Category Archives: Random Blogging

It’s Getting Harder To Ignore

A few days after Trump’s debate with Kamala Harris, an article in The Atlantic focused on his increasing incoherence. It began by noting Trump’s routine boast about passing a cognitive test.

The former president has repeatedly bragged over the past several years that he has passed various mental-status exams with flying colors. Most of these tests are designed to detect fairly serious cognitive dysfunction, and as such, they are quite easy to pass: They ask simple questions such as “What is the date?” and challenge participants to spell world backwards or write any complete sentence. By contrast, a 90-minute debate that involves unknown questions and unanticipated rebuttals requires candidates to think on their feet. It is a much more demanding and representative test of cognitive health than a simple mental-status exam you take in a doctor’s office. Specifically, the debate serves as an evaluation of the candidates’ mental flexibility under pressure—their capacity to deal with uncertainty and the unforeseen.

The author–a psychiatrist–readily admitted that he was not in a position to diagnose either candidate and was not offering any specific medical diagnoses, having never met or examined either of them.

But I watched the debate with particular attention to the candidates’ vocabulary, verbal and logical coherence, and ability to adapt to new topics—all signs of a healthy brain. Although Kamala Harris certainly exhibited some rigidity and repetition, her speech remained within the normal realm for politicians, who have a reputation for harping on their favorite talking points. By contrast, Donald Trump’s expressions of those tendencies were alarming. He displayed some striking, if familiar, patterns that are commonly seen among people in cognitive decline.

Trump’s mental decline is finally being widely noted. As a recent article from the Daily Beast reported,

An increasingly incoherent and profane former president Donald Trump, 78, is rambling at his rallies at previously unheard-of lengths and showing signs of confusion that could indicate mental decline, according to a New York Times analysis.

An average rally speech by the elderly Republican nominee for president—who has promised to release his medical records and cognitive tests and then refused to do so—lasts 82 minutes this election cycle, nearly double the 45 minutes he averaged in 2016, a computer analysis by the newspaper found.

In addition to Trump’s well documented rambling, repetitive and winding addresses—punctuated with strange asides about things like his “beautiful” body—among the potential signs of cognitive change are that he curses 69 percent more in speeches than he did in 2016. That could be a sign of disinhibition, a kind of impulsivity that is sometimes attributed to mental decline in old age, the Times said.

Of course, Trump didn’t exactly occupy a high place from which to decline– intellect has never been his strong suit. (One clue– he threatened to sue his university if it disclosed his GPA.) The article quoted a linguistics expert who questioned whether Trump had declined by pointing out that his “starting point” wasn’t particularly high.

On the other hand, Pennebaker said Trump has relied on unusually simple words and sentence structures going back to the days before he was president, suggesting he has simply always been an incredibly simplistic thinker.

One analytic metric he used—which tends to place presidential candidates in the 60 to 70 range—placed Trump speeches at 10 to 24.

“I can’t tell you how staggering this is,” he told Stat News. “He does not think in a complex way at all.”

References to sharks and his preference for death by electrocution, admiration for Hannibal Lecter…and still, the MAGA base remains solid. I have frequently referred to that base as a cult, and its continued idolization of an obviously mentally-ill,  uninformed and unintelligent 78-year-old man supports that characterization. Wikipedia tells us that cult members submit to absolute authoritarianism without requiring “meaningful accountability,” and that they have no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry. That description certainly fits.

As he sinks further into incoherence, Trump also engages more and more in projection. As The Hill recently noted, his attacks on Harris’ intelligence are especially telling.

Innate and acquired intelligence is clearly not Trump’s long suit. He has demonstrated a staggering ignorance about American history. He has alleged that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer and that vaccines cause autism. He doesn’t understand that tariffs raise retail prices on imported goods, in essence imposing a national sales tax on all Americans….

Those of us in the “reality-based community” look at Trump’s babbling, his third-grade vocabulary, his slurring of words and his increasing incidents of projection, and cannot understand why any rational voter could seriously consider returning him to office.

The only conclusion: the Trump cult isn’t rational. The open question is: how many of them are there?

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About Those Polls

Those of us who are obsessed with the upcoming election–now less than a month away–tend to focus on the the daily polling results. I have previously explained why I don’t think today’s polls are particularly predictive–while they can show which way the wind is blowing, I simply don’t trust their “likely voter” assessments. (As I’ve explained, all pollsters have developed methods for determining who is likely to vote–and their polls are almost always based upon the preferences of those “likely” voters–not the entire universe of registered voters.)

I feel reasonably confident that we will see a lot of votes cast by “unlikely” voters this time around.

But there is also something new–and dishonest–that has emerged in the polling during this election cycle, as Simon Rosenberg recently reported in his Hopium Chronicles. (Paywalled) He calls them “Red Wave Pollsters.”

