ELISSA SLOTKIN ALMOST GETS IT

In The New York Times today, David Leonhardt interviews Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, who's trying to make a name for herself as a -- how should I put this? -- post-woke Democrat. It would be easy to dismiss Slotkin as a Democrat who's out to harm the Democratic Party, and she provides plenty of reasons to feel that way -- but then she says something like this:

The division line now in the Democratic Party is: Do you believe Trump is an existential threat in his second term and needs to be fought in a very different way? Or do you believe that Trump’s second term, like Trump’s first term, is bad but survivable if we just let things play out?

And I’m in Category 1. There are interesting different coalitions that have been built among elected Democrats, among people who on a lot of issues I don’t agree with, but who agree that what Trump is doing, particularly around democracy in our economy, is existential and needs to be approached differently.

Or this:

I think there’s really two things that people who really want to be active can do that is meaningful. And one is make sure we bring awareness and focus to the president’s threat to democracy. Rallies, protests, events: When he tries to screw with election law or when he refuses to listen to the Supreme Court and their court orders, we should be putting a hot spotlight on that with protests, with education, op-eds. Visible and vocal.

And then the second place we can focus is on bringing the middle voters into the fight.

She cites the campaign to prevent the repeal of Obamacare in Donald Trump's first term.

How did that happen? Well, the base of the Democratic Party used full throttle all of the vehicles they had open to them to educate the public that this man was trying to take away your health care, your right to being covered, even if you have a pre-existing condition, your kid on your health care until 26.

And suddenly people who had never been political before were saying: Wait a minute, I don’t really like politics, but someone’s going to take away my health care? What are you talking about? That is what we need to do on the core things that Trump is now doing in his second term. We need the base to focus on educating people around what he’s doing to this economy, to their social security, to their health care and their V.A. benefits. And that is just as important as any rally to protect democracy. Both are important, but if you want to talk about following a model of change, turning the middle against Trump is where it’s at.

That all sounds good to me.

But while Slotkin wants angry activists and previously apolitical middle-of-the-roaders to work together, she also wants the left and the center of the Democratic Party to keep fighting each other:

I don’t think we can stand up to Trump in a credible, thoughtful, strategic way if we don’t own the mistakes we made in the last election that got us here....

If you don’t deal with the problems, then you can’t mount a united offense.

"If you don’t deal with the problems, then you can’t mount a united offense." Has Slotkin ever worked in an office? Any office drone knows that while it's certainly better to resolve problems you have with colleagues, sometimes you just have to work around them -- and a moment of crisis is not the time to stop working and air all your grievances.

(I know Slotkin has worked in an office -- she was a CIA analyst and then worked at the Pentagon, and then in the White House under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. So you'd think she'd know that living with a certain amount of friction is inevitable.)

Democrats do not have to beat themselves up over an election in which they barely lost the popular vote despite a mid-campaign candidate switch, and in which they came within a few seats of winning the House. "We suck! Now join our protest!" is a terrible message.

Slotkin is focused on the voters who are resistant to Democrats. She says:

I live in a town called Holly, Mich. I’ve never won my town. I’ve never won my precinct; I’ve never won my neighbors.

(She has that in common with Franklin Roosevelt, who never won his county in four presidential elections.)

I actually agree with her about the importance of inflation in 2024, although I could do without the elite-bashing:

... [Democrats] spent a good year plus after the pandemic explaining to people that the economy was not as bad as they thought. Saying things like: This Harvard economist says that G.D.P. is the highest, bah, bah, bah. I was going to punch someone if they quoted me one more Harvard economist when I could tell you with certainty that in my part of the world, people’s wages were not keeping pace with inflation. Period.

They just tried to tell everyone the economy was better than it was, and it made people feel stupid. And it completely ignored the fact that while maybe on a piece of paper in a spreadsheet in Boston, that was right in the aggregate. But for people who you were trying to talk to in the middle of the country, it was not accurate.

Inflation had cooled by 2024, but I think it seemed like a solved problem if you had enough of an economic cushion to weather the inflation spike in the middle of Joe Biden's term. If you didn't, inflation still stung. That's not the fault of economists. Economists produce a lot of economic measurements. It's up to politicians to gauge the ones that are economically important and the ones that are politically important. It was up to Biden to have an instinct for why people felt bad when the economy seemed good. (My guess: super-high credit card interest rates.)

Like other centrist Democrats, Slotkin misstates the beliefs of the Democrats she criticizes:

... I think what ["woke" is] shorthand for — for a lot of people — is caring about social issues more than pocketbook issues. And I think what I saw happen in this last election is that people tried to say: The American people, especially of certain categories, care more about identity issues than they do about pocketbooks. And I think that that is just false.

No Democratic candidate said that! Kamala Harris and Tim Walz certainly didn't say that. Among centrist Democrats, this is starting to seem like a Mandela effect. (The Mandela effect is a collective false memory created out of frequent repetition of a falsehood, like the mistaken recollection that Nelson Mandela died in prison. Centrist Democrats have said that the 2024 campaign was woke so often that they now seem to remember it that way.)

Early in the interview, Slotkin says, "Democrats are really good at analyzing policies and giving you the faculty lounge explanation of things." David Leonhardt seems puzzled after a while:

Leonhardt: ... I want to talk for a minute about Bernie Sanders, because I think for a long time Bernie Sanders has been trying to fashion a politics that is more based on class and the American dream, and less based on some of the identity issues that the faculty lounge progressives, as you say, have been pushing.

And yet I also know you don’t agree with Bernie Sanders about everything.... I’m interested in your thoughts about what parts of Bernie and Bernie-ism the Democratic Party should retain and what parts it should look to reinvent.

In response to this, Slotkin has nothing:

Slotkin: I have no problem with — I think his central tenet, that wealth has been absolutely concentrated and moved from the middle class of, let’s say, the previous generation to the upper classes of American society, that’s not an opinion; that’s a factual statement that the middle class was much more powerful 30 years ago than it is today. And that’s a problem. I see that, frankly, as a national security issue. I just don’t think that the answer is socialism, and I think that even using that term confuses people.

I think most people really believe that the system of capitalism is a positive one. It just often is abused by some of the wealthiest and most powerful. But not to scrap the whole system. And I say this as someone who comes from a family business. We were in the hot dog business; my great-grandfather came here at 13, didn’t speak the language and was able to start his own business that he gave to his kids and his grandkids. So I don’t think that the average American is looking for a fundamentally different system. They just want our system to work. So I don’t quibble with Bernie’s central analysis, but I don’t think the cure is socialism.

But "socialism," to Sanders, means a mixed economy, not an economy that rejects capitalism. He wants America to be Scandinavia, not the Soviet Union.

And there's the problem with Democrats like Slotkin: they worry that the party is losing working-class voters, and they say it's because Democrats don't focus enough on how the economy affects those voters -- but here's a guy who does focus on what the economy does to working people, and they reject him.

If you think you can save the Democratic Party, and your plan is to fight for working-class voters, you'd better have something to offer them. Sanders does. Does Slotkin?

DEMOCRATS NEED TO RUN ON THEIR POLICIES' COATTAILS

I like Jess Piper, the popular Substacker and progressive activist from rural Missouri, and I mostly agree with what she's saying here, but there's another point that needs to be made:

Piper says:

As a red-state Democrat, there's really something that I can't stand to hear, and that's when people will look at me and say, "You get what you voted for." Did you know that 40 percent of Missourians voted for Kamala Harris? Did you know that we worked and put hundreds of thousands of signatures together to put paid sick leave, a higher minimum wage, and to get rid of Missouri's abortion ban on the last ballot? All three things won. And then guess what happened? Our gerrymandered state legislators overturned our will. Again, rubbing our nose in it and saying we get what we voted for -- it doesn't really apply. We're trying. We're gerrymandered. We don't have Democrats running, and we don't have money here to support downballot Democrats. And I'm just putting this out there to remind folks: not all of us are voting against our self-interest. There's a whole bunch of people in Missouri trying to do the right thing. It's just an uphill battle.

