The Weekly Sift

I don’t think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there’s been no coverage of Trump’s dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden’s age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. That’s a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It’s that simple. It doesn’t mean that the Times hasn’t taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That’s how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.

-Doug J. Balloon (NYT Pitchbot)

This week’s featured post is “Squirrel!“

This week everybody was talking about keeping the government open

It looks like House Republicans aren’t eager to sacrifice themselves for Trump. Trump had been demanding that any deal to keep the government open include the Save Act, requiring proof of citizenship for a person to register to vote. It’s not clear what real-world problem that was supposed to solve, since non-citizen voting is already illegal and there is no evidence that law has been ineffective. But it would reinforce among the MAGA faithful the false impression that non-citizens are voting Democratic in large numbers. That, in turn, might set up all sorts of shenanigans should Trump lose again in November. Wednesday, he posted this on Truth Social:

If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form. Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak – They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to. Only American Citizens should be voting in our Most Important Election in History, or any Election!

Wednesday, however, Speaker Johnson was unable to pass such a resolution in the House, leaving him with no negotiating leverage against the Senate, where the Save Act is a non-starter. So yesterday he agreed to a clean continuing resolution that funds the government through December.

and attacks in Lebanon

Israel shifted its attention from Hamas to Hezbollah this week, with airstrikes on Lebanon and a sci-fi-like attack using exploding pagers.

and Mark Robinson

It’s time for another round of Republican limbo: North Carolina candidate for governor Mark Robinson just set the bar lower than ever, and the GOP continues to contort its moral standards to pass under it with him.

So CNN found a bunch of messages Robinson posted to a message board on the porn site Nude Africa between 2008 and 2012. (I haven’t seen them, but I am told many include disgusting images.) In the printable ones, he proclaimed himself a “black NAZI” and advocated bringing slavery back, saying “Some people need to be slaves.”

Robinson denies he posted those messages, but CNN has pretty good evidence it’s him. If he’s being framed, somebody must have started building the frame back in 2008, when Robinson was not a public figure.

Robinson was already trailing Democrat Josh Stein by 9.4%, largely because of his penchant for ridiculously inflammatory statements, like comparing transpeople to “maggots” and “flies”, telling them to “find a corner outside somewhere” rather than use a gendered bathroom, and saying that “Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.” The posts on Nude Africa are shocking at one level, but on another level they sound like him. Whatever he says, he says bigly. David French puts it like this:

No one, however, should be surprised. Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.

In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.

In the pre-Trump era, something like the Nude Africa posts would have been immediately disqualifying, and members of his own party would be demanding that Robinson leave the race. But the GOP is standing by him, because the only standard the Party has these days is loyalty to Trump, who hasn’t rescinded his ringing endorsements, like when he called Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids“.

Instead, Trump is pretending Robinson doesn’t exist. Robinson was neither invited nor mentioned at Trump’s rally in North Carolina Saturday. But Robinson’s staff is running away en masse.

Chris Christie connects Robinson to past MAGA losers like Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and Hershel Walker in Georgia:

This is the problem for us Republicans. As long as Donald Trump is your recruiting agent for candidates in swing states, we’re going to continue to get our rear ends handed to us.

French thinks Trump’s damage to his party goes further:

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

and the race

Since my state-of-the-race post last week, the national polls haven’t changed much: from Harris +2.7 to Harris +2.6 in the 538 average, and Harris +1.8 to Harris +2.2 in RCP. Some of the state polls look better, particularly Pennsylvania, which went from Harris +0.6 to Harris +1.3.

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Trump’s response to the Harris townhall Oprah did:

When I watched her interview yesterday with a woman who is destroying, through her complete and total incompetence, America, I couldn’t help but think this isn’t the real Oprah

It’s hard to tell whether “not the real Oprah” is supposed to be metaphoric or whether he thinks she’s physically been replaced.

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Heather Cox Richardson looks at the history of the Electoral College, and the persistent advantage it gives Republicans. Unlike some historians, she doesn’t attribute the origin of the EC to pro-slavery interests, but she believes pro-slavery interests made it impossible to eliminate in the 1830s. I hadn’t realized that the winner-take-all provision for each state’s electoral votes (other than Nebraska and Maine) wasn’t part of the Founders’ original vision.

and Trump’s armed stalker

It’s fascinating to me how quickly the second Trump “assassination attempt” story has come and gone, except inside the MAGA information silos.

One factor is how much less the story turned out to be than the first announcement — that shots had been fired on a course where Trump was golfing. It turned out the shots had been fired by Secret Service agents at a guy hiding in the bushes with a rifle, who never got a good look at Trump. Without the agents’ intervention, it might have turned into an assassination attempt. (So the Deep State saves the day again!) But all it really amounted to was an armed stalking.

And then there were the unnecessary conspiracy theories. Like: Trump’s round of golf wasn’t on his schedule, so how could the would-be assassin have known? It must have been an inside job! Well, cellphone records say he had been waiting in the woods for 12 hours. If you’re looking for Trump, pick out a day when he’s not campaigning and stake out his golf course. How much inside knowledge does that take?

Residents say Trump spends almost every Sunday at the West Palm Beach golf club when he is not on the campaign trail.

Then there was how quickly Trump moved to take advantage of the incident. A bunch of social media criticism went something like: “The first thing I do when someone tries to kill me is send out a fund-raising email.”

MAGA World’s attempts to “connect the dots” with the assassination attempt in Butler in July and from there link to Harris or Biden or the Deep State or some mysterious “they” were implausibly vacuous.

They are going to keep trying to kill Trump. This is only beginning. This stops only when we win in November.

The Butler guy was a conservative gun-nut who wanted to kill somebody important. Trump appears to have been a target of opportunity. Trump’s golf-course stalker is more plausibly motivated by politics, but we don’t yet know how. Neither appears to have any Biden/Harris connection.

Apparently the stalker did intend to assassinate Trump, but his motives don’t sound like they were lifted from any Democrat’s speeches.

Trump “ended relations with Iran like a child and now the Middle East has unraveled,” the letter says.

Republicans blaming Democratic rhetoric and calling for them to “tone it down” are just laughable, when Trump continues to call Harris a Communist and say at every rally that Harris and Biden are “destroying our country“. Here, in one sentence, he calls out inflammatory Democratic rhetoric while using his own:

Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country.

Trump has never once addressed the death threats his fans make against anybody who gets in his way: Judges Merchan and Chutkan, DAs Fani Willis and Alan Bragg, election workers like Shaye Moss. And he promises to pardon those convicted for committing violence in his name.

