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Robert Kagan is back already

Robert Kagan’s doomsaying article about a Trump dictatorship and The Atlantic‘s“If Trump Wins” series sounded loud alarms. And then some. I cautioned Monday that overdoing the shock treatment can backfire. Along with the warnings people need hope and plans for action. Kagan got that message from his readers and is back today with an attempt at offering some, reluctantly. His heart isn’t in it.

It’s not that we didn’t know what to do, Kagan begins. It’s that we didn’t do it when chances were better for stopping Trump. He offers “several things people could do to save the country but almost certainly won’t do, because they selfishly refuse to put their own ambitions at risk to save our democracy.” Feeling hopey yet?

For one, Never-Trump forces could throw all their support behind Nikki Haley as the least odious Republican presidential candidate. Probably won’t work, but go for it, Kagan suggests. A majority of the GOP are committed cultists. A smaller faction wants Trump as their best chance of beating Joe Biden. A third group, about six percent, say they’ll support Trump unless he’s convicted. So good luck, Nikki.

The other option is less direct but has a better chance of success. Raise doubts about Trump’s electability. “The way to do that is to warn those Republicans still capable of listening that a Trump presidency really does pose a risk to our freedom and democracy and the Constitution.,” Kagan argues. That’s what he, The Atlantic, and “sleepwalking into dictatorship” Liz Cheney are doing.

Republicans own freedom. It is their worship word. Anat Shenker-Osorio argues that Democrats have to take it back. Freedom is a universal American value. Democrats have to run on it. The Lincoln Project needs to take up that message too. Which side are you on?

This November, freedom is on the ballot. https://t.co/uM3tFP7je7

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) July 13, 2022

We must continue to make this election a referendum on freedom v. fascism. Do not get sucked into their attempts to change the topic. pic.twitter.com/DV8IpyyDxg

— Anat Shenker-Osorio 🟧 (@anatosaurus) October 6, 2022

“In short, the way to beat Trump is to make him seem unelectable, and the way to make him seem unelectable is to show that he is unacceptable,” Kagan offers:

Trump’s dictatorial tendencies and open disdain for the Constitution can become his greatest vulnerabilities — they might be his only vulnerabilities — if sufficiently highlighted for the American voter, and he and his advisers likely know it. Trump’s bizarre assertion that he would be a dictator only on “Day One” of his presidency to “close the border” was, believe it or not, an attempt to deflect the charge. (But what if it takes two days?) Democrats have gotten mileage in downballot races by painting their Republican opponents as lawbreaking, MAGA radicals. Trump is aware that he needs to hold on to some normal, non-cultist Republicans — that is why he has taken a more moderate position on abortion than much of the rest of the party. Trump is nothing if not a shrewd politician (the people who persist in claiming he’s an idiot should have a talk with themselves), and he knows he cannot win the general election on cult votes alone.

When Trump refused to deny he would act as a dictator with Sean Hannity at his Fox News town hall, he did it deliberately with a “wry humor,” Adam Serwer told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday evening [timestamp 10:50], to both bait opponents and maintain a thin sliver of deniability. His Day One pronouncement was a signal to his base of authoritarian followers that he would indeed rule as dictator. But many of his close acolytes are less reserved and talk like “low-level technicians on the Death Star.” Their gleeful anticipation of a Trump dictatorship needs more disinfecting sunlight.

There are many Americans who would run from him if they see a hint of Trump ruling as a dictator, strategist David Plouffe told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Wednesday evening [timestamp 8:50]. People like Kash Patel are actively promising that a second Trump administration would investigate opponents and target the oppressed. Trump himself has said he would terminate provisions of the Constitution that did not serve his needs.

Taking a page from the dictator’s playbook, Kagan explains, Trump is already trying to inoculate himself against those charges with an “I know you are but what am I?” strategy of declaring Joe Biden the real dictator.

In time-honored fashion, Trump is going for the biggest lie. His goal is to delegitimize the trials and convince Republican voters that he is the victim of corruption and abuse of the judicial system. He has just begun making that case, but he is going to bang it like a bass drum for the next year.

Can he succeed in establishing this as the narrative? You bet he can, and for the reasons outlined in the previous essay: As he becomes the presumptive nominee, the vast Republican campaign apparatus will be at his disposal, putting out his line on an hourly basis.

What that six percent with Trump unless he’s convicted need to hear ahead of the primaries from Republicans still keeping the faith — and not from Democrats and Post columnists — is that they are right, Kagan believes, “that the Biden administration is not a dictatorship, that the trials are not an abuse of power, and that if Trump is convicted, justice will have been done,’ Kagan writes. That “would not take a lot of speeches, or well-placed interviews, or appearances on Sunday shows, by the right people to change the conversation.”

