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Desultory Don Would Rather Whine Than Win

Published by digby on September 4, 2024

One of the articles of faith about the 2020 election among the MAGA crowd is that Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have won the election because he “campaigned from his basement” and never spoke before the big crowds as Donald Trump did. Biden didn’t campaign from his basement, of course, but he did run a very non-traditional campaign because the whole country was under a modified lockdown due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Large indoor gatherings that did take place, such as the one Trump held in Tulsa during the summer were super-spreader events that ended up with many people getting sick and some dying. That fall, Donald Trump himself showed up at a presidential debate knowingly infected and he soon ended up in the hospital and came close to dying himself.

Unlike Trump, Biden followed the advice of the scientists and they found ways to campaign without exposing themselves and the public unnecessarily. Despite all that, Trump and the right wing media insisted that Biden must have cheated because he didn’t barnstorm all over the country.

So what are we to make of the fact that in this campaign Trump can barely rouse himself to leave his cushy surroundings at Mar-a-lago and is more likely to be found on the golf course than giving a speech or holding a rally. Sure, does that but at a much slower pace than he did in his first two campaigns. He’s doing some non-traditional media, appearing on podcasts and giving interviews over the phone or at Mar-a-lago and he’s appeared at some right wing media confabs and made a foray to a plant in Pennsylvania last week. But the events are few and far between compared to the past.

He even skipped the traditional labor day blitz that every presidential candidate does as the kick-off to the fall campaign. Even if they have nothing positive to say about unions, Republican candidates always take advantage of the fact that people have a day off and are waking up to the fact that the campaign has begun. They usually fly around to various venues and hold rallies or show up at the state fair, as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz did on Monday.

Trump did nothing. He didn’t hold even one public event and while UPI reported that he was to hold a video call with current and retired members of the United Auto Workers I can find no record of it happening. His only campaign event this whole week isn’t scheduled until Saturday in Wisconsin.

As mentioned, he is doing media but even that is far less energetic that what we’re used to seeing from him. Last night he did an obscure X interview show and seemed desultory and depressed. If it was anyone else I would have thought he’d popped a Xanax before he went on. And the rallies he is doing are boring rehashes of the same old tunes.

One could almost say that Trump is campaigning from his basement. The question is, why? He knows what it takes to campaign for president. It’s been his life’s work for the past decade.

I might guess that he’s still very spooked by the assassination attempt and is resistant to going before the public. I can’t say that I would blame him. It was a very close call and it would freak anyone out. (He would never admit that, of course.) Or maybe it’s just that his heart isn’t really in it now that he thinks the Supreme Court has given him a get-out-of-jail-free card with its immunity ruling.

It’s also possible that his age has caught up with him and he just doesn’t have the “strength and the stamina” to campaign properly anymore. It certainly appeared that way in the interview on X last night and the Moms for Liberty appearance a few days back. He has never looked so frail — and some of the things he is saying are simply delusional. For instance, at the Moms for Liberty gathering he made insane claims that schools are performing transgender surgery on kids:

Before Biden withdrew there was a lot of loose talk coming from the campaign that Democratic states like New Jersey and New Mexico were in play. That was always hype but they were extremely confident that they had the election in the bag. Today, not so much.

The Boston Globe reported that a top volunteer in New Hampshire had informed the staff that the campaign had determined that the state is no longer a battleground state. (That volunteer has been fired.)

And AdImpact, which tracks political advertising released some startling numbers on Monday:

You will notice that the Trump campaign is only competing in Pennsylvania and Georgia. All the other swing states are apparently being left to their own devices. This is surprising to say the least. They do have less money to play with than the Democrats but you’d think they’d at least try to hedge their bets. But the consensus is that they have decided that if they can hold all their 2020 states they will put all their money on picking up those two states which will bring them to exactly 270. If they lose either one (or N. Carolina) that’s the ballgame.

Just as likely they’re really just planning on a post election legal challenge in any or all of those states, claiming that the Democrats stole the election. You can certainly bet they’ll do it in Pennsylvania and Georgia where they are already plotting with local officials. Trump himself has said repeatedly that “our primary focus is not to get out the vote, it is to make sure they don’t cheat.”

