What I’m telling myself now is that the tariff insanity is good actually(TM). As Matt points out, there is so much bad stuff happening- but what really terrifies me is the rounding people up without any due process and sending them to El Salvador. *THAT* unfortunately is probably popular in the context of a populace that really grew to hate immigration related chaos. But crashing the economy really is driving his numbers down, and he didn’t need to do it. I can imagine Earth2 where he is doing all the El Salvador stuff but hasn’t unleashed DOGE or touched the economy and he is at 60%.
It really can't be overstated how much Dems fumbled the immigration issue over the past 4 years. And the real policy consequences that are now resulting from it.
Classic example of why moderation is important to protect against the extreme.
If you are up against literally complete disregard for the law, I'm not fully clear on what you think they could have done? In particular, Democrats lost by trying to get a bipartisan thing done, no? Seems pretty moderate to me. Republicans just do not care for the rule of law, anymore.
The problem is that Biden finally took executive action in 2024 and illegal crossings plummeted. I don't really think you can plausibly argue that Biden was actually interested in addressing this issue for the entirety (or even majority) of his term given the evidence we have about what he actually did and when.
100%. The people that want to still argue that Biden handled immigration effectively sort of boggle my mind. Most of us were aware in real time how bad the issue was going to be for him, let alone in retrospect.
I think it improbable that the Biden administration had any interest in real border control. After three years of massive increases in illegal immigration, they did two things. First, they took half-hearted steps that made minor reductions, mainly in fear of an increasingly angry electorate. Second, they tried to sucker the Republicans into the Langford deal, which would have perpetuated high levels of illegal immigration. Neither suggests sincerity.
Democrats were trying to lawfully address the concerns of immigration without throwing people under the bus.
It is notable that removals were up for all of Biden's term. You just didn't hear about it because they never flagrantly broke the law in a removal. Nor did they release gross videos bragging about it.
No, my claim is no matter what Biden did, they were losing the immigration debate. He was already removing more people than anyone else in history. As a fun one, they had already gotten Mexico to send guards to the border. Just without threat of a trade war.
Could they have done more? I'm inclined to think so. I'm also inclined to think they would have remained on the losing side of the perception war. And, frankly, I don't see a way out for them. Not as long as the Republican framing is kept as at all truthful.
It really isn't. I am so sick of this learned helplessness where we just endlessly pretend the mushy middle is either stupid or propagandized to hell so we can excuse our own terrible decisions.
I am aware that not everyone who does it is a rabid leftist but it is telling how rabid leftists *have* to do it in order to avoid admitting how stupid the stuff they want is, and how disastrous the electoral outcomes are when we listen to them.
But you learn the helplessness because of comment threads like this one, and because of the prevailing attitude that only Democrats have agency. The Democrats in congress negotiated an extremely conservative bipartisan border control bill, which Biden would have been overjoyed to sign, which was then undermined by Trump, whose only concern was winning the election. And it worked! And now Democrats get blamed in this comment thread for not moderating enough on immigration and losing the election! This is what leads people to think that reaching the "mushy middle" is a fool's errand, because they are either too stupid or propagandized to know that Democrats crafted a draconian, bipartisan anti-immigration bill that was torpedoed by the guy they then voted for to "secure the border."
Immigrants were flooding the border during the Biden times, weren't they at their highest level ever? And we really think Democratic policies had nothing to do with that? Democrats only started to feel the pain after the Abbott busing masterstroke, and they started talking tough and trying to do things way too late. Didn't they have a majority in Congress and the Senate in the first two years of their term, but magically didn't think there was a problem until they started belatedly noticing the polling?
Isn't this the same problem Harris had with wokeness and leftism? She tried talking centrist way too late in the game - after being tarred as illegal immigrant friendly or Wokeist, you can't just pay lip service at the 11th hour and expect to carry the day.
I really think "democratic policies" had relatively little to do with immigration being up. Most of that is that things were that much better in the US than they were anywhere else. (Which, I mean, if we want to "blame" that on democrats...)
Don't get me wrong, you can find dumb statements from Democrats. If you widen your search to look at online leftists, you can get even dumber statements on any number of things. The actual policies and work that the government was doing was far more reasonable, though.
It is funny that you using the "bussing" event as a master stroke. Again, if you are up against flagrant disregard for the law, I don't know what to do. At least, not legally.