Vance complains that Democrats (truthfully) labeling Trump a “threat to democracy” is “going to get somebody killed“, but then goes on to lie about Haitians eating people’s cats.

It’s not working for them.

and how the media covers Trump

NYT reporter Maggie Haberman was interviewed on NPR Thursday, and showed real cluelessness about why her newspaper in particular and the media in general are being criticized.

I think that the media does a very good job covering Trump. … I think there is an industry, bluntly, Dave, that is dedicated toward attacking the media, especially as it relates to covering Donald Trump and all coverage of Trump. And I think that Trump is a really difficult figure to cover because he challenges news media process every day, has for years. The systems are just fundamentally – they were not built to deal with somebody who says things that are not true as often as he does or speaks as incoherently as he often does. I think the media has actually done a very good job showing people who he is, what he says, what he does. I think most of the information that the public has about Trump is because of reporting by the media. And I guess I don’t really understand how this industry that literally exists to attack the press broadly – and the media is not a monolith. It’s not a league. But this industry that exists to do that – I don’t see how they think they are a solution by undermining faith in what we do. That’s been very confusing to me. … I’m talking about criticism on the left.

James Fallows responded on X by suggesting someone at the Times address the specific criticisms people are making: like why Biden’s cognitive issues got highlighted while Trump’s are ignored, and “Why framing / headline / social-promo of stories takes a certain shape so predictably as to have given rise to the Pitchbot”.

This drew the satirical NYT Pitchbot into the discussion, which Jonathan Chait slammed as a “hacky, tin-eared comedy account”. That caused the Pitchbot’s author to drop his comedy mask and engage, making some very good points.

I don’t think anyone can dispute either of those two points: that there’s been no coverage of Trump’s dementia comparable to the discussion of Biden’s age and that hacked Democratic campaign emails would be getting covered. [The press has refused to publish the Trump emails Iran hacked.] That’s a different standard and one that is markedly lower for Trump. It’s that simple. It doesn’t mean that the Times hasn’t taught the public a lot about Trump. There have been a lot of revealing stories. But they are easier on Trump than on other candidates. That’s how narcissistic sociopaths work. They get weak institutions to make special rules for them.

I’ll add my two cents: The media in general, the NYT, and Haberman in particular have been doing a bad job covering Trump. They’ve been applying lower standards to him, for example, often covering what-he-meant rather than what-he-said, when they refused to give Biden that consideration. Lots of serious journalists like Fallows have noticed, as well as humorists like the creator of the NYT Pitchbot. It takes real arrogance to lump together the people who notice your failings and dismiss them as “an industry dedicated to attacking the media”.

and you also might be interested in …

The Federal Reserve finally has started cutting interest rates, signalling that it believes inflation is no longer a major threat to the economy.

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In Brazil, Elon Musk and his X social media platform have been fighting the law. The Guardian reports: “The law appears to have won.”

The platform bowed to one of the key demands made by Brazil’s supreme court by appointing a legal representative in the country. It also paid outstanding fines and took down user accounts that the court had ordered to be removed on the basis that they threatened the country’s democracy, the New York Times reported.

Musk had been resisting removing the accounts (basically for denying that former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro had lost his reelection bid) citing his commitment to free speech. However, he only seems to resist requests from liberal democratic governments. He has been much more cooperative with the governments of Turkey and India, the article notes.

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If you want to dig into the nuts-and-bolts of creating a sustainable economy, particularly how that economy will generate and distribute electric power, you should be reading David Roberts’ “Volts” blog on Substack. (Like most Substack blogs, Volts will ask you to subscribe, but let you read the content even if you don’t.)

I don’t quote Volts that often, usually because it delves deeper into the details than this blog ought to. But one recent post worth your while is his interview with Heather Boushey, a member of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors and the chief economist for his Invest in America Cabinet. She’s discussing the “$910 billion in announced investments all across the country in semiconductors, clean energy, manufacturing, batteries and EVs, bio-manufacturing, heavy industry, and clean power” that has come from the big bills Biden got passed before Republicans took over the House: the Inflation Reduction Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS Act.

What I find interesting here is not so much the specifics as the public/private investment approach she describes. As she puts it: “Markets don’t always deliver optimal outcomes. But, on the other hand, markets are amazing.” Markets themselves are neither blind nor all-wise, but they do certain things very well. Government incentives should lay out the playing field, but private-sector players should play the game.

It seems to be working. The public investment capital is drawing in many times that much in private investment. New productive capacity is being built and jobs are being created — many of them in the parts of the country that need jobs most. The public investments are not just in basic research — a role Roberts notes that even many libertarians endorse — but in opening the bottlenecks that keep research advances from being implemented.

Interestingly, this public money is turning into the exact opposite of patronage. By targeting areas that have suffered from disinvestment and job flight, the Biden administration has wound up channeling most of this investment money to Republican counties.

and let’s close with something graphic

When I joined BlueSky, not that many people were on it yet. So the first people I followed were just about anybody I had heard of, like comic-book creator Kurt Busiek (“Astro City”). From there, by following people other people followed, I wound up with a social-media feed very different from what I see on X: odd and creative and whimsical.

That’s how I discovered Sarah Andersen. Sarah’s cartoons tend to be witchy, cat-oriented, and just slightly dark. I’ve been enjoying them.

We did nothing.

– Donald J. Trump,
summing up his accomplishments on the issue of gun violence

This week’s featured post is “The Word of the Week: Sanewashing“.

This week everybody was talking about tomorrow night’s debate

I’m not going to say much about this because I’m trying not to think about it. It will happen, I can’t influence the outcome, and by Wednesday morning we’ll know how it went. Kamala Harris is smarter and sharper, but a shameless liar always has a puncher’s chance in these things, especially when moderators refuse to fact-check, as they did in the Trump-Biden debate.

Recent polls have Harris up nationally by 2.8%, according to the 538 polling average. Given the Electoral College’s thumb on the scale, that’s a toss-up. Hillary’s popular-vote margin of 2.1% wasn’t quite enough, but Biden’s 4.5% definitely was. Democrats hold a similar 2.6% edge in congressional generic ballot polls.

The Electoral College shames our country. Twice in this century, it has allowed the candidate who got the second-most votes to claim the presidency. People only support the Electoral College to rationalize the unfair advantage it gives their side. Can you imagine how Trump would scream if he got more votes than his opponent, but still lost the election?