If they can find a way to throw the election to the House, as they wanted to do in 2020, they will win and I kind of suspect that Trump would actually prefer to do it that way. It’s the ultimate power play, to make the Democrats lose through a post-election ploy that’s engineered by Trump and his cronies. In his twisted mind, I think that would even validate his Big Lie.

All of this probably explains why Trump isn’t really bothering to campaign much. He’ll spend some time in Pennsylvania and Georgia and make some perfunctory stops in some of the other swing states just to keep it close enough to contest. He’ll keep doing right wing media, the purpose of which is as much to keep his followers charged up about the alleged stealing as anything else. But unless he wins those two big states, which he might, he’s really preparing for the post election Big Lie Part II. He’s old and tired and at this point I think he’d rather whine than win.

The F#ck Yeah Factor

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 4, 2024

I’ll have what she’s having

Michael Podhorzer offers a thread of observations on why unions are gaining public approval where other institutions are losing it:

You may have heard that public support for unions “has been increasing”—but you probably haven’t heard just how big a deal that is in the context of the last 15 years. Since the Great Recession, we’ve seen the credibility of, and approval for, just about every major institution plummet—yet we’ve seen support for unions substantially increase.

Why is this happening? I call it the “fuck yeah factor.” A lot of us who strongly support unions already have at least some agency in our working lives (like good pay and benefits, the ability to telecommute, and so on). We might read about a successful UAW strike and think, “Yay! Good for them!”

That’s not the experience of most working-class people in America, especially if they do not belong to a union. They and their peers often have little or no agency in their work life—unpredictable schedules, no paid leave, dangerous working conditions, and the ever present threat of being fired at will.

When they see other working-class people like them standing up to their bosses and winning, it’s a game-changer. They don’t think, “Yay! Good for them!” They think, “Fuck yeah! I want that too!”

The “fuck yeah” factor is exactly what scares plutocrats like Musk and Trump the most. It’s the seed of social proof that blossoms into meaningful solidarity and powerful collective action.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, “power concedes nothing without a demand” – and a true “demand” is much more than, say, a preference revealed on an issue poll.

Entrenched power will only respond to demands that are wielded by a countervailing power. For ordinary people, that means collective power.

To be clear, voting is an essential democratic freedom, but it’s not the collective power I’m talking about.

Voting is like going to a restaurant and choosing between entrees on the menu. Collective power is like sitting at the table deciding what’s on the menu.

The Great Recession taught America’s nuevo poor a valuable and painful lesson, one former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm cast bluntly at the DNC convention in 2012 in attacking Mitt Romney, Republicans’ presidential candidate:

He loves our cars so much, they have their own elevator. But the people who design, build, and sell those cars?

Well, in Romney’s world, the cars get the elevator; the workers get the shaft.

She didn’t have to tell them. They lived it. The contrast in 2024 is even starker, writes Podhorzer:

On one side: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris walking the picket line with striking UAW workers, and Harris launching her campaign in Milwaukee declaring her support for the freedom of working people to join unions. On the other side: Trump and Elon Musk gleefully cackling about firing striking workers, as Musk and other plutocratic Trump supporters hope for the Federalist Society (FedSoc) Supreme Court justices to declare the entire NLRB, if not collective bargaining itself, unconstitutional. As this post will show, their hostility to unions is a prerequisite for the success of their broader political project. 

Unions are one of the two institutions left with equalizing power for ordinary people. The other is evangelical churches that have “taken over the Republican Party and fueled the MAGA movement.”

Podhorzer cautions:

If you (like many Americans) think Project 2025 is just a right-wing extremist fantasy that can never become law, think again. Many of its wishlist items have already been enacted in RTW states, such as banning abortion, eliminating DEI programs, and undermining the independence of our elections. Trump can try to distance himself from Project 2025 all he wants, but there’s no question that he and Vance are deeply linked with it, both in terms of personnel and ideology, and that Project 2025 is likely to serve as a playbook for a Trump-Vance administration.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Unions as democratic institutions help ordinary workers offset the power of the power-hungry. When they win against the growing strength of America’s oligarchs, unions “fuck yeah” inspire others to want some of that. Social proof. Not simply “what do people like me think?” but “what do people like me do?”

