At least they still hate Trump

I’m not really sure what to make of this but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway. Let’s just say I have a hard time understanding people who would vote for Trump or the GOP in general at this point, But going back and forth like the two parties are even in the same universe is incoherent in my book.

A critical group of swing voters was asked to give a brief, one-word description of the emotions they feel upon seeing President Biden.

The answers were bleak: “Indifferent … mixed to indifferent … bored … ambivalent … frustrated … flabbergasted … lost.”

Then the same voters, who had cast ballots for Donald Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, were asked for a show of hands for those who would support the former president in a rematch vs. the sitting president.

“None of you,” Rich Thau, president of market research company Engagious, said to his focus group Tuesday night in Pennsylvania.

It’s the same thread Thau has seen in focus groups all year. In six key battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — he has asked 89 Trump-Biden voters the same question about how they would vote in a rematch, and just 13 would prefer the former president.

This independent-inclined group has grown quite sour on Biden and the Democrats, but they have little interest inreturning to a Trump presidency and remain reluctant to support candidates in midterms who present themselves as mini-Trumps. And that may be the key to how candidates can win the election next month.

[…]

Conservatives outnumbered liberals by nine percentage points in 2016 and by 14 percent in 2020, according to exit polling data. After narrowly winning independents in 2016, Trump lost them to Biden by 13 percentage points four years later, ending his chances of a second term.

“Only one other major party presidential candidate has lost independents by a larger margin than Trump — Walter Mondale in 1984,” Winston wrote.

Thau, whose main work focuses on public policy messaging for trade associations, dug down into the key states and, ahead of the 2020 election, discovered that about three-fourths of the Obama-Trump voters planned to stick with Trump.

“These people were wound very, very tight. They were unbelievably stressed. You asked them what emotion they felt in the last week. It was anxiety, fear, unhappiness,” Thau said in a recent interview, during which he showed highlights from the past several years of research.

This group also was inclined to some degree of “xenophobia” and “bizarre conspiracy theories,” he said. But a critical bloc broke away from Trump after four years of chaotic governance.

In a March 2021 focus group, the Trump-Biden swing voters gave a better, but not great, view of their emotion upon seeing Biden: “Relaxed … a little relief … positive … more calm … mostly relief … trust and relief … renewed pride … renewed calm.”

By April 2022, after a run of bad news and high inflation, a different group of Trump-Biden voters expressed feeling just deflated by the new president: “Bored … confused … lack of confidence … uninterested … apathy … silly or goofy.”

They almost all support abortion rights and disapprove of the Supreme Court’s June ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Thau has found. They didn’t place much emphasis on abortion rights while voting for Trump in 2016 because they wanted an outsider who would shake things up.

Abortion animates their thoughts heading into the November elections, but inflation is also very central to their everyday stresses. Yet at the same time, this sliver of voters does not blame anyone in particular for high costs.

“They typically don’t go to Biden and the Democrats,” Thau said. “They will say that it’s the pandemic and all the spending that came out of the pandemic. It has to do with supply chains. It has to do with Putin and Russia.”

When it comes to news consumption, the vast majority of these swing voters first turn to their local TV news stations, with CNN, Fox News and Facebook providing backup information.

And they typically know very little about federal policy debates. One group last fall was asked about the roughly $1 trillion infrastructure plan that had been approved just a couple of days before: No one knew about it. Another group could not name a single legislative policy that Biden was pushing on Capitol Hill at that moment.

On Tuesday night, Thau asked if anyone knew the abortion position of John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s critical Senate race. No one knew.

But the group clearly favored Fetterman, with nine backing him, two supporting Republican nominee Mehmet Oz and two undecided.

These swing voters may be unaware of Fetterman’s strong support for abortion rights but they loved his outsider persona in describing their feelings toward him: “Weed … different … tax evasion … unpolished … tall … plain-spoken.”

Seven of the 13 Pennsylvania swing voters said Fetterman’s stroke concerned them, but only three said it would factor into their vote. Most just wished him a speedy recovery.

