Monday, August 24, 2026

Best Descriptions

Here is the thing. If you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, I am not calling you a racist to insult you, I am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.

- Jamelle Bouie

This week's featured post is "Can Democrats take the Senate?"

Ongoing stories

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about our strange foreign policy

So North Korea is good and Canada is bad. Got it?

As North Korea goes full speed ahead on building the nuclear weapons we're spending billions to keep Iran from getting, Trump wants a summit meeting with Kim Jong Un. To make himself more attractive to Kim, Trump cut short our planned military exercises with South Korea, saying that the exercises are "inappropriate and hostile" to the North, which is in the running for the most oppressive country in the world. If you're looking for some good behavior that Trump is rewarding, you won't find any.

Trump has maintained that he enjoys a "great relationship" with Kim, telling reporters on Wednesday: "He likes me".

That's all that matters. Previous American presidents didn't think having a "great relationship" with one of the world's bloodiest dictators was a worthy goal, absent some concession from the North Koreans. But Trump is focused on himself, not on the interests of the United States or the free world.

Meanwhile, we have entered into a trade war with Canada. Phillips O'Brien summarizes: The dispute is

is about far more than trade, it is about Canada’s right to exist as a sovereign state. ... Canada is faced with a USA that is now fundamentally dishonest and rapacious. Moreover, it is faced with a US government that denies its ultimate right to exist and speaks openly (and regularly) about how Canada should be annexed into the USA.

All through Trump's second term, foreign leaders have been treating him like a crazy uncle: Flatter him. Don't do anything to set him off. Don't call him on his bad behavior. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is done with that. He described the impossibility of coming to any agree with the Trump regime.

We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.

In other words, an agreement with Trump only lasts until he decides he wants something else from you. Friday, tariffs on an estimated $20 billion of Canadian goods went into effect, and Trump is threatening 50% across-the-board tariffs on January 1.

Also, he turned up his rhetoric.

US President Donald Trump has said Canada wants "the benefits of being a state, without being one" after trade talks between the two countries collapsed late on Friday.

He has repeatedly said that Canada should be "the 51st state". How do you negotiate with that?

and control of the Senate

That's the subject of the featured post. Democrats' odds are only improved by the tone-deaf candidates Republicans are running in key states. Here, North Carolina Senate candidate Michael Whatley disparages the anti-data-center movement.

You gotta remember that this opposition to data centers is not organic. This is being ginned up.

As if the big money were against data centers rather than behind them.

and some outrage stories: Harp and the USS Trump

As I've mentioned before, I don't know what to do with stories that grab public attention, raise people's blood pressure, and maybe illustrate character flaws of certain important people, but have no direct impact on our lives. Lately, though, they've been turning up so regularly that I feel like they need their own category. Feel free to skip down to the next section.

This week we heard endlessly about Natalie Harp, Trump's closest aide. It all started with this fairly innocuous line by Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, who is running for reelection in November.

While the sailors on the Lincoln fight his war, while he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.

[I've added links in case you don't recognize the news stories Ossoff is referencing. They're all legitimately fact-based.]

Now, the heart of Ossoff's charge is "He doesn't want to do the job." We're at war, and we appear to be losing. The economy is beginning to stall out. Working Americans are having a harder and harder time paying for basic necessities like groceries and fuel -- not to mention health insurance. The annual budget deficit may exceed $2 trillion before the fiscal year ends next month. We're continuing to do nothing -- and even go backwards in a lot of ways -- in the face of climate change. But our president doesn't have a lot to say about any of that. If you retain anything from Ossoff's quote, that's what it should be.

But that's not what the White House responded to. Trump and all his minions appeared to take deep offense at "He wants ... to travel with Natalie."

But although Ossoff’s aside resonated with the junkies, the majority of Americans likely had no idea who this Natalie woman was, and might never have given it another thought. But then the West Wing lost its mind. And Trump did too. Their pushback was so overwhelming, so obviously coordinated, so ugly and personal that it became a story. The White House inadvertently created news, as well as a permission structure for even the most cautious, fact-based media organizations to take on the topic. Which is why the name Natalie Harp is now everywhere.

This is known as the "Streisand effect": By objecting to a fairly minor story, you turn it into a major story. So anyway, Natalie Harp is a 35-year-old executive assistant who makes around $150K a year. She is with Trump constantly, prints out flattering news stories and social media posts for him to read, and helps him post his Truth Social rants. She -- and not Secretary of State Rubio -- was with Trump in the catering truck when he ditched Air Force One in Ankara.

She is devoted to Trump in a way that does not seem terribly healthy. "You are all that matters to me" says one of her notes to him. Some people think she does -- or is trying to -- look like his daughter Ivanka.

Ossoff's flip mention of her might be interpreted as hinting that she has a romantic relationship with Trump. But he didn't exactly say that, and most of the follow-up commentary doesn't say that either. (Compared to the attacks Trump regularly dishes out -- with Natalie's help -- what Ossoff said was fairly tame.) And even if she does, it may seem a little creepy, but it's neither my business nor yours; consenting adults and all that. The far more damaging interpretation of her role -- also probably false -- is that the big bag she is always carrying contains his supply of adult diapers.