And I really don't want the lesson that we all end up learning from this is that you should when the rhetorical war in any way possible. Laws be damned.
"New York can’t use “antiquated, unconstitutional” law to block migrant buses from Texas, judge says"
"While critics argue the busing program is inhumane and a political stunt, and some have raised concerns about potential violations of federal law or civil rights, no court has ruled that the state-sponsored busing program itself is illegal under federal law"
"New York has paid more than 35,000 migrants to leave, with Illinois, Florida and, yes, Texas among the top destinations. Denver has bought tickets for 22,000 migrants to go on to places like California, Utah and Florida."
My understanding was that this was still largely in the legal discovery phase. Possibly more reckless than flat out disregard. I am behind on the current status.
Specifically, bussing people away that were awaiting asylum proceedings is not on the up and up.
I'm assuming this is just a troll? It does cut to the perception problem, though. Why Democrats lost is effectively a gish gallop fight against any number of framings pushed by Republicans.
Consider, the post I was responding to was about how bad their handling of immigration was, and you immediately jump to trans debate. Didn't even lose the point on immigration. Just ready to jump to another framing.
Reality is that Democrats are losing. There is no denying that. Why, though, is a much harder question. And largely it is because they are perceived to be on the wrong end of a lot of debates.
I think the comment had moved into something more like there's nothing that Dems can do as long as Republican messaging is considered true.
So I said there's plenty that can be done. My question is really easy. Of which, you wrote three paragraphs not answering the question. Maybe that's the why.
Are we voting on genders? Charlamagne the God ad ran constantly in Atlanta. It's very easy to call someone a troll and block. But it's also very easy to just answer how many genders you think there are.
I don't think genders are the sort of thing that can be counted. In order to count something effectively, you have to be able to say whether two instances are the same or are distinct. Is RuPaul's gender the same as Caitlyn Jenner's? I don't think there's a clear fact of the matter.
"It really can't be overstated how much Dems fumbled the immigration issue over the past 4 years. And the real policy consequences that are now resulting from it."
I feel compelled to point out that allowing high levels of migration was an excellent economic policy and had genuine benefits. And that the way Biden did it was the only real way to do it that was legal.
It also wasn't a major campaign issue until inflation fell below 4% and then Fox News decided to make it one.
And guess what? It borderline doesn't matter what the actual situation on the ground is; immigration, like crime, is something the right wing can demagogue without needing a single fact on their side.
Leftist parties in Europe are having good success against the right going harder line on immigration, so I am not sure your framing is in fact correct.
The influence and messaging ability of right wing media in the United States is unique.
Also, US leftists are totally off the rails and would rebel emphatically against overtly anti-immigration policies, so you just make yourself another hole to plug up. (I've had American leftists tell me our handling of the border is "genocide." Seriously.)
Plus highly restrictive immigration is, as Matt as pointed out extensively over the years, pretty terrible policy, from an economic and quality of life point of view. So even if it's politically gangbusters we ought to be careful with how far we follow that path.
I don’t think it’s really just the right media. Poll showed across the racial lines, comment economic backgrounds, and geography that America’s really did not like immigration that was happening over the border. It got so bad that in Chicago, Black residence sued the city over it and in New York City historically open place for immigration, there was a huge backlash. And polling started against immigration all the way back in 2021. Hell Matt even wrote a post about it.
"Plus highly restrictive immigration is, as Matt as pointed out extensively over the years, pretty terrible policy, from an economic and quality of life point of view. So even if it's politically gangbusters we ought to be careful with how far we follow that path."
Highly restrictive low skill immigration may not be terrible, though.
Didn't Drumpf tank a moderate compromise immigration bill because immigration was good for his election chances?
it's not Dems that are the problem @Ben Krauss. There is a right-wing segment that only believes that the border should be _permanently_ locked down and anyone who entered unofficially should be expelled. (Really people, letting immigrants come out of the shadows, pay a fee, and get official permission is too much of an ask?)
Look, I elided some requirements like living here for some to be determined amount of time, having family connections like being the parent of a U.S. born child, having a job, not having committed any crimes, etc.
And, isn't that what Drumpf & his lackey, Musk are doing with the "gold-plated" visa? "[F]ee in hand anyone can live in the US".
The asshole governor's of Florida and Texas literally shipped thousands of them to NYC and DC. What were cities supposed to do tell them to go fuck themselves?
