SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN THE BASICS OF NEGOTIATION TO ELIE HONIG

I keep re-reading this New York magazine post by CNN analyst and former prosecutor Elie Honig in the hope that I'm missing something obvious, because if I'm not, then Honig is clearly the most naive person in the media and would be the worst possible person to negotiate anything.

Honig writes:

During oral argument on Donald Trump’s presidential-immunity claim back in January, District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Florence Pan posed this hypothetical: “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival [and] who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?”

Trump’s attorney John Sauer — Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law School grad, Supreme Court clerk, former solicitor general of Missouri — gave this astonishing answer: “If he were impeached and convicted first.” Pan incisively replied, “So your answer is ‘no.’” Sauer tried to recast his response as a “qualified ‘yes,’” but the damage was done. The hypothetical resurfaced during Supreme Court oral arguments with a bit of additional hedging by Trump’s team, but their bottom-line position remained mostly unchanged.

Sauer’s answer to the SEAL Team Six question, on Trump’s behalf, is wrong, reckless, and self-defeating. It’s also entirely unnecessary to the argument he needed to make and to how the Supreme Court will likely rule.

Any idiot can see what Sauer was trying to do there, right? He was trying to make an outrageously maximalist case for Trump's immunity from prosecution, so when a majority of the justices on the Court give Trump a great deal of immunity, they'll be seen as making a moderate decision. He's moving the Overton window -- or you could say he's just starting a process of dealmaking with an outrageous ask, as dealmakers routinely do.

Honig can't possibly fail to grasp this, can he? Can he?

Yes, he can:

Here’s a better answer, which Trump’s team could and should have given: “Of course, a president who ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival can be indicted. In fact, this scenario helpfully illustrates our point. The relevant question is whether the charged conduct is within or beyond the outer perimeter of the president’s official job. Obviously, an assassination plot would fall outside and the president would not be immune. But we maintain here that some of the conduct charged against our client was within the scope of the president’s job and therefore entitled to protection from prosecution.”

So Honig believes that Sauer -- who, like a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court, is affiliated with the Federalist Society, and thus will be recognized by those justices as someone who's on their team -- should have started the bidding by asking for exactly what his client would settle for, instead of asking for more. That's how Honig thinks this works.

When, any day now, the Supreme Court rules on criminal immunity, bank on this: The justices will not permit a scenario in which a president can put a hit on a political rival and evade prosecution.

Probably not.

Indeed, the Supreme Court can — and I believe will — firmly reject Trump’s SEAL Team Six response but still establish a more limited (and more sane) variation of presidential immunity.

I think it will be more limited, though I don't think it will be "sane." I expect the justices to give Trump a tremendous amount of immunity, stopping just short of saying he can lawfully order the assassination of a political rival. And they're counting on that to look like a reasonable decision in part because Trump and his legal team had such an unreasonable ask.

Does Elie Honig serioudly not understand this? Is this the best the mainstream media can do for legal commentary?

LOUISIANA BEGINS ESTABLISHING A STATE RELIGION THAT'S NOT JUST CHRISTIANITY -- IT'S PROTESTANTISM

No separation of church and state, please -- we're Republicans:

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom....

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law on Wednesday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.

... the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday....

A Catholic school seems like an odd choice for this signing ceremony.

So, even within Christianity, the Ten Commandments aren't precisely the same across traditions — the text is translated and even *numbered* differently. This law appears to mandate the KJV version — a Bible translation entire Christian traditions reject. apnews.com/article/loui...

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— Jack Jenkins (@jackmjenkins.bsky.social) Jun 19, 2024 at 3:58 PM

Jenkins is right. The text of the bill includes the prescribed version of the Ten Commandments, and it's not the version I grew up with as a Catholic child. The Catholic Ten Commandments don't include "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images" or any other translation of this passage. As a result, the commandments that follow are numbered differently, and Catholics have two "covet" commandments rather than one.

