I’ll leave the fine details to the experts, but here is the gist. If Team Red—or, of course, Team Blue—finds itself with a lot of extremely safe congressional districts, the partisan redistricting may be accomplished by spreading out those partisan voters, so that the team has somewhat fewer safe seats and a larger number of seats that it’s going to win by, say, only five percent or so.
That works just fine if you can accurately predict which way the political win will be blowing, come next election. But what happens if the political wind starts blowing against you?
If, let’s say, the wind unexpectedly blows against you—let’s say by seven percent in favor of Team Blue—then your bunch of five percent wins turn into a bunch of two percent losses. And you have well and truly shot yourself in the foot.
You will recognize this situation as a corollary of the general rule that the straight edge ruler is not your best tool for short term and long term planning.
Down in Texas, Team Red—having partaken generously of Trump’s Kool-Aid—thinks that Orange Man’s popularity in the Lone Star State will continue from strength. In particular, they think the Latino community is overjoyed by the ICE arrests, and will reward Mango Mussolini in 2026 by increasing their support in congressional districts bordering on the Rio Grande.
Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, His Most High Excellency has declared today that he will order his “Justice Department” to sue California for retaliatory redistricting on the part of Team Blue.
The Very Stable Genius did not, however, articulate a coherent legal principle that would condemn Team Blue in California while, at the same time, blessing Team Red’s efforts in Texas.
The exact quote is, “I want to try and get to heaven, if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this [a peace deal for Ukraine] will be one of the reasons.”
Does the Archangel Michael Have Trump’s Cellphone?
The Times asks an excellent question:
This fear of perdition raised some questions. Chief among them: Who, exactly, has been informing the president that he is “not doing well” with regard to kingdom come? Did Michael the Archangel somehow get Mr. Trump’s cellphone number?
Your Chances of Getting into the Christian Heaven? Not Lookin’ Good, Donnie.
You know, Orange Man, the Gospel of Matthew is pretty damn specific about who’s a sheep and who’s a goat.
And, Donnie, you, sir, are a goat. (And that definitely doesn’t mean Greatest of All Time.)
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me in. Naked, and ye clothed me. I was sick, and ye visited me. I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink.I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into life eternal.
And, Guess What, Donnie, You’re Also Going to Secular Hell for Megalomaniacs
And what, pray tell, is secular hell for megalomaniacs? I will answer my own rhetorical question. Secular hell for megalomaniacs is a fixed, enduring, well known and well established historical reputation for evil, vaingloriousness, inability to assess the relevant facts of a situation, inability to predict the consequences of your actions, refusal to recognize and accept good counsel, always valuing loyalty over competence, not recognizing the truth when it bites your own butt, and a love of performative cruelty.
Donnie, you and I are both 79 years old. We both graduated from an Ivy League university in 1968. AI tells us that deaths per year for 1968 Ivy League grads begin to reach their peak in our late 70s and early 80s.
Some, based on observation of your physical condition, your behavior, and your beginning to muse—in your own illiterate way—about the afterlife, ask, “Is Trump dying?”
Well, guess what, Donnie? Yeah, you’re dying. Maybe not next week. Maybe not next year. But you’re well on the way to your final reward.
And know this.
In future decades, in future centuries, for ages and ages to come, world without end, your name will be a byword.
It will be a byword for megalomania.
It will be a byword for wilful, pigheaded ignorance.
It will be a byword for joyous performative cruelty.
You will be a poster child for the President of the United States who possessed not a single character trait that made him worthy of his high office.
Clearly, he wants the Peace Prize so much that Putin can twist him around his middle finger.
Some thoughts that come to mind:
Maybe the Heritage Foundation, joined with the Southern Baptist Convention, could name him the International Prince of Peace.
Or the Council on Foreign Relations could award him the Annual Prize for Creative Diplomatic Strategy—commenting that Obama never won this prize, which clearly proves Trump is twice the man Obama is.
Or perhaps the best idea of all: Harvard could give him an honorary Ph.D in Foreign PolicyThinkology.
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
How we learned to love state capitalism
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former President Joe Biden went further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that, $8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would take a 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” author Dan Wang writes: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
Trouble with state capitalism
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems. Barry Naughton of the University of California, San Diego has documented how China’s rapid growth since 1979 has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leader Xi Jinping has reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
Means of control
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020, Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulators canceled the initial public offering of Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventually fined it $2.8 billion for anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
Hot Take by Me: Does Silence Necessarily Mean Capitulation?