Red Wave Pollsters Stepped Up Their Work This Week – The red wavers stepped up their activity this past week, releasing at least 20 polls across the battlegrounds. It’s a sign that they are worried about the public polling in both the Presidential and the Senate, and have dramatically escalated their efforts to push the polling averages to the right and make the election look redder than it is.

While they released polls in many states this week the states that have received the most red wave polls over the past few weeks are Montana, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Over the past 10 days, depending on how you characterize the pollsters, they released at least 5 and as many 7 polls in Pennsylvania alone. Their recent flood of polls in NC and PA tipped the Real Clear Politics polling average for each state to Trump, which then in turn got Trump to 281 in their corrupt Electoral College map. Yes, in Real Clear Politics Trump is now winning the election due to their gamesmanship.

I now count 27 Republican or right-aligned entities in the polling averages: American Greatness, Daily Mail, co/efficent, Cygnal, Echelon, Emerson, Fabrizio, Fox News, Insider Advantage, McLaughlin, Mitchell Communications, Napolitan Institute, Noble Predictive, On Message, Orbital Digital, Public Opinion Strategies, Quantus, Rasmussen, Redfield & Wilton, Remington, RMG, SoCal Data, The Telegraph, Trafalgar, TIPP, Victory Insights, Wall Street Journal.

Rosenberg says it’s time for those who publish their analyses of polls to acknowledge the emergence of this type of poll , which he describes as “red wave, right-aligned narrative polling that only exist for a single purpose – to move the polling averages to the right.”

They are exploiting the “toss it in the averages and everything will work out philosophy” of these sites to once again launder these polls and game the averages – and thus our understanding of the election. Party leaders should expect them to keep these polls coming, and keep working the averages until it looks like Trump is winning in all polling averages. It is what they did in 2022, and it worked. They are doing it again this time, and once again it is working as the averages are moving and everyone is treating this movement like an organic rather than a deeply corrupt process.

Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier of TargetSmart were the only two pollsters who predicted the non-emergence of the widely hyped “red wave” in the 2022 midterms–a wave that was widely forecast partly on the basis of voting history and partly on the basis of similar “red wave” polling.

Reputable pollsters face a number of daunting challenges–the shift from landlines to mobile phones, the reluctance of many (if not most) people to answer calls when they don’t recognize the number, evidence of the increasing willingness of respondents who do answer to lie… Despite those challenges, nearly all reputable pollsters find Harris ahead nationally by somewhere between 2 and 5 points. While I’m reluctant to rely on their numbers, I do think they demonstrate that the Democratic ticket has the momentum–that the electoral “wind” is blowing in the Harris/Walz direction.

What we do know with certainty is that this will be a turnout election. Early voting is open in most states right now, and the most effective thing we can do is vote early and work to make sure that every Blue voter we know gets to the polls. As the GOTV experts tell us, every solid Democratic vote that is cast early means that the GOTV effort can concentrate on getting those who are farther down the “reliable voter” list to the polls. 

We’re down to the wire, and as the saying goes, the only poll that counts is the one on election day.

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Do Republicans Hate Cities, Or Just Those Who Inhabit Them?

My husband and I live in the downtown core of Indianapolis, having downsized from a previous home in a nearby historic district. We are urban folks who love being able to walk to the grocery, the dentist, the bank and multiple restaurants and bars.

A recent report from Indianapolis Downtown suggests we’re not alone–our downtown’s residential population has grown nearly 50% since 2010, to almost 30,000, more than 50 new businesses have opened since last year, and $9.5 billion in development is in the works. Despite the fears and misconceptions of suburban and rural folks, crime downtown decreased 34% in the past year, and downtown is the safest district in Marion County. We were only 5% of all crime in the county.

Obviously, not everyone shares our love for urban living, and that’s fine–to each his own. What isn’t fine is the current Republican war on cities and those of us who choose to live in them.

Donald Trump portrays city neighborhoods as feral places, deranged by Democrats. “The crime is so out of control in our country,” Trump charged at a Michigan campaign stop during the recent Democratic National Convention. “The top 25 [cities] almost all are run by Democrats and they have very similar policies. It’s just insane. But you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped. … We have these cities that are great cities where people are afraid to live in America.”

This is, of course, a ludicrous caricature, as numerous bread-fetching city dwellers could attest. Yet to understand the significance of this seething anti-cities rhetoric — both its political potency and the unique opportunity it presents for Democrats — requires a brief look at a deep-seated tension in how conservatives have talked about urban areas across recent decades.

