Month: July 2023

Last fall as we were all girding ourselves for the impending “Red Tsunami” and contemplating what it was going to do to the remains of the Biden agenda, I wrote that we should be prepared for Revenge of the MAGA cult and recognize that it was inevitable that the Republicans were going to try to impeach Joe Biden. At that time Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene had already filed five impeachment resolutions against him and it was well known that Donald Trump would not be very happy if the new Republican majority didn’t issue payback for the two impeachments on his record.

One of the resolutions she filed on Biden’s very first day in office claimed that he had tried “to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.” That was, of course, based upon the bogus Ukraine scandal that prompted Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Nothing would be more satisfying to Trump than for Biden to be impeached for doing what Trump did when he attempted to blackmail the President of Ukraine into smearing Biden.

The then presumptive new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a staunch Trump acolyte, was asked by Punchbowl News before the mid-term election if would pursue the president’s impeachment and he replied:

I think the country doesn’t like impeachment used for political purposes at all. If anyone ever rises to that occasion, you have to, but I think the country wants to heal and … start to see the system that actually works.

Clearly that whole “system that actually works” thing didn’t pan out so McCarthy is predictably signaling that they are ready to go ahead with an impeachment inquiry. He told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Monday:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Monday night said the House's investigation into the Bidens is "rising to the level of impeachment inquiry." pic.twitter.com/uMFXWA9JSj

— The Recount (@therecount) July 25, 2023

This was always going to happen. As Barton Gelman presciently wrote in the Atlantic before the midterm election:

[T]here is little reason to think that McCarthy can resist the GOP’s impulse to impeach once it gathers strength. He is a notably weak leader of a conference that proved unmanageable for his predecessors Paul Ryan and John Boehner. If he does in fact reach the speakership, his elevation will be a testament to his strategy of avoiding conflict with those forces.

The chaotic and inane House “investigations” into President Biden’s son Hunter and the screaming outrage about the alleged “sweetheart deal” for paying his taxes late and lying on an application to buy a firearm have been leading this way for some time. The notorious laptop, an informant’s unverified statement that Joe Biden was in the room when Hunter was making business deals, another informant who is on the lam from the DOJ, and IRS whistleblowers who say that the Trump appointed US Attorney was hamstrung by the Justice Department from throwing the book and Biden’s son are, so far the extent of “evidence” if you want to call it that, that they’ve produced. The DOJ refutes these charges and that US Attorney is expected to testify when congress comes back into session.

The details of all these investigative threads are opaque but highly suggestive, consisting of unproven speculation, dubious sourcing and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. But that’s the point. It’s Republican scandal-mongering 101. If you rapidly throw volumes of incomprehensible minutia into the media ether and deliver it with breathless intensity, you can make the public believe that even though they may not understand what it’s all about, there must be something to it or everyone wouldn’t be talking about it.

Donald Trump is the biggest megaphone and he has dubbed Biden “Crooked Joe” and is calling him the most corrupt president in history and repeatedly slandered his family as the “Biden Crime Family.” It may seem as if he’s lost his touch, re-purposing that nickname from “Crooked Hillary” and the GOP’s long standing use of the term “Clinton Crime Family” but he knew what he was doing. He was drawing on all those years of character assassination of Bill and Hillary Clinton and wrapping Biden in them like cozy old sweater.

And he is pushing McCarthy hard to not only impeach Biden as soon as possible but also “expunge” his impeachments which would almost certainly, in his mind, mean that he can go into the election claiming that Biden was impeached and he wasn’t. (You know that’s how he thinks, right?)

This strategy is starting to work, and you know this by the fact that it’s not longer just the usual suspects who are flogging the scandals. Some high profile GOP Trump apostates are getting in on the action to. We saw former New Jersey Gov. and presidential candidate Chris Christie on Face the Nation this past weekend on the alleged “sweetheart deal” for Hunter Biden:

On the Hunter Biden plea agreement on tax and gun charges, @ChrisChristie tells @margbrennan, "I don't think it's time to move on.” Christie says the U.S. Attorney in Delaware's work "appears to be incompetent and inexplicable” and he “owes the American people an explanation." pic.twitter.com/yiM4Z4gJzI

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 23, 2023

Far be it from me to second guess a presidential candidate and former U.S. Attorney but I was under the impression that prosecutors didn’t reveal all the details about investigations in which they didn’t charge someone because it’s not fair to smear people with innuendo and suspicions of wrongdoing for which there isn’t adequate evidence. But apparently, that doesn’t apply to the sons of presidents.

Christie has at least, to his credit, also raised the question of how Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner got a 2 billion dollar sweetheart deal from the Saudi Investment Fund which is much more than the Republicans in congress have done.

