Category Archives: Random Blogging

I Wish This Was Correct

Macabre as it is, there’s a “death watch” for Donald Trump–partly due to his age and the multiple symptoms of decline that get more obvious each day, but partly (and yes, grotesquely) due to the deep animosity of the Americans watching his lunacy, pettiness and ignorance destroy their government. But I recently came across an essay predicting that–rather than dying–Trump will resign in 2027.

A resignation by our would-be king seems very unlikely to me, especially since our felon-in-chief would no longer be protected against the consequences of New York’s jury verdict, but the author, Mitch Jackson, promises to present the evidence supporting his conclusion.

He begins by describing Trump’s embarrassing performance in that Wisconsin barn, when he stalked out after he was unable to answer questions posed by Kristin Welker.

So here is my theory of the case, and I am putting my name on it. Donald Trump resigns the presidency in 2027. No impeachment removal. No election loss. He quits. And the door that lets it happen swings open on one night you control. This coming November.

Stay with me, because the road from a televised tantrum to a Rose Garden goodbye runs straight through your ballot.

Jackson says that his prediction doesn’t depend on Trump somehow not being Trump–instead, what makes this time different is “the machine.”

Right now, the machine protects him. His party holds the gavels. Committees look the other way. Subpoenas never get signed. The money flows wherever he points. The whole arrangement runs on a single fact. Republicans control the House and Senate, so nobody with real power ever forces him to answer for anything.

That arrangement has an expiration date. Tuesday, November 3, 2026.

Pollsters tell us that 57% of Americans disapprove of Trump–most, strongly–and that Democrats lead the race for the House by mid-single digits, and by more among the people most likely to cast a vote.

A Democratic House is the most likely result of this election. The Senate is a steeper climb, and the sudden death of Lindsey Graham this month only tightened an already knife-thin margin there. But the House alone rewrites everything that comes next, because a House majority hands the opposition three tools the founders built for exactly this moment. The purse. The subpoena. The oversight.

Jackson then goes through the likely consequences of a Democratic-held House. Hearings on his pretended lawsuit against the IRS and the creation of a slush fund; the full release of the Epstein files (which a recent court decision is already forcing);  his remaking of the Justice Department into his own private law firm; his appointment of unfit and unqualified people, especially at the nation’s intelligence agencies; his tacky ballroom; the blatant corruption that has characterized his tenure (the linked essay details some of the worst examples); and the outright sale of presidential pardons to criminals with the wherewithal to provide appropriately large quid pro quos.

And then, of course, the Iran war…..

As Jackson reminds us, Trump measures his entire worth by how the room looks at him. He can’t stand ridicule. He frantically denies reality on Truth Social at three in the morning– a coping mechanism that doesn’t work when someone is “standing next to him holding the evidence.”

A  Democratic House will hold that evidence.

And as Jackson points out, Trump’s own people are already leaving. The machine is failing even before a new Congress is sworn in.

There is one more motive, and it is the coldest one. Resigning lets him step off the ship before it takes on water in 2028. If the economy stays strained and the scandals keep stacking, somebody takes the blame. This is a man who has spent a lifetime claiming credit and dodging responsibility. Why would he start now? From the day he leaves, every Republican loss becomes proof they did not follow his advice. He plays golf and tells reporters between rounds it all would have been different if he had stayed. In his mind, resignation is not defeat. It is the escape hatch that preserves the legend.

And about those consequences? The model is Ford’s pardon of Nixon. JD Vance trades a pardon for the presidency.

Jackson says his case rests on one thing: the midterms. A Blue wave.

I would love to believe this, and it’s persuasive as far as it goes–but Jackson ignores the wild card. A federal pardon has no effect on state level offenses. Would Florida extradite Trump to New York?

Resignation or not, we need that Blue Wave…

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Call It What It Is

Have we Americans become so inured to Donald Trump’s daily idiocies and flights of fantasy that we simply don’t recognize what they illustrate–which isn’t just his stupidity and/or ignorance, but clinical mental illness? 

A couple of recent examples: numerous media outlets have reported on his attacks on the Chips Act–legislation passed by a bipartisan group of  lawmakers that provides incentives for domestic semiconductor production. Trump–for reasons that are mysterious to normal folks–has issued wild criticisms of the measure, including–and I am not making this up–his claim that  that the technology law signed by President Biden requires chip manufacturers to hire transgender executives.