Imagine if the wing of the Republican Party that still believes in defending the Constitution identified itself that way, as “Constitutional Republicans” implacably opposed to the man who blatantly attempted to subvert the Constitution and has indicated his willingness to do so again as president.

But don’t hold your breath. It will require courage in short supply among Republicans.

Many people responded to my last essay by insisting that a majority of Americans oppose Trump, and they are right. But the way our system works today, that popular majority is prevented from coalescing. Many blame the electoral college or the two-party prejudice built into our system, and they might well be right. But, folks, are we going to fix these problems before November? The question is how best to bring this majority together in a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Republicans to prevent a dictatorship this coming year. Afterward, we can look at reforming the system. First, the system has to survive.

And for that to happen Democrats have to deliver.

One that should make anyone say to themselves, “there but for the grace of God…” Another that should make anyone who lives in the real world see red.

Story #1:

A woman whose fetus has a fatal condition is petitioning a Texas court to let her override the state’s total abortion ban and terminate the pregnancy—the first such case since before Roe v. Wade.

Lawyers for the Center for Reproductive Rights filed suit on behalf of Kate Cox, a 31-year-old from Dallas-Fort Worth who learned last month that her fetus has Trisomy 18, a chromosomal anomaly that causes developmental delays so severe that most infants do not survive more than two weeks. Cox’s attorneys are seeking a temporary restraining order against Texas’ abortion bans to allow her to end the pregnancy without leaving the state.

Attorney Nick Kabat from the Center for Reproductive Rights said this is the first time a pregnant woman in a medical emergency has filed a lawsuit seeking access to abortion since Roe was decided more than 50 years ago.

“It’s a statement of where we are that what this case is about is a medical emergency,” he said. “This is not Jane Roe. Kate Cox is in the middle of a medical crisis.”

“You can just imagine how crazy it is that in the middle of a medical crisis, she has to reach out to lawyers, run to court, and try to get a court order, he added. “It’s really heartbreaking that this is where we are historically.”

The mother of two learned she was pregnant with a third child in August, but soon received devastating news from her doctors, according to the suit. Ultrasounds in October revealed the fetus had an umbilical hernia, a twisted spine likely due to spina bifida, a neural tube defect, clubbed feet, irregular skull and heart development, and other serious medical conditions. An amniocentesis in November showed the fetus had what doctors had feared: full Trisomy 18, an almost always fatal condition.

The diagnosis meant Cox’s fetus is unlikely to survive past birth or much longer, according to the suit. It also poses threats to her own health; because she previously gave birth twice by C-section, inducing labor early carries a “serious risk of uterine rupture,” while having a full-term C-section would make subsequent pregnancies higher risk, the suit states. Cox has already been to the hospital twice during her pregnancy, once for days of severe cramping and diarrhea and again for leaking amniotic fluid.

Doctors advised Cox that the safest option would be a dilation and evacuation abortion, the suit states. But Texas has barred abortion since shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe last year, except in narrow circumstances when it is necessary to save the life of a pregnant patient.

Texas wants to make this woman carry this doomed fetus for the next four months and go through childbirth, risking her own physical health in the process and almost certainly damaging her mental health and her family’s well being. What kind of monster would force her and her family to go through that? It’s sick.

Meanwhile, here is where these monsters are going in New Hampshire:

NEW HAMPSHIRE IS a state that puts a lot of stock in the concept of freedom. “Live Free or Die” is stamped on its license plates; it’s home to the libertarian-bating “Free State Project”; and just a few weeks ago, the governor celebrated its ranking as the “freest state” in the country, according to the Cato Institute. 

But that embrace of freedom apparently only extends so far. A group of Republicans from both the state House and Senate have announced plans to introduce a bill that would ban almost all abortions after just 15 days gestation.

The bill is effectively a total ban on abortion. The absolute earliest a woman can confirm she is pregnant is with a blood test 10 days after ovulation. But this proposed law does not ban abortion 15 days after ovulation — it bans abortion at 15 days gestation, counted from the first day of a woman’s last menstrual cycle… which means it would ban abortion before some woman have even had conceived. The only proposed exception to the law is for a medical emergency.

If passed, it would be among the most restrictive in the country.

Abortion is currently legal through 24 weeks gestation in New Hampshire; medical professionals who provide abortions after that point face both civil and criminal penalties. (Earlier this year, members of both the Republican and Democratic House caucuses sought to remove criminal and civil penalties associated with that ban, but the effort failed in Senate.)

