NO ONE GAVE THOSE LOST VOTERS A REASON TO REGISTER AS DEMOCRATS

Despite everything else that's going on in America and the world right now -- Russia and Ukraine, anger about Texas redistricting, Trumpist goon squads on America's streets -- this was the lead story on the New York Times site when I woke up this morning:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot....

All told, Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between the 2020 and 2024 elections in the 30 states, along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with a political party. (In the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party.) Republicans gained 2.4 million.

There are still more Democrats registered nationwide than Republicans, partly because of big blue states like California allow people to register by party, while red states like Texas do not. But the trajectory is troublesome for Democrats, and there are growing tensions over what to do about it.

The Times is obsessed with this topic. "The Democratic Party's Troubles" has its own banner (click to enlarge):

I'll admit that the numbers above aren't great. I'll also note that during the years in question, the party was led by the worst public communicator in the modern history of the presidency. Joe Biden did a better job than most Americans give him credit for on many issues, but he was a black hole of inarticulateness just as American politics fully entered an era in which social media and short videos became the dominant means of political communication. Biden also led a party that seems to believe that voters voters should just ... know that the government has done good things for them, and he naively believed that red-staters would reward the party for policies that were intended to create blue-collar jobs and build modern infrastructure. Add all that to temporary but unnerving post-pandemic upheavals (inflation, upticks in crime and border crossings) that Biden never spoke about in a compelling way, and it's not surprising that these registration numbers are bad.

The Times story tells us that even former skeptics see the extent of the problem:

Tom Bonier, one of the Democratic Party’s leading experts on voter registration trends, spent much of 2024 downplaying the seriousness of his party’s registration woes. He has now come around.

“I was wrong,” he said in an interview.

“Clearly, in retrospect, we can say the Democratic Party had dug itself in too deep a hole in the preceding four years for the Harris campaign to dig itself out in the last few months,” added Mr. Bonier, referring to the 2024 bid by former Vice President Kamala Harris. He now calls the registration figures “a big flashing red alert.”

Yes, but:

Here is what things looked like among new registrations in PA last year, from the election up to the inauguration, Republicans were crushing Dems in new registrations... pic.twitter.com/6vgGw69bHW

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 11, 2025

What was happening that week?:

- No Kings protests
- Trump's military parade
- Bombing Iran

Were any of those related to the registration surges? I don't know. It will be interesting to continue to watch though.

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) August 11, 2025

Hell, maybe Zohran Mamdani's upset victory in New York's Democratic mayoral primary (June 24) was a factor.

The Biden administration did many good things, but Biden himself was uninspiring, and the Kamala Harris campaign became more focus-grouped and less inspiring as it went on, to the candidates' detriment. In the second Trump era, party leaders such as Hakeem Jeffries have boasted about their lack of emotional engagement.

We'll see whether registrations tick up if people start identifying the party less with Biden, Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer and more with Mamdani, or Nicole Collier and other Democrats in the Texas legislature who are protesting mistreatment at the hands of majority Republicans, or Gavin Newsom and his Twitter feed -- or even this candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Susan Collins:

look I'm not myself a political scientist so I can't say what effects it would have for a spate of politicians to crop up saying "the enemy is the oligarchy" and "the enemy is billionaires" while swinging a kettlebell but I think we should try it for science and see what happens

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— Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social) August 19, 2025 at 12:38 PM

To some of you, Platner's campaign might seem a bit inauthentic, and made up of too many poll-tested attributes (military background, blue-collar job, ad featuring boomer-dad-friendly blues guitar). But I really like the fact that Platner calls for universal health care, backs unions, and denounces the oligarchy. (It wasn't long ago when Michigan senator Elissa Slotkin, who wants to be seen as a "tough" Democrat, was telling us that the word "oligarchy" is elitist, despite the massive crowds who turned out for the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "Fighting Oligarchy" tour.) And I love the line "We've fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage."

Democrats can't engage voters simply by trying not to offend them. That's the Schumer-Jeffries strategy. It's not working. It's hollowing out the party.

IN DEFENSE OF DOOMERISM

After President Trump announced that his lawyers were working on an executive order banning mail-in voting in America, Jamelle Bouie was one of several commentators who were dismissive:

and also, an executive order banning mail-in voting has the legal authority of a social media post

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 8:46 AM

He expressed contempt for people who think Trump might get away with this:

need people to understand that accepting or conceding that he has the authority to do these things is tantamount to giving him the authority, and so your preemptive dooming is actively counterproductive

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 8:55 AM

I'm one of those doomers:

I don't accept that Trump has the authority to do these things. I accept that six members of the Supreme Court will assert that Trump has the authority to do these things, and that will decide the matter.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) August 18, 2025 at 10:39 AM

Bouie believes that you simply can't be a doomer if you understand how congressional elections work. As an example, he uses his home state of Virginia, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger is likely to win this year's gubernatorial race, and then appoint a new secretary of the commonwealth, who will oversee the state's 2026 congressional elections.

"trump will just end mail in balloting in a blue state" yeah, so, how exactly is trump going to force the elected secretary of state to break state law and end mail-in balloting?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 5:45 PM

like, is trump going to force governor spanberger to appoint a new secretary of the commonwealth next year?

— jamelle (@jamellebouie.net) August 18, 2025 at 5:47 PM

Probably not -- but what will prevent Trump from rejecting the certification of Democratic victories in Virginia's elections, or in elections in any other state, citing nonexistent mail-ballot fraud as the reason for the rejection? And if you say that nothing in the law gives the president the right to decide these things (I agree), do you seriously believe that the lame-duck Republican Congress will defy Trump and insist that these Democrats be seated, especially if seating them will result in a change in party control of the House, and possibly the Senate? And even if the Supreme Court doesn't ultimately ratify this radical move, doesn't the recent history of the Court suggest that it might allow Trump to have his way while a case challenging him gradually works its way through the lower courts, on the premise that seating members of Congress who didn't really win is a mistake that can be reversed in the future without irreparable harm?

I'm not a doomer because I want people to give up hope. I'm a doomer because I want people to recognize how many angles Trump and his partners in crime might be trying to work, and how far all three branches of government have strayed from the law and the Constitution. I want people to be ready to fight abuses of power they previously assumed couldn't take place in America.

It's obvious that Trump and his fellow Republicans don't intend to just let the chips fall where they may in 2026. They're redisticting in Texas, and while California and a few other Democratic states hope to retaliate, there are more Republican than Democratic states where redistricting could happen. In addition, there's talk of a mid-decade census. And there's this:

The Department of Justice is conducting a state-by-state review to scrutinize how officials manage their voter rolls and remove ineligible voters.

