THE NEW YORK TIMES CONTINUES TELLING ITS READERS A FAIRYTALE ABOUT NIKKI HALEY

As I've told you a couple of times, Axios reported in January that Joe Biden's campaign "has internal data indicating that most of the undecided voters Biden is targeting don't think Trump will be the Republican nominee because they haven't tuned into an election that's more than nine months away." I've argued that these voters might not believe Trump will be the nominee because the press, desperate for a horserace, is lying about the possibility that he can be defeated in the primaries. The New York Times is doing it again:

Haley Says She Is Going the Distance Against Trump. Here’s Her Plan.

That's the headline. The subhead acknowledges that Haley can't really pull this off ("The former South Carolina governor is expected to lose big in her home state. Beyond that, it’s an even steeper climb"), but the text of the story conveys the impression that, actually, her plan is well conceived:

The Haley campaign has announced teams of elected officials, business leaders and prominent community members to help lead their efforts in Alaska, California, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Utah and Washington. Her “National Women for Nikki Coalition,” which counts chapters in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, has kicked into full gear, with a mission to court suburban women turned off by Mr. Trump.

On the day after the South Carolina primary, regardless of the outcome, Ms. Haley has said she will head to Michigan, which holds its own contest Feb. 27. From there, she has plans to crisscross the country ahead of Super Tuesday, the largest single day of the primary season, and the last real chance she will have to prove she can change the course of the nomination. The expected stops include Colorado, Minnesota, Utah and Virginia. Ms. Haley is betting her candidacy on courting independents and new Republicans in Michigan and in 11 Super Tuesday states where Republican primaries are not limited to voters affiliated with her own party....

The Times says the plan seems futile, but it's presented to us as if it isn't futile -- and surely there's a chance if billionaires think there is:

In interviews, some of Ms. Haley’s high-dollar donors in Texas and California echoed her focus on Mr. Trump’s and President Biden’s advanced ages, and cited Mr. Trump’s legal cases as signs that anything remains possible in the race. Mr. Trump spent Thursday in a Manhattan courtroom on criminal charges stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn star in 2016. A New York judge on Friday ordered him to pay a penalty of nearly $355 million plus interest after finding him liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth.

“A lot can happen in politics and in our legal system,” said Timothy Draper, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and Haley donor. “And the American people usually come to their senses when they come to the polls.”

(They do? Really?)

A fact that's never mentioned in this story -- because I appear to be the only political commentator in America who's noticed it -- is that Haley isn't very popular among Republicans, undoubtedly because Donald Trump has all but ordered his followers to hate her. I've talked about this before, but her numbers just get worse and worse. Here are the stats, according to FiveThirtyEight:

If she stays in the race through Super Tuesday, her unfavorables among Republicans will be higher than her favorables. She'll be headed to Chris Christie territory. She'll be at risk of becoming this year's Jeb Bush.

And it certainly won't help her with Republicans that The Washington Post is now describing her as a member of "the resistance":

As the former South Carolina governor has sharpened her rhetoric against Trump, she has emerged — partly purposefully, partly unintentionally — as a key voice in the anti-Trump resistance, articulating a forceful case against four more years of the former president....

The heightened anti-Trump tone has prompted comparisons between Haley and Liz Cheney....

This is going to be catnip for Trump. I'm sure his staff has already printed out the Post article for him, with the key passages highlighted. I'm sure he'll be linking her to "the resistance" in campaign appearances. Among Republicans, this will drive his numbers up and hers down.

The Post story tells us:

The Haley campaign and allies ... argue what many Democrats privately concede: that Haley could prove a far more formidable general election candidate against Biden, and that Democrats prefer to run against Trump. Haley is performing slightly better against Biden than Trump is in a Washington Post average of recent polls.

In the Real Clear Polling average, Haley is beating Biden by 3.6 while Trump is beating Biden by 1.1 -- but her advantage in a general election is starting to vanish. In a recent NPR/PBS/Marist poll, Biden leads both Trump and Haley by 1; in a late-January Emerson poll, both Trump and Haley lead by 1. I assume this is because Haley gains moderates but loses Trump voters -- in the NPR poll, Trump gets 93% of the Republican vote, while Haley gets only 78%; Haley gets 12% of the Democratic vote, while Trump gets 6%.

If you're imagining that a beleaguered Trump might look at his court schedule, drop out of the race, and graciously endorse the woman he's been calling "Birdbrain" for several months, you're delusional -- that would be an acknowledgment of weakness, and Trump won't let that happen. We know from the Supreme Courts arguments that Trump won't be removed from ballots judicially. So why is the media continuing to report on Nikki Haley as a viable candidate?

Maybe you think she'll simply seize the nomination if Trump drops dead. I think subsequent nominating contests could look like the Nevada primary, in which Haley lost to "none of these candidates": Voters will pick the dead Trump over Haley wherever possible, in the hope that delegates at the convention will pick a suitably MAGA alternative.

If late-state primary voters can't do that, I think they'll find other ways to send a signal that Haley isn't accaptable to them. The next January 6 might be the Republican convention, and the insurrectionists might win this time. If they lose, the party risks losing many MAGA votes in November. That's why they're likely to be given whatever they want. That might be a good outcome for America -- I think Joe Biden could beat Donald Trump Jr. -- but it won't be a good return on investment for Nikki Haley's billionaire donors, or mainstream-media cheerleaders.

TRUMP TRIALS: WHERE'S OUR SPIN ROOM?

Donald Trump now owes half a billion dollars after losing several civil trials. That's nice, but I won't be happy until his poll numbers take as big a hit as his bank account. Maybe that will start happening now, but at this moment he leads President Biden head-to-head by 1.1% (after winning the Electoral College in 2016 despite a 2.1% popular vote loss and nearly winning it again in 2020 despite a 4.5% loss). Trump leads in nearly every swing state. Don't these people know what's happening to Trump in courtrooms?

As James Poniewozik of The New York Times points out, none of Trump's recent trials have been televised, and his upcoming federal trials (assuming they ever happen) are unlikely to be televised either. So far, Trump is using the power of the media to spin what's happening to him, and he seems to have no high-profile counterpart doing the same on the other side:

In each case, Mr. Trump has sought out the cameras, or brought in his own, to offer a stream-of-consciousness heave of legal complaints and re-election arguments. In the process, the former reality-TV host and current presidential candidate has turned his many legal cases into one-sided TV productions and campaign ads....

After closing arguments in the fraud case, Mr. Trump took questions and reiterated his complaint in front of a wall of flags at his property 40 Wall Street, wearing a red tie and flag pin, as though he had just walked out of a summit meeting. Before the verdict in the Carroll trial, he appeared in a video on his social media platform Truth Social to declare, “I don’t even know who this woman is,” from a stately, wood-paneled room, flanked by two more American flags....

Mr. Trump’s star-spangled tirades exploit a void in TV imagery, at a time when Americans have become used to seeing everything from police-violence cases to celebrity defamation trials live on TV.

... outside the court, he recasts himself as the defiant fighter. Appearing on camera at his own properties, arrayed in flags, he is in control. He is vested with authority. He is, the set dressing seems to suggest, still the president.

His appearances may be inaccurate or irrelevant or unhelpful to his legal defense. But they are forceful, a perception he always sought.

... the headlines and TV captions are Trump Lashes, Trump Hits, Trump Slams — the kind of verbs of vitality and power (Hulk smash!) that are as valuable to him as currency.

Trump, in effect, has set up a spin room for himself, one in which he's the chief spinner. What he says in the spin room is that his trials are an election story, and he's punching back hard at victory-minded Democrats who are using "lawfare" to punish him. On the other side, there's no prominent Democrat spinning back.