Here's the part that does matter:

  • Trump often says stuff that makes you wonder what world he's widwidth=580 living in. Well, it's Natalie's World. Both her behavior and the relentlessly worshipful stuff she shows him communicates to Trump that he is a uniquely successful president who is widely admired and universally loved by the American people. Those ridiculous AI-generated images he posts of himself as Jesus or a great general -- where do you think he gets them?
  • She worked for a year without a security clearance. Given her constant proximity to the president, you have to assume that she's seen or heard some of the nation's most important secrets. But she didn't have clearance because she didn't submit the appropriate forms.
  • She is the most egregious example of a general trend inside the Trump regime: The sole qualification for any job -- attorney general, defense secretary, whatever -- is abject submission and obsequious flattery.

But for the most part, I think we should all feel silly for having spent this much time on her. I know I do.

Another story that is more symbolic than consequential: According to ABC News and "three sources familiar with the matter", the Navy is thinking about renaming an aircraft carrier under construction. The USS Doris Miller may be renamed for Donald Trump.

If true, this is outrageous in both directions: In the United States, we don't name things after sitting presidents. Or at least we didn't used to. Honors like these are supposed to be History's to decide. Worse, Trump has no military record, and is widely believed to have dodged the draft during the Vietnam War by speciously claiming to have "bone spurs". He's also in the process of losing the Iran War.

But as in the previous note, the Navy knows that flattery is the way to get what you want from Trump. And Trump knows (I believe) that future generations will be ashamed of him and the things that happened during his presidency. If he waits for the judgment of History, there won't be any Trump aircraft carriers or battleships or airports or performing arts centers.

The other side of this swap is to dishonor Doris Miller.

Doris "Dorie" Miller (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was a U.S. Navy sailor who was the first black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor. As a mess attendant second class aboard the battleship USS West Virginia, Miller helped carry wounded sailors to safety during the attack on Pearl Harbor. He then operated an anti-aircraft gun and, despite no prior training in gunnery, officially shot down one plane (according to Navy Department records), but Miller and other eyewitnesses claimed a range of four to six.

What makes Miller's story even more inspiring is that in 1941 Black sailors weren't assigned significant combat duties. Without the chaos of Pearl Harbor, he might have spent the war peeling potatoes and ladling out soup.

But Pete Hegseth's Pentagon is doing everything it can to erase the contributions of anyone who isn't or wasn't a White man. Naming an aircraft carrier after a Black hero? Impossible!

Your life and everybody else's will go on as before, but it's hard to look away.

The ring tone of our quack HHS secretary is a quack.

When people tell you about how "far left" or "out of the mainstream" Democratic candidates like El-Sayid are, remind them of Victor Marx, the Republican candidate for governor of Colorado. In Marx's book, he describes physical battles he has fought against people possessed by demons.

His detailed descriptions include claims that one man “transformed” in front of him, developing “pointy” ears and “superhuman strength.” In another episode, Marx said a “demonized” teenage girl “turned reptilian” before his eyes.

and you also might be interested in ...

The Abraham Lincoln is now headed home, to be replaced by the George Washington.

The latest Trump regime effort to control the press: It fired Erik Slavin, the editor-in-chief of the military newspaper Stars & Stripes, as well as Middle East reporter Lara Korte.

Slavin said he was being fired “for stating in a CBS interview that hypothetical censorship of news for service members would constitute a red line." ... "I stand by the principle that Stars and Stripes must remain editorially independent, as required by law and by the department’s own policies,” Slavin said.

Korte said on X: “Today, I was informed that the Department of Defense is firing me for insubordination after I told a CBS reporter that I work for Stars and Stripes — not the Pentagon, not the administration, and not any policy maker.”

As our HHS Secretary and President keep badmouthing vaccines, kindergarten vaccination rates are headed downward. The rates vary considerably from one state to the next. Idaho is the least-vaccinated state, with only 75% of kindergarten children getting the MMR vaccine, compared to Maine's 98%.

Often this gets framed as a personal choice by parents, but it's more than that. When vaccination rates dip below the level of herd immunity, diseases can spread widely. Some children are unable to benefit from vaccinations, so herd immunity is their only protection. Each unvaccinated child creates risks for other children.

Texas is refusing to extradict an ICE agent accused of shooting a Minneapolis man through a home's front door and then lying about it, falsely claiming that the man had attacked him. TPM pulls together several examples of Trump or Trump allies preventing criminal ICE agents from facing justice.

and let's close with something aspirational

Going to a dance lesson this afternoon. Think I'll come out looking like Astaire?

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Monday, August 17, 2026

Far Out

There’s a maddening tendency among elected officials and the political press to equate “far left” and “far right” candidates as occupying equally extreme, dangerous ends of the political spectrum, though those in the former camp mostly want universal healthcare and affordable housing while the latter is more likely to endorse the forced deportation of non-white people from the United States.

- Allegra Kirkland
"Whose Narrative Is It Anyway?"

