Where Did Inflation Come From?

Worldwide inflation has been a lingering symptom of the Covid pandemic. Trump and Biden share blame for the US inflation, and reelecting Trump won’t fix it.

Polls show that voters trust Trump more than Biden (and probably Harris) on economic issues, and the main reason for that is the inflation we’ve seen since Biden took office. The Republican platform and Trump’s convention speech both appealed to that issue, claiming that Trump will “end inflation … very quickly”.

A few things get lost in this promise, like:

  • Inflation is already ending, just as the Great Recession had already ended when Trump took office in 2017. So all a reelected President Trump will have to do to “end inflation” is to announce that it’s over. That can happen “very quickly”.
  • The low gas prices Trump’s supporters point to weren’t due to his energy policy. They came from the fact that the economy was shut down for Covid and nobody was driving.
  • Post-Covid inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon. Any explanation that pins the blame on Biden alone is simplistic.
  • Many of Trump’s policy proposals will increase prices, not lower them.

But rather than point fingers about inflation, let’s see if we can tell its story in a way that makes sense.

The roots of the recent inflation stretch back to the Covid pandemic, which reached the US in 2020, the final year of Trump’s term. That seems like a weird claim to make, because in 2020 itself, the threat was deflation. Gas prices, for example, dropped to an average of $1.84 in April, 2020, because the economy was largely shut down. If you had gas to sell, few people were buying. As the economy contracted and more and more people lost their jobs, the economic threat was a Depression-style cascade of bankruptcies: My business is closed, so I can’t pay my suppliers or landlord, so they go bankrupt and can’t pay the people who were counting on them. And so on.

But let’s tell the story from the beginning. Today, after a vaccine and treatments like Paxlovid have been developed, and after the virus itself has evolved into less lethal forms, many of us have repressed our memories of just how terrifying the early months of the Covid crisis were. At the time, the only treatment to speak of was to keep patients’ blood oxygen up in any way possible, and hope that if they didn’t die their immune systems would eventually win out.

In the early places where the infection got loose, such as Italy and New York City, it overwhelmed the health-care system. Sick people languished on cots in hallways, and refrigerator trucks supplemented the morgues. A lack of good data made it hard to determine just how lethal the virus was. Nobody knew how many asymptomatic cases hadn’t been noticed, and the number of Covid deaths might be either higher or lower than death certificates indicated. But the early estimates of lethality were around 3%; about 3% of infected people died. (That later got revised downward to 1.4%.)

So governments faced a lose/lose choice: If the virus were allowed to run wild, probably everyone would get it eventually, so about 3% of the population would die. In the US, that would mean over 10 million people. (The 1.4% rate implies around 5 million American deaths.) The alternative was to shut down non-essential activities where crowds of people might gather and spread the infection: sports events, political rallies, churches, concerts, and so on. Additionally, bars and restaurants, schools, movie theaters, factories, and offices were likely to spread the virus. When social interactions were unavoidable, governments could encourage masking and social distancing.

The point of all this wasn’t to defeat the virus, but to slow it down. The hope was that a slower-spreading virus wouldn’t overwhelm the healthcare system (“flatten the curve”, we were told), and that extra time might allow discovery of better treatments or a vaccine. That more-or-less worked out: In the US, “only” 1.2 million died, rather than 5-10 million. (If we had handled the virus as well as Canada, perhaps fewer than half a million Americans would have died.)

But there was a cost. The unemployment rate went over 14%, and that was an undercount. Millions of other Americans continued to receive a paycheck, but weren’t really working. (A government loan program allowed small-business loans to be forgiven if a business maintained its payroll.) What was going to happen to those unemployed through no fault of their own? What good did it do to keep them from getting sick if they were going to lose their homes and starve?

Again, a lose/lose choice: In order to avoid mass poverty, cascading bankruptcies, and economic destruction that might take years to recover from, governments propped up people’s incomes. In the US, I already mentioned the loan program. Unemployment benefits were repeatedly extended beyond their ordinary expiration dates. State and local governments got federal money that allowed them not to fire their employees. Landlords weren’t allowed to evict non-paying tenants. Occasionally, the government would just send everyone a check, whether they were covered by some income-protection program or not. Other countries took similar steps.

Because tax revenues were collapsing at the same time that governments were taking on these additional expenses, deficits skyrocketed. The largest US federal budget deficit ever came in FY2020 (October 2019 through September 2020), the last year of the Trump administration: $3.13 trillion. The next year (1/3 Trump, 2/3 Biden) was nearly as bad: $2.78 trillion.

What that money was doing was even more inflationary than the deficit itself: People were being paid not to produce anything. So: more money, but fewer goods and services to spend it on. This was inevitably going to increase prices.

But inflation didn’t hit right away, because people confined to their homes didn’t spend much. There was no point buying a new car, for example, when your current car was sitting unused in the garage. The cruise lines and theme parks were shut down, and no one wanted to risk spending hours sitting elbow-to-elbow in an airliner, so vacation spending collapsed. You had to keep buying food, but beyond that, the richer half of households worked from home, cashed their government checks, and let their money sit in the bank.

But when the economy opened up again, all that money was bound to come out and drive prices upward. In addition, not everything restarted at the same rate, so the economy developed bottlenecks that increased prices further. The Ukraine War disrupted the world’s grain and oil markets, adding additional inflationary pressure.

Post-Covid inflation was a worldwide phenomenon that peaked in 2022, when US inflation was 8%. Bad as that was, things were even worse in comparable economies like the UK (9.1%) and European Union (8.8%), while some smaller countries saw catastrophic levels, like Turkey at 72.3% and Argentina at 72.4%.

The final lose/lose choice was how fast to restart the economy. Unemployment was still over 6% when Joe Biden became president, and he had learned a hard lesson from the aftermath of the Great Recession. The stimulus spending President Obama had managed to secure during the two years when he had congressional majorities wasn’t sufficient, and after 2010 he battled Republican leaders in Congress for every penny. The result was an economic recovery so slow that many Americans barely noticed it. Not until 2016 did economic indicators return to the normal range. They continued upward from there, allowing Trump to take credit for “the greatest economy ever” when the trends Obama established continued into his term. (Look at the GDP and unemployment graphs below and see if you can pick out when the “Trump boom” started.)

Given Obama’s experience, Biden opted for a faster restart. To his credit, he invested the stimulus money wisely: building infrastructure and laying the groundwork for a post-fossil-fuel economy.

But the main thing he bought with that spending was job creation. By early 2022, the unemployment rate was back at pre-Covid (“greatest economy ever”) lows, and went slightly lower still. But Biden’s stimulus exacerbated the inflation that was already due to arrive.

The Federal Reserve responded to that inflation by increasing interest rates, which has brought its own hardships. The US economy has been surprisingly resilient under those interest rates, but it remains to be seen whether inflation can be beaten without starting a recession. (As I write, data from a slowing economy is sending the stock market plunging.)

So the impact of the Covid pandemic continues to be felt.

Conclusions. Nostalgia for the pre-Covid 2019 economy is understandable, but thinking of it as “the Trump economy” is a seductive illusion. Trump’s main economic achievement was that he didn’t screw up the recovery that began under Obama.

When Covid hit, the effect was going to be felt somewhere: as millions of deaths, as depression, or as inflation. Trump and Biden made similar policy choices, taking on massive deficits to lessen deaths and avoid depression. The bill for those choices was inflation, which in many ways was the lesser evil. Even in retrospect, I can’t wish the US government had taken a different path.

