musk has spent over $440 million this year trying to buy a Republican Congress, nearly $35 million on Ken Paxton alone. He is clearly afraid of being subpoenaed by Democrat-led congressional committees to explain things like temporarily cutting off Ukraine’s access to Starlink for its high-speed drones, or being called to account for the deaths his destruction of USAID is causing, or whatever happened to all the sensitive government data DOGE sucked up.
Musk responded to these possibilities with threats:
Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets.
One look at that tweet tells me everything I need to know: Musk has too much power. Concentrating that much power in one unelected individual is a threat to the Republic.
It’s pretty clear you won’t admit that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.
In his first administration, Trump tried repeatedly to undo the sanctions that the Obama administration had placed against Russia after its annexation of Crimea. But his administration and the Republican caucuses in Congress were full of people who respected the Russia threat and stood in his way. He also sided with Putin’s claims against the conclusions of the US intelligence agencies.
By the time Trump took office for the second time, in January 2025, Putin’s invasion of the rest of Ukraine was nearly three years old. During the 2024 campaign, Trump often said he could end the war in 24 hours; once in power, it was clear how he thought the war should end: Ukraine should surrender and give Putin all the territory he had demanded. (“Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk will be recognized as de facto Russian”.) That is still his position.
The Biden administration had provided something like $200 billion in military aid to Ukraine — one of its few actions that had bipartisan support in Congress. Trump began scaling that back soon after he took office, and by August of 2025 had cut US support to zero, though the US would continue to sell weapons to its NATO allies, which they would pass on to Kiev. Republicans in Congress, like the late Senator Lindsey Graham, continued to understand that Putin was the bad guy in this situation, so in August they passed the Graham Act giving Trump the power to sanction countries that buy Russia oil.
Trump signed that act, and then — surprise! — made a deal for the US to buy Russian diesel itself. Just before the Graham Act was scheduled to take effect, Trump waived all its anti-Russia sanctions.
Although the deal is unlikely to lower diesel prices, it will benefit Putin and Russia. Diesel sales will generate revenue that could be used to prolong the war in Ukraine. Since announcing the deal, Trump has also told Ukraine to stop attacking Russian refineries.
I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal because [Zelensky] could have made many deals and for some reason he never does.
At around this same time, Ukraine’s high-speed drones lost access to Elon Musk’s Starlink/Starshield system, crippling its battlefield operations. Though access was eventually restored, this may have been a shot-across-the-bow warning Ukraine that it had better surrender to Russia.
Support for Ukraine continues to be popular in both parties. But after the midterms are over, Trump may decide he no longer cares what voters think. The master will pull his strings, and even a new Democratic Congress may not be able to interfere.
This Summer and Fall have seen a noticeable and continuing increase in the number of Ukrainian civilians being deliberately targeted and killed by Russian bombing. It is becoming more and more common to have mass casualty events on a weekly basis, and Russian ranged systems are being used to hunt out trains, buses, apartment buildings, etc. … While we await the grim figure for Ukrainian civilian casualties for October 2026 as a whole, it is clear that 2026 is shaping up to be the worst year for Ukrainian civilian deaths caused by the Russian military since 2022, the year of Russian full-scale invasion. … This slaughter is a result of Russia’s strategic decision. It is an attempt to break Ukrainian will by killing non-combatants. It is also a primal scream of rage at the Ukrainian people for not bowing down in front of the Russian military and Vladimir Putin.
He further points out how Trump continues to placate the pro-Ukraine Congress and American people by making phony announcements of support. On October 30, for the benefit of the midterm electorate, the State Department announced that 500 of the most advanced Patriot missiles would be sold (not given) to Ukraine — for delivery in 2030 at the earliest.
and demonstrations in Europe
I was in Paris on my honeymoon when the demonstrations started there. I got emails from home asking if we were OK.
If you’ve ever been in a city where “riots” are going on, you probably understand how localized such disturbances can be. In the vast majority of the city life goes on normally. That certainly was our experience of Paris, though I gather that things got worse after we left. (Fortunately, we were able to visit the Louvre twice before it temporarily shut down.)
On the way back to our hotel one evening, we happened on a demonstration outside some public building. Neither of us speaks or reads French in any but the most rudimentary way, so the slogans being chanted were hard to make out. The signs seemed to be about children and perhaps homelessness. Later we read that there had been demonstrations against sexual abuse in the schools, so maybe that was one of them. There was no violence and we walked through the center of the demonstration with no sense of danger. The demonstrators we saw were trying to communicate with the larger public, not terrorize it. Later we figured out that on a previous day in a different neighborhood we had walked past one of the shops that burned
Trump and various online provocateurs tried to convince their American audience that this had something to do with immigration.
“The migrants have taken over France,” the president posted on Truth Social. “They must CLOSE THE BORDERS, FAST!”
This appears to be pure opportunism on Trump’s part. French President Macron denounced “stupid” comments by foreign leaders, presumably meaning Trump and Israel’s Netanyahu.
By most accounts, the demonstrations began with a student movement protesting against poor funding for schools, especially high schools. They then spread to a general sense of pessimism about young people’s prospects in France, and then to a larger movement of citizens concerned about the high cost of living, largely spurred by the increased fuel prices caused by Trump’s war.
None of these concerns should seem foreign to Americans. We just don’t have the same mass protest traditions the French do.
Another factor that Americans should be able to identify with: There’s no money to satisfy the demonstrators’ demands. France is running persistently high budget deficits, and the country faces increased needs in many areas. For example, the sudden unreliability of America’s commitment to NATO puts pressure on all European countries to increase their defense spending. And the nation’s difficult fiscal situation pushes investors to seek higher interest rates, making the fiscal situation even worse.