This week's featured post is "Some revolutions are too big to see."

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. DHS's response to ICE's murders of Alex Preti and Renee Good was to launch investigations into local Minneapolis groups that organized protests. The murderers are still at large.
  • Climate change. The predictions of a record-setting El Nino seem to be coming true.
  • Iran. As it becomes harder to deny that his war is lost, Trump's rhetoric has become increasingly fantastic. The two-month window for a larger deal set by June's memorandum of understanding has now run out, but Trump says he is "in no hurry" to end the war. But if Oman gets in the way of a settlement with Iran, "we'll bomb the shit out of them". He has also threatened to declare the Strait of Hormuz, which remains closed, "a territory of the United States".
  • Ukraine. Phillips O'Brien: "Russia's allies show they are more intent on helping Russia win than Ukraine's are in helping Ukraine win. The difference is stark." He counts Trump as an ally of Russia.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about primary elections

For the second week in a row, a progressive Democrat's big lead in the polls evaporated on election day. Last week, Abdul El-Sayed was supposed to have a double-digit victory in the Michigan Senate race, but instead he barely squeaked out a win. This week, progressive Francesca Hong actually lost by half a percent to David Crowley (who was supported by the current governor) in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin's governor.

The NYT's analysis points to three factors:

  • Undecideds went overwhelmingly for Crowley, as media focused on Hong's more out-of-the-mainstream past statements.
  • Young voters (who overwhelmingly supported Hong) didn't vote in the same numbers as older voters.
  • Hong's more enthusiastic supporters were more likely to respond when pollsters called.

Pundits love to play the expectations game, and announce some "collapse" or "surge" as results come in differently from the most recent polls. But in truth there are just votes. You get more of them than the other candidates, or you don't.

My state, Massachusetts, has its primary September 1, and the marquee race is for the Democratic Senate nomination. My congressman, Seth Moulton, is running against incumbent Senator Ed Markey, primarily on the age issue: Moulton is 47 and Markey is 79. Unlike most generational primary struggles, though, Markey is the more progressive candidate.

So far, I am unmoved by Moulton's case. To me, the age issue has to be backed up by something more substantive: examples where the older candidate is out of touch with today's world. Absent an argument like that, I don't see the point.

and the Abraham Lincoln

When we go to war without adequate planning, eventually the men and women of our armed forces suffer the consequences.

You've probably already heard the gist of this story: Due to the Iran War, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for a long time without shore leave for the crew or the kind of maintenance that can only be done in a port. The situation has been complicated by damage Iranian missiles did to a naval base in Bahrain, which would ordinarily be the logistics hub supplying the Lincoln while it was deployed in the Middle East. So it's being supplied through Diego Garcia, a British island in the Indian Ocean over 2000 miles away. The strain of constant deployment with limited supplies is taking its toll.

MSNOW talked to families of the Lincoln crew:

The families say that their loved ones have described food shortages and standing in line for the ship’s store for an hour or more, and that the store often lacks basic supplies like toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Families said there have been times during the deployment when the Lincoln was rationing portions. Nicole Conrad’s son is serving on the Lincoln, and she hasn’t been able to see his face in seven months. Exchanging messages from the ship, he has told her about days when the showers were locked and laundry was closed, and about food shortages on board that meant his meal was half a cup of rice and two tortillas.

USA Today has published photos of meals served aboard the Lincoln and also the USS Tripoli, which is also deployed to the Middle East. The trays pictured are from the Tripoli.

When Dan F.'s daughter said hygiene products were running low on the [Tripoli], the family sent a care package with shampoo and conditioner, deodorant, toothpaste and tampons, filling every open space with candy and snacks. They filled the second box with Emergen-C vitamin C packets – Dan's daughter said she was feeling a sore throat coming on – and clean socks. The boxes were sent nearly a month ago, yet neither has reached its destination.

It's easy to imagine being homesick and going stir crazy after more than 260 days at sea. What civilians have a harder time appreciating is the stress level on an aircraft carrier.

The flight deck of an aircraft carrier is already one of the most dangerous places in the military. High-speed aircraft with powerful engines can burn sailors and blow them overboard. Spinning propellers can cause accidents. And the constant loading and unloading of bombs, missiles and rockets pose the risk of explosions and fires.

Trump, Hegseth, and the Navy deny everything. US Central Command posted:

The Sailors and Marines of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group remain resilient and resolved after more than 260 days at sea, 10,000 aircraft flights, and 1.5 million pounds of ordnance expended. No service members aboard the aircraft carrier have died, and the one Sailor who fell overboard Aug. 3 was quickly and safely recovered. The rampant misreporting on Abraham Lincoln's historic deployment is a disservice to our men and women in uniform and their loved ones.

The Guardian quotes one relative's response:

The sister of a Lincoln crew member in his late 30s said that the remarks made her want to grab Trump and Hegseth and shake them. “I grew up in a United States where you have to be very respectful of the military, as they’re making the ultimate sacrifice and protecting their country, and now you have the commander-in-chief and defense secretary dismissing their experiences and calling them liars. I’m really angry,” she said. “It’s a feeling of betrayal. These are frustrating, false and careless comments, and they are going to have a lot of consequences for my brother.”