Then we have No Labels supporter and former GOP Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan with this startling comment:

We have two very unpopular potential nominees, and both of them potentially face very serious legal troubles. An overwhelming majority of Americans are looking for something else when given the choice between Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or neither, most pick neither. pic.twitter.com/Q8S57q8oc7

— Governor Larry Hogan (@GovLarryHogan) July 21, 2023

This is the first time I’ve heard anyone suggest that Biden might be facing “serious legal troubles” much less that they might be on par with Trump, who is under two indictments currently and possibly facing at least two more. Hogan did retreat a bit later when pressed by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki who pointed out that Hunter Biden isn’t in the government and that any equivalency between Trump and Biden in terms of “legal problems” is false.

It’s lucky for Biden that the credibility of most of his antagonists is so tattered that people who aren’t already in the fold aren’t likely to buy into it. Speaking of serious legal problems:

Rudy Giuliani who supports the twice-impeached, twice-indicted, sexual predator disgraced ex-president Trump says Biden should be impeached immediately:

“a criminal, should not be in the White House.” pic.twitter.com/BesNsCmTHU

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 25, 2023

According to CNN, Speaker McCarthy has been in close consultation with a former House Speaker who is telling him it’s time to strike. That would be the Newt Gingrich who, when he was Speaker, pushed the Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton — whose approval rating hit an all time high the day he was impeached. It lost Gingrich the Speaker’s gavel and he had to resign from congress over it. It sounds like he’s following that same script today and McCarthy is taking his advice.

No wonder Joe Biden smiled when he was asked about it on Tuesday.

Biden smiles as reporters ask him about McCarthy’s push for an impeachment inquiry pic.twitter.com/xznSewL6NG

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 25, 2023

Salon

You’ll note that New Hampshire voters pick Vivek Ramaswamy as their dream president over Ronald Reagan too…

He posted this rambling screed from Congressman Mike Davis:

They all sound like him now.

This is what he spends most of his time posting, however:

I guess this is what’s known as campaigning in the Republican Party these days.

The all-circus, no-bread party

Polling suggests (as I wrote earlier) that Americans really don’t get that things are looking up for them economically. Inflation is down — down by 44% — from last September. Unemployment is at record lows in many states, the lowest in 54 years in February. What Republicans cannot afford is for voters to notice.

So it’s culture wars a-go-go (Politico):

Republican policy riders seeking to limit diversity efforts, drag shows, Pride flag displays and promotion of critical race theory are rife throughout the House’s dozen proposed annual spending bills, including those that would fund the national parks, pay for roads or maintain U.S. embassies abroad.

The cascade of social issues turning up in the must-pass bills is noteworthy for how it’s pervaded this year’s appropriations process — and for how the GOP concerns have spread far beyond top-tier conservative causes such as limiting abortions and gender-affirming care.

And liberal groups are keeping score: Of the 12 bills moving through the House appropriations process in recent months, policy riders targeting agency diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have appeared in 11, according to tracking from Human Rights Campaign. Language seeking to ban “discrimination” against people who do not believe in gay marriage appeared in 10. Eight sought to block funding for Pride flags and gender inclusive care. Three took aim at drag shows.

That’s not exactly bringing home the bacon, is it? But it’s all they’ve got. Endless culture war.

“We just are continuing to spiral downward with more and more partisan rancor,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), an 18-year veteran of the committee, during a markup of the transportation, housing and urban development spending bill last week.

Republicans have maintained that they’re only responding to Democrats’ efforts to use government power to move the country to the left.

Democrats are instead working to move people’s standard of living up.

Cultural grievance has been a sure-fire vote-getter for the GOP for years. But how long will it be before their voters realize they can’t eat it?

The banks know it. Why don’t more Americans?

Those folkloric man-on-the-street (or in a rural diner) puff pieces are as infuriating as they are uninformative. They do, however, reinforce false, often minority, impressions of what’s really happening in the country, Timothy Noah argues in The New Republic. Misinforming tales abound (his mock example): “People Believe Stuff That Isn’t True, but They Feel Like It Is True, So Let’s Give Them a Hearing Because We Don’t Want to Seem Elitist.”

Outlets such as The Wall Street Journal regularly hand Joe Everyman a megaphone and let him expound on microchips in vaccines, schoolteachers “trying to turn your children gay or trans,” and the crappy Biden economy that isn’t. Given a platform, uninformed views steer public opinion by making the wrong seem right.

Polling later confirms that people think the economy sucks. It doesn’t. Ask Morgan Stanley. The firm was “obliged to nearly quadruple its previous estimate of gross domestic product growth for the first six months of 2023” and double “its GDP growth prediction for October–December 2023, to 1.3 percent, and predicts 1.4 percent growth in 2024.”