Republicans currently hold a trifecta in New Hampshire, with GOP majorities in the House and Senate and a Republican occupying the governor’s mansion. But control of the House — the largest in the country with 400 members — sits on a knife’s edge. There are 198 Republicans and 195 Democrats, three independents, and four vacant seats. 

You can imagine what these people will define as a medical emergency. It appears that these people in red states are just barreling ahead with their dystopian agenda.

It would be nice to think these GOP candidates for president (other than Donald Trump) would be questioned about this in tonight’s debate but I wouldn’t count on it. Nikki Haley has said she’d sign the most conservative “pro-life” bill that would hit her desk. Maybe they could ask her if she would sign this one if she were governor of New Hampshire. She’s said she’d sign a 6 week ban. Why not this?

They’re now holding the kind of Fox News hissy fits we’ve come to expect from the Freedom Caucus types in the House.

It’d a good thing everyone is dressed in a suit or someone might think they are playing undignified childish games:

 A classified briefing for senators on the White House‘s request for aid for Israel and Ukraine became “heated” Tuesday, with Republican members storming out of the meeting.

The briefing, led by the secretaries of defense and state, as well as the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was held behind closed doors to allow all 100 senators to ask questions about the administration’s funding request.

But it fell apart, senators from both parties said, after Republicans began asking about the border. GOP members in both chambers have demanded serious changes to immigration policy to address rising migrant crossings in exchange for passing new aid for Ukraine.

They didn’t like what they heard.

“People got up and walked out, because this is a waste of time,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told reporters.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called it “the most heated briefing in the SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility] I’ve seen.”

“What most, or many, Republican senators want to talk about here is the border, and Sen. Schumer would prefer not to do that in this venue; obviously, there’s nobody there to talk about the border,” Hawley continued, referring to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “So that was a point of some heated disagreement.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said: “It started off pretty bad … a lot of tension in the room because nobody talked about the border. In case you don’t have a television or you’ve been living in a cave, you would know that most Republicans feel like we need to address the broken border.”

This was a classified briefing by foreign policy and defense experts. Why would it be necessary to have a briefing in an SCIF with border experts? It’s a domestic issue.

Obviously, it isn’t. It’s the Republicans putting on a show for their MAGA constituents over the border which they consider to be their best issue going into the election.

Jordan was on the inside helping during the attempted coup and yet for some reason he, like all members of congress, seems to be immune to any sort of accountability for it.

Of course Jim Jordan has something to hide. He was talking to Trump the whole day.

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on Tuesday discussed the potential criminal liability of election-denying Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

“I think that there’s no question that Jim Jordan has something to hide, probably a lot to hide,” Cheney — who has dropped several bombshell revelations in her new bestselling book, “Oath and Honor” — suggested to MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.

“If you go back and look at the phone records, as well as what he’s said himself about his discussions and his conversations with Donald Trump on the 6th, the very significant role he played in the lead-up to that, [Jordan] was clearly one of the masterminds in terms of helping to facilitate Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the [2020] election and of course refused to comply with the select committee subpoena,” noted the ex-lawmaker, referring to a House panel order for Jordan to testify in connection with the 2021 attack.

Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, is likely “doing everything he can to help Donald Trump, to do Donald Trump’s bidding,” Cheney continued. “And I think that he has so many questions of his own to answer that people just need to go back and look at the record.”

He is “very clearly at the heart of what was an attempt to seize power and overturn an election,” she added.

Wallace asked Cheney if Jordan, who in October failed in his bid to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as House speaker after his ouster, had any criminal exposure to the insurrection.

“I think he has a lot of questions to answer,” Cheney replied.

He does, but apparently nobody’s going to ask. Why is that?

Kevin McCarthy is leaving at the end of the year. He thought he could finesse Trump and the crazies and he failed. They ate his face. After enabling them for years and completely humiliating himself at the feet of Donald Trump, there was never any chance they wouldn’t. But then he’s always been a little bit dumb. (Liz Cheney says Johnson is smarter which isn’t saying much. He’ll be happy to blow the place up.)

MyKev is hurt, obviously. And he’s pissed. After all he’s leaving Johnson’s majority one less seat. They will be down to two and there’s a rumor that another one is going to resign as well. They’d better hope everyone else stays very healthy.

He’s also upset that Trump didn’t really support him in his time of need. But I’m not expecting him to sign on with the Lincoln Project any time soon. The man has a backbone made of silly putty and a brain made of mashed potatoes. Whatever he does will be wrong.