I was struck by Mr. Ip’s observation that CEOs now keep silent about things they would have publicly protested in earlier years. I’m sure that’s right. But here’s another truth: CEOs also bloody well know how to scheme and collude in private.
I join with those who say the legal case against Trump’s power grab under the purported authority of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 is overwhelming. That case, moreover, ought to appeal both to the Supreme Court’s progressives as well as to the other six justices, who achieved their high station through the good offices of the Federalist Society.
Notably, the litigation challenging Trump’s tariff power grab is being financed by Mr. Federalist Society himself, Leonard Leo, along the Cato Institute, the Charles Koch Foundation, and many others of their ilk.
In this context today, the Wall Street Journal waxed sardonic. I’ll share the Journal’s words, followed by a final hot take by my good self.
The Journal’s Editorial Board writes,
Mr. Trump justified his “reciprocal” tariffs by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to declare emergencies over fentanyl and the trade deficit. A lower court blocked the tariffs in May (V.O.S. Selections v. Trump) as an illegal exercise of presidential power, and Mr. Trump is appealing.
The Federal Circuit put a stay on the lower- court ruling so it could hear the President’s appeal. Oral arguments before the full Federal Circuit late last month didn’t go well for the government, which may explain the Justice Department letter, which echoes a tirade by Mr. Trump against the judges.
“If a Radical Left Court ruled against us at this late date, in an attempt to bring down or disturb the largest amount of money, wealth creation and influence the U.S.A. has ever seen, it would be impossible to ever recover, or pay back, these massive sums of money and honor,” Mr. Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social. “It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION!”
Wow. Ending a tax increase means depression. Who knew? Mr. Trump also seems to think any judge who rules against him is a radical leftist. But the 11 judges who heard the appeal include Republican and Democratic appointees. Messrs. Sauer and Shumate parrot Mr. Trump’s doomsday prophesies in their letter.
“The President believes that our country would not be able to pay back the trillions of dollars that other countries have already committed to pay, which could lead to financial ruin,” the lawyers write. We doubt the President believes that, but in any case it isn’t true.
It is true that foreign countries have pledged to increase investment in the U.S. in return for avoiding even higher tariffs than Mr. Trump has imposed. But these are nonbinding commitments, and the government wouldn’t have to pay anything back to countries if the tariffs are blocked. It would have to compensate U.S. businesses that paid the illegal tariffs—and with interest.
Obtaining a refund could be a bureaucratic mess and take years. But putting an end to this tax increase would also be a relief to thousands of businesses. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently estimated that the Trump tariffs will cost the average small business importer $856,000 a year. Consumers notably won’t be able to seek refunds for tariff costs passed on to them.
The letter to the Federal Circuit judges illustrates the Trump style: try to intimidate by exaggerating the impact of a decision he doesn’t like and suggest he’ll blame the judges. We trust the judges won’t fall for it. If they do rule against the President and he appeals, we hope the Supreme Court quickly takes the case.
A Final Hot Take: Perhaps You Have Heard the Old Proverb, “Give a Fool Enough Rope and He’ll Hang Himself”
Along with Leonard Leo and his many close friends, thirteen states are suing to get a judicial finding that Trump is making a lawless power grab on tariffs: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Vermont.
Ironically, a victory by these assorted plaintiffs would not only save the country from a lot of economic grief, it would also save Trump’s bacon by depriving him of the rope he needs to keep on hanging himself.
My hot take: If I were on the Supreme Court, I’d consider voting for Team Trump on this one, just to spite him.
The United States today is engaged in two conversations that appear, at first blush, to be entirely unconnected.
The first focuses on men and boys. As Richard Reeves, founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has highlighted, younger-generation American males are increasingly despondent. The stereotype is of young men perpetually playing video games in their parents’ basements, too depressed and shut in to ask women out. But such exaggeration shouldn’t eclipse the broader and more subtle reality. You don’t have to be an incel to believe that the “system” is fundamentally broken and rigged against your success.
Separately, city and state leaders everywhere are focused on the housing crisis — specifically homeownership. Rents are too high, and even the most ordinary houses are astronomically expensive. Zoning is exclusive, interest rates are too high, and the legacy of redlining lives on. Worse, new home construction has dropped to a five-year low. We’re not building enough homes to keep up with demand, and even if we were, those just starting off wouldn’t be able to comfortably afford them.