“I’m concerned about his health for him. I don’t like these smear attacks,” said a 44-year-old from Lansdale, a northwest suburb of Philadelphia.

… [I]f those independents who decide these races have views similar to Thau’s focus groups, Democratic candidates have a chance to stand out on their own. These voters are “divorcing” their views of Biden toward midterm candidates and instead reviewing everyone closely, with their somewhat idiosyncratic measuring sticks.

“Biden is not what’s in their mind when it comes to voting. They’re not thinking about him and trying to punish Democrats or punish Biden because of what’s happening in the country” Thau said. “They’re looking at the people running for that office and who’s better.”

Hopeful? Maybe. All I can say is that my instincts tell me that people outside the cult are sick of the Trump drama and his inescapable presence hovers over everything. The election is a choice between more of that and … not more of that.

Echoes of Munich

So I read the opening paragraphs of this piece by Lawrence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut and assumed they were going to talk about the Elon Musk/Russia “proposal” and other demands that the US orchestrate an end to the Ukraine war by withholding all military aid and requiring Ukraine to allow Russia to keep the territory it has seized:

In the annals of successful political extortions, few rival the one that took place in Munich more than 80 years ago.

On September 29, 1938, two days before a deadline that Hitler had announced for invading Czechoslovakia, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain yielded and agreed to meet with the German chancellor. In the Bavarian capital, they signed a “nonaggression” pact that ceded the territory to Hitler without consulting the Czechs.

Hitler successfully bargained for something that wasn’t his (a piece of a neighboring nation) by agreeing to yield something that didn’t belong to him (the territory of other neighboring nations, which he agreed not to invade).

Eleven months later, Nazi Germany ignored the pact, invaded Poland and began the Second World War.

Right? It is certainly an apt analogy to what the west is being asked to do in Ukraine right now. (And, needless to say, up until five minutes ago “Chamberlain!” and “Munich!” were rallying cries for the last 75 years on the right whenever anyone suggested that the US not jump into wars around the world.)

But no. It’s not about that at all. It’s much less predictable than that:

Former President Donald J. Trump is mimicking Munich by leveraging claims to things that aren’t his (America’s national secrets) against something which does not belong to him (the public order, which he threatens to overturn).

On October 8, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt reported that in 2021, Trump sought to negotiate a deal with the National Archives by which he would return presidential documents (including some marked “top secret”) that he had spirited away to his beachfront resort at Mar-a-Lago. But Trump would only do so in exchange for the Archives giving him other government documents which he hoped to use to rewrite the history of his initial accession to the presidency in 2016.

Neither the documents he had stashed at his resort nor those he sought from the Archives belong to him.

The government materials he wanted were ones that he evidently failed to steal, but thought would serve his purposes. They were documents that he supposed would help clear him from suspicions still lingering from the Mueller investigation into his 2016 campaign’s involvement with Russia, suspicions he believed cast a public cloud over the legitimacy of his term in the White House.

What kind of leader or former leader seeks to exploit his place in the world and his power by leveraging assets that belong to the nation, not to him?

In Act II, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, Brutus offered one answer: “Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.” (“Remorse” in Elizabethan times meant “conscience” or “compassion.”)

Those qualities of character are lacking in the extreme narcissist: One who thinks that everything exists to serve his purposes. Such as America’s would-be caesar.

Experts who study disordered personalities understand that narcissists are pure transactionalists. The questions for them are not “What can make things better?” Or “What is fair?” But rather, “What’s in it for me?” As psychologists have written, “The life of other people is organized, controlled and bullied around the importance of the narcissist.”

For such disordered individuals, other people, other hearts, other interests do not exist. Nor is there any such thing as an asset that does not belong to the narcissist for purposes of trading so as to advance their own person.

We’ve long seen this pattern in Trump. He was impeached for it (the first time) in December 2019, for his effort to exploit the power he had seized by becoming president. In his “perfect call” to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump threatened to withhold from Ukraine hundreds of millions of dollars of congressionally-authorized military assistance unless Zelensky announced an investigation of Trump’s election rival, Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.