Trump was asked by his faithful servant Sean Hannity last night if he would reassure the public that he has no plans to be a dictator and abuse his power. His answer was telling:

WATCH: Hannity repeatedly asks Trump if he plans to “abuse power” and be a “dictator” — he doesn’t say no. pic.twitter.com/jh1iHZVeAS

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) December 6, 2023

Let’s remember that Trump believes the presidency has dictatorial power. He made that clear many times:

Hannity wanted so desperately for him to unequivocally deny it but he didn’t do it because it’s a big applause line for his feral mob. They love it when he’s swinging his tiny hands around like that.

Meanwhile,earlier in the day:

Kash Patel says as Trump’s next CIA Director he will lead “patriots” appointed by Trump in an all-out effort to prosecute and jail people in government and the media: “We will find the conspirators in govt and the media. Yes, we are going to come after the people in the media.” pic.twitter.com/NuLyqOIKWO

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 5, 2023

He’s not just some podcasting gadfly:

Patel was hired in February 2019 as a staffer for President Trump’s National Security Council (NSC), working in the International Organizations and Alliances directorate, and in July 2019 became Senior Director of the Counterterrorism Directorate, a new position created for him.^[18] According to The Wall Street Journal, Patel led a secret mission to Damascus in early 2020 to negotiate the release of Majd Kamalmaz and journalist Austin Tice, both of whom were being held by the Syrian government.

In February 2020, Patel moved to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI),^[21] becoming a Principal Deputy to Acting Director Richard Grenell.

In January 2021, Axios reported that Trump had considered Patel for appointment as Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency to replace Gina Haspel. According to Axios, Patel was to be appointed Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency immediately before a planned dismissal of Haspel, allowing him to head the agency in an acting capacity. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Ezra Cohen-Watnick confirmed parts of the Axios report. Patel declined to comment.

In November 2020, Patel was made chief of staff to Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller, a move that followed Trump’s firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Patel reportedly argued that Esper was disloyal to Trump by refusing to deploy military troops to Washington to quell the George Floyd protests.

AEI policy director Kori Schake argued that although neither Patel nor others were “confirmable”, the shakeup was primarily a matter of “spite” toward the Pentagon establishment. Foreign Policy magazine connected the move to Trump’s “refusal to accept the election results”. Based on interviews with defense experts, Alex Ward of Vox suggested that Patel’s appointment was “not sinister”, would “not change much”, and may have served an effort to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. According to an unnamed source quoted by Vanity Fair, Miller was a “front man” during his time as Acting Secretary of Defense while Patel and Cohen-Watnick were “calling the shots” at the Department of Defense.  Another source told the magazine that Patel was the most influential person in the U.S. government on matters of national security.

After the November 2020 election, Patel reportedly blocked some Department of Defense officials from helping the Biden administration transition, according to NBC.

He remains in Trump’s inner circle and is expected to hold a powerful position in a new Trump White House.

Trump tried to overturn the election results and incited his mob to storm the capitol to stop the transfer of power. And people are asking if he plans to be a dictator? Of course he does. he just ran out of time.

Update — Jonathan Chait has this right:

This exchange is best understood as Trump enjoying the idea of himself as dictator. Trump has always admired dictators and has longed to be granted the obsequious deference they are afforded. As president, his favorite moments were trips to places like North Korea, where he spoke admiringly about the way his counterparties were treated. (“He’s the head of the country,” Trump said of Kim Jong-un. “And I mean, he’s the strong head. Don’t let anyone think anything different. … He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”)

His allies have always found this trait embarrassing and wished to deny it. Republicans are angrily attacking media coverage of Trump’s promises to turn the government into a weapon of vengeance as a smear campaign.

“There is no longer any pretense. Not even a fig leaf about fairness,” complains Fox News self-style media reporter Howard Kurtz. “It’s not that [Trump] shouldn’t be held accountable for his own rhetoric and social-media posts, but I have never seen anything like this in my professional lifetime.”

Could the reason that Trump’s authoritarian threat is being covered in a different way than any previous candidate be that no previous presidential candidate has explicitly promised to use his power to crush his enemies as vermin? Kurtz does not consider this possibility. Media bias is the only explanation.

Trump’s allies likewise insist that coverage of his plans is actually a scheme to seed violence against Trump. “All of these articles calling Trump a dictator are about one thing: legitimizing illegal and violent conduct as we get closer to the election,” proclaims Senator J.D. Vance. “This extreme and dangerous genre — of claiming Trump is Hitler (because, they say, he might do what Democrats are doing right now) — should probably be given the name ‘Assassination Prep,’” warns the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.

