Month: June 2024

Have you heard about this? I confess that I haven’t:

Within weeks, the nation will deploy 9,000 people to begin restoring landscapes, erecting solar panels, and taking other steps to help guide the country toward a cleaner, greener future.

The first of those workers were inducted into the American Climate Corps on Tuesday during a virtual event from the White House. Their swearing-in marks another step forward for the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda. The program, which President Joe Biden announced within days of taking office in 2021, is a modern version of the Climate Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era project that put 3 million men to work planting trees and building national parks.

During the ceremony, the inaugural members of the corps promised to work “on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.” 

The American Climate Corps was among the first things Biden announced as president, but it took a while to secure funding and get started. More than 20,000 young people are expected to join during the program’s first year, according to the White House, with new openings appearing on the American Climate Corps job site in the months ahead. The pay varies depending on the location and experience required, with open positions ranging from around $11 to $28 an hour.

The administration is promoting the corps as a way for young people to jump-start green careers. In April, the White House announced a partnership with TradesFutures, a nonprofit construction company, a sign that the program might help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can help electrify everything. The White House will also place members in so-called “energy communities” like former coal-mining towns to help with environmental remediation and other projects.

“Whether it’s managing forests in the Pacific Northwest, deploying clean energy across the Southwest, or promoting sustainable farming practices throughout the heartland, the president’s American Climate Corps is providing thousands of young Americans with the skills and experience to advance a more sustainable, just tomorrow,” White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi said in a press release on Tuesday.

This seems like something worth celebrating. Unfortunately it seems to be another great policy that nobody knows about.

I didn’t know this but it seems like it should be relevant. I hope the Biden debate prep people are on it. (It’s probably too much to ask that the moderators are.) Jonathan Chait explains:

One of the most underappreciated developments of Donald Trump’s presidency is that his strategy toward China was a total failure on its own terms. While Trump began his presidency as a snarling trade warrior, bent on ending Chinese manufacturing dominance, he ended his presidency as a whimpering apologist for Beijing.

The culmination of Trump’s standoff with China was a trade deal that supposedly committed China to purchasing $200 billion worth of American goods. Robert O’Brien, a former Trump national security adviser, admits that the Chinese never actually carried out their end of the deal. “I don’t think we’re going to see a deal like we saw in the first term,” he told Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant. “I think people were generally happy with phase one, but as it turned out, the Chinese didn’t honor it.”

You don’t say? Huh.

Recall that he demeaned China at every turn until they set of his deal at which time he said, “Terrific working with President Xi, a man who truly loves his country. Much more to come!”

Then COVID hit and Trump did everything he could to keep the deal going even though people were dropping dead and the world economy was shutting down. It led Trump to weeks of playing down the crisis to keep his precious deal on track.

Chait writes:

So O’Brien’s confession that the deal didn’t actually pay off is a pretty damning one. Of course, there are plenty of former Trump advisers who now admit Trump was an ignorant, lying criminal, but O’Brien is not some repentant former lackey. He is very much an ongoing lackey continuing to jostle for influence in a possible second term.

Chait reports that there are some people in Trump’s orbit who think there is another approach to limit China’s involvement in EVs. Even OBrien says they’s have to work with allies to make it happen which seems like a tough lift since Trump is saying he plans to enact at least a 10% tariff on ALL foreign goods, possible even more so that he can replace the income tax and party like it’s 1825. It’s unlikely our (probably former) allies will be working with the US on much of anything under those circumstances.

As he points out, Trump has been slagging American allies for years and he’s not likely to stop:

For nearly as long, Trump has also been drooling over the world’s autocracies. Russia, famously, is the apple of his eye, but he has room in his heart for more than one dictator. Trump praised the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1990. (“Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”) After becoming president, he continued to fawn over China’s very strong leadership, congratulating Xi Jinping for making himself president for life and touting his brilliance and toughness.

The known methods for foreign countries to woo Trump involve a combination of payoffs and flattery. Authoritarian states have natural advantages at this game. They have weak or nonexistent laws against corruption, and their leaders can engage in nauseating displays of friendship with a hated figure like Trump without fear of alienating domestic constituencies.

Trump’s instincts tell him that allies are enemies and enemies are allies because the latter can do just that — woo and flatter and tell him how great he is. It’s pathetic but that’s how it is. Anything that requires America to rely on our historic alliances will be blown to smithereens in a second Trump presidency. And our adversaries will be pleased as punch.