Remember, Louisiana is 22% Catholic (according to the Public Religion Research Institute), or perhaps 26% Catholic (according to Pew). So this isn't just Christianity being imposed on the state's Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and so on -- it's also Protestantism being imposed on Catholics.

The American impulse to display the (Protestant) Ten Commandments got a huge boost from Hollywood in 1956, when Paramount Pictures released Cecil B. DeMille's film The Ten Commandments. Among those recruited to endorse the film was a judge in Minnesota:

In the 1940s, wishing to avoid sentencing to a juvenile reformatory a teenage boy who had stolen a car, Judge E.J. Ruegemer instructed the boy to find and keep a copy of the Ten Commandments. Inspired by the eventual success of this alternative sentence, Judge Ruegemer began distributing copies of the Commandments nationally through the Fraternal Order of Eagles, of which he was a member, starting in 1951. The F.O.E. distributed 100,000 printed copies of the Commandments and 250,000 copies of a comic book called “On Eagle’s Wings” promoting the organization’s belief in the transformative power of learning about the Commandments.

In 1956, DeMille contacted Ruegemer with hopes of using the judge’s service project to help promote his epic film. Funded in part by publicity money from Paramount, DeMille and Ruegemer ordered granite monuments with the Commandments engraved on them to be placed in front of courthouses and in public parks across the country.... DeMille often sent stars from the film to the dedications....

Several of the monuments still exist around the country, although some were removed as part of community and judicial conflicts over the separation of church and state. In 2005, the Supreme Court case found the F.O.E. monuments constitutional, in a case involving one of the monuments that was placed on the grounds of the Texas state capitol.

It's not clear whether this campaign inspired Roy Moore:

In 2001 ... Judge Roy Moore, the newly-elected Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, commissioned a 5,280 pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments. In violation of United States Supreme Court statutes, he placed it inside the rotunda of the state court building. As with the F.O.E. sculptures, inscribed on the monument were passages from the Declaration of Independence, the national anthem, and other writings central to the founding of the United States.

Judge Ruegemer thought he'd influebnced Moore.

Judge Ruegemer saw a connection, however, between his own and DeMille’s work to promote the Commandments, and the Commandments, and Judge Moore’s monument. In an interview he gave to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2003 at the age of 101, Ruegemer stated that, “You could say this big mess in Alabama, where the judge refused to obey a federal court order to remove the Ten Commandments, you could say that all started with that 16-year-old St. Cloud boy.”

So the publicity campaign for a movie released at a time of anxiety about communism, juveline delinquency, and other real or imagined threats to the American way of life became part of our now apparently permanent culture war. Obviously there will be court battles over this law. I assume that the federal judiciary Leonard Leo has created will use the battles to declare that, yes, separation of church and state is a myth, or maybe that this isn't really the establishment of religion, or that establishment of religion is fine as long as only the states do it. But I hope I'm wrong.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL JUSTICE ARE HARD. SPITE IS EASY.

What do Democrats want? An economy that work for all people, not just the rich. A justice system that's fair to everyone. Equal rights for all regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. A way out of the climate crisis. An end to the gun violence epidemic. Affordable healthcare. Affordable housing. And on and on.

What do Republicans want?

Spite.

As The Bulwark's Jonathan Last notes, Trumpers aren't driven by the pursuit of justice for themselves, because their lives are pretty sweet:

Most revolutions are borne of dissatisfaction. Some revolutions are motivated by ethnic or religious hatreds. Every once in a while, you get a revolution propelled by a belief that something better lies on the other side....

The Trumpian revolution, on the other hand, seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism.

Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes. And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones.

We are not talking about les misérables Américains.

Many Democrats are comfortable and fortunate but want to improve conditions for people who aren't like themselves. But there's no evidence that privileged Republicans want to help anyone who's not in their tribe. The central point of Republicanism is precisely that people who aren't in your tribe are unworthy of basic rights and decent treatment. They shouldn't have health insurance if they're working shit jobs with no benefits. They shouldn't be treated decently by the cops. It's intolerable if beer companies, department stores, and Hollywood studios sometimes market to them, even if they usually market to other groups.