I’ve decided not to do a state-of-the-race post until after the debate. But here’s Ruben Bolling’s account of the campaign so far.

and Russia, Russia, Russia

We all know that “the Big Lie” is Trump’s claim that he really won the 2020 election, and his victory was stolen from him by fraud. But a lie of similar size is his claim that “Russia, Russia, Russia” was a hoax cooked up by his enemies, and that investigations like the Mueller Report “cleared” him of wrongdoing. (This is covered in Chapter 1 of Steve Benen’s new book “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, reality, and the Republicans’ war on the recent past“.)

John Durham’s sham investigation of “the Russia hoax” went on longer than the Mueller investigation, and came up empty when juries quickly dismissed two prosecutions against minor characters in its conspiracy theory. The “crime of the century” Trump advertised was never revealed.

This week we got a reminder that Russia has never stopped trying to promote the American right wing. An indictment released Wednesday charges that the Russian state media company RT funneled $10 million through an American company (obviously Tenet Media, though the indictment does not name the company) to fund right-wing influencers online.

The people who ultimately got the money are all claiming they were duped, and had no idea Russia was funding their work. Author Renée DiResta observes:

Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas, because they bring their own trusting audiences and are actually, you know, real.

The Democratic Mormon X-account Dem Saints notes “The irony of calling Kamala a communist while cashing Russian checks.”

and the Georgia school shooting

Wednesday, a 14-year-old brought an AR-type weapon to Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia and began shooting, killing four and wounding nine. He has been charged with murder and will be tried as an adult. His father faces manslaughter and other charges for providing the gun “with knowledge [his son] was a threat to himself and others.”

I’m not sure how I feel about either of those prosecuting decisions. No matter what he’s done, a 14-year-old is not an adult. And the father deserves consequences of some sort, but manslaughter seems a bit much. More punishment is not the solution to every problem.

Gun violence (like climate change) is one issue where the difference between the two parties is stark. Kamala Harris responded: “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Meanwhile, J. D. Vance said: “This is a fact of life.” Donald Trump called the shooter “a sick and deranged monster“, as if the important issue for a leader to address is how to assess blame. In the past he has said “We have to get over it, we have to move forward.“, as if school shootings are acts of God with no policy implications.

Another Republican response came from Governor Kemp:

This is not the day to talk about safety or policy. We need thoughts and prayers for the victims, law enforcement, and educators.

For Kemp, it never is the day. Just two years ago, he signed a law that allows Georgians to carry handguns in public without a license or background check.

And here’s Trump, accepting the endorsement of the NRA in May:

In my second term, we will roll back every Biden attack on the Second Amendment.

At an NRA event in February he bragged:

During my four years, nothing happened. And there was great pressure on me, having to do with guns. We did nothing.

This TikTok video is a very raw response from a Mom who says she takes pictures of her kids every day so she will know what they were wearing in case something happens. She contrasts Trump’s attention to imaginary issues like schools changing kids’ genders with his disinterest in actual problems like kids getting shot at school.

Former Missouri high school teacher (and one of my favorite Substack bloggers) Jess Piper describes how disturbing active shooter drills are for teachers, not to mention students.

I also know that kids who are stuck in the hallway during an active shooter event are left in the hallway. Every single police officer who conducted drills told us the same thing: if you have a student begging to get into your classroom, refuse them. They could be the shooter.

During one drill, complete with explosions and smoke in the hallway, someone pounded on her locked classroom door and begged to be let in. She followed instructions and did not open the door. Even though she knew it was a drill, she felt traumatized afterwards. (Fortunately this was a teachers-only drill with no students present.)

Piper lists the common-sense changes the vast majority of voters would like to see: universal background checks, safe storage laws, and red flag laws.

Those proposals run into the same objections gun-violence apologists always raise: They won’t stop every shooter. No solution is perfect, so we should do nothing.

Qasim Rashid rebuts the nine most common NRA myths.

If you’re willing to accept school shootings as a “fact of life” and think government should “do nothing” about them, you know how to vote. If you believe that it doesn’t have to be this way, you also know how to vote.

and the corporate media covering for Trump’s mental decline

That’s the subject of the featured post, introducing the term sanewashing, which has been around for a while, but whose usage has recently exploded.

and Trump’s legal cases

Judge Juan Merchan delayed sentencing Trump for his 34 felony convictions until after the election. Frustrating as this is, Politico’s Ankush Khardori explains the judge’s thinking.

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The federal January 6 case is back in Judge Chutkan’s court, which now has to deal with the Supreme Court’s invention of presidential immunity. There are so many issues to sort out that we are still months or maybe even years away from trial, even if Trump doesn’t win the election and order the Justice Department to drop the charges. But between now and election day Chutkan may hold evidentiary hearings or request briefs that could allow Jack Smith to introduce evidence the public hasn’t seen yet.

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Trump must think the E. Jean Carroll defamation cases (where juries found him responsible for sexual abuse and defamation, totaling up to nearly $90 million in damages) works in his favor politically, because he purposefully called attention to it Friday.

He didn’t have to show up for the hearing in federal appeals court about his attempt to overturn the initial $5 million verdict, but he did. He also didn’t have to make a 49-minute statement to the press afterward, but he did that too.

The appeals court can’t just substitute its own judgment for the jury’s, because the jury heard witness testimony live rather than reading it in a transcript. So who the jury decided to believe is not reviewable. What the appeal is about is whether the jury should have been allowed to hear one of the witnesses at all, or listen to the infamous Access Hollywood tape, where Trump confessed to doing in general the kind of thing Carroll accused him of specifically.

The witness in question supported Carroll’s case by testifying that Trump had groped her on an airplane, something he continues to deny. In his press statement, Trump did what he so often does, saying that the witness wasn’t attractive enough to assault.

Frankly, I know you’re going to say it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen, and she wouldn’t have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.

“The chosen one” — as if it’s an honor, and women are lining up hoping that Trump will grope them. All I can say is: “What an asshole.” You can watch the video here; it looks and sounds just as bad as it reads.

Oh, and Trump also lied about Anderson Cooper, as Cooper demonstrated Friday evening.

and you also might be interested in …

The world’s most “liveable” city? Vienna.

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I was going to write a summary of the Democrats’ best chance to retain the Senate, but I was going to say exactly what Jay Kuo says: It all comes down to Jon Tester winning in Montana and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell beating Rick Scott in Florida. Doing both probably keeps the 51-49 margin.

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The knock on most renewable energy is that it’s unreliable; the sun isn’t always shining and the wind doesn’t always blow. The answer to that problem is battery storage. The Economist reports on the state of grid-scale batteries.