The main difference here is that the US runs its deficit in dollars, which its Federal Reserve can create at will. France owes euros, which are controlled by the European Central Bank. That gives the US more short-term flexibility, but it’s not clear that our long term situation is any better. For example, in the recently concluded FY 2026, we ran a $2 trillion deficit. We got essentially nothing for that money: We didn’t make some major national investment, spend our way out of recession, fight a major war, or deal with some external challenge like the Covid pandemic. Subtract the estimated $47 billion spent on attacking Iran, and it’s still a huge deficit. And that’s just business as usual.
and elections in Brazil, Israel, and Serbia
Brazil’s election was a very pleasant surprise. Jair Bolsonaro was Brazil’s Trump. When he lost his reelection bid in 2022, he reacted as Trump had in 2021:
On 8 January 2023, his supporters attacked the buildings of the Supreme Court of Brazil, the National Congress, and the Planalto Presidential Palace to instigate a military coup d’état and reinstate Bolsonaro as president.
Because the Brazilian justice system is less corrupt than ours, Bolsonaro was tried and convicted. He is currently in prison. His sone Flavio ran for president in Brazil’s recent election and led after the first round, in which neither he nor incumbent president Lula got a majority. It was widely expected Bolsonaro would win, and would pardon his father just as Trump pardoned all the January 6 criminals in the US.
But instead, Lula won the runoff in a surprise victory. Flavio was ordered to surrender his passport, pending an investigation into a money-laundering scheme. The Trump administration then conspired to spirit him to Florida, where he is expected to set up a government-in-exile.
Remember how upset Trump usually gets about South American countries sending their criminals here?
Serbia’s public broadcaster RTV Vojvodina has publicly apologized to viewers for years of one-sided coverage. The statement came after Aleksandar Vucic, who ran for prime minister, lost Sunday’s election in Serbia to the student movement. “Public broadcasting has failed to do its job for many years. A lot was left unsaid, a lot was overlooked, information was presented one-sidedly, reporting was uncritical, and the right questions were not asked, or no questions at all. And for that we must apologize to our viewers,” said Eror, as quoted by the TV channel N1.
It’s hard to know what to make of Israel’s elections held last Tuesday. These were the first elections held since the October 7, 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud Party lost seats in the Knesset, but remains the largest party. AP reports:
Netanyahu’s coalition, made up of ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported strengthening Israel’s Jewish character. It pushed for more settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and allowed for military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox Jews. It also attempted to push through an overhaul of the country’s judiciary in 2023 that drew mass protests.
Eisenkot’s camp promoted a vision where Israel’s Jewish character lives in harmony with its liberal democratic ideals. It promised honest leadership and accountability for Israel’s Oct. 7 failures, vowed to bolster the judiciary and end the military draft exemptions. They also promised to fix Israel’s international standing, which has deteriorated because of the Gaza war and settler violence in the West Bank.
Neither party seems likely to put together a 61-seat Knesset majority without making deal with the Arab parties, which hold 19 seats. The Arabs would never partner with Netanyahu, but Eisenkot has also pledged not to deal with them.
If no one can form a majority, they’ll have to hold the elections again.
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Chances are, you’ve eaten more than your usual quota of chocolate this last week. And maybe you got nostalgic about how good chocolate used to taste back when you were the trick-or-treater collecting candy rather than the homebody handing it out.
Well, apparently it’s not just your imagination. New York magazine writer Rachel Handler did a deep dive into how chocolate is made, who makes it, and why it (like just about everything else at this stage of capitalism) is getting enshittified.
It was a sad week for Star Trek fans. Walter Koenig, who played Chekov in the original series, died at the age of 90. And then Wednesday, Patrick Stewart died.
Stewart’s Captain Picard wasn’t just a beloved character, he represented a new direction, emphasizing exploration and negotiation rather than the more warlike virtues of Captain Kirk. It took a great actor to pull that off, and Stewart was one.
The Justice Department’s latest attempt to keep the Hunter Biden case going just failed: The case against two FBI agents that DoJ said lied to Congress about Hunter’s laptop was dismissed.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed a criminal complaint against two former FBI officials accused of making false statements to Congress about Hunter Biden, saying the investigation that produced the charges was rushed, overtly political and dogged by “critical mistakes.”
“What has transpired here cannot be described as anything other than weaponization,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui said in a scathing ruling from the bench that dismissed the case against former officials Nikki Floris and Bradley Benavides.
What polls and experts expect to happen. Real Clear Politics’ generic congressional ballot polling average has Democrats up 8.9% (52.0%-43.1%), and that margin has been in the 8-9% range for about a month. Such a lead is consistent with a wave election big enough that gerrymandering the districts shouldn’t matter. So just about everybody expects Democrats to win the House.
Things get interesting in the Senate, where 34 Democrats and 31 Republicans are not up for election this year. Cooks Political Report lists 9 Democrats and 11 Republicans as solid favorites, bringing the totals to 43 Democrats and 42 Republicans. Each party has two seats listed as “likely” and two more as “leaning” in their favor. So if you add those in, it’s 47-46 for the Democrats. That leaves 7 toss-up races, which is an unusually large number. So any outcome between a 54-46 Democratic majority and a 53-47 Republican majority (the same distribution we have now) is plausible. (Democrats have had fantasies about flipping seats in Mississippi and Florida, but that seems like a bridge too far.)
How that happened is fascinating. For months, Cooks has been shifting races towards the Democrats, but not across the board: Races might go from “likely Republican” and “leaning Republican” to “toss-up”, but the toss-up races would not shift to “likely” or “leaning” Democratic. (The NYT/Siena poll does seem to show Dems pulling away, but it could be an outlier.)