Also if people in northern Ohio are dealing about the southern border in their town that is 92 percent white I'm not sure what to do other than to tell them to touch grass
That's the point. Bussing migrants to northern cities was their way of saying "If you want immigrants so badly, why don't you take some in?"
Funnily enough, Rob Henderson appears to have had a point. Plenty of New Yorkers were perfectly happy to support the country taking on asylum seekers when the problem would be handled by someone else, somewhere else, using other people's money. Once it became their own systems being overwhelmed, and their own state and local taxes at work, a lot of people started to sour on the concept. And that woke up people in "northern Ohio" who suddenly had to face the fact that Florida and Texas were perfectly willing to spread the burden across the country.
seems odd to see the relatively recent problem of mass asylum claims from central america as some sort of fixed and unchangeable problem. traveling to the united states through mexico is not easy, and you won't do it unless you have some reasonably high expectation of benefit. the asylum claims spiked because it was a reliable way to get into the country and not be deported. the bipartisan immigration bill would have fixed it, but even just "refuse all new asylum cases until the current backlog is addressed" would have probably done the trick
Sure, but you only have to get a handle on it temporarily. Once you have a short timeline to resolve claims, the incentive to come disappears because most come on the assumption they will work until deported and that’s only worth the trip if that gives you an extended window to work.
To be clear, by “shut down the border” you mean “zero border traffic of any kind” or am I misunderstanding you?
So, if you’re a US citizen in San Diego and you want to drive to visit your cousin in Tijuana, but there have been too many asylum seekers recently, you’re SOL?
What about commercial traffic, do you halt that too or do you just search every truck extra thoroughly for illegal immigrants hiding in a shipping container?
From 2021-23 relatively few people were being smuggled, folks were walking right up to CBP and being detained, claiming asylum, and being released into the country with a court hearing 5-8 years away.
We would only have needed to say "if you don't have evidence of state persecution we will reject your asylum case on the spot and send you back across the nearest border crossing" to stop that entire issue from arising.
Umm, shutting down the border sounds worse than anything Trump has ever done. At least he only put 90% tariffs, rather than actually blocking all flow.
You just need to arrive at the border to request asylum, and we actually have laws on the books that say that. The law also says we have an obligation to fairly evaluate that claim.
The Trump administration is in this as in many things just being lawless in their behavior, but that's not something a dem admin should emulate.
The law allows us to conclude asylum claims are made in bad faith without evidence of *state-led* persecution, and that's what we should have done from 2021 on, loudly and publicly.
We should have also flipped the burden of proof for some countries. As an example, Brazilians made up over 1% of claims in 2023. They should have all blanket rejected barring incredibly strong evidence. People fleeing actual state-led persecution frequently go to Brazil--the asylum claims in the US by Brazilian citizens were patently ridiculous.
Agreed, and no need to hire more judges than you need to process the desired number of asylum cases per year. Over time, spurious asylum claims will drop and you've solved the problem without a judicial surge.
I think independent of asylum claims which are largely handled by ALJ Immigration judges rather than Art. III judges, there is a really good case for adding more Art. III judges. Unfortunately the politics of achieving this suck cuz both parties want to get their ppl on the bench. Maybe the best way is to schedule the increase over a longer time horizon, so POTUS 48 and 49 benefit but their partisanships are not yet known.
Isn’t a judicial surge cheaper and easier than a border patrol surge? No need to hire people for difficult and dangerous missions patrolling the desert.
That's what has been happening. They have hired almost 100 new judges each year but the backlog keeps growing. While the number of judges has more than doubled in the last ten years, the cases have more than quadrupled.
The problem is that people just have absolutely zero idea how the immigration system works. You'd have to establish like ten concepts that the average voter has no clue about to get to the point where "more judges" is an obvious policy move. So if Republicans want to keep the system as chaotic as possible, because it's a 100% political winner for them, no matter how much it's their fault, it's really, really easy for them to keep that from happening. Like they did last year.
Well, it’s true that most people don’t understand the intricacies of the immigration system. They do understand people crossing the border illegally. There is no way around it, Biden let in an astronomical amount of people, historically high. Most Americans continue to support legal immigration, but I think it’s justified to want it to be orderly And contained.
Generally, increasing the number of immigration judges has been bipartisan (I can find sources if you need). What happened last year though specifically?