I'd feel better if there were a high-profile Democrat known for snark who could be Trump's chief antagonist. If Democrats operated like Republicans, it might be the president -- or, more likely, the vice president -- who'd take on this task. Republican tickets tend to have a Spiro Agnew, someone whose job it is to bash the opposition. Sometimes it's the president (Ronald Reagan did Democrat-bashing with a wink and a smile). Sometimes it's the VP accusing Democrats of disloyalty to country (Dick Cheney). Republicans who take on this task aren't always effective -- hi, Dan Quayle -- but Democratic tickets never seem to include a person who takes on this job. And Democratic congressional leaders tend to be too earnest and humorless to do the job effectively.

I'm sorry the Trump trials aren't being televised. His behavior in court and the prosecutors' presentation of the facts would probably be all the spin we'd need. But failing that, the trial outcomes aren't sufficiently vivid for non-MAGA voters. (The fraud trial isn't even the lead story at nytimes.com right now.) Trump might end this year a broke-ass felon and the president-elect. Democrats can't rely solely on the law to prevent the latter outcome. They need to talk about why Trump is losing in court. (Short answer: because he really has done things that aren't legal.) They need to seize the narrative.

THE MESSAGE OF RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA: YOUR ENEMIES ARE EVIL AND YOU'RE REALLY SMART

Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died in prison, and the right has settled on a response:

As the world reflects on the murder of Alexei Navalny at the hands of Putin, it’s worth remembering that Democrats are actively doing Biden’s bidding as they also try to imprison his chief political opponent, Donald Trump, remove him from the ballot, and ensure he dies in prison. https://t.co/lLd13ATUdT

— Lee Zeldin (@leezeldin) February 16, 2024

See also Dinesh D'Souza:

The obvious point of this propaganda is the obvious point of all Republican propaganda: to tell Republican voters that their enemies are unspeakably evil -- much more evil, in this case, than Vladimir Putin.

The less obvious point is to reassure Republican voters that they don't need to trouble their silly little heads over geopolitics, because the actual nature of Putin's reginme is much less important than the fact that DimmoCRAPs suck!

This is exactly how Republicans responded to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: by telling GOP voters that their key takeaway should be Why do globalists care so much about Ukraine's border when they don't care what's happening on our border?

When something newsworthy happens in another country, ordinary Americans don't want to bother learning about the relevant issues. That's like honmework! Republican propaganda assures them that they can reduce anything that happens in the world to a metaphor for domestic politics -- and the key thing to understand about domestic politics, of course, is that Democrats are really, really bad. Keep it simple!

ANOTHER POSSIBLE SIGN THAT DONALD TRUMP MIGHT BE TOO SELF-OBSESSED TO COMPLETELY DESTROY AMERICA AS PRESIDENT

Donald Trump is trying to make the Republican Party into Trump Organization 2.0. New York magazine's Ed Kilgore writes:

The former president’s bulletproof standing in the 2024 presidential-nomination contest has made it exceptionally easy for him to begin remolding his party in his own image. This project achieved an early milestone with his planned replacement of RNC chair Ronna McDaniel with an ultraloyalist North Carolina operative named Michael Whatley, along with Trump’s own daughter-in-law Lara ... as co-chair.

Lara Trump is not simply a political nepo baby, however. She could well represent the final subjugation of any broader goals or purpose of the national party beyond hailing the chief. Her first comment about what she wanted to do with her RNC post, as Fox News reported, was highly illustrative:

“The RNC needs to be the leanest, most lethal political fighting machine we’ve ever seen in American history,” Lara Trump told Newsmax ...

“Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC — that is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States and saving this country.”

I'm not sure what this tells us about the Republican Party. But it might be telling us something about a possible second Trump administration.

Michael Whatley's chief qualification for the job of RNC chair is, in Trump's eyes, the fact that he's a strong believer in Trump's big election lie. Lara Trump's principal qualification is that she's Trump's daughter-in-law (and also an election denialist).

What do we fear about a second Trump presidency? That he'll follow the path laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and do massive damage to vital parts of America's government and democratic system. But his picks for the RNC aren't totalitarian theorists -- they're people who proclaim that the 2020 election was stolen and will say the same thing in 2024 if Joe Biden wins. If that happens, they'll direct party resources to another attempted Trump election theft. That's Trump's sole criterion for the job of RNC leader.

I'll repeat what I've been saying: While it's quite possible that Trump will fully empower Project 2025's America-destroyers as president, I think it's also possible that he'll focus so much on what matters to him personally -- keeping his ass out of prison and bankruptcy, along with making life miserable for the immigrants he despises -- that the rest might not get done. He might politicize but not dismantle the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. He might never get around to invoking the Insurrection Act in order to sic federal troops on anti-Trump demonstrators. He might not wage legal warfare against the mainstream media. (He won't admit it, but in many ways he likes the mainstream media.) He might not even try to jail Joe Biden. (He never tried to lock up Hillary Clinton.)

Trump is focused on winning. I'm not sure he sees past that. He'll do quite a bit of serious damage to America even in this (somewhat) less bleak scenario, but he won't do as much damage as he could.

Unlike, say, Ron DeSantis, Trump isn't a big-thinking totalitarian. He's just the biggest narcissist who's ever lived. If he wins, that might be what (barely) saves America.

NEW YORK SPECIAL ELECTION: THE MEDIA SAID IT WAS A HEAVY LIFT FOR DEMOCRATS, THEN SUDDENLY IT WAS AN EASY WIN

Good news for Democrats:

Former Rep. Tom Suozzi (D) has won back his old seat in the House, giving Democrats a critical pickup that will further narrow the GOP House majority....

Suozzi defeated Republican Mazi Pilip in the special election to fill the seat vacated by former Rep. George Santos....

Suozzi won the race by 8 points. Polls showed him leading by 3 or 4 points.

Politico now suggests that a Suozzi win was all but inevitable:

Democrats had a slew of advantages in the race. A recent former incumbent with extremely high name ID in the most expensive media market in the country. A massive fundraising and spending advantage. A short six-week timeline that made it difficult for Republicans to catch up. And GOP groups that largely sat out the race for the first few weeks.

But that wasn't what the press was saying before Election Day. On February 2, Politico published a story headlined "GOP Puts Dems on Defensive Over Border Security in Bellwether Special Election":

... between the surge of migrants to New York City — more than 170,000 since April 2022 — and the infrastructure of the hyper-organized Nassau County Republican Committee, Democrats find themselves on the defensive.

“This is our seat to win,” Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, a Nassau County Republican, said in an interview....

So far, Democrats are showing caution as Republicans are projecting confidence — especially around border politics.

“I will work to stop Joe Biden and Tom Suozzi’s sanctuary city policies and secure our border and invest in our brave ICE agents,” Pilip pledged....

Her campaign’s first three TV ads have featured juxtaposed images of Suozzi, Biden and masses of migrants on the move at the Southern border. An ad push by the House GOP super PAC Congressional Leadership Fund also capitalizes on migrant crisis backlash.

There’s good reason for that: An Emerson College/PIX11 poll found 26 percent of voters in the district listed immigration as their top concern....

Republicans have an easier task.

They must persuade voters concerned enough to head to the polls in a typically low-turnout special election that they have a better handle over the migrant crisis....

Democrats, by contrast, are on the defensive.

They must juggle acknowledging the gravity of the situation while calling out the GOP on leveraging it for political gain — and do both without undermining the president.

Under the headline "In the Land of George Santos, Machine Politics Fuels a G.O.P. Revival," a pre-election New York Times story touted the awesomeness of the local Republican political operation:

After decades of electoral losses and corruption scandals, the organization has roared back to life in the New York City suburbs....

In just the last three years, Republicans have swept every major office in the county, filling high-profile posts and hundreds of patronage jobs with party regulars often obliged to return the favor come campaign season....

One need only drive the streets of Levittown or Glen Cove on Long Island to understand the party’s reach. On any given Saturday, some of the 2,000 local Republican committeemen — many of them taking time off from plum government jobs — have fanned out to pull out the vote door by door....

It is the kind of organized force that has made the group perhaps the most powerful remaining political machine in the country....