The whole pretense of these complaints is that Trump has done or said nothing dangerous or unusual, and that reporting on his plans and public statements is a form of dangerous incitement. They are all but begging Trump to give them a shred of deniability. He can simply say, even with a wink, that he doesn’t wish to become America’s Putin. He won’t give them even that — because, to Trump, being called “dictator” is a compliment his ego won’t permit him to deny.

I love it that Howard Kurtz is having a fit over the coverage. Good. The media must keep it up so that it will finally penetrate to the people who are not paying close attention.

Get ready for another magical night in American politics. Yes, the fourth Republican Presidential Second Place Debate is tonight, being broadcast by an obscure cable channel called News Nation. The whole country is crackling with excitement at the prospect watching of the last four standing, Former New jersey Gov., Chris Christie, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Former S. Carolina Gov Nikki Haley going mano-a-mano once again.

Actually these debates have been the most boring political rituals in human history. The presidential race may be heating up and the stakes could not be higher but these events cannot wind up too soon. Their only purpose is to help the GOP base figure out who might be an adequate replacement if Donald Trump keels over at the Mar-a-Lago omelette bar one Sunday and I’m not sure most Republican voters really care who that might be.

DeSantis’ previous position as first runner-up has been usurped by Haley who is still riding the little boomlet that has pundits declaring that she is “surging” in Iowa and New Hampshire. The truth is that she’s pulled even with DeSantis for second place in the first and overtaken him for second in New Hampshire. That might mean something if it weren’t for the fact that Trump is leading both of them by nearly 30 points in Iowa and is leading Haley by 26 points in New Hampshire. (DeSantis has dropped to 4th there.) Nationally, Trump leads by nearly 50 points. So this Haley surge is reminiscent of past forgettable moments like when Newt Gingrich briefly took the lead in the GOP primary in 2012.

What is significant about the Haley boomlet isn’t this minuscule surge in her polling, it’s the massive surge in her donations from billionaires. It’s not just the Koch network which garnered huge headlines when it was announced that its Americans for Prosperity Action fund was endorsing her for president after laying out of presidential politics for some time. Haley attended at fundraiser New York attended by top Wall Street financiers on Monday and raised a whopping $500,000 in one fell swoop.

CNBC reported that the event was held at the “luxurious Upper West Side penthouse of former Facebook executive Campbell Brown and her husband Dan Senor, chief public affairs officer at hedge fund Elliot Investment Management” which was founded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer. (According to Theodore Schliefer of Puck News, everyone was slightly disappointed that Singer himself was not in attendance because everyone on Wall St. is waiting on tenderhooks to see who he has decided to back.) But, among those who were there were:

Cliff Asness, a co-founder of investment firm AQR Capital Management, Kristin Lemkau, CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s wealth management division, Robert Rosenkranz, head of Delphi Capital Management and Ray Chambers, a philanthropist who once had a stake in the NHL’s New Jersey Devils were all spotted.

CNBC notes that Lemkau showed up just days after her boss Jamie Dimon exorted people to back Haley at a conference hosted by The New York Times’ DealBook franchise. Dimon put it like this, which was laughable:

“Even if you’re a very liberal Democrat, I urge you, help Nikki Haley, too. Get a choice on the Republican side that might be better than [Donald] Trump,”

There is at least one liberal Democrat who stepped up early to help Haley in order to stop Donald Trump, Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who has funded a number of causes in opposition to Trump, but he’s a rarity. Liberal donors would generally rather spend their money on Democrats than Republicans.

The question is why in the world are these rich donors suddenly backing Haley so strongly when they are very unlikely to get much of anything out of it? As Pucks’ Schleifer observed:

[P]lenty of the people donating six or seven figures to Haley or DeSantis at this point don’t reasonably expect their candidate to win, a phenomenon I’ve never experienced before. The dominant feeling among major donors is a sense of apathy—that this is Trump’s race to lose, to say the least.

What is she doing that has them so enthralled that they are throwing away their money on her doomed campaign? The easy answer is that these people all have way too much money so these millions are just pocket change to them anyway and they can take a flyer. If there’s ever been a better reason to raise their taxes to better fund the government, I’ve never seen it. And that may hold the real answer to the question of why they are now looking at Nikki Haley.

As you’ll recall, in the last debate Haley broke dramatically with Donald Trump by declaring that “any candidate that tells you they’re not going to go after Social Security and Medicare is not being serious.” She didn’t sugar coat it with the usual euphemisms by saying “we need to reform entitlements” and she’s made it clear that she not only wants to raise the retirement age, she also wants to reduce benefits for current beneficiaries by changing the cost of living formula. None of that is new for the pre-Trump GOP, but it’s been off the table since he took office.

