THE PRO-TRUMP VIBES VS. A POSSIBLE SILENT MAJORITY

It's easy to mock Ezra Klein's latest piece in The New York Times, especially with that headline:

lol - now the actual Times is imitating New York Times Pitchbot on purpose

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— Will Bunch (@willbunch.bsky.social) January 19, 2025 at 6:54 AM

But he has a point. Trump and his party did barely win the election:

In 2024, Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.5 points.... by any historical measure, it was a squeaker....

Down-ballot, Republicans’ 2024 performance was, if anything, less impressive. In the House, the Republicans’ five-seat lead is the smallest since the Great Depression; in the Senate, Republicans lost half of 2024’s competitive Senate races, including in four states Trump won; among the 11 governor’s races, not a single one led to a change in partisan control. If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift.

And yet the GOP victory isn't being discussed that way:

Trump and Democrats alike treated this result as an overwhelming repudiation of the left and a broad mandate for the MAGA movement....

The election was close, but the vibes have been a rout.

Why? I think in part it's because the mainstream press, after 45 years of Republican ref-working, has learned to love bashing the Democrats. I also think Democratic self-hatred is deeply ingrained -- in Washington, Democrats love bashing themselves.

But Klein thinks something else is going on:

This is partially because he’s surrounded by some of America’s most influential futurists. Silicon Valley and crypto culture’s embrace of Trump has changed his cultural meaning more than Democrats have recognized. In 2016, Trump felt like an emissary of the past; in 2025, he’s being greeted as a harbinger of the future.

Also:

Among the tributaries flowing into the general shift: the Trumpist right’s deeper embrace of social media, the backlash to the “feminization” of society, exhaustion with the politics of wokeness, an era of negativity that Trump captured but Democrats resisted, a pervasive sense of disorder at the border and abroad and the breakup between Democrats and “Big Tech.”

But what Klein doesn't do is ask the question in reverse: Trump seems zeitgeisty. So why did he and the GOP barely win the election?

I think Elon Musk, crypto, anti-wokeness, and a proud toxic masculinity really are zeitgeisty now. Trumnp and Trumpist podcasters and CEOs have energy and self-confidence, while liberal leaders now seem as old-fashioned as The Lawrence Welk Show did in the late 1960s. But I'm old enough to remember 1972, when some people hoped that the 1960s counterculture was so ascendant that it could elect a president. Instead, George McGovern lost 49 states.

The lesson to be learned from this is that what's zeitgeisty doesn't always reflect the views of the entire culture. Nixon was right: there was a "silent majority" that wasn't quite ready to embrace the full worldview of the '60s counterculture.

Nixon won big in 1972 and Harris lost narrowly in 2024, but that's a difference of degree. Neither zeitgest shift represented an overwhelming majority of the American public.

There's a large percentage of the country -- maybe even a silent majority -- that doesn't want crypto, that wants women as well as men to thrive outside the kitchen, that doesn't swoon over Elon Musk the way eight-year-old boys swoon over sports stars. (As I told you yesterday, half of the respondents to the latest Wall Street Journal poll think it's a bad idea for Musk to serve as a Trump adviser, while only 39% think it's a good idea. Seventy-five million Americans just voted for a female presidential candidate, the third-highest vote total for any presidential candidate in U.S. history. And as for crypto, 63% of Americans aren't confident that it's safe and reliable, according to a Pew poll conducted last February.)

No one in politics seems ready to rally the voters who reject the Trump zeitgeist, but that might not be true in a year or three years. If it's still possible for an opposition party to function in America then, candidates who reject trendy Trumpism might prevail.

A WACKY, CRAZY, OUTSIDE-THE-BOX IDEA TO REVIVE THE DEMOCRATIC BRAND

A new Wall Street Journal poll (free link here) says Democrats are in deep trouble:

The survey shows that 36% approve of Biden’s job performance, with 62% disapproving—a record-low rating in Journal polls during his presidency. By an almost identical gap of 36% to 60%, voters view the Democratic Party more unfavorably than favorably. That marks the party’s weakest rating in Journal polls dating to 1990.

But the Journal's pollsters don't see a massive mandate for what Donald Trump intends to do as president:

Voters support many of the goals President-elect Donald Trump has set for his second term. They are just not on board with all the ways he wants to accomplish them....

Some 53% want Trump to make significant changes in how government is run once he is inaugurated Monday. But more than 60% oppose one of his central ideas for doing so—replacing thousands of career civil-service workers with people chosen by the president.

More than 60% also oppose eliminating the Education Department, a marquee Trump proposal for paring the federal government. Only 18% would supersede congressional powers and give Trump more authority over federal spending, as he has proposed.

The opposition to many specifics of the Trump agenda is quite significant:

* His promise to pardon people convicted in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol drew opposition from 57% of voters.

* More than two-thirds oppose using economic coercion or military force to take control of Greenland, while 57% oppose using coercion or force to retake control of the Panama Canal....

* Two-thirds oppose making Canada the 51st state....

* Half say it is a bad idea for Elon Musk ... to serve as an adviser, while 39% say it is a good idea.

* By a margin of 64% to 31%, voters oppose ending birthright citizenship....

* Voters place a high priority on protecting funding for education, healthcare and social safety-net program.... By about 60% to 34%, voters say protecting those programs is more important than cutting taxes or reducing the federal debt.

A new New York Times poll gets some similar results, although the Times frames them very differently:

For a political figure so divisive — Americans view him more negatively than any other president about to take office in the last 70 years — the level of support for his ideas is striking. Most Americans say the United States has ignored serious problems at home while entangling itself in costly conflicts abroad, the poll found. A majority believe the government is sending too much money to Ukraine. And many are expressing less tolerance of immigrants overall.

There's strong support (87%) for deporting undocumented immigrants who are criminals, or who arrived recently (63%). But 55% of respondents want to retain birthright citizenship, and 62% want to keep protecting those who were brought here illegally as children. Also:

... even though most people expect [Trump] will use the government to investigate and prosecute his political opponents, the vast majority of Americans do not want him to. That includes a majority of Republicans.

Overall, 73 percent of Americans say they oppose the idea of Mr. Trump pursuing legal charges against his adversaries — with 49 percent saying they are strongly opposed.

And while this isn't mentioned in the Times write-up of the poll, 69% of respondents want childhood polio, measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines to remain mandatory. (The numbers are here.)

So there's a lot of stuff Trump plans to do that won't be popular at all. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party isn't very popular. So, I have a crazy, nutball, out-of-the-box idea for Democrats:

Why not brand yourselves as -- you might want to sit down for this -- the opposition party?

Specifically, the party that opposes all the things Trump is likely to do that 60% or 70% of the public doesn't want him to do?

I know -- a wacky idea, right?

Since you guys like jargon, and were very excited a couple of years ago about a concept called "popularism," which was basically Let's support policies voters like, we could call this "negative popularism." The message: You know all the really crazy shit Trump wants to do? We're against it!

But Democrats have been afraid to be forthright about opposing Trump on anything. Until this week's hearings, they were afraid even to say that appointing an alleged alcoholic rapist as secretary of defense was a bad idea, apparently because we're really unpopular and Trump won an overwhelming victory (he didn't) so we'd better shut up about everything he's doing, even the batshit crazy stuff! And the result is that millions of Americans, particularly independents, have no idea what Trump's nominees are like. From the Times poll:

It's true that these polls make clear that Americans want a crackdown on at least some undocumented immigrants. Sadly, on trans issues, Americans accept the right's framing (which is also much of the mainstream media's framing): teens shouldn't get trans medical care and trans women shouldn't compete in women's sports.

