And yes, I realize that the stock market isn’t the economy. But the economy is doing well too:
Four years ago, this was what Trump told people. He says the same thing today and is never quizzed by anyone about how he justifies saying it considering how wrong he was. The one rationalization he gives is that the markets are up in anticipation of his win and that he hopes they crash before he becomes president again because he doesn’t want to be Herbert Hoover.
From The Washington Post, “US inflation eased last month in first slowdown of 2024” –
Led by lower food and auto prices, inflation in the United States cooled slightly last month after three elevated readings, likely offering a tentative sigh of relief for officials at the Federal Reserve as well as President Joe Biden’s re-election team.
Consumer prices rose 0.3% from March to April, the Labor Department said Wednesday, down slightly from 0.4% the previous month. Measured year-over-year, inflation ticked down from 3.5% to 3.4%. And a gauge of underlying inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, reached its lowest level in three years…..
……Wednesday’s report provides a dose of reassurance that the pace of price increases may be resuming its slowdown. While the latest figures show inflation still well above the Fed’s 2% target, it’s the first time this year that the year-over-year figure has declined. And price increases cooled in some service industries, such as hotels, health care and auto repairs, that had previously kept inflation elevated.
The report “was a tiny step in the right direction,” said Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com. “The fight against inflation is not yet over, but the worsening trend observed in the first quarter of 2024 may have ended……
…..Among individual items in April, grocery prices slipped, providing a break to shoppers. Egg prices, which have been volatile after a bout of avian flu, fell 7.3%. New and used car prices also dropped. By contrast, prices for gas and clothing both jumped.
Will anyone notice or are Americans in such a funk that they can’t see it? Someday they will, of course. The question is whether it will be in time to help Joe Biden or will they vote for Trump and give him all the credit?
I don’t usually watch Morning Joe because I’m on the west coast and it’s on very early for me. But the segment above has been circulating today and I thought it was worth sharing. It’s about the polling — specifically how the political press goes nuts over every bit of bad news for Biden in every NYT poll when others are showing a tighter race.
For all we know, the NY Times poll is entirely right and the others are all wrong. It’s certainly possible. It’s a good poll with experienced and qualified analysts. But the rush to assume that even when there are other legitimate polls that suggest otherwise is a problem because it’s helping to set Trump up to challenge the results of the election if it doesn’t go his way. If the country is programmed to believe that Trump is way ahead in the polls and Biden is in much deeper trouble than he is after months of this kind of press coverage, his people (and probably others) will be predisposed to believe Trump’s lies about a rigged election.
If these polls are correct then we will have bigger problems but if Biden wins, there will be regrets for flogging these negative polls so hard to the exclusion of the others that showed it was much closer. The media needs to be careful of how they talk about the horse race in light of this. And the Democrats should take heed too and stop their perennial pearl clutching over every bump in the road. It is always detrimental on some level but it’s downright dangerous now.
The AP reports:
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on Wednesday agreed to hold two campaign debates — the first on June 27 hosted by CNN and the second on Sept. 10 hosted by ABC — setting the stage for the first presidential face-off in just weeks.
[…]
Trump, in a post on his Truth Social site, said he was “Ready and Willing to Debate” Biden.
Hours later, Biden said he accepted an invitation from CNN, adding, “Over to you, Donald.” Trump said on Truth Social he’d be there, adding, “Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!” And soon after that, they agreed to the second debate on ABC.
“Trump says he’ll arrange his own transportation,” Biden wrote on X. “I’ll bring my plane, too. I plan on keeping it for another four years.”
Trump is convinced that Biden is such a doddering, drooling old fool that he’ll fall asleep during the debate. (This is rich considering that it’s actually drowsy Don who’s falling asleep every day in court.) His entire campaign is predicated on the idea that Biden is so ancient that he can’t run the country like the vital, virile superman Donald Trump. And yet, whenever the country tunes in to watch Biden fall off the stage he actually does quite well and Trump whines that he was on drugs.
Biden needs to be seen by a national audience right now to prove that this is all crap. It’s ridiculous but between the Republicans, the mainstream press and Biden’s lack of bronzer, hair dye and Aquanet he’s seen by the public as much older than Trump despite the fact that they are actually the same age — and Trump is the one showing signs of dementia, not Biden.
The much anticipated testimony by former Donald Trump lawyer Michael Cohen finally arrived this week and from the sound of many of the talking heads on television it’s been a huge disappointment. They were apparently expecting the former president’s one-time personal “fixer” to melt down on the stand in a fit of rage or lunge at his former boss but instead the carefully prepared Cohen was subdued and succinct, admitting his lies and misdeeds in service of Donald Trump with a sorrowful mien.