“We have now reached the point where the Wall Street titans on whom Biden wishes to raise taxes maintain a higher opinion of Biden’s economic stewardship than the public at large,” Noah wryly observes.

But you won’t find that out by asking the red-hat in the diner.

How voters feel about the economy has more to do with partisanship than reality, Noah writes. Raw public polling on Bidenomics is meaningless without examining the party affiliation of respondents.

For example:

In 2016, Gallup polled voters on the economy one week before the election and one week after. During the week preceding the election, with President Obama in the White House and Hillary Clinton widely expected to win, only 16 percent of Republicans thought the economy was improving, compared to 61 percent of Democrats. One week after the election, fully 49 percent of Republicans suddenly thought the economy was improving, compared to only 46 percent of Democrats. Note how much greater this postelection swing was for Republicans: 33 percentage points, compared to 15 for Democrats. 

Huh? Noah suggests, “Republicans were twice as mindlessly partisan as Democrats when they opined about economics. My unscientific guess is that the spread has gotten much wider since then.”

Very likely. Last week’s Monmouth poll found public opinion split on Biden’s handling of the economy (47 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove). But studying the crosstabs for the partisan split renders those figures near-meaningless.

The inescapable conclusion is that when you ask somebody whether the economy is doing well, you won’t get an answer about the economy. You may not even get an answer about that individual’s personal experience (which may or may not reflect broader economic trends as compared to one, two, or 10 years ago). Most of the time, you’d be better off just asking, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” Because these days, that determines how people—especially Republicans—feel about pretty much everything. If the man on the street sounds like a blowhard, hyperpartisanship explains why. The rest is just noise.

Fine. Now what?

We do not counter the fact that the platformed uninformed spread misinformation by carping about bad or slanted coverage. And yes, the right has the bigger media megaphone. But as Anat Shenker-Osorio points out, many people form their opinions by listening to what people in their communities think. They get a finger-in-the-air sense of what’s normal. The way to counter misimpressions is by reinforcing your normal, by spreading your view of the economy at every casual opportunity. Not with statistics but with your own man-on-the-street testimony.

Anand Giridharadas explains in this clip from a longer YouTube.

A quote from Bill McKibben’s 2005 “The Christian Paradox – How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong” has stayed with me on how uninformed opinion works to warp perception. He was writing about American Christianity, but the distinction between the Christian right and the Republican right today is also near-meaningless:

The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.

Guess where authoritarian Republicans want to lead this country?

This is from Axios the font of all beltway CW. It’s about time:

Republicans are hammering “Joe Biden’s America” as a land of rising violent crime, surging immigration and out of control inflation, but there’s just one problem: the numbers are starting to move in the opposite direction.

The big picture: With 2024 around the corner, the U.S. is making measurable progress in the areas where Biden has been most vulnerable to GOP attacks.

Violent crime surged in U.S. cities during the pandemic and ranked as a top concern for voters in the 2022 midterms.

Republicans slammed Biden and Democratic leaders for rising crime rates, and many Democrats started embracing a more centrist approach to policing.

Homicides were down 9% in the first half of this year over the same period last year, according to a study of 37 major cities from the Council on Criminal Justice.

State of play: Violent crime rates are generally down across the board, thought they’re still higher than 2019 levels.

Meanwhile, illegal border crossings dropped to the lowest level in over two years in June, the first full month under Biden’s new, restrictive asylum rule, which makes it much harder to attain asylum.

That policy replaced a pandemic-era policy enabling rapid expulsion of migrants, and was sharply criticized by immigration advocates and some Democrats as something out of former President Trump’s playbook For now, though, it seems to have helped stave off an expected summer spike in migrants crossing the southern border.

What to watch: A pending court ruling may threaten the relative calm at the border. And even with border numbers plummeting, House Republicans have pushed forward with their effort to impeach Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas over the “illegal immigration crisis.”

Arguably the biggest factor driving voter discontent has been inflation, which made consumers feel lousy about the Biden economy, despite otherwise favorable economic and job market conditions.

Now, as inflation retreats, there are signs of a shift.

Consumer sentiment, as measured by a long-running survey conducted by the University of Michigan, is the highest in two years — a jump “largely attributed to the continued slowdown inflation along with stability in labor markets.”

It’s even worse than we knew

Rolling Stone catches up with more Jason Aldean racism:

JUST WHEN YOU thought there couldn’t possibly be anymore dog whistles embedded in the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” saga, an intrepid, sharp-eyed TikTok user has potentially picked out one more.

Amazingly, this incident doesn’t involve the song itself, or even its controversial video — part of which was reportedly filmed outside a courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, the site of a 1933 lynching (and features a surprising amount of footage from Canada). Rather, it involves a promotional video shared on TikTok. It’s a largely innocuous lyric video with a newspaper theme, but as TikTok user Danny Collins discovered, there’s an actual old newspaper clipping featured in the video — and it’s tied to a Jim Crow-era story about a writer who was harassed for fighting segregation and white supremacy. 