The effort is so far focused on battleground states....

In nearly identical letters to state election officials in Minnesota, Nevada and Pennsylvania, the DOJ asked them to describe how they identify people who are felons, dead, nonresidents, or noncitizens, and how they remove them from their voter lists.

That's from a late July USA Today story. AP now reports that this fishing expedition has spread to 19 states, the majority of them Democratic.

And there was this, from the meeting between Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy:

During one part of their press conference, the U.S. president latched onto a statement by Zelenskyy about pausing elections during wartime, and spun it to hint at the possibility of him outlasting his two-term limit in 2028.

"So you're saying during the war you can't have elections," he said, interrupting the Ukrainian president's remarks. "So, let me just say, three and a half years from now... if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections. Oh, that's good."

That's Trump trolling us, but maybe he's not trolling, and maybe he's not just talking about 2028.

America, unlike Ukraine, conducts elections during wartime. It conducted elections even during the Civil War in 1864. But there's been a massive reordering of American life based on Trump's claims of nonexistent emergencies and "wars" that aren't wars -- for instance, against immigrants. We've now seen two cities occupied by masked federal troops, with more undoubtedly to follow. If you're sure Trump can't do anything to rig the 2026 midterms because the law and the decentralized nature of our elections makes rigging impossible for him, can you say with certainty that Trump won't have his goons at the polls in blue cities fifteen months from now?

If you respond to this with despair, that's a you problem. I think the proper response is a concerted effort to warn America of what Trump and the GOP might be planning. Prominent Democrats should publicly describe some of these scenarios and make the White House and congressional Republicans deny that they have any such ideas in mind. Democrats should accuse the Supreme Court of being a thumb on the scale for Trump, in the hope that they'll shame the Court into backing off.

We need to alert people to what the GOP is trying to do before we wake up and found out that it's already happening. We need to direct Americans' attention to how corrupt and un-American Republicans have been, in all three branches of governmnent, and put those Republicans on notice that we're on to them now. That's the purpose of doomerism.

GAVIN NEWSOM IS SUPPOSED TO STAY IN HIS LANE

John Stoehr believes that Donald Trump has dementia, and that the press is in denial about this self-evident fact.

You may have noticed something. I used to talk about the president’s dementia pretty regularly, but haven’t in months. That’s because I’ve lost faith. I used to believe the Washington press corps would see the plainly obvious. I no longer believe that. The hypocrisy is too baked in.

The double standard that prevents political reporters from seeing Donald Trump’s totalitarianism is the same double standard that prevents them from seeing his dementia. He doesn’t make choices. Only Democrats do. He can’t be held responsible for what he says.

Regualr readers know that I don't believe Trump has dementia -- mild cognitive impairment, probably, but not dementia. I think what's mistaken for dementia is mostly ignorance and a head full of Fox News oversimplifications. But I don't want to get into that now, because Stoehr and I agree that Trump talks a lot of nonsense, and the press seems determined to normalize it.

I know why the press does this. I'll explain below.

Stoehr thinks Gavin Newsom's mockery of Trump's social-media style will open the press's eyes to Trump's fascist tendencies and cognitive deficiencies.

... the California governor has been pursuing a media strategy that is a model for other ambitious Democrats to follow. It also has the potential to expose Trump’s weakness. And he’s doing that by the most unlikely means: copying Trump’s confabulated style.

At a news conference last week, a reporter asked Newsom a question about his tweets mocking Trump's prose style. Stoehr quotes Newsom's answer:

“I hope it’s a wake up call for the president of the United States,” he said. “I’m just following his example. If you have issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns with what he’s putting out, as president. To the extent that it’s gotten some attention, I’m pleased, but I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets and Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years to go without similar scrutiny and notice.”

But the press will never get it, for a simple reason: Our political culture puts the two parties in separate lanes. Trump's incoherent-simpleton social media posts keep him comfortably in the Republican lane. Newsom's parodies are the work of a Democrat refusing to stay in his party's lane.

The nature of the Republican lane was codified in the Reagan era. Ronald Reagan's utterances were aggressive and simplistic. Using simple language, he verbally attacked Russia as a force of pure evil, and he mocked Democrats and liberals with humor that was more mean-spirited than it appeared.

Reagan's electoral success, especially with blue-collar white men, led the press to conclude that Reagan was talking in the simple, elemental language of real Americans with dirt under their fingernails.

A few years into the Reagan era, Oliver North's self-righteous hostility during the Iran-contra hearings gave the media a variation on the Republican temnplate. Republicans didn't have to be winky and folksy like Reagan -- instead, they could be blustery, contemptuous, menacing macho egomaniacs wrapped in the American flag. That was seen a variation of the True Voice Of The Volk. (During those hearings, Ollie North probably invented both right-wing talk radio and modern country music.)

In 1988, George H.W. Bush, a New England preppie, decided to run using this Republican persona. He ate pork rinds and campaigned with country stars. He mocked his opponent -- a son of immigrants -- as an elitist. And he won big. He ran a vicious campaign, but the press wasn't appalled, because he had learned to speak The True Language Of The People and Michael Dukakis hadn't.

We see this pattern repeating in the two campaigns of Poppy Bush's son. George W. Bush was simple-minded and inarticulate, but that meant he was "authentic," and both Al Gore and John Kerry were elitist phonies. And now we're in the Trump era, and the press is so certain that misinformation and macho bluster are the true Song of America that Donald Trump can say anything and get away with it.

The press can't process Gavin Newsom's parodies of Trump because Newsom is far out of the lane Democrats are meant to occupy. Democrats are supposed to sound like brainiacs and approach conflict as low-pulse-rate conciliators. (See, for instance, the soft-spoken, soporific Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.) The two Democrats in the post-Reagan whose stardom the press has been willing to acknowledge, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, made their names calling for bipartisanship and comity. In his star-making 2004 Democratic convention speech, Obama said that "there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America," an assertion that was utterly wrong. But he was talking the way Democrats are supposed to talk.

This is why the press can't learn the lesson Gavin Newsom is trying to teach. Republicans are expected to communicate in ways that are crude and ignorant; Democrats are expected to be nerds who keep the peace. If we had a single standard for all politicians, Newsom's approach might change mainstream political thinking -- though if we had a single standard for all politicians, what Newsom is doing wouldn't be necessary. In any case, we haven't had a single standard for the two parties in the last 45 years.

TANKS ON CITY STREETS AREN'T EFFECTIVE OR POPULAR

I nodded in agreement when I read this post:

The White House is mobilizing red state military forces to occupy a Democratic stronghold and let me tell you: No one has ever pretended something isn't happening harder than Democratic leaders are pretending this isn't happening right now.