I hope you all have a chance to see at least one the various interviews with Dr. Anthony Fauci as he makes the rounds for his book tour. I particularly like the one with Rachel Maddow, above.

For some reason the hatred aimed at him makes me see red in a way that goes way beyond my usual ire at right wing hostility and that says something. Watching that ignorant harpy Marjorie Taylor Greene insult him at that congressional hearing last week had me screaming at the TV.

Anyway, his book sounds super interesting and I admire his grit in standing up to these miscreants. And bouy does he explode the myth that people over 80 are non compos mentis.

Time will tell but there are some signs that she might not be quite as nuts as the other nuts.

We are probably stuck with this 6 vote lunatic Supreme Court majority for some time so it’s more important than ever to keep our eyes on the potentially small changes that might be relevant, whether it’s signs of concern about politics playing a role or actual disagreement among the majority about their judicial philosophies.

This article in Politico suggests that there might be a developing schism on the right that could prove to be at least a little bit helpful depending on who joins what side:

 A rift is emerging among the Supreme Court’s conservatives — and it could thwart the court’s recent march to expand gun rights.

On one side is the court’s oldest and most conservative justice, Clarence Thomas. On the other is its youngest member, Amy Coney Barrett.

The question at the center of the spat may seem abstract: How should the court use “history and tradition” to decide modern-day legal issues? But the answer may determine how the court resolves some of the biggest cases set to be released in the coming days, particularly its latest foray into the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

If the court adheres to a strict history-centric approach, as Thomas favors, it will likely strike down a federal law denying firearms to people under domestic violence restraining orders.

But Barrett recently foreshadowed that she is distancing herself from that approach. If she breaks with Thomas in the gun case, known as United States v. Rahimi, and if she can persuade at least one other conservative justice to join her, they could align with the court’s three liberals to uphold the gun control law.

That outcome would avoid the certain political backlash that would result from a high court declaration that alleged domestic abusers have a constitutional right to carry a gun. Thomas, famous for his intransigence, might not care about such backlash, but the more pragmatically minded Barrett is surely aware of it.

“It does seem to me that there’s a fight going on, and Rahimi played an important role in provoking it,” said Reva Siegel, a professor at Yale Law School who is an expert on legal history.

This fight is breaking down to Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch vs Barret while Roberts and Kavanaugh are being “cagey.”

Apparently the divide shows itself in that weird trademark case last week ov =er a t-shirt that said “Trump so small.”

Despite the trivial subject matter, Barrett squared off with Thomas in such a confrontational manner that they seemed to be really fighting about something else.

“I don’t think this is about T-shirts at all,” Tyler said.

Thomas wrote the majority opinion rejecting the trademark applicant’s claim. Barrett (and all the other justices) agreed with that bottom-line result. The quarrel came down to methodology.

In a concurring opinion, Barrett used unusually blunt terms to skewer Thomas’ history-based rationale for denying the trademark. She described his approach as “wrong twice over,” and she made clear that her gripes went far beyond this case alone.

“I feel like this is a really stark break,” said Sarah Isgur, a former Justice Department spokesperson during the Trump administration who’s now a prominent Supreme Court analyst.

Barrett complained in her 15-page concurrence that her conservative colleagues have become so enamored of history that they’re now employing it even when the record is ambiguous and the purpose of embracing a retrospective approach is unclear.

“The views of preceding generations can persuade, and, in the realm of stare decisis, even bind,” Barrett wrote, using the Latin term for the principle that courts should adhere to past rulings. “But tradition is not an end in itself — and I fear that the Court uses it that way here.”

Barrett, a Trump appointee, added what could be interpreted as a jab at the very premise of originalism, which has been a hallmark of the conservative legal movement for decades.

“It presents tradition itself as the constitutional argument. … Yet what is the theoretical justification for using tradition that way?” she wrote.

Barrett’s next critique amounts to fighting words among legal conservatives: She compared Thomas’ approach to the kind of amorphous, multi-pronged legal tests that conservatives frequently accuse liberal judges of concocting.

“Relying exclusively on history and tradition may seem like a way of avoiding judge-made tests. But a rule rendering tradition dispositive is itself a judge-made test,” she asserted.

Oh baby. That’s quite a diss.

Barret used to be all-in on “originalism” but she seems to have changed her mind. (It would have been nice if she could have done that before Dobbs…)

Barrett joined both those opinions in their entirety, but now she’s sending an unmistakable signal that there are limits to the utility of history in resolving today’s hard constitutional questions.