@dannyfcollins Thank you to my followers who tag me. All I’m saying is lets get real. To everyone supporting Jason Aldean what else do you need to see or hear? Accept accountability and do better. #fyp #endracism #jasonaldean ♬ original sound – Danny Collins

The clipping in question appears around the eight second mark of Aldean’s TikTok. Collins was able to trace it back to an Aug. 30, 1956 article in The Petal Paper, a weekly paper out of Petal, Mississippi (an actual small town, unlike, say, Macon, Georgia, where Aldean grew up). The Petal Paper was run by Percy Dale East, who frequently delivered satirical broadsides against segregation, racism, and white supremacy. (Rolling Stone was able to confirm Collins’ findings.)

The clipping featured in Aldean’s TikTok refers to the most famous incident in The Petal Paper’s history: In March 1956, East published a full-page ad calling out the White Citizens Council, a network of white supremacist groups that had formed a few years prior. The ad (which you can see on the Smithsonian website) featured a caricature of a mule and “promoted” an upcoming “Glorious Citizens Clan” meeting, where attendees were promised the “freedom” to yell racist slurs and “be superior without brain, character, or principle!” 

The satirical ad actually went proto-viral, with East republishing it a few times himself and licensing it to papers not just in the U.S., but across the world. There was, of course, a lot of backlash, too — and the Aug. 30, 1956 clipping featured in Aldean’s TikTok finds East responding to some it.

Specifically, East addressed the the allegation that he was serving as “the local mouthpiece” for groups like the NAACP, the Republican Party (this is pre-Southern Strategy realignment), or “other monied interests.” East even offered up a $1,000 reward to anyone who could prove he had any ties to any groups (outside of the Methodist Church, “to which I was at one time a member,” he joked), stating, “I do not represent anything or anyone except myself.”

Below that notice, East printed a letter exchange with a man named Don Gross, who said he worked as a public relations consultant for the NAACP. Gross praised East for running the ad, but dryly noted: “I hope I am not congratulating a dead man. This must have taken courage and I hope you are still with us.”

n response, East offered up a few more details about how the people of Petal had responded to his satirical ad, saying he and his wife received numerous threatening calls filled with racist language. He also said he’d lost over 200 subscriptions and suggested there was “something resembling an organized effort to stop advertising with my paper.” (This part of the clipping is not featured in Aldean’s TikTok.)

A rep for Aldean did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment regarding how the Petal Paper clipping wound up in the country star’s TikTok video.

Aldean has rejected the interpretation of “Try That in a Small Town” as pro vigilante or “pro-lynching.” Instead, the musician released a statement saying he believes the song “refers the feeling of a community that I had growing up, where we took care of our neighbors, regardless of differences of background or belief.

He knew what he was doing.

Annie Lowrey in the Atlantic had an interesting take on why so many people are unhappy in this booming economy:

Dr. Dre on the radio, The Matrix on the big screen, The Sopranos on TV: The year 1999 was wonderful for many reasons, including economic ones.

That year, the median household income rose to a record level, a watermark that held for nearly two decades. (The average American family was poorer when Donald Trump was running for office than when Bill Clinton left office.) Wages were growing across the board—all kinds of workers were getting consistent raises. Productivity growth was strong. Wealth inequality was holding steady and far lower than it is today. The poverty rate hit its lowest point in years.

I could go on and on with the hard statistics: The share of workers with a college degree was climbing. The homeownership rate was booming. The stock market, booming. Consumer confidence was the highest it has ever been. The share of people employed was the highest it has ever been. Investor optimism was the highest it has ever been. The share of Americans saying the country was going in the right direction—also the highest it has ever been.

Things just felt like they were going well and getting better. High-quality televisions were becoming ubiquitous; cellphones beginning to replace pagers. The share of homes with a computer and an internet hookup was exploding, and the web was promising to change everything.

Now: Earwormy TikTok blips on the radio, warmed-over superheroes on the big screen (at least until Barbenheimer), Peak TV drowning us in okay content: 2023 is blah for many reasons. Roughly half the country thinks we’re in a recession or about to be in one. Consumer confidence is down, as is investor sentiment. Inflation is weighing on American families.

But I’m here to tell you that this is the best economy ever. Really. This year’s economy has now outpaced that of 1999, the previous best on record. It is growing more equitably than it has in years. American families are more financially secure and wealthier than they ever have been. Things are going great, I swear.