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— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) August 16, 2025 at 9:10 PM

But there has been Democratic pushback to the overall militarization campaign, even from Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer (who actually said there was "No fucking way" Democrats in the Senate would approve an extension of President Trump's 30-day takeover of the D.C. police department).

However, the resistance to this from elected Democrats seems muted -- maybe because elected Democrats generally aren't very good at making noise, and maybe because the "liberal" commentariat is warning that Cities Are Hellholes, Actually. We had Maggie Haberman arguing that "In some cases we have seen [urban crime] come down but there are a lot of people who feel unsafe in big cities." We have Michael Powell in The Atlantic writing that "Trump Gains When Elites Downplay D.C. Crime."

But Democrats shouldn't be afraid to push back because, as Jamelle Bouie says in this New York Times roundtable, Trump's crackdown isn't popular:

Bouie: I’ll say what is interesting is there hasn’t been much polling, but the one poll I’ve seen on this has 47 percent of Americans disapproving of this action, and it’s about 34 or 35 percent saying that they’re OK with it.

That would be this YouGov survey:

Bouie understands why the move is unpopular:

So in thinking about the political aspect of this — and to go back to our conversation earlier in the summer about L.A. — I think I argued then that the public doesn’t like disorder. When the president does things like this, it creates the impression that there is disorder, that the president is responsible for it. And I think that dynamic might assert itself here as well.

Yup -- Trump takes action and suddenly there's chaos. Trump equals chaos. That's offputting to normal people (as opposed to Republican voters, who are eating this up).

The initial Democratic counterargument was Trump is just doing this to distract us from the Jeffrey Epstein case. I don't think that's true -- it might explain the timing to some extent, but Trump loves seeing troops under his command in the streets, and this is part of a larger GOP/Heritage Foundation plan to purge liberalism from American life, and probably to tip the results of the 2026 and 2028 elections. A better argument for Democrats to make is that their party is already lowering crime, not by producing made-for-TV-and-viral-video visuals, but by deploying strategies that address the problem directly. Bouie and David French talk about this in the Times roundtable:

Bouie: ... I think it’s worth emphasizing that most of these troops are deployed to areas running the White House, National Mall, downtown, so on and so forth. If you were to make a heat map of criminal activity in Washington, D.C., you would find that it is not in those places. If you were going to do this, you would put soldiers in other places. And this gets to a reality about crime that’s important to understand: Most violent crime happens in specific, discrete geographic areas among specific individuals....

It’s worth noting that D.C.’s neighbor, Baltimore, has cut its murder rate in half year over year. That was partly a result of better and smarter policing, and partly a result of investing in social services and doing the hard work needed to identify the communities and people — when I say communities I mean the blocks, the neighborhoods — and the individuals who might be described as criminogenic, meaning more likely to be involved in crime. Then addressing those people in those places in a specific and targeted way....

French: I’m glad you brought up Baltimore because the Baltimore story is a remarkable story, and it does not involve the U.S. Army....

It’s a year-on-year crime drop that’s the stuff of dreams, almost....

I think that it’s very important to get the word out and to get the message out to American people that, A, blue cities are taking crime very seriously, and B, they’re actually achieving results — that good things are happening in these cities. Because Trump thrives off the sense that nobody is doing anything until he came aboard.

All too often, liberals need conservatives to tell them, Hey, when you're right and the Republicans are wrong, you should say so. This is why I listen to right-wing apostates -- they didn't spend years marinating in self-hate the way so many Democrats have, so now, in the moments when they agree with Democrats and disagree with Republicans, they often urge Democrats to stiffen their spines and stick up for themselves.

Let's also hear from former Washington Post data guy Philip Bump:

Governors of three states — Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia — are sending members of their state National Guards to D.C. to ... well, theoretically to combat crime but, if the past week is any indicator, mostly to stand near tourist sites and wear uniforms....

Data released by the FBI earlier this month ... shows that a lot of other places — including places in those three states — had higher rates of violent crime and homicide than did D.C....

The FBI reported that fully 43 cities in those three states had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did D.C. More than 1.2 million people live in those cities, including more than 900,000 in Ohio alone. Yet that state’s National Guard is being deployed to D.C. to protect the capital’s 700,000-odd residents. Half a million Ohioans live in cities with higher homicide rates than D.C.

Here's the map of violent crime rates. Before you ask what the dots are blah blah, just click through and use the interactive version!

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— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) August 16, 2025 at 11:58 PM

Democrats shouldn't be afraid to say all this forcefully and proudly: Democrats are reducing crime, and we're doing it without militarizing cities, by deploying police officers and other resources to the right areas at the right times -- oh, and by the way, we're doing it with cops and others who aren't afraid to show their faces. Putting troops and a Humvee in front of a famous tourist site makes a pretty picture, but if that's not where the crime is, then it's pointless. Trump isn't fighting crime -- he's making reality television. He's more interested in visuals than safety. He's more interested in acting tough than being effective. And the Republican governors who are working with him really ought to be looking at their own states if they want to reduce crime.

There -- is that so hard?

PUTIN HELPS TRUMP FIGHT THE REAL ENEMY (US)

If you live in the reality-based world, you know that yesterday's summit in Alaska was a miserable failure for President Trump. But according to the lead story at the Fox News site earlier this morning, the summit gave Trump a big win:

Trump has no interest in -- and no understanding of -- geopolitics. He doesn't care what happens to Ukraine. He wants a Nobel Peace Prize, but he wants it for the same reason he wants a trophy wife: so he can show his prize off to the world as a mark of his greatness.

He's in a dick-measuring contest with other presidents, specifically with Barack Obama and Joe Biden, so Putin threw him a bone and said what he wanted to hear:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said he agreed with Donald Trump's claim that the war in Ukraine would not have ever even begun if he had not lost the 2020 election and was serving as president when the carnage began, instead of former President Joe Biden.

"I can confirm that," Putin said at the tail-end of a press conferece that took place Friday evening after the pair met for a summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska....

"I'd like to add one more thing," Putin said, as the two heads of state provided remarks to the press, according to a translation of the Russian president's address. "I'd like to remind you that in 2022, during the last contact with a previous administration, I tried to convince my previous American colleague that the situation should not be brought to a point of no return when it would come to hostilities and I said it quite directly back then that it's a big mistake. Today, when President Trump is saying that if he was the president back then there would be no war – I am quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that."

