— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) April 30, 2026
Tim Scott: "The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting. Gas prices continue to come down, which means your groceries will come down a little bit as well. We've got a lot of… pic.twitter.com/etdF8eHkP3
No, there is a huge spike in gas prices as you can see by that chart above.
Why, then, do Republicans believe that these lies will work for them politically?
Part of the explanation is their belief that they can flush the majority of Joe Biden’s presidency down the memory hole, that they can pretend that Trump took office just after the inflation surge of 2021-2022, not after the “immaculate disinflation” — falling inflation without high unemployment — that followed. ..
Will these games with the timeline persuade voters that Trump is actually doing a good job on prices? No. That ship has already sailed (and sunk). As the chart at the top of this post shows, independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the cost of living by a remarkable 5-to-1 margin, and false claims on Fox News won’t change that.
So what’s the purpose of these MAGA lies? The answer, of course, is that they’re aimed at an audience of one. Voters know that gas prices are way up and that inflation is elevated, but Donald Trump, swaddled in his Mar-a-Lago bubble, doesn’t. Trump says that we have no inflation. He recently insisted that inflation was 5 percent at the end of Biden’s term and took credit for falling inflation before he took office. So Republicans determined to say whatever he wants to hear — which means everyone still in the party — feel obliged to praise his inflation record, the facts be damned.
It’s hard to imagine how this insane dynamic can continue but apparently, they’re still convinced that failing to slavishly lick Trump’s boots will be a death blow to their careers — or they want in on the grift. I’m guessing more of the latter are out there than we might think.
Jake Grumbach at Slate has an original take on the Supreme Court voting rights horror. I think he’s on to something. He begins by discussing the obsession among many of the punditocracy with “polarization” as an explanation for all of our troubles. I’m sure I’ve done it myself. Grumbach thinks that’s part of what’s led us to this awful place:
The Supreme Court just revealed where that project was leading. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court’s conservative majority held that when a legislative district is polarized along party lines, it cannot simultaneously be found to be polarized along racial lines under the Voting Rights Act. The consequence is devastating: In a country where over 90 percent of Black voters vote Democratic and over 70 percent of White voters vote Republican, any racially discriminatory map can now be laundered as merely a partisan one. The VRA’s protection against racial vote dilution has been nullified—using a conceptual weapon that liberals and moderates spent years building and lending prestige to.
The ruling also rests on a methodological error that would earn a failing grade in a graduate statistics course. The court treats race and party as competing explanations, as if controlling for one neutralizes the other. But for millions of American voters, race explains party affiliation. The vast majority of Black Americans did not randomly sort into the Democratic Party. Already trending blue since the New Deal, they were pushed fully into the Democratic Party by Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act and Republicans’ Southern Strategy over the decades since. To “control for partisanship” when assessing racial gerrymandering is to erase the very mechanism through which racism travels. Consider the analogy of a court ruling that a company didn’t discriminate by gender in pay because, once you control for being a manager or executive—positions from which women were systematically excluded—the gap disappears. Or that if you exclude people with high blood pressure, then a high sodium diet appears to have no effect on your risk of stroke.
The polarization nostalgists also badly misread the history they claim to be mourning. American politics has almost always been polarized by party. The exceptional era was that of the New Deal coalition of the mid-20th century, when the staunchest segregationists and the most anti-racist politicians in the country coexisted within the same Democratic Party only by keeping civil rights off the agenda. To conclude that partisan divisions negate racial divisions would be to assume that even the Civil War had nothing to do with race.
He has a point. Seeing “polarization” as the cause of our problems elides the underlying reasons why we are polarized. And it gave this misbegotten court a nice little rationale for proclaiming that racism is no longer a problem, it’s partisanship and that, my friends, is perfectly legitimate.
When we spend years insisting that partisan division is the master pathology of American life, we delegitimized arguments about racism as divisive. We created a cultural climate in which conflating race and party seems like a sophisticated, noninflammatory intervention rather than an evasion. And we’ve handed five Supreme Court justices a respectable intellectual framework for a ruling that would otherwise look nakedly like what it is.
Polarization is a description of political temperature. It tells you nothing about what is being fought over or who is being harmed. A democracy polarized between those who want to preserve multiracial voting rights and those who want to destroy them is not suffering from the same illness as one polarized between competing visions of the capital gains tax.