But on so many subjects, the public strongly opposes what Trump wants to do. And the public is still personally wary of Trump.

Start with that, Democrats! Talk about the idiocy of trying to steal Greenland! Talk about Trump's vendettas! Defend the polio vaccine!

It's a wacky idea, but it just might work!

BIDEN GAVE TRUMP AN OPENING LONG BEFORE HE STARTED HIS REELECTION CAMPAIGN

In The Atlantic, Franklin Foer repeats the conventional wisdom:

... As clearly as any recent president, Biden proposed the standard for judging his performance. From the time he began running for office, he presented himself as democracy’s defender at the republic’s moment of greatest peril....

By stubbornly setting off on his reelection campaign, by strapping his party to his shuffling frame, he doomed the nation to realizing the nightmare scenario that he’d promised to prevent. He created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return, and for his own spectacular failure....

The way that events unfolded—his catastrophic debate performance, the stark clarity with which the nation came to understand his geriatric state–-beggars belief. Why didn’t Democrats stage an intervention earlier? Why didn’t his aides stop him from running?

... The evidence that Biden wasn’t fit for a second term was abundantly clear in his public appearances—and in the public appearances that he studiously avoided. Advisers knew that Biden’s instinct was always to invest faith in his own capacities, but they never made a concerted effort to talk him back from his decision to run, until it was far too late. Donald Trump is their legacy too.

I agree that it was a mistake for Biden to run again -- but I think the damage was done before he began to run. If Biden "created the ideal conditions for Trump’s return," it was by giving up on the effort to communicate with the American people as president.

Biden struggles to speak, so he mostly gave up trying, and he also chose not to let surrogates -- his vice president, for instance -- be his voice. He governed as if public declarations of his administration's side of things weren't all that important anyway.

Previous Democratic presidents -- Bill Clinton, Barack Obama -- saw their popularity decline in their first terms, as Biden's did. But they could compellingly give their side of the story every day, and at least some of the public was undoubtedly swayed by their arguments on their own behalf. Both Clinton and Obama saw their first-term job-approval numbers drop to the low 40s, as Biden's did, but Biden's kept dropping into the 30s, while Clinton's and Obama's rebounded.

Into the gap left by Biden's poor public messaging came, first, video clips that depicted Biden as a doddering dementia case, then the bluster of Donald Trump. Trump sounds stupid to you and me, but he has an answer for everything. The sheer volume of his verbiage, and the vigor and confidence with which he makes his hateful, fact-challenged proclamations, stood in contrast to Biden's verbal clumsiness. Most Americans don't know enough to call Trump on his bullshit. To many of them, he sounds strong and powerful.

It appears that Biden has belatedly begun to recognize the importance of public communication. Last night, on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, he talked about his decision no to put his name on COVID stimulus checks, as Trump had done in 2020:

... Biden said the thought only crossed his mind because he kept hearing people say back to him they received a check from the president.

"'The president did that. Why aren't you helping me?'" Biden said he heard.

"It did cross my mind," he confessed. "The mistake we made was — I think I made — was not getting our allies to acknowledge that the Democrats did this. So for example, build a new billion-dollar bridge over a river. Well, call it the 'Democratic bridge' figuratively speaking. Talk about who put it together. Let people know that this is something that Democrats did. That it was done by the party."

Biden then added: "I'm not a very good huckster. That wasn't a stupid thing for [President-elect Donald Trump] to do. It helped him a lot and it undermined our ability to convince people that we were the ones that were getting this to them."

Bad communication wasn't just a problem for Biden on COVID relief or infrastructure. It was a problem for him every day.

*****

But couldn't Biden have made up for this by announcing that he wouldn't run again, thus allowing Democrats to choose a fresh candidate in a series of primaries? Maybe -- but I think the conventional wisdom, that primaries would have been a cure-all for the party's problems, is not borne out by the evidence.

The primary process doesn't magically produce a very electable candidate. Sometimes it gives us Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. Other times it gives us Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis (or, on the Republican side, Bob Dole or Mitt Romney).

All of the Democrats' intraparty conflicts -- progressives vs. moderates, Israel backers vs. supporters of the Palestinians, whites vs. people of color -- would have been a factor in these primaries. The party rallied around Kamala Harris when she became the candidate. There might have been some resistance to a primary winner.

And the winner probably would have been Harris in any case. As I've said before, she won every national 2024 Democratic primary poll I found at FiveThirtyEight that asked respondents to pick from a Biden-less field.

Maybe she wouldn't have survived a primary season. Maybe she would have been attacked for being part of an administration that didn't seem successful. That might have been enough to give the win to someone else. On the other hand, she might have won in spite of the attacks, and then the Trump campaign could have deployed clips from the primaries in which fellow Democrats described her as part of a failed presidency.

A candidate who seemed like a fresh start might have had a better chance of beating Trump, but as long as there was one picture of the primary winner with Biden, or one video clip of the winner defending Biden, the Trump campaign would have said the candidate was more of the same.

The way to defeat Trump in 2024 was to make a case for the Biden presidency in the preceding four years. Biden would have needed to seem like a strong, steady hand at the controls. He would have had to persuade voters that he felt their pain when they were dissatisfied, and that he had a plan when things seemed to be going wrong. When he couldn't manage any of that, he made it possible for Trump to win.

FOX POLL RESPONDENTS: TRUMP DOESN'T HAVE A MANDATE AND WE DON'T EXPECT HIM TO BE A VERY GOOD PRESIDENT (updated)

The headline for this Fox story is "Fox News Poll: Trump Is the Most Popular He’s Ever Been." But that's not saying much:

As Inauguration Day approaches, President-elect Trump receives his highest favorable rating and half of registered voters approve of his handling of the presidential transition.

When you look at the numbers, you see that the "highest favorable rating" is a mere 50%, with 50% having an unfavorable opinion of him. As for his handling of the transition, he gets 52% approval, with 46% disapproving. But among Fox poll respondents in December 2020, 65% approved Joe Biden's handling of his transition, while only 26% disapproved.

More:

Still, a majority does not view his election win as a mandate, and more think it was a rejection of the outgoing administration rather than an endorsement of Trump.

The latest Fox News Poll, released Wednesday, finds that by a 13-point margin, more voters view Trump’s victory as a referendum on President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ policies and performance (54%) than a validation of Trump’s (41%). That includes 71% of Democrats, 64% of independents and 34% of Republicans saying it was more of a rejection....

While Trump describes his 2024 win as a mandate, a slim 51% majority disagrees. Some 4 in 10 (42%) call it a mandate, including 69% of Trump supporters....

At a time when 99% of Democratic officeholders and officials seem to believe that Trump has a massive mandate, it's instructive to learn that ordinary Americans -- including some Republicans -- disagree.

Trump's agenda isn't popular. Given this choice:

1. Deport all illegal immigrants back to their home country 2. Deport only those illegal immigrants who have been charged with crimes but allow those who are law-abiding to remain in the U.S. and eventually qualify for citizenship 3. Allow all illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. 4. (Don't know)

Only 30% of respondents choose "Deport all," while 59% choose option #2, which includes a path to citizenship for the law-abiding.