She’s hardly alone in voicing skepticism. The court’s use of history in Dobbs and Bruen set off a furious debate among legal scholars, historians and judicial gatherings about whether the justices got the history right — and about the overall wisdom of the effort. Even Saturday Night Live weighed in on the shortcomings of turning to the 17th and 18th centuries to resolve 21st century disputes over issues like abortion.

In her concurrence in the trademark case, Barrett joined in some of those critiques, accusing her fellow conservatives of taking too narrow a view of what sort of past regulation qualifies as relevant enough to justify a government practice in the present.

“In my view, the Court’s laser-like focus on the history of this single restriction misses the forest for the trees,” she added. “I see no reason to proceed based on pedigree rather than principle.”

Huh. So citing 16th century inquisitors isn’t such a great way to judge law in the 21st century? Who knew?

[…]

Last week’s trademark case wasn’t the first time Barrett has unfurled the yellow caution flag as the court turned to history to resolve a case. Almost a year ago, in a case involving the admissibility of confessions by co-conspirators, Barrett again accused Thomas of making too much of a very limited historical record.

“The Court overclaims. That is unfortunate,” Barrett wrote in a solo concurrence, referring to Thomas’ majority opinion. “While history is often important and sometimes dispositive, we should be discriminating in its use. Otherwise, we risk undermining the force of historical arguments when they matter most,” she declared.

And in a speech last year at Catholic University, Barrett reiterated the point. “We have to be very, very careful in the way that we use history,” she said, adding that deploying historical evidence to advance a legal conclusion can be like “looking over a crowd and picking out your friends.”

No kidding.

“It does seem to me that Justice Barrett is trying to lay down a marker of at least some limitation or clarity in terms of where she and the others on the court see ‘history and tradition’ moving in the future,” said Catholic University law professor Jennifer Mascott, who clerked for Thomas at the Supreme Court and Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge. “Justice Barrett is basically raising questions that could really shift and perhaps limit the impact of the way specific [historical] examples are used.”

Barrett’s step away from hard-core originalism comes in the wake of Trump giving a less-than-stellar review to his three Supreme Court nominees: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. It has contributed to grumbling from some conservatives that she isn’t proving to be as doctrinaire across the board as they’d have liked.

“You see justices after three or more years on the court coming into their own,” said Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS, a blog that publishes statistical analysis of the Supreme Court. “She’s developing a jurisprudence at this point that isn’t extremely parallel to any other justice’s. I’ve heard from a fair number of conservatives right now who are not thrilled with any of the Trump picks, that they’re not Alito or Thomas, and Barrett has been kind of soft on some of these issues.”

You just can’t count on a woman, amirite?

But what about Roberts and Kavanaugh?

So far, those two justices have not publicly revealed where they stand in the current dispute. Notably, in the trademark case, they did not sign onto Barrett’s concurrence — but they also did not sign the portion of Thomas’ opinion that most directly responded to Barrett’s critiques.

Instead, they issued a terse, one-paragraph opinion that said Barrett “might well” be right, but the question she raised could be left for another case and another day.

Isgur, the former DOJ spokesperson turned Supreme Court analyst, said she reads the opinions to suggest that Roberts and Kavanaugh are closer to Barrett’s view on the utility of history than they are to the strict originalism of Thomas and Alito.

Isgur argues that the court is really a 3-3-3 split rather than a 6-3 split which just means the center of the court is now what we used to call the right and the right is what can only be called batshit crazy.

There also may be another split emerging:

Though Roberts and Kavanaugh did not join Barrett’s concurrence, the court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — each signed on to all or parts of it. (Kagan, the court’s leading dealmaker on the left, endorsed Barrett’s opinion in its entirety.)

It also appears to be the first opinion ever issued by the court in which four female justices all joined an opinion without any male justice also signing on. (The court never had as many as four women justices until Jackson, a nominee of President Joe Biden, was confirmed in 2022.)

That gender divide may be another clue that Barrett’s opinion presages her joining with the court’s liberals in the pending case about denying guns to domestic abusers.

“Rahimi is, in part, about gender,” Tyler said. “It’s about domestic violence.”

Keep in mind that if Trump wins Thomas and Alito are almost certainly planning to retire so he can replace them with two more batshit crazy young MAGA acolytes. I seriously doubt it will be a woman. They clearly aren’t reliable.