The USS George Washington reportedly is moving from the western Pacific to replace the Lincoln. This leaves the Pacific temporarily with no carriers.

No one expects China to invade Taiwan because an American aircraft carrier has left the region. But the carrier's absence gives the Chinese another opportunity to show its strength, said Bryan Clark, a former Navy submariner who is a defense analyst at the Hudson Institute.

"They're using this as part of the narrative to demonstrate to the Philippines, to Japan, to Indonesia and others that the US is not the big dog in the western Pacific anymore," Clark said. "They would just prefer that countries in the region decide that China is the bigger power and the US is not able to guarantee their security anymore."

While continuing to deny that the US supply of high-tech missiles is being depleted, Trump is blaming the problem (which he insists doesn't exist) on President Biden, who gave Patriots and other weapons to Ukraine.

I am reminded of what Donald Rumsfeld said when he was Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War:

You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Whatever you think about how Biden handled our armed forces, Trump arrived in office commanding a particular stockpile of weapons. It was up to him to use them wisely. But Trump has never in his life taken responsibility for any of his numerous mistakes.

and ignorance-based executive orders

If there was a theme of the week, it was Trump giving orders based on his disastrous combination of ignorance and confidence. Two were related to his ignorance of naval technology and ship design, and another had to do with public health.

Trump has frequently cited his admiration of steam-powered catapults for launching planes off aircraft carriers, rather than the newer electromagnetic tech. Thursday, he signed a memo instructing the War Defense Department to replace the newer systems with the older tech.

The new mandate would likely cost billions of dollars and revert the Navy’s most advanced ships to a system that takes more sailors to operate and is more difficult to maintain.

Reportedly, Trump also has the Navy looking at redesigning the Ford-class carriers still under construction to move the tower to the center of the ship, similar to the look of World War II era carriers.

The changes – including moving the multistory aircraft carrier’s command center tower to the ship’s middle – would cost billions and worsen chronic delays, sources said. Officials also told The Post that changing the command center to the middle would remove 3 key benefits: additional parking spaces, reduced launch time and lowered chances of turbulence during landing.

Neither of these examples is Trump taking a side in a previously existing dispute among experts. It's just Trump deciding that expertise doesn't matter.

Last Monday

US President Donald Trump has signed an order that ... recommends splitting the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) shots. ... The order also recommends that the number of childhood vaccines drop to 11 from the existing 18 recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

During a the signing announcement, Trump spread anti-vax nonsense, claiming at one point that

I've seen proof of it. Where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child's body.

He also implied, without saying outright, that vaccines are related to autism, a well-studied and often refuted piece of anti-vax propaganda.

Trump has no real authority here, since vaccine requirements are set by the states. Mainly, this order will make parents more doubtful of vaccines and less likely to get their children vaccinated. Separating the shots would require more office visits and more expense, further motivating parents to skip some.

Meanwhile, the regime is bungling the cyclospora outbreak. The cyclospora parasite is suspected of causing over 24K illnesses so far this year, resulting in an enormous increase in the usage of the phrase "explosive diarrhea". The center of the outbreak is in Michigan, and many cases have been traced through Taco Bell to lettuce from a plant in Mexico run by Taylor Farms.

The NYT explores how efforts to shrink the US government and loosen its regulations have made it harder to prevent outbreaks like this, and harder to track them after they arise. The Guardian points out that Congress mandated a better system for tracing outbreaks 15 years ago, but it has been repeatedly delayed and now is set for 2028.

It turns out that "big government" isn't always a bad thing. In many ways, those much-derided "bureaucrats" are like offensive linemen in football: When they're doing their jobs well, nobody notices them. It's only when the quarterback gets sacked that you see a replay of the guy who was supposed to stop that from happening.

and Trump in the catering truck

I'm always torn about covering stories in which Trump does something outrageous, but it doesn't affect most people's lives. (That's why I'm ignoring the fun people had making fun of Trump's new hairpiece.) They leave me asking "Can you believe a guy like this is our president?". But in some larger sense they're inconsequential.

The Air Force One story that broke this week is a great example: Trump flew to the NATO summit in Turkey in the luxury jet he got as bribe from Qatar. While he was there, US intelligence heard rumors about a plot to shoot down his return flight on July 8, a plan made simpler by the fact that the Qatari jet still hasn't gotten all of its security upgrades. Without referencing the threat, Trump moved back to the older Air Force One plane, which also carried the White House press corps and several high officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as top aides Stephen Miller and Steven Cheung.

But it turns out that flight was only a decoy. After boarding the plane, Trump was whisked away in a catering truck and taken to another plane, which went to the UK where he met up with AF-1 again as if he had never left it.

There are two possibilities here: Either the threat was not serious, in which case Trump was just being a scared little rabbit. Or it was serious, and to save himself he was content to sacrifice not just journalists, but some of his own cabinet and staff as well.

History will little note nor long remember this incident, but it says a lot about our president's character.

and you might also be interested in ...