Massachusetts is making a major investment in offshore wind power.

How fast climate change causes sea level to rise depends to a large extent on what is happening under the glaciers of Greenland — and nobody really knows.

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It’s September and Republicans control the House, so it must be time to talk about a government shutdown. The issue House Republicans are pushing this time is to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

That provision may sound reasonable if you don’t think about it too long — after all, we all want American elections to be decided by Americans. But basically it causes a problem without solving a problem.

It causes a problem because lots of legal American voters can’t easily produce proof of citizenship. In general, poor people have little incentive to get a passport, and Americans who have moved around a lot may have lost track of their birth certificates a few hops ago. (Again, there’s a socio-economic factor: If you’ve ever had to leave someplace in a hurry, taking all your important papers with you may not have been a priority.) You can probably go back to the county where you were born and pay a fee to get a new copy, but that’s a big enough hurdle to keep many people from voting — which may be the whole point.

As for the problem this idea is supposed to solve — noncitizens voting — it isn’t really a problem. Noncitizen voting is already illegal, and there is absolutely no evidence that significant numbers of noncitizens are voting (other than in local elections in cities that allow it). U.S. News summarizes:

Almost all available data says that noncitizen voting in federal elections, though not unprecedented, is incredibly rare.

In 2016, North Carolina audited its elections and found that 41 legal immigrants had cast ballots despite not yet being citizens out of 4.8 million votes cast. The state’s election board found that the votes made no difference in any state election.

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger conducted an audit of the state’s voter rolls in 2022 and found that 1,634 had attempted to register but all were caught and none were actually registered.

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God help me, but I agree strongly with Dick Cheney.

In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again

I still hold him responsible for the Bush administration’s torture policy and would like to see him tried at The Hague. But he’s right this time, and I appreciate him not including some poison pill in his endorsement. I couldn’t have made the point better.

In recent weeks there has been a steady drumbeat of Republicans (or former Republicans) endorsing Harris: Adam Kinzinger; Liz Cheney; 238 staffers of the Bushes, Mitt Romney, and John McCain; Jimmy McCain; Rupert Murdoch’s son James; and many others.

Other Republicans have not endorsed Harris, but have announced that they won’t vote for Trump: Mike Pence, Pat Toomey, Meghan McCain, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan.

The way the announcements are dribbling out makes me wonder if someone in the Harris campaign is orchestrating the timing. But apparently it’s not all leading up to George W. Bush, whose office says he won’t endorse anyone this year.

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In case you still respect Elon Musk: On September 1, he retweeted (with the comment “Interesting observation.“) a totally wacko theory that only “high-status” or “high-T” men should have input into political decision-making. The justification is that “people who aren’t able to defend themselves physically” process everything through a “safety filter” and aren’t free to ask “Is this true?” The ideal is “Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.”

Maybe I’m having a low-T day, but I can’t remember ever considering the idea that testosterone might enhance rationality. There’s a reason why we talk about guys who “think with their dicks”. When the ancient Athenian playwright Sophocles got old and felt his libido waning, he compared it to being freed from a harsh master.

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The week’s best comeback. The Economist published an article “The hard right takes Germany into uncharted territory“. And Jathan Sadowski replied:

Oh I don’t know, I think that territory is actually very well charted.

The Economist edited, replacing “uncharted” with “dangerous”.

and let’s close with something tasty

Have a few thousand gallons of milk you need to do something with before they go bad? Maybe you too can take a run at the Guinness record for the largest ball of string cheese. The UPI story and the YouTube link disagree about the exact weight. (Was it 2200 pounds or just 1400 pounds? I think the YouTube link just did the kilogram/pound conversion wrong.) But it’s big. Sadly, the story doesn’t say whether anyone will get to eat it.

Never underestimate a public school teacher.

– Tim Walz

This week’s featured post is “The Convention That Ate Republicans’ Lunch“.

This week everybody was talking about the Democratic Convention

The featured post focuses on how the DNC reclaimed Reagan-era values that Republicans have stopped taking seriously or have let drift away from American reality: freedom, family, marriage, tradition, masculinity, and what makes someone American.

I know I mentioned this in that post, but it deserves a second plug: One standard element of a political convention is the roll call of the states as the delegates announce their votes. The DNC did it a little differently from the RNC.

The DNC turned roll call into a dance party, with each state choosing music appropriate to itself, like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” or Illinois choosing Alan Parson’s “Sirius”, the walk-on music the Chicago Bulls use when they play in that same arena. My own state, Massachusetts, picked the Dropkick Murphy’s “I’m Shipping Up to Boston”. But Georgia stole the show by getting Atlanta’s Lil Jon to perform his own “Turn Down for What”.

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One difference between the conventions the featured post didn’t cover: The RNC’s message centered on hero-worship: America is in terrible shape, but if we elect Donald Trump again, he will save us. The DNC was more of a pep rally for activists. Speaker after speaker urged the delegates (and by extension those watching at home) to “do something”: volunteer for the campaign, send money, make sure your friends are registered to vote. Kamala Harris will not save us by herself; her campaign is the vehicle through which We the People will save ourselves and each other.

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I’ve never seen condoms used for political advertising before.

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Major media fact-checking during the conventions was somewhere between comical and infuriating.

If you’re a person actually interested in the truth, the main thing you need to know about the Democratic Convention speakers is that they were far and away more truthful than the Republican speakers. Nothing at the DNC rivaled the big lies that form the scaffolding for MAGA policies: the “migrant crime wave“, or that illegal immigrants are voting, or that other countries are emptying their jails and insane asylums to send their unwanted people to the US.

None of that is even remotely close to being true.

But both-sides-ism decrees that fact-checkers had to flag Democrats for something. So when Tim Walz said that “IVF and fertility treatments” are “personal for Gwen and I”, USA Today had to point out that the Walzes’ daughter Hope resulted from a different fertility treatment than IVF, as if IVF hadn’t been the next option, and as if succeeding before reaching that point would give the Walzes less empathy with infertile couples who do need IVF. In short: Nothing Tim said was wrong or needed correction.

Or when Pete Buttigieg said that “crime was higher on [Trump’s] watch”, USA Today found it important to point out that not all crime rates were higher all the time. So the murder rate (which rose under Trump) continued rising for Biden’s first year before falling to a level below where it was at the end of Trump’s term.