Barret is very, very conservative. I have no idea if any of this will make much of a difference. After all, even if she votes with the liberal justices it takes one more and you really can’t count on Roberts and Kavanaugh. But it’s nice to see someone on the righty fighting back even a little.

Paul Krugman writes:

A few days ago Donald Trump floated a truly terrible, indeed unworkable economic proposal. I’m aware that many readers will say, “So what else is new?” But in so doing, you’re letting Trump benefit from the soft bigotry of rock-bottom expectations, not holding him to the standards that should apply to any presidential candidate. A politician shouldn’t be given a pass on nonsense because he talks nonsense all the time.

But in a way the most interesting thing about Trump’s latest awful policy idea is the way his party responded, with the kind of obsequiousness and paranoia you normally expect in places like North Korea.

What Trump reportedly proposed was an “all tariff policy” in which taxes on imports replace income taxes. Why is that a bad idea?

First, the math doesn’t work. Annual income tax receipts are around $2.4 trillion; imports are around $3.9 trillion. On the face of it, this might seem to suggest that Trump’s idea would require an average tariff rate of around 60 percent. But high tariffs would reduce imports, so tariff rates would have to go even higher to realize the same amount of revenue, which would reduce imports even more, and so on. How high would tariffs have to go in the end? I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation using highly Trump-favorable assumptions and came up with a tariff rate of 133 percent; in reality, there’s probably no tariff rate high enough to replace the income tax.

And to the extent that we did replace income taxes with tariffs, we’d in effect sharply raise taxes on working-class Americans while giving the rich a big tax cut — because the income tax is fairly progressive, falling most heavily on affluent taxpayers, while tariffs are de facto a kind of sales tax that falls most heavily on the working class.

So this is a really bad idea that would be highly unpopular if voters knew about it.

But here’s the kicker: How did the Republican National Committee respond when asked about it? By having its representative declare, “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.”

Now, economists have been saying that tariffs are a tax on domestic consumers for the past two centuries or so; I guess they’ve been working for China all along. Yes, there are exceptions and qualifications, but if you imagine that Trump is thinking about optimal tariff theory, I have a degree from Trump University you might want to buy.

Anyway, look at how the R.N.C. responded to a substantive policy question: by insisting not just that Dear Leader’s nonsense is true, but that anyone who disagrees is part of a sinister conspiracy.

Don’t brush this off. It’s one more piece of evidence that MAGA has become a dangerous cult.

It barely got a mention in the press.

This is how Trump wins. He says ridiculous things, his cult lieutenants all chime in that the emperors clothes are beautifully tailored and the press moves on. No other politician in the world could get away with this.

SCOTUS is stalling

The National Review comments on the remaining decisions to come out of the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver opinions this Thursday and Friday. There should be 21 opinions remaining because there are 23 cases left, including two pairs (the Chevron challenges and the Florida and Texas social-media laws) that are consolidated and likely to be decided together. We will likely get at least five or six opinions this week, maybe as many as nine. The Court will need to schedule more opinion days next week, probably at least three of them if it intends to wrap up the term by the end of the week; otherwise, it could spill over to July 1 or 2.

NR provides a handy chart of what’s left. Notice what’s at the bottom:

Leah Litman writes at the New York Times:

For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued. But the reasons to think something is rotten at the court are impossible to ignore.

On Feb. 28, the justices agreed to hear Mr. Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. The court scheduled oral arguments in the case for the end of April. That eight-week interval is much quicker than the ordinary Supreme Court briefing process, which usually extends for at least 10 weeks. But it’s considerably more drawn out than the schedule the court established earlier this year on a challenge from Colorado after that state took Mr. Trump off its presidential primary ballot. The court agreed to hear arguments on the case a mere month after accepting it and issued its decision less than a month after the argument. Mr. Trump prevailed, 9-0.

Nearly two months have passed since the justices heard lawyers for the former president and for the special counsel’s office argue the immunity case. The court is dominated by conservatives nominated by Republican presidents. Every passing day further delays a potential trial on charges related to Mr. Trump’s efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election and his role in the events that led to the storming of the Capitol; indeed, at this point, even if the court rules that Mr. Trump has limited or no immunity, it is unlikely a verdict will be delivered before the election.

“As of Tuesday, 110 days had passed since the court agreed to hear the Trump immunity case. And still no decision,” Litman observes.

Who thinks this is an accident? What are odds SCOTUS issues the Trump decision July 2?