In fact, one of Joe Biden’s finest hours was when he goaded the congressional Republicans into insisting they had no intention of threatening the programs:

Joe Biden and the Democrats have made it clear that if they get the majority they plan to raise the caps on Social Security and Medicare taxes to shore up the program. These people are adamantly opposed to that and will do anything to prevent it.

As CNN reported, the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity Action made it clear in their endorsement why they are backing Haley:

Emily Seidel – a top official in the influential political network associated with billionaire Charles Koch – praised the former UN ambassador’s “courage” for advocating changes to “an entitlement system that makes promises it can’t keep.”

And they aren’t the only ones:

“We need a complete reevaluation of entitlements,” Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of Home Depot who is weighing backing Haley

In fact, I think we can assume that Haley’s eagerness to cut these programs is a primary motive behind the surge in big donor interest in her campaign. They may realize on some level that she is not going to win this time but they are signaling that this is the way to a billionaire’s heart. If you’re willing to force poor elderly people into even worse penury than they already are, you are their kind of gal. They are investing in a future when Donald Trump is no longer telling his followers what they want to hear.

It will be interesting to see how Trump handles this. Although he’s vaguely indicated that he thinks cuts could be offset by growth for some reason, for the most part he’s held fast to his promise that the two vital programs cannot be cut and he’s kept the party with him. But as we can see, that’s a very tenuous promise. The real owners of the Republican Party are preparing to reassert themselves and this one little populist promise will die the day that Trump is finally out of politics. Haley is savvy enough to see that coming out strong on this issue tells the billionaires everything they need to know about who she really serves.

Salon

What the public doesn’t know

Many readers may have first come across Elizabeth Warren (as I did) in an online lecture: “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class: Higher Risks, Lower Rewards, and a Shrinking Safety Net.” The then-Harvard Law professor lectured in the glow of her 2003 book, “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.” Warren described how since the Reagan administration the rich got richer and the rest got screwed. (She put it more delicately.)

The America Prospect this morning argues that Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis should in the public interest publish data it surely has that would make Warren’s case without her (or you) having to do the research.

This data is already collected but not displayed in a user-friendly form. The Gini index is reported annually, but Gross Domestic Distribution could be shown quarterly along with GDP, and offer granular data about who’s getting what share of growth. https://t.co/xYFMZwdjHI

— David Dayen (@ddayen) December 6, 2023

“Last year, America’s current-dollar GDP grew 6.6 percent to over $26,000,000,000—one quarter of the entire world’s total output, produced by just 6 percent of the world’s population,” explains Richard Parker. Yes, but who benefited?

And so when the latest GDP number is announced, it’s front-page news in newspapers and magazines everywhere, a leading story for TV and radio, and the preoccupation of an almost uncountable number of online sites. But you may have noticed something strange about GDP: Because it’s a measure of the total economy’s output, it’s silent about how that output is divided among Americans. We’ve been living—and are living right now—in a nation with ever-increasing inequality, which makes the question of who gets how much of the GDP as important as GDP itself. And that makes it time for the government to start measuring and reporting more than GDP’s sum of our aggregate production. We need to know how GDP growth is distributed.

Let’s for the moment call such a measure the GDD—for “gross domestic distribution.” (I’ll explain how it would work in a moment.)

Most Americans already know that America has been growing ever more unequal—but beyond that, they know few details. Government tells them that GDP is still growing—by 5.2 percent in the last quarter—but not that nearly all of that growth is captured by the wealthiest 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent.

Yet what most Americans know intuitively is that life for the Great American Middle Class has gotten much harder—something the government’s own data has been recording since the 1970s. That data shows that, to begin with, the broad middle class’s share of total household income has fallen from over 60 percent in the 1970s to barely 40 percent. Among young Americans—the millennials—far fewer are earning more than their parents at the same age, and the gap is growing wider, especially for the majority who lack college degrees.

Yet because that’s been a steady, slow-rolling decline, officials haven’t talked about what’s happening the way they do for a significant “event” like the Great Depression—or our recent Great Recession and COVID lockdown. Like the frog in the pot that gets hotter slowly, the temperature keeps rising—but the frog doesn’t jump.

Parker’s complaint is that while the data is there, it’s not available in user-friendly form (something I’ve found across the country with state election data).