Last night, Trump told Sean Hannity that Putin agrees with many of his election conspiracy theories:

Trump: "Vladimir Putin said something- one of the most interesting things. He said 'your election was rigged because you have mail in voting. It's impossible to have mail in voting & have honest elections.' He said that to me because we talked about 2020. He said, 'you won that election by so much'"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 15, 2025 at 9:28 PM

We don't have any evidence that this conversation actually took place, but since Putin actually did echo Trump's often-repeated talking point that he could have prevented the Ukraine war, unlike President Biden, it's conceivable that Putin listened to Trump blather on about "the steal" and said, "Oh yes, Donald, you're so right about that."

All of this costs Putin nothing, keeps Trump wrapped around his finger, and allows Americans in the right-wing bubble to continue arguing that Trump Is Right About Everything and Democrats are history's greatest monsters, as even the wily Russian dictator concedes.

Which is what Republican voters want. It's all they want. They care about this much more than they care about ending the war.

I've been telling you since the Bush years that right-wing voters hate their domestic political enemies more than they hate anyone else. They cheered on the Iraq War because they knew that many elected Democrats and much of the Democratic rank-and-file didn't want it. They wanted the Epstein files released (until they suddenly didn't) because they thought only Democrats (and people presumed to be Democrats' global elitist allies) would be implicated. And now they want Trump to be a Nobel-worthy peacemaker because they're certain his diplomatic success would own us.

Sure, they hated Al Qaeda and ISIS -- but they convinced themselves that we liked them, and that defeating them would be a defeat for us. They still think all Muslims are terrorists, which the exception of a small handful who are publicly on their side, and they think New York City is about to make Zohran Mamdani mayor because the libs like terrorism (just as our London counterparts have elected and reelected Sadiq Khan). They hate people of color and dark-skinned immigrants, but they believe this would be a proudly white country if it weren't for the damn libs.

Putin gets it. Putin didn't just work the con on Trump, he worked it on the entire Republican voter base.

AFTER FORTY-FIVE YEARS, SOME DEMOCRATS ARE FINALLY HITTING BACK

I have problems with some of Gavin Newsom's political positions, but I love the anger he's showing right now. Here he is addressing the fact that some of Donald Trump's ICE goons were sent to the venue where he was holding a press conference, clearly in order to intimdate him:

Newsom on ICE action outside his presser: "It's pretty sick & pathetic. It's everything you know about Trump's America & the authoritarian tendencies of the president. Wake up, America. You will not have a country if he rigs this election. You will a president running for a third term. Mark my word"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 14, 2025 at 4:04 PM

I also like Newsom's ongoing mockery of Trump's Truth Social posts...

... even if stupid people don't understand what Newsom is doing:

All caps does not make a post more impressive. Being willing to defend what you put out on this dumpster fire site...does https://t.co/hvT6Cher6K

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) August 14, 2025

Democrats don't have to be as aggressive and Trump-like as Newsom is these days. They simply have to have self-respect and not be intimidated by attacks. Zohran Mamdani has been criticized recently by Chris Cuomo's brother for having a rent-stabilized apartment. Unfazed, Mamdani is going on offense:

Independent mayoral hopeful Andrew Cuomo on Thursday again refused to release a list of clients he amassed as a private legal consultant in response to Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s video challenge to do so earlier this week....

In the video, Mamdani — a Queens Assembly member — attempted to link Cuomo to accused child-sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein via the former governor’s longtime friend: Andrew Farkas. Cuomo and Farkas worked together on a marina project in Puerto Rico, Mamdani says, citing The New York Times, after he resigned [as governor].

Farkas, he also noted, had at one point worked on a similar project with Epstein.

Mamdani also mentioned an April Bloomberg report that Cuomo advised a cryptocurrency exchange facing federal investigation and a Politico story that he did not disclose $2.6 million in nuclear stock options to the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.

Mamdani's video is fast, punchy, and to the point, and the candidate is good-natured even as he repeatedly slips in the shiv.



This is how you do it, Democrats. Go on offense. Make the other guy explain himself. Don't be ashamed of who you are and what you stand for. Explain why your opponent is the one who should be ashamed.

Compare this with John Oliver's recent segment about Chuck Schumer and the Baileys, the imaginary couple he's invented and allowed to guide his actions throughout his political career.

For decades, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has invoked Joe and Eileen Bailey, a fictional Long Island couple meant to represent the average American and serve as the guiding force behind his political decisions.

“The Baileys have guided Chuck Schumer’s political life — which is a little weird given they don’t exist,” Oliver said during his Sunday night monologue on Last Week Tonight....

“I have conversations with them... one of my staffers once said I had imaginary friends to the press, got me in some trouble,” Schumer says in a clip Oliver played.

Schumer describes the couple as Reagan-era Republicans — socially liberal but fiscally conservative. He’s offered up intricate details about their fictional lives: their love of Kung Pao chicken, Joe’s habit of singing the national anthem at Islanders games, and Eileen’s father’s chilling run-in with prostate cancer....

But despite Schumer’s continued devotion, the Baileys have effectively abandoned him. Oliver points out that, by Schumer’s own admission, the couple voted for Donald Trump in five of the last six presidential ballots cast between them.

“Politically, it seems they’ve already broken up with you,” Oliver said....

“Schumer’s devotion to his imaginary friends may help explain why he and the Democratic Party have been so underwhelming in recent years,” Oliver said.“He seems to be focusing a huge amount on the Baileys from Long Island — while forgetting other voters actually exist.”

This is the most powerful Democrat in Washington, and he has neurotically concocted a human-like pair of superegos who tell him that he's a bad person if he tries to move to the left -- or presumably, if he takes strong, foreceful action on anything. Meanwhile, nearly every Republican in Washington struts around in a state of absolute certainty about the party's righteousness. And so we get moments like this, which I learned about from a post by the pseudonymous Sister Toldjah at RedState:

Amid the rise of radicals in their party like Zohran Mamdani, Democrat pushback on cleaning up the streets of Washington, D.C., and the opposition from Democrats to arresting criminal illegal immigrants across the country and deporting them, Kennedy went off in a segment with Fox News host Sean Hannity, saying the "loon wing" of the Democrat Party had taken over and that the "mainstream wing" was terrified of speaking out against them:

The mainstream wing of the party is scared to death of the loon wing. They won't speak up. And they don't stand for anything anymore. All they stand for is against whatever President Trump stands for. That's why we find ourselves in the extraordinary position of mainstream Democrats have now come out firmly and passionately in favor of crime in Washington, D.C. Why? Because Trump is trying to do something about it."