As in, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Americans love to see the little guy win against the powerful. And the powerful have won quite a lot in the 21st century. Unions are growing in public favor because they demonstrate we don’t have to live in a world of, by, and for plutocrats.

You. Have. Been. Warned.

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 4, 2024

Don’t say, “No one could have imagined”

One of many famous quotes from the G.W. Bush administration was by National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. “No one could have imagined” an enemy using a plane as a missile and slamming it into our buildings, she told reporters. Except novelist Tom Clancy imagined a terrorist flying a passenger jet into the U.S. Capitol in “Debt of Honor” in 1994.

Rice later admitted to Congress that in fact people inside the government had imagined it, that “there were these reports in 1998 and 1999” she only learned about later. The Bush administration looked even worse when the President’s Daily Brief from 6 August 2001, headlined “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” was made public.

Signs are even clearer today that Donald J. Trump and his MAGA minions are determined to strike at the heart of the United States government should he win reelection and establish permanent minority rule where U.S. democracy once stood. He’s not only admitted wanting to use the levers of executive power to exact retribution against political enemies, Just Security documents he’s done it before “at least a dozen times.”

Trump has a history. He’s even more explicit today about weaponizing the Department of Justice and the military in a second term against any who dared hold him accountable for actual crimes.

Just Security admits it did not document similar efforts by the Biden administration for one simple reason: “because there is no evidence that he or anyone at the White House ever took similar actions.”

Don’t you dare

If we allow Trump to be reelected, we, all of us, have no excuse for saying no one could have imagined that the MAGA godfather would actually do what he said, and the authors of Project 2025 have put into print. Lists of prospective Trump II administration employees are being assembled even now. Their plan is to gut the U.S. Civil Service, replace experienced, dedicated public servants they’ve demonized for decades with people whose primary qualification is being MAGA loyalists. When Trump says jump, they’ll say (with tears in their eyes), “Sir, how high?”

His brain trust’s idea of making America great again is a place where life is poor, nasty, brutish, and short for everyone (in their view) not born to rule and plunder.

Donald Trump “has no conception or understanding of the concept of public service. He views public life and even the presidency as an opportunity to personally enrich himself, at the literal expense of the American people and the country as a whole.” He’ll emulate the autocrats he admires, arrest his enemies, loot and coopt public resources, maybe even raid the national treasury in the grand tradition of world’s most notorious autocrats. And he’ll do it under legal protections granted by the conservative Supreme Court majority he appointed in his first term. You have been warned.

To remind Americans what public service really looks like, Michael Lewis just published the lead essay in the Washington Post series he mentions in the video above. The Post means to spotlight federal experts with a dedication to the work, not to making big money from it, the sort of mission-driven public employees Lewis profiled in “The Fifth Risk” and that conservatives vilify as public enemies. Each year since 2002, the Partnership for Public Service presents awards known as the Sammies to federal employees for remarkable work no one’s ever heard of:

Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it.

They were the carrots in the third-grade play. Our elected officials — the kids who bludgeon the teachers for attention and wind up cast as the play’s lead — use them for their own narrow purposes. They take credit for the good they do. They blame them when things go wrong. The rest of us encourage this dubious behavior. We never ask: Why am I spending another minute of my life reading about and yapping about Donald Trump or Kamala Harris when I know nothing about the 2 million or so federal employees and their possibly lifesaving work that whoever is president will be expected to nurture, or at least not screw up? Even the Partnership seems to sense the futility in trying to present civil servants as characters with voices needing to be heard.

Geeks, essentially.

Lewis this week profiles Christopher Mark, who has spent his career in “the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States.” A former coal miner himself, he earned a Ph.D. in rock mechanics from Penn State and went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, the notorious communist.