Take over the Panama Canal? 53% say no. "Impos[e] large tariffs on Canada and Mexico to get them to change their immigration policies?" Again, 53% say no. Buy Greenland? 57% say no. Investigate Trump's prosecutors? 56% say no. (54% want to extend the 2017 tax cuts, but that's probably because the question doesn't use the word "cuts" -- it refers to "the 2017 tax reform law.")

78% of respondents want Democrats to work with Trump -- and 65% want Trump to work with Democrats, which won't happen.

Do voters think Trump will do a good job? A December Fox poll suggests that they're not expecting much. A few highlights:

"During the next year, do you think the economy will get better, get worse, or stay about the same?" Better 39%, worse 37%, the same 22%

"Under the new Trump administration, do you think... The country will be safer, less safe, or stay about the same?" Safer 42%, less safe 36%, stay the same 20%

"Prices for food and gas will increase, decrease, or stay about the same?" Increase 41%, decrease 39%, stay the same 19%

"Restrictions on abortion will increase, decrease, or stay about the same?" Increase 52%, decrease 13%, stay the same 34%

"American Democracy will get stronger, weaker, or stay about the same?" Stronger 38%, weaker 43%, stay the same 17%

"The national debt will increase, decrease, or stay about the same?" Increase 48%, decrease 31%, stay the same 20%

"Your taxes will go up, down, or stay about the same?" Up 37%, down 30%, stay the same 32%

These aren't great numbers. Trump's only really good number in this series of questions is on "The country’s southern border will be more secure, less secure, or stay about the same?" -- 56% say it will be more secure (14% less, 28% the same).

It's possible that Americans will be tolerant of Trump's inevitable failures because they simply don't expect government to work anymore. I hope his approval ratings plummet when he screws up, but those low expectations might save him, at least for a while.

*****

UPDATE: Some people are not reading the room.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman said Wednesday he’s open to Donald Trump’s idea that the U.S. acquire Greenland, telling reporters that it’s “strategically a smart thing.”

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— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 8:57 PM

It's understandable that some Democrats might want to move closer to Trump's positions on an issue or two. I don't like the headlong rush to embrace right-wing views on immigration, but I understand -- it's an issue on which the public seems to have moved to the right. But Greenland? Why? Buying Greenland is opposed by 76% of Democrats, 63% of independents, and even 37% of Republicans. What voters does Fetterman think he's winning over with this very unpopular idea?

DO REPUBLICANS BELIEVE HEGSETH'S TOXICITY IS A BUG OR A FEATURE?

Benjamin Wittes tells us that Trumpism is a "cult of unqualified authenticity," embodied in Donald Trump himself, but also in Pete Hegseth:

You can see in it so many of the central tenets of Trump’s approach to governance: the contempt for expertise and traditional qualifications; the insistence that the only real qualification is authenticity—and that authenticity is somehow wrapped up in performative masculinity; the belief that sounding tough and being tough are the same thing; and the conviction that complexity necessarily reduces to weakness.

It’s all right there in the nomination of a proudly unqualified individual who frames his lack of qualifications as qualification of a different, more authentic, variety.... And this idea has the apparently silent assent of all of the Republican members of the [Senate Armed Services] committee and a few, at least, enthusiastic takers.

I'm not sure there's a consistent worldview in the GOP. Marco Rubio's hearing is taking place as I type this, and he'll sail through his confirmation process because he is seen as traditionally qualified. Every Republican in the Senate will vote for both of them. But Republicans aren't shy about using one argument in a given situation and exactly the opposite argument in another situation.

Wittes can imagine circumstances under which Hegseth won't be confirmed:

In exchanges with Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Hegseth denied as “anonymous smears” any suggestion that he had shown up drunk for work or engaged in sexual misconduct....

Unless some evidence emerges that Hegseth’s denials are false, he will—I suspect—certainly be confirmed....

All bets are off, however, if Democrats produce the goods and show that not merely are the allegations true but that Hegseth was less than candid in his testimony.

No, Hegseth would survive that. I mean, sure -- if you had him on video unambiguously committing a violent act against a woman, maybe that would be enough to take him down. (I don't believe that even clear video evidence of day drinking in the past would matter, because Hegseth's narrative is that he's a changed man now, thanks to his current wife and Jesus.)

If Wittes means that testimony by a woman Hegseth has hurt could change the outcome, he should talk to Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and E. Jean Carroll. Even credible testimony of sexual misconduct, if it's from a woman and isn't accompanied by video, means nothing to most of the American public. Hegseth could easily survive that.

The Bulwark's Jonathan Last thinks Republicans are embracing vice as a virtue:

My theory is this:

Republicans embrace vice not because they believe that the accused Republican figures are innocent, but because they believe they are guilty. And so these voters exist in the hope that their champion will go on to hurt their enemies on their behalf.

After all: If a guy is willing to rape a woman, surely he can be counted on to visit destruction on Democrats, or woke generals, or whoever.

I don’t know. Maybe you have a better theory.

That may be true for some of them. For others, I think what's happened is that the GOP under Trump has become The Firm in John Grisham's novel -- you join, realize that its real purpose organized crime, and then you can't leave because no one who tries ever leaves alive. (In the case of the GOP, what's inevitable is political death. For instance, Senator Joni Ernst, who's up for re-election in two years, correctly fears the Elon Musk-funded primary challenge she would have faced if she hadn't agreed to support Hegseth.)

I'm sure most Senate Republicans would be happier with qualified nominees whose closets aren't full of skeletons. Republicans aren't strutting around boasting about Hegseth's toxic masculinity -- notice that they refused Democrats' request for a hearing of the customary length.

Republicans refused to allow for a second round of questions for Pete Hegseth. The entire hearing for the position of Secretary of Defense lasted just 4 hours and 15 minutes.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 1:50 PM

Which is why Democrats should have been pounding the table about Hegseth for weeks. They did a fine job in yesterday's hearings. But they missed the opportunity to define Hegseth.

An NPR/PBS/Marist poll conducted before the hearing suggests that Hegseth isn't widely known. Overall, he has a 19% favorable rating and a 26% unfavorable rating; 55% of respondents are unsure or have never heard of him.

Even among Republicans, his approval rating is only 37%, with 54% unsure. According to this survey, Elon Musk and Robert Kennedy Jr. poll in the 60s among Republicans, and at 37% and 40% overall, respectively.

It's possible that this poll has a liberal lean, but still: Hegseth appears not to have gone into his hearing as a MAGA superstar. He's been a Fox host, but not in prime time. He was vulnerable. But now he's almost certain to be confirmed.

TRUMP WON AFTER JANUARY 6 BECAUSE MUCH OF THE COUNTRY THINKS THE GOVERNMENT IS BRIAN THOMPSON

Donald Trump is the president-elect, and Donald Trump committed crimes:

Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Donald J. Trump on charges of illegally seeking to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Mr. Trump in a trial, had his 2024 election victory not made it impossible for the prosecution to continue....

In his report, Mr. Smith took Mr. Trump to task not only for his efforts to reverse the results of a free and fair election, but also for consistently encouraging “violence against his perceived opponents” throughout the chaotic weeks between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, injuring more than 140 police officers.

Mr. Smith laid the attack on the Capitol squarely at Mr. Trump’s feet, quoting from the evidence in several criminal cases of people charged with taking part in the riot who made clear that they believed they were acting on Mr. Trump’s behalf.