I copied the graph above from Noah Smith's Noahpinion blog. The original is on the Our World in Data site. I find it very striking. 36 years ago, extreme poverty was a worldwide phenomenon, mostly distributed across East Asia, South Asia, and Africa. Today it is largely a sub-Saharan Africa problem, with some contribution from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I don't have any grand conclusion to draw from this graph, other than that big changes in poverty are possible. And it's surprising that a change of this magnitude would draw so little attention.

According to TPM,

The Trump administration is planning to dramatically reshape the data the Census Bureau collects, setting the stage for an audacious effort to curtail crucial information used in voting rights complaints and revive a right-wing effort, pursued in Trump’s first term, to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count used to determine how many members of Congress represent each state in Congress.

The point would be to count fewer non-citizens in 2030 and thus lower the number of congressional seats that go to states with a lot of non-citizens, like New York and California.

The 14th Amendment is actually pretty clear about this:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

That clause superseded the famous 3/5 clause in the original Constitution that distinguished free people from slaves. The word "citizen" appears five times in the Amendment, so the authors knew how to use it. The fact that they stipulated "persons" should be taken literally.

It's possible the Supreme Court plans to continue its piece-by-piece repeal of the 14th Amendment. Section 3 (which bans from office anyone who has taken part in an insurrection) was made meaningless in 2024. This June, four justices wanted to ignore the birthright citizenship clause. (They'll get another shot at it this year.) But if not, the regime's new census rules should go down quickly.

TPM's Layla Jones examines the century-long history of right-wing attempts to gain an advantage by monkeying with the census.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is leaving her job because "I cannot be the best mom my two young children deserve while devoting the constant time, energy, and attention required of the White House Press Secretary". The Contrarian is not inclined to be generous:

Karoline Leavitt's farewell post contained no mention of a single administration accomplishment she's proud of — just how extreme the left has become. Fitting, considering her tenure.

To be fair, she did mention "the many historic accomplishments of this Administration" without getting specific about any. The Guardian notes that her tenure started with an outrageous lie -- "she claimed that the Biden administration had planned to use $50m in taxpayer dollars to send condoms to Gaza", and did not improve from there.

A snide comment I've seen frequently on social media is that Leavitt is quitting in order to spend more time lying to her family.

Last Monday, ICE agents cut off the car of US citizen Caroline Molina. They then jumped out of their van, and one of the agents pointed his weapon through her driver-side window, in the manner of the agent who murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis. He was yelling at her, claiming that she tried to run them over -- which was a complete lie.

Molina yelled back at them that she had a dashcam video recorder, so she could prove they were "full of shit". They eventually left. Both the dashcam video and the video she shot out her window are here.

Unraveled has identified the agents.

Unraveled has verified the agents in Molina’s videos were far from their usual base of operations. The team has been recorded inflicting violence on immigrants, protesters, and observers in the Chicago area since last summer, including outside the region’s ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois that became the epicenter of anti-deportation protests during Operation Midway Blitz last autumn. Members of the same team were also recorded intimidating and threatening drivers in the Twin Cities in mid-January—in the brief period after federal agents killed Renée Good, and before U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents killed 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti.

Will the agents be disciplined? Of course not.

ICE has been dragging its feet about its agents wearing body cameras that might capture their illegal actions. But they're about to roll out electric-shock gloves. No doubt they'll use them wisely.

and let's close with something celestial

Spain got to see a full solar eclipse on Wednesday. In case you missed it, here's a feline recreation.

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Monday, August 10, 2026

Interested Parties

Tyranny is the handmaiden of the moneyed interests.

- Robert Reich
"The real meaning of Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan"

This week's featured post is "Why the freak-out over El-Sayed?"

Ongoing stories

  • Trump's assault on American democracy. Blanche is fully installed as AG. Money for the rest of this calendar year has been voted. So there's nothing restraining Trump from doing his worst between now and the fall elections.
  • Climate change. Lots of climate stories this week. Wildfires are still raging. Lake Mead is at a historic low point. The Trump regime continues to spend taxpayer money to pull the plug on renewable energy projects. A judge is stopping the Pentagon from blocking all new onshore wind projects. Ford is planning a cheap EV pick-up truck for next year.
  • Iran. Phillips O'Brien: "A quick lesson on winning and losing a war. If you start a war of choice, blow through masses of your weapons stocks so that you cannot escalate effectively, and find the country you attacked dictating negotiating terms while in a stronger strategic position … You lost."
  • Ukraine. Trump has seemed to waver between favoring Russia and favoring Ukraine. But in fact it's always been Russia.

This week's developments

This week everybody was talking about the economy

Wednesday, Donald Trump told a crowd in Las Vegas that this is "the greatest economy we've ever had by far". Friday, the Labor Department released its July jobs report: The US lost 23,000 jobs in July, and the more robust hiring reported in May was revised downward by 66,000 jobs. The unemployment rate ticked downward to 4.1%, but for the wrong reason: The people who stopped looking for work outnumbered the people who lost jobs. More technically, the labor participation rate declined to 61.4% of the working-age population. Other than the Covid era, that's the lowest rate in 50 years. Wage growth was at an annual rate of 3.2%, which doesn't quite keep pace with inflation.