Mark just wanted to keep miners safe. He solved problems for the fun and challenge of it, and the only place to solve problems like these was in government service. Is it any wonder the modern conservative and guys like Trump find such characters suspect?

“The Enemy Within”

Published by digby on September 3, 2024

He tried. Oh how he tried:

The long line there was the Special Counsel he had Bill Barr name to “investigate the investigators” — the Durham investigation. Like all the others they came to nothing because there was nothing.

He, on the other hand, tried to overturn an election and incited an insurrection and then stole a bunch of classified documents and refused to give them back.

Big difference. Yuge.

Where Did All The Money Go?

Published by digby on September 3, 2024

Gosh, I wonder?

The leader of House Republicans’ biggest super PAC told donors last month he needed $35 million more to compete with Democrats in the fall. Senate GOP campaign chair Steve Daines used his primetime speaking slot at the Republican convention to lament that massive spending from Democrats was keeping him awake at night. And his House GOP counterpart warned that their party’s challengers trailed Democratic incumbents by a collective $37 million at the end of June.

Republicans were already worried about a glaring financial gap even before Kamala Harris’ rise. Now, with the election just two months away, they found themselves in an even more dire position: Democrats have seen a flood of enthusiasm in recent weeks, they’re far outspending Republicans on air and their donors are more energized than ever — with campaign finance data showing a surge in grassroots fundraising in late July after President Joe Biden dropped out.

Panic is starting to set in.

“The only thing preventing us from having a great night in November is the massive financial disparity our party currently faces,” said Jason Thielman, the executive director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “We are on a trajectory to win the majority, but unless something changes drastically in the next six weeks, we will lose winnable seats.”

Why in the world should they need money? Well. the guy at the top of the ticket is milking the donors for his own purposes.

Here’s one of them:

He spends most of the campaign funds he receives on his own properties and legal fees. They have few offices or staff in most of the swing states. They aren’t making the huge ad buys everyone assumed they would.

He’s pocketing the money.

Meanwhile:

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee plan to transfer nearly $25 million to support down-ballot Democratic candidates in state and federal races this year, a significant boost to those efforts following record fundraising for her campaign this summer.

“If we want a future where every American’s rights are protected, not taken away; where the middle class is strengthened, not hollowed out; and a country where our democracy is preserved, not ripped apart, every race this November matters,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement Tuesday. “The Vice President believes that this race is about mobilizing the entire country, in races at every level, to fight for our freedoms and our economic opportunity.”

Big difference. Huge.

Trump cares about nothing but himself. They know this and yet they just can’t quit him.

What happens to the GOP when Trump is gone?

Published by digby on September 3, 2024

JV Last at the Bulwark published one of those essays this morning that make you both depressed and relieved at the same time. Depressed because it tells a truth that you really wish wasn’t true and relieved because you realize you haven’t been crazy for thinking the same thing.

He starts off by quoting one of my favorite analysts, Philip Bump of the Washington Post:

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

I’d say this had started long before, all the way back in the 90s when Newt Gingrich ascended to the leadership of the party. Rush Limbaugh and Fox news all set the stage for Trump. It was inevitable that they would end up with a demagogue. Obama was just the final catalyst.

However, that’s not the issue Last addresses in his piece. He says that he had assumed that once Trump was gone there would be large scale recriminations within the party for having fallen for Trump and in the end it would snap back to its usual ideological positions. He was wrong:

My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.

By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.

This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.

True that. It was already happening but he finalized it by turbo charging that rural vote and repelling the college educated suburbanites. That has changed everything,

Anyway, this is the important insight:

I had always believed that in politics causality was a wheel. You turn it in one direction, then you turn it in the other direction. You set course, then you reverse course.

That view was incorrect. Political causality is like causality in most other realms: It branches.

Something happens and that action or event creates an entirely new universe. Which leads to another branch. And another. There is no going back. There is never any going back. The world is contingent.

Let me give you a historical example: The First World War was an accident. It didn’t have to happen. If you ran the events leading up to it ten times, it probably doesn’t happen in seven of them.