The prosecution’s case has been meticulously laid out through testimony from the people with whom Trump conspired to create fake news items about his political rivals in 2016 and their scheme to buy up negative stories about him. This was accompanied with testimony from his loyal, former assistants creating a timeline delineating what the former president knew and when he knew it.
And then there was Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress who received the hush money payoff, taking the stand to dramatically verify that the story they were trying to suppress was true. All of this has been backed up by a paper trail that even includes handwritten notes by Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg on incriminating documents outlining the crime Trump is charged with committing.
But the full story is best told through Michael Cohen who ties all the various strands of the plot together. In the last two days of direct and cross examination he has woven the tale of a nefarious scheme hatched by Donald Trump, a tabloid smear merchant, women with whom the married Trump had sexual relationships along with some lawyers and accountants to illegally suppress information and cook the books to aid Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Most legal observers think he’s done a good job of it, in spite of the baggage he carries as a convicted felon. (As every TV lawyer has pointed out at least once, witnesses who flip on their co-conspirator bosses are, by definition, not pure and innocent but they testify for the government in courtrooms around the country every day.)
At this writing Cohen in still in the midst of cross examination by Trump’s defense lawyers who appear to be suggesting that Cohen is angry with Trump for failing to pick him for a plum position in the White House that he’s lying about his personal plot to spend his own money and lie for him repeatedly, which seems a bit strained. When asked by Trump’s attorney why he would have done such things, Cohen replied, “I was deep in the cult of Donald Trump.”
Considering where he is today, there’s certainly a lesson in that but it’s obvious that some people who should know better are not heeding it. I’m speaking of the elected Republicans who are now making pilgrimages to Manhattan to demonstrate their fealty to the Dear Leader, even down to their clothes and the placement of their flag pins:
Cults often have uniforms, The only thing missing is a red MAGA hat to make it complete.
I called this last week when I wrote about Florida Senator Rick Scott’s appearance in court, after Trump was reported to have complained that he was getting no support from the party in his time of need. I expected that the VP wannabes would be making the trek right quick, elbowing each other out of the way to gain his attention. Sure enough, this week we have seen contenders, J.D. Vance, R-Oh., Gov. Doug Burgam, R-N.D., Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fl., and MAGA Trump superfans, Sen., Tommy Tuberville, Vivek Ramaswamy and last but hardly least, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. (S. Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Marco Rubio of Florida had better step it up.)
These GOP luminaries are supposedly there to provide moral support to the Republican nominee for president. As J.D. Vance told Fox News:
“I mean, look, I was there to support a friend. Recognizing that sometimes it’s a little bit lonely to sit up there by yourself, I offered to come in and maybe just be a friendly face in the courtroom. And that’s all I wanted to do.”
Please. That’s not really what they’re there to do for Donald Trump. They come into the courtroom for about 45 minutes or so then they leave and hold a press conference outside. They rant about the trial being a witch hunt and a sham and say all the things Trump is precluded from saying because of the gag order imposed by the judge to stop him from putting the family members of the the court employees, the witnesses and jury members in danger. It’s a blatant act of defiance of the spirit of the law from a group of people who take an oath to uphold it.
Senator Tuberville, a man with absolutely no filter, told Newsmax that this is a coordinated strategy:
Hopefully, we have more and more senators and congressmen go up every day to represent him and be able to go out and overcome this gag order. And that’s one of the reasons we went, is to be able to speak our piece for President Trump.
Perhaps the most shocking performance of the group so far was Speaker Johnson, the man who is second in line to the presidency, who called the trial a sham and, like most of the others, even lied about the judge’s daughter putting her in the cross hairs of the crazy MAGA followers in defiance of the gag order. What a low, low moment for American politics.
Trump is naturally very pleased with this unctuous display of sycophancy. He came before the cameras on Tuesday and said “I have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully.” If it could be proved that he “directed” them to do this, he would go to jail for violating the gag order but Trump’s mob boss style is well-understood. They all know very well what Trump wants them to say without him ever having to tell them.
All of these grasping sycophants are now “deep in the cult of Donald Trump” just as Michael Cohen was all those years ago. As MSNBC’s Chris Hayes so sharply observed yesterday,
You’re watching the next iteration of people auditioning to be the next version of that guy up on the stand … Here you have this set of people who seem to bear no connection to the ghost of Christmas future of the man on the stand who was himself this supplicant figure and you wonder which one of them is going to end up in the same position.