That aid was not Trump’s to hold back. Only a narcissist would think it was. And only a narcissist would be blind to the lethal consequences of withholding aid to a country in Ukraine’s position.

This is one of the most unusual comparisons to the “H’ man I’ve yet seen. It’s as apt as all the others. Add it to the list of similarities.

Techno-autocrats are moving into politics

This piece by Cheryl Rofer addresses the weird fact of Elon Musk’s entry into the discussion about Ukraine and Russia which I find somewhat terrifying. Who do these autocrats think they are?

Elon Musk, like many of his venture capital brothers, has decided to enter the discussion. His tweeted proposal of a peace agreement on October 3 repeated Russian conditions. Since then, he has blathered about the will of the people in the occupied areas (which he got stunningly wrong from stunningly inappropriate evidence) and introduced a new perfume. He has also threatened to turn off Starlink communications, which have greatly helped the Ukrainians. His proposal:

Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

Water supply to Crimea assured.

Ukraine remains neutral.

In between, there was a kerfuffle with Ian Bremmer over whether Musk had talked to Putin before he proposed this plan. Musk says he didn’t, but 1783, “Khrushchev’s mistake,” and the water supply to Crimea are oddly specific and oddly Russian.

Like many of the venture capitalists who are opining about the war, after a run of erroneous opining about epidemiology and virology because their money means they must be Smart People™, Musk doesn’t bother to look into what his conditions would require.

Rob Farley ticked off in our podcast a long list of what is needed to have fair elections in the annexed regions, all of which would have to be negotiated. It would probably take years. As would the rest.

The CNN article that broke the story about Musk’s demands attempts to figure what Musk is paying for it. It’s not clear. The article also raises the question of whether we are seeing Musk’s pique at the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany’s telling him to fuck off with the peace proposal. Others have asked whether this has something to do with Musk’s inability to raise the money needed to buy Twitter. Or if Musk’s generous initial provision of Starlink services to Ukraine was a bait and switch.

The incident also raises the question of whether an unstable and autocratic individual should have control of essential government and public functions, including Twitter. Ronald Reagan started a trend to “privatize” government services. It’s one thing if the cafeteria goes to crap under an outside contractor who is skimming profit that used to go to providing good food, and another if Elon Musk threatens to cut off defense services. Maybe it’s time to start turning back to government control of government services.

How about this guy, his former partner:

Peter Thiel is far from the first billionaire who has wielded his fortune to try to influence the course of American politics. But in an election year when democracy itself is said to be on the ballot, he stands out for assailing a longstanding governing system that he has described as “deranged” and in urgent need of “course correction”.

The German-born investor and tech entrepreneur, a Silicon Valley “disrupter” who helped found PayPal alongside Elon Musk and made his fortune as one of the earliest investors in Facebook, has catapulted himself into the top ranks of the mega-donor class by pouring close to $30m into this year’s midterm elections.

He’s not merely favoring one party over another, but is supporting candidates who deny the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election as president and have, in their different ways, called for the pillars of the American establishment to be toppled entirely.

Thiel’s priorities this midterm cycle have partly aligned with those of Donald Trump, with whom he has had an on-again, off-again relationship since writing him a $1.25m check during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Thiel, like Trump, has made it his business to end the careers of what he calls “the traitorous 10”, Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Four of these members opted not to run for re-election at all, and four more, including Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating January 6, went down in the primaries.

But there are also signs that Thiel is thinking around and beyond the former president. The lion’s share of his largesse – $28m and counting – has been directed towards two business proteges who, with his help, have established themselves as gadfly rightwing darlings: JD Vance, the best-selling author of the blue-collar memoir Hillbilly Elegy, who is running for Senate in Ohio, and Blake Masters, a self-styled “anti-progressive” and anti-globalist who is running for Senate in Arizona.