The court absorbed decades of elite discourse that trained us to distrust racial explanations and reach for partisan ones instead, then took that discourse to its logical conclusion. If everything is partisan, nothing can be racial, and the law that Congress designed to specifically fight against racial discrimination can no longer operate within its legislative intent.
They are acting in bad faith, of course. What else is new? They know very well that racism .(and any number of other cultural pathologies) are at the root of the stark differences between the two parties. It’s that they are either racists themselves or such pure partisans that they were determined to turn this into an advantage for their own team. Or both.
“We thought we were getting a TACO, ‘Trump Always Chickens Out.’ But so far we are getting a NACHO, ‘Not A Chance Hormuz Opens,’” Bloomberg columnist Javier Blas wrote on X.
The new nickname, bestowed by a financial trader, according to Blas, reflects the public’s frustration with the on-again, off-again blockade in the Strait that has disrupted global oil supply, causing gas prices to rise.
Forget the public. Who cares what they think? WTF is going on with the markets?
I guess we have to assume that they are still in thrall to the AI companies and are just playing the TACO Trump game of 2nd guessing what insane things he’s going to do next — like the prediction markets. Reality doesn’t seem to be relevant at the moment.
I have the sneaking suspicion that they’ve bought into the Magic Trump theory — “it’ll all work out, it always does…”
Trump: "As far as peace, I settled 8 wars. And people try to dispute it but then they go over them, and almost in every case they sent letters thanking me and letters to the Nobel Committee. I don't care about that. Maria was very nice. She gave me her Nobel Peace Prize because… pic.twitter.com/LPCWI2lWSr
Trump: “As far as peace, I settled 8 wars. And people try to dispute it but then they go over them, and almost in every case they sent letters thanking me and letters to the Nobel Committee. I don’t care about that. Maria was very nice. She gave me her Nobel Peace Prize because she said she didn’t deserve it.”
Trump: "How do you like the new floor? What I do best is built. That's what I do best. The ballroom will be just like that. I have a special black granite. Granite is the most powerful stone there is. Marble can be more beautiful, but it's a much weaker stone." pic.twitter.com/cyGffJnXk8
Former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, 26, appeared with The Ink’s Anand Giridharadas on “Morning Joe” to discuss what Democrats must do differently to win back the trust of working people. She built her campaign on aiding people in her district. After finishing second in a field of 16, she founded Kapow to keep her community together. Democrats need to show, not tell that they are fighting for working people. Create a home for them.
Abughazaleh spared no criticism of her party.
“We’re doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results, and that’s just not going to happen,” she told her hosts. “We have to do something different, and I think that should start with helping people.”
Some in her own party stand in the way of unity, she believes. Democrats have to be unified in their goal of fighting for the working class, a party of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act.
I see the same. Democrats are reactive, not proactive. They don’t think outside the box. They built the box. It’s what prompted an exasperated Giridharadas a year ago to declare, “I feel so fucking undefended by these people. Like what are they doing, any of them?”
I watched most of the DNC’s 12-1/2 hour winter meeting days earlier. Most of the speeches were dispiriting. They could have been written 30 years ago. Members said what they what they were expected to say as good lefties, what they learned to say years earlier then stopped learning.
It was speech after speech of Democrats saying what Democrats are expected to say to Democrats who expected to hear it.
Here in North Carolina in 2004, Democrats were 48 percent of registered voters. Republicans were 34 percent. Independents (“unaffiliated” here) were an afterthought at 18 percent. Twenty-two years later, independents are 39 percent, Republicans and Democrats are tied at 30. Democrats have lost 18 points in registration while independents have gained 21. Likely something similar has happened where you live.
Democrats as a party seem not to have noticed. They’ve certainly not changed their campaign formats over that time. A former campaign manager complained to me about that just yesterday. They update their software and adopt new digital tools, but in service to strategies as stale as those DNC speeches.
Yes, since 2004 we’ve seen big cultural and political shifts. Millennials and Gen Z especially see no reason to join parties seen as slipping into irrelevance. They’ve lived through Sept. 11 and the so-called War on Terror. They’ve experienced the Great Recession, a global pandemic, and the Jan. 6 insurrection as well as Trump’s war on immigrants, the Supreme Court’s war on civil and voting rights, and the resurrection of a fascist movement. Their economic prospects are shrinking. And yet Democrats keep plodding along as if nothing has changed. Not only do voters feel undefended, as Giridharadas does, but young people have “never really felt seen” by either major party.
