Political issues – Page 6

Civil War

Need some cinematic therapy? This film should do it for you. A fascist president refuses to leave the White House and claims a third term. You already know the story, but to improve your mental health you need to see the ending. The last fifteen minutes of this film are priceless. The problem is that, as the credits start to roll, you realize that in the real world it’s not over.

This film was released in April and had been streaming for several weeks at a cost of $20 to $30. When the rental price came down to $5.99 from Apple, I finally watched it. There may be other streaming sources as well.

Some reviewers accused this film of holding back on the politics. I don’t think that’s the case at all. It’s clear enough who’s who. The rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 81/70, which no doubt means that right-wingers took offense and voted down the audience rating.

Now what?

John F. Kennedy’s funeral, November 24, 1963. Less than five years later, Kennedy’s brother also will be dead. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

It’s all so predictable. As Democrats, liberals, and all responsible people hasten to condemn political violence, the worst type of Republicans rush in with yet more violent rhetoric to blame Democrats and liberals and thereby — knowingly and intentionally — to encourage more political violence, as they have been doing for years, because they understand very well who it is who benefits from chaos.

Though some Republicans did respond with the usual “thoughts and prayers” after gun violence, from others it was hell fire and damnation.

“Biden sent the orders,” said a Republican member of the U.S. House from Georgia. I cringe to imagine what other conspiracy theories are flooding right-wing social media right now.

J.D. Vance, who hopes to be Trump’s candidate for vice president and who obviously hopes to profit from what happened, said, “Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Frank Pavone, a right-wing activist and former Catholic priest, said, “We recall the words that President Trump always says to us: It’s not that they are coming after him,” Pavone said. “They are coming after us — all of us — he’s just standing in the way.”

We already were in a state of chaos because of the media’s feeding frenzy over Biden’s age and mental state. The powerful images from the Trump rally in Pennsylvania will amplify the MAGA lust for scapegoats and for retribution for their loss in 2020.

I have no idea where things stand now. In such a state of chaos, few things are predictable other than the likelihood that nothing good will come of it.

The delusional conservative mind

Attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Ross Douthat has another head-scratcher of a column today in the New York Times, in vague and inconcise language as always. It’s “Do the Democrats Really Think Trump is an Emergency?” I had to reread it twice (ouch!) to even figure out what he’s trying to say. (William F. Buckley and George Will taught conservative writers that pompous writing sounds smart.) But I think that what Douthat is trying to say is that, if Democrats really think Trump is dangerous, then Democrats would make big concessions to Republicans to try to win them away from Trump.

Has Douthat forgotten that Democrats gave Republicans pretty much everything they wanted in bipartisan immigration legislation, but that it was Republicans who killed the legislation, because Trump wanted them to? As NBC News wrote, “But Trump’s hammering of the deal, while he uses immigration as a campaign issue, and his demands that Republicans reject it won the day.” Or what about the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which passed 69-30 in the Senate and 228-206 in the House? It’s not that infrastructure was a concession to Republicans, it’s that Republicans touted “Infrastructure Week” the entire time Trump occupied the White House, but it was Democrats under Biden who eventually got it done.

Just what kind of concessions from Democrats does Douthat have in mind, then? Is Douthat’s memory faulty about the concessions that Democrats have made (or offered), or is it that he thinks ours is? Does Douthat think that Democrats are ever going to make concessions to the likes of the right-wing crazies who have paralyzed the House, or, heaven help us, to Trump?

I’m very serious about using the word “delusional,” which means holding false beliefs or judgments about external reality. Douthat’s model of external reality is highly defective here, both in what he conveniently forgets and in what he foolishly imagines any politically or morally sane person ought to concede to people who are not sane, politically or morally. Douthat never suggests any particular concessions. He only repeats the false notion that Democrats keep moving to the left, apparently never having bothered to read the Democratic Party’s platform.