Republicans are driven by spite -- and that makes a Republican politician's job much easier than a Democrat's. It's hard to fight for economic and social justice -- vested interests will fight back with all the power they have, so it's hard to win more than partial victories that leave genuine justice elusive.

Spite is much easier -- and even a partial victory in pursuit of spite feels satisfying to spiteful voters. Donald Trump didn't need to build his entire wall in order to satisfy his base -- just building part of it angered Democrats, and that was spiteful enough. The mere fact that Trump ran and won the nomination in 2024 is satisfyingly spiteful for Republicans. Every day that he remains in the race, especially after four indictments and a felony conviction, is pure spite. And his ongoing campaign to discredit the results of the 2020 election is also seen by his base as a welcome act of spite.

Trump doesn't really have to do anything if he's elected president in order to satisfy his voters -- just being elected, fairly or otherwise, spites us. Everything he does to us, or to people whose lives we think should be made better, is satisfying spite, even if a court rolls it back. And he doesn't have to do any of the big things on his agenda if small, easy things make us angry.

This isn't purely a Trump phenomenon. Nearly every Republican makes owning the libs a priority, and lib-owning alone can make a Republican politician seem like a success in office. Whereas Joe Biden looks like a failure if his supporters are in any way dissatisfied with the economy, the war in Gaza, the degree of homeless or crime in America....

In other words, it's much easier to be a Republican politician, as long as you concentrate on spite.

THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION WILL BE MEMED

Michelle Goldberg's latest column is about the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Indiana, who is so far right he makes Mike Braun, the very conservative gubernatorial nominee, uncomfortable.

... after the Republican convention this weekend, the influential conservative lawyer James Bopp Jr. wrote, in a confidential memo obtained by Politico’s Adam Wren, that there’s a “serious threat” to the party’s nominee for governor, Senator Mike Braun.

That threat is Micah Beckwith, a Pentecostal pastor, podcaster and self-described Christian nationalist who was just chosen, despite Braun’s wishes, to be his running mate.

Here's are just a few of Beckwith's public pronouncements:

The day after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Beckwith said that God had told him: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” He’s said that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and promised that if he wins, he’ll be a thorn in the side to the governor.

Also:

Before his victory this weekend, Beckwith was probably best known for leading a campaign to purge the young-adult shelves at the Hamilton East Public Library, where he was a board member until January. (He resigned after a policy he’d promoted, which removed books that included sex, violence or repeated profanity from a section for teenagers, was reversed.)

During that fight, Beckwith made an enemy of John Green, author of the massive bestseller The Fault in Our Stars, which Beckwith sought to remove from the Young Adult section of the library. But there's a lot more ideological extremism where that came from, as I'll explain below.

Goldberg sees the political rise of figures like Beckwith as a consequence of Trumpism:

I’ve written about this in Minnesota, where delegates to the state convention endorsed the Alex Jones acolyte Royce White for Senate, and in Colorado, where the state party recently called for the burning of Pride flags. Cadres of true believers inspired by Donald Trump, and by the religious movement that sees him as divinely ordained, are seizing the party from the bottom up, much to the consternation of more traditional Republicans who thought they could indulge the MAGA movement without being overtaken by it.

But Trump shouldn't get all the blame. Another factor at work here is the replacement of ordinary news outlets with social media sites as the main source of information (or "information") for much of the country. Trump was a Twitter ranter for years before he became a politcal candidate, but while a great deal of right-wing social-media discourse is bellicose in a Trumpian way, there's also an emphasis on memes that's largely independent of Trump. Right-wing meme culture has many influences other than Trump: Alex Jones, QAnon, and Fox News, to name three. Younger right-wingers such as Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro pump memes into the discourse every day. Crackpot cartoonists such as Ben Garrison do the same. This culture would exist even if Trump had never entered politics, and it will outlive Trump.