But the fact that the First World War did happen caused a bunch of contingent events which created a new universe. And in that universe, the accident of the First World War made the advent of the Second World War inevitable.

I’m sure some people in 1917 looked at the First World War and thought, “This whole thing was an accident that never should have happened. Once it’s over we can go back to normal.”

But that was incorrect. The Great War created a branch away from normal. “Normal,” as people understood it in 1912, was never coming back.

I made the same analytical error in 2016.

Other people continue to make this error today. Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley make it on a daily basis. So do the conservatives who insist that they are (still) skating to the puck of some post-Trump future.

They’re never going back to normal.

THEY’RE NEVER GOING BACK TO NORMAL.

We need to internalize that. Whatever happens going forward, it’s not going to be what it was. Not even close:

If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.

Neither will it be the same as it has been under Trump. But I think we need to consider that it might be worse — and harder to beat. Trump is a dumpster fire in a million ways despite the hold he has on the GOP base. It’s unlikely we’ll be so “lucky” as to face someone so uniquely corrupt, criminal and stupid again, The next one may be harder to beat.

As I said, depressing but oddly relieving. I hate it but I’m relieved to know that I’m not alone in thinking this. The Republicans are on a different path than the one we’ve known. I’m not sure they know what it is themselves. But the incentives are what they are for the foreseeable future and we need to be prepared for that.

How Could They Do That To Dear Leader?

Published by digby on September 3, 2024

Trump has primed his cult to believe that Kamala Harris is an illegitimate president. Of course he has. “Obama wasn’t born in the US!” “Clinton shouldn’t be allowed to run!”because of her emails. “Joe Biden didn’t win, they cheated!” Now he’s laying the groundwork to whine that Harris should not have been allowed to run. And his people believe it:

Jason Streem, also 46, a dentist from the Cleveland suburbs who supports Trump, objected to the way Harris became the nominee.

“She was never part of the running process,” he said in a follow-up interview. “She never received the primary votes.” He called it “the most undemocratic way of picking a nominee.”

“It just threw me off,” complained Roger Sierra, 28, of Miami, an independent who supports Trump. He questioned Harris’ rise − put on the Democratic ticket in 2020 even though she failed to win a single delegate during her short-lived presidential bid, “and then for her to have this much support and just to be installed rather than voted in, it’s just a little, how would I say, confusing to me.”

Someone should explain to this poor fellow so he isn’t so confused. JD Vance has never received one delegate and he’s on the ticket. Neither did Mike Pence, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine and on and on. That has nothing to do with anything. In fact, Vance, unlike those others, never ran for any office until 2022. He has almost zero experience in politics.

As for Harris being “installed” it’s totally up to the parties what to do in the circumstance of a candidate dropping out. In this case the party delegates were all polled and decided on Harris, the VP they had all voted for enthusiastically in 2020 to replace Biden if he couldn’t continue. Nothing weird about any of it except the unusual circumstances of an incumbent president deciding not to run again late in the primary season.

If it was so undemocratic you’d think there would be a bunch of Democrats complaining about having their choice of nominee usurped by this process. Nobody’s objected! Democrats are thrilled with their nominee. In the words of Tim Walz, “mind your own damn business!”

But you knew all that. This person is disappointed that his Dear Leader isn’t going to coast to re-election (he never way, by the way) and now he’s in for a fight. Boo hoo.

But you can bet that if she wins the cult will be screaming about Harris being a usurper forever.

Why Would Anyone Vote Trump Back In?

Published by digby on September 3, 2024

Aside from the obvious, his actual performance was just terrible. Here a just a couple of data points I ran across this morning:

I guess when people say they liked his policies, they meant his policies to deny people health insurance.

How about this one?

Or how about Trump’s claim that his tax cuts were the largest in history. (“nobody’s ever seen anything like it!”)

How about Trump’s new crusade against Joe Biden in which he claims that nobody died on his watch? He lied, of course:

65 military personnel died in war zones during Trump’s administration.