Over the past decade, ever since the supreme court dramatically loosened the rules of political campaign giving in its Citizens United decision, Thiel has placed sizable bets on candidates who are not only conservative but have sought to challenge longstanding institutional traditions and break the Republican party’s own norms: Senator Ted Cruz in Texas and Senator Josh Hawley in Missouri as well as Trump himself.

Masters, who has campaigned on the notion that “psychopaths are running the country right now” and spoken approvingly of the anti-establishment philosophy of the 1990s Unabomber, and Vance, a frequent speaker on the university circuit during his book tour days who now says “universities are the enemy”, fit the same mould. They and Thiel all have ties to a branch of the New Right known as NatCon, whose adherents believe, broadly, that the establishment needs to be torn down, much as Thiel and his fellow Silicon Valley disrupters believed two decades ago that the future lay in destroying longstanding business models and practices.

Thiel himself opined as far back as 2009 that he no longer believed democracy to be compatible with freedom and expressed “little hope that voting will make things better”. While a member of Trump’s presidential transition team in 2016, he flashed his institution-busting instincts by proposing that a leading climate change skeptic, William Happer, be appointed as White House science adviser. He also pushed for a libertarian bitcoin entrepreneur who did not believe in drug trials to head up the Food and Drug Administration.

Such proposals were too much even by Trump’s iconoclastic standards. Steve Bannon, Trump’s ultra-right campaign manager and political strategist, told a Thiel biographer: “Peter’s idea of disrupting government is out there.”

Thiel did not respond to a request for an interview, and his representatives did not respond to multiple invitations to comment.

Masters and Vance also did not respond to inquiries.

These techno-robber barons are even more arrogant than the originals. They all believe they are renaissance men, real Leonardo DaVincis, geniuses in every way. They are not. They have talents, to be sure. But these tech dudes are very one dimensional, almost puerile about everything else. God help this world if they represent our new leadership.

Tom Sullivan brought that clip to my attention today and I was reminded of what I wrote about this the day after he announced:

The GOP race for the presidency has been upgraded from a clown car to a three-ring circus with the official entry of Donald Trump into the race. After daughter Ivanka delivered a stirring introduction worthy of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill, the audience waited expectantly for the great man to appear. And it waited. And waited. Finally after several long moments, the great man finally emerged above the crowd on the mezzanine level of the glittering Trump Tower building waving as if he were Juan Peron (or the Queen of England). As Neil Young’s “Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World” continued to play over and over again, he then descended to the stage on an excruciatingly slow-motion escalator and began his speech by insulting his fellow Republican candidates for failing to know how to put on a competent political event.

It was a perfect beginning to what is going to be an astonishing political spectacle.

Right out of the gate he began to free-associate like a drunken Tea Partyer on 2 Shots For A Buck night, insulting Mexican immigrants by calling them rapists and drug dealers, asking when we’ve ever beaten China or Japan (!) at anything, declaring himself to be potentially the greatest jobs president God has ever created and more. Oh, and he also told us that he’s worth $8,737,540,000 — more or less. It was the best presidential campaign announcement ever, even better than Lindsey Graham’s.

The media seemed a little bit shell-shocked in the early going — perhaps they’ve never actually heard what the average right-winger believes. They seemed to find it noteworthy that he was incoherent and contradictory, with promises of totally free trade even as he said he would make Mexico pay a tariff to construct the Great Wall he envisions building on the border.

And they didn’t seem to know what to think about his endless gobbledygook about “making” the world do what he wants it to do. They are clearly unaware that members of the far right don’t follow the philosophy of Edmund Burke. They follow the philosophy of Glenn Beck, Joe McCarthy and P.T. Barnum. Not even Roger Ailes can control the way their minds work.

Donald Trump may not make sense to the average journalist — but to the average Tea Partyer, he’s telling it like it is, with a sort of free-floating grievance about everyone who doesn’t agree with them mixed with simplistic patriotic boosterism and faith in the fact that low taxes makes everybody rich. It’s not about policy or even politics. It’s about following your instincts. (“In your heart you know he’s right.”)