I think they all are in one way or another. No one escapes unscathed. They are all so blinded by ambition and the ecstasy of being in this exciting moment that they are failing to see that they are heading down exactly the same humiliating path that led Cohen to that witness stand this week having to confess to the whole world that he was a fool who destroyed his life trying to please this man who has never cared for anyone but himself.
It’s Wednesday, so Donald “88 Counts” Trump is not in court. He is free to golf and complain his criminal trial means he’s unable to campaign for president.
Tuesday featured three additional presidential primaries in Maryland, Nebraska, and West Virginia. Politico’s lede: “Donald Trump showed weakness in the suburbs in Tuesday’s primaries, while Joe Biden’s problem with the protest vote appeared to fade.”
Zombie Nikki is still a problem for Trump:
A week after Nikki Haley earned 22 percent of the vote in Indiana’s open GOP primary, the widespread expectation was that different rules in the states voting on Tuesday would take a huge chunk out of support for her zombie presidential candidacy.
That didn’t exactly happen. Even though Haley likely won’t end up matching her Indiana total in Maryland, Nebraska or West Virginia, there are still some warning signs for Trump in the results.
Unlike Indiana, where voters can pick any primary ballot they’d like, the GOP primary was open only to registered Republicans in Maryland and Nebraska, and registered Republicans and independents in West Virginia.
Despite its semi-open primary, West Virginia was the Trumpiest of the three states: The former president captured 88 percent of the vote there. But there were significant pockets of Trump resistance among Republicans in Maryland and Nebraska.
As for Joe Biden, another caveat to the Democratic fretting over the polls. Politico notes:
It’s been a paradox for Democrats fretting about Biden’s standing in the polls: Republicans are more likely to say they’ll vote for Trump in general-election polling than Democrats are for Biden, but there are more protest votes in the primaries against Trump.
That continued Tuesday in Maryland and Nebraska, where Biden outran Trump significantly by percentage. In Nebraska, Biden was breaking 90 percent of the vote against Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), even as Trump was stuck in the low 80s against Haley. And in Maryland, the “uncommitted” ballot line was poised to earn about 10 percent of the vote, with the greatest concentrations in the Republican counties of far Western Maryland.
There was still some “protest” vote for Biden in West Virginia, “with Jason Palmer, the surprising winner of the March caucuses in American Samoa, drawing more than 10 percent of the vote.” Ho-kay.
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A friend who like others is permanently frustrated with “the Democrats” said Monday she wants them to show more fight. No argument here.
We saw feistiness from Joe Biden during and in the wake of his State of the Union address: a flurry of hard-hitting internet ads went after his wannabe fascist opponent. But as college protests proliferated over the body count in the Gaza Strip, it feels as if the Biden campaign has dialed it back. It’s not helping that some polls show him trailing Donald Trump in several battleground states.
Tuesday’s Axios story that claims Biden doesn’t believe he’s behind, writes Dan Pfeiffer, got “Democrats reverting to their natural state of worry verging on panic.” Pfeiffer argues that campaign is not in denial about current polling. Running a campaign. especially a presidential campaign, is largely about “mood management,” he explains. What makes it worse is Democrats vent their anxieties in public while you rarely see a poll unfavorable to Donald Trump on Fox News:
Of course, the Biden folks are putting their best face forward. What do these reporters want them to say? OMG, WE ARE LOSING!!! And then crawl under the nearest table and assume the fetal position? Of course, they are confident, but that’s not the same as cockiness or denial.
But what are they doing?
I doubt the campaign agrees Biden is down by such large margins in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. I also doubt the Biden Campaign agrees that Trump is winning historically significant shares of young, Black, and Hispanic voters. But if we focus on how the campaign is deploying resources, it is obvious this will be an incredibly close election that could come down to a few thousand votes in the six battleground states. The Biden Campaign is raising money and spending it at a frenetic pace. They are running millions of dollars in television and digital ads monthly. According to the Biden Campaign, by the end of this month, they will have 200 offices and 500 staffers across the six battleground states polled by the NYT and North Carolina.
The time and money spent shows that they aren’t in denial about the demographic challenges. This campaign is targeting Black and Hispanic voters much earlier than previous campaigns. Last week, the campaign announced major ad buys in Black, Hispanic, and AAPI media. Finally, over the last several months, the President has highlighted his efforts to cancel student debt, fight climate change, and decriminalize marijuana — all issues of particular importance to younger voters.