The article noted that the GOP conservative wing has run against cities for years, with an animus rooted in nativism and religion. Initially, they appealed to Protestant voters by attacking heavily Catholic cities as sites of “popery, demon rum, and corrupt Irish politicians.” Later, Nixon appealed to white voters by focusing on urban crime and civil uprisings.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, leading conservative politicians and intellectuals modified Nixon’s rhetoric, adding elements aimed at corralling new urban and urban-adjacent Republican voters. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan explicitly placed the social functions played by local neighborhoods at the heart of his urban commentary. Tender odes to the beauties of the human-scale city neighborhood — paired with condemnation of government programs for undermining community self-help capacities — infused national GOP communications output. Crucially, this often lent the party’s outreach efforts a pro-urban veneer. Propelled partly by this neighborhoods appeal, Reagan attracted key support from traditionally Democratic “white-ethnic” inhabitants of older city and suburban areas.

Donald Trump and MAGA have returned to the earlier portrayal of urban areas as dangerous hellholes that endanger an  “American Dream” anchored in (White) suburban and rural America.

The central metaphor Trump uses when talking about cities is “war.” Normally, war occurs between sovereign nations. For Trump, however, the war is within our nation. War requires two sides that are clearly differentiated and physically distinct. For Trump, the two sides are cities and suburbs. In the cities, as Trump tells it, you will find one of America’s enemies: foreigners who presumably look different from native-born Americans. They have infiltrated urban neighborhoods, in his telling, fueling a conflict between alien cities and native suburbs.

This rhetoric depends on racism and xenophobia for its effectiveness. For that matter, Trump’s entire appeal–and MAGA’s philosophy (if one can call fear and hatred a philosophy)– is firmly rooted in racism.

Trump uses terms such as “living hell,” “total decay,” “violent mayhem,” and “a disaster” to describe cities. Cities are foreign outposts within American society. In this view, the hordes of “illegal aliens” invading the southern border have taken over city neighborhoods.

These attacks aren’t simply wildly inaccurate and hateful, they are evidence of MAGA’s pathological racism.

A few days ago, I suggested that Americans are engaged in a “cold” Civil War, and that it is being fought over essentially the same issue as the last one–whether people who aren’t White Christian males are entitled to be seen as human beings who deserve equal civic status with the White guys. The rhetoric employed by Trump–and increasingly by other Republicans–underscores that observation. 

A vote for Trump and those who support him is a vote to return to the Confederacy. I hope Harris is right when she says “we’re not going back”

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The Indiana Retention Vote

The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of a current effort to deny retention to three members of Indiana’s Supreme Court– judges who had voted to uphold Indiana’s abortion ban. As I told that reader, voting no on a retention vote because of disagreement with one ruling would set a very dangerous precedent.

I subsequently spoke with several practicing lawyers, including a good friend who is a highly respected trial lawyer, an active member of the local bar, and personally pro-choice. He suggested that I share the following information with my readers.

First of all, the process. For fifty years, Indiana has had a merit selection process to identify and appoint members of Indiana’s Supreme Court and Court of Appeals. Once candidates who have been found to be highly qualified are appointed, they submit to a statewide retention vote within two years. Thereafter, they are submitted for a retention vote every 10 years.

This year, Chief Justice Loretta Rush, Justice Mark Massa, and Justice Derek Molter are up for retention to the Supreme Court. None of them is known as “liberal” or “conservative” or partisan. The organized opposition to their retention is based upon their ruling on a challenge to Senate Bill 1, the abortion ban passed by Indiana’s regressive legislature in the wake of the Dobbs decision. Indiana’s ban broadly prohibited abortion but made exceptions for 1) when an abortion is necessary either to save a woman’s life or to prevent a serious health risk; 2) when there is a lethal fetal anomaly; and 3) when pregnancy results from rape or incest.

We can argue about how those exceptions work–or don’t–in the real world, but they are written into the law.

Abortion providers sued to invalidate the law and to enjoin its enforcement. The lawsuit was what lawyers call a “facial challenge”–meaning that the providers had to prove that they had standing and that there were no circumstances under which the law could be upheld. The court found that the plaintiffs had standing to bring the case and that Article 1, Section 1 of the Indiana Constitution protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk.

At the same time, the majority found that the Indiana Legislature had the authority to prohibit abortions that didn’t fall within one of those three categories. It also recognized that, prior to Roe v. Wade, Indiana and forty other states had upheld legislative limitations on abortion.

Lawyers can agree or disagree with the majority’s interpretation. I do disagree– but it was a reasoned decision, far from the   historical dishonesty and religious ideology that permeated Dobbs.

As readers of this blog know, I strongly support abortion rights, and I disagree profoundly with the Dobbs decision. But the postcards that are being disseminated to the public accusing these three justices of voting to ‘strip away’ Hoosier women’s rights to abortion are misleading and unfair. The Justices are bound by precedent–and, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court– they followed their honest reading of that precedent.

As my lawyer friend reminded me, Indiana has one of the most respected supreme courts in America. Our justices serve in many capacities in national judicial organizations, and Chief Justice Rush has been president of the Conference of Chief Justices and Chair of the National Center for State Courts. Opinions of our supreme court are frequently cited in other state judicial opinions and scholarly articles and relied on by state and federal courts nationwide.

