Everybody’s got their take on the “Gulf of America” and other babblings from the Trump “news conference” yesterday.
As per usual, some espouse the view that Trump is playing some kind of three-dimensional chess.
May I humbly suggest that Trump has, for a long time, suffered from malignant narcissistic personality disorder and related mental diseases; that, to his portfolio of afflictions, he has recently added early stage dementia; that his mental and physical health are worsening by the day; and that handing him power was a breathtakingly irresponsible act.
The Richie Richs did it because they loved them some tax cuts back in 2017—and here in 2025, they would love them some more tax cuts.
What with the confusion in their Republican legislative ranks, I don’t think they’re actually going to get their tax cuts.
What with the tariffs, the deportations, and other reckless nonsense, I think the Richie Riches are going to wind up screwed, blued, and tattooed.
I found this three-year-old video from the Noo Yak Times insightful and profound.
Blue states—defined as those states, like California and Illinois, that have Democratic governors and Democrats in control of the Legislature—are not voting their stated values.
The presenter addresses housing, taxation, and education, and demonstrates how blue state governments are systematically screwing the lower and middle class.
Please understand the point I am trying to make, however imperfectly I am making the point. The point is NOT that anyone should lash himself with a whip for the sin of “hypocrisy.” (If you feel you have been hypocritical, and if you think that self-flagellation would do you good, then go ahead. Please don’t let me stop you. But that’s not the point here.)
The point IS that
we blue folk, collectively, are not (for whatever reason) acting and voting the values we claim to hold, and that
the situation is unsustainable, and that,
unless we are prepared to live in a fascist state, the economic concerns of the lower and middle class have got to be addressed, and that right soon.
After the episode shown above, Mika—obviously prompted by the back office—came on to clarify that Trump was not criminally convicted of rape, he was found civilly liable for “sexual abuse” as “sexual abuse” is defined in New York state law. Judge Lewis Kaplan noted that what the jury found that Trump did would be called “rape” in jurisdictions other than the state of New York.
This is the same issue involved in the infamous Trump v. ABC News settlement. Mika and her back office were right to make the clarification and avoid giving Trump a stick with which to beat her over the head. Debating the fine points about New York’s narrow definition of “rape” is not the hill to die on.
Carville reaches the conclusion that so many others have reached, namely, that Democrats utterly failed to understand the level of economic anguish—and economic resentment—among the working class; that Democrats need a new program, a new message, and a new messenger; and that said new messenger had bloody well be someone who is comfortable speaking to podcasters.
All true. But Carville omits one key point. (I suspect the omission is conscious and deliberate, because of the delicacy of the subject. But no matter. For whatever reason, he left it out.)
What Carville leaves out if that, if a majority of us are now living in a siloed, curated reality based on selected YouTube videos and TikTok messages served by algorithms, then the good guys have got to find a way to burrow into those information silos and get the attention of the inattentive and the careless thinkers.
In other words, if the democratic accountability feedback loop is in trouble, as is surely the case, then the good guys need to restore it to a healthy state.
I am an old man, and I don’t personally know how to do TikTok and Instagram, but it surely can’t be all that hard for skilled, dedicated people to invade those information silos and begin to spread the message.
Instagram I don’t know, but here are a couple of things I do know. One is that when you put on your advocate’s hat—when your aim is to lead your audience in to see reality in a particular way—it is one hell of a lot easier to accomplish your goal if the picture you’re trying to paint is essentially an accurate view of that reality, as distinguished from a fairy tale and a tissue of lies.
I also know, to a high degree of confidence, that Trump will act in such a way as to immiserate his working class supporters.
Frank Bruni thinks that said working class supporters can be served a diet of shit sandwiches and be made to think they are eating filet mignon.
Maybe that will turn out to be the case. We’ll just have to see.
But if I were Mr. Bruni, I would not bet the ranch on it.
If Americans under Trump are demonstrably and undeniably hurting as much as they were under President Biden, he’ll weave stories and hurl accusations that absolve him of responsibility and assign it to his political foes. And he’ll find many more takers than he would have before we could all customize the reports we receive so that our designated heroes remain unblemished, our appointed villains irredeemable, our biases affirmed.