CNN's pre-election headline was "New York Democrats Are Worried About Tuesday’s Special Election. They Have Good Reason to Be":

“Long Island is running hot, and when people run hot, they run Republican,” said Alyssa Cass, a Democratic strategist. “George Santos was not an accident. His election was the direct result of years and years of careful Republican recruitment, party building and outreach in Long Island.”

... Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer lost the county while otherwise cruising to reelection in 2022. The year before, Democrat Laura Curran, the top official in Nassau County, was ousted by Republican Bruce Blakeman. GOP gains continued into 2023 – well after the Santos fiasco was in full flight – and Republicans are now close to dominant in local offices.

And a local news site called City and State New York asked, "Can Tom Suozzi Win in an Increasingly Conservative Long Island?"

Nassau County has a Republican executive, Bruce Blakeman, whose spokesperson said he plans to be heavily involved in the race. Nassau County’s other member of Congress, Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, attended Pilip’s launch event and will likely be involved in get-out-the-vote efforts ahead of his own race later this year. Popular and influential Republicans former U.S. Sen. Al D’Amato and former Rep. Pete King also came out for Pilip’s first campaign event, a show of force of the strength of the Republican brand on Long Island.

It’s a stark contrast to Suozzi’s own launch event roughly a week earlier. His rally featured no other current or former Democratic officials....

The Democratic brand on Long Island, strongly associated with perceived harmful policies coming out of Albany and Washington, D.C., is considered by some to be practically toxic.

The pre-election stories did acknowledge Suozzi's much higher name recognition and the national Democratic Party's strong commitment to the race, but there was a clear suggestion in those stories that the district is now solidly Republican, with a much stronger Republican political apparatus.

Yet now that the Democrats have won and beaten the polls, the victory seems to be no big deal. Funny how that works.

BAD BAD BAD BAD BOYS MAKE THEM FEEL SO GOOD

Here's Jamison Foser on Bluesky:

That's certainly how it feels, even though the Times endorsed Al Gore in 2000, endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, and endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. Unless there's a centrist third-party challenger with a serious chance to beat Donald Trump in November -- which is unlikely -- the Times will endorse Biden again this fall.

And yet the Times liked Bush's war, and seems to treat Trump's pathologies as normal political behavior.

I think we're watching a '30s Hollywood romantic comedy. The Times is engaged to the well-meaning, socially appropriate dullard (Gore, Hillary, Biden), but can't stop thinking about the inappropriate bad boy (Trump, Bush). In the Hollywood version of this story, the bad boy isn't really bad -- he's socially inappropriate, but he has magnetism and audacity and self-confidence and swagger. Of course he gets the girl.

In real life, these bad boys are often genuinely bad. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove) certainly were, and Trump obviously is. But many people second-guess their negative assessments of these bad boys because the bad boys are so sure of themselves. They don't express self-doubt. They follow the Roy Cohn playbook: never apologize, never explain, always stay on offense. So, some observers conclude, maybe ... they're right?

But it has to be more than that, because Bill Clinton had some of those bad-boy skills, and the Times hated him. Maybe it's because he'd sometimes bite his lip and acknowledge error. Or maybe it's because the Times is only occasionally left of center -- on abortion and maybe, by now, on homosexuality (though obviously not on the subject of trans people). The Times is, perhaps, JFK Democratic, or Scoop Jackson Democratic, which isn't liberal at all. It reflexively endorses Democrats -- but when it turns off the bedroom light, it dreams of Republicans.

NO, BIDEN ISN'T THE INEVITABLE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE BECAUSE BOOMERS REFUSE TO CEDE POWER

At Bluesky a couple of days ago, Amanda Marcotte posted this -- a theory about our 2024 presidential choices that's simple, elegant, and wrong:

Marcotte apparently doesn't remember who voted for the under-40 Pete Buttigieg in the early 2020 primaries: older voters, while younger voters flocked to Bernie Sanders, who is older than Joe Biden.

There's no question that two older major-party candidates are refusing to step aside, and other seniors are running for president or thinking about it. (Joe Manchin is 76 and Jill Stein is 73, while Robert Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West are both 70.)

But in polls of an imaginary Biden-less Democratic field, Kamala Harris generally beats Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren, though Michelle Obama occasionally wins. (She's technically a Boomer because she was born in the last year of the Boom, 1964, but she's younger than Biden and Trump.) In a Biden-less three-way poll conducted in November, Vice President Harris trounced Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson -- don't forget that Williamson is not only a Boomer at age 71, she's advocates a particularly Boomer-esque form of New Age spiritualism.

On the Republican side, there's even less evidence that older voters are demanding deference to their generation. Sure, Republican voters love Trump, but it's him they love, not his age. They want to revert to an imagined Golden Age that favored rural heterosexual Christian whites at the expense of everyone else, but they're fine if the authoritarian who imposes this cultural backlash isn't a generational peer: In poll after poll after poll of a hypothetical Trump-free field, Republicans' preferred candidate is fortysomething tyrant-wannabe Ron DeSantis.

The Democratic Party coalesced around Biden in 2020 not because of his age, but because he seemed to be the only candidate who could win both white and Black votes. Harris, Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar -- none of them seemed able to do that. In addition, Biden's apparent left-centrism was satisfactory to rich donors, who feared Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

A different candidate who had cross-racial appeal could have won the nomination, regardless of age. But no such candidate existed. Or the party could have taken a chance on progessivism -- but the top progressive candidates were also Boomers.

And this year, Democrstic voters are sticking with the incumbent -- which is what always happens when a party holds the White House.

We'll move past this generational logjam soon. But it's not happening now just because old voters won't let go.

TRUMP'S BRAIN MOSTLY WORKS THE WAY IT ALWAYS DID, AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM

When I go into one of my gloomy rants about the 2024 election, I'm told that voters haven't started paying attention to Donald Trump, and when they do, they'll remember how awful he is and vote for Joe Biden. I hope that's true. If they haven't been paying attention to Trump, this would be a great time for them to start:

Former President Donald Trump delivered an alarming message to U.S. allies during a Saturday rally where he outlined a scenario in which he would “encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to other NATO members.

Speaking to a crowd in Conway, South Carolina, Trump told a story that cast himself as a tough-talking negotiator.

“NATO was busted until I came along,” he began. “I said, ‘Everybody’s going to pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”

He rehashed the story a few moments later.

“One of the presidents of a big country stood up and said, ‘Well sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?’ I said, ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said.

Quite a few of Trump's supporters are military veterans. Some of them served in NATO countries. They might still have patriotic feelings about that service, despite years of Donald Trump/Tucker Carlson propaganda that depicts committment to international security as "globalist" evil. I hope they're offended.

But I don't agree with this characterization of Trump's story, from Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

The fact that Trump apparently thinks all of this actually took place is bad enough, and it is evidence that his detachment from reality is getting worse by the day.

But Trump doesn't think all of this actually took place. He's lying, and he knows it. He knows he's lying every time he tells a story that centers on an unnamed person who addresses him as "sir." Fact checkers have been pointing that out for years.

He knows he's lying, but he knows his fan base doesn't -- and the fact that he still understands how easy it is to deploy this trick in order to gull the rubes suggests that his brain is still working more or less the way it has since the 2015 escalator ride.

Trump is lucky that his fans are easily fooled, and that they genuinely believe Trump's "sir" stories give them a glimpse of what really takes place when powerful people congregate. However, Trump probably won't be able to fool them forever. He'll still try to lie brazenly if he reaches a more advanced state of dementia, but he won't stick the landing. For now, though, he's a seasoned liar who still knows how to seem believable to his under-informed voters.

TRUMP ON GUNS: THE AD WRITES ITSELF

The Daily Beast reports:

Former President Donald Trump boasted to a gathering of National Rifle Association members Friday in Pennsylvania that his administration “did nothing” about guns.

After stoking fears that the current president wants to “confiscate your guns and annihilate your God-given right to self-defense,” Trump recapped how he handled calls for stricter gun legislation.

“During my four years, nothing happened!” he bellowed. “And there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing. We didn’t yield. And once you yield a little bit, that’s just the beginning. That’s [when] the avalanche begins.”