Every time in the past when some pissed-off conservative has attempted to lecture me for being a liberal, I have observed that they have no idea what I think or what my principles are. Rather, what they think I think is what right-wing propaganda has told them that liberals think. It’s a simple tale, designed to be self-evidently stupid, and designed to enrage conservatives. I don’t expect to ever meet a conservative — even an educated one like Douthat — who is capable of actually understanding, and representing honestly, what liberals actually think. I should hasten to add here that not all liberals think alike, and that when liberals organize politically, we organize into coalitions. Though what liberal college students think matters, the thinking of liberal college students, still in their intellectually formative years, would be much easier to target and demonize than the sources, the histories, the examples, the values, and the philosophies on which most liberals actually base their principles and their politics.

Douthat misunderstands, or misrepresents, external reality because arguing for conservative ideas leaves him no choice. I am still waiting to encounter a conservative mind that can unconvince me of my observation that conservatives lie about things (or misrepresent things, if you prefer a milder word) because defending the indefensible is impossible. They lie, even to themselves, because they have to lie. They could be honest and say that they want to return to aristocracy, or put an end to democracy, or preserve the “traditional” hierarchies of race and sex and caste, of privilege and peonage, of lords and serfs and oligarchs, of dominance and submission. A few even do. But being too honest about what conservatives actually want to do with power won’t get you into the New York Times, or win many elections, in France or even Alabama.

Update 1: We’ve normalized this kind of absurdity, though we shouldn’t. On the same day that the New York Times is running conservative nonsense like the Douthat column above, they’re also running this: “Unbowed by Jan. 6 Charges, Republicans Pursue Plans to Contest a Trump Defeat: Mr. Trump’s allies are preparing to try to short-circuit the election system, if he does not win.”

So we’re expected to make concessions to the people who would bring us this kind of Trumpian emergency — trying to short-circuit the election system, again? Is it too much to expect that Republicans make some concessions to the law, to the Constitution, and to the very democracy that has enriched them and that goes much too far in trying to tolerate them and satisfy them?

There are not enough editors in the world, I’m afraid, to keep conservative “voices” like Douthat’s from trying to gaslight us. Mr. Douthat can write whatever he wants, but no one is required to publish it.

Update 2: While we’re talking about concessions to Republicans, let’s not overlook this, in case you missed it.

Mark Robinson is the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. He was caught on video saying, “Some folks need killing. It’s time for somebody to say it. It’s not a matter of vengeance. It’s not a matter of being mean or spiteful. It’s a matter of necessity!” Robinson was introduced by a preacher, who said, “Who’s behind President Biden, and that administration? Is it Obama. Is it Clinton? Read your Bible. It is the Devil.”

The Washington Post today rounds up some of this lovely conservative thinking today in “Pro-Trump Christian extremists use scripture to justify violent goals.”

The post writes:

“At the recent Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing conclave now dominated by pro-Trump factions, far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, onstage with Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon, welcomed the crowd ‘to the end of democracy.’

“‘We’re here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this,’ Posobiec told the audience, holding up a cross.

“‘Amen,’ Bannon said.”

Envying the U.K.

Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

It felt a little like Christmas morning to wake up today to the news that Britain’s Labour Party has swept the Conservative Party out of power, reducing the number of Tory seats in Parliament to its lowest number ever. At last, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher has been exorcized. Though there have been two Labour governments in the U.K. since Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Thatcher’s neoliberalism has been the governing philosophy since 1979.

Here in the U.S., President Biden has done much to lay neoliberalism to rest, though our foolish political media, interested only in political conflict rather than government, have had very little to say about it. Biden’s accomplishments are particularly notable in light of a Congress nearly paralyzed by a right wing desperate to take the U.S. back to the days of the Confederacy.

Though most of the political work of reversing neoliberalism and Thatcherism remains to be done, the intellectual work is solid. I am reading Joseph Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, and will write about it later. Stiglitz drives a stake into the zombie heart of neoliberal dogma. It’s a book that I hope policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are reading. Now is a good time to become familiar with the thinking (and proposals) of progressive economists, the better to judge what Britain’s Labour Party does now that they have pretty much unchallengeable power, with 412 seats in Parliament compared with the Conservative Party’s ever-so-humiliating 112.