It’s no surprise. Democrats have noticed neither them nor the political ground shifting beneath them. Much less make adjustments over the last two decades. They’ve lost people’s trust and we all have nearly lost our country. Democrats see Trump’s approval ratings falling like a rock, as Giridharadas notes in the video [timestamp 5:48]. But where has that historic unpopularity become support for Democrats? There has been no real reckoning with their disconnect from communities and with that loss of trust.
“Movements need to be homes, not just opinion factories,” Giridharadas says. People around the country may vote for the Democratic Party, but they don’t feel the party speaks to them.
Maybe start with making them feel seen. Week after week, commuters honk, wave, and cheer for a dancing old man who struts around like Mick Jagger. He displays message signs that don’t bark about his pet political issues but address their lived experiences. It’s not a model for how Democrats should retool their campaigns, but at least it’s not the same old shit.
President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is as unpopular among Americans as the Iraq War during the year of peak violence in 2006 and the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll, amid growing economic pain and fears of terrorism as a result of the military campaign.
Sixty-one percent of Americans say that using military force against Iran was a mistake, with fewer than 2 in 10 Americans believing that the U.S. actions in Iran have been successful. About 4 in 10 say it has been unsuccessful, while another 4 in 10 say it is “too soon to tell.” The polling numbers indicate a broadly unpopular war effort and growing economic fallout at a time when the White House has been trying to convince Americans that they are better off under Trump than under Democrats.
I keep forgetting to post these. If you have time and want to catch up with Brad, Desi, Drift glass and me:
‘86 47’ or ‘Weekend at Donnie’s’: Today's #BradCastGuests: Heather @digby56.bsky.social Parton of Salon, @driftglass.bsky.social of 'Pro Left Podcast' on the SCOTUS VRA ruling and fallout, the ballroom, Iran, Comey, Kimmel and much more!…FULL STORY, LISTEN: bradblog.com?p=16474
Lots of things keep Chris Hayes up at night. The MS NOW prime time host channeled some of those insomnia-triggering subjects into a hit podcast, “Why Is This Happening?,” which won a Webby Award for best interview/talk show podcast in 2025. Now he’s launching a new podcast, “The AI End Game,” to answer another unsettling question: is AI “unstoppable”?
AI is “moving very fast, and suddenly, it is just everywhere: workplace, schools, media,” Hayes says in a trailer for the podcast released Thursday. He says while AI presents new possibilities, it also “raises a lot of pretty terrifying questions.” And those are the questions he hopes to answer.Apple PodcastsIntroducing WITHpod: The AI End Game
Hayes say he’ll sit down each week with people who’ve studied AI and its effects, as well as refreshing listeners on exactly what AI is–and isn’t. “What happens if it changes not just how we work,” Hayes asks, “but how we think–or, more essentially, who we are?”
Hayes has lined up an all-star group of guests, including The Atlantic journalist Derek Thompson; professor at Wharton and New York Times bestselling author Ethan Mollick; professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and member of the Berkeley AI Research Group Alison Gopnik; former co-lead of the Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team at Google and co-founder of Black in AI Timnit Gebru; philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers; author, host of the “Better Offline” podcast and writer of the “Where’s Your Ed At” newsletter, Ed Zitron; and The New York Times journalist and author, Michael Pollan.
I don’t have enough real understanding of what’s happening to even know the right questions to ask. But Chris Hayes does. And whether we like it or not this is happening and we need to understand it. At least a little bit …
James Downie at MS Now takes a look at the current massive economic discontent among Americans:
For decades, when large numbers of Americans expressed negative feelings about the economy, they were generally reacting to high unemployment, high year-over-year inflation or both. But even as inflation decreased in the latter half of former President Joe Biden’s term, the issue played a central role in Trump’s return to the White House. Since Biden, though, Americans’ views of the economy have been much more negative than typically associated with inflation around 3% and unemployment below 5%.