Trump: During my four years, I did nothing on guns pic.twitter.com/SYrBIpbXE7

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 9, 2024

The Beast story goes on to remind us of how many gun massacres took place when Trump was in office:

During Trump’s presidency, notable mass shootings occurred in Las Vegas in 2017, Sutherland Springs, Texas the following month, and at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February 2018....

Subsequent shootings occurred at a Santa Fe, Texas high school, a Pittsburgh synagogue, a Thousand Oaks, California bar, an El Paso, Texas Walmart in 2019, and outside a Dayton, Ohio bar that same month.

The ad practically writes itself -- and it's precisely the kind of ad the Biden campaign needs to run.

One major reason Trump is doing better in general election polling than he was in 2020 is that voters have misty watercolor memories of the allegedly wonderful Trump years, or at least the first three. They look back and recall that there was no crime, no war, no high prices -- everything was terrific!

The ad should tell voters that the Las Vegas massacre happened on Trump's watch, that the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas massacre happened on Trump's watch, that the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting happened on Trump's watch. It should remind voters of the blood, the pain, the fear. Then we hear Trump saying: "there was great pressure on me having to do with guns. We did nothing."

The notion that America in the years 2017 through 2019 was paradise on earth needs to be challenged. Committed Democrats understand, but some voters in the middle don't seem to get it. Biden needs to jog their memory.

PUTIN: LOOKING FOR NEW CUSTOMERS?

Here's a quick, belated, and possibly uninformed comment on one aspect of Tucker Carlson's Vladimir Putin interview (which I admit I didn't watch). Yesterday, The New York Times noted this:

In Russia on Friday, experts and even some of Mr. Putin’s allies were ... puzzling over why [Putin] gave short shrift to his main ideological commonality with Mr. Carlson’s followers: opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and other liberal social causes.

Margarita Simonyan, head of the Russian state broadcaster, RT, lamented that Mr. Putin neglected to market Russia as “a safe haven for people who are not ready to send their children to be raised by L.G.B.T. people.”

“This is the only thing on which Russia can and should now build an ideology externally,” Ms. Simonyan said, blaming Mr. Carlson for not asking the right questions. “Just as the U.S.S.R. once built it on the ideas of social equality.”

If that's correct, I have to assume it was for one reason: Putin wasn't trying to do outreach to his base in the Republican electorate -- he was trying to do outreach to young horseshoe progressives, who he assumes are LGBTQ-friendly. Republican voters already know Putin's government is "traditionalist" and homophobic. They don't need to hear that again. But young anti-Biden lefties might have been put off by gay-bashing and trans-bashing rhetoric.

Maybe avoiding this subject was Putin's idea. Maybe it was Carlson's. Either way, I assume it was an effort to make Putin's message palatable to young progs, with an eye toward the November elections. That seems the most obvious explanation.

KAMALA HARRIS NEEDS TO STEP UP

Yes, it's bad. I know that the Pollyannas in my comments will tell me that nothing is ever bad for President Biden and he's about to win the biggest Democratic landslide since 1964, but I think some of you, at least, will agree that this is not great:

President Joe Biden sidestepped any criminal charges as the investigation into his handling of classified documents concluded, but the political blowback from the special counsel’s report Thursday could prove even more devastating, reinforcing impressions that he is too old and impaired to hold the highest office.

Special counsel Robert Hur’s portrait of a man who couldn’t remember when he served as Barack Obama’s vice president, or the year when his beloved son Beau died, dealt a blow to Biden’s argument that he is still sharp and fit enough to serve another four-year term.

In deciding not to charge Biden with any crimes, the special counsel wrote that in a potential trial, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Obviously, as Josh Marshall writes, this was a political hit job.

DOJ guidelines make clear that if you’re not bringing charges you don’t bash the subject of the investigation in your announcement (a la James Comey). You certainly aren’t supposed to affirmatively attempt to demean the subject of the investigation with clearly political attacks that aren’t even related to what you’re investigating. Hur might as well have called him “Fake News Joe Biden.” It’s really that transparent and that bad.

But it's damaging, coming just days after Biden confused current French president Emmanuel Macron and 1990s president François Mitterrand, and later confused two former German chancellors, Angela Merkel and Helmut Kohl.

I think Biden is struggling with specific details, which isn't the same thing as losing the ability to make the rational judgments a president needs to make. I don't think he's experiencing dementia. I agree with Paul Krugman -- because I see it in my own family -- that you can retain vivid memories of a beloved family member's death and not recall the specific year the death took place. (As adults, we don't necessarily think in years.)

But of course this will reinforce the view many voters have of Biden's unfitness to serve. It might be forgotten by November, but it doesn't help right now.

Marshall says, "The White House will need to get Biden in front of interviewers, where he actually does quite well, and in widely seen venues, to counter it." That's risky advice, but if Biden can will himself to do a better job in interviews, he should go for it. Maybe Biden's people should get in touch with CBS and say that the president has changed his mind about that Super Bowl halftime interview and, in fact, he'd be happy to do it live. But he'd better get it right.

A less risky strategy would involve Kamala Harris. Last fall, after reading a couple of Harris profiles, I wrote that Harris's problem seems to be an unwillingness to do the kind of grand, inspirational speechifying we expect from presidents and (to a lesser extent) vice presidents. The Atlantic's Elaina Plott Calabro wrote that Harris is out of her comfort zone when asked to talk in large generalities:

Go to enough of Harris’s events and you’ll notice a pattern. Many of them—conversations with community leaders at, say, a college campus or a civic center—begin shakily. The moderator opens by asking Harris a sweeping question about the state of the country, or the administration’s approach to some major issue—the sort of question that a seasoned politician should be able to spin her way through on autopilot. And yet Harris often sounds like she’s hearing the question for the first time.

But then:

During a discussion at Georgia Tech focused on climate change, I listened as Harris was asked to speak about the administration’s progress over the past two years in addressing the crisis....

Only when Harris assumed the role of interrogator herself did she seem to find her rhythm, pressing the moderators on the stage—two scientists—to discuss their personal journey toward an interest in climate issues. She then leveraged one moderator’s story to explain the administration’s plan to replace lead pipes across the country—using $15 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure deal, one of the Biden administration’s marquee victories. The communities that have been suffering from contamination “have been fighting for years and years and years,” Harris noted. “It didn’t take a science degree for them to know what was happening to their children.” The audience responded as if at a church service, with murmurs of affirmation.

Astead Herndon of The New York Times Magazine wrote that Harris's career didn't prepare her to be this kind of inspirational speaker:

... [Jamal] Simmons — her former communications director — argued that it’s a consequence of her career as a prosecutor and attorney general, law-enforcement roles that did not ask Harris to communicate with the press and the public in the same way. Even in Harris’s presidential race, staff members had to push her to share details about her life, family and career motivations. It was not always successful.

“Often in the White House, national leaders have to base their arguments on emotion and gut — and as a prosecutor that’s not the job,” Simmons told me.

Harris needs to learn how to do these things -- right now.

Do they have anything to do with her job? Obviously not. But the way Harris presents herself in public is what voters who aren't steeped in the news are judging her on. In an election year when every voter realizes that the Democratic candidate might struggle to complete his second term, it would be extremely beneficial for the ticket if Harris could seem like a steady, calm, straight-talking presence, a person who's got this, or who at least appears ready to handle problems deftly if elevated to the presidency, and who has a larger vision, which is what many voters want.

I'm not saying she needs to upstage Biden -- they both need to improve their communication skills. But Biden has never been a compelling speaker. Harris probably has more room for improvement. For the good of the country, she needs to step up.

I HOPE REPUBLICANS STILL CAN'T GOVERN NEXT YEAR

In The Atlantic, David Graham writes about a very bad day for Republicans:

... each bit of Tuesday’s chaos had Trump’s fingerprints all over it—offering a partial preview of what life will be like if Trump is reelected in November.

The most surprising fiasco was in the House, where a vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas unexpectedly failed....

