Month: August 2023

It’s ultimately up to the American people

During the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump repeatedly said that the electoral process was rigged. After losing the Iowa primary caucus he declared that Sen Ted Cruz had stolen it and tweeted, “based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” That was just the beginning. Throughout the general election campaign he refused to say if he would accept the results , even in a televised presidential debate in October. He finally told his followers that he would accept the vote count — but only if he won — and they responded with rapturous adulation. Even when he won the electoral college he refused to accept the popular vote results and formed a commission to prove that the numbers were fraudulent. (It came up empty, of course.)

So, it was no surprise that he spent most of the 2020 election casting aspersions on mail-in voting and planting the suspicion that the election was going to be stolen from him.

remember: https://t.co/EXTyrCfGAt

— bread, ribs, $100 bills (@no_cut_card) August 1, 2023

It’s not like he kept it a secret. We always knew he would never accept the results of an election unless he was the victor. So when he came before the cameras in the wee hours after election day 2020, as the votes were still being counted, and declared that there was something wrong with the election and that he won in a landslide, it was almost anti-climactic.

What followed, however, was anything but predictable. We knew he would whine and cry and declare the election was rigged but I don’t think anyone knew how far he would go to manipulate the system and break the law to stay in office anyway.

Yesterday, Donald Trump was indicted by the Special Counsel investigating the January 6th insurrection on four felony charges: obstruction of an official proceeding (the certification of the presidential election on January 6th), and conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy to deny voting rights.

If you wonder what the significance of this indictment might be in contrast to the other cases pending in various venues throughout the country, Former Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC:

This is a momentous legal event. It’s the most significant legal event of our lifetimes, one of the most significant legal events ever in the history of this country. It is up there with Marbury vs Madison, Brown vs Board of Education, Dred Scott as a defining case for the times… This indictment lays out a case that a guy who was president of the United States while he was president of the US leveraged his office, used his power to thwart the will of the people in the most solemn thing they do in our country, vote… this is the biggest constitutional crime in our history.

He was the only one indicted but six unnamed co-conspirators are accused of helping him do it, five of them lawyers and one a political operative. The five lawyers are assumed to be Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro. The identity of the political operative remains obscure.

Those of us who followed the January 6th Committee hearings and read its final report are familiar with the narrative laid out in the indictment. Trump and his henchmen cooked up several different plots to pressure local Republican election officials to change the vote count in his favor, create a fake set of electors from the close swing states, have the Justice Department send out letters erroneously suggesting the feds had found fraud and then strong arm the Vice President to defy the Constitution and refuse to count the legitimate electoral votes on January 6th.

The indictment has a few new details, such as the fact that even after the violence, as the congress was preparing to reconvene to certify the election near midnight, one of Trump’s co-conspirators emailed the Vice President, saying “I implore you to consider on more relatively minor violation [of the ECA] and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount o illegal activity that has occurred here.” After the violent insurrection in which Trump’s inflamed followers stormed the capitol during a joint session and chanted “hang Mike Pence” this person (assumed to be conservative constitutional scholar John Eastman) had the audacity to beg the VP to knowingly break the law — but just a little bit. (That plan, incidentally, was also pushed hard by Senator Ted Cruz.)

The assumption among the TV lawyers is that the co-conspirators were not indicted in order to move the case along more quickly and that some of them may well be indicted separately or are cooperating with the investigation. Giuliani appeared on television last night to defend his honor:

Rudy Giuliani on Trump: "I cooperated against him? Like hell I did." pic.twitter.com/Uhe5Z2OV6L

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 2, 2023

To be honest, Giuliani may not even know that he cooperated. He’s pretty far gone.

There is a lot of gnashing of teeth that federal trials aren’t televised and demands that someone do something about it so that the nation can watch the most important political trial in our history. That seems like an excellent idea but apparently it would come down to a decision by Chief Justice John Roberts so I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The good news is that we did have an excellent presentation of the facts and the narrative from the January 6th public hearings so it’s not as if we are fully dependent upon the press to report them from the court room.

Regardless of the outcome of this trial, even if they manage to get it done before the election next year, I think we may have to face a disappointing truth. In a normal, healthy democracy a candidate in this much trouble would drop out of the race, either because of a need to focus on the legal problems, pressure from the party or perhaps even a sense of shame. None of that applies to Donald Trump, the front runner for the Republican nomination who has vowed to stay in the race no matter what. Judging by the initial commentary from the right wing media, these charges aren’t going to make a bit of difference.