The labor market is flourishing, and not just for rich folks for once. The unemployment rate is at its lowest level in 60 years—jobs are more plentiful than they have been in a generation. Competition for workers has not only pushed earnings up—median household income is sitting near its brand-new high, one that is $6,000 higher than it was in the late 1990s. It has also pushed earnings up more for the lowest-paid workers than the highest-paid workers. The past three years have erased a quarter of the run-up in wage inequality created in the past four decades. Real wages for the lowest-paid workers are growing faster than they have since the 1960s. The country’s wage structure is getting more equal, not less.

Arindrajit Dube, a labor economist studying this “unexpected” phenomenon, told me that the country’s “job ladder” had broken about 20 years ago: Workers in crappy jobs found themselves stuck in those crappy jobs, unable to move up. “Starting around 2018 or 2019, you start to see the tight labor market bring back some health and dynamism,” he told me. “People are making more changes. The Great Resignation, the Great Reshuffle, whatever you want to call it—it means the market is working better. And it’s allowing people to leave jobs that are really bad.” As a result, workers report feeling more satisfied with their jobs now than at any point since the 1980s, and 4 million more people have full-time jobs (and 1.6 million fewer people have part-time jobs) than before the pandemic.

Improvements in earnings, along with the stimulus payments the government made during the pandemic, have helped lift millions of families out of poverty. The child-poverty rate has fallen from 12.5 percent to just 5.2 percent over the past three years. That’s the lowest level ever recorded. The share of people living in deep poverty and near-poverty has declined, too, and food insecurity is at its lowest-ever rate.

Bigger paychecks are helping middle-class families buy houses and build wealth. The homeownership rate was increasing faster than it ever had, until interest rates spiked a year ago; families in the lower half of the income distribution are more likely to own their homes now than at any point since the real-estate bubble burst in 2006. Most Millennials own property; the generation is starting to catch up with Gen Xers and Boomers in terms of net worth and household formation.

The economy has also delivered extraordinary gains for Black Americans. The jobless rate for Black workers is near a historic low, and the gap between the unemployment rate for white workers and Black workers is the smallest it has ever been. Black workers’ earnings are increasing rapidly too.

Measured in all sorts of more esoteric ways, American families are doing the best they ever have. The delinquency rate on loans is the lowest it has ever been. Real disposable income is the highest it has ever been. The personal-bankruptcy rate is at an all-time low.

So we have to ask: Why aren’t we partying like it’s 1999?

She points out that inflation has freaked people out and they aren’t seeing the lowering prices just yet. And then she points this out which I haven’t thought of before:

Then there is something I like to call the Wrong-Apartment Problem. The country’s big cities have added far too few housing units over the past few decades; now even rural areas have shortages. By one estimate, roughly half of Americans would live somewhere different if supply met demand; New York would be eight times as big as it is now, and San Francisco five times as big. Renters spend a larger share of their income on housing than they did in 1999, and rents have grown by 135 percent, whereas average incomes have grown just 77 percent. The country has an affordability crisis, with health care, child care, and rent eating up huge shares of family budgets.

Yet these statistics still underplay just how bad the situation is. People don’t spend what they can’t afford, and pretty much nobody can afford what they want anymore. Yes, we have more income, more disposable cash, and a better standard of living than at any other point in our history. But millions of us can’t live in the neighborhoods we want. We’re stuck in too-small, too-far-away accommodations, giving up on the dream of having a second bathroom or a third kid. This is why you get all the social-media nostalgia for the economic conditions of the 1950s, when many Americans still lacked indoor plumbing, but at least could live in Brooklyn or Somerville or San Francisco on a reasonable salary. We’re all stuck in the Wrong Apartment.

I think that’s huge. I don’t know how people are managing this problem in these populated areas. It’s very daunting.

She goes on to point out that inequality is still a big problem and I have to say that the profligate spending of the super rich is enough to make anyone feel depressed. These people have way too much money. And needless to say the political situation in this country sucks. That we’re even thinking of putting that orange monster back in the White House is enough to drive you to drink.

But the housing problem for average people is a major problem in the cities and all along the coasts and if it doesn’t right itself I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

If Trump wins the WH again, get ready to go backwards

Axios reports:

A reelected Donald Trump could pull several levers to try and pare back federal policies aimed at speeding the transition to electric vehicles.

Why it matters: EVs are becoming more mainstream, but they’re still a small share of U.S. car sales, and President Joe Biden has been keen to juice deployment.

Catch up fast: Trump, the GOP frontrunner, released a video late last week that, among other things, bashed EV costs. He vowed to reverse what he called a “ridiculous Green New Deal crusade.”

Trump’s seeking auto workers’ votes in competitive states like Michigan, at a time when the United Auto Workers leadership is skittish about EVs.