The House also failed to pass a bill with aid to Israel, which garnered a majority but needed two-thirds of the chamber. A coalition of Democrats and hard-right Republicans sank the bill.

Underlying the drama was a banal truth: Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t have a grip on his caucus. Maybe no one could manage such a thin majority, but his task will be even harder after yesterday’s failure

And in the Senate, a bill linking right-wing immigration policy to Ukraine aid failed.

It was already on life support by the time it emerged: Trump made clear that he opposed the bill, because he and other Republicans didn’t want to give Biden a win on the border so close to the election. Johnson forecast the bill’s demise in the House, and it promptly gave up the ghost in the Senate as well.... The GOP had fallen into its own trap.

You all know that I'm pessimistic about the 2024 election. It might surprise you that I'm slightly more optimistic than most of you about what will happen to America if Trump wins.

A lot depends on the composition of Congress. Democrats have a one-seat advantage in the Senate and have to defend seats in eight red or purple states (Arizona, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wisconsin), while Republicans are defending seats in red states only, so holding the Senate will be extremely difficult for Democrats. But they can win back the House, or at least hold Republicans to a single-digit advantage, which is what's currently making life so difficult for Speaker Johnson.

What gives me hope is that there's still a vestigial not-insane bloc in the congressional GOP, and maybe the most insane proposals from a second Trump administration will fail to win approval because of these not-insaners -- or maybe the GOP's lack of interest in learning how to govern will lead to struggles when the proposed governing principles are Trump-level crazy. Maybe, in the Senate, insane appointees (Mike Flynn? Alina Habba?) will fail to win majority support, because Republicans are more skilled at getting themselves on Fox News than they are at counting votes.

This dovetails with my belief that Trump himself might not be fully on board with the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and other mad plans that have been cooked up by his allies. Trump absolutely will politicize the Justice Department if he wins -- but he'll do it primarily because he wants to end his own legal troubles and because he wants to punish enemies, not because he cares whether the GOP has the ability to crush political opposition in the long term. I think he'll care about other aspects of the Project 2025 agenda only to the extent that the agenda serves his interests and hurts the people he hates immediately. He wants to make immigrants and homeless people suffer right now, but I don't think he cares whether it's structurally impossible for a Democrat to win a presidential election once he's out of office.

And as I said a few months ago, I think it's possible that the résumé-gatherers of Project 2025 are recruiting people who may have impeccable wingnut ideological credentials but also have no real job skills, which is what the Bush administration did when it took charge of Iraq after overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Trump's administration might be staffed with a lot of pink-cheeked 22-year-old right-wing boys who hate abortion and love the flat tax but have no idea how to get the lights turned on.

Obviously, I'm worried that Trump and a Republican Congress might actually carry out these plans. The result would be awful, and possibly irreversible. But Trump's narcissism and the congressional GOP's incompetence give me hope. Still, it would be much better to beat the SOB in November.

THEY JUST WANT A STRONGMAN. THEY DON'T CARE IF IT'S TRUMP.

This exchange took place on Twitter yesterday:

🤔

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2024

In case you don't know what inspired this:

Actress Gina Carano announced Tuesday she was suing Disney and Lucasfilm for discrimination and wrongful termination ... alleging she was fired for “exercising (her) right to free speech”—and the lawsuit is funded by X and Elon Musk....

Carano said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, that she was fired from “The Mandalorian” by Lucasfilm and Disney after “20 years of building a career from scratch” after she posted things on the platform that were not “in line with the acceptable narrative of the time.”

... Carano said her posts—one of which likened being a Republican in today’s political climate to being Jewish during the Holocaust—were “consistently twisted to demonize & dehumanize me as an alt right wing extremist” ...

There's a widespread belief that the Republican Party is a Donald Trump personality cult. I don't see it that way. Conservatives today flock to anyone they feel can seize power and wield it against the hated pronoun-spewing vaccinated woke cultural-Marxist libs. In electoral politics at the presidential level, that's Trump. But they're happy to follow anyone else who seems able to use clout and muscle to hurt their enemies, especially if they also find that would-be strongman entertaining. If Musk were American-born and thus constitutionally eligible to run for president, I think he could pose a more serious challenge to Trump in the primaries than any of the candidates who actually ran against Trump.

What will Republicans do when Trump is gone? They'll probably shift their allegiance to someone who's a less charismatic authoritarian. I still believe we're underestimating Ron DeSantis's appeal to post-Trump Republican voters, even though he's an unpleasant dullard. As an individual, Greg Abbott is no fun either, but his border stunts infuriate liberals, so maybe GOP voters will flock to him.

Republicans want a strongman who'll simply get stuff done. Trump's base believes that he'll be that strongman if he wins again. (Most liberals also believe this. In liberal America, it's seen as certain that Trump not only will seek to dismantle the institutional guardrails that prevent tyranny in America, but will actually dismantle them. He might, but he might also get distracted by his own desire to save himself from lawsuits and criminal cases, or he might hire guardrail dismantlers as ineptly as he hires lawyers.)

Republicans want a strongman at a time when their "governing wing" can neither govern nor effectively grandstand in Congress. The vote to impeach homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas failed yesterday. The effort to impeachment President Biden seems to be foundering. Republicans misjudged Democrats' willingness to compromise on the border, so their attempt to create a poison-pill border bill linked to Ukraine aid failed -- Democrats didn't think the pill was poison. And Republicans couldn't pass a standalone bill providing aid to Israel.

I wish all this meant that voters will abandon the GOP altogether in November. Maybe it will. But as Daniel Drezner says, "Despite all this GOP dysfunction there are polls showing that Americans believe Donald Trump will be more competent than Joe Biden at running the country." Republicans are ineffective at using the legislative process to either govern or own the libs, so ... let's vote for a Republican who doesn't care about the niceties of the governing process!

They'll transfer their allegiance when Trump is gone, but they'll still be looking for a lib-owning dictator.

FOR THE THOUSANDTH TIME: REPUBLICANS ARE NOT IN DISARRAY

A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled unanimously that Donald Trump doesn't have immunity from prosecution for crimes he committed while he was president. I'm glad the ruling is finally here, although it looks as if Trump will have some opportunity to continue playing stall ball, even if the panel limited that option:

The judges put their decision on hold only until Monday to allow Trump to ask the Supreme Court to take up the immunity fight on an emergency basis. If he does so, the decision won’t take effect until the high court acts on his request, the appeals panel decreed.

Trump could also ask the D.C. Circuit to rehear the case. But the panel said doing that won’t delay the return of the case to Chutkan, the trial judge, unless the full bench of the D.C. Circuit agrees to a rehearing, which requires a majority of the 11 active appellate judges.

I think this corrupt and partisan Supreme Court will agree to hear the case, in order to ensure that a Trump conviction on serious charges doesn't happen before the election. But maybe there are limits to what SCOTUS is willing to do for Trump. We'll see.

*****

But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about Very Serious people who think the Republican Party is falling apart. First, there's Rachel Maddow producer and blogger Steve Benen:

... there can be little doubt that one of the major American political parties is in disarray, but it’s not the Democratic Party. NBC News reported overnight:

In a striking turn of events, Senate Republicans threatened Monday to block a major bipartisan package of border security measures and asylum restrictions, just one day after their chief negotiator signed off on it. GOP senators left a special closed-door meeting in the evening predicting that their party would not provide enough votes to move forward with the package Wednesday, saying they agreed they need more time to discuss changes to the bill in the form of amendments.

In other words, Republican senators demanded that Democrats agree to a compromise package on border security and foreign aid; Democrats did as the GOP asked; and now Republicans are poised to reject the legislation they asked for.

That's not disarray -- that's array. The party came together on an approach to immigration (politicize it by demanding that Democrats agree to unpalatable right-wing policies in order to obtain aid for Ukraine and Israel) -- but then, when Democrats surprised them by actually expressing a willingness to do just that, Republicans came together on a plan to reject a bill full of those unpalatable right-wing policies. A party in disarray would have disagreed on the fate of this bill, but the GOP didn't -- it agreed, as it always does, on uniting around whatever owns the libs most effectively.