In general, and all else being equal, putting more judges on a caseload does bring processing time down. I can’t speak to immigration courts, but I clerked for a state court judge in New Jersey in the mid-2010s. At that time, judicial nominations in NJ were severely backed up because Chris Christie was in a pissing contest with the Senate President Steve Sweeney, resulting in a lot of slowdowns in the courts. Both the judiciary and the NJ Bar Association begged Christie and Sweeney to please just start approving judges because they just couldn’t get everything done. Eventually, they did, and times did in fact go down.
Similarly, in 2017 or 2018, the judges of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California wrote an open letter to Congress begging them to establish new seats on the court so they could handle their growing caseload. The letter is rather shocking both in itself—judges aren’t supposed to do political petitions like this, especially not publicly—and for the level of overwork described . So I imagine immigration courts could benefit from just having new judges, and probably do so rather quickly: they are administrative law judges, so adding more is easy (they don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate, they can just be hired), plus the administrative procedure in immigration court doesn’t have a lot of extended timelines like civil courts do.
If you went for a big expansion, you'd have to have more courtrooms - which obviously requires construction, which has its own delays. And it's not literally "more judges", they need offices to work in, clerks to manage the cases, sergeants-at-arms and all the other officers of the court and so on.
But it's certainly true that much of the backlog on straightforward cases (and this applies to criminal cases too, especially at the state level) is a shortage of hearing days in court, and the primary cause of that is a lack of judges.
Complex cases often have time problems because of the complexity, but there are plenty of straightforward cases that are just not getting dealt with because there aren't enough judges or immigration judges to deal with them.
Due process doesn't have to take forever - you just need to have an efficient, well-funded courts system that can give people a competent hearing with adequate representation.
Administrative courts don't need all the trappings of court rooms like jury boxes, witness stands, etc. They can be glorified conference rooms. These are nuts and bolts operations, yes if you increase judges you also need to increase support staff, but you could not infeasibly run a second shift in current facilities and up the number of claims processed.
Today of course we're just effectively not following our own asylum law, so I guess lawlessness was also always an option.
This is all true, but not as big a barrier as it seems:
(1) On the space question, there's two things:
(a) Courtrooms are often empty because courthouses usually run on a one-judge-one-courtroom rule and the relevant judge is working in chambers that day. (Or on vacation or golfing, but we won't get into that.) You can spin up the number of judges while waiting for a new courthouse to be built without finding new space by making judges hot-desk (hot-bench?) for a few years.
(b) Commercial real estate! Courts don't need to sit in designated courthouses, they can and do sit in rented space. The Municipal Court of Philadelphia's civil division is literally in an office building. So is the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (probably one of the most important bankruptcy courts in the country). (I did a judicial externship there in 2014. There was a Quizno's downstairs.) It's also very common for minor courts to be in a strip mall--or even a literal mall (e.g. the Municipal Court of Voorhees Township, NJ, which is in the old Echelon Mall).
(2) It's trivially true that judges need support staff, but that just means the expense is higher than just judges' salaries. Though I have to say immigration courts are pretty cheap on that front, the judges don't have much support staff.
Oh absolutely - you could easily double the numbers of ALJs without much need for infrastructure. Art III judges would need a little more work, but not that much. A lot of courthouses are very underutilised.
Also the full trappings of a court are mostly only necessary for criminal cases; we could move most civil cases into a big conference room easily enough (and there are loads of those. If you're in a real hurry, you just pay Regus or someone like that to rent you some).
But if you wanted a big expansion (5X or something), then you'd have problems, both with the pipeline - there aren't that many lawyers wanting to become judges - and with the infrastructure. But 2X the judges? Easy.
I think its important to remember that there is a perverse political incentive for parties to not solve problems that are big "winning" issues in elections.
Chaos at the border and high crime (or at least perception of high crime) are good for the GOP politically. So there is an incentive to not fully "solve" these issues (and it seems as though Trump is doing his best to erode GOP advantage at least on the former).
There is definitely I'm sure similar incentives for Dems around say health care. There a lot of practical reasons why a lot of Democrats are not pro single payer including that a lot are just not that far left on the issue. But I'm the writer of this substack notes all the time how this is Dems best issue and so there is a perverse incentive to also not "solve" the problem.