In the end, we are dealing with a great irony. Donald Trump is under indictment for trying to steal an election but he may very well be given absolution for his crimes by the free and fair electoral system he has demeaned and degraded ever since he entered politics. The half of the country that still believes in democracy and rule of law will be hard pressed to keep the faith if that happens. What would be the point?

Salon

“If we get this right … a safer and more secure” world

After Tuesday’s monumental third indictment of the immediate past president, perhaps a palate cleanser.

Over the weekend, President Joe Biden, the president actually chosen by the America people in November 2020 visited Maine to talk about his administration’s progress on the economy. But it wasn’t his public remarks you need to read, it’s Heather Cox Richardson’s account of Biden’s remarks at a private reception in Freeport. Biden views change as a challenge, not something to run from but to embrace:

Biden talked again about the world being at an inflection point, defining it as an abrupt turn off an established path that means you can never get back on the original path again. The world is changing, he said, and not because of leaders, but because of fundamental changes like global warming and artificial intelligence. “We’re seeing changes… across the world in fundamental ways. And so, we better get going on what we’re going to do about it, both in foreign policy and domestic policy.” 

“Name me a part of the world that you think is going to look like it did 10 years ago 10 years from now,” he said.

But Biden went on to make the case that such fundamental change “presents enormous opportunities.” 

He began by outlining the economic successes of his administration: more than 13.2 million new jobs—including 810,000 jobs in manufacturing—inflation coming down, and so on. He attributed that success to his administration’s embrace of the country’s older vision of investing in workers and the middle class rather than concentrating wealth at the top of the economy in hopes that the wealthy would invest efficiently. The administration focused on infrastructure and manufacturing, using measures like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act to jump-start private investment in new industries in the U.S. 

Then he turned to foreign affairs. “Does anybody think that the post-war eras still exist, the rules of the road from the end of World War Two?” he asked. The Atlantic Charter of August 1941 that defined a post–World War II order based that world on territorial integrity, national self-determination, economic growth, and alliances to protect those values. It was the basis for most of the postwar international institutions that have protected a rules-based order ever since.

But the world has changed, Biden said. In recognition of the new era, in June 2021, Biden and then–U.K. prime minister Boris Johnson signed a “New Atlantic Charter” to update the original. The new charter renews the U.S. commitment to the old one, then resolves “to defend the principles, values, and institutions of democracy and open societies,” and to “strengthen the institutions, laws, and norms that sustain international co-operation to adapt them to meet the new challenges of the 21^st century, and guard against those that would undermine them.”  

Yesterday, Biden noted that his administration has shored up alliances around the world, just as he called for at the State Department back in February 2021 and in the New Atlantic Charter of June 2021. It helped to pull Europe together to support Ukraine against Russia’s 2022 invasion, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “is stronger today than it’s ever been in its existence.”

The Indo-Pacific world is changing, with new alliances coming together to hold firm on the idea of a rules-based international order. Biden has supported “the Quad”—India, Japan, Australia, and the United States—to stop China from changing that order, and other countries are taking note, shifting toward support for that order themselves. Did “anybody ever think Japan would increase its military budget over its domestic budget and help a European war on the side of the West?” Biden asked. “That’s what it’s doing. It’s changing the dynamic significantly.”

“The world is changing in a big way,” Biden said. “And we want to promote democracies…. [T]here is so much going on that we can make the world…a lot safer and better and more secure.”

“So…if you think about what’s happening, there is a confluence, if we get this right, of both domestic economic policy and foreign policy. [It] can make [us] safer and more secure than we’ve been [for] a long, long time.”

For all that his talk was a heartfelt recap of his presidency, he emphasized that the key to those successes has been democratic institutions. Referring to President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s reference to the United States as “the essential nation,” he attributed the leadership of the United States in world affairs not to its military might or economic power, but rather to its ability to create and defend alliances and, crucially, institutions that aspire to a rules-based world that works for, rather than against, ordinary people.

“Who could possibly bring the world together?” Biden asked. “Not me. But the President of the United States of America. Who could do it unless the President of the United States does it?  Who? What nation could do it?” His vision was not the triumphalism of recent presidents; it reached back to the 1940s, to the postwar institutions that helped to rebuild Europe and create lasting alliances, and expanded that vision for the twenty-first century. 