That appears to have happened for a few reasons: The worst impacts of Trump’s policies — high diesel prices, closing hospitals, data-center construction — have tended to fall in rural states that usually vote Republican: Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Alaska. Because these states weren’t supposed to be competitive, the GOP is stuck with some poorly chosen candidates. I mean, Roger Marshall is a sucky senator, but it’s Kansas, so who cares? Darlene Graham isn’t her late brother Lindsey, but it’s South Carolina, so anybody with an R next to her name was supposed to be safe.
Meanwhile in blue states like Michigan and Maine, Democrats have maintained small but fairly stable leads in the polls. In a shifting national environment, you’d expect them to start pulling away, but they haven’t. So the RCP average has Troy Jackson up 3.3% on Susan Collins in Maine, and Abdul El-Sayed up 5.3% in Michigan. Both margins were considerably smaller before averaging in yesterday’s NYT/Siena poll.
You especially can’t count on small margins in a mid-term election, because mid-terms are all about turnout. The difference between Obama’s landslide in 2008 and the Democrats’ “shellacking” in 2010 wasn’t so much that people changed their minds. It was that the 2008 Obama coalition of young voters and minorities didn’t come out to vote in 2010. 2010 was an older, whiter electorate, and it elected a way more conservative Congress.
So a big piece of the Blue Wave theory is that Democrats are more motivated this year than Republicans. Trump voters who believed he would lower prices, end foreign wars, and generally look out for the little guy (at least the White male little guys) are disillusioned and unmotivated. But Democrats who have watched Trump circumvent laws, enrich himself, and send his ICE thugs out to murder American citizenswith no consequences — they’re motivated.
And that explains the Republicans’ closing arguments that center on fear and bigotry: Democrats will turn America Communist, let brown people run the country, change your child’s gender, take away your guns, and persecute Christians. El-Sayed is a jihadist, James Talerico and Adam Hamilton are fake Christians, and so on. Those arguments won’t convince anybody who cares about the price of gas or health care, but they’re not supposed to. They’re supposed to fire up the MAGA cultists to go out and vote.
The upshot of all this, in my opinion, is that the toss-up races will almost all go the same way. One party or the other will sweep at least six of the seven. The people who make up their minds at the last minute, the people who may or may not vote — they’re all going to do the same thing. I just can’t tell you what it is.
Michigan observers question how much difference this will make. It has been a much bigger story in the national media than locally, and has focused attention more on Stevens herself than on any problem with El-Sayed’s candidacy. Her career as a Democrat is over now, and it’s hard to imagine her as a Republican given her record in Congress. Possibly she’s hoping for a job as a lobbyist with AIPAC, who channeled $30 million into her primary campaign and has also spent millions to support Rogers.
Similarly, the would-be scandal of Democrats recruiting a second Dan Sullivan to run for the Senate in Alaska seems to be more of a national-media story than an issue on the ground in Alaska. The media-criticism blog Finding Gravity comments:
[T]he national news media is doing everything they can to make the central story of the last days of this election season an alleged political maneuver by Alaska Democrats that was, by all accounts, legal, consistent with past behavior by both major political parties, and unlikely to have any real effect on the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. America’s dominant news companies, led by the New York Times, have literally ignored the new rape allegation against the president of the United States while breathlessly hyping the Alaska maneuver, giving Donald Trump the distraction he desperately seeks and a phony premise for his anti-democratic efforts to effectively cancel a Senate election that could determine control of the entire U.S. Senate.
… At this writing, the New York Times has now run more than a dozen reports on this matter in just three days. The Times is in the kind of full-court press mode it saves for things like Joe Biden stumbling over his words. By my tally, the alleged Peltola maneuver has been a primary subject of six New York Times articles, four New York Times newsletters, a New York Times podcast, a New York Times video, and two letters to the editor the New York Times chose to run. At least nine New York Times journalists have bylines on these pieces. I can only imagine what the Sunday crossword puzzle has in store for us.
I have two observations:
If Republicans had done something like this, it would be covered as an infuriating-but-clever move to own the libs.
It’s a non-story, because Alaska has instant run-off voting. Even if you get confused about which Dan Sullivan is the Republican incumbent, despite the words “Republican” and “incumbent” appearing next to one Dan Sullivan’s name, you just rank the two next to each other. When the “fake” Dan Sullivan is eliminated, your vote will flow to the “real” one. So there is absolutely no chance this maneuver will affect the outcome of the election.
How the night unfolds. There’s a certain amount of tea-leaf reading you can do before any polls close. Exit polling goes on all day. The major media networks are committed not to release any of that information while the polls are open, but their talking heads have probably seen it. They’re generally pretty careful not to reveal anything directly, but I believe they shade their predictions so that they don’t look stupid later. So if MS-NOW folks are still talking about the Blue Wave at 5 p.m., it’s probably still plausible. Likewise, if Fox News pundits are making not-so-fast noises, that could be what the exit polls are showing.
The returns start coming in at 7 p.m. EST, when the polls close in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Virginia, Vermont. (All poll closing times and a summary of the interesting races are in this NPR article. Some eastern time zone districts in Kentucky and Indiana will report at 6.) None of the toss-up Senate races are here, but you can get some insight into how the night will go by looking at margins. The South Carolina Senate race is supposed to go to Republican Darlene Graham by a small margin. How small? If this race stays too close to call for a long time, it’s a good night for the Democrats. If Graham wins with surprising ease, that’s good for Republicans. The WaPo’s Henry Olsen targets five points as the line to watch.
The Georgia governor’s race is also expected to be close.