That bill came due under Biden, but the responsibility for it falls on Trump and Biden alike. That’s not because either of them performed badly, but because the pandemic’s toll had to be paid somehow. Governments got to choose the form of payment (and most made similar choices), but not paying wasn’t an option.

Trump’s primary talent is salesmanship, so he excels at taking credit for anything good that happens and avoiding blame for anything bad. His 2024 campaign has done an impressive job of selling 2019 as the typical “Trump economy”; if things got drastically worse in 2020, that wasn’t his fault. So if we just reelect him, he often implies, it will be as if Covid never happened. 2019 will magically return.

It won’t. Presidents do not wave magic wands, or move economies with their personal charisma. Presidents affect economies through their policies of taxing, spending, and regulation. So far, the policies Trump has put forward are vague and his numbers don’t add up. (The Republican platform promises to cut taxes, increase defense spending, rebuild our cities, maintain Social Security and Medicare at current levels, and yet reduce deficits by cutting “wasteful spending” that it never identifies. We’ve heard such promises before, and they never work out.) Some of his proposals, like a 10% across-the-board tariff on imports or deporting millions of low-wage workers, would increase inflation, not decrease it.

Whoever we elect in November, I can promise you one thing: 2025 will be its own year. It won’t be 2019 again.

August 5, 2024 – 10:08 am Categories: Articles | Comments (15)

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The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans

Thanks, Donald. Without your help, I never would have found a truly endearing Kamala video.

It all started with Donald Trump saying something that made even less sense than he usually does. Wednesday in Chicago, during his half-hour interview at a convention of the National Association of Black Journalists, he called attention to the great conundrum of Kamala Harris’ biracial identity.

She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. 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?

The first thing to note about this comment, which I’ll forget if I don’t mention it right away, is that it’s a lie. Not just that Harris has been open about her blackness all along, but that Trump himself knew.

Trump donated to Harris twice in 2011 and 2014, during her campaign for attorney general of California, around the time she was being touted as “the female Obama” precisely because she is Black. In 2020, a Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to those donations as proof that Trump was not racist, saying, “I’ll note that Kamala Harris is a Black woman and he donated to her campaign, so I hope we can squash this racism argument now.”

Now on to the “Is she Indian or is she Black?” part. I plan to say some serious things in this article, but I won’t be able to get through it without mixing in some humor, because I just can’t pretend that I’m taking this question seriously. I mean, we’re not talking about the wave/particle duality of light here. Harris was born in Oakland to a mother from India and a Black Jamaican father. That really shouldn’t be hard to understand, even if you’re a 78-year-old ex-president whose Secretary of State once called him “a fucking moron” and whose top economic adviser judged him to be “dumb as shit“. According to the 2020 census, multiracial people make up over 1/10th of the US population, so you might expect Trump to have met such a person at some time or another.

Knowing that Harris likes to use Venn diagrams, The F*cking News made one to help her explain the situation.

And Trump’s notion that Kamala at some point “turned Black” evoked memories of a 2016 SNL cold open..

But enough levity: What is going on here?

Unfortunately, I can’t start discussing that question without getting into the ways Trump has dug himself in deeper. I mean, we all say really, really dumb things from time to time, especially under pressure. But after the fact, most of us try to compensate in one of two ways: We either apologize, or we just shut up and hope everybody forgets about it. (That’s the great virtue of the current era: No matter how badly you embarrass yourself, the 24-hour news cycle rolls on, and your blunders will soon scroll off everybody’s news feeds.)

But not Donald Trump. After having time to listen to advisers and think it through, he has spent the last several days continuing to make some kind of a controversy out of Harris simultaneously identifying both with her mother’s family and her father’s family, like that’s just impossible without some kind of betrayal or duplicity.

Remember Trump’s birther days, when he claimed that the detectives he had sent to Hawaii to investigate Obama’s birth certificate “cannot believe what they’re finding”? (Michael Cohen has since verified what I long suspected: “He never sent anybody anywhere, he just said it and everybody sort of bought into it.”) Well, birtherism is back: On TruthSocial, Trump reposted Laura Loomer’s image of Kamala’s birth certificate, which lists her father as coming from Jamaica, not Africa (which no one ever claimed).

He also posted a photo of Harris with her mother’s Indian family, as if that proved something. See: She’s been claiming all along to be Indian, so she can’t possibly have been Black.

But the crowning piece of Trump’s evidence is a video where Kamala herself says “I am Indian.” It’s a 36-second clip from a longer video of Kamala cooking with another Indian-American woman.

Crazy Kamala is saying she’s Indian, not Black. This is a big deal. Stone cold phony.

But he couldn’t even edit the video well enough to make his point: The two women agree that they both have South Indian roots, and Kamala says, “You look like the entire one-half of my family.” The host is not at all confused about Harris’ family having another half, because why would she be? It’s perfectly simple, as everyone but Trump understands.

But here I got curious: I myself have been experimenting with cooking Indian food lately, so I couldn’t help wondering what they made. It wasn’t hard to find out that the other woman was the actress Mindy Kaling, and from there a little googling led to a 9-minute video on Kamala’s own YouTube channel. It was made in 2019, the first time Kamala ran for president. They’re cooking masala dosa.

You should absolutely watch this; I wish I could get every voter to watch it. It’s most endearing, humanizing view of Kamala Harris I’ve ever seen. (Thank you, Donald, for helping me find it.) It’s two women cooking together, laughing a lot, and bonding over memories of how their mothers cooked. (Both families stored their spices in re-purposed Taster’s Choice Coffee jars.)

If you get charmed by it, watch the follow-up of other Indian-American women’s reactions.

I find it impossible to imagine a comparable Trump video. I know cooking is typically a female bonding thing, so I wouldn’t expect to see Trump cook with anybody. But translate this into male stereotypes any way you want: fishing, outdoor grilling, carpentry, going to the big game. Trump could never make a video like this, because Trump doesn’t bond; he either dominates or submits. He’s either the Big Dog, or the runt who trails after the Big Dog (as Trump did with Putin in Helsinki).

The other thing I can’t imagine is anybody thinking this video disproves the authenticity of Harris’ blackness. Whose character is so narrow that there isn’t room to be different with different people, while still being yourself? (The Emmy-winning TV series “Severance” resonates precisely because it builds on the common experience of being different at work than you are at home.) Being both Indian and Black doesn’t make Harris “a chameleon”, as J. D. Vance charged. It makes her a typical resident of our complex 21st century society. (You’d think J. D. would understand biracial identity, since his own children are both Indian and White. Do you think he’ll make them choose someday?)

Which brings us back to the question: What is Trump doing? He’s lying. He knows he’s lying. He’s saying something incredibly stupid and then doubling down on it. But why?

Some writers warn us not to overthink questions like this. Trump’s niece Mary advises:

After eight years of covering Donald, too many journalists have gotten into the habit of seeing strategy in his crude and instinctive behavior. The truth is quite simple–Donald can’t help himself. When it comes to him, we shouldn’t overthink it. He is exactly what he seems: a racist, a misogynist, a liar.