That doesn't sound like such a great economy.

And here's something that nobody talks about any more: Remember, back when Joe Biden was president, how the growing national debt was an existential threat to the United States? In March 2025, when the second Trump administration was young and all problems could still be blamed on Biden, the Republican-led House Budget Committee reported:

If Congress does not act swiftly to confront the structural disconnect between reckless federal spending and incoming revenues, our nation will experience either slow and painful economic demise through sustained stagnation or a swift and catastrophic sovereign debt crisis whereby our creditors lose confidence in our ability to service and repay our debt. This distrust will jeopardize the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency and result in massive tax hikes and austere spending cuts. Both scenarios would imperil our Republic and our nation’s future.

Well, since then Trump and congressional Republicans have cut taxes for the rich again, started an unnecessary war, and massively boosted military spending. They tried to cover that with cuts to food programs and health care, but the numbers didn't balance. So the federal deficit for the first nine months of FY2026 has been $1.4 trillion. It's still an open question whether the year's final total will top $2 trillion or not. The deficit has broken $2 trillion only once before: in FY2021, a combined Trump/Biden year (running from October 2020 to September 2021), when the government was trying to keep the economy functioning during the Covid shutdown.

The striking thing about the current deficit is that no external emergency requires it. The economy does not need stimulus to get out of a massive recession. No one has attacked us. No plague, famine, or natural disaster demands government intervention. No, Trump is running this deficit by choice. He has chosen to fight an unnecessary war and to cut rich people's taxes. And the House Budget Committee doesn't seem terribly alarmed about it.

Here's what worries me: We're running this massive deficit while the big tech companies are borrowing unprecedented amounts of money to spend on their AI infrastructure. Yet somehow, this combination of public and private spending isn't causing a boom. GDP growth is limping along somewhere in the 2-3% range that it's been in since around 2011 (except for the Covid collapse and recovery, which were lower and higher).

I'm no economist, but it looks to me like we're masking a major recession with borrowed money.

Interesting gender disparity in the jobs numbers:

Overall, the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July: Women lost 32,000 jobs, while men gained 9,000. Many of the jobs lost were in local government and leisure and hospitality—real jobs that real women, who are already dealing with slowed wages and rising inflation, work. Meanwhile, a whopping 165,000 women exited the work force last month, meaning they were neither working nor looking for a new job. The number of men in the labor force remained steady. ... In fact, more than double the number of women have left the labor force than men since the start of the year. A total of 845,000 women have left the workforce since January, while 406,000 men have left.

The theory that fewer immigrants means more jobs for native-born Americans ... it's just not panning out.

and Todd Blanche

Well, a few Republican senators managed to get media attention with their public hand-wringing, but in the end all but Collins and Murkowski knuckled under, so Blanche was confirmed as attorney general 50-49. Fifty Republican senators have now signaled their approval of vindictive prosecutions, winking at obvious corruption, and continuing the Epstein cover-up.

I don't know how fair this point is, but I have seen it fairly often: As soon as Susan Collins came out against Blanche, we knew Trump had the votes to confirm him. She only strays off the MAGA reservation when they don't need her vote.

and Dr. Fauci

Imagine you're a Republican in Congress looking for some TV time, but wanting to stay in Trump's good graces. What are you going to talk about? Not the war, which has turned out to be a big mistake. Not the economy, which is limping towards stagflation. Not the wildfires spreading all across the northern hemisphere, because that leads into climate change, which Trump insists is a "con job", a "scam", and a "hoax". Not the budget deficit, which is approaching $2 trillion for the year, because who's fault is that exactly? Not the great job ICE is doing as it terrorizes cities across the country and murders American citizens on the streets. Not corruption, obviously, and not your vote to approve Todd Blanche, because he winks at Trump's corruption. The Epstein victims? No way.

I know: You can talk about an 85-year-old who holds no government office and is making no decisions that affect Americans' lives. So Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky published Anthony Fauci's diary, and then pulled Fauci in for questioning before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Consider the context of this appearance: Before he left office, President Biden gave Fauci a sweeping pardon so that the incoming administration wouldn't be able to harass him with vindictive prosecutions. We've just seen James Comey vindictively prosecuted for lying to Congress, when he actually did no such thing. Career prosecutors recommended against pressing charges, but the prosecutor Trump illegally appointed went ahead with them. The illegal appointment caused the charges to be thrown out by the judge.

So Fauci's pardon covers everything he did while he was actually in government, but testifying before Congress put him in danger of being prosecuted for lying to Congress, whether he told the truth or not. So Fauci took the Fifth Amendment 111 times.

You might think that would insulate him from prosecution, but guess again. Paul introduced a motion to find him in contempt of Congress. The committee approved that motion. Ordinarily it would go to the floor of the Senate, where it probably would not pass. So Paul wants DoJ to act on the referral of his committee, without the full Senate.