He recognized that U.S. policies have caused damage in the past, and that the country must fix things it has broken. “We’re the ones who polluted the world,” he said, for example. “We made a lot of money,” and now the bill has come due. 

And while the nation’s postwar vision was centered on majority-white countries, he emphasized that the modern world must include everyone. “[T]here’s a whole lot at stake, he said, “And I think we have an opportunity. And one of the ways we make life better for us is make life better for the rest of the world. That’s why I pushed so hard for the Build Back Better initiative to build the infrastructure in Africa…and in Latin America and South America.” 

Biden noted that the strength of the U.S. is in its diversity. “I said when I got elected I was going to have an administration that looked like America.” He noted that there are a higher percentage of women in his Cabinet than ever before—more than the number of men—and that he had appointed more Black appellate court judges to the federal courts “than every other president in America combined.” He did this for a simple reason, he said: “Our strength is our diversity. It’s about time we begin to use it.” 

“[T]he whole world is changing,” Biden said, “But if we grab hold,” he continued, “[t]here’s nothing beyond our capacity.” 

Compare that with the MAGA movement’s retromingent vision for returning America to the last century if not the one before that.

Trump indicted for efforts to overturn 2020 election

“You’re too honest.”

Then-President Donald Trump (the Defendant) berated Vice President Mike Pence on a January 1, 2021 phone call for resisting his plan to seek a court ruling stating that “the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution.” So alleges special counsel Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment (gifted article) of Trump on three conspiracy charges and one for obstruction of an official proceeding.

• 18 USC 371 (conspiracy to defraud the US)
• 18 USC 1512(k) (conspiracy to obstruct the vote certification)
• 18 USC 1512(c)(2) (obstructing the vote certification)
• 18 USC 241( conspiracy to violate civil rights)

Along with Trump the indictment references six unnamed co-conspirators. Unnamed because they have not yet been charged, several are obvious from details in the indictment, Co-Conspirators 1 through 4 being Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Jeffrey Clark. The Washington Post identifies appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro as Co-Conspirator 5. The sixth is described as a “political consultant” involved in helping implement Trump’s fake electors scheme.

The Smith indictment draws heavily on the work of the House January 6 Committee but includes more detail than was public previously. In particular, Pence’s contemporaneous notes taken during the period after Trump lost reelection to Joe Biden in November 2020 will be featured evidence in the trial. The indictment details how the conspiracy unfolded across several states Trump’s allies contested.

Trump lies reflexively. Everyone not in his thrall knows that. The “unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Smith told reporters, was “fueled” by those lies. Smith’s indictment dials in on that behavior, stating that “for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Thus was born the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election that resulted in hand-to-hand combat and death at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A violent insurrection. A failed coup.

But Smith’s strategic decision is not to charge Trump with the insurrection but with the conspiracy that led to it and his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and to disenfranchise voters. Trump will stand trial alone. Smith wants “a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens.” The six unnamed co-conspirators will face trial separately or together, once charged. Smith’s investigation into other individuals is ongoing.

Perhaps most shocking is evidence that then-Department of Justice official (Civil Division) Jeffrey Clark was prepared to accept violence in the streets if Trump remained in office, and for Trump to put it down with U.S. troops.

“Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Even in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol violence, co-conspirators attempted to keep the coup plans afloat (Para. 119). Giuliani left a voice message that evening urging a senator to slow down the certification proceedings. Eastman (Para. 122) at 11:44 p.m. “emailed the Vice President’s Counsel advocating that the Vice President violate the law and seek further delay of the certification.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes remarked on the magnitude of the alleged crimes Tuesday evening, describing them as “in the canon of American events” along with the Civil War.

“This is the greatest political crime since secession,” Hayes added. “And the gravest test, that Lincoln called on the battlefield in Gettysburg of whether a nation of, by, and for the people, that we are our own masters, whether that can long endure.”

“If the law is not for this, what is it for?”

What has endured is the bitterness of the Confederacy’s defeat. With the end of Reconstruction came the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Southern efforts to reduce freed Black people to serfdom, if not de facto slavery, included a reign of white terror and Jim Crow laws that endured for another century. Monuments to Confederate heroes planted across the land by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spread the myth of the Lost Cause. Their memorials to violent insurrection endured into the second decade of this century. Many still remain. Confederate battle flags feature prominently in Trump rallies and entered the Capitol with rioters on Jan. 6.