The big picture: It’s hard to see the votes for outright repealing the Democrats’ climate law or the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, even if Republicans have both chambers of Congress after 2024.

Yes, but: Trump would hardly be powerless.

Zoom in: His campaign released a list of proposals alongside the video. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but let’s explore some of those and other ways he could alter policy.

Trump’s vowing to kill the EPA’s brewing tailpipe CO2 emissions rules. The agency sees bringing EVs to 67% of U.S. light-duty sales by 2032.

Reversing a completed rule is time-consuming and legally fraught. One wrinkle: if the final rule was still tied up in court when Trump took office, his administration could decline to defend it.

A Trump-led Treasury Department could take a more restrictive view of how many EV models qualify for consumer purchase subsidies up to $7,500.

The climate law tethers tax credits to key battery materials sourced, processed or recycled domestically or from free-trade partners. But Treasury has wiggle room in the interpretation.

The Biden administration has also been crafting mineral-specific trade agreements with some countries that could be altered.

A Trump administration could make it harder to access funding streams and manufacturing incentives in the climate and infrastructure laws.

For instance, the infrastructure law has $7.5 billion for building out EV charging networks, but the money is doled out over multiple years.

State of play: Trump’s policy agenda comes as rapid EV growth in recent years is showing signs of slowing.

EVs were 7.2% of U.S. sales in Q2, down very slightly from Q1, per Cox Automotive.

The bottom line: The move toward EVs is too far along to kill as automakers embracing them commit billions of dollars and expand their lineups. But Trump could alter how fast the tech is adopted.

This is a man who ran for president whining about low flow toilets and complaining that it takes too long to wash the Tres Semme out of his hair in the shower. (He actually just complained about the shower flow but we all know what the problem is don’t we?) He is going to do everything he can to exacerbate climate change because he believes that he’s the worlds greatest environmentalist because he says he wants clean air and water. In fact, he brags that during his term we had the cleanest air and water in the history of the world.

This cannot happen. We re in a state of crisis which this summer’s heat domes are showing in living color. People need to sober up and understand that electing tee-totling moron because we’d liketo have a beer with them or because they are the best insult comics is going to kill life on this planet.

It appears that COVID is not going to be a big issue in the 2024 election and perhaps we should be grateful for that. It was only three years ago that the entire world was in a health crisis the likes of which we hadn’t seen in over a hundred years. In July of 2020 tens of thousands of Americans were dying each day in the first wave of a deadly pandemic and President Donald Trump was all over television alternately telling the people that they could cure themselves with unapproved drugs like Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin or telling them that the virus was going away and the economy needed to just open up and carry on as usual. It was a terrifying time and the trauma it caused has been very deep. 1.1 million people have died from COVID in the U.S. so far leaving many more family members and friends dealing with the grief and the loss.

It’s only recently that it has felt like the country is getting back to normal with the economy fully recovering and a sense of freedom in our business and social interactions. But we may have changed permanently in some respects and not necessarily for the better. The conspiracy theories that sprang up during the pandemic about vaccines and masks and a sense of mistrust in public health and science in general are having a pernicious effect on our society in ways that are going to test us in the future especially now that they have become part of the right’s tribal identity.

It’s odd that the main purveyor of vaccine misinformation today isn’t a Republican, it’s the son of one of the most beloved Democrats of the 20th century, Robert F. Kennedy. RFK Jr’s perverse Democratic primary campaign is based almost entirely on the same anti-science, anti-government conspiracy theories that are being pushed by Republicans. Slick operators like Steve Bannon are advocating for Kennedy and he’s been featured all over right wing media for months now. Congressional Republicans even called him before congress to testify that his views have been censored for political reasons. (It was quite the show.) And it’s mostly Republicans who are financing his campaign.

Kennedy is not a serious candidate and basically serves as a performance artist for the entertainment of the right wing which thinks it’s owning the libs by promoting him. But the COVID politics of 2020 just aren’t playing in the GOP primary and it’s highly unlikely to be a big issue in the general election.

Florida Gov. DeSantis’s primary campaign is floundering for many reasons but one of them is his bet that he could successfully attack Donald Trump from the right on his pandemic response. He staked a good bit of his reputation and image on the fact that he supposedly ran the best COVID response of any state by ignoring the Trump administration’s allegedly draconian lockdown policies. The ongoing anger among Republicans over that was going to show him to be more Manly than MAGA but it isn’t working out that way.

Rolling Stone reports:

Six different Republican operatives, campaign officials, and pollsters described or shared with Rolling Stone internal data and surveys they’d conducted or reviewed last and this year…Across the board in the surveys, Covid-related policy — including vaccines and vaccine mandates — did not rank as an item of high concern for voters. That held true even when voters were specifically given the option of Covid policy when asked about their concerns.