In Scotland, the Scottish National Party lost 38 seats and retains only nine seats in the British Parliament. And in France, it’s looking like the French are going to have to learn about right-wing governments the hard way, like the United Kingdom did. And here in the U.S., we are now in a state of complete chaos and unpredictability until the Democratic Party decides what to do about President Biden. At least in Britain people can sleep easier now.

Good government gets little attention

Pete Buttigieg

Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, was in the backwater city of Winston-Salem yesterday for the groundbreaking on a small project backed by the Department of Transportation — a $4.8 million pathway for bicycles and pedestrians that will link downtown with the city’s medical center. That’s small potatoes as transportation projects go. But Buttigieg is a hard-working guy.

In the turmoil that has arisen over President Biden’s debate performance last week, Buttigieg is one of the people mentioned as Biden’s replacement. Buttigieg is a wonk, a highly effective secretary of transportation, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, and a Rhodes scholar. I was happy to stand out in the July sun to see him in action.

Earlier in the day, both Buttigieg and Governor Cooper were in Raleigh for the start of a bigger project. That’s a railway project that will connect Raleigh to Richmond and then onward to Washington and beyond.

According to the Raleigh News & Observer, while in Raleigh Buttigieg dinged Trump without naming him: “Every one of those projects — and the 57,000 others that are funded, and counting, through President Biden’s infrastructure package — is really about one simple purpose, which is to make everyday life easier for the American people. … I would be remiss if I didn’t note that this is in contrast to what we’ve seen before, a prior administration that declared ‘Infrastructure Week’ every year without any results until it became a punch line, a byword for all talk and no action.”

Events like this force the local media to turn out whether they want to or not. The backwater media would much rather be writing about chicken sandwiches, petty real estate deals, and third-tier chefs in crummy and overpriced local eateries that won’t last a year.

Roy Cooper, governor of North Carolina

What in the name of Zeuss just happened?

There is much that could be said about whatever form of madness it was that happened during last night’s Biden-Trump debate. But the thing that matters most is that the media have made up their hive mind. What Trump is, what Trump has done, and what Trump intends to do no longer matters. The media, in ecstasy from the smell of blood, have found their victim, and it is Biden.

I wrote this to a friend this morning:

“I did not watch the debate last night. I am horrified at what I am reading this morning, a media ghoul feast like I’ve never seen before. The media being what it is, and the American people being what they are, I can’t imagine how Biden and the DNC can reverse this kind of press (and it must be nine times worse in the TV media). The media will do the Republican party’s work for them from here on, and Russia here we come. Everything other than Biden’s age will be drowned out; Trump’s age and what he is and what he has done doesn’t even matter anymore. We’re now in a manic psychic-epidemic mode, led and fed by a hyperventilating media, doing to Biden, and to history, what we did to Jimmy Carter, revising him into a failure. Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate for president would be a guaranteed way to lose. Nobody likes her, including me; she was a mistake in 2020. The only person who has the political ability to do what would need to be done in a mere four months is Gavin Newsome. Lots of people must have stayed up all night in Washington gaming out a plan, or at least I hope they did. Biden did great during the state of the union speech three months ago, while Trump has been rambling about sharks and not remembering people he has known for years. I don’t understand this. But it was clearly the miracle straight from hell that Republicans needed to sell Hitler to the American people. The media will be fine with it, because doomscrolling will bring back the 2016-2020 glory years. God save us.

“I feel like the world just got turned upside down. Yesterday I did something I hadn’t done in ages. I stopped at a greasy spoon and had a (terrible) breakfast. There was a group of old farmer guys talking. In the previous two election years, they’d have been angry, repeating Fox News talking points. Yesterday there wasn’t a bit of that. They were laughing, having a good time, and not a bit of anger, talking about cows, broomstraw, and how people used to know their neighbors. I was pulled toward the conclusion that Republicans simply have not been able to stir up enough rage and provide enough fear-inducing talking points to get the deplorables to bother to vote in November. Now I’m afraid that has all changed.”