Last night on MSNBC, Benen's boss, Rachel Maddow, also declared that the GOP is falling apart. She said:

Each of the two major political parties in our country has done okay in previous election years, even when the parties themselves were organizationally kind of a mess. What is different here, what’s important for all of us here in this moment, is that the Republican Party now, in the age of Trump, appears to be not just a mess. They appear to be sort of dissolving themselves.

Yes, the Republican Party controls the Supreme Court, the House, and most state legislatures. It's on track to win back the Senate and its presumptive nominee leads in the polls for the presidency -- but it's "dissolving." Right. Got it.

Like many Very Smart people, Maddow overstated the importance of one aspect of the GOP's 2020 campaign:

... the moment in 2020 when ... the party decided there would no longer be a Republican Party platform. It decided that officially and explicitly, the Republican Party would no longer stand for any particular thing other than generically saying that they supported Trump’s overall agenda. “We stand for nothing except whatever the leader wants.” That was a signal moment.

The people who'll tell you that the GOP is a party that doesn't even have a platform anymore are the same people who express alarm that the Heritage Foundation has issued a document of nearly a thousand pages laying out an agenda for the next Republican president in excruciating (in more than one sense of the word) detail. So which is it? Does the GOP have a very detailed master plan to destroy America as we know it, or does the GOP have no future plans at all? It can't be both.

And the GOP doesn't just stand for "whatever the leader wants." It stands for abortion bans even though Trump is wary of them. It stands for massive cuts to Social Security and Medicare even though Trump insists he's opposed to them. It rejects COVID vaccines even though Trump praises them (or used to until he heard enough booing at his rallies to drop references to the vaccines from his speeches).

And as I keep telling you, the GOP stands for policies on which Trump is a follower and not a leader -- Christian nationalism, the demonization of trans people, the delegitimization of cultural institutions regarded as liberal: elite universities, Hollywood, corporations that have DEI initiatives, stores that sell pro-LGBTQ merchandise.

Maddow said:

I mean, right now what we are very fast becoming is one party on one side and just a guy on the other.

But the GOP isn't just "one guy." It's Greg Abbott putting immigrants on buses to blue cities and defying the federal government on control of the border. It's state officials who want to make it illegal to get in your own car and transport your own granddaughter across a state line so she can have an abortion if she's been raped. It's Charlie Kirk and Chris Rufo and Chaya Raichik. It's Rupert Murdoch and his band of propagandists. And it's hundreds of federal judges, most of whom will be guilty of misrule long after Trump is in the grave.

Maddow said this last night:

... if we are going to stay a democracy with a two-party system, there do need to be two parties of some kind or we’re not that kind of system anymore. We’re going to have to develop into something else.

Oh please, not this again.

America already has two reasonable political parties. They're both called the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party extends from right-center to (somewhat) left, and debates many issues intramurally. We have the broad Democratic Party and we also have an unreasonable party, the GOP, that exists only to accrue power for itself so it can reduces taxes and regulations on the rich, and ultimately eviscerate the twentieth-century social safety net -- a goal it could somehow achieve in the next four years.

If the GOP succeeds in imposing its radical agenda on America -- which could really happen -- remember that it did so even though, according to Rachel Maddow and Steve Benen, it doesn't actually exist anymore.

MY SUBHUMAN RESPONSE TO J.D. VANCE

A common liberal summary of 21st-century American politics is: America elected a Black president and Republicans went crazy. Sometimes the end of this sentence is and white people went crazy. But the conclusion is still the same: The rise of Donald Trump (and, prior to that, of the Tea Party) can be explained exclusively by racism.

I've always had a problem with this argument. I agree that racism is a prime motivator for Republican voters. I just don't think it's the only motivator. I've seen the right-wing hatred directed at Bill and Hillary Clinton for the past thirty years. I've seen the hatred directed at Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Joe Biden, not to mention Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, as well as a long list of non-politicians: in the Bush years, Dan Rather, the Dixie Chicks, and even Barbra Streisand; in our own time, rage targets ranging from Taylor Swift to left-leaning college professors to ordinary trans teenagers.

All are deemed un-American, and maybe subhuman. The real America doesn't include them.

And then there are plain old liberals, who apparently shouldn't be allowed to serve on juries, according to the possible next vice president of the United States, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio.

Describing the jurors as from “extremely left-wing jurisdictions,” Sen. J.D. Vance said Sunday the New York jury verdicts in the E. Jean Carroll defamation and sexual assault cases against President Donald Trump had no validity....

“This case, like so many legal cases against Donald Trump, they’re trumped up — they’re in extremely left-wing jurisdictions, or it’s actually the Biden administration prosecuting his chief political rival,” Vance said to host George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week.”

... Stephanopoulos pressed Vance as to whether he believed any verdicts by a group of average citizens in New York City could be fair. “Well, when the cases are funded by left-wing donors and when the case has absolute left-wing bias all over it, George, absolutely I think that we should call into question that particular conclusion,” he said.

Yes, Vance blamed evil left-billionaires -- in this case Reid Hoffman, a LinkedIn co-founder who has offered monetary support to E. Jean Carroll -- but Vance also complained about "weird juries in New York City."

Stephanopoulos asked,

So, juries in New York City are not legitimate when they – when they find someone liable for sexual defamation and assault?

Vance made no effort to defend New Yorkers as legitimate citizens who are rightly entitled to sit on juries in America.

You can say that this is racism with no mention of race -- New York is, after all, a majority-minority city -- but I think the word "weird" is the tell here. Recall that Vance once called Paul Krugman (who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side) "one of many weird cat ladies who have too much power in our country." You can say that "weird" in this case is code for "Jewish," but I'm not sure it's just that. Krugman is a childless cat owner. He's married, but it's not a "trad" marriage -- Krugman's wife is a fellow economist and frequent collaborator. (Vance is married to a lawyer he met while they were both at Yale Law School, but they have three kids, and he's clearly "a real man" because he tosses gender-baiting playground insults at New York Times op-ed columnists.)

Race is a big deal, but the belief that liberals are "weird" and therefore dangerous motivates a great deal of right-wing anger. Liberals, as right-wingers see it, don't respect appropriate gender roles and aren't sufficiently upset when swarthy people cross the border. Liberals want to drive weird non-gas-guzzling cars and buy from weird companies that sell rainbow merchandise, even if they're not gay or trans. Liberals eagerly wear weird "face diapers" to avoid getting sick from COVID and got a weird shot that probably did weird things to their DNA. Liberal men are soy boys and pajama boys. Of course we shouldn't let them sit on juries and expect legitimate American justice.

I'm glad Stephanopoulos pushed back a little, but I wish he'd gone further. Does J.D. Vance believe that liberals are too "weird" for other American citizenship rights? Should we be allowed to vote? Should our votes count as much as the votes of "real" Americans? What about owning property? And who's weird? Just male cat ladies, or also female cat ladies? If a woman is childless and a feminist, should she be allowed to vote?

I'm married with no kids. I'm liberal and live in Manhattan. I'm weird, according to J.D. Vance. I think I'm also an American, but I know that he doesn't agree, and neither do the majority of Republican voters in America.

"DUMP THE HUMP" 2.0?

Jonathan Chait reports that grad students whose unions are part of the United Auto Workers are unhappy about the UAW's endorsement of Joe Biden, the most pro-union president in half a century, over the pro-plutocrat Donald Trump. The reason, of course, is Gaza.

Johannah King-Slutzky, a Columbia University graduate student in English and comparative literature, complained to the Intercept, a left-wing publication with a staunchly anti-Israel line, “A president who supports genocide and is actively sending funds and weapons to Israel to kill children, families, that’s not something that I feel has earned my endorsement.”

Aparna Gopalan, also a graduate student (Harvard Anthropology) and UAW member, wrote a scathing article for Jewish Currents, a left-wing publication, decrying the endorsement....