But it wasn’t long before Twitter lit up with insider jokes and insults among the Village press. Salon chronicled some of them here. The only one to take Trump seriously was Bloomberg News’ Mark Halperin, whose first impression was quite a bit less derisive than anyone else’s, giving him a solid B- on his tiresome political report card:

Substance: Made a concerted and admirable effort to laundry-list his presidential plans before the speech was finished, calling for the replacement of Obamacare, cautioning foreign adversaries about messing with the U.S., expressing opposition to the current trade bill, promising to build a southern border wall and sticking Mexico with the bill, terminating Obama’s executive order on immigration, supporting the Second Amendment, ending Common Core, rebuilding infrastructure, resisting cuts in entitlement programs. Still, left open too many questions about the hows and wherefores, given that he has never run for nor held office.

Best moment: Protracted run-up to formal declaration of candidacy was spirited and engaging.

Worst moment: Lost his rhythm a bit whenever cheerful supporters in the crowd tossed out helpful prompts or encouraging chants.

Overall: A madcap production–garrulous, grandiose, and intense—that displayed his abundant strengths and acute weaknesses. For the first time in decades, Trump is a true underdog, but his ability to shape the contours of the nomination fight should not be ignored. On the debate stage, through TV advertising (positive and negative), in earned media, and by drawing crowds, Trump has the potential to be a big 2016 player. He staged an announcement event like no other, and now he will deliver a candidacy the likes of which the country has never seen.

What is it they say about a stopped clock? Well, even Mark Halperin is right twice a day. The Villagers in general may not be able to see it — but for reasons about which we can’t even speculate, Mark Halperin is on to something when it comes to Donald Trump.

First, let’s dispense with the fact that his ideas are more bizarre than anyone else in the field. They are not. Say what you will about the Donald, but nobody can bring the wingnut cha-cha-cha like Tea Party fave Dr. Ben Carson:

“I mean, [our society is] very much like Nazi Germany. And I know you’re not supposed to say ‘Nazi Germany,’ but I don’t care about political correctness. You know, you had a government using its tools to intimidate the population. We now live in a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.”

This week’s latest poll actually shows him in first place.

Lindsey Graham often appears on television and breathlessly proclaims that we must stop ISIS “before we all get killed here at home!” Presumed top-tier Scott Walker makes so many gaffes you can’t count them anymore, including some doozies like musing publicly with Glenn Beck about shutting down legal immigration.

Compared to that, building a wall on the border is standard boilerplate on the right and it certainly isn’t hard to find candidates who are willing to demagogue China or Japan and claim that liberals have destroyed the American way of life. Trump’s style is colorful, to be sure. His ideas are disjoined and irrational. But they are hardly unique. In fact, he represents a very common strain in American political life: the right-wing blowhard.

Trump actually has something that none of these other candidates have and they’re pretty important. First, of course, is the money. Trump says he’s worth 9 billion. Let’s assume he’s exaggerating by 50 percent. That’s still a whole lot of money, more than enough to finance a presidential campaign for as long as he wants to do it. The Beltway wags seem to believe that he’s only announcing so that he can get himself into the debates but it seems more likely that he’s finally so wealthy that the cost of a campaign is so negligible he figures he’s got nothing to lose. After all, if he were to spend even a hundred million on the primary it wouldn’t make a serious dent in his bottom line. What else has he got to do?

But there is something else he has that may be even more valuable than money: stardom. I don’t think it’s possible to place a political value on the fact that Trump has had a prime-time network TV show for over 10 years with “The Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”

“The Apprentice” averaged 6 to 7 million viewers a show with finales sometimes getting between 10 and 20 million viewers. Last year’s “Celebrity Apprentice” averaged 7.6 million a show. Fox News’ highest rated shows rarely get more than a couple of million viewers and they are all elderly hardcore Republicans. The Donald has a wider reach and might even appeal to the most sought-after people in the land: non-voters.