I have known the people running the Biden Campaign for decades. These are very smart, experienced, data-driven political operatives. They know what they are doing. They are not readying themselves for defeat. Whether you think the latest polls are right or wrong, the operatives are making perfect moves. I am not saying Biden will win. This is a very tough election and he is facing a lot of headwinds, But if he loses,, it won’t be because of complacency or denial on the part of his campaign.
That’s all reassuring. Mastering the mechanics is vital. But what the Biden campaign also needs to manage is my friend’s mood and yours. Elections are not about good policy. They are for better or worse about feelings. Lately, about vibes. About the economy, inflation, etc., yes, but about more.
Michael Tomasky scratches his head over Trump getting credit for Biden’s economic accomplishments. Part of the problem is the media’s need to balance any good news about Biden’s accomplishments with criticism (even up-is-down lies) from Republicans. The numbers are good for the Biden economy, but it’s people’s perceptions that drive them. It’s no good if Biden’s economic numbers are terrific and no one knows it.
The New Republic cautions that conservative plans for dismantling the government under a second Trump administration could roll back a century of progress on public health. Food that’s safe to eat, air that’s safe to breathe, water that’s clean, and access to medical care when you get sick is on the line. Democrats need to be seen fighting for them, not just touting their policies and statistics.
Republicans are the bad guys here, bent on tearing down the fabric of the country. Conservatives don’t like social changes over the last couple of decades? How will they feel about losing the health insurance Democrats won them? How will they feel about losing their Medicare and Medicaid, about having their Social Security benefits cut? How will the rest of us feel about seeing marginalized communties driven back into the closet?
Biden needs more than numbers. He needs a narrative, a story with heroes. And he needs to press the attack. In its absence, the right with its multi-tentacled media machine will advance its own and win the battle of public perceptions.
Remember Maverick losing his nerve near the end of Top Gun? But then he calls on his reserves — “Talk to me, Goose.” —and the radarman on the carrier calls out, “Maverick’s reengaging, sir.” Biden and “the Democrats” need to do the same.
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Those are responses to what Trump has been saying about the judge in his NY criminal trial:
On a recent Tuesday morning, a visibly frustrated Donald Trump sat through a tense hearing in the first-ever criminal trial of a former American president. During a break, he let rip on his social media platform.
New York Justice Juan Merchan, Trump declared on Truth Social, is a “highly conflicted” overseer of a “kangaroo court.” Trump supporters swiftly replied to his post with a blitz of attacks on Merchan. The comments soon turned ugly. Some called for Merchan and other judges hearing cases against Trump to be killed.
[…]
The April 23 post by Trump and the menacing responses from his followers illustrate the incendiary impact of his angry and incessant broadsides against the judges handling the criminal and civil suits against him. As his presidential campaign intensifies, Trump has baselessly cast the judges and prosecutors in his trials as corrupt puppets of the Biden administration, bent on torpedoing his White House bid.
[…]
The rhetoric is inspiring widespread calls for violence. In a review of commenters’ posts on three pro-Trump websites, including the former president’s own Truth Social platform, Reuters documented more than 150 posts since March 1 that called for physical violence against the judges handling three of his highest-profile cases – two state judges in Manhattan and one in Georgia overseeing a criminal case in which Trump is accused of illegally seeking to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Those posts were part of a larger pool of hundreds identified by Reuters that used hostile, menacing and, in some cases, racist or sexualized language to attack the judges, but stopped short of explicitly calling for violence against them.
This is so sick. It’s kind of a miracle that someone hasn’t been killed. Yet. Let’s hope that Mike Johnson’s verbal assault on the judge’s daughter today won’t have that horrifying result.
Fox news is having a full-fledged meltdown over Kamala Harris using the F-word. It dishonors the office dontcha know.
Yeah…
Ed Kilgore takes a look at the inconceivable result in the Times/Sienna poll showing that huge numbers of people remember the Donald Trump years as glory days for America.
[W]hen the New York Times–Siena polling outfit asked voters “to describe the one thing they remembered most from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, only 5 percent of respondents referred to Jan. 6, and only 4 percent to COVID.” 39 percent cited “Trump’s behavior” as most memorable, and another 24 percent named “the economy.”