It happened. We all saw it. And four years later, Trump was elected president again. Why didn't January 6 matter?

I think it's because it was an attack on the government, and the feelings many Americans have about the government are similar to the feelings they have about murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Americans want a government that makes their lives better, one that works for them and not the rich and powerful. That's also how they feel about health insurance -- they want it to ease the financial burden of healthcare, not to make CEOs and stockholders rich.

From the response to Brian Thompson's murder, we know that millions of Americans believe health insurance in America is a scam. They're sick of having claims rejected and paying huge out-of-pocket costs. Many of them know that the murder of Thompson was wrong, but they don't think it was very wrong.

I think millions of Americans feel that way about the attack on the Capitol. I'm not talking about Republican voters, who mostly believe that any Democratic electoral victory is illegitimate. I'm talking about the swing voters and occasional voters who chose Trump or stayed home in November despite knowing that the January 6 insurrectionists were criminals and Trump was the instigator of their attack. I think most of them believe January 6 was wrong, but they don't think it was very wrong.

Americans have felt that the country is on the wrong track more or less nonstop since the 2008 financial crisis:

On January 6, 2021, 62.3% of Americans thought the country was on the wrong track, according to the Real Clear Politics average. Only 28.6% thought it was on the right track.

A newly released USA Today/Suffolk poll says:

By 54% to 32%, those surveyed said the country was on the wrong track, not headed in the right direction.

So they're not terribly upset at an attack on institutions of government that they feel have failed them, under Republicans and under Democrats, for as long as they can remember.

I'm not endorsing this view. I'm just telling you what I think is going on. The January 6 insurrectionists attacked the government, and much of Ametrica shrugged, because the government isn't a sympathetic victim.

A TERRIBLE EX-JOURNALIST SHOWS US WHY WE GOT TRUMP AGAIN

You might have seen this a few days ago:

A Gallup poll suggests that President Joe Biden will be viewed as the worst commander in chief since Richard Nixon....

Respondents were asked how they thought presidents would go down in history—"as an outstanding president, above average, average, below average, or poor?"

The poll found that among U.S. adults Biden received a net score of -35—the percentage Outstanding/Above Average minus the percentage Below Average/Poor.

The only president to receive a lower score was Nixon, with -42.

Biden has made his share of mistakes, and I suspect that a period of high inflation piled on top of forty years of increasing economic inequality left a lot of Americans with deep credit-card debt at high interest rates. Based on that record alone, his unpopularity was probably inevitable. But is he the worst president since Nixon? Why?

You probably know my thinking on this: Voters believe Biden is a terrible president because he's the worst public communicator in the modern history of the presidency. His public speaking deficits and physical presence prevent him from being a reassuring voice at moments of uncertainty. He's done a fine job on many fronts, but he doesn't seem competent.

Is that what people want from leaders? Do they really believe that seeming like a leader is what's most important? Amy Chozick certainly feels that way, by her own admission.

You might remember Amy Chozick. She was a terrible Wall Street Journal political reporter who in 2008 wrote a story suggesting that Barack Obama might not win the presidential election because he wasn't fat enough.

"I won't vote for any beanpole guy," [a] Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

The story strongly implied that this was a spontaneous outpouring of contempt, but it was later determined that Chozick had started a Yahoo thread with the express purpose of eliciting this opinion, and that exactly one commenter said what she wanted to hear. The Journal later issued a clarification. Undaunted, Chozick went on to a job at The New York Times, wrote a bestselling book about her time covering the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, and is now a writer and producer in Hollywood.

The Times just published an op-ed in which Chozick laments the fact that none of the politicians dealing with California's wildfires seem like leaders she admired in the past -- many of whom were incompetent:

I can’t keep up with Rudy Giuliani’s criminal indictments, but after Sept. 11, America’s mayor stood at Ground Zero and assured a broken city that the terrorist attacks would only make us stronger. Will someone — anyone? — stand in the detritus of the Pacific Palisades or Pasadena and say the same about Los Angeles?

In 2005, after widespread criticism of the response to Hurricane Katrina, Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré took charge in New Orleans. Then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin called Honoré, “a John Wayne dude,” who “came off the doggone chopper and started cussing and people started moving.”

In those dark early Covid months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York didn’t deliver niceties. (I’m not sure he’d know how.) But his daily briefings became essential. That is, before Mr. Cuomo resigned, amid allegations he downplayed Covid deaths at nursing homes and engaged in sexual misconduct, which he denied.

Chozick knows Cuomo resigned in disgrace, and knows he didn't really do a good job during COVID. She's aware that Giuliani has disgraced himself, though she may not recall that he stupidly ordered New York City's emergency command center to be placed in the World Trade Center after it was bombed in 1993, and hadn't replaced the radios that had failed first responders in 1993 by the time of the 2001 attack. Also, she seems to recall the response to Katrina as a success because one of the key figures had swagger.

Maybe Chozick isn't quite the living embodiment of that famous Bill Clinton remark:

"When people are feeling insecure, they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."

Donald Trump isn't doing it for her.

President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, instigated a schoolyard squabble, calling the California governor “Gavin Newscum” and blaming the devastation in Los Angeles on Democratic policies.

But, of course, neither is President Biden, as far as she's concerned, despite the guarantee of federal assistance that Biden has provided (and Trump threatens to withhold):

Our city is being reduced to ash and we’re being governed by puerile social media posts and presumably by President Biden, but honestly, who knows?

She doesn't care if everything that can possibly be done is being done in a situation of unprecedented awfulness -- she wants to be told it's being done right:

We’re willing to make sacrifices and overlook mistakes as long as we feel like someone is giving it to us straight. But we are getting neither poetry nor prose....

I’ve watched all of this enraged, but also beside myself. Why is it that the town that gave us Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman and Will Smith (OK, there was The Slap but he still saved the world) cannot find a lead character to try to save us from this catastrophe? This state loves a charismatic action hero so much that it birthed The Terminator’s political career.

You know all those actors were playing fictional characters, don't you, Amy?

Chozick wants stirring words and manly bearing. I think that's what millions of Americans wanted from Joe Biden the last four years, and they never got it. That's why he's one of the most despised presidents of our time. After a while, it didn't matter what he did or didn't do. All that mattered is how he seemed.

Mayor Karen Bass certainly isn't doing it for Chozick, and Chozick is sure many people agree with her:

On Sunday, a petition to recall Ms. Bass “due to her failure to lead during this unprecedented crisis” had over 100,000 signatures.

Of course, anyone in the world can sign a Change.org petition -- I signed it from here in New York using a fake email address and the fake name "Dick Hertz."

But I think what Chozick from politicians is what a lot of Americans want. Some of them think they're getting stirring words and manly bearing from Donald Trump, and that's why he won. Very few Americans think they can get these things from Joe Biden, and that's why Democrats lost.

"BABY CRIES, MAMA BUYS"

I found this picture today:

It was taken in Boston in 2016. Here's a close-up shot of a slogan that appears on the truck's body:

I remember seeing this slogan on an ice cream truck in Boston forty years earlier, though I'm sure it wasn't the same vehicle.

Because American political life has been dominated for the past decade by an infantile whiner named Donald Trump, I think about this slogan a lot. The implication is that resistance is futile: when Baby cries, Mama doesn't have a choice -- she has to buy or Baby simply won't shut up. That's certainly how Trump operates.