BTW: Celebrate Juneteenth!

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It was never really “mostly harmless”

Daniel Dale of CNN by now has got to be burned out fact-checking the firehose of false and misleading statements made by the immediate past president at every rally. Dale’s ability to do it in near-real-time has always impressed. But to have that as a job? He runs through 30 of Trump’s lies/exaggerations/misstatements from his Tuesday rally in Racine, Wisconsin in the clip below.

Even more soul-sapping, as Tom Nichols puts it, is that millions of people who live next door lap it up like cream from a saucer, “willfully blinding” themselves to the truth, as Peter Wehner put it, or exhibiting “motivated unreasoning” as I did.

The soul-sapping part of this is not that Trump is lying; he's emotionally unstable and that's what he does. It's the millions of people, as @Peter_Wehner wrote, who intentionally close their eyes to it and thus choose to live in the lies.https://t.co/NcFfi7nOMj https://t.co/GgZlHbKIUX

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) June 19, 2024

Brian Klaas posted Tuesday about “service magicians” still employed in Europe in the late Middle Ages:

But what we can know is that the service magicians of the medieval period—the cunning folk who professed an ability to harness magical forces to help others—were a more rational and effective form of recourse to manipulate the world to our whims than the modern multi-billion dollar industry of manifesting, the “laws of attraction,” and costly crystals allegedly infused with magical forces.

“Visualize Whirled Peas” lampoons the notion that thoughts can manifest reality.

Close your eyes. Visualize a pizza. With green peppers, onions, and pepperoni (that’s me). It’s right there on the coffee table. In an open pizza box from your favorite joint down the street. Smell it. Taste it, in your mind. Think hard. But you’ll still have to order it and pick it up if you expect to eat it.

Globally, roughly 40 percent of humans still believe in witchcraft, defined as “an ability of certain people to intentionally cause harm via supernatural means.” Four-in-ten Americans believe in the power of psychics, with a similar number agreeing that spiritual powers can be embedded in physical objects. A quarter of Americans believe in the power of astrology and the global astrology industry was estimated to be worth $12.8 billion in 2021, growing to $22 billion by 2031.

More recently, the practice of “manifesting,” in which aspirational thoughts are said to exert causal power on the physical world, has exploded. TikTok videos attest to the power of “scripting”—similar to the usage of Abracadabra in the distant past—in which writing down desires for wealth, or a crush to text you back, is said to bend reality to the power of the word and the mystical force of mental energy. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on “healing crystals,” a practice that dates back to the writings of Plato and, perhaps, the Sumerians.

Interest in such methods of asserting supernatural control over the natural world surged during the coronavirus pandemic, as can be seen from Google search results below for, respectively, “manifesting” and “crystals.” Both spiked after March 2020—with manifesting remaining extraordinarily popular today.

It’s amazing how “Bible-believing” Christians decry witchcraft while thinking that by cranking in the right incantation from their holy book and believing really hard they can make the creator of the universe pop out of his box like Jack and give them what they want. Magical thinking is everywhere.

Alvin Toffler’s best-selling “Future Shock” (1970) postulated that “too much change in too short a period of time” leaves people (and whole societies) “disconnected and suffering from ‘shattering stress and disorientation.’ ” What I witnessed in studying the New Age Movement (circa 1993) was a subculture disconnected from the modern world and retreating into a mystical, less-threatening past:

People are desperate for something in which they can believe. Communities have disappeared, replaced by subdivisions and condominiums. Terrorism and human rights abuses are more visible than ever. Anything you eat, drink or breathe might produce cancer. Science has reduced life to a cold set of mechanistic principles, demythologizing the world and stripping life of the meaning our myths once conveyed. The world seems to be coming apart and we are powerless to stop it. Nothing feels right anymore.

Is it any wonder people need something, some way to get control in their lives, some way to overcome our sense of powerlessness and paranoia? (Empowerment has become a hot term lately, both in enlightenment and legislative circles.) But in the absence of feeling that we can affect changes in our lives, we find solace in the notion that that power might exist somewhere else. It is as if we awakened to find ourselves locked in the trunk of a car careening down a mountain road. We desperately need to believe someone is behind the wheel. Even a diabolical someone is more comfort than no one at all.

Believing in a strong man on the heels of the country electing its first Black president has appeal for another subculture. And doing “your own research” into quack remedies for during a global pandemic. Science and pointy-headed intellectuals who know things are untrustworthy. “Is it any wonder” that in a changing America that the Trump cult yearns to manifest a less-threatening world in which they are once again unchallenged atop the social hierarchy.