There are sane voices (including Biden’s). But sane voices will be drowned out in the media stampede. This is from Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter this morning:

“It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.

“It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has.”

Who knows at this point how the Democratic Party will respond. Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party is one thing. But Democrats versus a depraved Republican Party and a depraved and savage media is another.

Update:

A few media watchers get it right, but pretty much no one pays attention to them. Dan Froomkin at Press Watch: “CNN fails the nation.”

We Americans need the Guardian now

The U.S. edition of the Guardian has been a part of my daily news-reading rounds for years. I probably should have subscribed long ago. Today I did it.

The reasons for subscribing to the Guardian have continued to add up. I will list them, because I think the reasons are important to all Americans in these times, not just me.

Loss of confidence in the Washington Post

Whether you read the Washington Post or not, the Post’s problems are important, because the Post’s influence is huge in setting the agenda for the American media. The Washington Post has been losing money. To try to stop the bleeding, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (who also owns Amazon) has brought in a bunch of British Tories who used to work for Rupert Murdoch’s news and propaganda operation. Not only that, the Washington Post knew about Samuel Alito’s right-wing MAGA flags more than three years ago, but decided not to write about it until the New York Times broke the story recently. The Post’s response to being caught in such a MAGA-friendly catch-and-kill was slimy, as was the Post’s reaction to a near rebellion in its newsroom about the recent changes in management. If you’d like to know more about the implosion at the Washington Post, I recommend two articles, both from Dan Froomkin’s Press Watch: “Beware the Tory Takeover of the Washington Post,” and “Will Lewis must go. The Washington Post publisher’s actions cast doubt on his newsroom’s credibility.” Dan Froomkin, by the way, is an old colleague of mine. We both got our start in newspapers at the same newspaper forty years ago.

Loss of confidence in the American mainstream media

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago, “All the news that’s profit-friendly.” Once again, Dan Froomkin does a fine job of shredding the New York Times’ political coverage: “New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it.” I will continue to read and subscribe to the New York Times, as well as the Washington Post. The important thing is to keep in mind that both newspapers go way too far in treating right-wing gaslighting as though it’s something to be taken seriously. They claim, of course, that that’s what the principles of journalism require. I say horsewash. It’s what corporate management requires. Truth is the standard of journalism, not both-sides “balance.”

Europe is more important to Americans than ever

Yesterday, members of the European Union voted for members of the European parliament. This provided the best picture yet of the political situation in Europe post-Brexit and post-Ukraine. (Britain, of course, withdrew from the European Union in 2020, but all of Europe is dealing with the regressive forces that led to Brexit.) The same political winds that blow in Europe also blow here in the United States. Sometimes Britain and the U.S. move in the same direction. Think Thatcher/Reagan, and Blair/Clinton. Britain will have a parliamentary election on July 4. The Tories are expected to get their asses handed to them for 14 years of misrule. Wouldn’t it be nice if there’s something predictive there for the fate of the American Republican Party in November?

Europe: A quick comparison

The mainstream media, as I have regularly complained, is always quick to flatter right-wing power and terrify liberals. Consider this headline in the New York Times today: “Conservative Dominance and Other Takeaways from the E.U. Elections.” There is more nuance if you read on. But the Guardian, by contrast, emphasizes that the situation is complicated and doesn’t play the fear card to scare liberals. The Guardian doesn’t downplay the fact that Denmark, Hungary, and Poland did not move to the right. I don’t know enough to try to analyze what the vote means in smaller E.U. countries that get little attention — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Malta. I do think it’s safe to say, though, that countries that have experienced right-wing, anti-democratic, authoritarian governments learn some lessons that other countries might have to relearn — France and Germany, for example.