To be clear, many Americans were already struggling despite low unemployment and inflation before and after the pandemic. Frustration over a two-tiered economy was widespread years before Covid-19, powering the Occupy movement in 2011 and, later, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign. As economist Mike Konczal noted, prices for essentials, such as food, electricity and motor vehicle insurance, have risen faster than inflation overall — a burden felt more heavily by households with lower incomes. And home prices have spiked while mortgage rates are at their highest in 15 years.
But where past economic discontent was easily explained by measures of unemployment or inflation, clearly something else has been driving the anger in the past few years. A March paper from Jared Bernstein, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Stanford’s Daniel Posthumus, found that “using four-year inflation rather than the more often used annual measure” better predicts consumer sentiment, including recent pessimism. The pandemic-era inflation spike has lingered in voters’ minds because, even as the rate of inflation has come down, prices remain higher than they are “supposed” to be — i.e., what they roughly would have been if the pandemic inflation had never happened. (Polling expert G. Elliott Morris reached a similar conclusion.)
If milk prices jump by 100% one year and 3% the next, you will not forget in the second year that milk used to cost half as much. It also explains why voters would react so negatively to inflation that is not high by historical standards. As economist Paul Krugman is fond of pointing out, prices rose by almost the same amount during Ronald Reagan’s first term as they did under Biden. Because Reagan followed the high inflation of the 1970s, however, voters were used to the inflation of his first term, so he could still run on “morning in America.” Whereas in 2024, the Democrats were defeated.
It is a different America than it was in 1982. There were still many people around who had gone through the Great Depression and WWII. They definitely had different ideas about what constitutes hardship. The baby boom was just coming into full adulthood and were getting ready to take over. Everyone was glad the 70s of Vietnam, Nixon, Watergate and stagflation were coming to an end.
The whole zeitgeist had shifted, not just the economy.
We experienced a little bit of that with the election of Obama. For a time it felt like real progress was being made. Then the Republicans staged a massive tantrum so it didn’t last as long as Reagan’s comeback did but it was real. And as Downie points out, the underlying economic discontent had already been building for quite some time.
Today the country is almost at the point of full revolt. The corruption, the chaos, the billionaire tech-bros, the phoniness along with an economy that is failing to deliver to the working and middle classes is making people angry and depressed. (Not to mention that we went through a horrific trauma with the pandemic that we’ve treated as nothing more than a blip and it was anything but.)
The question is what can a president do about it?
“They could be working with Congress on the affordability agenda, in housing policy, child care, energy, health care,” Bernstein said. “Some of those solutions take time, but newer policy models tend to include immediate help through some form of subsidies or price caps, like capping energy price hikes.”
These measures don’t target “inflation” writ large; instead, they focus on essentials most important to household spending that are unnecessarily expensive because the markets for the items are flawed. But, Bernstein said, “the main acclimation must occur through a combination of time and real wage gains.”
I’m sure that would help. But consider that Joe Biden actually sent out checks to people and had the biggest job and wage growth among the working class in 60 years. It didn’t help. I think the most important thing is to recognize that the whole system is tilted to the wealthy and powerful whether it’s Elon Musk or Jeffrey Epstein and there seems to be no accountability for it. And at the top of that list is Donald Trump the billionaire who is currently stealing the country blind right out in the open.
The Pentagon awarded a multi-million-dollar defense contract to a robotics startup affiliated with Eric Trump, one of President Donald Trump‘s sons, in a move panned by some Democrats as “corruption in plain sight.”
Foundation Future Industries, a Silicon Valley startup developing humanoid robots, landed the $24 million contract to test its “Phantom” android with the Marine Corps, according to a Thursday, April 23, Fox Business report. Company founder and CEO Sankaet Pathak appeared alongside Eric, Foundation’s chief strategy advisor, on the network’s Mornings with Maria on Thursday to speak about the technology and similar advancements in China.
The economic inequality is bad enough. Combined with the abuse of power, chaos and corruption of these Trump years it’s left people in a tailshpin. And as great as those policy prescriptions are (and I totally hope the Democrats enact them as soon as possible if they manage to get the majorites to do it) it won’t be enough. There has to be an accounting for what has happened and reforms to prevent it from happening again, at least in the foreseeable future. (Money is like water and will always find a way eventually…)
Until we can find a way to ensure that there is some sense of fairness and justice in our culture, this era of bad feelings is going to continue.