And Josh Marshall agrees:

[W]e don’t have to fall into this Trump confusion matrix where we’re kind of beguiled by some mysterious, secret, ingenious plan that explains why a bizarre racist outburst that normal people look at and think “What’s wrong with him?” is actually a genius political move. It’s just an outburst and attempted reset. No more, no less.

But at the risk of giving Trump too much credit, let’s start with a simpler question: Why did he accept the NABJ invitation to begin with? Three possibilities present themselves:

  • He wanted to appeal for Black votes. This wouldn’t be unreasonable, given Trump/Biden polls that showed him making inroads with Black men. But if that had been his motive, he would have behaved differently. He’d have fended off aggressive questions without rancor and repeatedly returned to nostalgia for the pre-Covid economy, as if anything in his policy proposals would bring it back. The fact that he was combative from the very first question indicates that he wasn’t there to win Black votes.
  • He wanted to convince White suburban voters that he’s not racist. Overt racism plays badly among educated suburban voters, especially women. That’s why dog whistling was invented: to appeal to White racists without scaring White moderates. That’s also why all Trump’s campaigns have been so diligent about recruiting somebody to stand behind him at rallies with a “Blacks for Trump” sign. It’s not important that Trump have much actual Black support, but he has to appear to have Black support, to placate White moderates. From this point of view, the ideal thing would have been to make no real news at the NABJ convention. Then the story would be the simple fact of Trump’s appearance before a Black audience rather than anything he said. Obviously, that’s not what happened.
  • He wanted to pick fights that will appeal to his White racist base. This interview will produce many clips that will go viral in the White racist echo chamber: Black women try to trap Trump, but he is not intimidated and stands up to them, challenging the suggestion that he is too chicken to debate Harris, and proving that he will stand up for you when the critical race theory goblins come for you.

It seems clear to me that the third option is correct: Trump’s false claim that Harris wasn’t Black until recently, and that before that she only emphasized the Asian half of her heritage, only makes sense if you’re playing to a White racist audience. Black people understand that being only half African is more than enough to get racists to treat you as Black. And choosing to emphasize some other part of your heritage is never an option, because racism isn’t a choice you make, it’s a choice racists make about you. Also, non-racist Whites have no trouble processing the notion of mixed-race, which Trump seems so confused by.

So Trump’s script casts the Black journalists as antagonists in his performance as the Champion of Beleaguered White Men. Once you see that, his subsequent actions only need to make sense in the worldview of racist White men, who often frame race as a scam, a way for non-Whites to claim some kind of sympathy or benefit. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer spells it out.

Trump’s attack on Harris is meant to evoke this worldview, in which Black advancement is a kind of liberal conspiracy to deprive white people of what is rightfully theirs. Trump is saying that Harris became Black only when it was obvious that being Black conferred social advantage. … Trump’s smear of Harris is also an accusation of racial disloyalty—that she was ashamed of being Black until it was politically convenient. Racial treason is something Trump finds particularly offensive. He has begun referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, as “Palestinian,” doubly racist in that it turns Palestinian into an epithet and castigates a Jewish man for being insufficiently loyal to his own people. The idea that liberal Jews are not truly Jewish operates similarly to Trump’s attack on Harris, in that it gives the speaker permission to attack a Jewish target in anti-Semitic terms because the target is not “truly” Jewish. Attacking Harris in racist terms, under this logic, is not racist, because she is not “truly” Black. The point of this rhetorical maze is simply to justify racist attacks on a particular target while deflecting accusations of bigotry.

And Noah Berlatsky elaborates:

[A]s a fascist, he believes that only white people—or more specifically, only his own white cishet Christian male voters—are authentic and real. Everyone else, to Trump, is fake and inauthentic. … Trump can say that Jewish people who don’t vote for him, “hate their religion,” because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what Jewishness means. He can say Obama isn’t American, because as a white Christian fascist, he defines what America is. He can say Harris isn’t Black, because he is the fascist leader, and he defines what Blackness is. For that matter, he can lie about crowd size, about the weather, about his own actions and beliefs, because as the white fascist patriarch, he is the one authentic measure of truth. He is real. Nothing else is.

Serwer and Berlatsky were writing before Trump began smearing Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, both on Truth Social and at his Atlanta rally, referring to her as “a good male boxer” who “transitioned”, and pledging “I WILL KEEP MEN OUT OF WOMEN’S SPORTS.” Khelif is female from birth, and gender transitions are illegal in Algeria, but what does it matter? As the fascist leader, Trump defines what gender means.

In short, Trump was trying to stoke up the energy of his base by appealing to their sense of racial and gender grievance, promoting resentment that women and people of color are taking what is rightfully theirs, and arguing that they are doing it under the false flags of anti-racism and anti-sexism, because racism and sexism haven’t been a thing in decades and were never that big a deal to begin with.

The fact that he may have confused or angered anyone else, like me or you, is just a side effect.

I don’t have any special insight into the White racist community, so I’m not sure how well this is working. I can only trust that White racists are not a majority of the electorate, and hope that the rest of us show up in large enough numbers to outvote them.

August 5, 2024 – 9:14 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The momentum for Harris continued this week, as the Trump campaign struggled to come up with a counter-message. On Wednesday, Trump was interviewed at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, and reverted to his Birther political roots: He challenged Harris’ racial identity, professing not to understand how she could be both Indian and Black.

The first featured post will examine what he could possibly have been thinking and what audience his remarks were aimed at. Because his position is so hard to take seriously, I’ll include a certain amount of humor, and I’ll point you to an endearing Harris video from 2019 that Trump thinks proves his point. (I hope you’ll watch it. At a minimum you’ll learn a good onion-dicing technique.) “The Unfathomable Mystery of Biracial Americans” should post around 9 or so EDT.

For weeks I’ve been hoping to write a series of issue-oriented articles, but events keep outrunning my ability to cover them. I particularly want to examine the issues where the Trump campaign claims an advantage: inflation and immigration. This week I’ll finally get my inflation article out. “Where Did Inflation Come From?” should appear by 11.

Even with two featured posts, the weekly summary has a lot to cover: the prisoner swap with Russia, the rising tensions between Israel and Iran, Venezuela’s post-election crisis, J.D. Vance’s continuing problems, the Trump/Egypt investigation, Harris catching Trump in the polls, and a few more things. I’ll aim to get that out by noon.

August 5, 2024 – 8:41 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Forward or Back?

Make America great again.

– Donald Trump

We are not going back.

– Kamala Harris

This week’s featured posts are “The Harris Surge” and “Couches, cat ladies, and J. D. Vance“.

This week everybody was talking about the Harris surge

That’s the subject of one featured post. Here’s something I left out of that piece: Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade criticizing Kamala for speaking to 6,000 members of the historically Black Zeta Phi Beta Sorority rather than attending Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.

She’d rather address, in the summer, a sorority — a colored sorority. Like she can’t get out of that.

This segment of Nicole Wallace’s show demonstrates what Harris candidacy means to Black people and especially Black women. Erin Haines describes Republican’s racist attacks on Harris as “a train that is never late”.

The segment replays part of a Harris interview:

So here’s the thing about breaking barriers. Breaking barriers does not mean that you start on one side of the barrier, and you end up on the other side. There’s a breaking involved. And when you break things you get cut. And you may bleed. And it is worth it every time.

Maya Wiley responds:

We have been cut. When she says that … we have lived that cut as students at Ivy League schools. We lived that cut when we were lawyers standing in front of a judge that said “Where’s the lawyer?”