What endures in many “freedom-loving” conservative souls is a not-so-latent hunger for a monarch. Indeed, evangelicals are taught from childhood to yearn for the return of Christ to reign as king over the Earth. Every knee shall bow, etc. In Trump, they found one.

Woman at the Trump rally today says she supports “King Jesus and King Trump.” pic.twitter.com/fIrhe82Pn5

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 29, 2023

Karl Marx believed that the internal contradictions of capitalism would eventually destroy it. Perhaps what Lincoln saw in a Southern aristocracy willing to tear the country apart to preserve their medieval society was the latent tension between Americans’ monarchist impulses and their aspirations for democratic self-government. Trump’s attempted coup was the latest test of whether the latter might yet prevail. In an age of rising autocracy, that testing continues.

Do not expect that MAGA Republicans will not, as they have already begun, weave a new Lost Cause myth. They will paint prosecution of the coup conspirators, their foot soldiers, and “King Trump” as a betrayal as bitter and unjust as the War of Northern Aggression. One hundred years on, the ancestors of those who fought at the Capitol will romanticize them as true patriots.

He’s not happy…

Remember this?

The Republicans and Fox News are talking about virtually nothing but this story that Hunter Biden put his father on the phone during some dinner parties with his clients. Of course that was influence peddling and it’s always been as shady as it is ubiquitous among wealthy elites.

But please. Nobody on the planet ever did it more blatantly than Trump. He refused to divest himself of his international business while he was president and his sons ran the thing! His White House advisor son-in-law delivered to powerful interests in the middle east in exchange for 2 billion dollars to be paid out upon his departure from government. There has never been a more corrupt president in US history. Not even close.

Here’s that India story from 2018 in case you forgot:

Donald Trump Jr. arrived in India on Tuesday for a week-long visit, and his trip has already revealed a couple of things.

First, it’s clear that the Trump administration is still embroiled in huge conflicts of interest. And second, it’s evident that the Trump brand, though toxic at home, commands surprising power in the world’s second most populous country.

President Trump’s eldest son will be spending his time in India promoting Trump-branded luxury apartments across the country. He’ll be meeting with real estate brokers and potential buyers throughout the week in his family business’s biggest market outside the US.

He’s also offering a special reward to Indians who buy property from him: He’ll join them for an intimate meal.

Indian newspapers have been running advertisements that promise homebuyers willing to pay a roughly $38,000 booking fee an opportunity to “join Mr. Donald Trump Jr. for a conversation and dinner.”

Government ethics experts in the US are appalled by that prospect, and say that the arrangement encourages Indians — especially those with ties to India’s government — to use purchases of Trump-branded property as a way to gain favor with the Trump administration.

“For many people wanting to impact American policy in the region, the cost of a condo is a small price to pay to lobby one of the people closest to the president, far away from watchful eyes,” Jordan Libowitz, the communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Washington Post.

Trump Jr.’s India visit also highlights something else: While Trump’s polarizing presidency has put a dent in his domestic businesses, it doesn’t seem to have damaged his reputation in India. In fact, the Trump brand seems to be chugging along quite nicely there.

How the Trump family is profiting from corruption

Trump Jr.’s visit to India not only suggests that the Trump Organization wants to lean into its investments in India — it almost seems designed to invite corrupt behavior.

Experts say Junior is selling access to himself — and by proxy, to the president of the US — in exchange for buying his products. He knows that if a member of the Indian elite wants a chance to advocate for a policy that they’d like to see enacted, buying Trump property is a simple way to do it.

But what makes it crystal clear that Trump Jr. wants to use his political ties to advance his business interests is the fact that he’s planning to deliver a speech on Indo-Pacific relations at an event in India on Friday. (It’s a serious affair — Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be speaking at the same summit.)

Unlike his sister Ivanka, Trump Jr. is not a formal member of the White House. He’s technically just a businessman running the Trump Organization on behalf of his father.

But by delivering a foreign policy speech, Trump Jr. is signaling to Indians that he’s in their country as a businessman and as a surrogate for the US government. If any wealthy Indians were on the fence about whether it was worth buying a condo just to talk to Trump Jr. about, say, trade policy, the fact that he’s delivering that speech should make it seem worthwhile. Trump Jr. is sending a clear signal that he wants to talk policy.