These patterns are two sides of the same coin. Just 30 years ago, the median age of first-time home buyers was 28. Today, it’s 38. In 2000, the typical price of a single-family home was three times a family’s annual income; today, it’s six times. The effects are clear: In Germany and Spain, where real estate prices have climbed more modestly over the past 30 years, the percentage of young adults who report regularly experiencing worry, sadness and anger has largely remained steady. In the United States, however, where home prices have risen 85 percent, one-third of young adults now report a sense of despondency.
This is, of course, a problem for all Americans — men and women alike. But, unpopular as it might be to say in some quarters of my party, the crisis affects one gender with particular potency. Like it or not, American men are still raised to believe that their role is to act as providers and protectors. And when men whose self-worth is tied up in that aspiration realize they’ll never be able to buy a home, they’re bound to feel shame and anger.
The American Dream can’t live up to its name when only a tenth of the population has a shot at it. The dream has become unaffordable and inaccessible in a way that Democrats should declare unacceptable. Democrats talk all the time about democracy being on the ballot. But the solution won’t be found only in registering more voters or making mail-in balloting universal. The problem is that real generation-over-generation prosperity is harder to achieve today. This shouldn’t be some mystery: American democracy became unstable at almost exactly the same time the American Dream became unaffordable. And because that’s not a coincidence, we need to tackle the homeownership challenge head-on.
This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s not just a matter of Democrats finding our own Joe Rogan, or making better use of TikTok, or using more “authentic” language. Of the necessities for which prices keep rising — gasoline, groceries, health care — housing is first among equals. And if Democrats want to save our democracy while simultaneously fighting against economic inequality, we need to address the primary source of half the country’s humiliation and anger.
This challenge didn’t emerge overnight. To understand its roots, look no further than the 2008 financial crisis. As the mortgage bubble burst, millions of families lost their homes explicitly because Wall Street had rigged the system. And yet the bankers who participated in the rigging demanded their annual bonuses — and in most cases received them.
As White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, I advocated Old Testament justice. I wanted to hold the bankers who sold liar loans accountable. But my arguments on a Saturday afternoon in the Roosevelt Room were overruled, perhaps wisely, so that Democrats could first pursue health care reform. Though we later instituted the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, no one ever went to prison — adding insult to injury. You can draw a straight line from that outrage to the tea party and, eventually, to the candidacy of Donald Trump, who promised to be an instrument of “your justice [and] retribution.”
If there’s any silver lining to the housing crisis, it’s that, unlike so many of our national challenges, it’s solvable. Unlike the rise of China, or the specter of AI, or the scourge of global climate change, we don’t need a new batch of policy tools or institutions to help working-class families purchase their first homes. We’ve done this before.
A century ago, mortgages were unaffordable to the broad mass of potential buyers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal responded by engineering a system that made 30-year fixed-rate loans that amortized the principal accessible to most home buyers — an effort that then evolved to encompass Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not long thereafter, the government enacted the GI Bill for World War II veterans. Details of the housing market are different today, but the fundamentals are the same. So let’s apply the lessons.
First, much as we treat veterans as a population apart when it comes to home-buying, we should treat first-time home buyers as their own class. To make it easier for them to reach that first crucial rung on the ladder to economic prosperity, we should reinstitute the Obama administration’s $8,000 homebuyer’s tax credit, triple it to reflect present market conditions and index the benefit to inflation. Second, we should explore ways to make it possible for first-time home buyers to take out mortgages at favorable interest rates.
Third, in learning from the recent successes Texas and California have had with state-level reforms making land cheaper and zoning more streamlined, we should champion federal policies that incentive housing production. Texas now allows housing on land zoned for commercial use statewide; California just enacted a bill making infill housing much easier to construct. As Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) have proposed, the federal government should be rewarding states and localities that embrace supply-side solutions.
Tackling homeownership head-on is poised to be the ultimate example of how good policy turns out to be good politics. As data expert David Shor found in his analysis of the 2024 presidential race, the best moment of Kamala Harris’s campaign coincided with the decision to air television spots focused on housing costs. Today, the stock market is near an all-time high, CEOs are paid nearly 300 times the wage of average workers, and the uber-rich are building personalized spaceships. Yet young couples can’t afford a down payment for their first home.
The vast majority of Americans once believed they could enter the middle class by working hard and playing by the rules. Now, a burgeoning percentage of young people feel as though they’re running in place and getting nowhere fast. The hope of owning a little slice of the future is woven deeply into our national psyche. And the Democratic Party’s success hinges on our ability to enable men in particular to realize that hope and ensure their own success.