Trump may have learned his bare-knuckles tactics from Roy Cohn, but he learned manifesting from Norman Vincent Peale, the guru of positive thinking who officiated Trump’s first wedding and whose sermons the Fred Trump family heard on Sundays in Manhattan (Politico):

“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.”

Subsequent rules tell the reader to avoid “fear thoughts,” “never think of yourself as failing,” summon up a positive thought whenever “a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind,” “depreciate every so-called obstacle,” and “make a true estimate of your own ability, then raise it 10 per cent.”

The New Age, positive thinking, etc., were once isolated to powerless subcultures and, as Douglas Adams quipped, “mostly harmless.” Not now, Klaas continues:

These practices, which some may dismiss as useless and backward, often form a patchwork of valuable, meaningful rituals for the participants. They have intrinsic value as a social bonding exercise and a way of articulating shared aspirations. It doesn’t really matter, per se, if they work.

But the crucial point is this: scared soldiers carrying talismans in trenches, or islanders constructing fake radar dishes to erect physical embodiments of their hopes, do not directly harm others, nor do they cast blame on victims for lived misfortune.

The same is no longer true of our mysticism.

This creates an upside-down interpretation of how we normally consider the superstitious past, in which we wrongly presume that we, not our ancestors, are the rational ones. But from service magicians to ordeals, medieval superstitions were both more rational and less harmful than many spiritual practices that dominate modern culture.

I once postulated:

Alvin Toffler theorized that too much change in too short a time can produce physical illness. Maybe. And maybe not just physical illness. Carl Jung spoke of a collective unconscious. If it exists, perhaps it is not so adaptable to rapid change either. What might it look like to go through life in the 21st century with a collective unconscious lagging a couple of centuries behind the times?

A lot like this.

Maybe he isn't just lying constantly. Maybe he's truly delusional. https://t.co/O6R1N0blro

— digby (@digby56) June 19, 2024

Setoodeh: Trump seemed to think he still had some foreign policy powers. There was one day where he told me he needed to go upstairs to deal with Afghanistan even though he clearly didn’t pic.twitter.com/e17xnz3okg

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 19, 2024

Or Trump could just be losing what little mind he had to begin with.

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The hero worship of Donald Trump has reached new heights. It’s now Kim Jong Un level. Dan Morrison at USA Today writes:

It’s the Summer of Trump in the House of Representatives, where Republican lawmakers have flooded the chamber with bills and resolutions honoring the former president, convicted felon and 2024 GOP frontrunner. 

These largely symbolic gestures are a way to get noticed by the Republican powerhouse, who can make or break politicians with his endorsements, according to a former member of Congress.

Earlier this month, Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., introduced a bill requiring the U.S. Treasury to start printing $500 bills again after 79 years, with the pricey legal tender now “featuring a portrait” of Trump in place of the late President William McKinley. Gosar said the proposal was meant to draw attention to high inflation under Joe Biden. 

There’s cash, and then there’s gold. 

In May, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., pushed a bill to award Trump the Congressional Gold Medal for his administration’s foreign policy successes.

“They’re all trying to curry favor from the former president,” said Fred Upton, a Republican who represented southwest Michigan in the House for 26 years before retiring in 2023. “They want to be recognized by him.”

Some are literally trying to put him on the map. 

The real estate and reality TV billionaire has slapped his name on everything from skyscrapers to sneakers and Bibles, to a purported university that closed in 2010 and had to pay $25 million restitution over fraud allegations.Now, in the heat of a neck-in-neck presidential election, some members of Congress are looking to place important national real estate under the Trump brand. 

On June 14, Rep. Greg Staube, R-Fla., put forward legislation to name the country’s coastal exclusive economic zone – an area of more than 4,383,000 square miles, bigger than the total U.S. land mass –  for the former president.

Meanwhile, a bill to rename Dulles International Airport for Trump is awaiting action by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The Virginia airport is currently named for John Foster Dulles, who served as secretary of state under President Harry Truman in the early days of the Cold War. 

Democrats have proposed naming a Florida federal prison after him. I think that’s fitting. Some garbage dumps could use a new name. But other than that, nothing.

These people are beyond help, I’m afraid. How embarrassing for their families.