What the BEA doesn’t do is tell you how Americans’ income can be broken out and arranged by the size of their incomes—ranked by the top 10 percent, say, or the middle fifth, or the bottom half. Thus, you won’t learn from the BEA where income has been flowing over the years—how much to the one percent or the poor or the middle class. That is, needless to say, elementary information for addressing income inequality—a serious topic to, let me remind you, 80 percent of Americans nowadays.

What the public doesn’t know won’t upset the status quo. Is that by design? The problem is (Parker dons his tinfoil hat, and I mine), “the government has a vast amount of detailed, publicly available information about the distribution of Americans’ income. It’s just that apparently the public doesn’t know it.”

Thus, here’s how a Harvard Business School study found Americans think income gets distributed vs. how it really is and how they think it should be:

As I’ve found with election data, Parker found after inquiring if “the BEA would be open to adding GDD data from the Census Bureau to its GDP reports,” that the issue comes down to bureaucratic turf and budgeting. Mustn’t pull back the curtain and reveal the Wizards.

A 2022 report by the nonprofit Washington Center for Equitable Growth recommended:

The federal statistical system needs to be resourced to expand and continue reporting on inequality … Four decades of rising inequality calls for a more robust policy response to ensure broad-based growth in the U.S. economy. An important first step is to develop the data infrastructure to track growth in inequality over time, so that policymakers can monitor and respond to the problem, and voters can hold them accountable to producing strong growth for all U.S. households.

I could say something similar about state election data. But now that’s 50 agencies and budgets. Imagine what happens to all the federal data with MAGA lackeys in charge.

Trump Plus Nothing, The Sequel

Donald J. Trump and his MAGA horde attempted the murder of the United States of America on January 6, 2021. Give them a second chance and they may succeed. The media have finally caught on. The claxon sounding over at The Atlantic is itself news. (There are new articles there today.)

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, it’s said. Trump has announced his plans to make the 2024 election one for the country. His collaborators are mixing up the Flavor Aid now.

Prepare for Trump Plus Nothing, The Sequel. Call it mass insanity or something else, Trump’s followers are indeed ready once again to make their obeisance. During the COVID pandemic, many eschewed masks and vaccines and gave their lives for him. As former Trump fixer Michael Cohen explained, he talks like a mob boss. He doesn’t give explicit orders. The Boss lets underlings know what he wants and they go do it, even to their graves.

“Call it the opposite of virtue signaling,” writes Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark:

Trump’s harsh 2025 immigration agenda of travel bans, large-scale raids, detention camps, and “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” along with a House bill reflecting his views, are hanging over Republican senators as they try to negotiate a border security deal crucial to passing a bipartisan aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza. The Republicans are acting as if Trump is “looking over their shoulders,” a Democratic source told Washington Post writer Greg Sargent.

Health care is the next test for conservatives trying to out-conservative each other. By suddenly renewing his vows to kill the 2010 Affordable Care Act, Trump has now signaled what he expects from them. As in fealty, or else.

Lawrence’s focus this morning is health care policy. The Greg Sargent column suggesting Republicans sense Trump (and Stephen Miller) “looking over their shoulders” was about immigration policy. Whatever hints Trump drops, whatever mood strikes him in a second presidency, MAGA civilians and lawmakers will jump through their asses to deliver for The Boss. Zombie apocalypses are fiction. MAGA Republicans mean to make the Trump apocalypse a reality.

Rep. Patrick McHenry (R), 48, of North Carolina announced on Tuesday he will retire at the end of his term, saying, “This is not a decision I come to lightly, but I believe there is a season for everything and—for me—this season has come to an end.”

McHenry counts today as a moderate conservative. He served as Speaker pro tempore during the GOP’s weeks-long effort to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy with whom he was closely aligned. Like animals nervously signalling the arrival of an earthquake, he’s heading for the exits.

Update: McCarthy is following McHenry out the door.

Krugman is on the case

Let’s deal in reality for a moment shall we?

Over the past six months, the personal consumption expenditure deflator excluding food and energy — I know that’s a mouthful, but it’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of underlying inflation — has risen at an annual rate of only 2.5 percent, down from 5.7 percent in March 2022.

The Fed’s inflation target is 2 percent, so we’re not quite there yet. And you shouldn’t expect the Fed to declare victory any time soon. As I can tell you from personal experience, anyone suggesting that inflation is more or less under control can expect an avalanche of hate mail and hostile commentary on social media. In fact, I believe that the vehemence with which some Americans insist that inflation is still running wild distorts coverage in conventional media, too, because journalists are deterred from saying anything positive. And the Fed has to be especially careful, because it would lose credibility if inflation went back up after sounding too optimistic. The truth, however, is that inflation is looking very much like yesterday’s problem.