And this seems to be happening in California now:

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has invited President-elect Donald Trump to visit the Golden State to see the devastation of the Los Angeles fires firsthand.

Trump has been critical of Newsom’s handling of the wildfires, and of California’s overall wildfire prevention efforts, calling on the governor to resign and blaming the natural disaster on him. Newsom ... sent a letter to Trump inviting him to visit the state as he returns to the White House....

“In this spirit of this great country, we must not politicize human tragedy or spread disinformation from the sidelines. Hundreds of thousands of Americans — displaced from their homes and fearful for the future — deserve to see all of us working in their best interests to ensure a fast recovery and rebuild,” he added.

Maybe Trump won't take Newsom up on the invitation. I think he will, and he'll be reasonably polite while he's in California -- and then immediately resume sniping at Newsom as soon as he leaves, now pretending to be an expert with firsthand knowledge. Newsom will have given him what he wants: attention and credibility. Maybe he'll concede some point to Trump, on water usage or forestry, in an attempt at cooperation. Trump will pocket that win and continue attacking Newsom.

Danes and Greenlanders are doing it too:

Denmark sent private messages in recent days to President-elect Trump's team expressing willingness to discuss boosting security in Greenland or increasing the U.S. military presence on the island, two sources with knowledge of the issue tell Axios....

The Danish government wants to convince Trump, including through the messages passed to his advisers this week, that his security concerns can be addressed without claiming Greenland for the U.S.

In a way, you can't blame Trump fans for seeing this as a good approach to governing, a real-life "art of the deal." Trump picks an enemy and goes on the attack. He makes a lot of noise. The enemy tries to mollify him by giving him part of what he wants. Everyone in MAGA: Trump wins! Baby cries, mama buys.

But on the other hand, what does the MAGA base get out of all this? We were told that Trump won the election because voters were upset about the price of eggs. Right-wing voters were upset about immigration. Ads attacking trans people reportedly had a major impact.

How does strong-arming Gavin Newsom until he agrees that maybe California should clear more underbrush address any of those issues? How does a thuggish attitude toward Greenland and Denmark strengthen the U.S.-Mexico border or lower grocery bills?

The truth is that Trump's base might be concerned about certain policy goals, but they'll be very happy if Trump just beats up someone they hate. Fox News, talk radio, and Republican politicians trained the GOP base to despise California long before Trump entered politics -- and the same is true for the godless socialists of Denmark and other Western European countries.

The conventional wisdom is that these fights are attempts to distract us from the real Trump agenda: cutting taxes and regulations on the rich and big companies, pursuing a full-blown Heritage Foundation culture war. Maybe there's some truth in that, but I think the fights might be efforts to distract us from Trump's inevitable policy failures. He's admitted that it's "hard" to lower grocery prices. His Department of Government Efficiency concedes that it won't find $2 trillion in budget cuts. His border czar is lowering expectations on the scope of the immigrant crackdown.

Trump is picking gratuitous fights to reassure voters that he still has the right stuff -- and I think he's also doing it to reassure himself. He has a desperate need to believe he's the greatest president ever, even though he knows deep down that he can't solve the problems he faces. But hey, he can beat up Greenland!

YES, IT WOULD BE TERRIBLE IF DEMOCRATS DID THAT THING THEY DID EIGHT YEARS AGO THAT ... UM, WORKED

We're being told again that it would be bad for Democrats to oppose "everything" Donald Trump is doing. In a Rolling Stone story about Democrats' supine response to Trump this time around, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng quote a Democratic operative:

“I think it’s important to distinguish between capitulation to Trump in a way that betrays Democratic values, versus constructive pragmatism,” says Jesse Lehrich, a former 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman. “Because I actually worry about both ends of the spectrum — weak-kneed Dems letting Trump steamroll them on one end, and the party just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports (i.e., 2017-style ‘resistance’) on the other.”

This echoes a December quote I've posted here several times, from Senator Brian Schatz:

“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.

I question whether Democrats were "just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports" and "freaking out about everything" in 2017. Fifteen members of the Democratic Senate caucus voted for a majority of Trump's 22 initial Cabinet appointees, while nine more voted for at least ten of them and every senator, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, voted for at least three. And have we all forgotten how eager Democrats were to work with Trump on infrastructure? From December 2016:

But let's accept the premise that Democrats were "just reflexively opposing anything Trump supports" and "freaking out about everything" in Trump's first term. What were the negative consequences of that?

Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in 2018, gaining 41 seats. Was that a bad thing, according to Democrats now?

And in the 2020 elections, Democrats won back the presidency and the Senate, while holding on to the House. Was that bad?

During Trump's term, he and his party failed to overturn the Affordable Care Act. They faced pushback on separation of immigrant families. Very little of the wall was built. Trump and the GOP passed a standard-issue pro-plutocrat tax cut, but that was Trump's only major legislative accomplishment.

But now I guess Democrats think all that was bad. Winning a few fights with Trump? Can't have that!

THE LIARS ARE WINNING, BUT HEY, AT LEAST THE TRUTH FINALLY LOCATED ITS BOOTS

So I learned from The New York Times today that the lack of water in California fire hydrants is perfectly understandable:

Officials now say the storage tanks that hold water for high-elevation areas like the [Palisades] Highlands, and the pumping systems that feed them, could not keep pace with the demand as the fire raced from one neighborhood to another. That was in part because those who designed the system did not account for the stunning speeds at which multiple fires would race through the Los Angeles area this week.

“We are looking at a situation that is just completely not part of any domestic water system design,” said Marty Adams, a former general manager and chief engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which is responsible for delivering water to nearly four million residents of Los Angeles.

Municipal water systems are designed for firefighters to tap into multiple hydrants at once, allowing them to maintain a steady flow of water for crews who may be trying to protect a large structure or a handful of homes. But these systems can buckle when wildfires, such as those fueled by the dry brush that surrounds Los Angeles’s hillside communities, rage through entire neighborhoods.

In fact, this has happened in other states, including a red one:

As urban growth spreads into wilderness areas around the country and climate change brings more challenging fire conditions, an increasing number of cities have confronted a sudden loss of water available for firefighting, most recently in Talent, Ore.; Gatlinburg, Tenn.; and Ventura County, Calif.

But ... but ... we were told it's all President Biden's fault!

Or Mayor Karen Bass's fault, as the Times strongly suggested yesterday:

Rick Caruso, a real estate developer who lost to Ms. Bass in the mayoral race in 2022, said that he had a team of private firefighters in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, as well as some nearby homes. All night, he said, they were telling him that water was in short supply....

“The lack of water in the hydrants, I don’t think there’s an excuse,” Mr. Caruso said. “This was very predictable,” he said, referring to the forecasts that predicted the devastating windstorm.

Mr. Caruso, who served two stints as president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that it will take time to account for why firefighters struggled to get enough water to fight the fires.

Apparently it won't take time to account for why the water wasn't there, because we already know that our systems aren't built for this, and remedying that would be very, very costly, and possibly ill-advised:

Greg Pierce, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies water resources and urban planning, echoed the concerns over water systems that are designed for urban fires, not fast-moving wildfires. But redesigning water systems to allow firefighters to take on a broad wildfire would be enormously expensive, he said.