And when Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker said “Donald told us to inject bleach” as a Covid treatment, that was “misleading“, because Trump only made that ridiculous suggestion as something scientists should waste their time investigating.

Bill Clinton said that since the end of the Cold War, 50 million American jobs have been created under Democratic administrations and only 1 million under Republican administrations. PBS rated that only “mostly true“, because even though what Clinton said was exactly right, 1989 was a particularly fortuitous time to measure from. Starting the clock running somewhere else might give less lop-sided results.

Summing up: While Republicans told big whopping lies that they can’t justify their policies without, Democrats sometimes failed to include all the footnotes a journal article would require.

It seems like a conscientious fact-checker would want to note that distinction. But AP’s headlines looked like this:

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Good lines from the convention that I haven’t found another place for. D. L. Hughley:

Republicans for Kamala? I guess Donald Trump will finally know what it’s like when you get left for a younger woman.

Ted Lieu:

As a computer science major, I am so impressed by how large this AI-generated crowd looks tonight.

Hakeem Jeffries:

Donald Trump is like an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won’t go away. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason.

Pete Buttigieg:

JD Vance said ‘if you don’t have kids you have no physical commitment to the future of this country.’ When I deployed to Afghanistan, I didn’t have kids then. Many of the men and women with me didn’t either. But let me tell you, our commitment to the future of this country was pretty damn physical.

Raphael Warnock:

We believe that a patient’s room is too small and cramped for space for a woman, her doctor, and the United States government. That’s too many people in the room.

and RFK Jr. endorsing Trump

Friday, Robert Kennedy Jr. announced that he was suspending his campaign and supporting Donald Trump.

No one should be surprised by this, because RFK Jr.’s campaign was a Trump operation from the start. The Kennedy name was supposed to divide the Democratic vote, which is why RFK Jr.’s campaign was funded by pro-Trump donors and pushed by pro-Trump media. But recent polls had begun to show Kennedy pulling more votes from Trump than from Harris, so it was time to pull the plug.

On paper, this looks to favor Trump, but it also ratifies Harris/Walz framing: Trump, Vance, and Kennedy are all weird, so of course they would wind up together.

I’ve seen lots of triumphal posting by Trumpists, claiming that this is a big development that nails down Trump’s election. But Nate Silver is unconvinced. His model has Harris up 4% with her convention bounce just starting to show up in the data. Her margin drops about 0.3% when Kennedy is taken out.

and the horse race

I’m not going to pay much attention this week, because if Kamala gets a bounce out of the convention, it won’t show up fully in the polls until at least next week. But generally, her slow and steady momentum has continued. 538’s polling average has her up by 3.4%, which is close to where she needs to be to overcome the Republican advantage built into the Electoral College.

But there is reason to expect a convention bounce. Here, a CNN reporter is stunned that 6 of the 8 undecided voters he talked to in November have decided for Harris. One has decided for Trump and one still isn’t planning to vote.

and you also might be interested in …

Maybe “Communist” and “Marxist” don’t mean what Trumpists think they mean.

and let’s close with something cold-blooded

OK, I’ve heard of support dogs, cats, and even monkeys. But a support gator? I’m picturing a bumper sticker: My support animal can eat your support animal.

No Sift next week. The next batch of new articles will post on August 19.

I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?

– Donald Trump

When prejudice cannot deny the black man’s ability, it denies his race.

– Frederick Douglass

This week’s featured posts are “Where Did Inflation Come From?” and “The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans“.

This week everybody was talking about getting prisoners out of Russia

Thursday, President Biden announced a multi-country swap of prisoners that brought home three Americans: WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan, and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva. Whelan had been held the longest, since 2018.

The swap relied heavily on US allies. Germany, Slovenia, Estonia, Poland, Norway, and the Maldive Islands released prisoners Russia wanted back. In his announcement, Biden underlined the importance of having allies, a backhanded slap at Trump’s anti-NATO sentiments.

---

If Trumpers wonder why calling him “weird” is catching on, they should look at his first reaction to the prisoner swap, which he had said could not happen until he was reelected (apparently because he’s Putin’s pet).

So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia? How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash?

At some point, questioning the details of the swap is legitimate. But surely the first reaction of any non-weird American was to be happy for fellow Americans who are free now, and for the families who can welcome them home. Trump expressed none of this, but (without knowing any of the details) simply assumed the deal must be bad because it worked against his political interests. He doubled down during his Atlanta rally Saturday.

I would like to congratulate Vladimir Putin for having made yet another great deal.

Didn’t every American other than Trump feel at least a little joy in their hearts for their freed countrymen? That’s the kind of thing that makes him weird.

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Of course there’s speculation about what this means politically in the US. Back in May, Trump posted that he would get Evan Gershkovich released “almost immediately after the election”, and that Putin “will do that for me, but not for anyone else”. Some people at the time interpreted this as Putin’s ransom demand: If you want to get Gershkovich back, elect Trump.

But after this week’s deal was announced, Slate’s Fred Kaplan speculated:

[L]ike most world leaders, Putin has no doubt been reading the polls, and he may have concluded that Trump is not going to win … Therefore, Putin might have reasoned, it’s better to take a deal now so it looks as if he’s acting without an eye to our election.

However, I wonder if there’s another angle: Maybe our allies were willing to sacrifice more for Biden, in order to make it less likely Trump will ever be restored to power.

and Trump’s interview with Black journalists

That’s the topic of one featured post. A few related things didn’t make it into that article.

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John McWhorter’s analysis of why Trump mispronounces “Kamala” is interesting. He relates it to previous generations of American mainlanders calling the 50th state “Ha-WHY-a” and its capital “Honolula”, or misnaming foreign foods “raviola” and “guacamala”.

The Trumpian attitude toward Harris’s Indian name reanimates an old American trope. Instead of opening up to a foreign word and even exploring it a little, Trump is treating it as an alien presence in need of assimilation, telling it to conform to whatever he decides it should be.

This willfully blasé attitude toward the word’s pronunciation has the effect of othering it, and Harris by extension. A name with no set pronunciation is alien, exotic, unplaceable — and therefore not who we are. It’s a subtle dig that aims in the same direction as Trump’s false rumor that Barack Obama wasn’t American.

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A subtle detail in a scene from the recent movie American Fiction sums up something important about race in America. The main character, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, is a Black author who doesn’t want to be defined by his blackness. (He wants to write literature, not Black literature.)

Early in the movie, he is coming out of an airport while talking on the phone to his agent about his unwillingness to write the stereotypic “Black novel” the market wants from him. “You know,” he says, “I don’t even believe in race.”