And since he is deliberately blurring the lines between his role as a businessman and as the son of the president, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to conclude that President Trump’s foreign policy could be for sale to the highest bidder.

The Trump brand is hurting in the US, but it’s hot in India

Back in the US, Donald Trump’s pivot to politics seems to have hurt a number of his businesses.

The Trump Organization saw a 3 percent decline in revenue during the 2016 campaign and the early months of the Trump presidency.

And during the past year, a number of Trump’s businesses — particularly those in blue states — appear to have taken a substantial hit. For example, attendance at his golf courses in the Northeast and on the West Coast has declined, with a double-digit drop in revenue at his course outside of Los Angeles.

In New York City — Trump’s hometown — the Trump brand seems radioactive in some quarters. In November, the residents of a Manhattan condo complex voted to have Trump’s name removed from three buildings. A Trump-branded luxury condo building on Manhattan’s West Side is currently suing for the right to do the same thing — although a Trump Organization lawyer has threatened to countersue if the building tries to do it.

According to CityRealty, a real estate website that tracks market data, between November 2016 and November 2017, the average price per square foot for condos sold in 11 Trump-branded buildings dropped by 7 percent compared to the year before.

But surprisingly, the Trump brand has far brighter prospects in India.

Currently, the Trump Organization is overseeing five projects in India, making it the largest international market for the company. In India, as in many other places, the Trump Organization strikes licensing deals with local building partners. It sells its name to the partner to boost the profile of a building and then gets a cut of the profits.

Since 2014, those licensing deals in India have resulted in payments that range from $1.6 million to $11 million, according to the Washington Post.

The Trump Organization gets a bigger chunk of money when Trump-branded property sells above market rates — and that appears to be happening. According to the New York Times, many units are currently selling at 30 percent per square foot higher than market rate.

Pankaj Bansal, director of the real estate firm M3M India, told CNN in January that he can sell Trump-branded apartments for more than other luxury real estate because the brand is so hot in India.

“It’s all about status symbols,” Bansal said. “People want to be able to say: ‘Come, let’s go have a drink at the Trump Tower.’ That’s what we’re trying to tap into.”

Trump appeals to India’s conservatives and growing pool of wealthy elites

Experts say the Trump brand is thriving in India in part because Trump himself appeals to large swaths of the population, both for his politics and for his perceived business acumen.

“[Trump is] popular on the right, especially among supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the current ruling party in India, who admire his Islamophobic rhetoric and blunt nationalism,” Aditya Dasgupta, a scholar of Indian politics and economics at the University of California Merced, told me.

The Trump administration has spoken highly of its partnership with India and taken aim at India’s major rivals over the past year. Trump announced that he was suspending military aid to Pakistan in January and is on the path to a trade fight with China after criticizing its practices for years — moves that make India feel better about its own ties to the US.

A Pew Research Center survey released last fall found that Trump’s approval rating in India was about twice his approval rating in other countries in the region like Japan and Indonesia.

But Trump’s popularity among Indians also stems from the way he symbolizes wealth and power.

“India has a rapidly growing and prospering urban middle and upper class, which often looks aspirationally to American society for symbols, brands, and status markers to emulate,” Dasgupta explained. “It’s no surprise that the Trump brand, and the conspicuous consumption it is meant to signal, would attract buyers.”

Niranjan Sahoo, a senior fellow with the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi, told me the Trump Organization is also reaping the benefits of taking a gamble on India’s market. He said that many other foreign companies have stayed away from India’s real estate market due to concerns about corruption and bureaucracy.

“The Trump Organization has taken a sort of risk, which is now paying off, particularly after Trump became president,” Sahoo told me.

And they have the nerve to create a scandal out of Hunter playing on his daddy’s name. You just can’t make this stuff up…

JV Last at the Bulwark points to a column by Noah Smith, a centrist (ish) economist who just can’t find a good reason to say that the Biden economy is terrible:

[H]ere’s economist Noah Smith struggling not to praise Biden—and failing—in a post titled: “If this is a bad economy, please tell me what a good economy would look like.”

I do not want to be a shill for the Biden administration. Yes, I like most of what Biden is doing on industrial policy. But I really want to resist being one of those center-left pundits who always just blasts out the latest press release of a Democratic administration and trumpets how many jobs the President has “created”. . . .