A more fundamental question, he said, is whether it’s a good idea to rebuild neighborhoods adjacent to wildlands, an issue that has been broadly debated across the West as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of fires on what is known as the wildland-urban interface.

If Caruso proposed a crash program to upgrade the water infrastructure of Los Angeles at great expense when he ran for mayor, I'm not aware of it.

The lie that the lack of water is all liberals' fault has gotten halfway around the world -- but hey, at least the truth belated knows where its boots are.

*****

That saying about lies and the truth could also apply to Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees. Remember how Democrats reacted late last year, when Trump announced that his Cabinet would include a motley crew of lunatics, sleazebags, and incompetents? We were told that Democrats didn't want to raise a fuss right away:

“The mood is slightly different than the last time and there is a sense that if you are freaking out about everything, it becomes really hard for people to sort out what is worth worrying about,” Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, told CNN.

Democrats wanted to keep their powder dry because there'd be plenty of time to object:

“Until these folks are scheduled to face the Senate, Democrats are going to let the Republicans do the knifing,” one senior congressional Democratic aide told The Post.

But Republicans didn't actually do any "knifing" after they'd dispatched with Matt Gaetz. And now that hearings on the nominees are about to start, Democrats are discovering that -- having squandered a great deal of time by keeping their powder dry -- they might not have the opportunity to challenge the worst nominees properly because the hearings will be rushed:

A quiet but bitter partisan clash is underway on Capitol Hill over President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choices for key cabinet posts, as Republicans face immense pressure to fast-track confirmations and Democrats charge that they are cutting corners on vetting for critical administration jobs.

... Democrats on the committee have begun raising objections about a potential lack of access to background materials such as an F.B.I. report on [defense secretary nominee Pete] Hegseth....

“Republicans choosing to rush nominees is quickly becoming a pattern,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said on the Senate floor on Thursday. “It’s hard not to wonder what are the Republicans trying to hide about these nominees from the American people.”

So when these people were first appointed, you said nothing (or nothing apart from "I want to seem cooperative with this president, even though he calls me and everyone else in my party evil and treasonous, so I'll give all his nominees a fair hearing"). And now the big chance you claimed you'd have to confront the nominees will come and go in an eyeblink, because Republicans plan to rush the process -- which is something you could have foreseen.

The lie that got halfway around the world is that Robert Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and other extraordinarily unfit nominees are reasonable choices to help run America. While this was happening, Democrats ensured that the truth wouldn't put its boots on. They could have been making a lot of noise for weeks. But now all of these people will probably be approved, and most Americans won't even know why that's a problem.

THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA ATTACKS KAREN BASS FOR FOCUSING ON RIGHT-WING PRIORITIES (AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA PILES ON)

It's possible that Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass deserves all the criticism she's getting, but if you're The New York Times, this is not how you should be reporting on that criticism -- with a story that includes direct quotes from only two people apart from the mayor: a homeowner who doesn't really have any way of knowing what the mayor did or didn't do while traveling at the request of the president of the United States, and her opponent in the last mayoral election, a rich ex-Republican who probably wants to run again in 2026:

When a series of dangerous, wind-driven fires broke out on Tuesday in the Los Angeles area, Mayor Karen Bass was on the other side of the globe, part of a delegation sent by President Biden to Ghana for the inauguration of its new president....

The mayor’s absence has drawn criticism from some Angelenos....

“There was zero preparation. There was zero thought here,” said Michael Gonzales, 47, whose home burned down in Pacific Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. His family of five was camped out in a hotel in Santa Monica on Wednesday as they began figuring out where they will live.

Mr. Gonzales, a lawyer, said he believed Mayor Bass made a poor decision to remain overseas despite forecasters warning of the most dangerous fire conditions in more than a decade.

“It was an utter breakdown in leadership and it starts with the mayor’s office,” he said in an interview....

Rick Caruso, a real estate developer who lost to Ms. Bass in the mayoral race in 2022, said that he had a team of private firefighters in Pacific Palisades on Tuesday night helping to protect a major outdoor retail space he owns, as well as some nearby homes. All night, he said, they were telling him that water was in short supply.

City officials confirmed that water tanks ran dry during the intense firefight early Wednesday in Pacific Palisades because demand surged to four times the normal rate for 15 hours. The system, they suggested, was not designed to supply so much water in such a short period.

“The lack of water in the hydrants, I don’t think there’s an excuse,” Mr. Caruso said. “This was very predictable,” he said, referring to the forecasts that predicted the devastating windstorm.

Mr. Caruso, who served two stints as president of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said that it will take to time to account for why firefighters struggled to get enough water to fight the fires.

“This is a massive failure of epic proportions,” he said. “To know the storm was coming and then to leave, and not rush back. Leadership matters and the first thing is to be present.”

But this is how the mainstream media operates. Because right-wingers have been attacking mainstream news organizations as liberal for sixty years or so, they reflexively assume that any criticism of a liberal is justified, while assuming that there must be a valid reason for nearly everything conservatives do, even when they're proposing batshit crazy ideas like annexing Greenland.

As a rule, Democratic officeholders spend the majority of their terms on the back foot because when they're viciously attacked by the right, the mainstream press inevitably piles on. The right is attacking Bass for reducing fire department funding, and it's true that her 2024-25 budget cut the fire department's budget by $17.6 million. However, as Politico reports, there was supplementary funding that actually increased the fire department's budget:

The city was in the process of negotiating a new contract with the fire department at the time the budget was being crafted, so additional funding for the department was set aside in a separate fund until that deal was finalized in November. In fact, the city’s fire budget increased more than $50 million year-over-year compared to the last budget cycle....

And who was the big winner in Bass's initial budget? The police department. Fox 11 Los Angeles reported in April:

... the proposal — described by Bass a "reset" — includes ... an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the L.A. Fire Department.

The right-wing media always says that police budgets should be increased, and raises hell if there's even the slightest indication that a city plans to trim the money that goes to cops. So Bass was doing what the right wanted.

In fact, when Bass and Caruso ran against each other and against other mayoral candidates, they battled one another over how many new cops they should add to the LAPD.

... real estate developer Rick Caruso revealed details of his platform Tuesday, including a plan to add 1,500 officers to the LAPD's force if elected mayor.

The Los Angeles Police Department's current personnel number stands at 9,521 sworn members, 185 fewer than its authorized deployment for the fiscal year, Chief Michel Moore said Tuesday.

An additional 1,500 officers would put the department just over 11,000 officers, the number called for by mayoral candidate and LA City Council member Joe Buscaino. City Attorney Mike Feuer has said as part of his campaign for mayor that the department should expand to at least 10,000 officers, and Rep. Karen Bass said that if elected mayor she would bring the department to its authorized levels of 9,700 officers by hiring civilian personnel to move desk officers to patrol.

There's also a Fox Business story with this headline:

Los Angeles Mayor Slashed Fire Budget Last Year, Prioritized Homeless Population

Really? Has there been a Fox story about California in the past five years that doesn't describe homelessness there as a massive problem? So why is Fox objecting to the fact that there's more money in the budget for dealing with homelessness than for dealing with fires? Isn't that what the right wants?

And as this story concedes:

The budget for homelessness was also reduced in the 2024-2025 budget....

So you can't win. The right sets the terms of every debate and changes those terms 2when circumstances change. The mainstream media frequently echoes right-wing critiques -- and so every Democratic officeholder is perpetually operating in enemy territory.