Donald Trump did beat Kamala Harris in Missouri 58%-40%, while the ballot measures Piper mentions passed: Missourians decided to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution by a 52%-48% margin, and they voted to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour while mandating paid sick leave 58%-42%. (Both issues were part of one ballot measure.)

Yes, the Missouri legislature is working to nullify these referenda, and yes, the legislature is gerrymandered: Republicans hold 70% of the seats in the state Senate and 69% of the seats in the state House of Representatives. Neither Trump nor the victorious Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mike Kehoe, reached 60% of the vote in 2024. Nor did Republican Eric Schmitt in his winning Senate bid in 2022. So the legislature is noticeably more Republican than the state electorate.

But Republican candidates still routinely win statewide elections. Democratic candidates running statewide do much worse than ballot measures featuring Democratic ideas. Remember, gerrymandering doesn't apply in statewide elections.

Missouri is, roughly speaking, a 58%-40% Republican state. And why is that, if the residents believe workers should have paid sick leave, the minimum wage should be higher, and abortion rights should be preserved?

I think I've said this a hundred times here, but I'll say it again: Millions of voters in America regularly vote Republican and don't realize that policies they support are opposed by nearly every Republican. They don't realize that Democrats support these policies.

None of these are radical ideas. None of them involve the world "Latinx" or "equity." Democrats across the spectrum can support them -- Jasmine Crockett as well as James Carville. (Hey, there's another idea: what if Democrats talked about popular policy positions the entire party agrees on? Imagine a Democratic Party in which moderates weren't always fighting with Democrats to their left -- that's crazy talk, right?)

Democrats need to start saying, Republicans oppose all of these policies. If you support them, you need to know that Republicans are on the other side, and Democrats are on your side. This should be a major project for the Democratic Party: making sure that millions of voters in the middle understand the mismatch between the policies they support and the party they regularly vote for.

This won't flip the majority of Republican voters. But it might flip just enough to make states like Missouri, Ohio, Iowa, and Texas competitive again.

TRUMP TORCHES THE COUNTRY, BUT CENTRIST DEMOCRATS THINK THE REAL THREAT IS PROGRESSIVISM

Today is Memorial Day. Because federal holidays are normally slow news days, well-connected think tanks and interest groups often pitch op-eds and stories to major media outlets when holidays are approaching. For this weekend, I see that anti-progressive Democrats have successfully pitched a couple of high-profile pieces.

The first, in The Wall Street Journal, is a story about Rahm Emanuel's all-but-declared run for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. Emanuel apparently intends to run on the slogan "Rahm: Because Democrats Are Bad." (I made that up, but it's very close to the truth.)

Rahm Emanuel, never humble about his political skills, is trying to accomplish something that seems far-fetched even for him: push his Democratic Party—rooted in the identity politics of the left—to the center.

The former congressman, White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor and diplomat is direct about what he thinks Democrats need to do to win national elections again. He calls the party’s brand “toxic” and “weak and woke,” a nod to culture-war issues he thinks Democrats have become too often fixated on that President Trump has successfully used against them.

The Democratic Party's poll numbers are bad. Ever wonder why? We know that dyed-in-the-wool liberals and progressives are frustrated by the party's weak response to Trump. We know that Republicans have been told for decades that Democrats are history's greatest monsters. But what about the people in the middle? Why don't they say nice things about Democrats?

I think one big reason they don't is that they keep being told that Democrats suck by Democrats. I believe this has a real impact on how voters vote. Here are the messages swing voters hear:

Republicans say: Democrats suck!
Democrats say: Democrats suck!

Republicans say: We have all the answers and we are the only true patriots in America.
Democrats say: We need a strong Republican Party! Isn't Liz Cheney wonderful?

Under those circumstances, it's amazing that Democrats win any elections at all.

In additioon to that Journal story, there's this in The Washington Post:

Really? Again?

Here are the opening paragraph, which could have been generated by AI or, really, by anyone familiar with America's political media:

Maybe it’s using the word “oligarchs” instead of rich people. Or referring to “people experiencing food insecurity” rather than Americans going hungry. Or “equity” in place of “equality,” or “justice-involved populations” instead of prisoners.

As Democrats wrestle with who to be in the era of President Donald Trump, a growing group of party members — especially centrists — is reviving the argument that Democrats need to rethink the words they use to talk with the voters whose trust they need to regain.

They contend that liberal candidates too often use language from elite, highly educated circles that suggests the speakers consider themselves smart and virtuous, while casting implied judgment on those who speak more plainly — hardly a formula for winning people over, they say.

The latest debate is, in part, also a proxy for the bigger battle over what the Democrats’ identity should be in the aftermath of November’s devastating losses — especially as the party searches for ways to reverse its overwhelming rejection by rural and White working-class voters.

What percentage of rural white working-class voters have ever heard a Democratic politician -- or anyone else -- say "justice-involved populations"? For that matter, how many progressives have ever heard this phrase? If you're not still in the academic hothouse, it's likely that you never hear this -- except from Democrat-bashing centrist Democrats.

The story quotes the usual gang of Democratic language cops. Ruben Gallego is here, as always, denouncing the use of "Latinx." (I'm not a huge fan myself, but I can't think of a single Democratic politician who's ever used it, except Gallego himself, pejoratively). Andy Beshear cites a couple of phrases that aren't even associated with lefties:

Saying someone has defeated “substance abuse disorder,” he said, minimizes the sheer human triumph of beating addiction; decrying “food insecurity” fails to convey the tragedy of hungry children.

"Food insecurity" is a bit wonky, but "substance abuse"? That's normie English by now -- it doesn't mark the speaker as an elitist.

And then there's Elissa Slotkin:

Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Michigan) is another rising swing-state Democrat who contends that her party needs to use language that comes, as she puts it, from the factory line and not the faculty lounge.

She said the scope of her party’s challenge hit home when a voter wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap asked her, “What’s your hat?” He was hoping for a Democratic message that could fit onto a cap, she said, and she realized there was no obvious answer.

You want a slogan that fits on a hat? I've got one, and it even fits on a red hat:

And here's a slightly longer version of this slogan that would also make a nice hat:

“Tesla Takedown” protesters chant “Tax the rich! Tax the motherfucking rich” in NYC.
pic.twitter.com/zmkWVabw3w

— 💋🇺🇸 Country Over Party🇺🇸🇮🇱🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@gagirlpolitics) March 22, 2025

Elissa Slotkin should like that -- after all, she claims she used the additional word in an appeareance during the 2024 campaign:

She recalled speaking to a roomful of skeptical Teamsters before the November election. “I just said, ‘Hey, you motherf---ers, I don’t want to hear another godd--n word about all Donald Trump has done for you,’” she said, adding, “They love it. ... To me that is a different way to enter the room.”

(I need to see a clip of that before I believe it, and the same goes for "What's your hat?")

The word that apparently offends Slotkin the most is "oligarchy." As I wrote last month, when both Slotkin and David Brooks were whining about this word,

... Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing massive crowds in non-coastal America with a tour called "Fighting Oligarchy." Do Brooks and Slotkin object to the word "oligarchy"? Or do they object to fighting the oligarchy? Because people want that, and I sense that Brooks and Slotkin (and most mainstream Democrats) don't.