Beckwith loves memes. Nearly everything he posts on Facebook and Instagram is a meme. The memes cover a range of topics, including at least one topic on which Beckwith is at odds with Trump (vaccines), but there are some common threads: The enemy (us) is unspeakably evil, on par with the worst villains in human history. Powerful people are in a massive conspiracy to conceal plain truth. And each meme is presented as a perfect nugget of wit and incontrovertible truth -- anyone who tries to refute it is obviously dull-witted and stuck in the Matrix.

Here are some examples from Beckwith's social media:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

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A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Micah Beckwith (@micah4indiana)

The future of the Republican Party will be in the hands of people who only think about political issues at this superficial, us-good-them-bad level. The party eventually won't have a "governing wing." It will be focused on pure revenge. And yet it will run possibly half the states in the union, and probably the federal bench, while it's also able to win the White House and Congress.

That is, unless Democrats focus voters' attention on the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of this party, and learn to push back against "Democrats are the embodiment of pure evil" messaging. I hope I live to see that happen. But I'm not sure any of us will.

IF TRUMP PICKS J.D. VANCE AS HIS RUNNING MATE, HE'LL PROBABLY REGRET IT

This happened over the weekend:

Sen. J.D. Vance cemented his status as frontrunner to become Donald Trump's running mate on Sunday, coming top in a poll of attendees at Turning Point Action's People's Convention in Detroit....

When 1,986 people at the Detroit event were asked who they favored out of Vance, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sens. Marco Rubio and Tim Scott, some 43 percent said they favored senator from Ohio.

Scott was a distant second on 15.4 percent, Rubio took third with 7.7 percent, and Burgum, who in particular has been talked up by Trump in recent weeks, took seven percent.

Does that mean Trump should pick Vance? According to the conventional rules of politics, it probably means he shouldn't. Just about everyone at the Turning Point gathering is a committed Trumper. Why would Trump want a running mate who's the favorite of people who are already certain to vote for him? The way he'd gain from a running mate pick is by selecting someone who primarily appeals to voters other than his base. That would suggest someone like Scott or Rubio -- someone who's seen as a "mainstream" Republican, whatever that means these days.

(If I had to guess, I'd say that Trump will pick Burgum, just because he looks like a vice president out of "central casting," as Trump likes to say, and because he's the least likely to upstage Trump. Notice that we speculated for months about a female running mate, and now the top contenders all seem to be men. I assume that non-whites will drop out of contention in the same way, so it probably won't be Scott or Ben Carson, and possibly not Rubio, either. But who knows?)

But conventional political fundamentals aren't the main reason Trump would regret picking Vance. I think he'd regret picking Vance because Vance is far too ambitious to be a meek helpmeet like pre-January 6 Mike Pence. Trump wants a vice president who's a potted plant. I read Ross Douthat's Vance interview, which makes clear that Vance wouldn't be what Trump wants.

That's not because Vance said mean things about Trump on social media years ago. Trump likes it when people attack him and then capitulate to him -- examples include Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio. What the Douthat interview makes clear is that Vance may not be ambitious in a flamboyant, spotlight-seeking way -- he's no Marjorie Taylor Greene or Vivek Ramaswamy -- but he still greatly admires himself and thinks he has all the answers. The subtext of nearly everything Vance says to Douthat is: Why yes, I have a very large brain and many highly developed ideas about politics. He comes off as a less showoffy Steve Bannon -- and remember what happened when Bannon worked in the White House. Vance is a Trump loyalist now, but I think his ultimate loyalty would be to himself.

Vance came from poverty, but he quickly figured out the point of an elite education: to seek mentors and social circles that can advance your career, then cling to them until you find someone new who can help you more. Vance has passed through one career-advancing milieu after another -- the Amy Chua/Jed Rubenfeld crowd at Yale Law, Peter Thiel's demimonde, and now the world of Trump. Before Vance became a Trumper, he was an anti-Trumper because that seemed like the path to success. Vance isn't Lindsey Graham, a lifelong sidekick who latched on to Trump only because the man for whom he'd been a sidekick, John McCain, was dead. Vance wants power of his own.