Florida’s eastern time zone polls close. A number of House races are close, including some recently gerrymandered districts.
At 7:30: North Carolina, Ohio, West Virginia. The big race here is the Ohio Senate race, where Democrat Sherrod Brown has a small lead in the polls, but the race is considered a toss-up. Don’t expect that to get called early either way. The thing I’ll be watching for early is Black turnout in Cleveland and other big cities. The first bad sign for Hillary Clinton in 2016 was low Black turnout in Cleveland. Probably the Democratic early vote comes in first, so Brown should have a big early lead that shrinks as the night goes on.
Roy Cooper is expected to flip the North Carolina Senate seat to the Democrats. Polls have him up double digits. If that holds, and the race gets called early, that’s a sign that the polls are accurate. NC-1 is a toss-up House seat. Gerrymandering was supposed to push Democrat Don Davis out of Congress. If it doesn’t, that’s a bad sign for Republican gerrymanders across the country.
OH-7 is another toss-up race. This time Republican Max Miller is the incumbent.
At 8: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Washington, D.C.
The Maine Senate race is one of the closest in the country. Chris Pappas is supposed to be ahead in New Hampshire; if he’s not, that’s a bad sign for Democrats. If the Mississippi Senate race is close, then the toss-up races are trending Democratic.
In Pennsylvania the focus is on House seats, where Democrats are expected to flip several. Florida is another test of Republican gerrymandering.
Josh Shapiro and Jay Pritzker will easily get reelected as governors in Pennsylvania and Illinois, but the margins matter if you think of them as a presidential contenders in 2028.
Somewhere in the 8-9 range, expect to hear projections that Democrats will take the House. The majority of races won’t be called, but enough toss-up races should come in to determine the outcome.
8:30. Arkansas. The only real news here will be if the Republicans don’t sweep.
9: Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming
Lots to chew on here. Michigan is a toss-up Senate race with last-minute events. Cook has the Iowa Senate race as a toss-up and the polls are very close, but I have a hard time believing Iowans won’t come home to the Republicans.
Texas and Kansas test the liberal Christian message. Will Christian voters stick with MAGA, or do the teachings of Jesus still mean something? Will Christian voters prioritize anti-abortion and anti-gay rights (two issues Jesus never mentioned) or helping the poor, healing the sick, and welcoming the stranger (which he talked about all the time)?
NPR says this about Texas:
Talarico could take an early lead as early voting data and mail in ballots are counted but Paxton will probably start to gain ground as counties will start reporting their totals. While the governor’s race between Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and state Rep. Gina Hinojosa is also close, Abbott is still favored.
New York has some Republican House seats that Democrats need to flip.
By now, you shouldn’t be looking for tea leaves to read any more. The night will have developed momentum one way or the other.
10: Montana, Nevada, Utah. Not a lot of excitement here. Mostly watch for close races from earlier states to begin resolving.
11: California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington. No major Senate races. California is a test of Democratic gerrymandering. But California results take a long time to come in, so we may not know much until Wednesday, if then. Ditto for California ballot questions, like the wealth tax.
12: Hawaii.
1: Alaska. If the Senate is close nationally, it could all come down to Alaska. Put some coffee on.
I’m back. The wedding itself was everything we hoped it would be (thanks for asking), and France and Spain made for a lovely honeymoon. By chance, we were always about two days ahead of the major demonstrations and unrest, and three days ahead of the train crash on the Madrid-Seville rail line. So we did a lot of looking at the news and saying: “Didn’t we walk past that shop?”
My nominee for the most beautiful cathedral in the world is La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, where the afternoon light streams in like this:
Anyway, it’s election eve. All month, polls and pundits have been trending toward the Democrats, with the result that the once impossible — Democratic control of the Senate — is now being predicted more often than not. Trump has been unable to turn the tide for a reason I predicted before I left: He has no positive message other than denial of reality — the economy is wonderful, prices are going down, and the war is all but won.
That has left Republicans with nothing to run on other than fear: Democrats are communists and jihadists who will take away your guns, sex-change your children, and outlaw eating meat, while Republicans are manly men with great butts. That message shouldn’t work with people who are worried about affording gas or health care, and (if you believe the polls) it hasn’t.
But should we believe the polls? I mean, can a Democrat really win a Senate seat in Kansas or Texas? We’ll see tomorrow night.
Today, I’m going to put out a returns-watching guide, setting the stage with pollsters predictions and then looking hour-by-hour at what returns will best tell the story. I’m hoping to get that out by 10 EST.
The summary post actually has more than a month to cover, so I’ll center on a few big things: Trump’s ever-more-open support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the demonstrations in France, and the elections in Brazil, Serbia, and Israel. I hope to get that out by noon.
Mostly, I try to keep my personal life out of this blog, but occasionally it sneaks in (usually in the Monday Morning Teasers). Today I can’t avoid it, because I’m about to take a break longer than any I have taken since I started this blog in 2008. (Interestingly, that first post had the same title Paul Krugman used this week for the post where I found the quote above: “Fear Strikes Out”. It’s a reference only a handful of people will get, to a book and a movie almost 70 years old. RIP, Jimmy Pearsall.)
As many of you know, or may have gleaned from subtle references, I was married for 40 years to a woman who (after surviving several serious health crises) died unexpectedly almost two years ago. Saturday, I’m getting married again. In October, my bride and I are going to travel around Europe, where I plan to spend as little time as possible thinking about American politics.
I realize I am deserting my post at a key moment. This fall’s campaign is a pivotal point in American history. The electorate will either ratify or reject Trump’s attempt to put aside the Constitution and establish autocracy. Billionaires are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure we ratify the current regime and its rampant corruption. I hope they will be disappointed.