Kennedy agreed that it was unlikely that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would ever stand up to the radicals who have taken over the Democrat Party, but he called on them to man up anyway, as only he can:

No, but they could. And I don't mean any disrespect. I don't know Mr. Jeffries that well. I know Sen. Schumer very well, so I say this with respect: Chuck and Hakeem need to go to Amazon, buy some testicles, and stand up to the loon wing of their party. And until they’re willing to do that - I haven't heard Senator Schumer say anything bad about Mamdani. I mean, the guy's a socialist. He's a whackjob. They're scared to death. And the party is not going to get better until they do.

🚨NEW: John Kennedy🤣

"I say this with respect: Chuck and Hakeem need to go to Amazon, buy some testicles and stand up to the loon wing of their party!" @DailyCaller pic.twitter.com/uYOpV1YxIs

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) August 14, 2025

I realize that this wasn't an important moment in our political life. It was just another night's programming on Fox.

But this is an example of what Josh Marshall, more than twenty years ago, referred to as "the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics":

One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used.... Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you....

Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person’s supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who’s receiving the hits into an object of contempt ... in the eyes of the uncommitted.

Marshall came to regret his name for this approach to politics, but he was right about how it works, although I'd add one more thing: when you attack someone this way and the attacked person doesn't punch back forcefully -- or decides that the best way to respond to the attack is just to ignore it, which is the usual Democratic approach -- the public may come to believe that the attacker is right on the substance. Attack John Kerry by saying he didn't deserve his Purple Hearts and when he won't respond, people will assume he really didn't deserve them. Attack Chuck Schumer as pro-crime and if he doesn't respond, people will assume he is pro-crime.

Imagine if Schumer surprised Kennedy by punching back. Imagine if he pointed out that Kennedy's home state of Louisiana has one of the worst crime rates in the country, and that his state's largest city, New Orleans, has the third-highest murder rate of any city in America -- more than twice as high as Washington's murder rate. Imagine if Schumer noted that a just-released study from WalletHub ranks Louisiana as the second-worst state to live in, a state that's dead last economically and second-to-last in terms of education and health. (To be fair, it's only 40th out of the 50 states in terms of safety.)

But Democrats rarely push back on these ad hominem attacks, just as they rarely push back on the widespread belief that big cities are all crime-ridden hellholes. In reality, crime has dropped significantly all over the country in the past three decades or so. Some analysts scratch their heads trying to understand why voters believe the opposite, but to me the answer is obvious: the Democratic Party, which runs most of the cities that are perceived as high-crime, don't say Republicans are lying when they insist that crime is running amok.

Democrats needs to believe in themselves. Mamdani believes in himself in part because he was too young to live through the three thrashings Democrats suffered in presidential contests during the 1980s, an experience that left politicians like Chuck Schumer with an apparently incurable case of political PTSD. Newsom is older than Mamdani, but he can read the room: he's figured out that we live in a political culture formed by Fox News, talk radio, and Newt Gingrich, and then Trump. He knows that meekness and niceness won't cut it.

People like the Baileys exist, but Republicans try to shape what they believe, and frequently succeed. Democrats need to do the same.

ESTABLISHMENT DEMS WOULD RATHER BE A CORPORATIST MINORITY PARTY THAN A LIBERAL/PROGRESSIVE MAJORITY PARTY

This New Republic article is the most disheartening thing I read yesterday:

... again and again, in must-win House and Senate races, rather than embracing candidates that are proving their capacity to spark grassroots Democratic enthusiasm and tap into the populist ferment of the American public, establishment leaders [of the Democratic Party] are working to tilt the scales in favor of exactly the kind of uninspiring corporatists that dug the party’s current hole.

The villains of the piece include the worst pair of Democratic senators from any state, and it happens to be my state:

We’re seeing this play out very clearly in the Senate race in Michigan. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, backed by Bernie Sanders, is a full-throated progressive populist.... State Senator Mallory McMorrow is running as a D.C. outsider. Both are charismatic communicators and strong grassroots fundraisers; despite refusing to take corporate PAC money, they raised $1.8 million and $2.1 million, respectively, in the last quarter.

So naturally the Democratic establishment is pushing hard for a third candidate, with reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who chairs the Democratic [Senatorial] Campaign Committee, are privately encouraging donors to line up behind Congresswoman Haley Stevens.

Stevens is not charismatic in person. She is not an effective communicator online; her social media posts regularly get single-digit engagement. She’s not a strong fundraiser; she raised less than either McMorrow or El-Sayed, with just $1.3 million in new contributions last quarter, despite being the only candidate in the race taking money from corporations. And she’s taking a lot of it, with hundreds of thousands of dollars from nearly 100 different corporate PACs representing Wall Street (Goldman Sachs, the American Bankers Association); fossil fuels (Dupont, Dow, the American Chemistry Council); insurance (UnitedHealth, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield), utilities (Cox, Verizon, DTE); Big Tech (Google, Microsoft); retailers (Walmart, Home Depot); Big Sugar; and many, many others.

Unlike McMorrow and El-Sayed, who both oppose weapons shipments to Israel, Stevens is firmly in the pocket of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: She raised more money from AIPAC than she did in small-dollar unitemized contributions.

A similar dynamic is playing out in a House race in California, where the party establishment appears to be urging "State Assemblymember Jasmeet Bains—arguably California’s most conservative Democratic legislator, whose blatant shilling for the fossil fuel industry earned her the moniker 'Big Oil Bains'"—to run against vulnerable Republican David Valadao, rather than a progressive educator named Randy Villegas.

If this plays out all over the country, Democrats will lose in 2026 -- and continue the process of losing an entire generation of voters -- even if the White House allows free and fair midterms to take place. Every authoritarian party wants to neutralize its opposition, but Republicans seem to have lucked into an opposition party that's working to neutralize itself.

When I posted a link to the story at Bluesky yesterday, a commenter pointed me the Rational Wiki page about the Iron Law of Institutions:

The Iron Law of Institutions, created by political blogger Jon Schwarz, states:

The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

I don't think Democratic institutionalists want the party to fail exactly. But I think their comfort zone is exactly where Democrats are now: close to a majority in the House and Senate, but not quite there, which means they're powerless and can't be pressured to fight for real change in America. Being close to a majority means they can tell ordinary voters and potential small-dollar donors that they might win majorities next time. So give! Vote! But definitely give! And would you consider giving monthly?

But they won't do anything if they win back the House and Senate. There are realistic limits to what they can do, obviously -- President Trump can veto any bills they pass, and they'll never get 67 votes to convict any member of the administration they might impeach -- though they could still put a horrible person like Robert Kennedy Jr. through a Senate trial, just to try to remind people how awful this administration is.

But they don't want to go on offense. They don't want to begin the long process of attacking the cruelty and extremism of the Republican Party as an institution. They just want to keep winning their individual races and meekly doing their jobs, because they're in safe seats, and billionaire donors think America is just fine the way it is, even now.

And yet we need to elect Democrats, because Republican rule has given us a far-right Supreme Court (and Trump's future picks will extend that court's rule another couple of decades), as well as a president who's indistinguishable from many of the worst authoritarian dictators on the planet. It's still necessary to vote for Democrats to prevent everything from getting much, much worse. (Things can always get much, much worse.) But we need to vote against establishmentarians wherever we can. Primary Hakeem Jeffries. Defeat Nancy Pelosi. Send the message Republican voters sent when they shitcanned then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor: No more business as usual.

SAY NOTHING, DO NOTHING: THE USUAL DEMOCRATIC STRATEGY LEADS TO THE USUAL RESULTS

I'm pleased that this will happen next month, but the story makes me angry:

A rebel Republican congressman has invited multiple victims of Jeffrey Epstein to a press conference at the U.S. Capitol as part of a bipartisan push to force the release of legal files linked to the late pedophile.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a thorn in Donald Trump’s side for his frequent objections to the president’s spending bills and foreign policies, said that he and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna will be co-hosting the Sept. 3 conference.

The event will feature survivors of abuse by Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, several of whom “will be speaking out for the first time,” according to the two lawmakers.

Should we hear from Epstein's victims? Yes, absolutely -- but why isn't a Democrat leading to charge to make this happen? Why haven't Democrats spent the entire month of August appearing with these women and promoting their stories? This was an opportunity to put Republicans on the defensive, but Democrats are letting a gadfly Republican be the hero, the same way they encouraged Liz Cheney to be the hero of the January 6 investigation. It's as if they never want to be seen as the party on the correct side of issues. It's as if they don't want to challenge the GOP as a whole on anything, ever.

Democrats are doing what they always do: they're assuming that voters already know everything they need to know about this issue, so there's no need to continue talking about it. But that means the story has dropped from the headlines. You might not like what CNN's Harry Enten says here, but he's essentially correct:

“I would say that this is, from at least a political point of view, quickly turning into a dud of a story,” Enten said on CNN News Central....

“Take a look here. Google searches for Epstein down 89 percent versus just three weeks ago. Falling through the floor,” an animated Ented exclaimed. “It is no longer the top term searched alongside Donald Trump‘s name – that‘s been trading off between tariffs and Vladimir Putin, with obviously the meeting coming up later this week.”

He added: “But at this particular point, the American people‘s interest in this story – it‘s quickly becoming something of a nothingburger!”

... “Trump‘s approval rating in July of 2025, it was 45 percent. It‘s still well within that margin of error here at 44 percent,” Enten stated, referencing his own aggregate of pollsters.

If you ignore the grotesque amorality of it all, it appears that Republicans played a bad hand very well. Shutting down the House of Representatives to avoid dealing with the Epstein case was an effective move. And clearly the Trump Justice Department is colluding with Ghislaine Maxwell to ensure that she does no harm to President Trump.

(And speaking of Maxwell, do you think 100% of the American public knows the extent of her participation in Epstein's crimes? Or is this another set of facts the Democratic Party assumes that voters know, meaning there was no point in reminding voters of her depravity when she was moved to a minimum-security prison and granted work release?)

I know what most Democratic officeholders and party strategists are thinking: voters care about the economy and nothing but the economy. Every other issue is a "shiny object," a distraction from what's really important.

But Republicans are destroying this country, and Democrats should make noise every time the GOP stakes out a position that's massively unpopular.

Here's another example: the secretary of defense apparently isn't sure that women's suffrage is a good idea:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raised an alarming question last Thursday when he reposted a seven-minute CNN segment on X.

The video he reposted was about the influential pastor Doug Wilson, a leading theologian of the Christian nationalist right. In the clip, a female CNN reporter, Pamela Brown, followed Wilson around his base in Moscow, Idaho, where Wilson explained his particular biblical views on gender. In his vision of an ideal Christian society, Brown noted, women wouldn’t be able to vote.

... A fellow pastor at Wilson’s church argued that ideally, people should vote as households, with men casting the vote, “having discussed it with [the] household.” When Brown mentioned that some Christian nationalists wanted to repeal the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, another pastor at the church said, without any pause, that he would support that move.

In his repost of the video, Hegseth left a rather cryptic comment: “All of Christ for All of Life.”

The reporter I'm quoting, Slate's Molly Olmstead, got in touch with Hegseth's office to clarify his position of whether women should be allowed to vote.

We asked directly, and in the final line of a very brief email: “Does Secretary Hegseth believe women should have the right to vote?”

This was the department’s response, in full, sent four and a half hours later:

Hello. Thanks for your note. Here is our statement: “The Secretary is a proud member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, which was founded by Pastor Doug Wilson. The Secretary very much appreciates many of Mr. Wilson’s writings and teachings.” —Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell

That's not a yes.

"Woimen shouldn't vote" is an increasingly mainstream idea in the Republican Party, undoubtedly because women are less likely to vote Republican than men are.

Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon says America is under the "curse of feminism" and God will not bless the nation until women are forced out of all positions of leadership: "No more women in Congress. No more female state reps. No more women in any function of societal leadership."

[image or embed]

— Right Wing Watch (@rightwingwatch.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 1:53 PM

Why aren't Democrats talking about this? Why aren't they asking whether the Republican Party is fully committed to the Nineteenth Amendment, and to women's participation in politics?

In my city, the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has some proposals that make moderates a bit uncomfortable. Mainstream Democrats worry that every position Mamdani holds will be hung around the neck of every Democrat in America. Yet no one expects Hegseth's flirtation with the idea of repealing the Nineteenth Amendment to be hung around the neck of every Republican in America. Why not? Why couldn't that happen?

Mainstream Democrats are afraid to attack the Republican Party as a party. They think they'll alienate Republican voters who might consider voting Democratic in future elections. Meanwhile, Republicans attack the Democratic Party -- or, as they usually say, "the Democrat Party" -- every single day, and somehow they manage to flip persuadable Democratic voters.

Activist Democrats -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxwell Frost, and so on -- are more forthright about messaging, but they tend to focus on issues. Their messages are about inequality, guns, climate, the carceral state, and so on. They don't say that the Republican Party is bad and the Democratic Party is better, presumably because they're not fully convinced that the Democratic Party is significantly better. This and the relative silence of the moderates means that no one sticks up for the Democratic Party and no one flatly says that Republicans are bad. No wonder the Democratic Party's poll numbers are so much worse than the GOP's.

I know what some of you are thinking, but this post isn't an embodiment of Murc's Law. I don't believe that only Democrats have agency in American politics. I don't believe that Democrats are the reason Republicans are bad.

Both parties have agency -- but Republicans use the power they have, and Democrats don't. Republicans pursue as many goals as they possibly can when they have power, and they flood the zone with messaging to defend the evil things they're doing. Right now, they're all over the media, telling lie after lie after lie after lie after lie in defense of Trump's claim that Washington and other American cities are crime-ridden hellholes that need to be subdued by military force. Republicans always act when they have power, and they always make noise, whether they're in power or out. They shape narratives. Democrats don't. Both parties have agency, but only one party acts as if it does.

THE D.C. CRACKDOWN IS PROBABLY ABOUT THE MIDTERMS -- AND ALSO ABOUT TRUMP'S YOUTH

I'm back. Thanks, Yas, for some very smart posts while I was away.

In the past couple of days, President Trump began the process of turning Washington, D.C., into an occupied territory. Trump's D.C. crackdown is based on his gut sense that Washington is a crime-ridden hellhole ("Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people"), even though statistics make clear that crime has plunged in the District since the early 1990s, and hit a 30-year low in 2024, according to the Justice Department.

But Trump and other Fox-addled Republicans believe in anecdotes, not statistics -- particularly anecdotes that are looped and endlessly repeated on Fox.

He saw a black guy break a window on Fox and the network reaired the footage 300 times so Trump thinks there’s an epidemic of blacks gone wild breaking windows. This is literally how he comes up with “policy.”

[image or embed]

— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 7:55 AM

I think Trump also has a weird nostalgia for the high-crime 1980s and early 1990s. I think he romanticizes that era, much the way American Psycho does, in both novel and film form.

Trump's feelings about the crime statistics during the era when he was a cash-flashing chick magnet are basically the same as your feelings about the bands you loved when you were fifteen. He just doesn't want to hear about anything that's happened since then.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 8:10 AM

Trump romanticizes that era of higher crime because he thinks it means he was a tough guy for surviving it. (Of course, people who rode limos everywhere they went in that era had close to a 100% survival rate.) I'm sure Trump's rescue fantasies took shape in that era, in between sexual encounters and bad deals. And I'm sure Trump's beliefs about urban violence were developed behind the smoked glass of a limousine, which is still where he does his thinking about cities. On Sunday, The Guardian reported:

In a social media post on Sunday, Donald Trump has demanded homeless residents of Washington DC leave the country’s capital or face eviction....

The post was illustrated with four photographs, all apparently taken from the president’s motorcade along the route from the White House to his golf course. Two of the images showed a total of 10 tents pitched on the grass along a highway on-ramp just over a mile from the White House. The third image showed a single person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. The fourth image showed the line of vehicles that whisk Trump to his golf course passing a small amount of roadside litter on the E Street Expressway, near the Kennedy Center.

A Politico reporter thinks that's an appropriate way to make policy:

"For the president, this is something that hits home, because he is a visual person and the visuals of him driving to his golf course and seeing those homeless encampments" -- Politico's Dasha Burns puts on a masterclass in Trump sanewashing on Fox News

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 11, 2025 at 6:59 PM

This is about life as seen from a limousine window, but I think it's also part of the GOP's plan to steal the midterms. Yesterday, Trump promised a widespread militarization of Democratic cities.

President Donald Trump said he might expand his crackdown on crime in the nation's capital to other major U.S. cities as he announced plans to send 800 National Guard troops into Washington, D.C.

Trump singled out New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland, California during a Monday, Aug. 11, news conference as potential future targets in what would be a drastic escalation of federal presence on the streets of American cities.

This seems like a variation on a recent policy proposal from Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, which I wrote about late last month:

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urged right-wing state legislators this month to “de-charter” liberal capital cities and replace them with “state municipal districts.” ...

"When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense,” he urged....

Roberts’ justification for this brazen attack on democratic self-governance? He claimed that the biggest threat to the Trump-Vance agenda, which is essentially the Project 2025 agenda promoted by Roberts and Heritage, is “that there are government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people.”

Roberts want this done at the state level, in order to remove any risk of a Democratic challenge to permanent one-party rule by the GOP, particularly in his home state of Texas. But Trump seems to be working toward urban disenfranchisement at the federal level, starting the process a year before the midterms. Blue cities in blue and purple states send a lot of Democrats to the House, and provide the votes some Democratic senators need in order to win. A military crackdown that intimidates Democratic voters in big cities could, alongside Texas-style redistricting in red states and a mid-decade census that excludes undocumented residents, reduce the chances that Democrats could gain some power in Washington. (Please don't tell me that the Constitution requires the undocumented to be counted in a national census. I know that. I also know that the Federalist Society Supreme Court will allow Trump to violate this constitutional provision if he decides to do it.)

Trump fantasizes about being America's savior. He also likes the idea of a military occupation in an aesthetic sense -- we know he was hankering for a military parade in his first term and finally got one for his birthday this year, even if it was a flop. But beyond all that, he's trying -- presumably under Heritage Society influence -- to turn America into a "competitive authoritarian" pseudo-democracy, i.e., a democracy that's not competitive at all but has the appearance of competition. He hopes troops in the streets, in D.C. and elsewhere, will make that a reality.

Kashy Patel and the Room of Requirement

  

Hogwarts Level 7, with the Room of Requirement, by mvm5600/DeviantArt. 

Had a weird sighting of FBI director Kash Patel a week or so ago, in The New Republic:

Sources told Fox News Digital Wednesday that FBI Director Kash Patel had discovered multiple burn bags filled with sensitive documents stashed away in a secret room at the agency.

Stashed away in a what? The TNR writer flatly called it nothing but a "far-fetched attempt to distract from the president's ties to the alleged sex trafficker" Jeffrey Epstein, and moved on to making fun of Trump for talking about Epstein anyway, in response to a press question about Patel's discovery, but my impression was that he thought Epstein was really what the question was about:

“Well, I want everything to be shown. You know, as long as it’s fair and reasonable I think it will be shown and it should be shown, and I think [Patel] feels that way, and I think Pam feels that way,” Trump said....“But it’s gotta be stuff that really doesn’t hurt people unfairly, because you have so many people involved. And if they can do that in a fair way, I think it’s great. I think it’s really great. The whole thing is a scam...”   

I think Trump doesn't, or didn't, know about Patel's secret room. Or at least didn't know enough to expect a question about it at the presser. I suspect it's a bit of Patellerie of a kind we've wondered about before that he hasn't seen a particular need for Trump to know about (yet), because it's not quite ripe. There are a lot of things Trump doesn't need to know about, like the outcome of the dinner with Bondi and Patel that was supposed to take place at the vice president's office to discuss the Epstein matter (publicity drove the dinner to the White House instead, but there's still no indication the president showed up for it). Patel has tried the story out, though, according to the New York Post version of the story, sometime in late June, on the Joe Rogan show:

 “When I first got to the bureau, [I] found a room that [former FBI Director James] Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover Building, full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of,” he said. “They [l]ocked the key and hid access and just said, ‘No one’s ever gonna find this place.'”

That's a fascinating detail about the hard drives. Is that going to be where the Hunter Biden laptop ended up? But the crown jewel of this chamber of secrets according to The Post is something else:

Total Victory

 

Satellite image by Planet Labs, food aid convoy in southern Gaza, via The New York Times.

This paragraph has been hanging out in the tabs for a few days already, but it's getting more bothersome as time goes by. From Tom Friedman:

This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.

Well, wait a minute, Tom. Not disagreeing with the basic premise that the Netanyahu coalition and the Hamas thing are the worst, as bad as political leadership gets, but "insisting on surviving this war" is not a good illustration of how bad the latter are. It's not crazy if they don't like a deal where they let go of the hostages and then IDF kills them all, which is why they keep insisting that the release of the hostages must  be accompanied by the end of the war. You may well feel that death is what they deserve, but it's not surprising that they feel different. This is actually normal. Good people and bad people alike object to being killed. You can bothsiderize the parties on some parameters but rejecting peace is not one of them.

Another Casualty of the War on Reality

 

Via 5 Calls Civic Action.

There's a hint of rationality in Trump's violent reaction to the July jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, when he accused the BLS of "rigging" the numbers in an attempt to harm him ("ME"), and abruptly fired the commissioner, Erika McEntarfer:

Though the history is virtually all fiction: the October 2024 jobs report, issued two days before the election on November 1, was dismal for the Democrats, counting just 12,000 new jobs for the month, effectively zero, and a downward revision of 112,000 jobs to the August and September numbers; there was no report issued on November 15 (it always comes out on the first Friday of the new month); and in the next report, issued on December 6, listed a gangbusters gain for November of 227,000 jobs and significant upward revisions of 56,000 for September and October—so if it was rigged to affect the presidential election it must have been rigged against the Harris campaign and in Trump's favor. (Of course it wasn't rigged at all.) The 818,000-job downward revision referred to in the "Truth" was announced in August 2024, well before the election, and covered the previous 12 months, so that would have favored Trump too. Has anybody but me bothered to check any of this out? 

The bit of rationality is in the fact that this month's downward revisions really do seem unusually high, from 291,000 jobs in May and June to just 33,000 for the two months. That's a collapse of almost 90%! How on earth did they get it so wrong? You can see why Trump might feel a little suspicious.

Pretty sure I know the answer to that one too, and it's Trump's own fault, as a matter of fact. I know about it because it was reported on the radio on [checks notes] Monday, in a story that was primarily about the wrecking of federal data by the Trump administration's stupid censorship of racial and ethnic categorizations, anything smelling of climate change, or anything related to sexual orientation and gender identity; but wait, there's more:

More Spaghetti on the Wall

 Yastreblyanksy here while Steve is taking a well-earned break.

This, discovered by @plankysmith.bsky.social, took me aback. What? Who makes fun of weeping police officers? Why would he do something like that? We all have our issues with NYPD, but that just sounds gratuitously mean. Leave the poor guy alone, you know. Who knows what he might have been through, what violence he might have witnessed, what pain he might have been forced to inflict, what sufferings he might have endured in his private life? A policeman's lot is not a happy one! (Happy one!) As a general rule.

And it's not like the Zohran we've come to know and love! Funny, but never cruel, and more likely to laugh at himself than some defenseless third party. What's up with this?

And then the other thing was that nobody seemed to know,  or even to be interested. Planky, and Roy Edroso, mocked the story from a literary standpoint, as it well deserved, but the Bluesky commentators mostly seemed to be most interested in denouncing Politico's morals and those of its right-wing German owner, which was understandable, but not very informative, while at the ci-devant Twitter, they just denounced Zohran, and nobody was wondering what had happened:

And finally, long story short, Mamdani's original tweet, to which Politico helpfully linked, didn't seem very informative either:

Umm what pic.twitter.com/DhIcZxOQRb

— Timbo (@TimboNotes) July 29, 2025

At least until you looked at the timestamp, which was pretty clarifying. Mikey had observed the troubled officer shortly before noon on November 7, 2020; Zohran offered his gnomic comment just an hour later. What was November 7, 2020? Four days after the 2020 election, and the day enough of the absentee ballots had been counted that the media outlets were able to call it for Joe Biden, which they did around 11:30 AM.

In other words, that cop wasn't upset because he'd seen somebody getting shot, or had to make a difficult arrest, or gotten a breakup text from a girlfriend, he was overcome with grief because he had just learned that Trump had lost. Or that's how Mikey evidently saw it. And how is that not funny? And how is Zohran's remark "mocking a crying cop"? (Whoever the cop was, it's totally unlikely he ever saw the tweets, let alone had his feelings hurt.) If you were scrolling a lot that afternoon you'd get what it was about, but by the next morning its meaningfulness had to be reconstructed out of the metadata, as I just did. I still don't really know myself what Zohran exactly meant, either, I may as well admit.

There's a lesson there, I think, on the current media climate: that it's not just vicious, but also profoundly stupid. Axel Springer Politico's purpose, no doubt, is to make trouble for Mamdani, not even necessarily to get Andrew Cuomo or whomever elected, just to make things difficult for the Democratic nominee, maybe focusing on trouble with the NYPD, which is kind of a given for a New York mayor of the progressive or left variety, given how right-wing the cops are especially in the upper echelons—remember how fraught the relationship was with de Blasio. I wouldn't be surprised if Politico was explicitly dredging the data for examples: feeding Mamdani's Twitter feed into the chatbot and asking it to find instances of him disrespecting the police, and this is what it came up with.

But they didn't have any clear idea what it might actually mean,  and weren't curious enough to try to find out. They didn't quote it in the article, or describe it to any degree, just linked it and hoped for the best, that the right people would accept that it was a real scandal without looking into it too closely, and that's pretty much what they got—though it's less a proper scandal than more spaghetti on the wall. But you can't learn anything from it if you don't look at it a little more closely, and that wall is getting really fithy. It's just more moral denunciation, all the damn time.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

OFF FOR A WHILE

I'm taking some time off. I'll be back on August 12, assuming it's still legal to do this by then. While I'm away, Yastreblyansy and Tom Hilton should be here to stir up trouble. See you soon.