Typically, only 75-80% of those who go to the polls will bother to vote on judicial retention. Of that group, there’s a “hard core” of approximately 30% who always vote no. That means that an organized group opposing a judge or justice need only muster another 21% or so–and that’s why this effort is so dangerous. The retention of judges should be based upon their entire body of work and not upon a single opinion, even a questionable one.

I share the anger of people who oppose Indiana’s ban, but our animus should be directed at the legislature–not at a court that, rightly or wrongly, held that the legislature had authority to act.

If the effort to unseat these jurists succeeds, it will close the Indiana Supreme Court for several months, pending the selection of new justices. Worse still, if the Braun/Beckwith ticket wins (and this is deep-Red Indiana), Christian Nationalists will select the new Judges. I’m sure that Braun would be more than willing to subvert the merit process in order to elevate clones of Alito, et al. to Indiana’s top court.

Be careful what you wish for.

 

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Will Endorsements Matter?

In traditional election cycles, endorsements–generally issued by newspapers–rarely moved votes. The endorsements this year are very different, but whether they will change any votes is unclear. Trump’s MAGA base is firmly insulated from reality–they seem to occupy a different country, where up is down and wet is dry. It isn’t just accusations about immigrants eating dogs and cats–they believe Trump’s claims that crime is up and the economy is tanking, despite the fact that data shows crime plummeting and the American economy flourishing. They might just as well be on another planet.

Because Trump voters occupy an alternate reality, the avalanche of endorsements of Harris/Walz probably won’t pry MAGA votes away. But we can hope that the unprecedented nature of those endorsements will generate registrations and turnout by rational folks who might not otherwise go to the polls. (That certainly is the hoped-for result of celebrity endorsements from super-stars like Taylor Swift.)

What has set this year’s endorsements apart isn’t just the unprecedented number of them, but the political identities and bona fides of the endorsers. (Example: Evangelicals for Harris–really!) Recently, four hundred economists endorsed Harris, warning that the election “is a choice between inequity, economic injustice, and uncertainty with Donald Trump or prosperity, opportunity, and stability with Kamala Harris, a choice between the past and the future.” The other day, seven hundred national security figures announced their endorsement of the Democratic ticket. They were later joined by General Stanley McChrystal.

The sheer number of Republican endorsers–not just the “Never Trumpers”– is staggering.

It isn’t simply high visibility people like Liz and Dick Cheney. Every day we encounter headlines like “State Republican party chairs endorse Kamala Harris for president.” In addition to the Republicans who spoke at the Democratic convention, a group of more than 200 who worked for former Presidents George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Sen. Mitt Romney and the late Sen. John McCain signed onto a letter supporting the Democratic nominee.

A recently launched “Republicans for Harris” is steadily growing.

Perhaps the most striking of all was a New York Times recent compilation of opinions of Donald J. Trump from “those who know him best”–members of Trump’s own administration, and “friends” who’ve known him for many years. As the introduction to those quotations put it,

Dozens of people who know him well, including the 91 listed here, have raised alarms about his character and fitness for office — his family and friends, world leaders and business associates, his fellow conservatives and his political appointees — even though they had nothing to gain from doing so. Some have even spoken out at the expense of their own careers or political interests.

The New York Times editorial board has made its case that Mr. Trump is unfit to lead. But the strongest case against him may come from his own people. For those Americans who are still tempted to return him to the presidency or to not vote in November, it is worth considering the assessment of Mr. Trump by those who have seen him up close.

Those opinions followed, and they are scathing. I encourage you to click through and read them.

The sheer number of economic, military and governmental experts–both Republicans and Democrats–who are warning against another Trump administration ought to be dispositive, but it clearly isn’t making inroads into MAGA fidelity, and I think there are two main reasons.

The first–and most frequently noted–is the similarity of MAGA Republicanism to a cult. In large part, MAGA folks have drunk the Kool-Aid. For whatever reason, some people are susceptible to the Jim Jones and Donald Trumps of the world, and fact-based arguments are irrelevant to them. Their devotion to the cult leader fills some sort of psychic need that the rest of us don’t share and can’t understand.

The second reason is less well understood, but I think it’s important.

Much has been made of the growing division between educated and uneducated voters. Education is absolutely not the same thing as intelligence, but folks who never learned how government works, or what the Constitution requires, are much more likely to believe, for example, that the government can simply round up and deport millions of immigrants (not to mention failing to understand the effect that would have on America’s economy if it were possible). They believe Trump when he says other countries will pay for his proposed tariffs–despite the fact that anyone who took Econ 101 knows tariffs are a tax on Americans. Etc.

The first group will simply ignore facts. The second rejects expertise as offensive elitism.

The reality-based community needs to turn out in force.

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