I’ll be back in time to write an election-eve Sift on November 2.
Ongoing stories
Trump’s assault on American democracy. This week’s assault was against the press, as Trump banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico reporters from the White House, and threatened to add the New York Times and Washington Post to that list. “Something is wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” he said, attacking the whole notion of a free press. The ban is being challenged in court. Other reporters should boycott the White House in solidarity. I didn’t think they would, but maybe so.
Climate change. Climate change has a number of effects you wouldn’t necessarily have predicted. One is that waterways are becoming less navigable. Diminished local rainfall is limiting shipping on the Rhine, the Mississippi, and the Panama Canal.
Middle East. The US appears to be staying out of the Saudi/Houthi battle. We’ll see what effect this has on world oil supplies.
This week’s developments
This week everybody was talking about interest rates
Wednesday, the Fed raised interest rates for the first time in over three years. The increase was .25%, to a range from 3.75%-4%. Trump appointed Fed Chair Kevin Warsh precisely because he wanted interest rates to go down, not up. So he must be very disappointed.
A quick explanation is appropriate here, since most of the interest rates the average person deals with — mortgage rates, credit card rates, whatever your bank might pay on your checking account — are nowhere in that 3.75%-4% range. So what exactly did the Fed raise?
Financial institutions are obligated by law to hold liquid assets that can be used to cover sustained net cash outflows. Among these assets are the deposits that the institutions maintain, directly or indirectly, with a Federal Reserve Bank. An institution that is below its desired level of liquidity can address this temporarily by borrowing from institutions that have Federal Reserve deposits in excess of their requirement. The interest rate that a borrowing bank pays to a lending bank to borrow the funds is negotiated between the two banks, and the weighted average of this rate across all such transactions is the effective federal funds rate.
What the Fed now wants to keep in the 3.75%-4% range is that effective federal funds rate. It has two tools for controlling those rates: First, the interest rate the Fed pays banks on those institutional deposits, called the IORB (interest on reserve balances). Second, the rate the Fed charges banks for loans at its discount window. (Basically, the Fed will loan banks money based on their capital assets. This prevents runs on the bank, where a bank has assets, but can’t quickly generate the cash that depositors suddenly want back.)
Those two rates essentially bracket the interest rates the banks charge each other for the overnight loans: The only reason to loan another bank your reserves is if it will pay a rate higher than what the Fed is already paying. But there’s also no reason to pay a rate higher than what the Fed would charge you.
Changes in the Fed funds rate tend to ripple through the economy, to all the other rates people pay. That’s what we mean when we say the Fed “sets interest rates”. It only does that indirectly.
Next we get to why. By law, the Fed has two competing missions: to simultaneously keep the inflation and unemployment rates low.
Basically, high interest rates encourage people to save, while low interest rates encourage people to borrow and spend. More spending means more demand for goods and services, which tends to encourage businesses to hire. But it also makes prices rise, as more dollars chase the same quantity of goods.
High interest rates also fight inflation in another way: The ability to earn high interest encourages foreign investors to keep their money in dollars. That increases global demand for dollars and so makes the dollar more valuable relative to other currencies. That means that the price of imported goods goes down.
Recently, the unemployment rate has held fairly steady at a rate just over 4%, which in general is pretty good. But inflation is also running close to 4%, which the Fed considers too high. Hence the decision to raise rates.
After the Fed raised rates, Trump demonstrated how little he understands about economics by tweeting this on Truth Social:
Interest Rates in the United States should be 1%, or less, because we are the Best Credit in the World — BY FAR. Our Country is BOOMING with new Investment! If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year. The word “Deficit” is nothing more than a fancy word for LOSS. We are “carrying” almost every country in the World, and that cannot go on any longer. LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST! President DONALD J. TRUMP
That’s about as much economic stupidity as I’ve ever seen compressed into one paragraph. It combines two different elementary misunderstandings: one about interest rates and the other about trade.
First, interest rates have to cover three different things simultaneously
credit risk. That’s the lender’s insurance that the borrower won’t pay the loan back. So if a bank lends to 100 people and one defaults, the interest payments from the other 99 need to cover that loss. This is the only component of interest that Trump recognizes. The US government has been a great credit risk for a long, long time, because it essentially has the power to create the dollars it owes. So yes, if credit risk were the only component of interest, rates could be very low.
inflation. Inflation is currently running at just under 4% (which is almost exactly the Fed’s new short-term interest rate). If I loan somebody money for less than the inflation rate, I’m losing money, because the dollars I get repaid are worth less than the dollars I loaned.
compensation for deferred consumption. Suppose we’re two kids in our school lunchroom, and I want your candy bar. I could offer to give you back a candy bar tomorrow. But the ability to eat the bar now is worth something. If you could eat a bigger candy bar tomorrow, the deal might seem worthwhile, but otherwise not.
So no, a 1% interest rate would make no sense at all. First principles would lead you to a higher rate than the one the Fed has chosen, not a lower rate.
Then there are the macro-economic consequences. If interest rates were 1%, holding cash would be a losing proposition, so everybody would spend and borrow rather than save. That would increase the number of buyers for everything, which would drive prices up further. Inflation would skyrocket.
Now we come to Trump’s trade stupidity: He thinks that we are “losing” whenever we have a trade deficit with some country, and that we’d gain that money back if we just stopped trading with them.
This is something everybody should easily understand from their own experience: I have a trade deficit with my local supermarket, because I buy things from them while they never buy anything from me. I also have a trade deficit with my dentist, with the local coffee shop, and a lot of other businesses. Under Trump’s logic, I should just stop trading with them.