Vance, as VP, would probably be an inveterate leaker -- for career advancement, he might think it's a good idea to butter up influential journalists. Vance will probably disagree with Trump on some issues. To Douthat, Vance comes off as a hater of the elites, someone who agrees with Bernie Sanders supporters more than mainstream Republicans:

The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to — it’s the Bernie Bros. But generally, center-left liberals who are doing very well, and center-right conservatives who are doing very well, have an incredible blind spot about how much their success is built on a system that is not serving people who they should be serving.

In the interview, Vance talks about raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour. Does he really believe all this? I think he thinks he does. Trump, however, loves the economic elites and doesn't want to help working people. If Trump struggles in a second term for any reason, Vance might try to subvert his boss, even if he doesn't openly challenge Trump the way Bannon did in an interview with, of all publications, the liberal American Prospect, just before Trump fired him.

That didn't work out for Bannon, of course -- he's now a Trump lapdog again. But if Vance sees Trump struggling -- possibly after a strong 2026 midterm performance by the Democrats -- he really might go rogue. The Douthat interview makes clear that he has too much regard for his own ideas to be Trump's beta male for very long -- nd remember, he's only 39 years old.

Vance sees a bright future for himself. Trump shouldn't assume that Vance thinks that future will be as a lifelong MAGA loyalist.

DOES TRUMP EVEN WANT TO BE PRESIDENT?

June 18 will be the publication date for a new book about Donald Trump and his years on The Apprentice. In The Washington Post, Ron Charles recently reviewed the book, Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass by Ramin Setoodeh. The review suggests that while Trump may have run for president twice since his first victory, he didn't particularly enjoy his time in office.

Any other former president would surely be eager to wax eloquent about his tenure as leader of the free world. But Setoodeh says that Trump “just wants me to understand how he made great TV.” Every time they meet, he asks, “Do you think I would have been president without ‘The Apprentice’?” ...

“In our days together,” he writes, “Trump is happiest when he talks about ‘The Apprentice’ and crankiest when he relives his years as the commander in chief.” ...

Trump’s memory of what happened in the Oval Office is muddled, but he can recall the details of every battle on “The Apprentice.” His face flushed with excitement, “he sounds like a retired high school football coach, lounging in a diner.”

Among the book’s most pathetic scenes — and there are many — is one that shows Trump standing before “his wall of egotism,” gazing upon a framed page of his Nielsen ratings from “The Apprentice.” ... the former resident of the White House says, “This is my whole life.”

“He doesn’t dare touch this valuable document, something that seems to carry as much value to him as the U.S. Constitution, if not more.” And yet, even as they’re both looking directly at the Nielsen stats, Trump exaggerates the number of viewers as reflexively as he lies about his vote counts.

It's obvious why Trump is running again: He wants to use the powers of the presidency to get himself out of legal trouble, and he wants to go out a winner rather than a loser. But in some ways, he seems to be running for president because it offers the possibility of feeling like the king of the world again -- the way he felt when The Apprentice was a ratings hit (and apparently didn't feel when he was the Leader of the Free World).

So he wants to be president, but it's clear he doesn't want to do the job of president. He has happy memories of The Apprentice, but he doesn't seem to have happy memories of his presidential term.

I've been arguing lately that what might save us if there's a second Trump presidency is Trump's lack of interest in much of what his advisers want to do, i.e., the mad schemes of Project 2025. The counterargument is that these advisers will set their sinister plans in motion and merely ask Trump to sign off on them. He doesn't need to do any of the work.