“We had this ridiculous CHIPS Act where you give billions of dollars to a company, and they didn’t even know what the hell to do with it. You give them billions of dollars, they say they’re going to build, nobody knew what to do with it,” Trump said. “And of course, the standards were so high if you weren’t transgender, as an example, uh, you didn’t qualify. So they get the money, they hired— they look all over for transgender people to run the company, large portions. They couldn’t find them. They weren’t into the chip business, I guess.”

Rather obviously, the Act does not require companies receiving federal money to hire transgender employees, much less appoint transgender executives, and the word “transgender” is nowhere in the lengthy statute. Online speculation is that Trump has confused the word “transgender” with “transistor,” although that term also isn’t in the Act, and it is highly unlikely that Trump read it (or anything, for that matter) anyway. 

Then we have his recent insistence that America is infested with Communists.  Charlie Sykes–a conservative “Never Trumper”– has written about a speech Trump made at Mount Rushmore, in which he warned that communism “is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11.” Trump then went on to say that  “You can be loyal to Karl Marx or you can be loyal to America. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” Even more bizarre was a speech he then made at a high school in Georgia in which accused the communists among us of wanting to destroy Mount Rushmore. Trump asserted that “The communists want to take it down. They have tried take Mount Rushmore down. They want to blow it up. They want to take it down…. These people are crazy.”

I don’t know about “these people,” but the evidence for Trump’s own insanity is overwhelming. Despite that evidence, Republicans in Congress remain unwilling to do anything about it, and media outlets don’t connect the dots between these wacko eruptions and what they rather clearly suggest about the mentality of the nation’s Chief Executive.

It isn’t just dementia due to aging, although that condition is clearly worsening the problem.

There’s ample reason to worry about Trump’s longstanding mental defects: frequent statements that are, at best, detached from reality — the repeated false claims about crowd sizes, election results, and other easily verifiable facts; his
erratic and/or contradictory statements made within short periods (sometimes within the same speech); the constant
grandiose rhetoric (his self-comparisons to historical figures); and his assertions of victimization by nefarious “others”…The evidence is overwhelming. 

Mental health professionals have argued for years that he demonstrates narcissistic personality traits. (Several even wrote a book in 2017 titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”)

Charlie Sykes makes the point.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and offer the contrarian opinion that it ought to be a rather big deal that the President is neck-deep in baseless conspiracism, even if we’ve become numb to the lies, smears, and guano-saturated fabulism of the man who sits in the Oval Office. Go ahead roll your eyes; I admit this is far from the worst outrage of the Orange God King.

But still.

I’m struggling to imagine this kind of behavior by any other president being met with a collective shrug. (“Obama accuses Red China of Planning to Blow up Lincoln Memorial” would have been a thing, no?)

But that shrug has become a daily feature of the news cycle; we have a Watergate virtually every week and forget about it in days; a daily McCarthyite smear that gets memory-holed within hours.

And–if I may add–unwillingness to call the daily evidence that the Commander in Chief lives in la-la land what it quite obviously is….

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The Media

I frequently focus on the enormous changes in American media, because I am convinced that those changes, and the fragmentation that results, are responsible for much of the political turmoil we are experiencing. As the New York Times editorial board recently wrote, we are rapidly entering a time when we no longer share a common reality.

Democracy rests on something we rarely notice — a rough agreement about what is true and what happened. That ground is cracking, as trust erodes in the institutions that once settled fact, and artificial intelligence can fabricate convincing lies in seconds. A citizenry that cannot agree on what is real cannot deliberate. It can only split into camps. When people retreat to tribal enclaves, it can foster a sense of self-righteousness and victimization.

People often complain that “the media” is ignoring thus-and-so, but there is no single entity we can label “the media” today.

The so-called “legacy” media–characterized by centralized institutional gatekeepers–is no longer where most people  access information. Today, we increasingly get information from creator-led platforms and decentralized delivery; we consume content directly from individuals writing Substacks or posting to social networks. Research suggests that platforms like TikTok are increasingly operating as search engines, and that younger demographics are abandoning traditional news sites and publishers in favor of social video feeds. 

And then there’s the oligarchy takeover of what is left of traditional media. Paul Krugman recently did a deep dive into that phenomenon. As he notes, the legacy media takeover by the super-rich is just “part of the extraordinary exercise of power by the extraordinarily wealthy small number of men who have been wreaking so much havoc with America as we know it.” As he writes,

we’re not talking about some kind of hidden conspiracy. We’re not talking about the Protocols of the Elders of PayPal. We are talking instead about stuff that’s largely out in the open, though not fully understood, which is the way that an incredibly wealthy small group of men, mostly men, is able to commandeer a lot of the political life of a country that is still nominally a democracy. And that’s a fundamental story for our time, maybe the fundamental story.