With all this smoke, you might be wondering if there's a fire somewhere. I don't think there is. There is legitimate scientific debate about whether Covid-19 leapt from animals to humans spontaneously in China or whether the virus leaked from a Chinese lab. But that debate has gotten swallowed up by a conspiracy theory that the virus was created in that lab, perhaps intentionally, perhaps with NIH funding that Fauci had some oversight over. There seems to be nothing to that theory.

Looking back, it's hard to remember just how scary Covid was and how little anybody understood about it. Over a million Americans died of the virus, and perhaps millions more would have died without the vaccines. We all did things (I recall my household wiping down our groceries) that look silly in hindsight.

During this time, Fauci gave the best advice he could, which was always based on incomplete information. On the whole, though, his advice wasn't that bad. And besides, he never had the power to impose his views. That had to be done by governors, school boards, and other elected officials at various levels.

Thankfully, I have never had to make decisions based on incomplete information while people were dying around me.

an El-Sayed's win in Michigan

This is the subject of the featured post. But I have a few things to say that weren't in that article.

Robert Reich had this comment on the idea that the Democratic Party is the subject of a hostile takeover:

The Democratic party isn’t being taken over by “the left” or by democratic socialists. There’s no civil war between progressives and moderates. We aren’t witnessing an ideological battle between the “left” and the “center”.

We’re seeing the US wake up to the tyranny that’s engulfed us, and to a crisis of affordability that’s causing most Americans to struggle financially while fueling the biggest stock market rally in history.

Trump’s tyranny and America’s affordability crisis are related. ... When corporate America and Wall Street are unleashed – when the president of the United States has made an implicit deal with the moneyed interests to back him and his authoritarian regime in exchange for tax cuts, deregulation, monopolization and pay-to-play corruption – of course prices soar and wages stagnate.

One thing I don't like about special-interest ads is that the interests usually don't own their message. I wouldn't care how much Elon Musk had spent in Wisconsin if he had appeared in ads himself and said, "I'm Elon Musk, and I want you to elect Brad Schimel to your state supreme court." Ditto if AIPAC ads had said, "We're AIPAC, and we want you to vote for Haley Stevens because she supports continuing US military aid to Israel, while her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, does not."

If all political ads were that straight-shooting, the Supreme Court's otherwise bizarre notion that money is speech would almost make sense. But AIPAC-supported ads about El-Sayed being "disrespectful to women" aren't just deceptive about El-Sayed, they mask why AIPAC doesn't like him.

To be fair, a renewable energy PAC did the same thing to Andy Ogles in Tennessee.

According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of the GOP House caucus, went down to defeat is that he was targeted with $2 million by a SuperPAC funded by solar industry execs. They didn’t hit him on renewables or environment policy. They used garden variety attacks about Ogles’ missed votes while playing up the conservative credentials of his primary challenger.

PACs do that because the honest message -- "We're solar executives and Andy Ogles has been working against our industry." -- wouldn't persuade enough voters.

A hilarious attack ad against El-Sayed's opponent Mike Rogers is framed like a drug ad. The drug is called "Endless War", and Rogers is pitching for it.

Trump seems to think this meme works in his favor. (Note the misplaced apostrophe.)

El-Sayed accepted the challenge in an interview with Jake Tapper:

Yeah, he’s right. One [America] in which your overlords are two people who don’t like each other but join in the interest of making billions of dollars off of you, or two people who genuinely love each other, enjoyed some pancakes together, want to come together to build the kind of America where they can raise a family, and know that that family is going to have the good things.”

So yes, you’ve got two different visions of America. Donald Trump’s vision is the one you’re living in right now. Can you afford your gas? Can you afford your groceries? Do you believe, when you look your kids in the eye, that they’re going to have a better future than you did?

and you also might be interested in ...

They two parties really do have different standards. Unlike Democrat Graham Platner, Republican Rep. Max Miller has not withdrawn from his race and will be on the November ballot.

The WaPo claims Trump is upset with War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for hiding the munitions shortage from him, and that Hegseth in turn blamed his Deputy Secretary Stephen Feinberg. (The White House claims the whole story is "fake news". The Pentagon says: "Secretary Hegseth did not mislead anyone about our munitions posture, and he did not blame Deputy Secretary Feinberg. These claims about depleted stockpiles, internal disagreements, the Secretary’s position on Iran … are equally fictional." Those quotes are also in the WaPo, because that's what journalists do.)

A couple of observations here:

  • Any idiot knows that you don't just go down to Home Depot and get yourself more Patriots and THAADs and Tomahawks. The Pentagon stockpile is the only one, and these missiles take years to manufacture in any quantity. So the whole idea that Trump would buy Hegseth's claim that the munitions problem had been "fixed" points to Corporal Bonespurs' ignorance about war.
  • The old adage that "Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics" needs third classification for Hegseth: Complete doofuses talk testosterone and worry about the race and gender of their officers.

Paul Krugman used the previous story as one of many examples of administration officials lying to each other, which is one reason why they are governing so badly across the board.