And she calls out the sense of “victimization” Trump keeps appealing to:

People who are victimized by fairness. Who are victimized by competition from the competent. And who are upset because they have for so long gotten to be mediocre and rise.

The whole thing is worth watching.

and J. D. Vance

the subject of the other featured post. And I didn’t even get around to mentioning this weird conversation he had on a podcast in 2021. He claimed “a core part of what’s wrong with journalism in America” is that female reporters are panicking about their biological clocks running out. And then this:

they’re all fundamentally atheist or agnostic. They have no real value system.

Because to him the only values are Christian values. If you don’t have those values, you don’t have any values.

and Trump’s “You won’t have to vote any more”

A mistake journalists and pundits often make with Trump is to hear what he says and think: “He couldn’t possibly have meant that.” Then they search for some less threatening interpretation, and claim that’s what he must have really meant.

Well, this weekend I caught myself about to do the same thing. Friday, Trump spoke to Turning Point Action, a political group of right-wing “Christians” [About that: How much of the Sermon on the Mount would they reject as “woke”?] founded by Charlie Kirk. He said that Christians needed to get out and vote for him just this once.

You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

That sure sounds like he’s confessing to exactly what his enemies charge: If he gets another term, democracy will be over in America. Nobody will have to vote any more.

But then I thought: No, he must not have meant that. He must be talking to Christians who usually ignore politics, telling them that they should make an exception this time. (Even that isn’t a very positive take: He’s pitching his message to people who think democracy is a burden; they should vote for him so they can slough off the chore of self-government.)

But he said what he said. He should have to explain it, not me.

As he so often does, Pete Buttigieg had the perfect response when he talked to Jen Psaki yesterday: “I don’t want to have to worry about what he means.”

Marcy Wheeler traces how the NYT covered this speech: Its initial headline was about Trump calling Harris “a bum”. Only after the won’t-have-to-vote clip caught fire on social media did the NYT mention it — in paragraph 14, with the explanation I suggested above.

As he so often does, Trump wants it both ways on his failed assassination: He wants to brag about “taking a bullet for democracy”, but he doesn’t want to provide any transparency about his injuries. (In recent appearances, his ear looks fine.)

Predictably, the NYT completely ignored the transparency issue and did its own analysis to back up Trump’s claim about the bullet. The FBI later said more-or-less the same thing, though they left open whether he was hit by a whole bullet or just a fragment of one.

This is the result of Trump successfully working the refs: He has complained so loud for so long about “the fake news media” that the NYT is too intimidated to apply the standards every other politician is subject to.

Appallingly, the Times’ editorial board then framed transparency as a both-sides issue, and called on Harris to make the first moves: “she needs to do more, and she needs to do it quickly”.

Trump won’t release the real ER report on his injury, so somebody made one up. It’s fake, but I love it.

and Elon Musk

Elon had a bad week. On Tuesday, Tesla announced that its second-quarter earnings dropped 45% compared to last year. It was bad news in two ways: the number of cars sold was down 4.8%, and profit on each car dropped as well, as the company had to cut prices on some models. Tesla, which the market treats as a growth stock, saw its shares drop from around $250 to $225. Musk owns over 700 million shares, so his net worth went down nearly $18 billion. The shares still sell at over 60 times earnings (more than double the market average), so there’s still a long way to fall if growth doesn’t resume.

Tesla has a number of problems, starting with increased competition in the electric-vehicle market, and including the Cybertruck, which is looking like an Edsel-level blunder. The company’s fantasy of self-driving robotaxis continues to recede into the future. But Musk himself has also become a drag on Tesla, as liberal electric-vehicle buyers are turned off by his increasingly fascist social-media presence.

Last month, Tesla shareholders approved a plan to grant Musk tens of billions of dollars worth of additional stock options, under the implied threat that he might take his future ideas elsewhere. If those ideas are anything like the Cybertruck, the company will be sorry it didn’t let him go.

Musk’s personal image took yet another hit this week, as his 20-year-old trans daughter responded publicly to comments he had made about her Monday in an interview on Jordan Peterson’s podcast. Musk told Peterson that his “son” was “dead”, “killed by the woke mind virus”, and that Musk himself had been “tricked” into approving gender-affirming treatments.

Thursday, Musk’s child, Vivian Jenna Wilson, gave an interview to NBC News.

I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged. Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.

Wilson, who had her name legally changed two years ago to disassociate herself from Musk, described him as “absent”, “cruel”, and “cold”. Looking at what he said, it’s hard to argue with her.

and you also might be interested in …

Last Sunday was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That record lasted until Monday. 2024 has consistently broken temperature-on-this-date records, and now that we’re getting into the hottest part of the year it’s breaking all-time records.

“Librarians are my suspects …”. This is the world MAGA is building.

Jess Piper, who writes the blog “The View from Rural Missouri“, which I have linked to in the past, got swatted on Tuesday. One of her posts had drawn the ire of Libs of TikTok, which Wikipedia defines as “a handle for various far-right and anti-LGBT social-media accounts operated by Chaya Raichik”. A few days later (a correlation whose causality is impossible to prove), a deputy sheriff interrupted her gardening to inform her that the sheriff’s office, and several other law enforcement entities in the area, had received an email. The local water department had gotten a letter.

The email claimed to be from a close family relation. The letter stated that the family member had murdered me and my husband the night before. It went on to state that they intended to shoot and kill anyone who came on the property.

Needless to say, Jess was fine, and so was everyone else in her household. The point of a hoax like this is to provoke police to come into the situation with guns blazing, and maybe kill the unsuspecting target or her loved ones. Failing at that, the person being swatted should be terrorized, maybe so terrorized that she’ll stop doing, saying, or writing things that far-right or anti-LGBT people find offensive.

It might have worked, but for the fact that Jess really does live in rural Missouri, where local authorities know most of the long-term residents. So the deputy sheriff decided to drop in on his neighbor rather than call in a SWAT team.

It sounds like the terrorizing part of the plan didn’t work either.

In the end, this is the time in which we live. The internet has allowed me to find a following with like-minded people. It’s allowed me to organize across the state and remind people that folks like me exist in rural spaces. A whole lot of us live here and it’s getting out. We are contesting more rural seats and this will lead to more Democratic wins in my state.

But, with the good comes the bad. I have folks threaten me on a regular basis and now it has escalated to a swatting. But, I can’t bend to fear and I can’t stop the momentum we are building. So, I move on. We move on.

We lock arms. We do this together. I could not organize without support.

BTW: I notice Jess made an appearance across the river in Quincy, Illinois, my home town. She reports that Democrats in rural areas and small towns are just as energized as they are everywhere else.

Watch these clips of Don Jr. interviewing Vance and see what you think about those drug use rumors.

I just noticed Betsy McCaughey showing up as a panelist on CNN. Betsy is the well-known liar who is most famous for starting the death-panels hoax against the Affordable Care Act. Shame, CNN.

and let’s close with something big and loud

I can’t say elephants share my musical taste, but they’re clearly playing something.

July 29, 2024 – 12:16 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

The Harris Surge

After Biden stepped down, the story was supposed to be “Democrats in Chaos”.
But instead it’s the Republicans who are floundering.