Three editions of the Guardian

The Guardian has a U.S. edition, a U.K. edition, and a European edition, all three of which are of great interest and all three of which are included in a subscription. (There also are Australia and International editions.) American publications don’t cover Europe very well. Where coverage overlaps, comparison is always revealing. I have access to the Times of London through Apple News, but I’m even more skeptical of the super-Tory Times of London’s political coverage than that of the New York Times. The Times of London’s coverage of Scotland is incredibly snarky and condescending. Again, comparison is always revealing. I should not neglect to mention that you can get full access to the Guardian by merely registering, but there will be ads and a promotion for subscriptions on every page. Paid subscribers bypass that. Not to mention that the Guardian deserves all the support it can get. The Wikipedia article on the Guardian describes how the Guardian pays for itself. Hint: It’s not owned by a billionaire.

Information isn’t free

I’m becoming increasingly resigned to the cost of information. I’ve complained that, at my stage of life, the biggest expenses now are insurance and property maintenance. What I pay for books and subscriptions seems to get higher every year, but I’ll deal with it.

Update

For what it’s worth, it’s interesting to take note of what financial markets thought of this election. Share prices in most European countries fell. The stock of two big French banks was down more than 5 percent. Britain’s pound rose to its highest level against the euro in almost two years. The U.S. dollar rose to almost 93 euro cents. French and German bonds weakened. None of these changes are exactly dramatic, but it would appear that the rich don’t think that the prospect of more right-wingery will make them richer.

Don Jr.’s sick dreams

Source: Wikimedia Commons

After the Trump guilty verdict yesterday, we got all the batty outpourings of Republican rage that would be expected. Axios wrote, “A profound sense of rage — and an insatiable thirst for revenge — is permeating virtually every corner of the Republican Party in the wake of former President Trump’s historic conviction.”

Trump himself, for the cameras, went through the motions of displaying rage, but am I the only person who got the impression that an addled Trump only half understands what just happened? One person in particular, though, totally gets what happened. That’s Donald Trump Jr.

“Such bullshit,” Junior said. “The Democrats have succeeded in their years long attempt to turn America into a third-world shithole. November 5 is our last chance to save it.” Junior’s rage is real. If you’ve watched any of his podcasts (I’ve watched only snippets), he works himself into a deranged, spit-flinging lather.

There is a psychotic, and genuine, hatred in his rage. He is a fiend and probably was born that way. Remember the photos of Don Jr.’s and Eric’s African safari in 2012? According to one report, “In one of the photographs, Donald Jr. displays a smug grin while holding the sawed-off tail of the dead elephant, knife in hand.”

Despite the show of Republican rage, you can be sure that, behind closed doors, Republicans know that Trump’s days are numbered. The problem for MAGA world now is how to keep the movement going. Several people have tried to get anointed as the new Trump, Ron DeSantis in particular. DeSantis failed. Nikki Haley, actually, has the best numbers. But though Haley might be suitable to lead a somewhat chastened establishment GOP, she is not at all suitable to keep the MAGA cult going after Trump is out of commission. A very common way for authoritarian strongmen to keep the regime going is have a family dynasty. Think Juan and Isabel Perón, or Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Don Jr.’s dream — I would even say plan — is to be the new Trump.

I have a prediction. In the coming months, no matter what the courts do or don’t do to Trump, and no matter whether or not Trump’s mental state becomes an issue, look for the Trump family to do everything they can to shift MAGA loyalty to Don Jr. as Trump Sr.’s hopes fade.

Donald Trump Jr. will run for president in 2028. The mainstream media again will fall for it, and another Trump will get another free ride in the media because of all the hits and ratings.

MAGA wants revenge, and Don Jr. is the only mutant with any hope of providing it.

All the news that’s profit-friendly

Source: Wikimedia Commons

For those of us who aim to be both well-informed and conscientious in our politics, it’s important to know that most sources of political news are corrupted by money and self-interest. For example…

When I read a few days ago that Nikki Haley has said that she will vote for Trump, my first reaction was, “Aha. As I suspected and expected, she’s now setting herself up to get the nomination when Trump either drops out or the Republicans dump him.” To me it seemed obvious all along that Haley’s intention was to set herself up as the only alternative to Trump. She succeeded, and she continued to get about 20 percent of the primary vote even after she said that she was no longer running.