Gopalan’s story quotes fellow UAW member Adithya Gungi (also a grad student at Columbia), who says, “Donald Trump needs to be opposed. But this does not mean a full-throated endorsement of a Democratic president who has been actively supporting a catastrophic genocide in Palestine.”

And Politico reports on additional signs that anger over Gaza is making it difficult for Biden to connect with young people who are concerned about other issues on which Trump is far to the right:

Pro-cease-fire outbursts have interrupted a series of public appearances by Biden and his aides in recent weeks, including a climate speech Tuesday by USAID Administrator Samantha Power where someone in the audience urged her to “resign and speak up.”

“27,000 people have been killed,” the person called out during the former U.N. ambassador’s speech on “climate shocks” at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg Center in Washington. “You know what would cause a lot of climate shock — is the bombardment of Gaza.”

Earlier this month, audience members chanted “cease-fire now” during Biden’s remarks on extremism and democracy at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the site of the 2015 murders of nine Black churchgoers by a white supremacist. Last week, more than a dozen protesters yelling slogans such as “genocide Joe” repeatedly interrupted an abortion-rights rally that Biden was holding in Virginia with Vice President Kamala Harris.

Biden is publicly supporting Israel while his administration works to try to get to a ceasefire. He's beginning to remind me of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 -- a Vietnam War skeptic who, as vice president, eventually came out in support of the war, and then called for a bombing halt late in the campaign. His war support cost him the votes of angry opponents -- who thus handed control of the war to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

In a 2018 New York Times op-ed, Michael Brenes wrote:

On Feb. 17, 1965, Vice President Hubert Humphrey sent President Lyndon B. Johnson a memorandum stating the United States must begin an exit strategy in Vietnam: “It is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson administration is in a stronger position to do so now than any administration in this century.” ...

Johnson ignored Humphrey’s advice. In fact, he was described as infuriated with the vice president....

For his dissent against the war (his “disloyalty”), Humphrey suffered the brunt of Johnson’s unpredictable wrath. Humphrey’s advisers felt Johnson’s intimidating, dismissive treatment was the reason Humphrey reversed his position on Vietnam a year later....

The war alienated Humphrey from liberals, civil rights activists and young Americans — the same people who, for decades, had loved Humphrey for his support of racial justice, full employment and the labor movement — and ultimately cost him the presidency in 1968.

... as he promoted the war to the American people (his main task after 1966), Humphrey was increasingly taunted by the antiwar movement. When Humphrey emerged as the Democratic candidate in 1968 ... “Dump the Hump” became a common motto. Signs with slogans such as “Killer of Babies” and “Humphrey’s Johnson’s War Salesman” regularly greeted him on the campaign trail.

Humphrey called for a bombing halt in late September 1968, but this didn't save his candidacy.

Biden's position on the Gaza war may infuriate progressives, but as Chait notes, the candidate who'll win if Biden doesn't will be far worse on Gaza and the rights of Palestinians (and Muslims in general):

The trouble is that [Biden's] opponent, Trump, is considerably less empathetic toward Palestinian lives than Biden is. He has not only given complete support to the Israeli right, but also “would support expelling Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) from Congress for voting against a resolution condemning Hamas.” So, supporting Trump is a very strange position even for a single-issue anti-Israel voter.

Also, shortly after October 7, Trump vowed to ban refugees from Gaza if elected, and suggested that he'd deport foreign nationals who express support for a ceasefire:

The ex-president and 2024 Republican frontrunner also said he would aggressively deport resident aliens with “jihadist sympathies” and send immigration agents to “pro-jihadist demonstrations” to identify violators.

“In the wake of the attacks on Israel, Americans have been disgusted to see the open support for terrorists among the legions of foreign nationals on college campuses. They’re teaching your children hate,” he said. “Under the Trump administration, we will revoke the student visas of radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges and universities and we will send them straight back home.”

And there's this Trump campaign promise:

“I will restore my travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of our country,” Trump said in a late-April appearance in New Hampshire. “We were very tough on that. We don’t want our buildings blown up. We don’t want to have problems.”

“My wonderful travel ban, it was so wonderful,” he lamented during a March appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference as he promised mass deportations if reelected.

He subsequently promised a Muslim ban that will be "even bigger than before."

Anti-war progressives made the wrong choice in 1968. This year, let's hope history merely rhymes and doesn't repeat.

MAYBE THE LOW-INFORMATION VOTERS WHO ARE HURTING DEMOCRATS IN THE POLLS AREN'T THE REPUBLICANS

Philip Bump of The Washington Post notes that Republicans really don't know much about Donald Trump's legal troubles, according to the polls:

New polling conducted by YouGov shows that only a bit over half of the country on average is aware of the various legal challenges Trump faces....

YouGov presented American adults with eight legal scenarios to judge the extent of the public’s awareness....

At most, 45 percent of Republicans said they knew about legal issues: specifically, the documents case and his being found liable for assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll. Only a quarter knew about the value-inflation suit, and only 4 in 10 knew about the criminal charges in Manhattan related to the hush money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels....

On average, only 4 in 10 Republicans said they were aware of the ... legal issues.

That's bad -- and as Bump notes, the right-wing media deserves some of the blame:

In May, The Washington Post looked at the extent to which Fox News covered the documents and Daniels cases relative to other cable-news channels. It did so much less frequently.

But the overall numbers don't suggest universal awareness among any group, even Democrats. According to poll's crosstabs, the legal case with the highest awareness among Democrats is the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, at 74%. The lowest awareness number among Democrats is 69%, on the fact that Trump has "been charged with attempting to obstruct the certification of a presidential election."

At a time when Biden needs every vote he can get, and seems to be shedding votes among core members of his coalition, isn't it a problem that a quarter of party members don't even know about these cases?

Biden needs a strong youth vote, yet the highest awareness of Trump's legal issues among 18- to 29-year-olds is 52%, on the charge of trying to overturn the election results. Alarmingly, only 35% of poll respondents in this age group are aware that Trump has "been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll."

Biden needs independent voters as well, but in this group, awareness of Trump's legal cases is at 53% or lower on all but one charge.

My assumption is that the Biden campaign is run by highly educated people who have a lifelong obsession with the news, and all of whose friends, even if they're not in politics, are also obseesed with the news. I think professional Democrats routinely assume that awareness of news that casts Democrats in a good light or Republicans in a bad light just happens, and doesn't require party or campaign intervention.

Democrats need to tell their potential voters that Donald Trump is a terrible person who's committed many crimes. They need to point out what those crimes are and what the legal system has said about those crimes. They need to do this even though they believe everyone already knows all this -- because millions of voters don't.

BIDEN IS RUNNING ON AN ABSTRACTION. TRUMP IS RUNNING ON SPECIFICS.

Ezra Klein almost gets it. In a new column, he praises the Biden administration's concrete accomplishments, but says the Democratic Party, in trying to reelect Biden, is focused on democracy -- an abstraction. This is my characterization of what Klein writes. I don't think he fully understands what he's writing:

Biden’s first term has been impressive, legislatively speaking, and the bills he and the Democrats passed are the most ambitious effort to change America’s built environment since the construction of the Interstate System of highways, if not before.

But his re-election campaign launched not by describing what he has transformed but by describing what he is still seeking to safeguard. “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about,” Biden said.

Klein thinks that what's important here is that the Democratic Party "has become both the party of progressivism and of preservation, the party that promises both to defend American institutions and to reform them." But do ordinary voters really think in political-science abstractions like these? I think ordinary voters want to know what you've done for them lately, though they'll also vote for your party if you can persuade them that the other party will do really terrible things to them. (That's how George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1988.) Either way, they're interested in what's tangible.

Klein alludes to real things the Biden administration has done -- then he tells us that the president isn't running on real things. He also quotes one Democrat saying that on real issues that matter to people, Democratic voters feel they're losing ground:

“I’ve definitely been in rooms where people are frustrated they’re spending so much of their time protecting things that our parents’ generation fought for,” Senator [Cory] Booker, of New Jersey, said. “Union organizing rights. Women’s rights. Civil rights. Voting rights. A lot of the battles we’re fighting are battles where we feel we’re in the majority. That is frustrating, but also motivating.”