That takeover goes well beyond media, of course. As Krugman acknowledges–and most Americans understand– a major element is the current status of campaign finance. Political campaigns have become more money intensive thanks to Citizens United. A huge amount of that political money comes from a “small number of incredibly wealthy people. According to the New York Times analysis, about 20% of all campaign contributions in 2024 came from 300 billionaires and their families.”

And then there’s the influence that comes from simply “buying politicians, buying policies, paying for the policies you want with cash or crypto on the barrel.”

There has always been some of that in our system, but it was normally discreet, indirect, deniable, the revolving door. It was the case even more than 20 years ago that when the Bush administration pushed through a Medicare bill that was very favorable to pharmaceutical interests, that the then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, who basically engineered and steered the bill through Congress, then promptly retired and became the chief lobbyist for the pharma lobby. So this kind of thing has been going on for a very long time.

But now it’s just blatant, out in the open, and the sums are massive.

Then Krugman gets to what he calls the shaping of the information space, the promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy with “zombie” ideas that experience should have debunked. (Tax cuts for the rich have never stimulated economic growth. Climate science is not a hoax.) The takeover of the legacy media is one way of promoting those “zombie ideas” 

The Ellison family has already acquired CBS and installed Bari Weiss to corrupt it. Ellison’s proposed takeover of Warner will effectively destroy CNN as we now know it. (Krugman says “It will almost turn into Fox News. Now, that won’t be a profitable venture. There’s already a Fox News, and so creating another one is not going to actually produce a lot of profits, if any, but that’s not the objective. This is buying influence.”) Look what happened to Twitter when Musk took it over.

Krugman says this takeover of the general information environment by a handful of billionaires will continue, and the only “fix” is to bring the concentration of wealth at the top down.

Go back and re-read that quote from the New York Times. Reducing the oligarchy won’t solve the problem of inconsistent realities, but it will definitely help.

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An Important Lesson

I am always impressed by the LIncoln Square essays from Kristoffer Ealy. (They do tend to be longer than I think they need to be, but they are almost always perceptive and extremely well-written. Ealy is an academic who most definitely does not write in “academese.”)

In a recent post, he deconstructed the often-tossed-around demand that candidates “earn my vote.”

Ealy makes it clear that this essay is not aimed at candidates, whose job it rather obviously is to earn people’s votes. His message is directed to voters, and it focuses on timing. He emphasizes that what he is arguing about is what voters are supposed to do, and especially, when they’re supposed to do it. Because–as he insists– “the ‘earn my vote’ crowd has the right instinct and the completely wrong calendar.”

He compares that “wrong calendar” to people who are trying to haggle with a waiter after they already ate the food.

When I heard Cenk Uygur in 2024 still talking about how Kamala Harris had to “earn” his vote after she was already the nominee, or when I heard genuinely smart people like Eddie Glaude Jr. still arguing in 2016 that Hillary Clinton had not done enough to earn voters’ trust after she was already the nominee, I damn near had an aneurysm. I remember sitting there thinking: you guys do realize the negotiation phase already ended, right? The plane is already in the air. The dealership already sold the car. The restaurant already brought the check. This is what we’ve got. At that point you are no longer shopping for your ideal candidate like you’re building a custom player in NBA 2K. You are deciding between two actual governing outcomes, one of which is going to happen whether your feelings are hurt or not.

Ealy is exactly right when he points out that political decision-making has distinct phases requiring distinct and different strategies. Primaries are the place for leverage, general elections are what he dubs “outcome management,” and governing requires building coalitions, bargaining, and “trying to extract policy wins from the people you helped put into office.”

The problem is that too many voters treat all three phases like they are interchangeable when they are not. They keep trying to negotiate after the dealership already handed somebody else the keys and drove the car off the lot. The problem is not wanting leverage. The problem is misunderstanding when leverage is real and when the negotiating window has already closed.

Ealy lays our the timetable: a negotiating window during the primary season, when candidates are auditioning. “That’s when your withholding means something because there are other candidates standing right next to the one you’re pressuring, any one of whom might earn what this one can’t.” The primary season offers participants genuine leverage, because alternatives still exist. Then he makes a very important point.

If your candidate of choice doesn’t make it through, that’s when you pivot — not to the sidelines, not to a third party, not to whatever Jill Stein emerges from every four years like a cicada with a podcast microphone — but to the next phase of your job.

Because once the nominee is set, the window closes. And your job changes. You are no longer a free agent negotiating in an open market. You are now a coalition member deciding between two specific outcomes.