If this were an ordinary election cycle, Trump would be flying high right now. The out-of-power party usually holds its convention first, gets a lot of media attention for its message, paints its nominee in his or her most favorable light, and has a bright new (or maybe distinguished old) vice presidential nominee everyone’s excited about. In 1988, that combination of factors temporarily gave Mike Dukakis a 17-point polling lead over George H. W. Bush. Then the Republicans held their convention, and the rest is history.

If anything, you’d expect Trump to be flying higher than is typical for the inter-convention lag, because he survived an assassination attempt. Right now, he should be getting as much sympathy as he’s ever going to get. And Kamala Harris is an unknown quantity who wasn’t even considered all that popular even a week ago.

Instead, just about every poll is within the margin of error. The RCP polling average has Trump up 1.7%, down from the 3.1% lead he had on Joe Biden. And the news cycle is running in Harris’ favor. She’s raising incredible amounts of money and signing up incredible numbers of volunteers. She’s getting new endorsements just about every day. (Barack and Michelle Obama have disdained the kingmaker role in the Democratic Party, so their endorsements Friday put the final exclamation point on Harris’ rise.) In a few weeks she’ll have her own convention to showcase her vision, and her own shiny new VP candidate.

I’ve had to admit to being wrong about a lot of things lately, so what’s a few more? I totally did not anticipate how smoothly the transition from Biden to Harris would go, how quickly Democrats would unite behind Harris, and just how exciting the whole process would be. Harris was ready to go, Democrats were eager to get past the angst of the previous month, and Harris’ people have artfully exploited social media, especially Tik Tok. Framing the race as the Future vs. the Past is brilliant. “We are not going back” is the perfect response to “Make America Great Again“.

Biden’s gracious exit had a lot to do with this, and I think we should all be grateful to him. He has been an excellent president under difficult circumstances, and I agree with him that he deserved a chance at a second term. But the future of American democracy depends on beating Trump, and he came to recognize that he wasn’t in a good position to do that. So he responded to the world as it is rather than the world as it should be.

The Harris boom seemed to take the Trump campaign by surprise, in spite how often they had claimed Biden would have to step aside. I think that’s because Trump himself still cannot imagine how someone with power could voluntarily surrender it for the common good. [1] In a similar situation (which he is sort of in now — he’s the over-the-hill guy dragging his party down) he would be plotting his next coup, not anointing his successor. Even if he could somehow be induced to withdraw, he couldn’t possibly do it without whining.

So Republicans didn’t have anti-Harris talking points ready to go, and instead fell back on kneejerk racist and sexist attacks.

Dahlia Lithwick has a complex but worthwhile interpretation of the whole catalog of attacks against Harris: DEI hire, slept her way to the top, Jezebel, childless cat lady, and so on. What unites these lines of attack is the belief that a woman’s life is not the sum of her own choices, but the sum of the judgments men have made about her. The attacks are “rooted in the idea that any woman who succeeds in America does so only because men desire her, sleep with her, promote her, and support her”. Those kinds of attacks may have worked in the past, but after Dobbs, American women have been pushed too far.

There are a thousand good reasons that going after Harris for her race and gender are stupid and should stop now. But from a purely strategic perspective, chief among these reasons is that every woman who votes has been told within the past two years that someone else—a doctor, a legislator, a husband, a Supreme Court justice—is better suited to make life choices for her than she is. I’m not sure they’re buying it. Reducing Harris this time around to a cartoon version of a person who never made any real choices because powerful men have been slinging her around the chessboard for 30 years is not a persuasive argument for the GOP, even while it’s a familiar one. Maybe Republicans think women resonate with being called lazy sluts who stand on the shoulders of powerful men for the entirety of their careers. But it seems to me that a failure to treat the putative next president as a moral and political actor in her own right signals a failure to believe that women voters are themselves moral and political actors as well.

Having watched their initial attacks backfire, Republicans seem to have settled on framing Harris as a “San Francisco radical“.

This is another thing Republicans do that Democrats don’t: demonize parts of America. Democrats threw the kitchen sink at George W. Bush, but I never heard anybody say that he was bad because he was from Texas. Ted Cruz and Greg Abbott are objectionable because of their beliefs, actions, and character, not their home state.

Anyway, the San-Francisco-radical attack seems to be centering on Harris’ support for defund-the-police policies, San Francisco’s status as a “sanctuary city”, and her role in the Biden administration’s border policies. She must have anticipated this, so we’ll see how she responds.

Oh, and she supposedly wants to ban plastic straws. (She does, but only after somebody comes up with a better paper straw.) Clearly this is a great issue for Republicans to build their national campaign around. Forget climate change, abortion, Ukraine, democracy, the Supreme Court — plastic straws.

I consider myself attuned to the symbolic meaning of various superheroes. But I’ve been surprised by one association: Kamala Harris as Captain America. I might have expected Storm from the X-Men, or a warrior from Wakanda, or even a white female icon like Wonder Woman. But no: Captain America. And it works.

I expect the Democratic Convention to contrast strongly with the Republican Convention, and that it will provide Harris with the polling bounce Trump didn’t get. One reason: Democrats are not ashamed of their recent history.

Two weeks ago, the RNC engineered none of those emotional moments we often see at conventions, when the party loudly applauds some elder statesman. Think about all the people who could have been featured at the Republican Convention but weren’t: most obviously Mike Pence, but also the Bush family, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mitch McConnell. Cindy McCain could have waved to a crowd cheering the memory of her husband. None of that happened, because today’s Republican Party has no past. It’s just Trump.

But in Chicago next month, Joe Biden’s ovation will probably last longer than his speech. Barack Obama will be welcomed home. Hillary Clinton will pass her glass-ceiling-breaking torch to Kamala. Maybe there’ll be one last video montage paying homage to Jimmy Carter. Rising stars like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer will get prime-time slots. And I guarantee you that Harris and whoever she picks as VP will give more inspiring acceptance speeches than Trump and Vance did.

It will be great TV. People will feel good watching it. And it will move the needle.

[1] When DC relaunched Superman in 1986, John Byrne came up with a new solution to an old problem: If Lex Luthor is so brilliant, why can’t he figure out that Superman is Clark Kent? The answer came in Superman #2 “The Secret Revealed”. Luthor had a subordinate investigate what relationship Superman had to Kent, and the answer came back that they were the same person.

Luthor fired that woman, because “I know better. I know that no man with the power of Superman would ever pretend to be a mere human. Such power is to be constantly exploited. Such power is to be used.”

In short, he had the answer, but his worldview wouldn’t let him accept it. That’s also what happened to Trump. Sure, he kept saying the Democrats would have to replace Biden, but he couldn’t imagine that Biden would step aside gracefully for the good of his party and the country. Because Trump knows better. He knows that human beings will hang onto power at all costs, because that’s what he tried to do after he lost the 2020 election.

July 29, 2024 – 10:41 am Categories: Uncategorized | Comments (13)

Couches, cat ladies, and J. D. Vance

Trump’s VP pick has had an inauspicious debut.

Let me say this right up front: In no part of Hillbilly Elegy did J. D. Vance confess to having sex with a couch. In fact, we have no reliable reports of Vance sexually abusing any piece of furniture. Ever. He has not been banned from Ikea. The clip of him singing a love song to a couch is fake; the lip movements don’t even match the audio. If you search on the #CouchHumper hashtag, all you’ll get is misinformation. Are we clear on that?