The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!
It’s hard to judge IQ from a distance, but I can say with confidence that Trump does not know or understand much. That’s what happens when you aren’t curious and surround yourself with people who only tell you what you want to hear. It doesn’t matter how good your brain is if it never engages with the world.
I am reminded of something one of my junior-high teachers said: “Some people are so stupid, they think they’re intelligent.”
One of the themes is those articles is countries like Canada deciding to go their own way rather than remain in the American orbit. Here’s an example: You know those foreign knowledge workers that Trump slapped a $100K tax on? He’s saying America doesn’t want them. But Canada does.
Remember back in those innocent days of the Biden administration, when it was a major scandal that the president’s son might have gotten a job he didn’t deserve? Last Monday, ProPublica revealed that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin spent hundreds of thousands of dollars celebrating Don Jr.’s wedding — including renting a private island and putting on a fireworks display.
A wedding with a guest list only 50 people long — not even Don Sr. came — had room for Umar Kremlev, whom Don Jr. described as a “close friend”.
The Christian Democrats of German Chancellor Frederick Mertz continue to do badly in regional elections, with voters moving both to the right and the left.
America PAC, Elon Musk’s super PAC supporting conservative candidates and causes, is churning out dozens of digital ads vilifying transgender people and criticizing Democratic candidates over their past support for trans rights in the hopes of driving Republicans out to the polls in November. In less than a week, the group, initially created to support President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign, has released at least 38 social media ads claiming Democrats in competitive midterm Senate races would “put our daughters in danger” and prioritize a “radical trans agenda” if elected. Most of the group’s ads focus exclusively on trans people, according to a review of America PAC’s ads in the Meta and Google libraries.
Two of the ads feature people who are implied to be trans women; it is unclear if they are real actors or AI-generated amalgamations. … The ads, which portray trans women as drag queens rather than as they are in day-to-day life, follow a recent pattern of AI-generated attack ads targeting Democratic candidates over their support for trans rights. It’s unclear whether these specific ads are AI-generated, but they fall in the uncanny valley of authenticity. At minimum, they present harmful stereotypes of trans women — that they are physically imposing and always wear overdone makeup — to an audience who may not have ever met a trans person.
Appealing to negative stereotypes is key to maintaining bigotry, whether it is Jewish caricatures with big noses or Black characters speaking in jive or plantation-era pidgin English.
Scapegoating is one of fascism’s central strategies: Raise people’s anger at trans folk or immigrants, and maybe they’ll forget about gas prices, how expensive their healthcare is, and that our nation is fighting another pointless war.
Anti-trans, of course, is one of Musk’s many bigotries, including racism and sexism. He has never accepted his trans daughter. If you want to see a real trans woman, she looks like this.
Musk is just the biggest example of a larger phenomenon: As other parts of Trump’s coalition lose faith in him, billionaires are standing firm.
According to a recent analysis from the Financial Times, “More than a third of the $2.8 [billion] raised for the current 2025-26 election cycle comes from the 20 biggest mega-donors,” 16 of which have “plowed money” into the Republican midterm campaigns, a marked shift from prior cycles. … A closer look at the donors themselves tells much of the story. The shift is driven primarily by Silicon Valley boodle—particularly money tied to concerns about the regulation of artificial intelligence—as well as special interests like crypto and gambling.
If you’re not rich, and the richest people in the country are all putting their weight on one side of the scale, that’s a good reason to put your weight on the other side.
If the Kennedy Center story weren’t happening in full public view, it would be hard to believe. First, Trump took over the board of the Center, which apparently is something all previous presidents could have done, but chose not to. He politicized the Center, alienating both the artist community that performs there and the Washington-area audience that attends. His hand-picked board added his name to the Center, in violation of the legislation that established it. When a court said no to this, his board tried various other schemes to attach Trump’s name to the Center, which the court has also said no to. Then he started talking about tearing it down. He’s been quite explicit about it: Put his name on the building or it won’t survive.
If we’re going to save the Kennedy Center, I think the Trump administration should be given recognition for doing so.
I can’t think of any comparable case for any previous president: Name this thing after me, or I’ll tear it down.
Pundits are explaining this as childishness or petulance or some such. To me, it looks like mental illness.
Meredith Blake at The Contrarian has a good summary of the Ed Sheeran controversy. Sheeran himself is about as uncontroversial as a musician gets. But the opening act on his tour was the rapper Macklemore, who made pro-Palestinian statements during a recent concert. This brought down the wrath of the pro-Netanyahu Robert Kraft, who owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, one of the Sheeran tour venues. He organized resistance to Macklemore, who was then removed from Sheeran’s tour by the promoter.
Sheeran has claimed that wasn’t his decision, and that he doesn’t make political statements. Then the other musicians opening for him then pulled out.
The debacle has thrown Sheeran’s tour into chaos and resulted in a rare PR crisis for a musician who is usually about as incendiary as a bowl of oatmeal. But it has demonstrated one thing: despite what Sheeran would like to believe, being apolitical is not really an option for an artist with a global platform in 2026. That’s because many of the artists who do opt to speak out in this climate, particularly on Gaza, face severe consequences, disproportionate backlash, and bad-faith allegations of antisemitism.
and let’s close with something generic
Writing new English subtitles to Hitler’s breakdown rant in “Downfall” is practically its own genre of political satire. Here’s the latest Iran-war version.
For weeks I’ve been promising a review of The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán. Now that it comes time to deliver, I find I have more of a commentary than a full review. You can find wide-ranging interviews with Durán here and here.
The central character the book follows is Peter Thiel, a billionaire who is notable for several reasons:
He co-founded not just PayPal but also Palantir, which has enormous government contracts involving surveillance.