That's why we're seeing articles like this: centrist Democrats believe the party can stage a comeback in 2026 and 2028, and they (and their donors) want to make sure that that winning party faction isn't the one that wants to impose serious taxes and regulations on wealthy people. In other words, Trump is running rampant right now, and these centrists have decided that progressives are the people America needs to worry about most.

They want to persuade America that centrists are the real edgelords who'll lead the party into the future. The Post story says:

a crop of youthful, up-and-coming Democrats is arguing that liberals need to abandon what they portray as a series of constantly evolving linguistic purity tests.

Oooh, they're youthful! (Well, maybe not Rahm.) They're up-and-coming! And fusty old progressives such as ... um, AOC are "weak and woke," a phrase that turned up in a Slotkin profile in April and turns up again in The Wall Street Journal's Rahm Emanuel story.

If we have real elections in 2028, I think Democrats will need to appeal to both progressives and moderates to win. I can't tell you the exact mix that would lead to victory. But I know that constantly denouncing the party for alleged crimes of "wokeness" will make defeat all the more likely.

Here's the formula: Democrats should feel free to criticize other Democrats. But if your criticism of fellow Democrats reinforces the GOP's messaging about Democrats, you should -- and I hope Elissa Slotkin likes the way I put this -- just shut the fuck up.

THE NEW YORK TIMES IS PRACTICALLY BEGGING US TO GET ANGRIER ABOUT TRUMP'S CORRUPTION

The lead story on the New York Times site right now is Peter Baker's catalogue of corrupt acts by President Trump, which, Baker says, should be inspiring far more outrage than we're seeing now:

The Trumps ... have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and is opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.

Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.

And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally....

Yet a mark of how much Mr. Trump has transformed Washington since his return to power is the normalization of moneymaking schemes that once would have generated endless political blowback, televised hearings, official investigations and damage control. The death of outrage in the Trump era, or at least the dearth of outrage, exemplifies how far the president has moved the lines of accepted behavior in Washington.

Baker's tone suggests that he believes there simply is no outrage about Trump's corruption, even though he acknowledges the reason why there are no official expressions of outrage:

There will be no official investigations because Mr. Trump has made sure of it. He has fired government inspectors general and ethics watchdogs, installed partisan loyalists to run the Justice Department, F.B.I. and regulatory agencies and dominated a Republican-controlled Congress unwilling to hold hearings.

Baker quotes Paul Rosenzweig, who was a counsel to Ken Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton, who believes the public is indifferent:

“Either the general public never cared about this,” he said, or “the public did care about it but no longer does.” He concluded that the answer is that “80 percent, the public never cared” and “20 percent, we are overwhelmed and exhausted.”

But Baker also notes that the public does care about the plane from Qatar:

The gift of the Qatar plane seemed to break through to the general audience in a way that other episodes have not. A Harvard/CAPS Harris poll released last week found that 62 percent of Americans thought the gift “raises ethical concerns about corruption” ...

And he quotes a Never Trump GOP lawyer who, I think, gets the situation exactly right:

“The American public has had to inure itself to the corruption of Donald Trump and his presidency because the president and his Republican Party have given the American public no choice in the matter,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals court judge who has become a critic of Mr. Trump.

The #2 story on the Times site also focuses on Trump's corruption, although it's saddled with a disingenuous headline:

Why Vietnam Ignored Its Own Laws to Fast-Track a Trump Family Golf Complex

Yes, why did Vietnam do that in the midst of Trump's tariff war? I can't imagine!

The story, written by Damien Cave, makes clear that Vietnam is rapidly expediting a bribe:

This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.

To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”

And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.

There's a lesson here for ordinary Americans who oppose the Trump regime, and it dovetails with something I wrote a month ago.

In April, I told you that anti-Tesla protests had received a surprising amount of media coverage, even in the early days of the Tesla Takedown movement, when demonstrations were small. I'd been at larger protests that got less media coverage. I told you this when the top story in America was Donald Trump's tariff war, which had just begun, and which drove stories about Trump's immigration abuses out of the headlines. The conclusion I drew was that the mainstream media is more interested in business than it is in human rights abuses or the erosion of democracy, or even the economic suffering of ordinary people. General-interest news sites devote a lot of resources to business coverage, and in addition, there are many, many standalone news outlets devoted exclusively to business. Business journalism appeals to well-heeled readers, so the press pays special attention to business.

Which means that even though we want to march against human rights abuses and transfers of wealth from ordinary citizens to the rich, even though we want to denounce the dismantling of important government services, even though we're angry about the theft of our personal data by DOGE, even though we're furious about cuts to scientific research and vaccine denialism, we might want to consider placing a little more emphasis on Donald Trump's corruption -- not because every other horrible thing he's doing is less important, but because the mainstream press is ready to cover Trumpian corruption as a business story. At the very least, The New York Times is ready to cover it.

Trump's unprecedented corruption is potentially a headache for businesspeople around the world, who are accustomed to thinking of America as a relatively honest country. That's why I think activists should focus more on how Trump is using his office to get richer. Peter Baker is practically begging us to express more anger about this, because the Times, and presumably other high-level media outlets, know how to cover it.

GET READY FOR AUTOPEN-GHAZI

What will Congress do after the Big Beautiful Bill is signed into law? (Sadly, we all know it will be signed into law into some form, after a few tweaks; pay no attention to any GOP senator who claims to be a holdout now. Republicans always close ranks eventually, especially when tax cuts to the rich are involved.)

Once the BBB is in the statute books, why will members of Congress even need to show up for work? President Trump is running the country via executive order. Republican majorities in Congress and on the Supreme Court have no problem with this. So the House and Senate will need to fill a lot of time looking busy.

I expect that some time after the budget bill passes, congressional Republicans will turn to the burning question of ... Joe Biden's mental fitness during his presidential term. This won't just be an airing of grievances. I think Republicans expect it to have real-world consequences.

Republicans (thanks, Jake Tapper!) are reviving and refining an old narrative: that Biden wasn't merely impaired during his time in office, he was literally not functioning as president. According to this narrative, by the end of his term Biden didn't even know what went out over his signature, largely because it wasn't his signature at all -- the signing was all done by aides using an autopen.

On one day in March, this was the right-wing message of the day:

In the first two months of this year, the term ["autopen"] was mentioned a total of 49 times on television, radio and podcasts in the United States, according to data from the media tracker Critical Mention.

It was uttered 6,188 times on March 17 alone.

(That waas after a Trump Truth Social post that mentioned the autopen.)

Then it faded into the background. But on May 16 -- as pre-publication publicity for the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book was peaking -- the conspiracy-minded chair of the House Oversight Committee announced an investigation:

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) today announced the panel will continue its investigation into the cover-up of President Biden’s mental decline and use of autopen....

“Key decisions made in the final days of the Biden presidency, including using autopens to issue blanket pardons for the Biden Crime Family, must be fully examined. There are serious concerns that President Biden lacked the mental capacity to authorize those actions. The American people are done being lied to. We’re going to bring the truth into the light, and starting next week, those involved in the cover-up will begin to be put on notice,” said Chairman Comer.

Trump weighed in on Tuesday, the publication date of the Tapper-Thompson book:

Vice President J.D. Vance piled on, obliquely, in his New York Times podcast interview with Ross Douthat:

Also, to be candid — and this is going to sound like I’m beating up on him — I really don’t know how much Joe Biden’s late evolution on abortion was that thought out. Far be it from me to defend Joe Biden, but I really think the more that we learn, the more that we see the policy of the Biden administration was driven much more by staff than it was by the elected president.