The fact is that it isn’t possible for an administration to be completely dishonest with the courts and the general public while being honest with itself. Do you believe that when Trump boasts about $18 trillion in foreign investment, Kevin Hassett, the administration’s top economist, quietly tells him, “Just between you and me, Mr. President, that number comes out of nowhere, and even the investment promises we have received are vaporware”? Of course not. ... So the Iran War is just the most visible of many ongoing, self-inflicted disasters perpetrated by this administration.

A few weeks ago I reviewed Cory Doctorow's book Enshittification, which focuses on the software platforms that are increasingly making life miserable. But the trend is larger than that. There's a broad trend for big conglomerates to buy famous brands and then cut quality. There are big short-term profits to be made before the brand's reputation is used up. One article focused on how this trend has affected cookware.

Yesterday, Phillips O'Brien's weekend update on the Ukraine war veered into media criticism. He needed to explain why the latest Trump regime nonsense about "helping" Ukraine -- Trump is and always has been on Putin's side in this war -- had gotten so much serious coverage. O'Brien originally thought he was writing a niche blog for military strategists, but suddenly has seen his substack vault into popularity (with people like me).

[W]hat I have discovered, which is not enlightening, is that the actual reporting of war and politics these days in most media outlets can be incredibly weak. The system often seems broken—reporting White House inspired narratives that have no basis in fact as actual events, and replacing rigor with herd behavior.

He started trying to figure out why that was.

Doing what I have done over the last few years has been learning experience (and not it a good way) about how much of the media (and much of the think-tank community) works. The key thing in both worlds is not being accurate or truthful as much as it is gaining access to power and being seen to be smart. Access and perceived intelligence—usually drastically greater than real intelligence—is the currency of these worlds.

Thus to maintain access, some reporters and commentators will say exactly what the White House wants, time and again, even after the White House narrative has been shown to be nonsense (many times). When it comes to think tanks, many are not interested in attempting even-handed or rigorous research; instead, they want to impress funders and also maintain access, and thus they publish crap to appeal to power and maintain their perceived viability (in most cases they have none). This means that much of what is produced in think-tanks is of laughable quality, meant to signal access and support, not to actually analyze a problem or policy.

When I started this blog, nearly all of my sources were mainstream media: CNN, NYT, WaPo, with occasional deeper articles from The Atlantic and a few similar outlets. And I still quote those sources selectively: When they publish a checkable fact, the fact usually checks out.

Increasingly, though, I am relying on blogs written by people like O'Brien, Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall, Jess Piper, Jay Kuo, Marc Elias, and so on. Why? Because they aren't chasing access to sources in the Trump regime, so they can maintain higher standards.

So it's none of my business, or yours, whether or not Ariana Grande has an eating disorder. The public response to recent photos is probably counter-productive. But if it leads to an intelligent discussion of celebrity culture and eating disorders in general, some good may come of it.

[Grande's] body has also become a proxy on to which wider cultural anxieties are projected. In a moment of GLP-1 drugs reinstating the aspiration of thinness, body positivity in retreat, bonesmashing still on the up, and Maga tradwives once again moralizing fatness, fears about the return of aughts-era anorexia have settled on to Grande herself. Whether or not those fears belong to her alone is almost beside the point. Her body has become the site through which the culture argues with itself.

That can't be a comfortable position to be in, no matter what her actual health situation is. Send a few good vibes her way, however that works in your religious tradition.

Trump is already preparing his response for when Republicans lose big in the fall: Voters are "not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans." Nothing in the history of the world has ever been his fault.

Ross Douthat's final NYT column (before he moves on to be a white conservative DEI hire at 60 Minutes) expresses the it's-not-so-bad view of the Trump administration that I think we need to push back hard on.

But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.

But look at what he has implicitly admitted there: If Trump doesn't have a Democratic successor willing and able to roll this back, American democracy is in real trouble.

We have masked federal police who obey Trump rather than the law, and who get away with murdering people in the streets if they protest against Trump's policies. We have a massive concentration camp system under construction and partially operational. We have a "unitary executive" who has obliterated all the boundaries that used to wall off certain key areas of government power from the whims of the president. That executive is immune from prosecution after he leaves office for all "official acts", which might include having political rivals jailed.

The whole point of Trump's effort to control elections is that he doesn't have to be popular. The point of encroaching on the power of Congress is that he doesn't need legislative capacity. Give him two more years of a supine Congress and it might be too late.

Expect to hear a lot of it's-not-so-bad between now and the midterm elections. Everyone who isn't dyed-in-the-wool MAGA needs to respond to the fall elections like a four-alarm fire. But what if your candidate lost in the Democratic primaries? What if the Democratic nominee makes you feel uneasy for reasons that may or may not have something to do with your subliminal biases against color or religion or gender? What if you have a lot to do and getting out to vote feels like a hassle?

But if it's not really so bad, then you can stay home or vote for the White guy or teach the politicians a lesson by voting for a third party. I mean, what's the harm?

and let's close with something mythic

It's hard to tell if it's too soon to joke about Mitch McConnell's situation, since we don't really know what that situation is. But The Wizard of Was is pretty darn funny.

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