Thiel is not just powerful himself, he is also influential: Durán attributes to Bloomberg the observation that “sixteen men connected to Thiel and his companies now hold positions of power in the Trump administration”.
Most importantly, J. D. Vance is essentially a Thiel creation. Thiel found him as a student, shepherded his career in venture capital, and then funded his race for the Senate. [1]
The important thing to know about Thiel’s vision is that he seems not to appreciate that the world of 1990s cyberpunk novels is a dystopia. In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, just to give one example, government exists but has largely become obsolete, with its services mostly privatized by franchised corporations. Local jails have turned into franchises of a corporation called “The Klink”. Another franchise operation, Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, is made up of gated communities in which you can buy citizenship.
Apparently, Snow Crash and various other cyberpunk classics are not dystopias to Thiel. Making government obsolete and expanding corporate power to usurp government has been his vision since he first read the 1999 nonfiction book The Sovereign Individual. [2]
He was also influenced by Balaji Srinivasan’s notion of a “network state”, which Srinivasan’s book defines as
a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, in other words. Thiel is part of a broader community of tech visionaries and entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Plans for a new frontier, new city, new country, or new colony run throughout their thinking, pulling together examples that otherwise seem to have nothing to do with each other, like Musk’s Mars colony, the California Forever planned city, Jared Kushner’s “New Gaza”, plans to develop Greenland after the US takes it over, seasteading operations, and many others. The point is to find a place that is either empty or populated (like Gaza) with people whose rights can be neglected, and then to build whatever a tech lord dreams, controlling it much like a company town from America’s Gilded Age. As diverse as they seem, they are all “network states”.
Jared’s vision of New Gaza
Crypto-currency, of course, is a key part of this vision, because it privatizes the management of money.
Taking powers away from government can sound good in an anarchistic sort of way. But the powers typically don’t go away, they just get lodged in some organization where the average citizen has no voice or influence. That’s a good thing to Thiel, who has opined “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” An article in SFL Media that claims this quote is “misunderstood” provides a more nuanced explanation:
True breakthroughs, from PayPal to SpaceX to Palantir, require continuity beyond election cycles. Thiel has seen firsthand how visionary projects can take decades to mature. Political instability and constant electoral turnover, he argues, kill innovation before it can bear fruit. For this reason, he insists that innovators and technocrats need protection from the volatility of democracy, creating islands of stability where the future can be built without interference.
The author apparently thinks this is less scary.
It’s worth considering Thiel’s point of view in the context of the current debate over artificial intelligence. I understand the fear that the electorate cannot be trusted to make wise choices among potential futures. But who should be trusted instead? Thiel? Musk? Sam Altman? Anybody rich enough to buy their own island, like Jeffrey Epstein? Will the future they build serve everyone’s interests, or just their own?
To the tech elite, the answer to those questions is obvious: They truly are an elite, and deserve consideration that no one else gets. This is why so many of the tech lords flirt with eugenics: Musk so far has had 14 kids with four women — trying, he says, to “set a good example”.
if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad.
He worries about population decline, even as world population is still growing.
Musk, however, acts as though we’re already in a state of decline, which suggests he’s more concerned with the growth rate of particular segments of the population than the population as a whole — as his concern about the procreation of “smart” people suggests.
This is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the massive wealth a few individuals have acquired through technology: It’s not just that they have disproportionate wealth and power, but that their ascension has convinced them that they are superior beings. They saw opportunities that no one else did, and had the nerve to let their bets ride when anyone else would have cashed out. So of course their current vision of the future is correct. The rest of us should just get out of their way. They are the players in this game, we are just NPCs (non-player characters, i.e., the characters in a computer game who are created and managed by the algorithm, and are not actually real.)
More than anything, this is why they have no sense of noblesse oblige. They do not consider themselves lucky, or as people who happened to be in the right place at the right time. They do not look at the poor and think “There but for the grace of God …”. They are superior, and the world is better off with them running it.
[1] If you wonder “Why J. D. Vance?”, you’re not grasping a major piece of Thiel’s worldview. He is fundamentally a venture capitalist. As such, he invests in lots and lots of wild schemes, understanding that most of them will go bust. The point, though, is to find the one that becomes the next big thing. A VC may lose hundreds of small bets. But if one turns out to be the next Apple or Amazon, he’s a big winner.
Same thing with people. We don’t know how many young men (and maybe a few women) Thiel invested in. Dozens or even hundreds of them might amount to nothing. But if Vance becomes president and is still under Thiel’s thumb, it’s all been worthwhile.
[2] A few recent events become clearer when viewed through Durán’s lens.
DOGE, for example, appears to me (and most people now, I think) as a massive blunder. Musk’s acolytes fired a lot of people and broke a lot of government systems, in the end probably increasing the very government waste they were supposed to eliminate. But that’s only if you take Musk’s stated intentions at face value. What if, instead, you view breaking government systems — not saving money — as the goal? Then DOGE was a great success. Breaking government, however you do it, moves the world closer to the cyberpunk dystopia the tech lords want.
In the current Atlantic, Phillips O’Brien announces the end of the “American age”. (The link is a gift from O’Brien and should work even if you don’t subscribe to Atlantic.) By the American age, I think he means an era when the financial and technological dominance of the United States has allowed it to project power all over the world, and has allowed allies as far afield as Saudi Arabia and South Korea to rely on that power.
Our failure in the Iran War heralds the end of that age, not just because we are losing to a regional power, but because we are losing in a way that undermines our whole theory of power projection. We are losing because we cannot defend our own bases in the region from Iran’s missile attacks, and cannot defend our regional allies.