“Unfortunately,” his agent replies, “other people do.” And as he says that, a cab drives past Monk to pick up a White man.

A question White conservatives ask constantly is “Why do Blacks (or Democrats or liberals) make everything about race?” That scene is the answer: Black people may try to forget about race, but the world will remind them.

and the rising Iran/Israel friction

I don’t claim to understand this, so I’ll point you to The Economist’s article.

and Venezuela

Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro allowed an election, appeared to lose it, and has announced victory. Now he’s cracking down on protesters and opposition politicians.

and J. D. Vance continues to embarrass Republicans

Outrageous things Vance has said continue to surface. In a 2021 interview on the Dear Ohio podcast of Spectrum News 1, while he was running in the Ohio Republican primary for the Senate seat he now holds, Vance was asked “Should a woman be forced to carry a child to term, after she has been a victim of incest or rape?” He replied:

I think the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong. It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society. The question really, to me, is about the baby.

In other words, a woman should be forced to carry her rapist’s baby, but that’s an inconvenience. It’s not the important thing about the situation. Also, this requirement makes rape a viable reproductive strategy for men, but that’s not important either.

I noticed something in that interview that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere: Vance repeatedly uses the word normal in a way that I find creepy. The first question is why he wanted to run for the Senate, and Vance says

I think normal people in this country, people who want to live a good life, who just want to raise their families, they deserve somebody who fights for them.

Normal comes up several times throughout the interview, and it always refers to people like Vance himself. I find myself wondering what percentage of the country Vance considers normal.

Another clip that has resurfaced was his opinion of Simone Biles after she withdrew from the 2020 Olympics for mental health reasons.

What I find so weird about this, and it reflects on the media more than it does on Simone Biles, is that we’ve tried to turn a very tragic moment — Simone Biles quitting the Olympic team — into this act of heroism. And I think it reflects pretty poorly on our sort of therapeutic society that we try to praise people not for moments of strength, not for moments of heroism, but for their weakest moments

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Peter Thiel is the tech billionaire who made Vance. The WaPo summarizes their relationship:

Thiel made him wealthy, setting him up to invest in companies that became popular with the MAGA set. He shepherded Vance’s entry into politics, bankrolling, alongside other Silicon Valley donors, his successful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2022.

An amazing clip is circulating on social media, in which Thiel compares present-day America to pre-Nazi Germany, but without any sense of alarm about it.

Liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that means, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window.

Before passing that on, I felt obligated to search for the context. I found it here: an hour-and-a-half dialog with Tyler Cowen, who I don’t recognize. I haven’t looked at the whole thing, but the immediate context of the quote is a little better than it sounds. They’re discussing the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (who I also don’t recognize). He accurately predicted the fall of democracy in Germany, but “things went very haywire” (according the Thiel) when he got “somewhat entangled with the Nazis”. Thiel describes that entanglement as “bad judgment”.

So Thiel’s not openly espousing fascism in that quote, but I still can’t be comfortable electing the protege of someone who suspects democracy is exhausted. And my overall feeling is: God save us from billionaires who want to raise questions “very far outside the Overton Window”.

and the horse race

Who you think is ahead right now depends on which polling average you trust. They are all close, and they all show Harris gaining. RCP has Trump ahead 0.8% in a two-way race, down from 1.9% last week. In a five-way race (including RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornell West), Harris is ahead by 0.2%. Nate Silver’s average has Harris up 1.4%; Trump was ahead by 0.4% a week ago. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Like everybody else, I’m wondering who Harris will pick as VP. But I don’t see much point in writing about it, because I’m sure the decision is already made and we’ll find out soon enough.

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One striking thing about Donald Trump is that so many of the Trump administration veterans who know him best oppose his candidacy: Mike Pence, John Kelly, Jim Mattis, and many others.

The same observation extends to his family. His niece Mary has long been a critic, and recently her brother Fred has told negative stories about Donald in a book. Here, Mary defends Fred against an attack by their cousin Eric.

and you also might be interested in …

Being accused of being weird has gotten under MAGA skins in a way that fascist and racist never did. And yet they keep acting weird.

Normal Americans find inspiration in the Olympics, and cheer for the great athletes who represent us: Simone Biles, Katy Ledecky, LeBron James, and many others. But Trumpers have a weirder reason to pay attention to the Olympics: They need something to get outraged about.

Look at what has gone viral in MAGA-Land: Anger at female Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who defeated her Italian opponent in 46 seconds. Khelif was identified as female at birth and has never professed to be anything else, but she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after the amount of testosterone in her blood exceeded some limit. The Olympics has different standards, which she fulfilled. She does not physically stand out from other women boxers, and is not the favorite to win the gold medal in her weight category.

But to Trump and his minions, Khelif is “trans”. Trump posted a video of Khelif’s bout with the comment:

I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS!

In his Atlanta rally Saturday night (where the crowd was noticeably smaller and less energetic than the one Harris drew to the same arena a few days before), he lied outright about Khelif.

It was a person that transitioned. He was a good male boxer.

If having more testosterone than the average woman makes you a man, then all those low-T men — you must have seen the TV commercials for supplements — are actually women.

---

More weirdness is the way that Trump cheers any bad news for America. Today, he’s glorying in the stock market plunge — even though the market is still much higher than when he left office. At the end of the day, check the value of your 401(k), and reflect on how happy Donald Trump is about your loss.

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For reasons that defy explanation, Trump has been going after Georgia’s popular Republican Governor Brian Kemp, both on Truth Social and during his Atlanta rally Saturday night. But here’s the line that really slays me:

He should be seeking UNITY, not Retribution

Look back at my article on his convention speech, which was billed as a “unity” speech. The only unity Trump recognizes is submission to him.

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It’s too soon to tell yet how big a deal the Trump/Egypt bribe story will be.

and let’s close with something tasty

I promise not to mix politics and the closing very often, but here’s something I want to pass on. In one of the featured posts, I linked to a video from Kamala Harris’ 2020 primary campaign where she made masala dosa with actress Mindy Kaling, who is also Indian-American.

It turns out that was a regular thing in her campaign, and not restricted to Indian people or Indian food: She’d go meet with supporters and cook something. “Cooking With Kamala” is a 7-video series on her YouTube channel. In this one, she visits the chair of her Iowa campaign and teaches her how to make apples with bacon. Kamala attributes the recipe to her mother, who must have picked it up after she came to America. (In the Mindy video, she says her grandmother was a strict vegetarian.)