But the GOP's main focus in "Autopen-ghazi" isn't abortion or immigration. It's executive orders and pardons. Here's Comer the day the Tapper-Thompson book was published:

Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee, told Newsmax on Tuesday he wants to get to the bottom of who was running the country when Joe Biden was president.

Comer appeared on "Rob Schmitt Tonight" after President Donald Trump raised questions about Biden using an autopen to sign executive orders.

"Who would put the document in there?" Comer said. "Who gave that staffer the authority? Was it Joe Biden or was it another staffer? We don't believe Joe Biden knew what was going on." ...

"We don't believe that autopen was authorized by Joe Biden," Comer said. "We don't believe that using the autopen makes these executive orders and even these pardons legal. We're going to do this investigation. Hopefully it will benefit Trump in court as he tries to do what the American people want done. And that's drain the swamp."

Pardons and executive orders are also the focus of a piece published in The Hill by long-time right-wing hack Liz Peek:

Republicans want to investigate former President Joe Biden’s use of the autopen. Did he personally grant broad (and possibly unconstitutional) pardons for family members, members of the January 6 Committee and Anthony Fauci, or did someone else make the decision? Was he responsible for all the executive orders issued under his name, or did White House personnel make those decisions?

... Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a statement he plans to subpoena former Biden aides Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal and Ashley Williams, who he claims “ran interference” for Biden and may have overseen the use of the autopen.

If he did not personally sign various documents, are they valid?

I think they believe they can get some of Biden's executive orders invalidated, although I'm not sure what practical effect that will have. Maybe Mike Johnson just wants natural gas producers in his state to be able to sue the government for lost revenue. Peek writes:

The Wall Street Journal reported last June about a February 2024 Oval Office meeting between House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Biden. According to Johnson, the president denied that he had recently instituted a pause on further expansion of liquified natural gas exports, claiming instead that it was just a study. Johnson told six people about Biden’s confusion after the meeting, suggesting it indicated a slippage of Biden’s memory....

Speaking with Bari Weiss early this year, for her Substack podcast, Johnson [said he] ... asked the president why he had paused liquefied natural gas exports to Europe, pointing out that this action was enriching Russia and fueling Vladimir Putin’s war effort. Biden relied, “I didn’t do that.” When Johnson reminded the president of the executive order he had signed just weeks earlier, the president denied that the order mandated a pause.

Johnson has since said he walked out of the meeting shaken, thinking, “‘We are in serious trouble — who is running the country?’ Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know.”

The attack on the pardons seems more worrisome. I had contempt for everyone who finger-wagged at Biden after he signed those pardons: Where was all that moral outrage when Trump pardoned his son in-law's father, Charles Kushner? You know, the guy Chris Christie is talking about here?

For that matter, where was the outrage when Trump appointed Kushner as ambassador to France?

Biden pardoned a lot of people who would otherwise have been subject to merciless lawfare by the Trump regime -- and Comer apparently wants Trump to have the opportunity to persecute them despite the pardons. And who knows? We're so far through the looking glass that this might actually happen.

I don't know what the timing would be. Assuming we have legitimate midterms, my guess is that Comer will want the hearings to peak just before voting starts in 2026, in the hope of increasing GOP turnout, with prosecutions to follow after the election.

Maybe all this will fall flat. Maybe the federal courts aren't so in the tank for Trump that they'll be willing to let Trump neutralize Biden's actions based on this he-didn't-control-the-autopen theory. But Republicans intend to go for this moonshot, and there's a non-zero chance they'll succeed -- or at least succeed in making the 2026 election at least partially a referendum on Biden.

IMAGINE NO FIRST-RATE UNIVERSITIES -- IT'S EASY IF YOU TRY

Long before Donald Trump entered politics, right-wing hatred of the opposition made T-shirts and bumper stickers with this slogan very popular:

Right-wingers in America don't just want to dominate politics -- they'd prefer it if their opponents didn't exist. They haven't started putting us in camps, but I think many of them want to.

The madness of our current Trump/Heritage Society dictatorship largely derives from the belief that all dissent can and should be neutralized, that no law passed by a previous Congress and signed into law by a previous president should remain in effect if it contradicts what Trump and Heritage want, and that no institution that displeases Trump and/or Heritage should remain intact. Among the institutions that should be eliminated from American life is elite academia, of which the most acclaimed institution is Harvard. Trump isn't attacking Harvard in order to change it. He's attacking it in order to destroy it. I'm not sure he knows that, but the leaders of the Heritage Foundation who have steered him in this direction certainly do.

The foreword to Project 2025's 900-page manifesto, Mandate for Leadership, makes this clear. It was written by Heritage's president, Kevin Roberts. He writes:

Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas. Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.

The educated elite betray the morally pure Volk at those high school football games in Waco by subjecting them to globalism and (of course) "wokeness."

They enthusiastically support supranational organizations like the United Nations and European Union, which are run and staffed almost entirely by people who share their values and are mostly insulated from the influence of national elections. That’s why they are eager for America to sign international treaties on everything from pharmaceutical patents to climate change to “the rights of the child”—and why those treaties invariably endorse policies that could never pass through the U.S. Congress. Like the progressive Woodrow Wilson a century ago, the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.

And while I agree that we need people without elite degrees in government, Roberts says that education is literally useless if you're in government.

Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity.

Also, universities are entangled with the Great Satan: China.

Through the CCP's Confucius Institutes, Beijing has been just as successful at compromising and coopting our higher education system as they have at compromising and coopting corporate America....

But these really are not many issues, but two: (1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people. The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat.

So what is the solution to these problems?

We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.

Roberts appears to want all elite institutions removed from America, "root and branch."

The rest of the Manual for Leadership has much more targeted, if terrible, ideas about education, primarily an assault on diversity programs. But this is the real vision.

The madness of modern conservatism stems from the belief that right-wingers can simply do away with anything that annoys them and there'll be no negative consequences, at least for them or anyone they care about. Thus, George W. Bush chose not to regulate segments of the economy that almost dragged us into a second Great Depression. Conservatives refuse to fight climate change, on the assumption that no one they know will suffer great losses in floods or heat waves. Gun control? There haven't been any shootings at their kids' schools.

Now the right believes we can do without vaccines and without National Weather Service monitoring of natural disasters. The right believes we can live without adequate Medicaid funding (including funding of eldercare) and without an adequate air traffic control system (even though high-level right-wingers fly a lot).

In their madness, they've concluded that we don't need scientific research -- we don't need grants to universities, and it would be fine if the best-known universities ceased to exist altogether.

The people who are thinking this way have comfortable lives and apparently can't imagine any kind of setback in life that would make them dependent on programs and institutions they despise. They're also massively selfish -- many of them actually learned much of what they know about politics from the author of The Virtue of Selfishness -- and they don't care about anyone who benefits from whatever they're eliminating.

They think they'll be fine if elite universities simply cease to exist. And maybe they will be. But the rest of us will miss the universities when they're gone.

THE REPUBLICAN FORMULA FOR SUCCESS: GET YOURSELF BRANDED AS THE SOLUTION TO PROBLEMS YOU CREATE

The House has passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (yes, that's its official name). It will go to the Senate, and there will be changes, but it will undoubtedly remain awful.

According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would drastically cut federal spending on programs for the bottom 10% of Americans, while increasing federal benefits for the top 10%, all while exploding the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion....

The CBO also stated that the bill would trigger $500 billion in automatic cuts to Medicare under the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act.

Polls routinely show that voters worry about government deficits and debt. We're told that the Republican Party is full of deficit hawks, but nearly all the so-called hawks in the House voted for this, even though they know the bill is a budget-buster:

Figures from the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan referee, forecast that the GOP tax bill would push deficits to around 7% of gross domestic product in the coming years, an unprecedented amount of borrowing for a peacetime economy with a low unemployment rate.

Financial markets are sending up big screaming warnings about this:

Yields on government debt spiked on Wednesday as investors fretted that the bill would add roughly $3.3 trillion to the federal debt pile over the next decade. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which underpins mortgages and commercial loans, has risen nearly a percentage point since September, even as the Fed cut its benchmark lending rate by almost the same amount over that period.

The yield on the 10-year on Thursday stood at 4.61 percent, well above the “yippy” level it traded at last month that forced Trump into a tariffs rethink, and a 90-day pause on some of the biggest levies.

Investors appeared to tank an auction for 20-year Treasury bonds on Wednesday.

And that's going to affect ordinary people soon:

Higher bond yields mean the government has to pay more money to cover the interest on nearly $29 trillion in debt, raising the prospect that Americans will someday have to pay more in taxes or accept cuts in government services.

As long as Republicans are in power, "cuts in government services" will always be the preferred choice.

Consciously or unconsciously, the Republicans know that they're increasing government deficits and debt, not reducing them. They always do this -- and it works. Why? Because even though they routinely push America further and further into debt, they're perceived as the party that opposes debt. They sustain the problem so they can look like the heroes riding to the rescue to solve it.

This is similar to what the president did with tariffs, although we all saw it happening: Trump created an economic crisis, the markets freaked, then he (partially) cleaned up the mess he made -- and his poll numbers rebounded. He has an unearned reputation as an excellent dealmaker, so even though we've lost more than we've gained from his tariff dealmaking, half the country thinks he's our hard-nosed economic savior.

Republicans regularly benefit from unearned reputations for "touughness." Remember when George W. Bush was asleep at the switch in the weeks before 9/11, then became an almost universally admired president in its aftermath? That's because we all "know" that Republicans are strong on defense -- even though Bush was the exact opposite.

How do we turn this around? I don't know. It's hard to kill a myth.

J.D. VANCE THINKS IMMIGRATION MAKES AMERICANS STOP WANTING TO HAVE BABIES

J.D. Vance says a lot of awful things in his podcast interview with Ross Douthat. He also says a few ridiculous things. Here's an example of the latter. Vance is talking about immigration, the great obsession of this administration. He tells us that immigration is having a deleterious effect on ... American baby-making:

The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together. Where what I think Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant.

And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good. I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.

That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.

(Emphasis added.)

Yes, honey, I would have kids with you, but remember that plumber we hired who spoke English with an accent? He sure didn't look like he was here legally. I couldn't possibly bring a child into this world when it might breathe the same air as someone who's undocumented.

Vance is "trying to preserve something ... where we are a unified nation"? Well, maybe he ought to consider resigning his job so he's no longer working for a president who hates half the country:

President Donald Trump argued that a GOP budget bill should help only Republican states instead of benefiting Democratic governors.

"We're going to make a couple of tweaks," Trump said of his "one big beautiful bill" during a Tuesday trip to Capitol Hill. "I mean, we don't want to benefit Democrat governors, although I would do that if it made it better, but they don't know what they're doing."

"We want to help all the states, but we have governors that are from the Democrat [sic] party, let's say New York, Illinois, big ones, and let's say Gavin 'Newscum,' who's done a horrible job in California."

"We want to benefit Republicans. They are the ones that are going to make America great again," he added. "The Democrats are destroying our country."

The GOP has hated Democrats for decades -- when James Watt, Ronald Reagan's first interior secretary, said in 1983, "I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans," he didn't think he needed to explain what he meant, because he assumed (correctly) that millions of Americans agreed with him. Obviously, that's not the main reason Americans are having fewer kids, though it might be part of the reason: Republicans, and particularly the current president, don't want to address the climate crisis, which will make the world worse for any child born now, and a significant reason they don't want to address it is that not addressing it owns the libs. Though to be fair, I think the main reason they don't want to address climate change is that billionaires control our politics, and most of those billionaires, especially the oil billionaires, don't want it addressed.

Billionaires also don't want young people to have sufficient time off work or the robust social safety net they need so their children can thrive. The rich have their hooks in both parties, but most of them prefer the GOP. Worsening economic inequality also makes it hard for America to be "a unified nation," and the Trump/Vance administration and Republican Congress intend to make that worse:

Tax cuts in House Republicans’ megabill would lead to increased assets for the richest Americans, while reducing them for the lowest-income households through cuts to federal spending on Medicaid and food aid, according to a new preliminary analysis from the Congressional Budget Office.

... household resources would fall by about 2 percent of income for the lowest-income 10 percent of households by 2027, and 4 percent by 2033. That’s largely due to changes to Medicaid and SNAP policy that would lead to nearly a trillion dollars less in federal spending on those programs.

But the top 10 percent of households would see their household resources rise 4 percent by 2027 and 2 percent in 2033, “mainly because of reductions in the taxes they owe,” CBO said.

But yeah, blame low birthrates on immigrants. They're an easy scapegoat.

WHAT ARE YOU GONNA BELIEVE -- DECADES OF PROPAGANDA OR YOUR LYING EYES?

In The New York Times today, Thomas Edsall quotes Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia, who says (in Edsall's summary of her remarks) that "Trump's second term agenda ... is elite-driven." Rudman tells Edsall:

There is no indication that these new Trump voters, his winning margin, voted for demolition of the basic structures of governance in this country as DOGE has done, impeding the services, e.g., social security and Medicaid, and the jobs upon which they depend.

While there's no indication that swing voters who chose Trump in November voted for these cuts to basic services, or cuts to scientific and medical research, it's becoming clear that they aren't particularly outraged as these cuts are being made. Trump's poll numbers dropped significantly in the immediate aftermath of his "Liberation Day" tariff announcement, but now that Trump has partially suspended the tariffs, his poll numbers are improving dramatically -- at RealClearPolling he's at 47.1% approval and at 49.6% disapproval, a significant improvement over his 45.1%/52.3% split on April 29.

I have a theory about why swing voters who chose Trump in 2024 aren't up in arms about service cuts at Social Security, the VA, FEMA, and elsewhere: They think government services were always bad -- even when, in their own experience, those services were delivered well.

There's no place in America, liberal, moderate, or conservative, where people would nod in agreement if you said, for example, "The Social Security Administration is doing a really great job." We simply don't praise the government that way. No one does. That's true even though most Social Security recipients get their checks or their automatic deposits without fail every month. Most Medicare recipients get their claims paid efficiently. Most people like the U.S. Postal Service. But most people have also been told for decades -- even before Ronald Reagan's presidency -- that the government is a sinkhole of "waste, fraud, and abuse," and that government employees aren't very good at their jobs. (We use the phrase "close enough for government work" as a synonym for "not carefully done," even though it had the opposite meaning during World War II.) People have been conditioned to expect the worst of government, even if that's not their experience. And now they're getting what they expect.

I think this also why the Trump administration's blatant corruption isn't hurting the president in the polls. Maybe voters don't think Trump should accept that Qatari plane, but his poll numbers are going up in spite of the scandal. Voters don't seem particularly upset about all the crypto cash Trump is receiving, or about his real estate deals in the Middle East, or about stories like this:

Vietnam approves a $1.5 billion Trump golf resort project as tariff talks loom

As trade tensions between Washington and Hanoi escalate, Vietnam has approved a $1.5 billion investment from the Trump Organization to build golf courses, hotels, and real estate....

Vietnam, the largest U.S. trading partner in Southeast Asia, has long been a focal point of President Donald Trump’s tariff push.

I think I understand this. All my life, ordinary people have said the same thing about politicians: "They're all crooks!" So now when we have a politician who's clearly much more of a crook than any previous president, they appear to be shrugging it off. Even though they clearly aren't all this bad, voters think they are, so they don't seem to care much about how Trump is cashing in on the presidency.

I think this will change when there's an entrenched economic downturn, but I'm beginning to question whether there'll be widespread, sustained disillusionment with Trump before that. Voters' expectations of government are very, very low. Trumpism is extremely destructive, but the end result is a government that's as bad as the American people think government is, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

REPUBLICAN GHOULS WANT TO TURN JOE BIDEN'S CANCER DIAGNOSIS INTO A MASSIVE SCANDAL (updated)

Former president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones. I wish him a speedy recovery, but he's fighting long odds -- the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer that has spread to other parts of the body is 37%. But Biden's a tough guy. He really might hang on for a while.

President Trump surprised many of us by not going on the attack. His message at Truth Social: "Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis. We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery." Donald Trump Jr. was similarly restrained ... for a few hours. At 4:34 Eastern yesterday, he posted this:

Agreed 100% pic.twitter.com/ry4aifQtVx

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 18, 2025

A little more than three hours later, he decided he'd checked the "decent human being" box and could say what he really wanted to say:

What I want to know is how did Dr. Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another coverup??? pic.twitter.com/fSqtDmcX4p

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 18, 2025

This is now his pinned tweet.

Junior is stupid, but I don't think he's so stupid that he fails to comprehend the nature of the former First Lady's doctorate, which was in education, not science or medicine. Dinesh D'Souza, who used to be a semi-serious right-wing pundit before he became a conspiratorial hack, posted a similar tweet:

I wonder if “Doctor” Jill Biden was surprised to hear about her husband’s diagnosis.

Unless…could it be…just raising the possibility…let me know if I’m way off base here…she’s not a real doctor?

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) May 18, 2025

They know the nature of her doctorate. They also know that most of their followers don't know what they know. No modern Republican ever missed an opportunity to exploit the ignorance of the electorate.

But these ghouls don't just want to use Joe Biden's cancer as the subject of their latest Two-Minutes' Hate. They want to turn the announcement of the diagnosis into a scandal that changes the course of our politics. In this they're getting an assist, unwitting or otherwise, from Rahm Emanuel's oncologist brother. Here's a tweet D'Souza retweeted:

Dr. Zeke Emanuel on Biden’s Cancer diagnosis:

“He did not develop it in the last, 100, 200 days. He had it while he was President. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021… I don't think there's any disagreement about that.”

pic.twitter.com/OyFgunMaxy

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) May 19, 2025

D'Souza and his ideological soulmates want to send this message: Biden knew he was dying of prostate cancer when he was president and there was a massive cover-up. Here's a D'Souza ally (and top Trump adviser) on that subject:

The cover up of a terminally ill illegitimate President is grounds for the Democrats to never hold office ever again.

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) May 19, 2025

But as The Independent reports, there's no smoking-gun evidence of a cover-up:

PSA blood testing, a method used to test for prostate-specific antigen, can sometimes have abnormal results, prompting false-positive or false-negative results, according to the American Cancer Society.

Some prostate cancers grow so slowly that they would never cause any problems during a person’s lifetime.

Even if screening detects prostate cancer, at times, medical professionals can’t tell if the cancer is truly dangerous and requires treatment.

Dr. Daniel Petrylak, a prostate cancer specialist at Yale Cancer Center, told WTNH in Connecticut that despite his surprise that the president’s condition wasn’t established earlier, if Biden’s PSA levels didn’t spike during previous screenings, the alarm would not have been raised.

“One thing that may be a wrinkle in this case is the fact that PSA levels with a high-grade tumor may be lower than you expect. Because the high-grade tumors make less PSA per cancer cell than the low-grade tumors,” Petrylak said.

Even a Republican congressman who's a doctor doesn't think this story should be exploited politically.

North Carolina Congressman Greg Murphy, M.D., a surgeon, said, “While [I] definitely agree that Biden’s declining mental acuity was covered up, it is medically reckless to assume his prostate cancer was as well.

“I have treated prostate cancer patients for 30+ years. Let’s get the politics out of medicine,” he stated on X Sunday night.

Republicans are pointing to this moment from 2022:

President Joe Biden’s speech at a former coal-fired power plant in Massachusetts led to widespread claims on social media that he made a significant announcement not about climate change, but about his health....

At one point during his speech, he discussed the impact of environmental pollution from oil refineries near his hometown, sharing an anecdote about his childhood.

“And guess what? The first frost, you knew what was happening. You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks. “That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up (with) have cancer and why can — for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.” ...

But Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson, confirmed on Twitter that Biden was referring to the publicly disclosed fact that he had skin cancer removed before he became president.

Biden says that his mother using windshield wipers to "get literally the oil slick off the window" is "why I and so damn many other people have cancer." pic.twitter.com/YIoBlZadRJ

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 20, 2022

But right-wingers don't merely want to argue that Team Biden covered up a cancer diagnosis in a way that's scandalous. They're asserting an overall health cover-up and calling for legal consequences.

It seems obvious now they were lying about this.

We need investigations, answers, if necessary prosecutions. pic.twitter.com/4ia1LGWape

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) May 18, 2025

This letter was released after reports emerged of a neurologist's visit to the White House. D'Souza is tweeting this now because he wants all the questions about Biden's mental acuity and questions about Biden's cancer diagnosis to be scrambled in his followers' minds.

And the same is true for Jack Posobiec:

Only a President can sign a commission officially nominating a Supreme Court Justice

Not a staffer, not an autopen, a president with full mental capacity

— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) May 19, 2025

It's no surprise that this scumbag wants to argue that the entire Biden presidency was a sham and should be wiped off the books because (as he suggests) Biden was a brain-dead dementia case and an autopen was used to simulate his judgment. Again, Posobiec knows this is bullshit, but he knows his audience doesn't know that. But why is he tweeting this now, and why is D'Souza retweeting it now? Because they want questions about a possible cancer cover-up to be mixed up in their readers' minds with questions -- thanks, Jake Tapper! -- about Biden's mental health.

We just found out about Biden's cancer and this is what these low-lifes are doing. Remember this the next time there's a mass shooting and the same ideological thugs tell us that it's "too soon" to talk about gun control. And remember all this the next time you're told that Democrats are elitist bullies who treat Trump voters with contempt. This is the media diet of Trump voters. They hate us, and this is why.

*****

UPDATE: I see it isn't just online right-wing influencers who are trying to conflate Biden's prostate health and his mental acuity. Here's the vice president of the United States:

Always be demonizing.

IT'S GOOD TO BE ABLE TO CRITICIZE YOUR OWN SIDE, BUT NOT WHEN THE ALTERNATIVE IS FASCISM

There's a book review I read more than twenty years ago that I think about a lot in reference to American politics and the dire state of liberalism. The book under review wasn't about politics -- it was Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s by Gerald Nachman. I haven't read the book, though I'm familiar with most of the comics it discusses. What stays with me is this passage from Adam Gopnik's review in The New Yorker. It talks about the degree to which the "rebel comedians" of the Eisenhower/Joe McCarthy/JFK/LBJ era were mocking the people who bought tickets to their shows rather than people on the right:

For what is really striking about all the “rebel” comedians of the time, hard and soft, is that their main target was almost never the excesses of the right wing in power. From Tom Lehrer’s “Love, love love me, I’m a liberal” and Shelley Berman’s nervous flier to Woody Allen’s mockery of CUNY ethics and Nichols and May’s sublime catalogue of the sounds of tolerance (“Well, Al Schweitzer is just a great guy. Al is a lot of laughs. I personally have never dated him”), their subject was liberalism and its pieties. As Nachman sees quite clearly, though he seems not always to see the centrality of his own observation, the bulk of Mort Sahl’s material, beyond a couple of anti-McCarthy jokes long after McCarthy was out of power, wasn’t political—and, to the degree that it was, it mostly mocked liberal saints like the Kennedys. Rather, it was social and sexual: “There are no women in the Beat Generation, just girls who have broken with their parents for the evening.” Lenny Bruce may have been victimized by the police and the judiciary, but he seldom made fun of them—partly because he had a twisted, junkie’s respect for anyone who had contempt for him, but mostly because there wasn’t enough life in what they did to be very funny. “What can a man Eisenhower’s age say to me?” he shrugged memorably and then joked about liberal hypocrisies and liberal conventions (“I used to go to civil-rights marches, but Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles keep bumping into people”). Nichols and May are funny because they have perfect pitch for the holy words of progressive culture (“I can never believe that Bartók died on Central Park West”). Well past the high-water mark of McCarthyism, the comedians were mocking liberalism, implicitly recognizing that this was the ideology in cultural ascent.

The book and this review were published in 2003, but we've seen what Gopnik describes in subsequent decades on Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. We see it in contemporary streaming shows like Hacks and The Studio, in which characters who earnestly or cynically embrace progressive ideas are depicted as somewhat ridiculous.

I thought about all this again when a friend on Bluesky pointed me to Jake Tapper's Substack page, where we learn that his book tour with Alex Thompson for that Biden "cover-up" book will continue for several more weeks and feature quite a few public appearances with friendly interviewers:

THURSDAY MAY 22 in WASHINGTON DC with Maureen Dowd at the 9:30 Club;

TUESDAY MAY 27 in NEW YORK, NY with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y;

THURSDAY MAY 29 in PHILLY with Tamala Edwards at the Free Library;

SATURDAY MAY 31 in SEATTLE with Mike Pesca at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival;

MONDAY JUNE 2 in SAN FRANCISCO with Marisa Lagos at the Commonwealth Club;

TUESDAY JUNE 3 in LOS ANGELES with Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett at Writers Bloc;

THURSDAY JUNE 5 in CHICAGO with David Folkenflik at WBEZ Presents, at the Vic Theater.

More to come!

If you think of the contemporary version of the liberal culture Gopnik describes above as a belief system, Tapper and Thompson are about to appear with several of its most prominent clerics (Jon Favreau! David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker!), and at some of its most famous cathedrals (the 92nd Street Y! WBEZ, home of This American Life and Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!).

What does it mean when liberal culture embraces a book that bashes the Democratic Party and its former leader this way?

Up to a point, I respect liberals for being willing to engage in self-criticism. Do Republicans ever do that? How many Republican-bashing books have Republicans bought in bestseller numbers? How many jokes does Greg Gutfeld tell on Fox that are at the right's expense? But past a certain point, this impulse leaves many liberals unable to fully take their own side in an argument. They'd rather attack their own allies.

Maureen Dowd will chat with Tapper and Thompson in D.C. next week. Her latest column bashes Biden and the Democrats using the language and ideas of the Tapper/Thompson book. Gratifyingly, most of the reader picks among the comments are having none of it:

Looks like we're back to the old pastime of observing that Joe Biden is old. Never mind that Donald Trump is also old, but is also a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and barely able to string two coherent sentences together. And he's also crashed the economy and is wrecking the federal government. Plus, he's got those strange ties to Vladimir putin. Instead, let's beat up on Biden again. I'd take Biden's peace and stability, and the economy running like a well oiled machine, any day over the chaos we have now.

****

I believe that Joe Biden should never have declared for a second term. I also believe that Joe Biden’s worst day with mental decline is preferable to any day under Trump.

****

Be that as it may, whie Biden was President in the last year, he made no major gaffes, said nothing outlandish, was not vengeful - despite was Dowd offers up here. And most important in this "cognitive decline narrative", BIDEN STEPPED ASIDE; HE DID NOT RUN. Meanwhile, Trump messes up every single day, lies every day, grifts every day, insults every day. BUt here we are, still blaming Biden for everything.

****

I was with you, Maureen, until I read this:

"Democratic pooh-bahs and lawmakers were silent when they should have been screaming — as the Republicans are now with Trump’s egregious assaults on the Constitution, his cringey grifting..."

Republicans are screaming about Trump's corruption? Who? Where? When?

****

Yes, Biden should’ve dropped out earlier or not run at all. But in November 2024 voters had a clear choice between a qualified woman of color and chose the grifter instead, so the current ongoing catastrophe is on them. Leave Biden alone.

****

Cool! Do we have this fully off our chests now? Can we not hear another peep about Biden from this newspaper and bring the focus back to Israel's destruction of Gaza and Trump's rendition of US residents to El Salvador?

I guess these readers are capable of taking their own side in an argument.

WAS IT A COVER-UP IF EVERYONE KNEW WHAT WAS ALLEGEDLY CONCEALED?

Here's an excerpt from a post I found at Reddit, in the Bulwark subreddit:

Like many of you, I’m starting to get sick of Jack Tapper’s “Biden cover-up” book tour. Here’s a newsflash, Jake: There was no “cover-up,” you just don’t know how to do journalism.

It was obvious to anyone with two eyes, two ears, and three brain cells that Joe Biden was physically and cognitively impaired and shouldn’t seek a second term. Many of us, myself included, expressed our feelings on this board and others in 2022/2023....

None of us were geniuses or had any inside information, we just saw what we saw. Biden barely did public appearances, which is always a bad sign. When he did, he was stuttering and hesitant. He trailed off, both verbally and physically. He shuffled about. He looked terrible: The hair loss, the squinting to the point where you couldn’t see the whites of his eyes, the age spots. He looked like the Crypt Keeper from Tales Of The Crypt. And that’s just in comparison to the Biden of 2020!

This poster, who goes by the name of PorcelainDalmatian, points out that some people resisted this assessment:

We were told we weren’t “team players” and “you can’t ask a President not to run for a second term.” If I had a nickel for every snarky “I didn’t know you were his doctor!” comment on my posts, I’d be richer than Elon Musk.

This poster is describing an America in which millions of voters, possibly a majority, thought Biden was obviously, self-evidently impaired, while his defenders insisted that he remained capable of doing the job, and would certainly do it better than Donald Trump.

And that's exactly what the polls said. Here's an ABC News/FiveThirtyEight story that was published just after Biden's awful debate with Trump:

... the debate didn't suddenly thrust Biden's age into the spotlight for most Americans the way it seemingly did for Democratic Party elites.... [A]nswers to specific questions about Biden's age haven't changed much ... because most Americans already thought Biden was too old....

Here are some numbers:

When asked last September [2023] how much of an effect they thought Biden's health and age would have on his ability to fulfill his duties as president if reelected, 57 percent of Americans said his age would "severely limit" his ability. Right after the debate, that number was 61 percent. A significant share of Democrats, too, have long held concerns about the president's age and his ability to do the job. In September, 25 percent of Democrats said Biden's age would severely limit his abilities in his second term, while 30 percent said so immediately after the debate (and 27 percent in a more recent poll).

In a poll fielded between June 28 and July 1 [2024] (the weekend following the debate), 56 percent of Americans and 28 percent of Democrats said Biden's age was a big problem. But that's not so far off from a November [2023] poll in which 25 percent of Democrats and an identical 56 percent of overall respondents said the president's age was a big problem.

So if there was a cover-up prior to the debate, it wasn't working. Non-Democratic voters already thought Biden was too old to be effective, and it's quite possible that Democrats thought he was still capable but impaired. The FiveThirtyEight story adds:

... 69 percent of registered voters said they somewhat or strongly agreed that Biden was "too old to be an effective president" in a New York Times/Siena College poll after the debate, including 55 percent of those who chose Biden in a head-to-head with Trump. But when asked to expand, 40 percent of voters who chose Biden and said he was too old said that his age "makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough," compared to 14 percent who said his age was "such a problem that he is not capable of handling the job of president."

Even before the debate, it's quite likely that many Democrats would have said that Biden's age "makes him ineffective, but he is still able to handle the job of president well enough." (I would said it made him less effective but still able to handle the job well enough -- and certainly better than Trump. I still believe that.)

The fact that the media can't seem to move past this, and that a subset of Democrats can't get enough of this discourse, is a byproduct of the Republican Party's highly successful Stockholmization of both the mainstream press and the Democratic Party over the past few decades. Tapper and others seem to take great pride in saying, Wow, we really suck don't we? We did this horrible thing on behalf of the Democratic Party! We really deserve to be flagellated for that! Democratic insiders seem to take pride in saying the same thing, which complements the "I'm not awful like those woke Democrats" message so many of them are leaning on now. Both groups are wallowing in mea culpas because the GOP has brainwashed them into believing that if they beat themselves up while confessing anti-Republican bias, they'll win the favor of the Republican captors with whom they've fallen in love. (They won't.)

The public knew the pros and cons of voting for Biden in 2024. The media and Democratic insiders are telling us otherwise because they want to be chastised by the GOP.

ONE MORE TRUMP VICTORY IN THE BATTLE TO MAKE OFFENDING REPUBLICANS ILLEGAL

I know this looks like one of those Trumpian "distractions" that establishment Democrats believe they should ignore, but the regime and its allies are hitting this one hard, and they've already successfully bullied an ex-FBI director into submission, with no pushback from Democrats:

U.S. law enforcement officials said on May 15 that they were looking into a social media post by former FBI Director James Comey depicting an image of "8647," which some Trump supporters interpreted as a threat against President Donald Trump.

Comey, who was fired by Trump in 2017, later took down the post, according to Reuters, saying he was unaware the apparent political message could have been associated with violence....

A federal law enforcement official told USA TODAY that the Secret Service was sending agents to question Comey about his post....

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose agency oversees the Secret Service, said on X that DHS and the Secret Service were "investigating this threat and will respond appropriately."

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard went further, saying she believes Comey should be put behind bars for the post. Asked by Fox News anchor Jesse Watters if she believed the former FBI director "should be in jail," Gabbard said, "I do.” ...

Current FBI Director Kash Patel said on X that his agency was in communication with the Secret Service about the post and "will provide all necessary support."

Others were more explicit in assigning a malign meaning to Comey's post, with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino saying it was a call to assassinate Trump.

More:

“This is deeply concerning to all of us and is being taken seriously,” Taylor Budowich, White House deputy chief of staff, said in a post on X.

“American leadership has been restored and peace is on the horizon,” Budowich added in another post. “This has left the Deep State desperate and dangerous—Comey is only the latest and most disturbing example of them lashing out through threats of violence.”

That's a lot of firepower directed at an innocent social media post.

This is now the lead story on the USA Today site. It was the lead story at 9:00 A.M. on Fox. And now a Fox interviewer in Abu Dhabi has asked the president about this.

Trump says, "A child knows what that meant" -- yes, because if there's one thing the average child knows well, it's twentieth-century restaurant slang.

That's what "86" is. Merriam-Webster tells us:

Eighty-six is slang meaning "to throw out," "to get rid of," or "to refuse service to." It comes from 1930s soda-counter slang meaning that an item was sold out. There is varying anecdotal evidence about why the term eighty-six was used, but the most common theory is that it is rhyming slang for nix.

Merriam-Webster offers many examples of these two meanings:

When a soda popper says the tuna fish salad is eighty-six, he means there isn’t any more.
— Will Cuppy, The New York Herald Tribune, 21 Dec. 1941...

I have all I can handle eighty-sixing the drunks.
— Independent (Long Beach, CA), 12 Sept 1960

There's one quote from a soldier using "eighty-sixed" to mean "killed in action," but that's not the common understanding of the term.

The only pushback I see is from anti-Trumpers on social media, who point out that there's a great deal of "86 46" merchandise on sale, even with President Biden out of office:

How about all the people who bought and sold 8646 merch? They should all be in prison, right? pic.twitter.com/1aQNZhtSzA

— Jeff Ralston 🥧🥧🍻💉 (@JeffR914) May 16, 2025

A Google Shopping page is here. No one ever threatened these T-shirt and decal sellers with potential prosecution because no one ever saw them as death threats.

And, of course, a prominent Trump supporter who's denounced Comey posted "86 46" a couple of years ago:

Oops….MAGAs will say that when they went around posting "8646" and wearing the shirts that it was completely different from what Comey posted pic.twitter.com/Gg4EtmxLl7

— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) May 16, 2025

This isn't just a shiny object. It's serious for a lot of reasons.

I've seen "86 47" signs at a number of anti-Trump rallies. If the notion that this is a death threat becomes credible, maybe the administration won't dare to indict Comey, but it might indict ordinary protesters. Or Republican law enforcement personnel at the state and local level might decide the signs are a crime. And once that's a crime, what's next? I see many posts on social media with messages like this:

If "86 47" can be redefined as a threat, is some variation on I can't wait for Trump to die also a threat? Is there a limit?

All this comes at a time when the weaponization of the law by the Trump administration and the Republican Party might just be getting into gear. Punchbowl reports:

House conservatives are urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to be more aggressive against President Donald Trump’s political enemies.

These Republicans want Dr. Anthony Fauci and New York Attorney General Letitia James arrested for what they view as politically targeted efforts to go after Trump.

They also want federal criminal charges filed against Democratic mayors who offered sanctuary to undocumented immigrants.

Another target — Biden administration bureaucrats that Republicans argue wasted federal taxpayer money by pushing DEI, climate change and other progressive goals. It’s unclear what laws were allegedly broken here, or if any were.

Pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion in ways that were not only lawfully but encouraged by the previous administration might be a crime now? That's chilling.

And this is happening when rignht-wingers are urging President Trump to pardon George Floyd's murderer, Derek Chauvin, and one right-wing troll, Jack Cashill -- yes, the guy who thinks Bill Ayers ghostwrote Barack Obama's first book -- is urging Tim Walz to pardon Chauvin on state charges.

They're trying to build an America in which anything a Fox viewer would like is legal and anything a Fox viewer would find distasteful is against the law. At the very least, they're trying to build an America in which anything that offends the famous Fox viewer in The White House is illegal. If we don't call them on this now, they'll keep trying to remake the country in this way. And they might get us at least partway there.