But somehow this week the mythical Vance/couch tryst became one of the funniest examples in the history of framing. It started on social media, with a tweet providing exact page numbers for the confessional excerpt. If you didn’t happen to have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy handy, how could you check? Surely nobody would just make something like that up, would they? [1]

Largely because of that specific referencing, the rumor began to take off — I even believed it myself at first — to the point that it needed to be debunked. So AP published a fact-check (since removed) which it headlined: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.”

As any fan of George Lakoff knows, the first law of debunking misinformation is: Don’t put the lie in the headline. The reasoning is simple: Directly negating a frame invokes the frame. In Lakoff’s famous example, “Don’t think of an elephant” invariably makes you think of an elephant. Until this week, the most famous real-life violation of Lakoff’s rule was Richard Nixon’s immortal denial “I’m not a crook.” If you had never before considered whether Nixon might be a crook, you did then.

Well, lots of people who don’t delve deeply into social media, and so hadn’t heard the rumor at all, do read AP headlines. And they immediately thought: J. D. Vance? A couch? What’s up with that? And then, even though they didn’t have time to read the article, they wondered what exactly was wrong about the rumor. Did Vance just flirt with the couch? Did the couch misinterpret his intentions? Maybe he was napping on the couch and had a wet dream. That’s embarrassing, but it’s innocent; it could happen to any young man.

A few people who made the early couch memes may have believed the claim was true, but before long everybody knew it was invented. And yet the jokes just kept rolling in a tone of OK-it’s-false-but-I’m-having-too-much-fun. [2]

I am still looking for a social psychologist who can explain why this has been so enjoyable. But in the meantime I’ll take a stab at it. I think the message here is: “See? We can lie too.”

Democrats are sick to death of Trump and his minions pushing lies that they know are lies, like that the 2020 election was stolen, or Kamala isn’t a citizen, or Democrats support murdering babies after they’re born, or other countries have sent their prison population to the US, and hundreds of others. Mike Johnson is a lawyer, so he has to know that his Harris-will-have-trouble-getting-on-the-ballot claims are bogus, but he makes them anyway.

We’re sick to death of answering stuff like that with facts, only to watch the lie propagate in spite of the facts. So you want to lie? Fine. Our lie is funnier and more viral than yours.

I’ll be interested to see whether people start consciously using it that way, responding to right-wing BS with Vance-and-the-couch claims, and, when challenged, saying, “Oh, I thought you had started a lying contest.”

Another reason we’re all being so merciless with the couch jokes is that other stuff emerged this week: stuff Vance really did say that personally insulted millions of us, and left us feeling like “I dare you to say that to my face, you couch-humper.”

In one, he disparaged women who decide not to have children (like my wife) as

childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too

In another, he proposed that people without children (like me) should have less voting power than parents, because we “don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country”.

How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?

Wow. What a judgmental, clueless thing to say. J. D. Vance has never met me, but he’s sure that I don’t care about the future, that I couldn’t possibly care like he does, because my only connection to the future is through my sister’s kids and grandkids, the children of my close friends, the kids in my church community, the students I’ve taught, the coworkers I’ve mentored, and my membership in the human race. Kamala Harris is even a stepmother to her husband’s children, but she’s one of the childless cat ladies Vance called out by name. Apparently, step-parenting doesn’t count either.

Another childless person he called out by name was Pete Buttigieg, whose adopted twins are nearly three now. But at the time

Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey. He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children. [3]

In an interview Sunday with Jen Psaki, Pete offered a more abstract perspective on Vance’s attitude.

He seems to view everything in terms of the negative. … I think a lot of us who have had kids would certainly say that that experience opens you to a new way of thinking about the world. But he doesn’t talk about it in those terms. He talks about how anybody who doesn’t have kids is less than, that their perspectives have less value, which is a really strange take.

Precisely. If Vance wants to wax poetic about how parenthood has changed him for the better, I’m happy for him. But if he wants to project onto me the benighted mindset he had before becoming a father, or (based on that projection) assign me a correspondingly lesser role in the nation we share, I’ve got a problem with that.

And let’s be clear: Projection is the key concept here. Vance’s attack is actually a confession. He doesn’t care about the future beyond how it affects his own biological descendants. Caring about other people’s kids, or about your community more broadly, is so foreign to him that he can’t even imagine how people like me can do it.

Such a me-and-mine worldview perfectly explains his position on climate change. If he can leave his own children well fixed by selling out to fossil fuel companies, that sounds pretty good to him, even if it condemns everyone else’s kids to an apocalyptic hellscape.

His attempts to clean this up only doubled down.

I’ve got nothing against cats. I’ve got nothing against dogs. … People are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I said, and the substance of what I said, Megyn, I’m sorry, it’s true.

But he wasn’t being “sarcastic”. He was being an asshole. He has ignorantly insulted me and millions of people like me, and when it was pointed out to him, he wouldn’t apologize. So the insult stands.

Do you want an asshole to be vice president of United States?

But OK, let’s put aside the insults and assholery and look at what Vance was proposing, which is — let’s face it — just a dumb unworkable idea: Children get votes, which their parents get to cast. So if Mom and Dad disagree — it is OK for a woman to disagree with her husband, isn’t it? — which one gets to cast the kids’ votes? If Mom and Dad separate with joint custody, where do the votes go? And think about those stereotypic welfare moms that Republicans love to scapegoat, the ones who keep having kids just to get more welfare. Do they get extra votes? If I’m an undocumented immigrant, but my “anchor baby” is an American citizen, can I cast her vote?

The whole idea is stupid. Clearly Vance just says stuff without thinking it through.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz burnished his Harris-VP credentials by applying a term that has stuck: weird. If you want to say that Vance’s ideas are scary or stupid, I can’t argue with you. But the main thing they are is weird. Here’s an example of the far-out scenarios that hatch in Vance’s mind, and the kinds of things he justifies with these bizarre fantasies. [4]

Let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion … let’s say in 2024. And then every day, George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. … And if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? … I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually.

Federal response like what exactly? Banning pregnant women from crossing state lines? Making women take pregnancy tests before getting on interstate flights? What? Suppose a pregnant Ohio State student flies home to California for Thanksgiving and miscarries while she’s there. How can she prove she didn’t get an abortion? What happens to her?

I’m sure Vance’s musings would sound perfectly normal in the Republic of Gilead. But not here. In America, they’re weird.

[1] Apparently, people have been making stuff like this up for a long time. In Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Hunter S. Thompson told this story about Lyndon Johnson.

The race was close and Johnson was getting worried.  Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows.

“Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.  “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.”

“I know,” Johnson replied.  “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

[2] Rep. Jack Kimble is often amusing, but he’s not a real congressman. California’s 54th district does not exist.

[3] Pete is being generous. Yes, Vance couldn’t have known at the time that Buttigieg and his husband were having trouble adopting. But he knows now, and hasn’t offered any kind of apology.

I haven’t found any direct statement of Vance’s views on same-sex marriage, or adoptions by same-sex couples, but he opposed the Respect for Marriage Act that would have codified marital rights for same-sex couples, and many of his “pro-family” statements use phrases that are also used by anti-gay hate groups. So it’s possible, even likely, that Vance not only thinks Pete should have second-class citizenship, but that he opposes any attempt by gays and lesbians to qualify for first-class citizenship by getting married and adopting children.