But I think the paradigm example of this is abortion. Pre Dobbs it was clearly an electoral winner since the topic was concentrated so much on "edge" cases (and also led GOP to overplay their hand. I'm positive a whole lot of state legislators in various red states signed on to super restrictive abortion restriction bills thinking it would never actually be implemented to avoid being primaried). Everything about the issue and lack of movement on a Federal level for decades tells me GOP knew it was better for them to not "solve" the problem.
I think it's important to point that while general anti immigration sentiment is very real and that the median voter's policy views (however coherent or incoherent they are) are decidedly to the right of the median Democratic position circa 2021, it's not at all clear to me that the median voter supports this kidnapping of Juan Garcia Abrego or the kidnapping of Venezualan migrants (and let's be clear, the Kafka-esque reasoning behind not bringing Abego home and complete lack of due process for the other deported migrants is kidnapping full stop).
I know citing Joe Rogan as some avatar for all normie voters is almost certainly too reductive, but the fact that he called out these administration actions is pretty striking to me nonetheless.
I'll quote Josh Barro speaking on Tim Miller's podcast and note we need to distinguish between how issue positions poll in the moment vs how issue positions poll in practice (Josh was talking about tariffs which in theory have a decent amount of normie support but as we're seeing now are not at all popular in practice. Especially if implemented in cartoonish fashion).
So this is where I think Matt's podcast co-host has it right; Dems are being way too scared of their own shadow on this issue. Especially on Abrego. Go out there, call this criminal kidnapping by in over the heads thugs (which it is) so you can actually maybe get the attention of normie voters.
To quote one of my wife's favorite shows; step your ::Bleep:: up Dems.
"Dems are being way too scared of their own shadow on this issue. Especially on Abrego."
Chris van Hollen is on his way to El Salvador right now. Is that enough? Or should we demand all 47 Democratic Senators go there?
One of the problems is what we mean by "Democrats." It's all independent actors; the party will never act in lockstep, so demands that it do so are empty.
The other problem is that every Trump outrage seems to lead us to turning our guns on our own folks. I think this is warranted when we see Democrats cozying up to Trump in nauseating ways or the leaders of the party fail in their leadership role (e.g., Schumer's comments about his Republican colleagues). But in general, let's keep our focus on the horrors perpetrated by the Trump regime and spend less time backseat driving Democratic responses.
I think Trumps numbers would go down if he started sending citizens who haven’t been convicted of crimes to El Salvador. If he starts sending unconvicted citizens, I’m emigrating. I’d rather live like a grad student than worry about being put in a dungeon.
"I think Trumps numbers would go down if he started sending citizens who haven’t been convicted of crimes to El Salvador."
He already has. And, yes, it is terrifying. Right now, U.S. citizens may think they're not at risk, but using El Salvador for political prisoners, in addition to immigration prisoners is going to be all too tempting.
What do you mean? Trump talked about sending US citizens to CECOT in his meeting with Bukele, and that’s alarming enough, but to my knowledge he hasn’t actually sent US citizens there? Am I wrong?
Keep in mind, you might not be able to emigrate, if a lot of other people want to emigrate at the same time. The US might not let you leave, and the destination might not let you come
I can't really imagine those rules remaining in place if the US continues to abuse visiting Canadian and European nationals.
More broadly, if there is a flood of US 'refugees', the world will close it's door to US refugees. At least those places that can. The price of Venezuelization of the US.
It's not obvious to me that the El Salvador deportations will prove popular. The way I think about it is that you cannot separate Trump's approval numbers on immigration (specifically border security) from the median American's wildly incorrect ideas about the immigration system. People have this vague preference for accommodating the Good Ones while cracking down on the Bad Ones, and they are constantly surprised when the administration shows no interest in this distinction.
In fact, I think it's pretty crazy that the Administration appears to be doubling down on this, up to the point of defying the Supreme Court. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a sympathetic victim (dad, union worker, married to U.S. citizen and was deported in error) and respect for the Supreme Court still runs fairly deep. But Steve Miller is a lunatic who thinks every immigrant is a policy failure, and he's taking point on this.
It wasn't so long ago (just one presidential term!) that most voters disapproved of Trump's immigration policy. There's no reason to think he can't overreach on this, and pay for it.
which is a shame because literally the only good thing i was hoping for out of Trump 2 was a 250th anniversary that was actually cool with pomp and circumstance and military parades and over-the-top patriotism etc. instead of whatever weird sanded off corpo stuff the democrats would have done to mollify people who hate america. but it turns out you can't even count on Trump to performatively love america anymore!