DeSantis’ rise was predicated on his alleged refusal to order lockdowns and his defiance against vaccine mandates. But he’s gone full-blown anti-vaxx since then. As recently as December he requested that the Supreme Court of Florida empanel a grand jury investigation “to investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the Covid-19 vaccine.” That’s right — “crimes and wrongdoing.”

And his campaign has hit Trump hard for the one thing he did right in his COVID response which was to sign off on operation Warp Speed to develop the vaccines as quickly as possible. Ironically, Trump isn’t allowed to take credit for that accomplishment because his followers are anti-vaxx so he’s had to allow DeSantis to attack him for it. The good news for Trump is that nobody cares.

The rest of the country should care, however. Both of these men are world class phonies when it comes to their leadership during the pandemic. They each claim they were heroes for forcing businesses to open up when the truth is they were never really closed down. It’s only in the fevered minds of those intent upon seeing the pandemic as some kind of political act, that any of the mitigation efforts were draconian assaults on our individual freedoms.

MSNBC’s Ari Melber hosted a special recently revisiting Trump’s COVID response based upon his taped interviews with Bob Woodward, who released them with a book called “The Trump Tapes.” Listening to the excerpts of the interviews it became clear once again just how irresponsible and reckless Trump was in his handling of the crisis. It was all about how it was affecting his re-election campaign. In an echo of his refusing to concede the election despite all the legitimate legal election experts telling him that he’d lost, he also ignored all the science and medical experts who informed that COVID was going to kill vast numbers of people unless he mustered a rapid federal response. Trump just refuses to listen to anyone or hear anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Perhaps the most telling moment of the tapes is when Woodward asks him if he considered the crisis his greatest test of leadership and he instantly replied, “no!” He was wrong. It was. And he failed.

Likewise Ron Desantis’ vaunted response was also a miserable failure. The NY Times analyzed the data on his state’s results and they are not good. DeSantis pushed for vaccinations for people 65 and older early on but started going the other way once they were approved for younger people and then instituted a crusade against mandates for health workers and cruise ship employees effectively undermining the accepted public health approach to a pandemic. Florida ended up with many fewer vaccinated people when the big Delta wave hit and the consequences were severe:

Floridians died at a higher rate, adjusted for age, than residents of almost any other state during the Delta wave, according to the Times analysis. With less than 7 percent of the nation’s population, Florida accounted for 14 percent of deaths between the start of July and the end of October.

He too was planning for his presidential campaign and wanted to be on the side of the emerging anti-vaxx sentiments on the right, no matter how many people had to die.

Both of these men were serving as executive leaders during a time of great crisis and peril. And they both cravenly and cynically put their political ambitions ahead of their duty to protect American citizens. Whatever promises they make about the future we already know who they are and what they will do as leaders. They failed their test and disqualified themselves for high office ever in the future.

Salon

Tim Miller with a word for the pundits who think Tim Scott or Nikki Haley are running in a real primary:

THERE’S ANOTHER WORLD out there—one that’s better than ours. In this world there are two healthy political parties waging vigorous primary campaigns with vibrant debates between factions and these factions have genuine disagreements over what policies will best serve our fellow Americans. I don’t begrudge anyone aspiring to build such a world. I don’t even begrudge those who have chosen to live in a blissful state of disreality and disconnect from politics entirely, rather than face the Super Not Great world we do live in.

But I would expect professional political commentators, and donors shelling out millions in campaign cash, and the political strategists receiving that cash, to live in the real world. 

Alas this is not the case. Instead we have a heavily capitalized right-wing ecosystem that exists to prop up an imaginary Republican presidential primary so that the participants can feel better about their party identification. This way they can do business with Republican politicians or chew the fat at the club without feeling icky at having to admit that their Grand Old Party has become something dark.

In this imaginary primary, some people are wondering if Tim Scott might surge to the top. Highly unlikely! Others are looking longingly at Glenn Youngkin and chattering among themselves about whether or not he might perform better than DeSantis.

In this fake primary there are several candidates using creative strategies to figure out how to make it onto a debate stage. Yet should they succeed, they do not plan to use that stage to directly challenge the person beating them by 50 points in the polls. (If he even bothers to show up.) Some people in this fantasy world are even talking about Rick Scott running for president. Yes that Rick Scott! The one with the inverted endo- and exoskeletons.

But most absurdly, the “professionals” who are running these fantasy campaigns are haughtily dismissing Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the few candidates who is participating in the real primary since he has actual support among the MAGA Republicans who will decide the winner. 

HERE ARE A FEW anonymous svengalis quoted last Thursday in a Semafor article titled “Vivek Ramaswamy is rising in the polls. His rivals don’t seem to care.”