And yet when I look at how the U.S. economy is doing right now, I find it difficult to describe it in terms that allow me to avoid sounding like a shill. I know lots of Americans still think the economy is doing poorly, and are upset about that. But when I look at objective measures, I just can’t rationalize that negative viewpoint. Because as far as I can tell from the actual numbers, this economy is doing really, really well.

Here’s Noah again:

What do we want from the macroeconomy?

We want employment to be high, meaning that as many people as possible who want jobs can get them.

We want inflation to be low, so that people have certainty about how far their paycheck and their savings will go in the future.

We want real incomes to rise, meaning that we’re able to consume more than we could in the past, or save more if we want to. . . .

Basically, this is the whole list. . . .

And when we look at the objective numbers, they are great.

Smith goes on to give detailed explanations of the employment, inflation, and real income indicators—go read the whole thing—before trying to put Biden’s accomplishment in perspective:

This economy isn’t just good; it’s impressive

Anyway, this is all very good news. But I want to point out how improbable and surprising it is, from a macroeconomic standpoint. The basic theory of macroeconomics — still, in this day and age — includes the idea of the Phillips Curve. That means that when the government takes action to reduce inflation — raising interest rates, cutting deficits, etc. — it’s supposed to reduce real income growth and employment. There’s supposed to be a tradeoff there!

And yet instead there seems to have been no tradeoff at all. OK, maybe the Fed’s rate hikes just haven’t had time to work their way through the system yet — maybe 1.5 years isn’t enough. Maybe we’ll still eventually get that recession that everyone was forecasting up until a short while ago. But so far it looks like we’ve managed a macroeconomic miracle — bringing inflation down without damaging the real economy noticeably. . . .

This is a remarkable achievement. Who gets the credit? Because we don’t really know how macroeconomics works, we can’t actually give a definitive answer to this. Some of it was probably luck. . . .

But there’s a good argument for U.S. policy doing a lot here too. We’ll probably never know just how much the Fed’s rate hikes were responsible for taming inflation, but to think that rates can go from 0% to 5.5% with no effect would be quite an assumption. . . .

There’s also the financial side of things. Remember that a large-scale collapse of financial institutions very reliably causes economic downturns — 2008 being the most dramatic example. This could have happened in the U.S. banking system last year — rate hikes put a lot of banks in danger, and a few mid-sized regional banks like Silicon Valley Bank actually failed. But the FDIC, the Fed, and the Treasury stepped in and guaranteed bank deposits and provided emergency loans, and the banking crisis that lots of people were predicting never materialized. In fact, financial conditions in the U.S. actually improved after SVB’s collapse! . . .

In addition, the Biden administration might have had something to do with low oil prices. Biden released a bunch of oil from the strategic petroleum reserve back in 2022, and teamed up with Europe to put a price cap on Western purchases of Russian oil that may have allowed China and India to negotiate lower prices as well. Biden also mended fences with Venezuela and encouraged U.S. companies to start investing there again, which is starting to bring that country’s production back on line after a long hiatus. Remember that a drop in oil prices is a positive supply shock, which economic theory says should boost growth while also reducing inflation — i.e., exactly what we’ve seen over the last year or so.

And finally, there’s the investment boom. The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are spurring a ton of private investment in semiconductors and green energy . . .

[I]t seems fairly likely that this is making a positive impact right now. Morgan Stanley and other banks think it’s having a major impact, in any case. . . .

So although I always stress that the President has a limited impact on the economy, there are several reasons — oil policy, bank rescues, and industrial policy — that I feel inclined to give Biden some credit for the economy’s surprisingly stellar performance. Not all, but some.

While we’re all doing back flips to account for the public’s unrelenting negativity (*cough* the media *cough*) the numbers don’t lie.

Trump’s own words are being used against him. Again.

We’ve mostly forgotten about the Manhattan hush money case but it’s chugging along. Here’s the latest:

The Manhattan district attorney seeking to jail Donald Trump over his hush money payment to a porn star is seeking to potentially weaponize the same piece of damning evidence that nailed the former president at his rape trial: the deposition where he said stars like him get away with sexual harassment “unfortunately—or fortunately.”

It’s now up to a federal judge to decide whether those prosecutors can get a video that shows Trump at his worst: unapologetic about sexual assault, uttering misogynistic comments, and willing to lie to the American public to save his own skin.