But of course, that’s not what the political media reported. What the political media reported was that Haley had thrown in the towel, humiliated by getting a mere 20 percent support, making Trump indomitable and Trump 2024 inevitable. Trump-is-inevitable is one of the most profitable political memes of all time. It gets ratings and clicks on both sides of the political spectrum. It allowed the Washington Post and the New York Times to survive the steep decline of the newspaper industry. On the right, the Trump-is-inevitable meme flatters the idea of right-wing righteousness and right-wing power. On the left, the terror of it bolsters doom-scrolling. I’m not even going to mention cable news here because I don’t watch cable news and because I assume that neither does anyone else who aims to be both well-informed and conscientious in their politics.

We can trust the New York Times and the Washington Post (and even cable news!) on a great many subjects — culture, sports, entertainment, food, weather, and even, for the most part, international events. There is only one area in which the mainstream media absolutely cannot be trusted. That’s politics, because politics is so closely connected with media profits, with the job security of the mediocre herd of people who work in the political media, and with the attention that the political punditry can draw, preferably from “both sides.” This is why the media will make a very big deal out of a poll that shows Trump leading the horse race but bury a poll that shows the opposite. The formula is ridiculously simple and transparent: Flatter Republicans, scare the hell out of liberals.

Not until today did I read anything supporting my view that Nikki Haley is cleverly unfolding her strategy for positioning herself as the only alternative to Trump when Trump implodes. It’s no surprise that this came from the daily newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson. Richardson is a liberal historian. Though no doubt she is monitored by some elements on the right who want to know what the liberal intelligentsia are thinking, Richardson does not need right-wing clicks or ratings, either to boost profits or to support a sham of objectivity and impartiality. Richardson wrote, in this morning’s newsletter:

“There are two ways to look at Haley’s capitulation. It might show that Trump is so strong that he has captured the entire party and is sweeping it before him. In contrast, it might show that Trump is weak, and Haley made this concession to his voters either in hopes of stepping into his place or in a desperate move to cobble the party, whose leaders are keenly aware they are an unpopular minority in the country, together.

“The Republican Party is in the midst of a civil war. The last of the establishment Republican leaders who controlled the party before 2016 are trying to wrest control of it back from Trump’s MAGA Republicans, who have taken control of the key official positions. At the same time, Trump’s MAGA voters, while a key part of the Republican base, have pushed the party so far right they have left the majority of Americans—including Republicans—far behind.”

If anyone has seen, either in a mainstream media news item or an opinion piece, the ideas that Heather Cox Richardson relates so concisely above, then I will stand corrected. But I haven’t seen it in anything I’ve read. My view is that this is one of the things that the mainstream political media cannot say, because it would weaken the Trump-is-inevitable meme that profits depend on.

Now we get into a gray zone in which everything is murky because of probabilities, the likelihood of unforeseen developments, and even the actions of the state and federal courts, some of which have been corrupted by Republicans, including Trump, who appointed three members of the current Supreme Court.

So…

I still am strongly of the view that Trump will not be on the ballot in November. How can he be, because he is a criminal, because he is one of the most hated people in the world, because his faculties are failing so fast that he can’t follow a teleprompter, because his memory is shot, and because he is so out of it that he can’t stay awake in court and farts loudly at the defense table. We still don’t have the smoking gun (it will have to be caught on video) that will force the mainstream media to report that Trump is increasingly senile. Only a smoking gun on video will do, because Trump’s increasing senility does not support the Trump-is-inevitable meme. The political media will do everything they can to avoid having to write about Trump’s mental state.

On the other hand, writing about Biden’s age does support the Trump-is-inevitable meme. I’m not going to try to predict what the verdict will be New York, because there is always the chance of a jury fluke in such a politically charged case. But, if there is any justice, the jury will convict Trump on 34 felony counts, because it was entirely obvious, even before we heard the evidence in court, that Trump is guilty as sin.