It’s common for some gold star families to blame the administration in charge for the deaths of their loved ones. Weirdly, since Benghazi it only seems to be right wing gold star families blaming Democrats. I didn’t see much of this during Trump’s tenure. Maybe all the families of the fallen were Trump fans? Or, more likely, the non-Trump fan families weren’t interested in becoming part of a political campaign.

Bill Sher at the Washington Monthly has more on this:

Trump is betting that he can make inroads on the anti-war left, with the help of Kennedy and Gabbard, by portraying himself a peacemaker battling warmongers Biden and Harris.

Evidence for that charge is also scant. If Biden and Harris have so deeply embroiled America in endless war, how is it that fewer American soldiers have died in combat during their administration than in Trump’s? How is it that fewer soldiers have died in combat than in any administration since Jimmy Carter?

According to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks annual casualty data, 65 soldiers died in “hostile action” during the four years of the Trump administration, versus 13 under Biden through 2022, the last year tabulated. The Washington Monthly’s Zach Marcus reviewed combat-related deaths announced in Pentagon press releases over the previous two years and identified three additional hostile action deaths, for a total of 16. That’s a 75 percent decline.

You are likely familiar with the incidents that caused the 16 deaths, as there are only two: the August 2021 suicide bombing at an Afghanistan airport and the January 2024 drone attack on an American military base in Jordan, for which the loose-knit Iranian-backed militia Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility.

The reason why the Biden-Harris administration has suffered so few hostile action deaths is because it ended the so-called “forever war” in Afghanistan. Most of the deaths were a tragic consequence of leaving that combat zone, not from deepening any foreign conflict.

In leaving Afghanistan just short of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks, Biden and Harris closed the book on the failed neoconservative project of exploiting that traumatic event to expand American hegemony across the Greater Middle East with American ground troops.

How exactly are we on the verge of World War III? In Trump’s narrative, it’s because of the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars.

Trump places heavy emphasis on the Afghan bombing deaths to argue Biden and Harris are so incompetent that they facilitated fresh conflicts. He told the National Guard conference, “It gave us Russia going into Ukraine. It gave us the October 7 attack on Israel. Because it gave us lack of respect.”

This tenuous, self-serving argument collapses upon minimal scrutiny.

Read on. It’s a good analysis.

Trump’s only national security and foreign policy is to blather about money, “make friends” with despots who see him coming a mile away, tariffs as a “negotiating” posture that doesn’t work and doing the opposite of whatever his predecessors did. He is an imbecile in most ways but in this way in particular.

Assholery As A Lifestyle

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 3, 2024

Pithy turns of phrase for dysfunctional personalities

OpenClipArt image by StudioFibonacci.

Tim Miller of The Bulwark appearing the other day on MSNBC used the phrase “emotional support cougar” to describe the over-made-up groupies who decorate Donald Trump’s Mar-al-Lago resort. The term seems not to have originated with Miller, but perhaps with comedian Carla Collins. Miller deployed the phrase to reference Trump’s regular need to run home to them in his Florida safe space.

But the desperation behind the need is broader than Trump, his sons, and his hangers-on.

Over at The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klaas explores the epidemic of toxic masculinity embodied by Trump and guys like Elon Musk. The day after Gov. Tim Walz modeled a healthier masculinity in addressing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a professional purveyor of the destructive kind, Andrew Tate, was placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge for human trafficking in minors.

Klaas describes the type with a few more pithy phrases:

On the one hand, Tate—a fool so dense that light bends around him—embodies what is often referred to as “toxic masculinity,” a whole suite of severe character flaws.2 For our purposes, I’ll focus on a subset of Tate’s destructive deficiencies which are much more widely held, a specific model of masculinity that pretends one can only be a “real” man if they engage in constant abusive performative insecurity.

In this world, men must not only constantly be peacocks, but peacocks who overcompensate for their lack of genuinely magnificent tailfeathers by buying big guns and flashy cars while confusing women for property and wrongly conflating high wealth with high value.