I'm not hoping for it. I would just watch the ceremony with a feeling of disgust and think of how Washington and all the Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves, because their worst nightmare has come true.
I for one am *shocked* that he would renege on his campaign promise to throw the “most spectacular” birthday party!
(In all seriousness I think this goes to the competence point - last I checked the initiative was focused on the diverse perspectives pooh-poohed by this admin, but the party aspect sounds like something he would be very interested in. This is a weird mix of first- and second-term dynamics)
Especially as an Angeleno, I find it tragic that Trump will be President* during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. I was really looking forward to it as a wonderful advertisement for America. Now I'm not even sure it will happen or if anyone will come.
Bastard.
* We'll see. He's very old and not in good shape. Not that Vance would be an improvement.
"Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia"
It seems clear that MAGA, and apparently an enormous number of Americans (hopefully not a permanent majority) share enough distrust/loathing of the PMC that they are willing to cut off their (our?) nose to spite their face. There are a number of other comments on this post wondering/lamenting why DOGE/MAGA would destroy things (like basic science research) that have no relation to DEI and are essential to American strength and/or mankind's progress. For many of the people making decisions in this regime, those producers of knowledge are PMC or adjacent and therefore class enemies, who must be destroyed no matter the collateral damage. MAGA would rather rule over the ruins than acknowledge that those they hate contribute to making America great.
ETA: I'm currently in Osaka and visited the World Expo 2025, where the USA Pavilion was beautiful, but also a bizarrely discordant and sad vision of an America before we started racing towards the new Dark Ages of corruption and ignorance. Seriously, the theme song is crafted around the word "Together" in English, Mandarin, and Japanese, and the tour features 3 of 7 rooms about NASA, focused on SLS, Artemis, and Earth Sciences (with zero mention of Space X!), as well as a section about educational and cultural exchange programs that Rubio's proposed State Department budget would eliminate entirely (Fulbright being probably the most well known), and in fact is already subjecting to impoundment/recission.
Also, surprisingly to me, it turns out that many Japanese are most interested in the moon rock on display, because there was a similar sample (very recently collected) featured at the 1970 World Expo that was also held in Osaka.
I agree with your core point that there is a desire to own the libs that is animating things, but I would add another component.
People just fundamentally do not appreciate that there are a lot of basic boring things that are responsible for our prosperity. They don’t think you need basic science research, soft power, consistency, or any number of other things. They believe that America is powerful and can have only the parts that they personally like.
If this keeps marching forward, it's going to really fuck up Republican vote share in the suburbs and exurbs of cities like Houston, Atlanta, Lancaster, Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City...
It's not possible to punch you in the federal bureaucracy, me in infrastructure services, others here in research science, etc... in the face economically without sideswiping folks like my engineer cousin and his consulting accountant wife out in suburban Lancaster too.
Every year in March/April I joke to my buddy that the best day of NCAA tournament is the day Duke is eliminated. Now this extreme like of Duke (widely shared by the way) is obviously mostly a function of the fact that Duke one of the most successful and arguably the most successful Men's college basketball programs in the country since 1990*. See also why the Yankees are hated, why the Brady era Patriots are hated and why there is an increasing turn against the Kansas City Chiefs. No need to overthink this too much.
But the anti Duke hatred clearly is more than just normal sports stuff. If you know anything about Duke basketball, you know that a disproportionate number of their top players are white in a sport that is famously disproportionately made up of black players. And that even among the black players they recruit, there are "controversies" (look up "Jalen Rose comments about Grant Hill"). I've long maintained that you can't understand the dynamics of the Duke rape trial without understanding the place Duke basketball holds and Duke university holds; namely the reputation that's it's an elite rich school for rich kids.
And that's because...it basically is. Same with Harvard, same with Yale. My point with all of this I'm as pro college as they come (I think I'd have to turn in my Indian card if I wasn't) and I have some major criticisms of the way elite colleges operate. It's definitely definitely not only a right wing thing to be super critical of how universities conduct themselves (I'm looking at you Columbia).
And yet, I can say with pretty great confidence that how the Trump administration is operating with universities and basically holding ransom public funds is banana pants; especially in light of the stated reasons behind it.
And the big "TLDR" of this post is I feel pretty confident that as anti elite and anti elite college as Americans in general probably are, I feel pretty confident if normie voters knew about this issue more (like everything else it's being overshadowed by trade policy right now) they'd also consider the idea of attacking universities in this manner banana pants.