That might be what happens. On the other hand, Trump likes to feel as if he's in charge. He wants his underlings to focus on his priorities. He might look at their plans to, say, use the Comstock Act to ban the abortion pill and say: Wait -- what's in this for me? It might really piss him off if his people are prioritizing policy goals that, in his opinion, don't make him look good.

On The Apprentice, by contrast, everything was designed to make him look good. That's what he wants. He'll pick a lot of fights with his subordinates if he feels he's not getting that. In some policy areas, at least, this could be what saves us.

DID THESE CEOs ONLY NOTICE TRUMP'S IGNORANCE AND INCOHERENCE NOW?

Breaking news: Donald Trump is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Former President Donald Trump failed to impress everyone in a room full of top CEOs Thursday at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting, multiple attendees told CNBC.

“Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said one CEO who was in the room, according to a person who heard the executive speaking. The CEO also said Trump did not explain how he planned to accomplish any of his policy proposals, that person said.

Several CEOs “said that [Trump] was remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,” CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin reported Friday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

... “At one point, he discussed his plan to bring the corporate tax rate down from 21% to 20% ... and was asked about why he had chosen 20%,” Sorkin said Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “And he said, ‘Well, it’s a round number.’”

I'm happy that this is being reported, but, um ... have these CEOs been living in caves? Trump has been like this for years.

"Meandering"? That's nothing new for Trump. A Canadian reporter called his 2015 Trump Tower campaign kickoff announcement "an epic, meandering, bizarre speech." Chris Cillizza used to publish pieces at CNN with headlines like "The 45 Most Incoherent Lines from Donald Trump’s Rambling Rose Garden Speech." And here's an account of Trump "meandering" remarks at a 2019 White House social media summit:

Rambling from one topic to the next, Trump ... discussed the stock markets, the census, his pardon of Scooter Libby, his hair, and hit on a number of other issues....

The President, who described himself as “technologically OK,” spent an inordinate amount of time suggesting – without evidence – that there was a conspiracy to keep his following count and engagement low on Twitter.

“I used to watch it,” Trump told attendees, referring to his followers. “It’d be like a rocket ship when I put out a beauty.”

Trump, then added, “When I put out something, a good one that people like, right? A good tweet. It goes up. It used to go up, it would say: 7,000, 7,008, 7,017, 7,024, 7,032, 7,044. Right? Now it goes: 7,000, 7,008, 6,998. Then they go: 7,009, 6,074. I said, what’s going on? It never did that before. It goes up, and then they take it down. Then it goes up. I never had it. Does anyone know what I’m talking about with this?”

It was not clear if the President was talking about his follower count or his retweet count.

And when it comes to governing, has Trump ever known what he was talking about? Even before he was sworn into office in 2017, Vox reported that Trump "seems to be stunningly ignorant about what a president actually does." Vox cited a Wall Street Journal that reported on Trump's cluelessness:

In the meeting with Obama, the Journal reports, Trump seemed surprised by how much the president has to do: “Mr. Obama walked his successor through the duties of running the country, and Mr. Trump seemed surprised by the scope.”

... Nor did Trump realize he had to hire a staff. The Wall Street Journal wrote that Trump aides “were … as unaware that the entire presidential staff working in the West Wing had to be replaced at the end of Mr. Obama’s term.”

Obnce he'd been president for a few months, U.S. News wrote of his "jaw-dropping obliviousness." As he approaches a possible second term, he has vague ideas about how to get revenge on his enemies and absolution from the legal system, and his advisers have detailed plans for remaking the federal government, but he still doesn't know how anything in government really works.

And he's always been fond of tossing out any number he thinks will sound good, especially if it's "round." In 2018, when it was reported that Trump's Commerce Department wanted a 24 percent maximum tariff on imported steel, Jonathan Swan, then at Axios, wrote:

I’m told that’s accurate, but with one small tweak: Sources tell me the president has told confidants he actually wants a *25* percent global tariff on steel because it's a round number and sounds better.