It’s impossible to know if that’s a serious possibility. But it’s fair to say that many more people in the country know the name of Donald Trump than know anyone else in the race (with the possible exception of Jeb Bush). It’s hard to quantify that kind of name recognition but it’s certainly not worthless in our celebrity-obsessed culture. And remember, Trump would not be the first show business celebrity who everyone assumed was too way out there to ever make a successful run for president. The other guy’s name was Ronald Reagan.

Obviously, Trump is no Reagan. But he does bear a passing resemblance to another wealthy presidential gadfly who wasn’t taken seriously by the political cognoscenti: Ross Perot. 1992 featured a Republican incumbent who was widely considered a shoo-in for reelection and a Democratic Party offering up a long list of people who were trying out for what was assumed to be the next opening in 1996. When Perot appeared on the scene with his quirky style and his facile prescriptions for the nation’s intractable problems (“I’ll get under the hood and fix it”) nobody thought he was more than a flash in the pan. But he ended up getting 20 percent of the vote in the general election — and that was after a couple of epic implosions that had undoubtedly eroded much greater support.

So far, Trump is running as a Republican and there’s no reason to think he would go third party as Perot did. But if he had the slightest encouragement, can anyone think he wouldn’t? After what he said about his fellow Republicans today, it certainly doesn’t appear that he cares what they think.

Sure, Trump is a clown. But he’s a very rich and a very famous clown. And he’s really not much more clownish than many of the current contenders or some serious contenders in the past. It’s interesting that the one time Mark Halperin deviates from the conventional wisdom he may actually have seen something more interesting than the rest of his cohort: the fact that Donald Trump has the potential to be a serious 2016 player. And that says everything you need to know about the Republican presidential field and the state of our politics today.

Agreed. It never ceases to amaze how much this lie gets repeated without question. Trump literally escalated every theater of combat he inherited and added a few new ones.

Trump surged Trumps in Afghanistan, he massively upped bombing there too as well as Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. He escalated war in Yemen including special forces raids days into office. He assassinated an Iranian govt official nearly bringing us to war a few times…

Remember those troops who got killed in Niger? Oh yeah that was under Trump too. He threatened war with North Korea and Venezuela and may have supported a bonkers paramilitary attempted invasion of the latter. Am I missing anything?

Oh yeah, HE WANTED TO NUKE A HURRICANE. But sure, he said he was antiwar and if you negate nearly everything he did as President and judge him as to whether he let Erdogan talk him into leaving Syria and drawing down in Afghanistan to basically where he found it then ok.

Originally tweeted by Stephen Miles (@SPMiles42) on October 15, 2022.

The idea that the violent, hostile Donald Trump was some kind of a peacenik is ridiculous. It always has been. His idea of peace is to scream, “mess with me and I’ll blow you to smithereens!”, kiss up to tyrants and insult all our allies. It’s a miracle we didn’t have a terrible accident as a result.

That people with good sense will get power

And that they will have the patience and strength to survive faux-patriot Real Americans™.

Julia’s not Nancy Pelosi (i.e., real), but she ain’t takin’ it.

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Herschel flashes debate audience

TMZ lays down the backstory:

Herschel Walker showed up to his Georgia Senate debate Friday, expecting barbs from his opponent, incumbent Raphael Warnock … but ended up getting a scolding from the debate’s moderator for intentionally breaking the rules with a seemingly bogus badge.

The two shared the stage in Savannah to mix it up before the election next month, and when someone asked a question about policing, Warnock pivoted into an accusation aimed at the former Georgia Bulldog star running back.

“One thing I have not done … I’ve never pretended to be a police officer,” the Senator said,  “And I never threatened a shoot-out with the police.”

Warnock’s accusations were met by applause and cheers from the crowd, so a flustered Walker tried to cut in.

“You know what’s so funny?” and the 1982 Heisman winner flashed what appeared to be a fake police badge … “I am with many police officers, and at the same time…”

The debate moderator cut him off, sternly and sharply called him out … “You have a prop. That’s not allowed Sir! … You’re very aware of the rules, aren’t you?”