“Vivek is like the fajitas that go by you at the restaurant,” one advisor on a rival campaign told Semafor. “They make noise, look exciting, and come on the fun plate. But if you order it, it’s too much, too annoying to assemble, and you wish you just ordered tacos.”

Another advisor on a rival campaign noted that Ramaswamy has “barely raised any money outside of what he donated himself,” and predicted the 37-year-old’s campaign “will fizzle out”—adding he’d ultimately see success in the form of “increased book sales and inflows into his investment products.”

First things first: If I were a candidate I would immediately fire anyone who revealed themselves to be too lazy to assemble fajitas. But moreover, this analysis is just totally wrong. And unless these anonymous hacks work for Trump or DeSantis, the fajita man they are dismissing is currently kicking their ass.

Nikki Haley’s Super PAC put this nonsense on the record in a memo to donors saying “Let’s be honest, there’s only four candidates who can win the nomination: Nikki Haley, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Tim Scott.”

Are you sure you want us to be honest, Mark Harris, the lead strategist for the Haley PAC? Because I suspect you can’t handle the actual truth. But here goes.

If there really are only four candidates who can win this primary, then Nikki Haley sure as hell isn’t one of them. 

THERE ARE TWO REASONS these strategists can pull the wool over donors’ eyes with these phony arguments: 

(1) All parties involved in this exchange deeply wish that the fantasy world existed.

(2) They are hermetically sealed off from what is happening in the real primary. 

Do you think Mark Harris or the big donors funding Haley have ever been to a Trump rally? Do you think they watch Greg Kelly Reports? Do you think they have any close friends or colleagues who genuinely believe Joe Biden is a fraudulent president? Because I don’t. And those are the people in the real primary. 

As I wrote last week in a  profile of Candace Owens, in the media outlets consumed by the MAGA voters who will decide the nominee, candidates like Haley are just apparitions. They’re barely even talked about. 

The real campaign among actual voters is essentially between Trump and DeSantis, and right now it’s a blowout. Other than that, these voters are most intrigued by two long-shot options—Vivek and RFK Jr. In the real primary the competition is intense. But Scott, Haley, Youngkin, Will Hurd, and the rest aren’t involved.

For example, last week the MAGA web was on fire debating some highly charged fissures in the real primary. First there was a rare cogent point from the frontrunner in a straight-to-camera video in which he mocked DeSantis for changing the pronunciation of his name to “Dee-sanctus” in the middle of the campaign (something we have also noticed).

Then there was the influencer beef where one Trump supporter called former Trump lawyer and now DeSantistan Jenna Ellis a “stupid cow” and a “thundercunt.” There was also a fiery back and forth over Daily Wire host Michael Knowles’s claim that DeSantis surrogates were harming their candidate’s cause by being too mean to poor Mr. Trump. Oh, and there was a debate over the merits of a new national poll that showed Vivek and “Rod” tied for second place. (The DeSantis team convincingly argues the poll was put out by grifters, though that doesn’t really explain another poll showing Vivek closing fast.) 

That’s the real primary. Tainted polls, vile accusations, Vivekmentum, and unidirectional Trump/DeSantis slap fights. 

The voters who are consuming that information will be the ones who decide if Donald Trump is nominated by this party for a third time. If some unanticipated “event” upsets the apple cart (if, for example, there is an artery-clogging, well-done cheeseburger of destiny between now and Iowa), these voters still won’t turn to the candidate in a half-zip sweater whom Karl Rove is trying to anoint at a confab in Sun Valley. 

There are honest, well-intentioned reasons to run for president without expecting to win. Chris Christie seems to be doing it because he wants to kick Trump’s ass and eat Hardee’s and he’s all out of Hardee’s. Good on ’im. In 1996, Steve Forbes wanted to raise the salience of the flat tax—not my cup of tea, but it was a good-faith effort on behalf of an issue. In 1984, Jesse Jackson wanted to show that his “Rainbow Coalition” had a real constituency and he succeeded.

But that’s not what any of the non-Christie pretenders are doing this time. They are trying to convince the world (and themselves) that once GOP voters get serious in a few months things will go back to normal. They’ll keep on pretending that this is a normal party having a normal primary right up until the moment they are forced to get in line behind the most abnormal, abominable major-party nominee in our nation’s history. 

Here’s the reality: The only *serious* people involved in this primary are the ones who see their fantasy for what it is. 

Nearly every conversation, memo, and piece of analysis that comes from the donor-class fantasy campaign isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. And everyone except the consultants building a new pool house off their McMansion would be better served if the money going to write those memos were instead redirected to food-insecure youth who have been forced to become vegetarians.

And to be really honest, the primary is over. Donald Trump has been the presumptive nominee since January 21, 2021. The rest of it is really nothing more than a death watch.