GROUCHO TRUMP TRIES TO USE US AS HIS MARGARET DUMONT

Yeah, that was a weird press conference yesterday.

There was talk of the rising number of beached whales in Massachusetts, the victim, the president-elect said, of those windmills that have been erected off the coast. They “are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”

There was a vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico, by presidential decree, to the “Gulf of America.” And then there was Donald J. Trump’s refusal to rule out using military force to seize the 51-mile Panama Canal on national security grounds, along with the 836,000 square miles of Greenland, the world’s largest island....

He waxed on about a favorite complaint during his first term: Shower heads and sink faucets that don’t deliver water, a symbol of a regulatory state gone mad. “It goes drip, drip, drip,” he said. “People just take longer showers, or run their dishwasher again,” and “they end up using more water.”

Is it dementia? Is it a brilliant scheme to dangle shiny objects before reporters so they won't pay attention to Trump's corruption or his degradation of the rule of law?

Regular readers know that I think Trump has mild cognitive impairment at worst. He's still sharp enough to approach a press conference like this with an intuitive sense of what works for him.

What works for him is impropriety. Usually, as in this case, it's aggressive impropriety. Sometimes it's just Trump doing weird shit, like dancing to one of his mix tapes for more than a half hour at an event that was supposed to be a town hall.

The point of it -- and I don't believe Trump has analyzed this as much as intuited it, because he has a lifelong instinct for how publicity works -- is that the critics respond by saying, in effect, This is unseemly! It's preposterous behavior and it's unbefitting of a national leader!

That reaction is why it works.

My grand unified theory of why right-wing populist parties are on the rise globally is as follows: The super-rich want more and more, and it's a zero-sum game because ordinary people are hurting as inequality rises. Mainstream right-wing parties don't even want to help the non-rich, while mainstream liberal parties help the non-rich only in small, incremental ways, because the super-rich won't permit real progressive change (as genuine leftists learn when they gain power in some countries).

So no one is going to improve the lives of the non-rich -- but right-wing populists will at least make a great show of scapegoating and hurting immigrants, LGBT people, racial and religious minorities, and other groups they've taught the working classes, in particular, to despise. Ordinary people's lives never get better, but right-wing populists at least give them focused hate.

Some of that hate is focused on "elitists." Elitists, of course, aren't actual elitists -- for instance, Elon Musk, according to this worldview, is a swashbuckling iconoclast who's the richest man in the world because he deserves to be. The real elitist is the college professor with a low-six-figure salary who hates Musk and watches MSNBC at night.

If you're reading this, you're an elitist, as Trump's base sees it. You're an elitist because, among other things, the impropriety of Trump's public appearances bothers you. You think it's buffoonish and reckless to call for annexing Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal. You say, logically, I thought people voted for Trump because they were upset about the price of eggs. How does this lower the price of eggs?

You represent propriety, and Trump's base is delighted that, as they see it, you're "triggered," that you have "Trump Derangement Syndrome." You are -- and I'm really dating myself with this reference -- Margaret Dumont.

Margaret Dumont played an upper-crust woman in seven Marx Brothers movies between 1929 and 1941. The brothers, Groucho in particular, uttered impolite quips and did inappropriate things while she looked on, aghast.



Marx Brothers movies had a vogue in the late 1960s and early 1970s, around the time when the Yippies and other groups were trying to use violations of propriety to help start a left-wing revolution. When the Yippies introduced a pig as their candidate for president in 1968, it seemed Marxian in the sense of Harpo, Groucho, and Chico.

I don't know if Donald Trump has ever sat through a Marx Brothers movie. I'm sure he found the Yippies repulsive. But he's intuited that millions of voters think the system sucks, and that defenders of the system, and of propriety in general, are enemies.

That's us. When Trump does crazy shit and we recoil, we're Margaret Dumont. He uses us as his foil.

But that's absurd. We're not actually defending propriety -- we're defending sanity. I think there are millions of other voters who understand that.

By coincidence, yesterday on Bluesky I saw this paragraph from a July 2024 profile of John Fetterman:

I could point out that the Fetterman aide who's quoted here, Adam Jentleson, is a Columbia graduate. I could also point out that the winning presidential ticket in November included a Yale Law graduate.

But there's something to this. Maybe a little scruffiness would help the Democratic Party.

On the other hand, the 2024 Democratic ticket had some scruffiness, or at least non-"elitism." Tim Walz was a Midwestern guy with no elitism in his pedigree. He called Republicans "weird" until consultants, presumably, told him to stop.

Walz shouldn't have stopped -- and maybe John Fetterman should pick up the slack. Maybe the message Trump wants to buy Greenland? What a weirdo! should be coming from a guy in a hoodie and cargo shorts.

Instead:

This is not the senator Pennsylvanians elected... themindshield.com/fetterman-bu...

[image or embed]

— Covie (@covie93.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 9:11 AM

Here's a passage from that July profile of Fetterman:

Igor Bobic, a senior politics reporter for HuffPost, told me that Fetterman first caught his eye that fall, during then Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s ill-fated effort to impeach President Joe Biden. “The words he was pulling out were just totally words that you wouldn’t normally hear in the Senate,” Bobic said. “You know, like ‘jagoff’ and ‘circle jerk,’ and calling Republicans ‘dicks.’”

Maybe Fetterman's response to Trump's Greenland talk should be "He's a dick. People can't afford groceries and this is what he's talking about? That's a dick move." Maybe he should have said this in cargo shorts on Fox News. He would have pissed some people off and he wouldn't be invited back, but he'd be framing this in a way that Margaret Dumont never would.

THE INTERNET INEVITABLY LEADS TO INFORMATION BRAIN ROT! (UNLESS YOU'RE A DEMOCRAT)

In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield argue that the GOP's ability to rewrite the history of January 6 is all the internet's fault:

... misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one....

The justification machine ... has made the process of erasing cognitive dissonance far more efficient. Our current, fractured media ecosystem works far faster and with less friction than past iterations, providing on-demand evidence for consumers....

Warzel and Caulfield are right to argue that false assertions spread fast on the internet. But they write as if the internet inevitably destroys people's abilities to process information that's contrary to what they believe (or want to believe).

Yes, many of the messages that were spreading on the internet in the wake of January 6 argued that left-wing or government saboteurs were responsible for the violence, and that Trump supporters were entirely innocent. But as I noted yesterday, the internet had plenty of help. Fox News and other elements of the right-wing media were also spreading these messages, as were Republican politicians and influencers. They've never stopped spreading these messages -- on the air and, in the case of GOP officeholders, in official proceedings of Congress.

Wurzel and Caulfield's article appears under the headline "The Internet Is Worse Than a Brainwashing Machine." The suggestion is that the online world has a unique ability to rot brains, and resistance is futile. But if that's the case, why doesn't it work that way on the Democratic side? Recall, for instance, that in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, a story spread that Elon Musk had used his Starlink internet service provider to manipulate the vote count and give Donald Trump a victory. If internet-based falsehoods that confirm partisans' prior beliefs inevitably supplant reality in the minds of those partisans, why don't the majority of Democrats now believe this falsehood?

The majority of Democrats don't believe this narrative because the media outlets we like didn't embrace it. Neither did the Democratic politicians we vote for.