Friends and Fellow-Citizens: The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.

– George Washington
The Farewell Address, 19 September, 1796

This week’s featured post is “The Two Kinds of Unity“.

This week everybody was talking about Joe Biden’s decision

Yesterday, Joe Biden announced that he is ending his candidacy, but will continue as president to the end of his term. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take his place. He promises to make a formal address to the nation later this week. (He’s been in Delaware recovering from Covid. I suspect he wants to be more recovered and back in the White House before he makes the address.)

I have a million reactions, but let’s start with this: Can you imagine Donald Trump ever, under any circumstances, doing something that selfless? Despite the pressures brought to bear on him, if Biden had stood his ground, he would not have been denied the Democratic nomination. And despite all the recent pessimism, the fall election was still virtually a toss-up. Polling averages had Biden around 3% behind, which is not much at this stage, especially considering how late-deciding voters broke for the Democrats in 2022. So he is giving up a very real chance to continue as president for another four years.

But that scenario also includes a substantial risk of Trump being elected again, which would be a disaster for this country. So Biden is stepping aside. As historian Jon Meacham wrote in today’s NYT:

By surrendering the possibility of enduring in the seat of ultimate power, Mr. Biden has taught us a landmark lesson in patriotism, humility and wisdom.

Trump could never do that. He showed on January 6 that he would risk pulling the whole country down around him in order to stay in power.

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Then we come to Kamala Harris. Biden has endorsed her, and so have a few key Democrats like Rep. James Clyburn. More importantly, none of the frequently mentioned competitors has stepped up to challenge her.

The media is spinning all kinds of theories about the process for choosing a nominee, and salivating over the prospect of the first contested convention in many years. But I refuse to speculate until some major candidate other than Harris steps forward. For weeks we’ve been comparing Biden to Somebody Else, and that kind of conversation needs to stop. If you can’t identify who Somebody Else is and point me to the place where they have announced their candidacy, I don’t want to hear it.

The Democratic Convention starts in Chicago on August 19. A “virtual vote” was supposed to happen sometime in early August, because of an Ohio deadline that could have kept the Democratic nominee off that state’s ballot. But Ohio has since changed its rules, so that’s not necessary any more. That vote, though, has neither been scheduled nor called off, so we’ll see what happens.

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These are maddening times to watch the news networks, because we all want to know what’s going to happen, but nobody can tell us. So the airwaves are full of speculation that is mostly baseless. I advise ignoring it: Tune in occasionally to see if there’s any actual news, but turn the TV off as soon as the talking heads start speculating. You’ll be happier and saner.

Also ignore the polls for at least a week. Harris-as-candidate will poll differently from Harris-as-possibility. Maybe better, maybe worse. (I notice myself feeling more excited about her than I thought I would.) Wait and see.

A few speculations are worthwhile: anticipating attacks on Harris, as Judd Legum and Kat Abu do. Abu’s take is particularly interesting: She thinks the Right has wasted four years when it could have been assembling a supervillain image of Harris, a la Hillary Clinton. Instead, they’ve just painted her as ditzy, which definitely should make swing voters see her as the lesser-of-evils compared to Trump. They’ll undoubtedly try to paint a new supervillain image of her, but it won’t penetrate as well as it would have if it had been marinating for four years.

Dueling ads are already out: an attack ad against Harris blaming her for covering up Biden’s shortcomings, and a pro-Harris ad billing her as “the anti-Trump”. “She prosecuted sex predators. He is one.”

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Josh Marshall:

Donald Trump and [Trump campaign adviser] Chris LaCivita are about to hit Kamala Harris with an avalanche of racist and sexist attacks and a ton of slut-shaming. Democrats across the board need to be saying now what we all know, which is that this will bring out the very worst of Trump. Racism and sexism are his brand. Charlottesville is his brand. You can’t just be on the receiving end of this stuff. Trump is about to show the kind of gutter white nationalist and racist pol he is. Force the press and all observers to see this totally predictable move through that prism. … Of course Trump will go there, and these attacks and those attacks can be very damaging. But Trump the racist bully and gangster is what kills him in the suburbs. It’s what embarrasses people.

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One thing Biden’s decision does is put the too-old-to-be-president shoe on the other foot. Trump is 78, which means that in four years he’ll be older than Biden is now. Unlike Biden, he’s fat, out of shape, and eats a lot of junk food. Like Biden, his mental acuity is dubious. His proposed VP is 39 and has been a senator for a year and a half, during which he has accomplished essentially nothing. That VP, who very well could be president soon if Trump wins, has no other experience in public office.

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I’m reposting a David Roberts quote from a few weeks ago:

So, say Biden stepped aside in favor of Harris tomorrow. How long until the vapid gossips we call political reporters find something wrong with her, some alleged flaw they just have to write 192 stories about? … About 30 f’ing seconds, is my guess.

The NYT in particular is worth watching. It has been running a dedicated campaign to push Biden out since … I don’t know, around March at the very latest. Will they be happy now? Will they finally start covering Trump’s inadequacies with the intensity they deserve? Or will they wait a week or so and then go after Harris just as hard as they went after Biden?

and the Republican Convention

The Republican Convention in Milwaukee just ended on Thursday, but it already seems like very old news. The featured post discusses Trump’s record-long acceptance speech, which was billed as a call for national unity. The media has been describing it as two speeches at war with each other: a unity call followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric.

But I think they’re missing something: What Trump means by “unity” is that his opponents give up and submit to his domination. Once you understand that, the two halves of the speech fit together perfectly: He will be a president “for all America” as soon as all Americans shut up and get in line behind him.

Oh, and the speech was full of lies, as CNN’s fact-checker pointed out.

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J. D. Vance’s acceptance speech centered on the kind of false populism he specializes in:

We’re done catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.

But Trump contradicted that sentiment at his first post-convention rally in Grand Rapids:

I love Elon Musk. … We have to make life good for our smart people, and he’s as smart as you get. But Elon endorsed me the other day. And I read … [that] he gives me $45 million a month.

That’s how it works in TrumpWorld. He’ll be “committed to the working man” until that man’s boss writes him a check.

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The Convention’s most vivid Party-of-Dumb moment came when Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberley Guilfoyle said:

It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country any more.

All over America, US History teachers were covering their faces and shaking their heads. The heroes who stormed Normandy were fighting Nazis. The Communists were our allies in that war.