Tate sells this form of warped masculinity as a product, including a $50 monthly subscription service to the “Real World”—previously known as “Hustlers University”—where he will teach young disciples how to get rich quick on the internet. Or, for the low, low price of just $7,979, you can join The War Room, an online community of Tate superfans that is billed as being “a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” What an erudite wordsmith one must be to create so much meaningless ambiguity with so few words of drivel!

The fact that internet vipers like Tate are so financially successful indicates that there is a social malaise among rudderless young men; if there weren’t, nobody would pay him absurd amounts of cash—or for this demographic, cryptocurrency—to tell them how to amass control over more worldly objects (which includes women in Tate’s antediluvian mindset).

As James Bloodworth writes, for the men on Andrew Tate’s courses, “Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools – something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. The contemporary manosphere has taken the concept of the trophy wife and expanded it into the trophy harem.”

How alpha must Trump be then? He doesn’t have to buy emotional support cougars. They pay him for admission to his club!

What’s particularly spooky about Tate (both British and American) is how well known he is in England where “one in five young British men — have a ‘favourable’ or ‘very favourable’ view of Tate.”

Tate’s strategy of trying to capitalize on the social angst of young men is nothing new. It’s simply dressed up in a new guise and packaged in a slick digital offering. What Tate is bottling up and selling online is an emotion that the sociologist Michael Kimmel identified a decade ago as aggrieved entitlement.

This concept refers, essentially, to the rage-filled sentiment among some men—particularly white men in the West—that they are the innocent victims of a world that’s becoming fairer by race and gender. Some report feeling emasculated by women holding any power. Many believe they are entitled, through fake pseudoscientific allusions to biological determinism and the grace of their genes, to being on top. Andrew Tate’s favored moniker, Top G, is no accident. The chumps toil at the bottom. The champs climb over whoever they need to in order to regain the top.

And at the top, it turns out there’s a lot of performative insecurity: fast cars, big guns, plastic bodies—the empty trappings of a broken person’s idea of what it means to project the illusion of a successful life.

Emotional support cougars, aggrieved entitlement, performative insecurity. Otherwise known as a public health crisis like “deaths of despair.”

It’s a poison in modern society. Not only are these abhorrent, backward views associated with higher rates of gender-based violence that leads to men beating and murdering women, but they are also killing young men, too.

It’s tough to muster sympathy for men who have adopted assholery as a lifestyle even if it’s killing them.

Walz is the counterpoint, Klaas believes, arriving not a moment too soon:

Beyond the biography, though, Walz represents one important rival model of masculinity to Andrew Tate. And it’s not just that he looks like—and is—a Midwestern Dad who likes football and knows how to fix cars and makes lame jokes while posting photos of his pets on social media.

Instead, it’s that Walz inverts the Tate philosophy on every front. For Walz, the chumps are those who speak a big game but are losers because they do nothing to strengthen their communities. The champs are those who need no praise or vanity to help others; who acknowledge their weaknesses and thank those who they’re indebted to; and are those who are never afraid to showcase emotional vulnerability. (The fact that Gus Walz’s unscripted tearful excitement in honor of his Dad became a lightning rod for ghouls in the Tate-adjacent MAGAsphere as an indication of beta male emotional weakness only underlined how utterly broken those men are inside). And, crucially, Walz feels empowered, not emasculated, to be working with a powerful woman.

You don’t need an extortionate online course to teach you how to be a good neighbor, a kind friend, a caring partner, or a community leader, either.

Walz therefore offers a form of quiet, inspiring masculinity that transcends traditional gender roles because it has a powerful message: being a good man and being a good person are the same thing.

If you want a perfect encapsulation of the conservative world view, I wrote early in my tenure here,

you need look no further than “A Boy Named Sue,” a song made famous by Johnny Cash and (ironically) written by the late Shel Silverstein, a writer of children’s books.

“Son, this world is rough, and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough…

It’s the name that helped to make you strong”

Not a good father. Not a good husband. Not a good citizen. But strong. It’s all that matters.

That and having a few cougars hanging on your elbow.