And he quotes a Republican pollster saying -- correctly -- that Trump is running on concrete issues:

Biden and his allies are framing this election as order against chaos. The party that gets things done against the party that will make America come undone. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a co-founder of the Republican polling firm Echelon Insights, believes that the Democrats are right that voters are craving stability. But she thinks they refuse to see that Trump is leading in many polls because voters believe that he is the one who might offer it. What Trump is pitching, she said, is a “push for order — ‘I am going to be the one who secures the border. I’m going to be the one that cracks down on crime. I’m going to be the one that tries to stabilize your prices.’”

You may not like much of what Trump is promising to do as president, you may not believe he can do it (closing the border, negotiating a responsible end to the war in Ukraine, lowering grocery prices), and you may think he's concealing his real agenda, but notice that he's promising to do real stuff. What are the real things Biden is promising to do, besides preserving democracy?

Klein notes that Democrats at the state and local levels are winning on concrete issues:

In 2018 — a banner year for Democrats — Jared Polis won the Colorado governorship by almost 11 percentage points. In 2022 — a much harder year for Democrats — he won re-election by nearly 20 points.

“Democrats can’t just be the party of protecting liberal democracy,” he told me. “That’s not the top voting issue for most Americans. For them, it’s really about how you’ll improve my life. We focus our agenda on reducing costs — particularly on reducing housing costs.” ...

("Democrats can’t just be the party of protecting liberal democracy.... For [most Americans], it’s really about how you’ll improve my life." Exactly.)

“The experience of being in a really competitive state suggests that what the Democratic Party is, at its core, is very different than what you see on Twitter or in the national debates,” Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, said. “Fundamentally, Democrats are the people who are in politics to make government work for people, which is a very old, New Deal-conception of what the Democratic Party is about.”

As Wikler watched this message win Tony Evers the governorship of Wisconsin and Gretchen Whitmer the governorship of Michigan, he came to a theory of why it works so well in places where Democrats have so recently struggled. “When you talk to inconsistent voters and swing voters, you see a very high level of cynicism that government can ever deliver,” he told me. “To be persuasive to them, you need to credibly describe what kind of change you can generate and on what kind of things. And it tends to be on things that people know the government already does. That’s how you wind up with Whitmer and Evers running on fixing the damn roads in 2018. Then they did fix the damn roads. And then they got re-elected.”

They were also re-elected in 2022 to preserve or reinstate abortion rights -- a real issue that affects real people.

Klein correctly observes that this is a winning approach for Democrats in purple states. But he misses the obvious point: This is a purple country, and presidential elections are decided in purple states, therefore Democrats should run this way nationwide. Their presidential candidate should emphasize the real things he's done and the real things he intends to do, and he should also talk about the scary real things Republicans will do if elected -- on reproductive rights, healthcare, education, labor rights, taxation, LGBTQ rights, and a host of other issues. Just talking about democracy all the time won't get it done. Make it real for voters. That's how Biden can win.

ADAM SERWER EXPLAINS THE RIGHT'S WAR ON TAYLOR SWIFT WITHOUT EVER MENTIONING HER ONCE

You probably assume that Republicans who are attacking Taylor Swift are making a serious political miscalculation. It really might be a huge mistake on the GOP's part, but this piece by Adam Serwer in The Atlantic explains why they're doing it, even though Serwer never mentions Swift by name.

He begins:

Is sexism the Republican Party’s big-tent strategy? Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, appearing recently on the right-wing network Newsmax, dismissed the party’s losses among women voters by insisting, in language laced with stereotypes, that Black and Hispanic men would cross over to vote Republican in their place.

“This is the blue-collar realignment of the Republican Party, and what I can tell you is for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement,” Gaetz told Newsmax.

Serwer believes that "what Republicans have in mind is ... a diverse coalition of people who band together in their shared contempt" for women, gay people, and trans people: "a Rainbow Coalition of Haters."

Sexism, homophobia, and transphobia are widespread, and not just among conservative white men.

A 2023 PerryUndem survey found that while 90 percent of Americans said they “believe in equality for women,” sexist attitudes persist beneath the surface, with large numbers of people disagreeing that, for example, husbands should be prosecuted for raping their wives....

Although the numbers varied some depending on the statement, large and roughly similar percentages of Black, Hispanic, and Asian men agreed with statements like “I’d be uncomfortable if someone thought I was gay,” or “I’m more comfortable with women having more traditional roles in society, such as caring for children and family,” or “women are too easily offended.” That means there is a potentially meaningful audience—one that Republicans don’t usually reach—for the kind of sexist, homophobic, or anti-trans rhetoric that has become a staple of right-wing content in streaming videos, podcasts, and social media.

Serwer and Gaetz emphasize the potential for this kind of content to win over non-white male voters, but it may be winning over some young white males as well, at a time when we've assumed that the young are overwhelmingly left-leaning. And this seems to be happening in other countries as well as in America:

NEW: an ideological divide is emerging between young men and women in many countries around the world.

I think this one of the most important social trends unfolding today, and provides the answer to several puzzles. pic.twitter.com/kG4qQReqfT

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) January 26, 2024

(I've seen critiques of Burn-Murdoch's data, but even some of those suggest that young men are significantly more right-leaning than young women.)

A new survey reported in The Guardian suggests that sexist content is moving young men rightward in Britain.

Boys and men from generation Z are more likely than older baby boomers to believe that feminism has done more harm than good, according to research that shows a “real risk of fractious division among this coming generation”.

One in four UK males aged 16 to 29 believe it is harder to be a man than a woman and a fifth of those who have heard of him now look favourably on the social media influencer Andrew Tate, the polling of over 3,600 people found.

Tate, the British-American former kickboxer who has 8.7 million followers on the social media platform X, is facing charges in Romania, which he denies, of human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women. He has talked about hitting and choking women and has said he is “absolutely a misogynist”.

The bestselling author and Canadian academic, Jordan Peterson, is also seen favourably by 32% of 16 to 29-year-old men, compared with 12% among women of the same generation....

The figures emerged from Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. The research also found that 37% of men aged 16 to 29 consider “toxic masculinity” an unhelpful phrase, roughly double the number of young women who don’t like it.

There's an ethnic skew in Britain:

Ethnic minority men are most likely to follow Tate, with more than a third agreeing he “raises important points about real threats to male identity and gender roles” compared with 12% among white men.

It may seem that Taylor Swift is universally popular, but her fan base skews very female. Some men, especially young men, consider it appalling when women enter what they regard as male spaces. Remember Gamergate -- "a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture," according to Wikipedia? Remember the male backlash against a 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters in which the ghost fighters were all women? ("You're runing my childhood!" the haters wailed.) This is the feeling Republicans are trying to replicate with their denunciations of Swift.

Swift is a pop superstar who operates like a mogul, which, in the eyes of sexists, makes her a woman who won't stay in her lane -- and these days, in a lot of online content aimed at young men, women's lane is seen as very, very narrow:

Much of this content taps into socially conservative ideas of women's role in society, as well as fake-science incel ideas about how women are allegedly damaged, both physically and psychologically, when (like Swift) they've had multiple sexual partners. We can see all this -- plus some bizarre gay-baiting -- in a tweet from Owen Benjamin, a racist and anti-Semitic right-wing comedian and online influencer who has more than 200,000 followers on X/Twitter:

A real man would want a young virgin who doesn't work, and who not only doesn't endorse candidates, as Swift has done, but also doesn't vote:



Can content like this flip enough young male votes to throw the election to Trump? Hard to know. But Democrats need to hang it around the GOP's neck. I think most people find all this bizarre -- or they would if they knew about it. They need to see it and need to be told that this is what the GOP is in 2024. It's not Mitt Romney or Nikki Haley. It's this.