Aside from the radical shrinkage of COVID and January 6 in the rearview mirror, what’s remarkable about this reaction is that it had little to do with what we normally think of as specific events, much less issue positions. As political scientist Seth Masket commented, complaints (mostly coming from Biden supporters) about “Trump’s behavior” may well stem from initial reactions to his conduct even before he became president, while positive assessments of “the economy” under Trump are vague:
“Behavior” covers quite a bit of ground, from racist rhetoric to fulfilling campaign promises to assault of women to just tweeting too much. But to an impressive extent, most of the responses in this category have little to do with the Trump presidency at all. Many of these things occurred when he was running for president in 2016 or even earlier.
Similarly, “the economy” is pretty broad terrain. It’s not completely fictitious — the economy, by most measures, was growing at a respectable pace with low unemployment and inflation during Trump’s first three years in office, even if those numbers weren’t notably different from the economy during Barack Obama’s second term … To a considerable degree, voters seem to be saying that things were pretty good for Trump’s first three years, and the fourth wasn’t his fault.
The Times’ own analysis of these rather startling numbers attributes them to “recency bias,” suggesting that voters are letting their current concerns (particularly about inflation) distort their memories of the not-so-distant past. But they also suggest that voters have formed a fixed opinion of Trump and his presidency that may be very difficult to change. If COVID and January 6 are not front of mind when voters think of 2020 and 2021, and the economy as it was in 2019 is recalled as Elysian, what does that say about the Biden campaign’s efforts to remind people of Trump’s responsibility for the reversal of Roe v. Wade? Will voters accept that a Very Bad Thing that happened long after Trump left office was actually his fault?
Unfortunately, many Americans are apparently massively uninformed:
As it happens, a new survey of registered voters was released last week from Navigator Research showing that a sizable number of Americans, incredibly enough, held Biden responsible for “the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the elimination of the federal right to an abortion.” That opinion was held by 34 percent of self-identified independents, 32 percent of Black voters, and 42 percent of Hispanic voters. It helps explain why the Biden campaign is devoting so much energy to connecting the dots between Trump’s Supreme Court appointments and the Dobbs decision. But it also suggests public perceptions of Trump are very hard to change, and that’s a big problem for Democrats.
Oy vey. I just don’t know what to say about that. It’s literally insane.
I guess we just have to accept that Americans want the Trump circus and blame Biden for all the bad stuff that goes along with it.
Jamelle Bouie has some thoughts on this as well. An excerpt:
… “The economy” under Trump is simply the one that existed from Jan. 20, 2017, to March 13, 2020, when the White House declared the coronavirus a national public health emergency. For everything else after that date, the former president gets a pass.
No other president has gotten this kind of excused absence for mismanaging a crisis that happened on his watch. We don’t bracket the secession crisis from our assessment of James Buchanan or the Great Depression from our judgment of Herbert Hoover or the hostage crisis in Iran from our assessment of Jimmy Carter. And for good reason: The presidency was designed for crisis. It was structured with the power and autonomy needed for handling the acute challenges of national life.
“Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 70. “It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws.” And the most important ingredient that constitutes energy in the executive is “unity.”
“Those politicians and statesmen who have been the most celebrated for the soundness of their principles and for the justice of their views have declared in favor of a single executive and a numerous legislature,” Hamilton wrote. “They have, with great propriety, considered energy as the most necessary qualification of the former, and have regarded this as most applicable to power in a single hand.”
The point and the purpose of vesting a single elected official with the executive authority was to give the national government the ability to respond to national emergencies with alacrity and focus. We have made it a point to judge presidents on the basis of their ability to handle a crisis, whether war or internal rebellion or economic collapse.
Except, it seems, when it comes to Trump. With the notable exception of Operation Warp Speed — which he now disavows as he caters to anti-vaccine sentiment among Republican voters — Trump failed to handle his crisis, and the nation paid a steep price in lives as a result. But memories are short, and nostalgia clouds the senses. The voters who give Trump a pass for his final year in office may well put him back in the White House. Having failed to fulfill his responsibilities the first time, Trump may return to fail again.
This is beyond political analysis or polling. I think we need deep psychoanalysis to figure this out. As someone Bouie describes this way in the opening to his piece, it’s beyond me to figure it out:
For many millions of Americans, time seemed to move differently under President Donald Trump. There was no breathing room — no calm in the eye of the storm. From beginning to end — from the “American carnage” inaugural on Jan. 20, 2017, to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — it felt as though the country was in constant flux, each week a decade. We lurched from dysfunction to chaos and back again, eventually crashing on the shores of the nation’s worst domestic crisis since the Great Depression.
I get that the hardcore MAGAs don’t see it this way. But the amnesia on the part of moderates and Independents is mystifying to me.