And this past February, The New York Times reported that Trump was taking a similar approach to reproductive rights:

One thing Mr. Trump likes about a 16-week federal ban on abortions is that it’s a round number. “Know what I like about 16?” Mr. Trump told one of these people, who was given anonymity to describe a private conversation. “It’s even. It’s four months.”

If CEOs who planned to support Trump are having second thoughts, that's great (though I bet they'll give him money anyway). But if they're surprised by his ignorance and lack of focus, all I can say is: Where have you been all these years?

THERE'S AN OBVIOUS REASON WHY BIDEN SEEMS TO BE DOING BETTER AMONG OLDER VOTERS

Axios reports that President Biden seems to be doing surprisingly well among older voters.

The most recent New York Times/Siena poll shows that Biden has a 9-point lead in a head-to-head matchup against Trump among likely voters aged 65 or older.

In a Quinnipiac University poll released last month, Biden is beating Trump by 12 points with the 65+ set.

This is unusual.

Republicans have — with the exception of 1992, 1996 and 2000 — won the senior vote in every presidential race for the last half-century, according to exit polls.

Why is it happening? Here's a possible reason:

Preserving democracy has emerged as one of the clearest dividing lines between younger and older voters.

When asked by Quinnipiac to identify "the most urgent issue facing the country today," 10% of registered voters aged 18-34 said democracy.

For those 65 and up, that number rose to 35% — higher than any other single issue including the economy and immigration.

Also:

Biden campaign pollster Geoff Garin pointed to two key factors going for the president with older voters:

"First, older voters strongly support what Biden has done to lower drug costs for seniors on Medicare," he told Axios.

"Second, older voters pay much more attention to the news than any other group, so they are the most aware of any group of how unhinged and extreme Donald Trump has become."

I think there's more to it than this. Older voters who succeeded at attaining middle-class or upper-middle-class status are doing okay financially now. They may have been too young to participate in the remarkable economy of the 1950s and 1960s, with its broad middle class (at least for white people), but their parents did, and some of that wealth was passed on. The economy of the Reagan and post-Reagan eras wasn't quite as good for the middle class, but inflation was low and housing prices weren't as awful as they are now. If you're in this age group and you were able to put a decent amount of money away for retirement, things probably look pretty good for you now. You have the money to do the things you want to do, and you can afford to pay higher prices for groceries and other items.

I'm not saying that this is a generation of "greedy geezers" who are backing Biden because they like their privileged status and don't want anyone to take it away. I think many older voters want the sense of prosperity to be extended to younger Americans, who, after all, include their own children and grandchildren. But these are the voters for whom the economy actually feels strong. That must be helping Biden with voters of this age group.

By contrast, polls suggest that young Americans might vote for the authoritarian-populist candidate, Donald Trump. Albena Azmanova, who teaches political and social theory at the University of Kent, writes in The Guardian that similar things are happening all over Europe, though not, she argues, because young people embrace the ideas of authoritarian populism:

In both European and national elections, voters under 30 have given their support to far-right parties such as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, Rassemblement National (National Rally) in France, Vox in Spain, the Brothers of Italy, Chega (Enough) in Portugal, Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium and the Finns party in Finland.

... In Germany, the ultra-right AfD enjoys unrivalled popularity among the young, gaining the support of 17% of 16- to 24-year-olds who voted.... 32% of the French youth, irrespective of gender, supported National Rally....

Rising support for the far right is all the stranger because surveys indicate that the left’s trademark themes of social and economic justice are now more important for voters than the far-right’s flagship issue: immigration....

What ails the young is ... economic uncertainty, or rather “livelihood insecurity”. If older people are living in fear of job loss, younger generations fear they will never land a job, no matter how many master’s degrees they might invest money, effort and hope in. Authors of the 2024 study Jugend in Deutschland (Youth in Germany) established that fears about future prosperity (rather than cultural chauvinism) were driving a shift to the right....

For now, all we can glean from the populist revolt of the young is that the political mainstream is not providing satisfying answers to their grievances.