Judd Legum writes about the factual disconnect on crime:

According to the latest FBI data, violent crime and property crime are down sharply in 2024. The new data shows substantial drops in every category, including murder (-26.4%), rape (-25.7%), robbery (-17.8%), and property crime (-15.1%). These declines follow steep drops in violent crime and property crime in 2023. 

And yet, according to a recent Gallup poll, “77% [of Americans] believe there is more crime in the U.S. than a year ago.” Why?

There are two key factors. First, high-profile politicians are constantly making false claims about crime rates in the United States. For example, speaking at a Black church in Detroit last Saturday, former President Trump said the following:

We’ll bring back public safety and defend our communities for law-abiding American citizens. The crime is most rampant right here in African American communities. And more people see me, and they say, “Sir, we want protection. We want the police to protect us. We don’t want to get robbed, and mugged, and beat up, or killed because we want to walk across the street and buy a loaf of bread.” They want it so badly. Fake news doesn’t talk about it.  

But most people do not watch Trump deliver remarks live. The second factor creating misconceptions about crime is how these comments are covered by major media outlets. Here is how Trump’s remarks were covered in the Washington Post:

Note that if readers simply read this headline, they would not know that Trump’s claims about “rampant crime” are false. Worse, you would not know that Trump’s claims about crime are false if you read the entire article. You do learn that “recent polls show Trump has made gains with Black men, alarming some Democrats because even a small change in Black turnout or preferences could tip such pivotal states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.”

The Washington Post also notes that the event included two Black men Trump is considering as his running mate, former HUD Secretary Ben Carson (R) and Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL). The piece also criticizes Trump for “playing on racial stereotypes, such as his suggestion that Black voters will look more favorably on his candidacy now that he has a mug shot and has faced criminal prosecution.” But accurate information on crime in Detroit — and the nation — is completely missing. 

It should have been in the headline and it should have been blaring. It’s not just irresponsible journalism, it’s a huge disservice to their readers. It’s downright cruel to amplify this liar’s fear mongering and help him scare the hell out of the population when things are actually getting demonstrably better. It’s very good news that the crime rate is plunging but I guess it isn’t as sexy as passing on Trump’s lies.

It shouldn’t be this hard to tell people the truth.

The Biden campaign has good reason to run ads drawing attention to Trump’s criminal conviction:

President Joe Biden’s campaign had been restrained in its attacks on Donald Trump’s New York criminal conviction for weeks until the campaign said internal polling and focus groups showed the verdict turned off voters.

The result, hitting TV sets across the country on Monday, was the campaign’s unleashing of its sharpest attack ad yet, depicting Trump as a “convicted criminal who’s only out for himself.” And the campaign says it’s just the start. Biden advisers say they plan to hammer Trump over the coming weeks — aiming to both set up a favorable narrative ahead of next week’s debate and keep Trump’s felony conviction top-of-mind for voters who haven’t yet fully tuned into the election.

“We’ve seen in polling since the conviction that the more the conviction is front and center in voters’ attention, the worse it is for Trump,” said a Biden campaign pollster granted anonymity to describe internal polling because they were not authorized to do so publicly.

The pollster said their research concluded that Trump’s conviction could effectively be used in a broader depiction of Trump as being self-centered and unwilling to take responsibility for his actions.

“Trump has dug his own hole deeper on the convictions,” the pollster said, “and we’re seeing him pay the price for that in the polling.”

Polling shows:

Twenty-one percent of independents surveyed by Politico and Ipsos said they believe the verdict is an important issue in determining their vote and that they are now less likely to support Trump. 

Among other independents who consider the conviction an important factor, 10% said it would not impact their vote while 5% said it would make them more likely to back Trump. Sixty-five percent of independents said the verdict is not important to how they will vote.

While Republican voters have largely continued to express support for Trump since the verdict and Democrats have remained critical, the poll sheds light on how independents — the all-important swing voters the candidates are vying for — view Trump today.

Among all voters, a plurality of 38% say Trump’s conviction is unlikely to affect their support for the presumptive Republican nominee. But about twice as many respondents — 33% — said they are less likely to support Trump than those who said they are more likely to support him — 17%.

It’s a problem for him, no doubt about it. And it’s not just the conviction. It’s the message that he cares more about himself than he cares about the country, which is obvious. When you put that explicitly as we hear him whining incessantly about how unfair everything is and his ongoing denials of ever doing anything wrong, it just has the ring of truth.

Republican voters know that, they just can’t admit it. They bought the line of a criminal conman and that’s really hard to come to terms with.