But wait — don’t real people have to buy food and energy? Well, there are good reasons for policymakers to look at “core” measures excluding components that jump around a lot, but in case you’re interested, prices including food and energy have risen at an annual rate of … 2.5 percent, the same as core inflation.

The more familiar Consumer Price Index is rising a bit faster, by 3 percent, but that’s entirely because it puts a higher weight on housing, which at this point is very much a lagging indicator.

What’s remarkable isn’t just the fact that we’ve made so much progress against inflation, but also the fact that this progress has seemed to come without any visible cost. So far, this has been “immaculate disinflation,” requiring neither a recession nor a large rise in unemployment.

Here’s a chart I find helpful for telling the story of inflation in recent years. The horizontal axis shows the fraction of adults between 25 and 54 who are employed, an indicator that is closely correlated with the unemployment rate but has seemed to be a bit better at measuring how “hot” the labor market is running. The vertical axis shows core inflation:

The blue dots at the bottom are annual numbers from 2000 to 2019, while the red line above shows the path since January 2021. Prepandemic, there was on average a modest positive relationship between employment and inflation, shown by the dotted line. But inflation went far higher than this relationship would have led you to expect, then rapidly came down without any significant loss in jobs.

So what explains this history, and how does it compare with economists’ predictions?

There were some big disagreements among economists here. Almost everyone, I think, was surprised by how easily we reduced inflation. But some were more surprised than others.

Here’s a schematic picture with three arrows starting from the high inflation, fairly high employment position we were in midway through 2022:

The curve labeled “LS” shows the very pessimistic view held by economists who believed that we would need to go through a period of large job losses and very high unemployment to get inflation down, the way we did after the 1970s. Yes, L.S. stands for Larry Summers, the most prominent advocate of that view, although he had plenty of company.

The arrow labeled “PK” shows the much more optimistic — but as it turned out, insufficiently optimistic — view held by economists who believed that getting inflation down would have some cost in terms of unemployment, but nothing like the stagflation of the 1970s and 1980s. P.K. stands for the obvious: In August 2022 I put out a newsletter explaining why I thought the analogy with the aftermath of the 1970s was all wrong. I was, in fact, baffled by the extreme pessimism I was hearing. More on that later.

But I didn’t think disinflation would be painless. I believed that the U.S. economy was overheated, with demand exceeding supply, and expected that correcting this imbalance would involve some pain. “Getting inflation down,” I wrote, “requires cooling the economy down, but not putting it through an extended slump.”

And who’s R.W.? That’s the real world, where getting inflation down didn’t require any job losses at all. How was that possible? Demand may have exceeded supply in 2022, but the gap appears to have been closed not by reducing demand but by increasing supply, as lingering disruptions from the pandemic were resolved.

I think those of us who weren’t quite optimistic enough can be forgiven for not seeing this coming, although I would say that, wouldn’t I? And I did believe that the Fed was justified in raising interest rates given what we knew at the time, although I’m quite worried now that the Fed has overdone it and should start cutting soon.

But where did the extreme pessimism of some of my colleagues come from?

Several economists had warned that the American Rescue Plan, the large spending bill passed early in the Biden administration, would be inflationary, warnings that appeared to be vindicated by the inflation surge of 2021-22. In retrospect, these economists may have been right for the wrong reasons, since inflation eventually surged, not only in America but almost everywhere:

This suggests that inflation may have had less to do with overspending than it did with pandemic-related disruptions; see the article by Claudia Sahm in “Quick Hits” below. But my big question is why so many economists predicted that the rapid initial rise in inflation would be followed by protracted stagflation.

The thing is, we have a standard story about why ’70s inflation was so hard to end, which relies on the way persistent inflation had become entrenched in expectations. But this clearly wasn’t the case in 2022. So while predictions of inflation in 2021 more or less reflected textbook macroeconomics, predicting stagflation after 2022 meant throwing out the textbook in favor of novel arguments for pessimism.

Furthermore, what struck me in 2022 was that the arguments that leading pessimists were making for persistent high inflation had no logical connection to the arguments they had made for a surge in inflation back in 2021. They were predicting the same thing but for completely different reasons. There was nothing linking the inflationist views of 2022 to those of 2021 except a shared pessimistic vibe.

And vibes are a poor basis for economic analysis. Indeed, vibe-based predictions of stagflation — vibeflation? — turn out to have been completely, you might say epically, wrong.

Vibes are not reality and we need to live in reality right now, more than ever. That so many keep acting as though it is is yet another sign of our deep political crisis,