Ealy is clear that being a coalition member–supporting the winner of the primary–does not mean meekly falling into line. Those who lost the primary should tell the victorious candidate what is important to them, and what will make the people in their group work for the candidate’s election rather than just voting or worse, staying home. (As Ealy writes, “Sit home or go third party, and congratulations — now you have a podcast, a purity certificate, and absolutely no leverage over the people actually governing the country.”)

The linked essay is long, and Ealy provides a number of examples of how damaging post-primary “purity” has been, including how, in 2016, the “Bernie or Bust crowd, the Jill Stein voters, and the “Hillary is just as bad” crowd” handed Donald Trump his first term, a term that led to three lifetime seats on the Supreme Court and a conservative supermajority that overturned Roe v. Wade, gutted voting rights protections, and gave Donald Trump unprecedented immunity and authority.

Ealy’s lesson is especially pertinent to Democrats and Independents (the MAGA base, being a cult, obediently falls into line).

Elections are choices from a limited menu. Voters need to actively help diners select the dish that’s least likely to poison us all.

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The Commie In The Oval Office

It has become so tempting to simply ignore the increasing insanity coming out of the Oval Office. As it has become abundantly clear that Trump has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about 90% of the time, I’m increasingly tempted to delete the newsletters, turn off the TV or podcast and pour myself a stiff drink.

But the recent ranting about “communism” is so ridiculous that it demands a response, especially since our Moron-in-Chief not only wouldn’t know a communist if he fell over one, but also because his own behaviors increasingly mimic those of actual historical communists.

A recent essay in the Atlantic made precisely that point.

As the essay’s author, Jonathan Chait, points out, communist regimes have typically been run by ruling parties that control the country’s economic investment decisions–and Trump has a lot more in common with such Communists than he appears to recognize.

He has probably done more to expand public ownership of the means of production than any president in history. Trump has seized a stake in nearly two dozen private firms so far, for little reason other than the fact that he can. Recently, he wrote on Truth Social that gasoline retailers “must” lower prices or “big problems lie ahead.” And although he has no power to do so, the distinction between public and private has eroded during his presidency to the degree that oil companies, or any large companies, have reason to believe that defying Trump’s wishes could expose them to government retaliation.

Chait also points out that, over the years, Trump has been considerably more complimentary of communist regimes and their political methods than his current rhetoric would suggest.

Trump has praised Communist dictators in terms unlike those used by any American president outside the context of a wartime alliance. In 1990, Trump told Playboy that the Chinese Communist Party “almost blew it” before showing “the power of strength” by crushing demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, thus avoiding the fate of the Soviet regimes that fell the same year.

Trump’s affinity for dictators is well known, and he hasn’t hesitated to praise communist dictators—especially when they crush opposition.

“He’s a brilliant guy,” Trump gushed of China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in 2024. “He controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. I mean, he’s a brilliant guy, whether you like it or not.” Trump once claimed that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love,” explaining: “He’s the head of a country. And, I mean, he is the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

And who can forget his defense of Putin when questioned about his good friend’s homicidal tendencies. His response? “We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”

As Chait notes, capitalists tend to see prosperity as a “positive-sum enterprise generated through cooperation.” Trump, however, views monetary gains in zero-sum terms, the result of the strong seizing from the weak (a view that may explain his constant efforts to steal resources from smaller countries.)

Unlike his attacks on liberalism, which consist of pure contempt, Trump’s denunciations of communism have an undercurrent of admiration. “Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything, but it is very easy,” he mused recently. “I’ll be honest—I think I’d be the greatest Communist in history. I’d give free rent: Ladies and gentlemen, from now on, you don’t have to pay any rent. From now on, anybody who wants a house, just pick the house you want. Everybody gets free food. Everything is free from this point forward. Everyone’s gonna vote for me.”

The irony is that his description of communism could easily be applied to Trump’s own political style–his claims that his health-care plan would give people “fantastic coverage at lower cost,” his repeated assurance that he would bring American manufacturing jobs back “by the millions,” and his promise to personally roll back inflation, among other (increasingly hollow) boasts. Chait tells us that Trump once told a crowd, “I will give you everything,” a pledge that, as he notes, “would have struck even Lenin as a bit messianic.”

Indeed, Trump has added the worst elements of communism to his neo-fascism: “coup attempts, show trials, military parades, kitschy personality cult, and endless harangues filled with absurd claims about economic progress.”

Capitalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, communism–Trump couldn’t define any of them. He just wants to be a dictator with lots of money surrounded by tacky gold tchotchkes.

I’m going to go pour that drink…

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