Wurzel and Caulfield's effort to bothsides this comes up embarrassingly short. Here's how they argue that the internet eats the brains of Democrats as well as Republicans:

During this past election season, for example, anti-Trump influencers and liberal-leaning cable news stations frequently highlighted the stream of Trump supporters leaving his rallies early—implying that support for Trump was waning. This wasn’t true, but such videos helped Democratic audiences stay cocooned in a world where Trump was unpopular and destined to lose.

How is that comparable to believing that all the violence in the Capitol on January 6 was the work of Antifa and the FBI? Some people actually did leave Trump rallies early. Many polls showed Kamala Harris leading Trump. Those two facts helped give many of us a false sense of confidence. But what percentage of Democrats concluded that a Trump victory was utterly impossible? And what percentage still believe that Trump couldn't possibly have received enough legitimate votes to win, which is what most Republicans continue to believe about Joe Biden in 2020?

Wurzel and Caulfield write:

A culture where every event—every human success or tragedy—becomes little more than evidence to score political points is a nihilistic one. It is a culture where you never have to change your mind or even confront uncomfortable information.

Republicans appear to live in a culture like that, but Democrats don't. Democrats are urged to change our minds all the time. We're regularly told that we need to change our minds about bail reform, about student loan forgiveness, about compassionate treatment of immigrants and homeless people, about COVID school shutdowns, about providing care for trans youths and letting trans girls play on school teams. We're told that our values are elitist. We're told that our unwillingness to embrace right-wingers is arrogance, even though many of those same right-wingers openly declare that they hate us and want us executed or imprisoned. Maybe we're never required to change our minds, but we're told that we're terrible people if we don't.

The misinformation internet is not an all-powerful brain-deadening machine. Many people still look to other information sources for confirmation of what the misinformation internet tells us. When Democrats do that, we get the truth or something relatively close to it, even if it's not what we want to hear. Republicans mostly get exactly what they want to hear.

NO, WE WEREN'T ALL IN AGREEMENT ON JANUARY 7, 2021

Recalling the events of January 6, 2021, Matthew Yglesias writes:

The scariest thing about contemporary American politics is that on January 7, 2021, it was widely acknowledged among American conservatives that Donald Trump’s behavior on January 6th was completely unacceptable.

No one, at the time, was emotionally or intellectually invested in debating whether it was “really” a coup or whether a political movement that did something like that was “really” fascist.

Trump was "widely" condemned on the right. As Yglesias writes, "Mitch McConnell said Trump was morally responsible for the crimes committed.... Kevin Williamson of National Review rightly called the riot at the Capitol 'just the tip of a very dangerous spear.'”

But quite a few people on the right were "emotionally or intellectually invested" in debating what happened that day. They began trying to rewrite the narrative on January 6. Many of them worked at Fox News.

As a New York Times story noted a couple of days ago:

Before the Capitol had even been secured, Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, was asserting on Twitter that the events had “all the hallmarks of Antifa provocation.” Hours later, the Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham was telling viewers that “there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” And by morning, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, was claiming on the House floor that some rioters “were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact were members of the violent terrorist group antifa.” ...

According to M.I.T. Technology Review, this fabrication was repeated online more than 400,000 times in the 24 hours after the Capitol attack, amplified by a cast of MAGA influencers, Republican officials and members of Mr. Trump’s family.

A post I published on the evening of January 6 included these tweets:

Do not be surprised if we learn in the days ahead that the Trump rioters were infiltrated by leftist extremists. Note: this is not to excuse any of them.

— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 7, 2021

Sarah Palin on Fox just now begins by blasting “fake patriot” protestors, then blames the media and suggests Antifa was behind the mob

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 7, 2021

These are not Trump supporters. pic.twitter.com/ptcNp2lzrG

— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 6, 2021

I later discovered that the Antifa rumor was sourced to a Washington Times story, the original version of which read in part:

Trump supporters say that Antifa members disguised as one of them infiltrated the protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

A retired military officer told The Washington Times that the firm XRVision used its software to do facial recognition of protesters and matched two Philadelphia Antifa members to two men inside the Senate....

One has a tattoo that indicates he is a Stalinist sympathizer. Antifa promotes anarchy through violence and wants the end of America in favor of a Stalinist-state. “No more USA at all” is a protest chant.

XRVision also has identified another man who, while not known to have Antifa links, is someone who shows up at climate and Black Lives Matter protests in the West.

I don't know who the "retired military officer" was, but he was lying, as BuzzFeed reported on January 7:

An attorney representing XRVision ... issued a statement to BuzzFeed News refuting the Washington Times story. The statement said XRVision’s software actually identified two members of neo-Nazi organizations and a QAnon supporter among the pro-Trump mob — not antifa members....

The Washington Times removed the story just after 1 p.m. ET Thursday, after this story was published. Roughly five hours later, it published a completely rewritten version that removed the references to antifa members and included a correction acknowledging that the paper's original claim was false.

Also on January 6, a rumor spread that the so-called QAnon shaman was a Black Lives Matter or Antifa supporter.



A Reuters fact check debunked this on January 6.

The notion that Trumpists simply wouldn't riot was out there. Laura Ingraham wasn't the only right-wing TV pundit attempting to rewrite history, as a Forbes story noted on January 7:

Newsmax's Greg Kelly said, "these people don't look like Trump supporters. Trump supporters don't do these things."

And then there was Tucker Carlson. Forbes reported:

Fox News Host Tucker Carlson was one of several popular conservative media pundits who condemned the violence that took place Wednesday, but he also expressed sympathy for many of the "deeply frustrated" Trump supporters who engaged in a siege on the U.S. Capitol....

* Carlson on Wednesday night described the pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol building as "kind of solid Americans," and asked if "people in Washington... really understand why" they’re aggrieved and if they'll "empathize with their frustration."

* Speaking of Ashli Babbitt, a white woman who was shot and killed by police while attempting to climb through a barricaded door in the Capitol building, Carlson said, "it's not enough to call it a tragedy. Imagine for a second that Babbitt was your daughter" ...

* Over the summer, Carlson described Black Lives [Matter] as “poison,” and he admonished the protesters in Minnesota and elsewhere, claiming, "the rioters in Minneapolis and in other places act as if they're allowed to loot and burn... No one stops them. The authorities don't arrest them. Instead, they pander to them, flatter them, desperately try to win their love."

* In contrast, Carlson claimed that Babbitt "bore no resemblance to the angry children we have seen wrecking our cities in recent months," adding, "she looked pretty much like everyone else."

Prominent Republicans were denouncing Trump and telling reporters that they might support impeachment or an invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. But under circumstances like these, many people on the right instantly snap into action, spreading falsehoods that advance the right's usual narratives. We saw that again this week, when Fox News falsely reported that the vehicle used in the New Year's Eve terrorist attack in New Orleans had crossed the Mexican border a couple of days earlier, a narrative that was subsequently picked up by Trump:

Fox News incorrectly said that a car a terrorist suspect used had just crossed the U.S. southern border. Fox then released a statement by Donald Trump where he incorrectly said crime is at a level "no one has ever seen before." Slightly over an hour later Fox issued a retraction. pic.twitter.com/HA4LuGTyFf

— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) January 1, 2025

Prominent elements of the right always try to rewrite the truth under circumstances like these. They started within hours of the January 6 riots. They wanted to muddy the waters and prevent the banishment of Trump from public life -- and they accomplished their mission.