That makes this defeat different from, say, our loss in Vietnam. There, we were unable to achieve a result we wanted at a cost the American public was willing to pay. But North Vietnam wasn’t able to strike at our bases in Thailand, the Philippines, and Guam. The Japanese and Australians did not have to worry about our ability to protect them. Walking away from Vietnam wounded our pride, but left the rest of our world power structure largely unaffected.
Not so this time. The much-publicized travails of the USS Abraham Lincoln, for example, arose because the Iranians destroyed our logistics base in Bahrain, and so the Lincoln had to be supplied from Diego Garcia thousands of miles away. And the Bahrain base is not just temporarily out of commission. O’Brien notes:
At a recent town-hall meeting, Navy Timeshas reported, a service member asked Admiral Daryl Caudle about retrieving personal items from the Bahrain base. “We’re not getting back in there anytime soon,” Caudle responded. “I just want to be completely honest with that.”
Our era of dominance was bound to end eventually, O’Brien says, but Trump has made it come about sooner by starting a foolish shooting war against Iran and foolish trade wars with our former allies. Around the world, countries are concluding that neither our power nor our word can be trusted, and are beginning to make post-American arrangements.
Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia—all long-term U.S. partners—recently signed their own defense pact. Now that Iran is exercising control over the Strait of Hormuz, Oman, on the waterway’s opposite shore, is inching toward closer cooperation with Tehran. Other Gulf States are reaching out to Iran as well. Even Saudi Arabia, which for decades based its security on massive purchases of U.S. weapons and the hosting of U.S. forces, must reassess its choices after Trump told its de facto ruler that the U.S. will not assist the country in its war with the Houthis. Meanwhile, South Korea is improving relations with China, and European states are thinking more and more of a European-wide defense association.
It is quite ironic that this end of American greatness happens under a regime that promised to “Make America Great Again”. What makes O’Brien’s article important — I suspect it will be referenced decades from now, the way George Kennan’s anonymous 1947 “X article“, the one that promoted a policy of “containment” against the Soviet Union, has been — is that the American public has not gotten this message yet. The Trump regime still trumpets its “victory” in Iran, and hubristically compares an ally like Canada to “a little yippy dog“.
The bulk of Trump voters, the ones who live in the MAGA echo chamber, are beginning to become uneasy about the war dragging on, and are tired of paying higher war-induced gas and diesel prices. But they do not yet understand that we have lost, much less what we have lost.
The rest of the public is not far ahead of the MAGA base. Most Americans are coming to understand that Trump has no plans that will lead to victory, so we will at some point have to simply drop the war — probably ending up in a situation far worse than Obama achieved by negotiating with Iran. But even they are imagining a loss like Vietnam or Afghanistan, where we feel embarrassed, but turn the page and go on as before.
What the end of the Pax Americana will mean is still a mystery, even to foreign-policy experts. The last time a world power passed from the scene was over a hundred years ago, with the decline of the British Empire. As Kipling wrote in 1897:
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
But even then, Britain could pass the torch to a like-minded ally in the United States. In some sense, what is ending now is an Anglo-American period of dominance that goes back at least to the Napoleonic wars. Today, China is the only power comparable to the United States, and it is neither like-minded nor ready to define a world order.
We are likely to be entering a period of instability around the world. Probably the worst thing we can do is to refuse to recognize it, and to escape into nostalgia for our past greatness. We could go ever-deeper into debt by increasing our military budget, maybe rebuilding bases we still cannot defend, and buying nostalgia-inducing weapons like the Trump-class battleships.
Or we could rethink America’s role in the world. We are a strong nation with outstanding technology and world leadership in many areas. Much can be still be done with that, if we come to a new understanding of both our strengths and our limitations.
I’m about to take the longest vacation from the Sift since I started it in 2008: five weeks. I don’t plan to post again until election eve. I guess we’ll find out whether blogging is a choice or a compulsion.
I realize this is bad timing on my part, but there are special circumstances: I’m getting married again Saturday, and I’ll be on a long honeymoon in France and Spain. Those of you who have followed this blog for a while may remember that I was married for 40 years before my first wife died in 2024. I did some fairly public mourning before making the decision to get on with my life rather than wallow in grief and nostalgia. I’ve been extremely lucky in how well that getting-on-with-life has been going. The way I describe this to myself is that I’m writing new chapters in my story rather than living out an extended epilogue to a story that has already concluded.
While I’m gone, I’m counting on the rest of you to step up and make history. Let’s hope that the election I come back to is a pivotal rejection of the MAGA autocracy.
In an attempt to clear the decks, I’ll be posting two featured articles today. One is a response to a recent article I think is very important: Phillips O’Brien’s “The American Age is Over” in the current Atlantic. The Iran War isn’t just a defeat like Vietnam or Afghanistan, it points out a fundamental flaw in the way America projects power. Going forward, the world is going to be different in ways that are hard to predict. That post is nearly done, and should be out shortly.
The other is my commentary on The Nerd Reich by Gil Durán. I’ll try to get that out before 11 EDT.
The weekly summary will discuss the Fed’s interest rate hike, and get a bit nerdy about how that actually works. Then there’s the latest example of blatant corruption: a close Putin associate putting up hundreds of thousands of dollars to celebrate Don Jr.’s wedding. (So far, no one has offered to rent me a private island for my afterparty.) Also: billionaires trying to come to the GOP’s rescue with a massive burst of anti-trans propaganda, Trump’s bizarre and destructive obsession with the Kennedy Center, Ed Sheeran’s failed attempt to stay apolitical, and maybe a few other things. The goal is to post that at noon, so I can get back to wedding-prep stuff.