Here is a kind of scientific real-world test of my view that Trump is doomed. On May 15, it was reported that Biden and Trump have agreed on two debates, the first of which is to be on CNN on June 27. In my view, Trump’s handlers know that Trump is by no means fit to appear in a live debate with Biden. According to my view, it was extremely clever of the Biden campaign to get Trump to agree to such a debate. The Biden campaign knows that Trump’s mind is shot. Scheduling a debate can only be a win for Biden. By far the most likely outcome is that Trump will come up with some lie to explain why he is backing out. If such a debate did happen, then Trump would get slaughtered on live television. If the June 27 debate actually happens, then I’m wrong and will have to do some rethinking.

If Republicans were smart — they aren’t — they would find a way to get Trump to withdraw before the Republican National Convention (July 15-18 in Milwaukee). If establishment Republicans fail to accomplish that, and if Trump drops out (or is somehow forced out) after the convention but before voting begins in November, then Republicans will be stuck with elevating their vice presidential choice to be the candidate for president. You can be pretty confident that Nikki Haley and establishment Republicans are secretly working to get Haley chosen as Trump’s running mate, instead of the bat-shit crazy Republicans who are at present jostling for the job (such as Kristi Noem, who boasted of killing a dog, confirming that the cruelty is the point). Getting Trump and the crazies out of the way by July 18 is Republicans’ best hope.

To believe the mainstream media is to believe that Donald Trump, who has never won a majority of the popular vote and who lost, big, in 2020, has somehow been made even more powerful and popular in spite of everything that has happened in the last four years. This could be true only if voting Americans are even more deceived now than ever. It’s certainly true that the mainstream media are working alongside the right-wing media to maximize deceit. Deceit has been as profitable for the mainstream media as it has been for the right-wing media. On the right, it’s about billions of dollars in profits. For the mainstream, sadly, it’s about survival.

It seems the mainstream media don’t think far enough ahead to consider what would happen to their profits if MAGA ever got back into power and had four more years to create in America a Russian-style kleptocratic economy, a Russian-style police and military, a Russian-style judiciary and justice department, and a Russian-style media.

Update 1:

A new viral podcast, “Shrinking Trump,” has become a must-listen. The mainstream media have, of course, ignored it, viral or not. Two prominent clinical psychologists talk about Trump’s mental condition.

Update 2:

The Washington Post knew in January 2021 about the Alitos’ upside-down American flag. They sat on the story, claiming that they believed the explanation that Alito’s wife gave. Note that the New York Times first reported this on May 16, while the Washington Post is just now admitting, on May 25, that it caught the story and killed it. Why did it take the Post so long to admit this? Also, you can be sure that the Washington press corps — a herd — all know each other and drink together. If Post reporters knew about the flag in January 2021, then it’s a good bet that Times reporters found out about it too. It’s juicy talk at Washington watering holes, but it’s not something that we mouth-breathing common folk need to know.

The rottenness of the political media still continues to shock me, though it is something that I have understood for many years.

Update 3:

The Washington Post is starting to catch hell for suppressing the Alito flag story. The Post deserves all the contempt and ridicule that it’s going to get.

Forbes: Washington Post Had—But Passed—On Blockbuster Alito Flag Story In 2021.

DailyKos: Washington Post sat on Alito flag story for 3+ years

Update 4:

From Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter this morning (May 29, 2024):

‘Last November, Matt Gertz of Media Matters reported that ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News provided 18 times more coverage of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment at a fundraising event that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” than they provided of Trump’s November 2023 promise to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

‘CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned the “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” language. The ratio for the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers was 29:1.’

A John Rawls recipe book

Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Daniel Chandler. Penguin Random House, 2023. 404 pages.

As the jacket blurb says, this book about the philosophy of John Rawls aims at “dragging his theory of justice down from Harvard’s ivory towers and into the streets with the people.”

For those already familiar with Rawls (unfortunately not many people), this book will be redundant. But Chandler does lay out Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” in lay language rather than in the dense language of moral and political philosophy. Chandler includes real-world examples of where some of Rawls’ ideas actually have been put to the test, and he proposes ways of bringing justice as fairness into the theory and practice of good politics.

Chandler is an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics.