There was a shooting last night at the White House Correspondents Dinner and the president did a 180 on the subject of White House correspondents, according to The New York Times:
All week long he had been aiming screeds at the news outlets in the room, but now he was praising the reporters before him, complimenting their outfits, using a polite tone of voice and thanking them for their work.
“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”
This was definitely not the message he had planned to deliver to the media tonight. He said he was going to make what he called the “most inappropriate speech ever made,” and sounded a bit disappointed that he had been robbed of that opportunity. So disappointed, in fact, that he vowed the dinner would be rescheduled for some time in the next 30 days.
But then, he would need a rewrite — or at least that is what he said for now.
“I don’t know if I can ever be as rough as I was going to be tonight,” he said. “I think I’m going to be probably very nice. I’ll be very boring the next time, but we’re going to have a great event.”
I have no idea whether Trump really would have delivered the "most inappropriate speech ever made" if the shooting hadn't happened. This could be an empty boast, like his threats to obliterate Iran. But I assume he would have delivered a typical Trump speech -- a rambling but very nasty hour-and-a-half diatribe, probably with an emphasis on the supposed sins of "the fake news." It would have been ugly. It might have had a few new insults that would have seemed unusually harsh even by Trump's standards and would have grabbed all the headlines, while going viral on X and Bluesky.
And then the shooting happened, and Trump was the central figure in the only news story anyone cared about. And all of a sudden, he didn't feel the need to launch mean-spirited attacks at the press, because his narcissistic supply needs were being met. He no longer needed to make news. He was news. Attention was coming to him.
When asked by a reporter, “Why do you think this keeps happening?” Trump responded, “Well, you know, I've studied assassinations, and I must tell you the most impactful people, the people who do the most, take a look at Abraham Lincoln ... the people that make the biggest impact, they're the ones that they go after. They don't go after the ones that don't do much.”
“And when you look at the people where there was an attempt or a successful attempt, they're very impactful people. They're big names," he continued.
(Apparently he doesn't know that Gerald Ford, one of our least consequential presidents, survived two assassination attempts in one month.)
And he gets to demand his beloved ballroom, which I'm beginning to believe he sees as himself in the form of a building.
Am I saying that Trump doesn't really hate the media -- that it's all an act? No. He hates the media and he wants to woo the media. He's known for attacking some of the same journalists he's courting -- Maggie Haberman, for instance. He wants them to write nothing but flattering pieces about him, and he hates them when they don't. But instead of accepting the idea that they sometimes won't feed his ego, he continues to seek their praise and resent them when they don't deliver it. His need for praise is bottomless.
But a shooting silences any criticism of Trump, at least temporarily. And so he gets the coverage he wants
“You’ve been very responsible in your coverage,” he said. “I will say I’ve been seeing what’s been out. You’ve been very responsible.”
Translation: He's the main character, and no one is being mean to him. And the world turns on Trump's need for ego gratification.
If you believe the media, Zohran Mamdani just did a very bad thing.
Last week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani highlighted a new proposal, introduced by Governor Kathy Hochul, that would charge a yearly surcharge on pricey second residences in the city that remain largely unoccupied by their wealthy, out-of-town owners.
In a Tax Day–themed video, the mayor touted the proposed pied-à-terre levy as a fulfillment of his campaign promise to tax the rich and name-checked one owner in particular: Citadel CEO Ken Griffin. “This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full-time in the city. Like for this penthouse, which hedge-fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million,” Mamdani said as he gestured toward 220 Central Park South, which sits along 57th Street’s “Billionaires Row.” In 2019, Griffin purchased a massive 24,000-square-foot penthouse apartment in the building, paying the most for a home or apartment in American history.
I'm quoting a story from New York magazine. It appears under the scoldy headline "Mamdani Has Mightily Pissed Off One of NYC’s Richest People." Gothamist, a local news outlet that is usually better than this, now asks:
Did Mamdani’s 'Tax the Rich' Video Outside a Billionaire's NYC Penthouse Cross a Line?
Oh, please.
Gothamist tells us that the video
is sparking a backlash from members of New York City’s business community who say the mayor went too far in an era of increasing political violence.
Kathy Wylde, a longtime power broker between City Hall and business leaders, said Mamdani’s video outside hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin’s 23,000-square-foot penthouse comes amid genuine safety concerns among executives.
That would be this Kathryn Wylde, who recently retired after a quarter century as CEO of the Partnership for New York, which represents the interests of the very, very rich:
Wylde, who turns 80 in June, is one of the most connected and influential people in New York. She is in regular contact with financial titans like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, KKR co-founder Henry Kravis, and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — leaders who shape the city’s economic and political landscape behind closed doors.
Wylde joined the Partnership for New York City in 1982 and became CEO in 2000. Founded in 1979 by David Rockefeller, the Partnership brings together top business leaders to work alongside the government to shape the city’s future. Its 350 members span Fortune 500 CEOs, tech founders, and real estate heavyweights whose companies employ about one million people in New York City. Membership is by invitation only, with annual dues ranging from $25,000 to $125,000 depending on a company’s size and industry.
I guess the rich have figured out that they embarrass themselves when they compare tax-increase proposals to Hitler invading Poland, as Blackstone Group founder Steven Schwarzman did in 2011, or compare anti-rich protests to Kristallnacht, as venture capitalist Tom Perkins did in 2014. Wylde has defends the rich by talking about their safety.
Last summer, a gunman killed four people and himself at a Midtown building that housed NFL offices and the investment giant Blackstone. Luigi Mangione is awaiting trial for the alleged assassination of an insurance CEO in Midtown in 2024.
“In the current political environment, you can’t personalize policy issues without negative repercussions, as we saw with the UnitedHealthcare CEO,” said Wylde....
A Blackstone executive was among those killed in that shooting at a Midtown building, but the target was the NFL -- the shooter blamed football for his traumatic brain injury, and spared NFL executives because he took the wrong elevator. And the shooting of United Healthcare's Brian Thompson was inspired by Mangione's dealings with the healthcare system, not by any publicity surrounding his target.
If we argue that it's wrong to criticize anyone who could conceivably be shot by an angry person, that requires us to be silent about every public figure in America.
This jamoke also weighs in:
Kevin O’Leary, the star of the entrepreneurial reality show Shark Tank, said Mamdani needed to do some “soul searching.”
“How would he like it if Ken took a video crew outside his house and say, ‘Mamdani lives here. This is where he lives,’” he said during an interview on the cable channel NewsNation. “Think about what that means for personal safety.”
I guess O'Leary forgot the period during the mayoral race when Andrew Cuomo incessantly attacked Mamdani for living in a rent-stabilized apartment in Queens.
Somewhere last night in New York City, a single mother and her children slept at a homeless shelter because you, assemblyman @ZohranKMamdani are occupying her rent controlled apartment.
Mamdani haters routinely ascribe great wealth to him, even though his father is a college professor and his mother makes art-market films, none of which have made as much money at the box office as the Michael Jackson biopic made yesterday alone.
Ken Griffin, by contrast, has a net worth of more than $50 billion. And it's not as if his many real estate purchases are a secret -- this 2020 CNBC story not only reports on (and gives the address of) Griffin's $238 million apartment in New York, it also provides a photograph and the address for his
16,000-square-foot mansion located near Buckingham Palace in the heart of London. The home, which is the most expensive home sold in London since 2008, is a 19th Century townhouse that previously housed French statesman Charles de Gaulle during World War II. The mansion features an indoor swimming pool and spa, staff quarters and private gardens.
We also get a link to a story about Griffin's 2018 purchase of the most expensive home in Chicago, a four-story condo bought for $58.5 million; the story includes the building's address and a photo of the lobby. (Griffin also has homes in Miami, Aspen, and Hawaii, CNBC tells us.)
So Griffin's properties, like the properties owned by most rich and famous people, aren't shrouded in mystery. It's easy to find out where they are. The rich have to keep themselves safe (and they certainly have the money to do so).
The Gothamist story tells us that Mamdani might cost the city some jobs:
“Attacking one of the city’s largest and most important employers is definitely a strategy, but it’s not a good one,” said Howard Wolfson, who worked as a top aide to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, on X.
“Ken’s company is a major employer in NYC of very high paying jobs which drive a considerable amount of our tax base,” said Bill Ackman, a fellow billionaire and critic of the mayor. “We wouldn’t want him to move even more employees to Miami.”
The thin-skinned Griffin moved his company's Chicago operations to Miami in response to a referendum that, if passed, would have raised rich people's income taxes; he did this while spending $50 million in a successful campaign to defeat the referendum.
Would Griffin do the same thing to New York? Maybe. But his company, Citadel is not really "one of the city’s largest and most important employers." It employs 1,346 people in the city, far fewer people than the six-figure head counts of companies such as Ernst & Young and JPMorgan Chase. And even many ordinary right-wing voters understand now that the rich aren't paying enough in taxes. Economic populism might eventually come for Ken Griffin no matter where he is.
Griffin is highly unlikely to be killed because of Mamdani's video -- and besides, how risky is it to show his New York apartment building if he doesn't actually live there? And wouldn't people be less angry at Griffin if they thought he was willingly paying his fair share of taxes?
... the SPLC was not paying members of [racist] groups to provide material support to their activities or out of ideological sympathy. They were cultivating informants who could provide damaging (or even basic) information about extremist groups, their members, and their operations, thereby furthering the SPLC’s goals of “dismantling” those groups. Sunlight, as Justice Louis Brandeis once said, is a potent disinfectant.
Donors knew this. News accounts informed the public about it:
In a 1996 New York Times article that was published on the eve of the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, the newspaper reported that the SPLC had “spies” at a white nationalist convention at Lake Tahoe the preceding weekend.
The government worked with the SPLC to monitor hate groups. None of this was a secret. None of this was intended to help or enrich hate groups -- just the opposite.
But as is so often the case, Republicans know that the overwhelming majority of Americans know nothing about the SPLC one way or the other. So they've all agreed on the same lie, because if it were true, it would be really bad, and they assume most Americans will never bother to learn whether it is true:
In recent decades, mainstream conservatives have often criticized the SPLC for categorizing anti-LGBTQ organizations as “hate groups,” arguing that the label unfairly treats them as akin to the Klan. Kristen Waggoner, who runs the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, claimed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2025, after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, that the SPLC’s labeling of Talking Points USA and her own organization “encourages violence.” ...
The Trump administration had already taken steps to break ties with the SPLC even before the indictments, citing its research into far-right traditionalist Catholic groups. “The Southern Poverty Law Center long ago abandoned civil rights work and turned into a partisan smear machine,” FBI Director Kash Patel wrote on Twitter last year.
They don't like the fact that the SPLC considers anti-LGBTQ hate to be hate, or anti-Muslim hate to be hate. (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim who has positioned herself as the thinking person's Muslim-basher, crows about the indictment in a piece for Bari Weiss's Free Press.)
But the message that's going out to rank-and-file Republicans in meme form is the lie they love to tell themselves: that the modern Democratic Party is exactly as racist as the party was when it aligned itself with segregation and the Klan. The memes are already multiplying:
The people who delight in these memes are the same folks who are furious if a Confederate general's statue is taken down or a military base is renamed so it doesn't honor a hero of the Confederacy. But they also tell themselves that they're the real anti-racists. And they seem to have had no trouble sustaining this doublethink for a few decades.
I don't think the GOP messaging will resonate with the general public, but it will motivate base voters who might be wavering these days. Hurting the libs is what they wanted Trump to do.
I found myself thinking about gerrymandering when I was reading this New York Times roundtable featuring Nadja Spiegelman, the opinion section's culture editor, and two fellow lefty thirtysomethings, streamer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Their subject: shoplifing and other crimes against capitalists, up to and including CEO murder.
Nadja Spiegelman: ... Would you share your Netflix password?
Jia Tolentino: I do. With anyone.
Hasan Piker: I also do....
Spiegelman: Would you get around a paywall on an article you’re trying to read?
Piker: I do it every day on my stream.
Tolentino: I support it when people do it for my own work. I say, go off, use the Wayback Machine.
Spiegelman: Would you pirate music from an indie band?
Tolentino: Is it 2005 and I’m using LimeWire? Because yes.
Spiegelman: I feel like every millennial has at some point.
Tolentino: I mean, I feel like, fundamentally, Spotify is kind of deleterious to the musician livelihood, and I use that, but then I go to the shows....
Spiegelman: Would you dine and dash from your local diner?
Tolentino: Never. Never! Tip 35 percent. Come on.
Piker: No, I wouldn’t do that. If I saw somebody doing that, I’d probably pay for their meal.
Spiegelman: Yeah. Would you steal a book from the library?
Tolentino: Never.
Piker: No.
Spiegelman: Would you steal from the Louvre?
... Piker: I think it’s cool. We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature. I feel like that’s way cooler than the 7,000th new cryptocurrency scheme that people are engaging in.
They agree that the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was wrong, but that stealing from a Whole Foods is okay -- though as Tolentino says about the latter,
The ideal world is not one in which this continues and this increases to somehow even it out, right? The ideal world is one in which the theft from above is broken by regulatory means and/or bottom-up means, like unionization.
And as for Thompson's murder, Tolentino says:
I felt enormously frustrated in the weeks following that. I don’t know why I thought that Democrats would immediately take this up as pushing a unified message toward universal health care. I don’t know why I expected that. I don’t know why I was disappointed that it didn’t happen.
It's bizarre reading some of this in the Times, but I don't want to focus on the fact that well-remunerated media figures are boasting about stealing lemons from Whole Foods, as Tolentino does early in the conversation.
What seems significant to me is that the panel is discussing these options because actual justice seems unattainable. Neither Thompson's murder nor any other healthcare outrage has gotten us closer to universal health coverage in America, and, in fact, the Republican trifecta in Washington has taken health insurance away from many people and closed many rural hospitals. Tolentino thinks unionizing a Whole Foods is preferable to shoplifiting from one, but, as she says about the retail theft,
As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.
We might be on the verge of electing a Democratic Congress, and maybe a Democratic president after that. But will real change come from that? While discussing Thompson's murder, Piker makes a familiar argument:
Democrats are failing. Are they feckless because they’re just bad at politics, or is it something more indecent? And that their fecklessness is simply cover for their ulterior motives, which is participating in this grand design. They’re funded by the same corporate lobbyists that Republicans are funded by, especially when it comes to private health care providers, and they have a vested interest in the continuation of private health care. There is consensus in American politics, when it comes to the continuation of the private health care system, that the system must be private.
By disempowering Republicans, we might prevent terrible things from happening -- the utter elimination of the social safety net, a total war on undocumented immigrants, and so on -- but it seems as if the best we can do is prevent the arc of history from bending toward injustice as much as it does under Republican rule.
And that's what I'm thinking about as I think about Democrats' success in responding to GOP gerrymandering with gerrymandering of their own. It's not justice -- it's our injustice in response to their injustice. It's stealing from Whole Foods because Jeff Bezos is sickeningly rich in an era when we can't tax Bezos and his fellow multi-billionaires at anything close to an appropriate level, or compel him to treat his workers decently, even though we know he can easily afford to.
On voting, this is admirable:
This is expert trolling from Jamie Raskin. If Republicans are suddenly angry about losing in the gerrymandering wars, then they're welcome to join him and Dems in passing bans on gerrymandering in the next Congress, he tells me:
newrepublic.com/article/2093...
But will this ever happen? And if it does, how much will we further discredit American democracy -- something we care about even if Republicans don't -- before we reach an anti-gerrymandering truce?
But I don't see an alternative, because we're so far from bending that arc toward justice right now.
I'm pleased that Virginia's voters approved a redistricting plan that should shift four House seats to the Democrats, but I hate the fact that it's come to this. In a better country, neither the GOP gerrymandering that's taken place since 2010 nor the pro-Democratic Party gerrymandering in California and Virginia would be allowed -- but, of course, our Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that federal courts can't intervene when nakedly partisan redistricting takes place, at a time when Republicans were redistricting and Democrats were sitting on their hands, so here we are.
I'm not happy about the way the Virginia story is being reported. We often complain that reporting in the mainstream political press focuses on the odds -- which party is winning, which party is losing -- but not the stakes for ordinary Americans. The Virginia fight, by its very nature, is a story about the odds. It's about Democrats gaining an advantage in the upcoming midterms, and beating the GOP in a mid-decade redistricting battle that's been going on throughout Donald Trump's second term. It's not being discussed in terms of what Democrats would do with a majority in the House.
That's bad, because average American voters are angry at the Republican president, but also exasperated by how our political system is failing them. They've had it with Trump -- his net job approval is -17.1 points according to Real Clear Polling, -18.8 according to Nate Silver, and -22 according to G. Elliott Morris -- but the Democrats' lead on the generic House ballot is much smaller than Trump's approval deficit (5 points according to Morris, 5.9 according to Real Clear).
Middle-of-the-road voters know that they're against Trump, but they're not sure what they're for. Democrats have been winning big in off-cycle elections, but the midterms will be higher-profile, and I wonder whether Democrats will be as dominant. Do Democrats have a positive agenda? Are they even talking specifically about a negative agenda -- that is, specific ways they can keep Trump in check, or even reverse his worst policies?
At Paul Krugman's Substack, today's post concerns the abysmal consumer sentiment numbers of the second Trump era. Krugman accepts G. Ellott Morris's belief that cumulative price increases since the end of COVID are responsible for Americans' dissatisfaction with the economy. (I still believe, as I've said before, that many Americans are carrying balances on their credit cards and are exasperated by high credit card interest rates, which prevent them from paying down what they owe, but Krugman doesn't talk about that.)
Krugman notes that consumer sentiment is worse now than it was in the Biden years, even though inflation was higher under Biden. Krugman thinks Americans are more dissatisfied now because many of them really believed Trump could wave a wand and make all the post-2019 inflation go away.
I think Krugman may be right about that -- but I also wonder if many Americans just think they've tried both parties recently and both have failed them. Trump didn't just run as an opponent of Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris -- he ran as their antithesis. Biden was sleepy, Trump was vigorous. Biden and Harris were stupid and weak and naive and ineffectual, while Trump would get stuff done. Biden and Harris hated America, Trump loved it. Biden and Harris were terrible stewards of the economy, while Trump was the world's greatest businessman and dealmaker.
All that was bullshit, but I think millions of Americans believed it -- and now some of them probably think we've tried everything and nothing works.
Will those voters show up at the polls at all? I think quite a few of them won't. I think those are the ones who despise Trump but aren't on board with Democrats. I hope Democrats can give them real reasons to vote Democratic in November.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson apologized on Monday for campaigning for President Donald Trump, declaring that he would be “tormented” by the decision “for a long time” to come.
During an interview with his brother Buckley Carlson – a Republican Party operative who previously wrote speeches for Trump – Carlson expressed regret for having publicly supported the president, who has repeatedly attacked him in recent months.
“You wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. I mean, we’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Carlson to his brother on The Tucker Carlson Show. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well I changed my mind,’ or like, ‘Oh this is bad, I’m out.’ ...”
... The former Fox News host continued, “So I do think it’s like a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people, and it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”
Well, that's nice, but please don't offer Tucker Carlson honorary membership in the resistance. Note what else he's been saying in response to Trump's Truth Social attacks on him and other right-wing critics.
Responding to Trump’s attacks this month, Carlson remarked, “I’ve always liked Trump and still feel sorry for him, as I do for all slaves... He’s hemmed in by other forces. He can’t make his own decisions. It’s awful to watch.”
Carlson said that to Newsmax on April 10. At that time, Carlson portrayed Trump as a victim -- specifically, of Israel. The "morning note" he published on his website that day said that we're fighting a war with Iran because Israel blackmailed Trump.
Establishment media never reports this, but the Israeli government has a storied history of blackmailing U.S. presidents.
Perhaps the most jarring example occurred in the 90s, when Israel used recordings of a Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky phone sex session as leverage to pressure Clinton into releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard from prison. We’re not joking. That really happened.
The phone sex story is worth remembering as President Trump attempts to end the Iran War. Like many other things Israel has done, it shows that America’s “special ally” is willing to play very dirty to achieve its goals....
Based on the country’s past, its leaders are doubtlessly willing to push as hard as necessary to ensure the bloodshed continues. That could mean Clinton-style blackmail against Trump, or something far more morbid....
He is under a level of pressure that most people cannot fathom, with rabid Israel Firsters viciously harassing him any time he dares to stray even slightly from their favorite country’s agenda. Their shameless pursuit is steadfast enough to make even a man like Donald Trump go mad.... They are never grateful, they always want more, and they refuse to give the president even an inch of breathing room....
He is facing a level of pressure that is dark enough to make him abandon his campaign promises and morph into the precise kind of politician he once vowed to destroy. He would not have let that happen unless his personal stakes were really high. We hope he overcomes.
I'm no fan of the Israeli government, but while it's obvious that Benjamin Netanyahu persuaded Trump to go to war, Bibi was clearly pushing on an open door. Trump's egomania is at its peak right now, and he's casting about for projects that, in his view, will secure his legacy as the greatest and most consequential president -- the greatest and most consequential person -- who ever lived.
What's new in the Buckley Carson interview is that he and his brother portray Trump as a villain and not just a victim. Starting at about 2:02:00, Tucker implies that Trump is pursuing the war with Iran because he's a secret Jew -- yes, really.
BUCKLEY CARLSON: So, um, the enormous amount of money he got from Miriam Adelson now seems -- it seemed suspect to a lot of people at the time, but, you know, there's a lot of money in politics, to run for president requires an enorm-- I mean, Cackling Cameltoe [Kamala Harris] went through two billion dollars in four months. So, um, sure, there's an argument to be made that you get money from those who will give it to you. It's just the nature of that game. But it's still reprehensible and it's still a big question mark. Why would someone who has obvious and demonstrated allegiance to a foreign power give Donald Trump 250 million dollars while he's running for president? I mean, how is that defensible? It's really not....
TUCKER CARLSON: ... I just think, given his behavior and his demonstrated disloyalty and viciousness to previous supporters....
BUCKLEY: Yes.
TUCKER: ... why wouldn't he display the same lack of loyalty to Miriam Adelson? I mean, that's kind of the ques-- the only people he's been loyal to are the neocons and his donors. So he's attacked, you know, so he attacks Islam. Some of us stand up and say, "Probably shouldn't be attacking a religion." "Oh, you're a Muslim. Secret Muslim. You love Muslims." No, just-- I like reverence, and I don't think you should attack people on the basis of their religion. You don't attack their religion.
BUCKLEY: Yes.
TUCKER: And all these, like, evangelicals are like, "Oh, yeah, see? You're a Muslim." The next week he attacks Jesus. Okay. 'Cause it's all connected, right?
BUCKLEY: Clearly.
TUCKER: Of course.
BUCKLEY: You know, well beyond money, obviously.
TUCKER: Well, right, but the one person he's never going to attack is Rebbe Schneerson.
BUCKLEY: Yes.
TUCKER: And, uh, you know, Chabad leader, who's passed, but-- who I'm not attacking, by the way, but who was regarded as the Messiah by many of his followers. I don't think Trump should attack him, to be clear, but Trump would never attack him. That's the one Messiah he will never attack. So, like, what is that?
It's bizarre to me that Tucker fixates on Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who was the leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement but is not revered by the majority of Jews, and is certainly seen as the Messiah only by members of that movement. But Tucker needs to elevate some Jew to the status of Jesus or Muhammad in order to make this batshit argument, so Schneerson it is.
If you open up the information panel on the YouTube page for this video, you see links to some merchandise you can buy at his site. This is the one that jumped out at me:
It's a parody of the famous logo for The Godfather, with marionette strings. It reads, "AIPAC: An offer you can't refuse."
I loathe AIPAC. I wish it had less influence over American politics. But I don't think it kills people, or tries to. The Brothers Carlson seem to blame AIPAC and/or Israel for the Trump assassination attempts (shortly after 2:01:00 in the clip):
TUCKER: But what was this? Was this always the plan?
BUCKLEY: You know, looking back after the last year and a half, it seems like it kind of was, and it's easy-- well, you could get really deep about it and say, "What was Butler? Like, how was it that he-- and Ryan Routh?" I mean, he was subject to two legitimate assassination attempts. Have we ever gotten to the bottom -- I know you've talked a lot about this, but have we ever gotten to the bottom of that?
TUCKER: I have talked a lot about it. I don't know the answer, but I know that those investigations have been stymied. Fact.
Translation: (((They))) tried to kill him twice, so he's fighting the war (((they))) want him to fight. See also "That could mean Clinton-style blackmail against Trump, or something far more morbid" in the April 10 "morning note."
Did Israel use death threats to persuade Trump to attack Iran? Nahhh. Trump attacked Iran because he's a blithering idiot.
We're living through one of the worst episodes of The Apprentice ever. We have this woman trying to nab a promotion:
The Justice Department has demanded that Wayne County, Michigan, turn over all ballots from the November 2024 election, another escalation in the Trump administration’s voting inquiries.
In a letter to the chief election official of Wayne County dated April 14, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon ... gave the county 14 days to produce the requested documents, which included ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes.
Michigan's governor, secretary of state, and attorney general are resisting this effort. Much of MAGA wants Trump to choose Dillon as his new attorney general, and I'm sure Dillon knows that continually trying to prove that elections are rigged by Democrats, particularly in big cities, will make Trump more inclined to pick her.
Another competitor on this episode is doing something similar because he's trying to avoid being fired.
FBI Director Kash Patel has insisted he has the “evidence” to finally prove President Donald Trump’s long-standing claim that the 2020 election was rigged against him and hinted he could make it available this week.
Patel – who was hit by allegations of alcoholism this weekend, sparking rumors he could soon be fired – told Maria Bartiromo on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures: “We have the information that backs President Trump’s claim....
“Stay tuned this week,” he urged Fox viewers. “You might see a thing or two.”
As I'm reading this, I'm also reading about the latest "wellness" trend: nicotine.
A new wave of health influencers ... many of whom are aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement, are championing nicotine as a health product. They promote nicotine patches, gums and lozenges as well as pouches, which are often filled with nicotine salt powder and give people a convenient way to consume the compound.
To these boosters, nicotine is another “natural” product that the medical establishment has unfairly demonized, like beef tallow, peptides or raw milk....
Tucker Carlson, the conservative TV host and vocal MAHA ally who sells his own brand of nicotine pouches, has called the nicotine pouch brand ZYN a “lifesaving” product that can increase productivity and “male vitality.” Mr. Carlson went so far as to say that the pouches are “like the hand of God reaching down and massaging your central nervous system.”
... Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ... has been photographed carrying a tin of ZYN....
Last month, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer wrote about Americans who seem to combine cynicism and gullibility:
Many Americans believe that vaccines are unsafe, but will jab themselves full of performance enhancers. They think seed oils cause chronic disease, but beef tallow is healthy. They’ll say you can’t trust federally insured banks, but you can trust the millionaires who want you to invest in their volatile vaporware crypto tokens. They think food additives are toxic but support an administration removing all restrictions on pumping pollutants into the air and water. They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.
... Americans are ... facing a bizarre epidemic of gullibility and cynicism—gullicism, if you need a portmanteau—that is drawing people into a world of conspiracism and falsehoods, one where facts are drowned out by a cacophony of extremely loud and wrong voices.
Serwer quotes Hannah Arendt:
The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.”
But what we have in America today isn't merely a curious "mixture of gullibility and cynicism." The cynicism is the gullibility. The people who think we're "sheeple" for believing what experts tell us -- that vaccines are safe, that nicotine and raw milk are dangerous, that American elections aren't rigged -- have the same naive faith in anti-experts that they claim we have in experts.
If they were the skeptics they claim to be, they'd be as wary of anti-experts' claims as they are of experts' claims. But they aren't. They'll believe anything an anti-liberal, anti-expertise influencer tells them.
And while mainstream experts might look at new data and tell us that a drug they thought was safe has dangerous side effects or is ineffective, that rarely happens on the anti-expertise side, because none of the claims are backed by evidence. In fact, evidence that debunks their claims is often cited as a reason to believe them even more -- Look how far the so-called experts will go to cover up their lies! they say. (See, for instance, every failure to find election irregularities after the 2020 election.)
I see genuine cynicism among mainstream people -- we criticize politicians we vote for and news outlets we rely on. We think doctors are basically knowlegeable but sometimes downplay our symptoms or don't listen. We trust vaccines and other medical treatments from Big Pharma, but are wary of Big Pharma's greed.
I don't see a similar cynicism among the believers in anti-expertise. They implicitly trust Donald Trump, Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and wellness snake-oil peddlers. They trust these anti-experts even when the quack treatments don't work, the tariffs don't turbocharge the economy, the war doesn't achieve any of its goals.
The most gullible sheeple in America are the ones who apply the term "sheeple" to the rest of us.
Yesterday, for some reason, Palantir's X account tweeted out a 22-point summary of CEO and co-founder Alex Karp's 2025 book, The Technological Republic. Some of this summary reads like the work of a basement-dwelling underachiever recycling fourth-generation Reagan-era talking points ("it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet"). Some is Palantir essentially saying, Civilization won't survive unless you build an Orwellian hellscape using our technology ("The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose"; "Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime").
And then there's point #21:
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures ... have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
This is ... really racist. It's Bell Curve-level racist.
But it's not Trump-style racist or groyper-style racist. It's vague enough that it slides under many people's anti-racist radar.
I think this and not the open bigotry of Nick Fuentes and young-Republican message boards is the future of the post-Trump GOP. I addressed the subject of GOP anti-Semitism in a post last month: Despite the popularity of open anti-Semitism among young right-wingers, I believe the party will still remain friendly to right-wing Jews and Christian Zionists, while quietly sending signals to bigots reassuring them that they're welcome in the party. That's what likely 2028 presidential nominee J.D. Vance does every time he downplays the seriousness of chat-group bigotry among young Republicans and refuses to condemn bigots. Vance has also told us in multiple speeches that he believes some people just aren't Americans, even if they come to America and believe in American ideals.
America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life....
You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged. In the same way, you can’t export our Constitution to a random country and expect it to take hold.
That’s not something to lament, but to take pride in. The Founders understood that our shared qualities—our heritage, our values, our manners and customs—confer a special and indispensable advantage.
As Josh Kovensky recently noted at Talking Points Memo, a Texas group that campaigns against Muslims says it fights on behalf of "heritage Americans." It's a term that doesn't raise the same alarms as overt racial slurs or open declarations of white superiority. I think the post-Trump GOP will focus on euphemisms like this rather than the open insults of the groypers and the message-board youth -- and get away with it.
In a New York Times roundtable discussion conducted after the fall of Viktor Orban, and also after a series of failures by J.D. Vance, David French says this about a possible end to our current political era:
French: Look, political eras do end, parties do reform, so when it comes to when will this era end, I feel confident it will at some point. I just don’t know when and how much damage will be done before it does. And that’s very much an open question. And I do think in JD Vance’s failures, we’re beginning to see maybe how this political era ends. Because the question has always been: Who is getting the baton from Donald Trump? Who is the next standard bearer?
And for a long time it’s been JD Vance. JD Vance is sort of the heir apparent, and he has been faceplanting time and time and time again.
And one way to think of his phase as a leader of the Republican Party is that he’s got all of the toxicity of Trump and none of that real charisma that Trump has. It’s charisma that I don’t fully understand. It’s never landed with me. Although I will say, early on I did enjoy “The Apprentice.” But it has never really landed with me, this hold, this charisma that he has. But one thing I know is that JD Vance does not have it. He just doesn’t have it.
Michelle Cottle replies:
Cottle: No, the man can’t order a donut without alienating people.
That's true. I get it. I really do. Vance is not loved. He or Marco Rubio could lose in a blowout two years from now, the way John McCain did in 2008.
Or he could be George H.W. Bush -- also an unloved, charisma-challenged successor to a beloved figure in the GOP. Bush wasn't the spiritual leader of the right on Election Day 1988. Nevertheless, he won 40 states and a 426-111 Electoral College blowout.
What this tells us is that the conservative movement can survive an uncharismatic leader, because the leader of the Republican Party and conservative movement doesn't have to be a GOP president or presidential candidate.
During that election, arguably, the leadership of the right passed into the hands of Lee Atwater, who ran the most vicious presidential campaign in living memory. Bush took control of the conservative movement during the Gulf War, but he was unpopular by 1992 and lost his reelection bid badly. By that time, however, power on the right was passing into the hands of Rush Limbaugh and his fellow radio talkers. Soon the leadership of the party would be shared with Newt Gingrich in the House. Eventually, it would settle on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, at the headquarters of Fox News.
The point is that the GOP can survive the loss of a charismatic leader. During periods without such a leader, the party might not control all of government, but even if a Democrat is in the White House, it will have the power to make his life miserable. Gingrich's congressional majorities did that to Bill Clinton. A generation later, the Tea Party's congressional majorities did that to Barack Obama. The Republican Party did just fine without an object of cult worship in the White House.
Democrats' mission in 2028 is to engineer a repeat of 2008 rather than 1988, but Democrats don't have a Barack Obama in their likely candidate field, so they're at risk of running a candidate who's mocked and othered the way Mike Dukakis was. You might think Vance is a national laughingstock, but he beat Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by 3 points each in an early-April survey from UMass-Lowell/YouGov.
But even after the 2008 election, the GOP regrouped, making a comeback with the help of the Murdoch media and the Koch-funded Tea Party movement. There was no Reagan then. There was no Trump. There was just lots and lots of right-wing billionaire cash and lots and lots of propaganda. After Trump, sadly, the GOP will be just fine.
The goal must be to sweep the Republican Party out of power and to do so thoroughly that a new political project can begin to emerge in the aftermath. Failing to understand this is failing to meet the moment on a world historical scale. That’s because dislodging a competitive authoritarian regime takes significant effort, especially in a system as skewed as the United States is by the Electoral College and our chronic underrepresentation in the House.
In Hungary, Péter Magyar's Tisza Party just demonstrated what needs to be done in America. Not only did Tisza defeat Viktor Orbán's Fidesz Party, it won a two-thirds legislative majority that will allow the party to rewrite Hungary's constitution and unwind changes that empowered Orbán.
How do Donald Trump's opponents replicate that? Elrod writes:
This time, the opposition [in Hungary] refused to let factionalism threaten their mission. Rather than let a crowded field enable Orbán to retain power, parties stood down their candidate to maximize the vote behind Magyar and his Tisza party. This matters because Magyar, while a pro-EU and a pro-democracy small-l liberal, is ... center-right....
As speculation about the 2028 election heats up, we’re already being subjected to debates about who various constituencies will and won’t support against a future Trumpist or MAGA candidate. The biggest kerfuffle so far kicked up around Hasan Piker’s declaration that he wouldn’t support Gavin Newsom in a hypothetical matchup against JD Vance. This is the wrong position. It’s politically and morally simple-minded and short-sighted. But it isn’t so hard to imagine that some more conservative-minded folks might raise a similar opposition to a nominee like, say, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This would also be wrong.
I'm optimistic about the 2026 midterms, but I'm doomy about 2028. This is the main reason. I don't think there'll be a united front in 2028. I'm sure there'll be defections. There might not be enough defections to elect Vance (or whoever the GOP nominee is), but the opposition won't be fully united the way it was in Hungary this year.
In part, that's for an obvious reason: Trump won't be on the ballot in 2028. He's effectively on the ballot this year, which is the main reason Democrats are winning special elections and appear ready to win the midterms (at least in the House).
But Democrats have never managed to persuade more than a small handful of the electorate that the Republican Party is the problem. Mainstream Democrats don't try because they fear alienating swing voters. Progressive Democrats don't try because they think mainstream Democrats are problematic as well, even if, like AOC, they align themselves with the Democratic Party and endorse some Democrats who are more mainstream.
Magyar and Tisza were intensely focused on one clear goal: removing Orbán and Fidesz from power. The country was ready to dump Orbán and his party. In 2028, however, our Orbán won't be on the ballot, and our Fidesz, in all likelihood, won't be seen as the source of the country's problems.
One reason America won't be able to generate the same level of frustration and disgust is that Trump will have been in power for only four years. Orbán had been in power for 16 years. Beyond that, it seems very hard to get Americans to change their minds about the GOP if they've been amenable to it in the recent past. Texas, for instance, hasn't elected a Democrat in a statewide election in this century. At a time when the overwhelming majority of voters believe the country is on the wrong track, you'd imagine -- if you didn't know any better -- that this would give Democrats in Texas the potential for a Tisza-style sweep. But while James Talarico might win the Senate race, it's unimaginable that Democrats can dominate the midterms in Texas. The same is true in states like Florida, Missouri, Iowa, and Ohio, all of which used to be swing states: Democrats might do better than usual this year, but there's no chance that they'll wipe out the GOP.
I keep thinking about this piece by Politico's Alexander Burns:
... Orbán’s ouster represents a new triumph for a particular brand of disruptive politics: one defined by reformist candidates who launch new parties and blow up old ones, winning elections by rendering traditional political structures obsolete. Hungary’s Peter Magyar, the leader of the anti-Orbán Tisza party, is the latest victor in this mold....
It would be difficult but not impossible to do what Magyar did in America:
The American party system is heavily armored against disruption. It would be all but impossible to replicate here what Magyar has done in Hungary — or what France’s Emmanuel Macron and Argentina’s Javier Milei did before him — and turn a fledgling political organization into a personal vehicle and bring it to national power in a flash. We do not have secondary political parties that can surge to prominence in a single campaign, like Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia or Rob Jetten’s D66 in the Netherlands.
Yet as Trump himself has shown, it is possible to devour a major party from the inside — commandeering an old institution with grassroots support, casting aside its entrenched leaders, remaking it in a new image and earning a fresh look from voters who didn’t like the old version. Mark Carney has done something similar in Canada, with a very different political agenda. So has Lee Jae Myung in South Korea.
I think a billionaire like Mark Cuban could mount a viable third-party campaign. Widespread dissatisfaction with both parties might carry him to victory. But it's also quite possible that Fox and other GOP propaganda outfits would succeed in keeping Republican voters loyal to the party, while Democrats and the Cuban party split the anti-Republican vote.
Could someone who isn't an insider take control of the Democratic Party, the way Trump took control of the GOP? Burns writes:
If Democrats want to take the hint, they’ll give a closer look to the leaders frustrating their peers in Washington and defying their home-state political bosses, and less time measuring the applause meter at various special-interest conventions and donor retreats.
I'm sure he's referring to crypto-Republicans like John Fetterman and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, even though his words could just as easily apply to many progressives. But a Fetterman presidential campaign wouldn't tap into Americans' frustration. To do that, Fetterman would have to say that the whole system sucks. But Fetterman clearly believes that only Democrats suck. He's fine with Republicans.
In 2028, the Democrats will run a mainstream pol. The Republicans will run either Vance or Marco Rubio. And maybe the Democrat will win because the Republican won't distance himself from the current president, the way John McCain refused to distance himself from George W. Bush's widely reviled Iraq War in 2008. But a race like that won't lead to a Tisza-sized blowout. And we could just as easily have a repeat of 1988, when George H.W. Bush overcame Reagan fatigue and his own Vance-ish lack of charisma by viciously portraying his Democratic opponent as a dangerous freak, with the media's eager assistance.
In a 12-hour span this week, President Trump promised that the war with Iran was ending soon. He picked a fight with the pope on social media. He threatened to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve. He posted an illustration of himself receiving an encouraging hug from Jesus Christ.
This is what it looks like when Mr. Trump is under pressure and burrowing his way into a more flattering news cycle. And anyone who has been paying even a little bit of attention over the past decade can pinpoint where we are in a well-established routine, when, intentionally or not, the president tosses out little rhetorical grenades meant to shift attention elsewhere. (It often works: Remember last week, when he threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization?)
... What makes this different from all the other times is that he cannot post his way out of a war he started without congressional permission or without the support of voters.
It's the same old same old from Trump, and also it isn't. I agree with Stephanie Grisham, whom Rogers quotes:
When the moment calls for him to put the phone down or back away from a critic, he hits back harder.
“He’ll double down, lie more and say that everything’s perfectly fine and great, and then do all his bonkers postings,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary for Mr. Trump.
But she added: “He’s being erratic, even for him.”
Is he being dementia erratic? Or experiencing some other form of mental illness that's new, or at least worsening?
Trump's White House is a massive flattery bubble -- but outside its walls, Trump knows how many people dislike him. I think, consciously or otherwise, he's looking for evidence that he can still get away with anything. So he's acting like a self-indulgent pop star.
I'm not a Justin Bieber fan, but a few days ago I found myself reading this account of Bieber's appearance at Coachella, and it made me think of Trump.
Three years after retreating from the spotlight, [Bieber's] Saturday night set was set to be his biggest performance in years.
What fans hoped for, it seems, was vintage Bieber. They wanted the hits: “Baby,” “One Less Lonely Girl,” “Sorry.” They wanted nostalgia; they wanted a dance party. They wanted a pop star with a microphone headset and a flock of backup dancers. They wanted choreography.
Bieber had other ideas.... The singer appeared on stage alone, with a pink hoodie pulled over his head and sunglasses across his eyes. He selected his backing tracks manually from a Mac on the side of the stage. Occasionally, he scrolled through comments on the Coachella livestream to pick his next songs....
Things got weird a third of the way through the set when Bieber started playing through his old material. Or rather, his computer did. The singer sat perched in front of his Mac, searching for his old music videos on YouTube. He shared his computer’s screen so that the crowd could see.
When he clicked on the video for “Baby,” the audience’s reaction was immediate....
And then, after a minute, he pulled the plug. He searched for another song, “Favorite Girl,” and did the same routine: one minute, then on to the next.
One possible reaction to being a massive celebrity is that you might indulge yourself the way Bieber did just to prove to yourself that your fans will stay on board, and also to draw attention to yourself, at a time when you seem to be past your peak and less able to make the world pay attention to you. And you feel you can get away with self-indulgence because you've been told you're great by the flatterers who surround you.
You become late-period Elvis, stumbling through "Are You Lonesome Tonight?":
Elvis had drug problems, and Bieber has spent time in rehab. Bieber also -- like Trump -- got away with a lot when he was at the peak of his popularity. Here's Bieber in 2013:
In a video posted Wednesday by TMZ, a young man the publication identified as Bieber appears to be urinating into the yellow plastic mop bucket as his friends cheer him on.
"That's the coolest spot to p**s, you know, you will forever remember that," someone tells a staffer as the man identified as Bieber is shown from the back. "You're not going to remember him p***in' in the restroom. Everybody does that."
The publication reported Bieber was exiting an unidentified nightclub through the restaurant kitchen at the time.
At the end of the video, the man identified as Bieber is seen spraying a photo of Bill Clinton with a cleaning solvent and saying, "F*** Bill Clinton," the publication reported.
You might even get this way if you're a leading figure in a subculture. I'm thinking about the time when Bradford Cox, the frontman of the acclaimed indie-rock band Deerhunter, responded to a heckler by leading his band in an hour-long version of "My Sharona." About halfway through,
Cox instructed–rather, demanded–that the bewildered crowd take off their clothes and shake their chairs above their heads, all the while shouting “seemingly intoxicated defenses about his art” and simulating felatio. The nightmarish charade reached a screeching, welcomed, and equaling head-scratching end when Cox invited the remaining spectators on stage, triumphantly proclaiming that the show was “the death of folk music and the birth of punk.”
He later told Pitchfork, "I am a terrorist. As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity."
None of this diminished his standing in the indie-rock world, and Deerhunter went on to release three more acclaimed albums before Cox, who's struggled with depression, went into semi-retirement.
This morning, The New York Times published a story about Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign to become governor of Ohio, which might not succeed, despite Ramaswamy's many advantages.
Almost a year before the May 5 Republican primary, Vivek Ramaswamy, the loquacious billionaire entrepreneur and former presidential candidate, had almost completely cleared the field contending to become Ohio’s next governor. That alone made him the favorite, since a Democrat has not held the office for 15 years.
He has been endorsed by trade unions, farm associations, dozens of county sheriffs and President Trump. He has visited every county in the state, often feted as a celebrity by local Republican leaders. Perhaps most formidably, his campaign and the super PAC backing him have amassed nearly $40 million — a record-breaking sum that does not include the many millions he’s ready to spend from his own pockets.
The only matter remaining is whether a majority of Ohioans will vote for him.
Ohio is a state that has voted for Donald Trump three times. In 2024, Trump won the state by double digits. The current governor, Mike DeWine, won reelection in 2022 by 25 points. So why is Ramaswamy struggling against his likely Democratic oppponent, Amy Acton?
The Times has a few theories:
Perhaps Mr. Ramaswamy’s showing in the polls is simply a function of the current national mood, as rising costs, economic uncertainty and an unpopular war drag down the popularity of the president and his party.
Or perhaps Mr. Ramaswamy, 40, is facing a challenge he faced in his campaign for the presidency in 2024: that his fast-talking self-assurance just rubs some people the wrong way.
And ...? Could some other factor be involved?
This is a 27-paragraph story. Only starting in paragraph 23 are we told this about a primary opponent with the rather on-the-nose name Casey Putsch:
Mr. Putsch rails against data centers, “billionaire tech bros” and foreigners, Indians in particular, who are granted H-1B visas for high-skilled jobs in Ohio. Mr. Ramaswamy, Mr. Putsch said to his supporters, “is a globalist Trojan horse.”
Mr. Ramaswamy has said he does not think that anti-Indian bias will be much of a factor in his race....
In other words, there's barely a mention in this story of the possibility that Ramaswamy is struggling to close the sale because his ancestry isn't European and his religion isn't Christian. Okay, there's also this:
John Adams, a retired pastor in Erie County who is active in local Republican politics, said that people were still learning about Mr. Ramaswamy. Most everyone knew him as a figure in Mr. Trump’s orbit, but many didn’t know he had grown up in Cincinnati.
“For some folks, I hear them say, ‘Well, he’s an outsider, we really don’t know him very well,’” he said.
Ramaswamy didn't just grow up in Cincinnati -- he was born there. But his parents are Indian immigrants and he's Hindu. Surely that has at least some influence on some voters.
I read this story a day after reading Josh Kovensky's report at Talking Points Memo on Frisco, Texas, a thriving and rapidly expanding city of a quarter million people that's now the focus of right-wingers who fear a "Great Replacement" because of the number of Indians who live there.
But for a coterie of area activists and influencers, the influx of Indians — some on H-1B work visas, others citizens of Indian descent — is a real-life example of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Under that idea, elites are replacing white Americans — sometimes referred to by right-wing activists as “Heritage Americans” — with nonwhite foreigners in a bid to gain political power. That narrative about Frisco has been magnified in recent days by national political figures. Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX), who represents a district near Frisco, cited the city’s demographic changes during a recent podcast appearance to demand an end to the H-1B worker visa program.
“We’ve got communities like Frisco that have been totally transformed, whether it’s Islamic immigration or immigration from anywhere else in Asia,” Gill said. “I don’t want to hear Muslim calls to prayer in my community. I do not want the caste system socially in the schools that my kids are going to because we’ve had so many people come to the United States who are not assimilating into American culture.”
(Gill says these things despite the fact that he's married to the daughter of Dinesh D'Souza, a right-winger of Indian descent.)
Kovensky tells us that Steve Bannon is in on the hatemongering, unsurprisingly:
Others, like former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, have trained a spotlight on Indians in the city in recent weeks, using a video by political activist Tyler Oliveira depicting Indians in the city to call for “a moratorium of at least 10 years on all immigration” and a “special deal” for American citizens.
Thanks to the flattening effects of the media, I don't imagine there's a huge difference between Texas Republicans and Ohio Republicans on this subject. Ramaswamy is neither an immigrant nor a Muslim, but it seems highly unlikely that most Ohio voters know that. They look at him and see a brown person. I'm sure that's an immediate dealbreaker for quite a few of them.
The campaign against Indians in Frisco takes advantage of the fact that right-wingers will believe anything about people they hate or fear:
One [video], titled “The Muslim and Indian Takeover of Texas” by TPUSA contributor Savanah Hernandez, featured Sara Gonzales recounting an email she received from someone near Frisco describing an Indian couple supposedly inviting a cow into their home before exulting over its urine and feces.
Oh yeah, I'm totally sure that happened.
In 2022, Pew reported that 45% of Americans say that the United States should be a Christian nation. That includes 67% of Republicans and Republican leaners. In this group, 76% believe that the Founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation.
So I think is more of a factor in Ramaswamy's struggles than the Times is letting on.
The editorial board of The New York Timesresponds to the victory of Peter Magyar's Tisza Party in Hungary by telling us that Democrats should take notes:
Hungary is obviously a very different country from the United States. But Mr. Orban’s rise and his use of power were long models for Mr. Trump. Now, Mr. Orban’s demise can be a model for the Democratic Party and any other party that is trying to defeat an authoritarian right-wing threat.
How exactly?
First, [Magyar] focused on the bread-and-butter issues that often guide the decisions of swing voters, and not just in Hungary.
And what did he propose?
The campaign platform of the party Mr. Magyar leads, Tisza, was titled “Foundations of a Functional and Humane Hungary.” It criticized the inefficiency of government services. Its agenda included tax cuts for working-class families, expanded health care, increased pensions, larger child benefits and a pay increase for support staff members at schools. It said it would help pay for these programs through both a wealth tax on the very rich and the recovery of European Union transfer payments reduced because of Mr. Orban’s anti-democratic policies.
Yes, you read that correctly: An overseas politician endorsed a wealth tax on billionaires and the ed board of The New York Times said "Bravo!"
What else?
Crucially, Mr. Magyar made corruption a core campaign issue....
On the campaign trail, he linked Mr. Orban’s corruption to Hungarians’ frustration with their stagnant living standards. In his victory speech on Sunday night, Mr. Magyar promised a country where citizens could rely on their government to help provide good medical care, a decent family life and a dignified retirement. What should matter, he said, was not political connections but the kind of person somebody was.
So you're saying that Magyar denounced oligarchy? You mean, like these guys?
Obviously, this can't be mainstream political commentary without a swipe at the left. It's a familiar one:
The second lesson may be harder for Democrats — and center-left parties in Europe — to absorb. Mr. Magyar, who identifies as center right, won partly by avoiding the social progressivism that dominates elite left-leaning circles and alienates many voters. He ran as an economic progressive and a cultural moderate if not conservative.
And what are some of the things he said and did that the dogmatic lefties in America's Democratic Party won't do?
He declined to attend a Pride march in Budapest, making it harder for Mr. Orban to paint him as captive to L.G.B.T.Q. activists.
Okay, now we're talking: The Times ed board wants us to understand that Magyar's party won in part by throwing LGBTQ people under the bus. But some 2028 Democratic aspirants are already throwing trans people under the bus, and it's not helping them break from the pack. Note that J.D. Vance beat Gavin Newsom in a recent UMass-Lowell/YouGov poll.
On immigration, which has shaped recent elections around the world, Mr. Magyar called for even tighter restrictions than the Orban had government imposed. He said he would keep a border fence, repeal a guest-worker program and allow no guest workers from outside the European Union.
This is a tougher one. Polls show that Americans don't like the heavy-handed and brutal way Trump is handling immigration, but they're in favor of at least some deportations. I think Democrats could start reframing the issue by saying that Americans want immigrant criminals prioritized for deportation, and the Trump administration has prioritized the most law-abiding immigrants, because it's easier and less dangerous to round them up. Democrats can also talk about an immigration system that prioritizes the rule of law rather than warfare in the streets.
The implication of this editorial is that Democrats lost in 2024 because they didn't campaign this way. But to a large extent they did. Kamala Harris didn't campaign on social issues. Democrats had supported an immigration reform bill that accepted many of the GOP's ideas. And it didn't help.
But in the area of economics, Democrats campaigned on incremental change. Would a platform of serious economic populism have changed the outcome?
The Times ed board seems to be implying as much. Okay, fine -- let's try that.