I don't know about Europe, but America's authoritarian party won't be able to lower prices, make housing more affordable, or create more good-paying jobs for young people. Unlike the Democratic Party, the GOP doesn't even want to do any of those things. And the GOP will be godawful on every other issue young people care about -- the climate, racism, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, Israel and Palestine, you name it.

But I'm afraid the only way young people will learn how awful Republicans are is by helping to elect them. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

IF TRUMP WINS, LET'S HOPE WE HAVE A SHARK-ANECDOTE PRESIDENCY AND NOT A PROJECT 2025 PRESIDENCY

As you probably know, Donald Trump said some bizarre things about boat batteries and sharks at his Las Vegas rally over the weekend:

Sharks, Donald Trump claimed, were attacking more frequently than usual (not true) and posed a newfound risk because boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which would cause them to sink because they were too heavy (really, really not true...)

... Trump, undeterred by truth or science, invoked his intellectual credentials by mentioning his “relationship to MIT.” (Trump’s uncle was a professor at the university, pioneering rotational radiation therapy, which seems a somewhat tenuous connection for conferring shark- or battery-related expertise to his nephew.)

This is pure Dunning-Kruger-ism -- Trump doesn't have any expertise on these subjects, but he thinks he does. He's been like this for years. Plus he thinks this is tremendously entertaining.

I don't see this as a sign of dementia. I see it as a sign that Trump's happy place is being an amateur observational comic, the wittiest guy at the dinner after the country club's senior golf tournament.

Trump's happy place is not policy. It wouldn't have been policy if he'd been a serious candidate for president thirty years ago. Tom Nichols writes:

... Trump’s staff tries to put just enough policy fiber into Trump’s nutty verbal soufflés that they can always sell a talking point later, as if his off-ramps from reality are merely tiny bumps in otherwise sensible speeches. Trump himself occasionally seems surprised when these policy nuggets pop up in a speech; when reading the teleprompter, he sometimes adds comments such as “so true, so true,” perhaps because he’s encountering someone else’s words for the first time and agreeing with them.

I fear that Trump will be elected in November, but this is what gives me a small glimmer of hope.

We know that one of the things that rankled Trump during his presidency was the fact that aides and underlings sometimes wouldn't do exactly what he wanted them to do. J.D. Vance talks about this in his new interview with Ross Douthat:

I first met Trump in 2021. One of the stories he told me was about how some of our generals were changing the timings of troop redeployments in the Middle East so that they could tell him that the troop levels were coming down when in reality they were just changing the way in which troop levels jump up and down in the short term.

... The media has this view of Trump as motivated entirely by personal grievance, and the thing he talked the most about — this was not long after Jan. 6 — was “I’m the president, and I told the generals to do something, and they didn’t do it.”

We've been told that he's solved this problem -- everyone in his second administration will be a Trump loyalist. However, we're also told that the underlings will be ideologues committed to the mad schemes of Project 2025.

We think it will be a sign of loyalty to Trump if his aides and underlings relentlessly pursue the Project 2025 goals. But what if Project 2025 isn't what Trump wants? Remember, his people have a boilerplate answer whenever someone in the press writes a story based on the assumption that he shares his advisers' and allies' goals:

Campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita said in a statement, “Unless a message is coming directly from President Trump or an authorized member of his campaign team, no aspect of future presidential staffing or policy announcements should be deemed official.”

What if, this time, he decides that being a religious-right policy zealot is what constitutes disloyalty to him, because the zealots' priorities aren't his priorities? What if he just wants freedom from legal troubles, a little racism (mass deportations, a Muslim ban), and money flowing into his bank accounts? What if he doesn't care about advancing the cause of Christian nationalism or dismantling the administrative state? What if all that bores him, because he just wants to be America's emcee, telling shark jokes while taking bribes and getting revenge against an enemy or two, with a Get Out of Jail Free card thrown in?

If Trump wins, I think that's the best-case scenario.