It’s a testament to the breadth of Trump’s legal problems that we’re witnessing the collision of two totally separate cases: a civil defamation case about rape and a criminal case about a cover-up. And it all comes down to a closed-door question-and-answer session Trump had on Oct. 19, 2022.

That shocking testimony first came out in a federal courtroom in May in New York City, where jurors ultimately decided that Trump did indeed sexually abuse the journalist E. Jean Carroll decades ago. In the video, the former president talked about his previous gloating that he could grab women “by the pussy”—and answered whether he felt that the rich and famous could get away with it.

“Historically that’s true with stars. If you look over the last million years, that’s largely true, unfortunately—or fortunately,” he said, later adding that he considers himself a star.

At the time, the video stunned those in the federal courtroom, going a long way to show how Trump remained defiant about his predatory sexual behavior. He called Carroll a liar and viciously attacked her female lawyer. At one point, he told the attorney, “You wouldn’t be a choice of mine either.”

Now, the Manhattan DA wants that video for his own criminal investigation.

According to court records, Manhattan prosecutors plan to use it to show the way Trump “dealt with allegations of a sexual nature,” which could get them closer to proving that he was desperate to keep the lid on bad news that could have sunk his 2016 campaign.

It shouldn’t be too hard. He’s on record calling many of the many women who have accused him of assault liars, scam artists, you name it. This deposition is just one piece of such evidence — he’s repeatedly said it on twitter and television.

The LA Times’ Jonah Goldberg discusses the idea that Republicans are hooked on victimization, believing that they are under siege by powerful forces that are destroying their way of life:

Among his core supporters, about 37% of the party according to a breakdown of the poll by the New York Times’ Nate Cohn, literally nobody thinks he committed any crimes and 94% think the party needs to rally around him against these presumably bogus charges.

[…]

 If the Republican establishment forces were as powerful as Trump and his voters think, they’d be able to do something about it. If the Deep State were half as formidable as they think, Trump would never have been president in the first place.

But large segments of the GOP suffer from the delusion that they are victims of the ruling classes and that the woke left is running everything — or will — if Trump doesn’t stop them.

Even in states with Republican governors and legislative supermajorities, like Tennessee, a certain paranoia that the left could take over at any moment dominates politics. As one GOP state legislator recently said on a leaked conference call, “The left wants Tennessee so bad because if they get us, the Southeast falls and it’s ‘game over’ for the republic.”

Of course, if these left-wing overlords were as fearsome as all that, the GOP would not be in total control of the Volunteer State in the first place. Similarly, if the “RINO” establishment were in charge, Trump wouldn’t be the runaway front-runner.

This is the paradox of Republican politics today. The populists run or at least dominate the party but they derive their power and intensity from the bizarre conviction that they’re powerless victims — and that only Trump can save them.

The delusion is vexing but it also points to the only way to prevent Trump from getting the Republican nomination. The last decade has shown that the only kingmakers in American politics are precisely who they’re supposed to be: the voters. In 2008 Hillary Clinton proved that big money and establishment backing weren’t enough in the face of a popular opponent. Jeb Bush proved the same thing in 2016.

Much of the left and right have convinced themselves that American democracy has been hijacked, to one extent or another, by powerful special interests, billionaire donors, the Deep State, hegemonic party establishments and/or the media. And yet, time and again, the string-pullers have proved to be ordinary people.

He’s right up to a point. Our democracy hasn’t been so degraded that ordinary voters have no power at all. They certainly do. But I think the left, at least, is quite cognizant of that fact. They know that the MAGA right is composed of tens of millions of ordinary people who are enthralled by a deranged demagogue who has convinced them that they have been targeted for extinction by a non-existent conspiracy. That is not a delusion. It’s all too real. And it is terrifying.

Bankruptcy, fistfights and leather couches

Rachel Maddow’s staff noticed a sprawling story that while not exactly headline news ought to be. (I’d missed it until her show Monday night.) Multiple state Republican parties are at or near bankruptcy. The headline for Jim Geraghty’s National Review column last week dubbed it a “quiet collapse” in four key states.

Political donations follow power. Especially in the states. Especially in non-general election years. So it is not surprising that in four states with Democratic governors that state Republicans are not seeing their coffers as full as when the GOP holds the governor’s mansion. What Geraghty sees in that less is something more. In Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and Minnesota Republicans are “going broke and devolving into infighting little fiefdoms.”