And before our entrenchments in such cinched corridors of pseudoreality zapped our powers of discernment. “We’re living in a world where facts instantly perish upon contact with human minds,” George Packer wrote in The Atlantic this month. “Local news is disappearing, and a much-depleted national press can barely compete with the media platforms of billionaires who control users algorithmically, with an endless stream of conspiracy theories and deepfakes. The internet, which promised to give everyone information and a voice, has consolidated in just a few hands the power to destroy the very notion of objective truth.” …
The next best thing to results is illusions. And a record of accomplishments isn’t necessary in a hall of mirrors, not if it’s big and blinding enough.
By contrast, Jerusalem Demsas, who writes for The Atlantic, writes,
[T[he Democratic Party’s performance in the 2024 presidential election has led some to doubt whether the feedback loops necessary for good policy—and a healthy democracy—even exist.
This episode of Good on Paper pushes back against the pessimists. Interpreting signals from voters is complicated, and so much is contingent on which issues are salient when they head to the ballot box. But the political scientist Hunter Rendleman’s research indicates that when states rolled out Earned Income Tax Credit programs—a benefit for working-class Americans—voters rewarded governors who implemented the policy with higher vote shares and approval ratings.
“I think I’m an optimist on sophistication,” Hunter told me. “I think a lot of times political scientists are a bit pessimistic on individuals’ capacities to actually know what’s going on to them because it is quite complicated. But we don’t often set up our analyses or studies in a way to give voters the benefit of the doubt.”
George Packer, also writing in The Atlantic, tries for a balanced view:
The Trump Reaction is more fragile than it now seems. Trump’s behavior in the last weeks of the campaign did not augur a coherent second presidency. He will surround himself with ideologues, opportunists, and crackpots, and because he has no interest in governing, they will try to fill the vacuum and turn on one another. The Trump administration, with a favorable Congress, will overreach on issues such as abortion and immigration, soon alienating important parts of its new coalition. It will enact economic policies that favor the party’s old allies among the rich at the expense of its new supporters among the less well-off. It’s quite possible that, approaching 80, Trump will find himself once more among the least popular presidents in the country’s history. But in the meantime, he will have enormous latitude to abuse his power for enrichment and revenge, and to shred the remaining ties that bind Americans to one another, and the country to democracies around the world.
The Trump Reaction will test opponents with a difficult balancing act, one that recalls F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line about a first-rate intelligence holding two opposed ideas in mind while still being able to function. The Democratic Party has to undertake the necessary self-scrutiny that starts with the errors of Biden, Harris, and their inner circle, but that extends to the party’s long drift away from the most pressing concerns of ordinary Americans, toward the eccentric obsessions of its donors and activists. But this examination can’t end in paralysis, because at the same time, the opposition will have to act. Much of this action will involve civil society and the private sector along with surviving government institutions—to prevent by legal means the mass internment and deportation of migrants from communities in which they’ve been peacefully living for years; to save women whose lives are threatened by laws that would punish them for trying to save themselves; to protect the public health from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s security from Tulsi Gabbard, and its coffers from Elon Musk. …
A few weeks before the election, Representative Chris Deluzio, a first-term Democrat, was campaigning door-to-door in a closely divided district in western Pennsylvania. He’s a Navy veteran, a moderate on cultural issues, and a homegrown economic populist—critical of corporations, deep-pocketed donors, and the ideology that privileges capital over human beings and communities. At one house he spoke with a middle-aged white policeman named Mike, who had a Trump sign in his front yard. Without budging on his choice for president, Mike ended up voting for Deluzio. On Election Night, in a state carried by Trump, Deluzio outperformed Harris in his district, especially in the reddest areas, and won comfortably. What does this prove? Only that politics is best when it’s face-to-face and based on respect, that most people are complicated and even persuadable, and that—in the next line from the Fitzgerald quote—one can “see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
This is a companion to the post immediately below, What Word Best Describes Trump Suppporters?—wherein another blogger debates with herself about whether that word is “stupid” or something even worse.
Well, dear reader, if you are a person of some maturity, you have learned that there are many ways of being smart, and many ways of being stupid.
And if you are situationally self-aware you are aware that Trump managed to put together a plurality based on a portfolio of folks suffering from a very wide variety of ways of being stupid.
And if you are capable of strategic thinking, you will have figured out that the way forward is to bust open the Trump’s fragile coalition of racists, anti-vaxxers, Christianist nationalists, people in a moral panic over transgender rights, and the terminally illiterate and uninformed.
James Carville writes,
I thought Kamala Harris would win. I was wrong. While I’m sure we Democrats can argue that the loss wasn’t a landslide or take a little solace in our House performance, the most important thing for us now is to face that we were wrong and take action on the prevailing “why.”