It's worth reiterating this over and over again. We really mistake the popularity of Trump (and as we can see, that "popularity" was very soft outside of his hardcore base) with popularity of Trumpism. The actual "true believers" I can't emphasize enough have some truly fringe and not at all popular policy ideas which we're seeing play out. I really really hope Democrats can recognize this and attack accordingly.
Do you read any left-leaning fashion blogs? The amount of cognitive dissonance about wanting all these cute clothes and yet believing that consumerism is evil is boggling. And I don't care if you're buying from queer, woman-owned independent shops and paying $700 for a t-shirt. You're still consuming.
But then I'm almost as bad as Kelsey Piper about "I like cheap shit and I cannot lie."
The bloggers usually tell you in almost every post. Lots of concern about the environmental impact of fast fashion, lots of concern about about not buying from Target because they backtracked on DEI, not buying from Amazon because Bezos is an evil billionaire, etc.
The fact that they are trying to take over major research universities (put them in receivership) has been the biggest indicator yet that this is their attempt at a cultural revolution.
I might have said this previously regarding the GOP’s voter suppression strategy, but “short of going full 1970s Bihar, it’s nearly impossible to keep educated upper class voters from voting”
This is where all the things like requiring a passport to vote and saying that only people who can fill out forms in triplicate can vote backfires - that's not going to suppress the people they want it to suppress.
Workers finally saw how that other half lived on social media (esp TikTok which is more likely to show random content), and decided to take them down a notch.
I don’t think the animosity is to healthcare workers who work standing up - it’s against all the workers whose job involves making other people fill out paperwork, which counts as “managerial” in the relevant sense, even if they people at the DMV or whatever aren’t literally managing workers.
The original essay that coined the term by the Ehrenreich's included pretty much all knowledge workers. Its originally a Marxist term looking to update Marxist classes for the 20th century but in practise people now just use it as an insult for any white collar worker to try and conflate them with middle managers.
Seriously. MY's pointed out the flaws of our Madisonian system before. It's already failed completely once, and it's held together for 160 years due to a combination of norms and the parties overlapping ideologically for most of that time.
Also, arguably for the first half of this period, the world just wasn't sufficiently dangerous and complex for a suboptimal constitution to seriously harm a big, rich country protected by oceans. And after 7 December 1941, foreign affairs concentrated minds enough to paper over the flaws for another half century.
With a parliamentary system the Civil War would have come earlier most likely since starting in 1820 the north had the numbers in the House of Representatives. Starting with passage of the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have banned slavery in Missouri, the North/South divide escalated and the southern slavery interests became obsessed with the Senate.
I'm a bit skeptical of this - wasn't the main mechanism for damage that Buchanan did just continuing to stall and avoid confronting the divisive issues that Congress was torn about?
Parliamentary system would probably made it happen sooner, unless one is imagining a non-federal system. But there wasn't a path to create that in 1787.
I know this is sarcasm, but of all the reasons cited for Trump II this is the most baffling one from my experience. I've worked in tech for 15 years at companies big and small, and the only notable interactions I've had with HR are at the beginning and end of my tenure. Every HR training I've ever had has been a 15-30 minute online click thru CYA checkbox. Hell, most small businesses don't even have an HR department! What am I missing?
My experience has been that everything involving performance management or hiring everywhere I've worked has been made much worse by HR's involvement. HR departments believe in their soul that they should decide how these things are done for technical staff, so a huge amount of employee time is wasted on trying to fit a square peg into the round hole of things HR can pretend to understand.
I've never seen this as a political divide, though. I'm quite confident my median coworker is to the left of the median HR employee (easy when you work with other phd-havers).
At universities, I get the sense that the HR people are much deeper into the ineffective woke signaling than the professors are - that doesn't mean anything about who is farther left, but it does mean something about who symbolizes "leftness" more explicitly.
I've participated in a couple of HR interviews that were centered around managing problem employees, (staff vs. staff, so CYA was risky in both directions). These managers knew how to conduct an objective investigation. And then, it was an HR employee who came to tell me that a friend I had recommended for a job, and who had gotten it, had died suddenly from an unknown cardiac condition. But that was local government (some of those slacker public servants...)
We did have a diversity training session back in the day, but some of the other pre-Woke stuff was fun. I got to mentor a woman mechanic, disabled from service in Iraq, when she went to back to college.