Arizona Republicans are down to their last $23,000 in their federal account while their failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake barnstorms the country as “real” governor in exile. She could be raising money to help her fellow Arizona Republicans, but no. Four years ago at this point in the cycle, the party had nearly $770,000 in the bank.

Colorado Republican Chair Dave Williams is attacking his own legislators and threatening to disenfranchise from the primary process “more than 900,000 Republicans” and “more than 1.8 million unaffiliated voters, 47% of the electorate,” reports the Colorado Gazette:

Stolen election conspiracist Dave Williams, the new state chairman, has announced the Colorado Republican State Central Committee (CRC) will vote on August 5 on whether to cancel the 2024 Republican primary election. And to accomplish this act of political suicide, they want to make a change in the committee’s voting rules that would make the old Soviet Politburo proud.

(What was it I wrote about the Republicans’ Soviet leanings yesterday?)

Minnesota Republicans have “barely $54 cash on hand” and “more than $335,000 in debt, according to the FEC paperwork filed in late June.“

Four county Republican parties in Michigan are at odds with one another, Geraghty recounts from a June Washington Post story:

At least four county parties in Michigan have been at open war with themselves, with members suing one another or putting forward competing slates that claim to be in charge. The night before an April state party meeting, two GOP officials got into a physical altercation in a hotel bar over an attempt to expel members. The state party’s new chairwoman, Kristina Karamo, has struggled to raise money and abandoned the party’s longtime headquarters.

Michigan Republicans have but $93,000 in their account under 18 months ahead of the 2024 elections. Donors who’d rather their money was well spent are closing their wallets.

Then there is Georgia. Gun-toting Republican Brian Kemp is governor and Republicans have a firm grip on the legislature. Yet the party’s accounts are bleeding for the legal defense of its “alternate” electors in the scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential results. They still have $1.4 million banked after raising $722,000 through June this year. But they’ve spent over a half million in legal expenses, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, more than $340,000 of it defending the fake Trump electors.

The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson called it five years ago: “Everything Trump Touches Dies.”

Geraghty laments:

In these states, we are seeing the self-marginalization of the Republican Party. No outside force came along and forced these state parties to spend money, alienate traditional supporters and donors, pick nasty fights with their own lawmakers, turn loyalty to Trump into the preeminent litmus test on all issues and disputes, and alienate and repel once-persuadable swing voters. No, the people who took over these parties chose this path.

Political operatives who handle the boring day-to-day of party operations do some things right: “get more money coming in than is going out, pay attention to down-ballot races, and avoid infighting and messy public squabbles.” The MAGA Republicans who have replaced them are “blustering nutjobs” in the mold of Dear Leader, himself not exactly a paragon of financial or managerial competence.

As zealots (the left has its own), they are more interested in ideological purity and “not interested in attracting the votes of anyone they deem insufficiently dedicated to the MAGA vision.” Geraghty concludes, “The MAGA crowd now running these state parties insisted they didn’t need anyone else. And now we see where that got them.”

Truthfully, there was an outside force. It was not a boat accident. It wasn’t any propeller, it wasn’t any coral reef, and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper. It was Donald Trump. And even he was not the cause. Just the catalyst.

Talked about Barbie bein woke this weekend. pic.twitter.com/8rj8C5my5L

— Trae Crowder (@traecrowder) July 31, 2023

Consider the now regularly scheduled, near-unintelligible culture-war freakouts on the right. Over BLM. Over CRT. Over DEI. Over “woke.” Over “grooming,” drag shows, and kids’ books. The right has been slowly melting down over losing its cultural dominance for decades. Trump was an accelerant.

Consider Tucker Carlson’s and Josh Hawley’s embarrassingly public insecurity over manliness. Consider Ben Shapiro’s extended-cut rant — excuse me, rants — over the Barbie movie. These men don’t need more testosterone, bigger audiences, bigger guns or bigger penises. They need therapy.

The Republican Party as well. Not that they’d fund it.

Maddow’s segment is here:

To all who celebrate

This will only be effective if EVERYONE refrains from tweeting (X-ing?) on August 1st a/k/a #TweetlessTuesday. Let's show the owner the POWER OF THE PEOPLE. Honestly, would it kill you to keep your thoughts to yourself for 1 damn day? Read a book! 👀 #August1stTweetOutDay https://t.co/0apu2XsbAC

— Mark Hamill (@MarkHamill) July 30, 2023