[4] Lots of Republican proposals are justified by similarly bizarre fantasies. We have to ban late-term abortions, for example, because of the possibility that some woman might carry a healthy fetus for nearly nine months, and then choose an abortion at the last minute on a whim. Who does that?

Or we need to ban trans athletes from high school and college sports, because women’s programs could be overrun by men pretending to be women. How many trans athletes do they think are out there? Are they dominating any sport? Is any women’s program in America being overrun by them? Can Republicans name even one trans athlete whose motivation is anything like what they’ve described?

July 29, 2024 – 9:22 am Categories: Articles | Comments (21)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

I keep getting overwhelmed by events, so the series of posts I plan to do on major issues keeps getting pushed off. (I have one on inflation half-finished, and plan another one on the border and immigration.)

But this was an amazing week. Last Monday morning, President Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race wasn’t even 48 hours old, and it wasn’t clear at all how things would shake out. But this week, Kamala Harris unified the Democratic Party behind her candidacy. None of the rival candidates pundits had fantasized about stepped up to challenge her, and she’ll go into the Democratic Convention with the support of a large majority of delegates.

Perhaps even more important, Democratic hope and energy exploded this week. The Harris campaign raised money and signed up volunteers at a record pace. New voter registrations also surged, though they didn’t quite reach the levels the Obama campaign achieved in 2008. Potential VP choices for Harris fanned out across the news shows, competing to show how well they can articulate the Democratic message and take the offensive against Trump and Vance.

So that’s one post, “The Harris Surge”, which I’m aiming to get out around 11 EDT.

Before that, though, I plan to post an article on J. D. Vance’s rough week, and why I believe he deserved it, even if he never actually did have sex with a couch. (I think we can’t repeat that often enough: J. D. Vance did not have sex with a couch. He does not pose a threat to the sofas of America.) “Couches, cat ladies, and J. D. Vance” should be out by 9 or so.

That leaves a bunch of stuff to the weekly summary, which I hope to get out between noon and 1.

July 29, 2024 – 8:40 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Resolutions

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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“.

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.

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.

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.

July 22, 2024 – 11:22 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

The Two Kinds of Unity

Unity can arise in two very different ways: when a group of equals recognize their common interests and purposes, or through dominance and submission. Guess which kind of unity Trump called for Thursday night.

Shortly after Donald Trump’s ear was barely grazed by a bullet, piece of shrapnel, or whatever it was, he announced that he was rewriting his convention speech to call for Unity.

It is a chance to bring the country together. I was given that chance.

The media dutifully reported this intention, imagining, as they so often do, that Trump was about to mature and become presidential. Friday morning, some headlines around the country echoed Trump’s call for unity, as if he had actually made one. Parker Malloy collected the evidence:

She commented:

The notion of a Trump “pivot” is as old as his political career. Since 2015, the media has repeatedly predicted — and prematurely celebrated — moments when Trump supposedly transformed into a more measured, presidential figure. These predictions have consistently proven to be mirages, disappearing as quickly as they formed.

When the mainstream media realized the speech wasn’t what they had predicted, they started interpreting it as two speeches at war with each other (which at least would explain why it was twice as long as a typical acceptance speech).

The “new” Donald Trump soothed and silenced the nation for 28 minutes last night. Then the old Trump returned and bellowed, barked and bored America for 64 minutes more.

This interpretation is misguided. Trump gave one speech, with a single theme: unity, but not the kind of unity politicians in a democratic republic usually call for.

Pundits misinterpret Trump when they refuse to recognize what he is: a sociopath. As such, Trump has no concept of what we usually mean by national unity: A broad consensus of citizens coming to recognize their common interests and purposes, and using that recognition to put aside their previous conflicts and mutual distrust.

The most obvious examples of unity in our history come after shocking disasters like Pearl Harbor or 9-11. Republicans did not instantly find love in their hearts for FDR, and Democrats similarly did not love W. But they recognized that all Americans faced a common threat and needed to move with a common purpose.

Admittedly, moments like that are rare, and the attempted assassination of Trump didn’t rise to that level. But nonetheless there are common purposes Trump could have invoked and built on.

Hardly anyone likes the level of hostility that currently exists in American politics. We’ve fallen a long way from that moment in the 2008 campaign when John McCain corrected a questioner who said she couldn’t trust Barack Obama because “he’s an Arab”.

“No ma’am,” McCain politely but firmly replied, “He’s a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that’s what this campaign is all about.”

We’re also past the moment that same year when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Speaker Newt Gingrich made an ad together about addressing climate change.

Nonetheless, there is still a lot to build common cause around. A substantial majority of Americans in each party want our children to get educated, and to be able to find productive places in a prosperous economy. We want our basic infrastructure — roads, electrical power, communications, etc. — to work flawlessly. We want clean water and breathable air. We want sick people to get care and old people to live their final years in dignity. We want to be safe from crime. We want to live in peace. We want our country to do well in international competition, and not to fall behind China (or anyone else) either economically or militarily. We want to help our fellow Americans when natural disasters strike. We want to be able to take pride in our country, and to believe that oppressed people around the world see us as a beacon of hope.

We often lose sight of these common intentions, but we shouldn’t. How to accomplish any of these goals leads to serious arguments — like whether the government or the market should take the lead — many of which are hard to resolve. So there would still be plenty of room in our politics for “disagreements on fundamental issues”. But there is a lot to build unity around, if we would choose to do so.

Donald Trump, however, doesn’t live in a world where that kind of unity is possible, or even makes sense. To a sociopath, all relationships are built around dominance and submission. In every interaction, somebody wins and somebody loses. Win/win is just not a thing.

This view runs far deeper than just his politics. The Art of Deal, for example, is about winning every negotiation, not about building mutually beneficial long-term relationships with clients, employees, or suppliers. He often refused to pay small contractors who worked on his casinos and clubs, or he bullied them into taking less than their contracts called for. (They will never deal with him again, but so what? He won.) The background for his recent fraud trial was that banks would no longer offer him competitive rates without special guarantees, which he verified through false documentation.

Or take a look at his cabinet picks from 2017: Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, Jim Mattis, Steve Mnuchin, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo, Ryan Zinke, Sonny Perdue, Wilbur Ross, Alexander Acosta, Tom Price, Ben Carson, Elain Chao, Betsy DeVos, Rick Perry, John Kelly, David Schulkin, Nikki Haley, Scott Pruitt, Mick Mulvaney, Robert Lighthizer, Linda McMahon, and Andrew Puzder. Forget about whether any of them will serve again should he be reelected; how many of them are even supporting him now? Why did he even need a new vice president?

Trump doesn’t do mutually beneficial relationships that build trust over time. He uses people until their usefulness is exhausted, then he discards them as “losers” or denies that he ever really knew them.

Similarly, NATO has never made sense to him, because it’s about countries banding together for mutual protection. In his mind, though, if we’re not taking advantage of them, they must be taking advantage of us. Many of the fantasy sir-stories he tells during his rallies are about him expressing dominance and other world leaders submitting. Here’s one in his convention speech:

For years and years when I first came in, they said President Obama tried to get [gang members we wanted to deport] to go back and [other countries] wouldn’t accept them. They’d put planes on the runway so you couldn’t land the plane. They’d close the roads so you couldn’t take the buses; they’d all have to turn back.