Warnock was referring to Walker’s claims of being a cop when in reality he’s an “honorary deputy” in Cobb County, a distinction former DeKalb County district attorney J. Tom Morgan told WaPo was nothing more than a “political token” that holds no power.

“When I served on the Torrance City Council, I was provided a cool badge. But that doesn’t make me a police officer any more than a stethoscope makes you a doctor,” tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat.

The QAnon Shaman (a.k.a. Jacob Chansley) drew a 41-month prison sentence for tresspassing in the Senate chambers on Jan. 6 and occupying the seat of the President of the Senate.

Peach State Republicans hope to send a Georgia Bulldog with a memento deputy badge in Chansley’s place.

There is no bottom.

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Baby chimp super fun edition

Chimpanzees are critically endangered. It just breaks my heart.

Take a look at Liz Truss

Will she last longer than a head of lettuce?

On Thursday, just 37 days after being appointed British finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng was asked if, in a month’s time, he would still be in his job and Liz Truss would still be prime minister.

“Absolutely, 100 percent,” Kwarteng answered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Less than a day later, he was gone. Truss’ Friday removal of Kwarteng—her closest ideological ally—from the second most powerful role in government so soon after choosing him to run the British economy is easily the worst humiliation among a cavalcade of catastrophes to hit Truss’ administration since it took over from the disgraced Boris Johnson slightly over a month ago.

“You have asked me to stand aside as your Chancellor,” Kwarteng wrote in a letter Truss which he shared on Twitter on Friday. “I have accepted.”

After praising Truss’ “vision of optimism,” Kwarteng added: “We have been colleagues and friends for many years. In that time, I have seen your dedication and determination. I believe your vision is the right one.”

“Your success is this country’s success and I wish you well,” the letter concludes.

Kwarteng’s rapid downfall began with his “mini-budget” delivered on Sept. 23. The statement—which set out a radical reimagining of British economic policy in line with a radical right-wing agenda—included the biggest cuts to U.K. taxes in 50 years while also guaranteeing energy prices. It also included scrapping the cap on bankers’ bonuses, as well as getting rid of the top rate of tax—a policy which would only benefit the richest earners.

As well as being despised by the electorate, financial markets reacted to the unfunded proposals with horror. The pound collapsed to an all-time low against the dollar and the Bank of England was forced to take emergency action to prevent total ruin for pension funds.

Kwarteng and Truss were forced into making an embarrassing U-turn on dropping the top rate of tax earlier this month. “We get it, and we have listened,” Kwarteng tweeted as he announced the 180.

But as economic chaos continued to roil Britain’s finances, speculation built this week that Truss and Kwarteng would have to overturn even more of their calamitous mini-budget. Kwarteng was supposed to stay in Washington, D.C., for an International Monetary Fund summit but flew back to London a day early as the crisis mounted.

His sacking makes him the second shortest-serving U.K. finance minister in history. The shortest was Iain Macleod, who died of a heart attack just 30 days after starting the job in 1970.

With her policy agenda destroyed, Truss will now attempt to replace Kwarteng and cling onto power—possibly by turning to the policies of her Conservative leadership rivals who said her plans would lead to the catastrophe she now finds herself in. Unsurprisingly, opposition lawmakers and even members of her own party are already demanding that Truss resigns.

The question will now turn to how long she can hold on.

A scathing article in the Economist this week concluded that her grip on power ended with the mini-budget, and that when accounting for “the ten days of mourning after the death of Queen Elizabeth II” which overlapped with Truss’ first days in power, the prime minister actually only enjoyed around one week in power.

“That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce,” the piece said. And as news broke on Friday that Kwarteng was returning to Britain early, the Daily Star newspaper setup a satirical livestream of a lettuce withering in real time, asking “Can Liz Truss outlast this lettuce?”

I’m betting no. Has there ever been a more disastrous first month of a world leader? And she was given a gift of the Queen’s timely death, raising all kinds of patriotic emotions in the public, which she promptly burst with her cockamamie economic plan. I’d say she’s gone before Christmas.

Update: Maybe not past Halloween