Guilfoyle’s historical rewrite got me wondering: Do Republicans even recognize any more that the Nazis were the bad guys? Present-day Nazis are MAGA now, so the idea that Americans could have been fighting them in World War II seems unthinkable. Near the end of Trump’s speech, he recalled glorious past battles from our history: “Yorktown, Gettysburg, and Midway”. Midway, a battle against the Japanese, not the Nazis. By itself, it’s a trivial thing, but the pattern seems worrisome.

and the Trump shooting

When I wrote last week’s blog, the shooting was still too new for there to be many reportable facts. There had been a shooting and Trump got hit, but he was OK. A few other people were wounded and one had died. The shooter, a 20-year-old White guy, was also dead. That was pretty much it.

Now we know a bit more: Trump was barely injured at all. His ear wound didn’t even require stitches. The ear bandages his cultists wore at the convention reminded me of the purple-heart band-aids Republican conventioneers wore in 2004, to minimize John Kerry’s war wounds. Then they were trying to make something serious look trivial; this time they wanted something trivial to look serious.

A lot of investigating has happened since last week, but nothing has come out that fits into a convenient narrative. The shooter was into guns, and had some vaguely conservative views, but wasn’t particularly active politically. The lack of obvious hostility towards Trump

has left authorities puzzled about a motive for his assault and has had investigators speculating that his intentions may have been less politically motivated and more about attacking the highest-profile target near him. … In addition to the former president, Crooks had searched online about President Joe Biden and had photos on his phone of other prominent figures from both parties. He searched for the location of Trump’s rally as well as the upcoming Democratic National Convention, the briefing notes say, and discovered that Trump planned to appear just an hour’s drive away from his home in the Pittsburgh suburbs. That suggests Crooks may have been looking to carry out a high-profile shooting, and the Trump event’s proximity and timing offered the most accessible opportunity, federal officials have speculated.

The New Yorker’s Jay Caspian Kang suggests that the shooting may have no real political effect, for precisely that reason:

When an act of violence doesn’t lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it.

and J. D. Vance

To my surprise, I discover I have a public record when it comes to J. D. Vance: In 2016 I reviewed Hillbilly Elegy for UU World magazine as part of a batch of white-working-class books.

Vance and I are both from what I like to call the “transitional class” — people who grew up working class but got an education and are professional class now. (I became a mathematician while Vance became a lawyer.) Though we went different ways both politically and religiously, I thought Vance’s book was a credible account of how a transitional class person might become a social and religious conservative:

Realizing how close he came to having no one who cared about him, he values traditional notions of duty—holding a marriage together, taking responsibility for children—over individual fulfillment. His feelings about government come not from the military or the state university that helped him, but from the foster care system that he feared would take him from his grandmother and give him to strangers. When as a teenager he reconnected with his father, he found a man who had converted to conservative Christianity and established a new family blessedly free from drinking, daily screaming arguments, and violence. Vance’s adult religion, though conservative, seems to be less about theology or salvation than about the hope of establishing such islands of peace and sanity in an unstable world.

As for who Vance has become since, I turn to two men of his generation also from the center of the country: Pete Buttigieg and Trae Crowder. “I knew a lot of guys like J. D. Vance,” Pete says in his trademark blunt-but-not-nasty style.

When I got to Harvard I found a lot of people like him, who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead. And five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican, so that’s what he was. … Five years later, the way he gets ahead is that [Trump]’s the greatest guy since sliced bread.

Pete compares Vance to Mike Pence, who similarly started out with one set of principles — Evangelical Christian moral rectitude — and then spent down his credibility making excuses for Trump’s immoral behavior. Pete notes how that ended “with Trump supporters proposing that he be hanged for using the one shred of integrity he still had to stand up to an attempt to overthrow the government”. Pete expresses his hope that things work out better for Vance “maybe not as a politician, but as a human being”.

As for why Silicon Valley billionaires support J. D. Vance (Peter Thiel is Vance’s biggest political donor) and Trump (Elon Musk is giving millions to Trump’s SuperPAC) in spite of otherwise being pro-science, anti-climate-change, pro-gay-rights, and libertarian rather than authoritarian, Pete says:

We’ve made it way too complicated. It’s actually super-simple. These are very rich men who have decided to back the Republican Party that tends to do good things for very rich men.

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Trae Crowder, the “liberal redneck”, is even less generous, seeing Vance as someone who has sold out the people they both claim to represent. His rant is entertaining, and more fun to watch than to read.

and you also might be interested in …

A half-written article that keeps slipping from week to week as more urgent news erupts is “The Mythical Trump Economy”, about nostalgia for pre-Covid America, which fundamentally has nothing to do with Trump or his policies. In the meantime, look at the WaPo’s “Trump’s Economy vs. Biden’s in 17 Charts“.

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I also still haven’t found time to read Judge Cannon’s dismissal of the stolen-documents charges against Trump, the most obviously open-and-shut case against him. Here’s the analysis on Law Dork:

It’s a weak-on-the-law ruling for which Chief Justice John Roberts deserves a not insignificant amount of blame — despite his name not appearing once in her 93-page opinion.

Roberts has led the Supreme Court into an era in which precedent can selectively be ignored, eviscerated, or overruled when it gets in the way of conservatives’ goals. That, in turn, has led lower court judges to feel that they have been given power to do the same — predicting, in essence, the precedents that they believe the current court would ignore.

This is not how the law is to work. And yet, one need only glance through Cannon’s decision to see that reality at work Monday in her effort to do Trump’s bidding.

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Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghait:

We know from studies of authoritarianism that the more despondent and despairing people are, the more they become dependent on the promises of a savior, someone who’s going to save the nation. They become prone to accepting conspiracy theories. They don’t know what’s true any more, so they need an anchor, and that anchor would be Trump. So be very wary when you hear these slogans designed to discredit democracy and designed to convince people that America is failing.

Aaron Rupar posts a clip of Trump praising authoritarian leaders, concluding with:

We have to have somebody to protect us. And Orban was right: We have to have somebody to protect us.

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Amanda Marcotte:

We asked RNC attendees when America was last “great.” Regardless of age, most said when they were children. Says nothing about America, but lots about conservative psychology.

A Salon newsletter article fleshes this out:

As one commenter on Tik Tok aptly noted: “I’m amazed at the grown men who don’t understand that life was simpler when they were children because they were children.”

and let’s close with something fake

Sometimes you just can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. When a flaw in a Crowdstrike security update crashed Microsoft systems around the world, somebody created a fake image of the Blue Screen of Death filling the Las Vegas Sphere. Snopes declared the rumor false.