I’ve been going over this in my head for the past two months, all the variables, all the what-ifs, all the questions about Joe Biden’s re-election decisions and what kind of Democrat or message might have worked against Donald Trump. I keep coming back to the same thing. We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid. We have to begin 2025 with that truth as our political north star and not get distracted by anything else. …
Mr. Trump, for the first time in his political career, decisively won by seizing a swath of middle-class and low-income voters focused on the economy. Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back. Perception is everything in politics, and a lot of Americans perceive us as out to lunch on the economy — not feeling their pain or caring too much about other things instead.
To win back the economic narrative, we must focus on revving up a transformed messaging machine for the new political paradigm we now find ourselves living in. It’s about finding ways to talk to Americans about the economy that are persuasive. Repetitive. Memorable. And entirely focused on the issues that affect Americans’ everyday lives.
This starts with how we form our opposition. First of all, we have got to stop making Mr. Trump himself our main focus; he can’t be elected again. Furthermore, it’s clear many Americans do not give a rat’s tail about Mr. Trump’s indictments — even if they are justified — or about his antidemocratic impulses or about social issues if they cannot provide for themselves or their families.
Mr. Trump won the popular vote by putting the economic anger of Americans front and center. If we focus on anything else, we risk falling farther into the abyss. Our messaging machine must sharply focus on opposing the unpopular Republican economic agenda that will live on past him. Vocally oppose the party, not the person or the extremism of his movement. I don’t always agree with Wall Street, but Jamie Dimon was right when he saidthat Democrats’ railing against “ultra-MAGA” was insulting and politically tone-deaf. Denouncing other Americans or their leader as miscreants is not going to win elections; focusing on their economic pain will, as will contesting the Republican economic agenda. …
Let’s start by forcing [Republicans] to oppose a raise in the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Let’s make Roe v. Wade an economic messaging issue and force them to block our attempts to codify it into law. And let’s take back the immigration issue by making it an economic issue and force the G.O.P. to deny bipartisan reform that expedites entry for high-performing talentand for those who will bring business into our nation. This year the Democratic Party leadership must convene and publish a creative, popular and bold economic agenda and proactively take back our economic turf. Go big, go populist, stick to economic progress and force them to oppose what they cannot be for. In unison.
Finally, Democrats must trudge headfirst with this economic agenda into the new media paradigm we now live in. I am an 80-year-old man and can see clearly that we are barreling toward a nontraditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience. Our economic message must be sharp, crisp, clear — and we must take it right to the people. To Democratic presidential hopefuls, your auditions for 2028 should be based on two things: 1) How authentic you are on the economy and 2) how well you deliver it on a podcast.
The road ahead will not be easy, but there are no two roads to choose from. The path forward could not be more certain: We live or die by winning public perception of the economy.
Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it forever shall be.
A good friend has called my attention to a recent post by Prof. Sheila Kennedy. In the post, Prof. Kennedy muses on the question “Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?” and reposts this message that she received from a friend:
THE SERIOUS ANSWER: Here’s what the majority of anti-Trump voters honestly feel about Trump supporters en masse:
That when he made up stories about seeing Muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/donald-trumps…/)
That when you heard him relating a story of an elderly guest of his country club, an 80-year old man, who fell off a stage and hit his head, to which Trump replied: “‘Oh my God, that’s disgusting, and I turned away. I couldn’t—you know, he was right in front of me, and I turned away. I didn’t want to touch him. He was bleeding all over the place. And I felt terrible, because it was a beautiful white marble floor, and now it had changed color. Became very red.” You said, “That’s cool!” (https://www.gq.com/story/donald-trump-howard-stern-story)
That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.” (https://www.usatoday.com/…/what-trump-has…/1501321001/)
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!” (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/why-cant-trump…/567320/)
That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.” (https://www.huffpost.com/…/trump-insult-foreign…)
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!” (https://www.politico.com/…/138-trump-policy-changes…)
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!” (https://www.usnews.com/…/how-is-donald-trump-profiting…)
That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!” (https://www.cnn.com/…/donald-trump-dictators…/index.html)
That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids, has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “Well, OK then.” (https://www.nbcnews.com/…/more-5-400-children-split…)
That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise. (https://www.americanprogress.org/…/confronting-cost…/)
What you don’t get, Trump supporters, is that our succumbing to frustration and shaking our heads, thinking of you as stupid, may very well be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.
Facing MAGA 