As soon as I said no more economic aid of any kind to any country that does that, they called back and they said, “Sir, it would be our great honor to take M.S. 13. We love them very much. We love them very much, sir. We’ll take them back.”

He reinterprets his greatest diplomatic blunder — tearing up the Obama agreement that would have kept Iran from getting nuclear weapons, then utterly failing to get the “better deal” he said was possible — as simply not having enough time for his attempted domination to take effect. (Because of course the country that was willing to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers in its war with Iraq would crumble under his economic threats.)

I told China and other countries, “If you buy from Iran, we will not let you do any business in this country, and we will put tariffs on every product you do send in of 100 percent or more.” And they said to me, “Well, I think that’s about it.” They weren’t going to buy any oil. And they were ready to make a deal. Iran was going to make a deal with us.

And then we had that horrible, horrible result that we’ll never let happen again. The election result. We’re never going to let that happen again. They used Covid to cheat. We’re never going to let it happen again. And they took off all the sanctions, and they did everything possible for Iran and now Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon, which would have never happened.

Because to Trump, that’s what relationship is all about: dominance and submission. If you’re not the predator, you’re the prey.

So it should have been immediately obvious what kind of national unity Trump would call for in his convention speech: If you’ve been resisting his dominance, it’s time for you to recognize that you’re beaten and submit.

The opening part of Trump’s speech, the 28 minutes Axios liked, sounded like common-purpose unity, if that’s what you were primed to hear.

I stand before you this evening with a message of confidence, strength and hope. Four months from now, we will have an incredible victory, and we will begin the four greatest years in the history of our country.

Together, we will launch a new era of safety, prosperity and freedom for citizens of every race, religion, color and creed.

The discord and division in our society must be healed. We must heal it quickly. As Americans, we are bound together by a single fate and a shared destiny. We rise together. Or we fall apart.

I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America.

But it is also consistent with the sociopathic unity of dominance and submission, as the second part of the speech made clear. He wasn’t reaching out to the other half of America, he was demanding its surrender.

And we must not criminalize dissent or demonize political disagreement, which is what’s been happening in our country lately, at a level that nobody has ever seen before. In that spirit, the Democrat party should immediately stop weaponizing the justice system and labeling their political opponent as an enemy of democracy. … If Democrats want to unify our country, they should drop these partisan witch hunts, which I’ve been going through for approximately eight years. And they should do that without delay and allow an election to proceed that is worthy of our people. We’re going to win it anyway.

He lamented what has been happening to his sons, who were fellow defendants in the fraud lawsuit that he lost (because a jury of ordinary Americans found that he and his sons committed fraud).

[Eric is] such a good young man. He went through a lot of trouble, and Don, last night, was incredible. They went through so much trouble. They got subpoenaed more than any people probably in the history of the United States. Every week they get another subpoena from the Democrats. Crazy Nancy Pelosi, the whole thing. Just boom, boom, boom.

They’ve got to stop that because they’re destroying our country. We have to work on making America great again, not on beating people. And we won. We beat them in all. We beat them on the impeachments. We beat them on the indictments. We beat them. But the time that you have to spend, the time that you have to spend. If they would devote that genius to helping our country, we’d have a much stronger and better country.

Got that? Everyone has to stop focusing on beating people, but I beat you. You don’t win; I win. So stop trying to make me obey laws or holding me accountable for my crimes. Submit. And then our country can move forward in unity.

If we do that, if we submit to Trump, he offers the vision that he can become powerful enough to dominate others on our behalf.

For too long, our nation has settled for too little. We settled for too little. We’ve given everything to other nations, to other people. You have been told to lower your expectations and to accept less for your families.

I am here tonight with the opposite message: Your expectations are not big enough. They’re not big enough. It is time to start expecting and demanding the best leadership in the world, leadership that is bold, dynamic, relentless and fearless. We can do that.

We are Americans. Ambition is our heritage. Greatness is our birthright.

But as long as our energies are spent fighting each other, our destiny will remain out of reach. And that’s not acceptable. We must instead take that energy and use it to realize our country’s true potential — and write our own thrilling chapter of the American story.

Trump closed by recalling past American glories.

Together, these patriots soldiered on and endured, and they prevailed. Because they had faith in each other, faith in their country, and above all, they had faith in their God.

Just like our ancestors, we must now come together, rise above past differences. Any disagreements have to be put aside, and go forward united as one people, one nation, pledging allegiance to one great, beautiful — I think it’s so beautiful — American flag.

But you will search this text in vain to find any indication that Trump himself is putting aside past differences. He’s still talking about “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and refusing to recognize any positive purpose (like mitigating climate change or trying to limit Covid deaths) that Biden might have been trying to achieve with his policies. And if you don’t share “faith in their God”, well, you just don’t count.

Even Sunday, after Biden withdrew from the race, Trump could not be gracious, and continued to lie about Biden and his record.

Crooked Joe Biden was not fit to run for President, and is certainly not fit to serve – And never was! He only attained the position of President by lies, Fake News, and not leaving his Basement. All those around him, including his Doctor and the Media, knew that he wasn’t capable of being President, and he wasn’t – And now, look what he’s done to our Country, with millions of people coming across our Border, totally unchecked and unvetted, many from prisons, mental institutions, and record numbers of terrorists. We will suffer greatly because of his presidency, but we will remedy the damage he has done very quickly.

So no, putting aside differences is not for him, it’s on me and on you. We just need to get in line and submit. Only then will America have the kind of unity Trump wants.

There is a word for this kind of unity, but not an English word: gleichschaltung. It’s an old German engineering term, for when you wire a bunch of electrical circuits together under a common master switch. It got applied to German politics in 1933, for reasons that you may recall from history books.

July 22, 2024 – 9:34 am Categories: Articles | Comments (31)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I don’t usually put a cartoon in the Teaser, but this Garth German drawing was too spot-on. Last week, the Trump shooting was still so fresh that not much was known about it. Then J. D. Vance was announced as Trump’s VP and the whole circus of the convention started, culminating in Trump’s record-long 90-minute acceptance speech, which had the laundry-list quality of a bad State of the Union.

Meanwhile, President Biden’s support among elected Democrats continued to slip, with a new defection or two almost every day. Then Sunday, he announced he’s leaving the race and endorsing Kamala Harris. Now all eyes are on her, and the TV talking heads barely have time to mention Trump, who suddenly looks very old.

It’s a lot to cover, but I have one advantage over CNN and MSNBC: I try to stick to what I know, and nobody knows much at this point. So I’ll edit out all the maybe-this-maybe-that and see what’s left.

Here’s what I have planned: For my sins, I watched the full 90 minutes of Trump, and I think the mainstream media completely missed his point. They saw two speeches: the call for national unity that they predicted and wanted to see, followed by Trump’s usual divisive rhetoric. I saw one speech: It was all about unity, but not the kind of unity the media had imagined. Throughout, Trump was calling for his enemies to surrender to his domination. Then we can be one unified nation, he promised, and stop wasting our energies fighting each other.

The Germans have a word for that kind of unity: gleichschaltung, which is pretty much untranslatable. It’s an old engineering term, but they coined its political usage in the 1930s, for some reason.

So the featured post “The Two Kinds of Unity” will flesh out that interpretation of Trump’s speech. Everything else will wind up in the weekly summary. The featured post should appear between 9 and 10 EDT, and the summary before noon.

July 22, 2024 – 8:26 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)