I can see this - performance reviews can feel like a waste of time and they're always switching up the format. But I've always viewed that as HR just executing demands from the C suite, just like I wouldn't blame the HR person who lays me off.
I wouldn't advocate blaming any random line employee, but performance reviews &c are worse than they would otherwise be because of the success of HR as an institution in seizing control of things that they should not control (and the resulting need to make, or at least pretend to make, things legible to HR).
All the HR commentary is gender and class ("email jobs") resentment, captured in a pithy trend. Most people, including most of the commenters on this thread, have very limited understanding of what HR does. People at big companies associate their interactions with HR around frustrating access to benefits and/or mandatory trainings - of course they have a negative perspective on it.
Only a minor point but the self-congratulatory tweets (and public statements) that the Houthi bombings 'were a success' the day after the bombing when the measure of success was if the Houthi's would stop attacking shipping is a sign of dumbo ill-disciplined thinking. If they knew anything about the Houthis they'd have known they kept on fighting after extenisve bombing from the Saudis. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump has put into high positions people for whom disciplined thinking is not thier strong point.
You see this reflected in Hegseth's total pea-brained approach to rebranding the DOD. Everyone is a "warfighter". There's no room for anyone who isn't a manly white man who would make a good action star. There's no focus on strategic effectiveness. It's all just tactical -- did we kill the people we wanted to kill? Did we blow up the things we wanted to blow up? This is the problem with putting some random grunt who became a fox news host in charge, he genuinely has never thought about war in terms of political ends in his life, he has only ever thought about it in terms of carrying out specific operations with targets who need to be eliminated.
I was dismayed to find Hegseth's book coming up at the very top of a Libby search (if you don't filter, the search sorts by "Most Recent") Yep, it's called "The War on Warriors".
You’d think a significant slice of the business community (and their representatives) would care about longer term threats to the American economy and market confidence. Lax SEC regulations and enforcement, degraded economic statistics and a more political central bank being among such areas of concern. I wonder what stories they’re telling themselves about this.
There's a lot of movement behind that number, yields are flat despite the stock market's implosion (no flight to safety this time), and there is almost certainly insufficient liquidity to clear the market if the Admin really does something stupid and starts a stampede.
Like, for instance, blowing out the deficit by another few trillion over the next decade.
Are you assuming they don't care because they're not publicly saying "this is f---ing insane"?
My view is that the business community is probably horrified but muzzled. If you run a business that is affected by tariffs, are you obligated to brown-nose the administration and bite your tongue to try to get a carve out for your supply chain?
"Deafening silence" is dead on. I think it's the same "gag incentives" problem. Republican house members mostly face _primary_ threats, and Trump can credibly screw them in the primary, which will be dominated by hardcore MAGA voters.
One of the macro-level things that really scares me is that it would seem to me that in order to disincentivize future corruption and straight-up flouting of judge's orders, some of the bad actors in the current administration need to have the hammer dropped on them, and HARD, and with polarization being what it is now, I don't see how you do that without it being seen as explicitly political retribution.
The problem with this administration's naked corruption and politicization of the various federal agencies and civil service is that the solution to fix it after he's out of office is basically to do the exact same thing. And I worry we fall into a cycle of every new administration replacing the political appointees of the previous guy or gal.
Like, Trump has created the deep state that he always bitched about, and I don't see how you get out of the doom loop.
You moderate, win a whopping victory, and then call the most reasonable part of the other side in for some private discussions, with two options:
1. We don’t do anything radical aside from raising taxes enough to close the deficit and fixing Social Security, otherwise we just try to reset things to 2024, and in exchange you enthusiastically endorse us as we go for broke trying to convict and imprison every Trump appointee and associate who did anything even remotely illegal.
2. We pass a federal redirecting package and gerrymander to the point where you’d need 60% of the popular vote to win the House, split every reliably blue state in 2-5 and readmit them, and pack the Supreme Court, *then* prosecute the entire admin and trump’s associates, not to mention looking extraordinarily closely at every business dealing and tax filing you and every one of your large donors have made.
The man ruined your party and gave us an opening to make that permanent, you hate him and want this to never happen again. We’re willing to forebear from burying you permanently… Do you want tit-for-tat authoritarianism that we’re going to play to win, or a functioning country?
If we don't do #1, to the fucking hilt, then the GOP is just going to do this shit again and make it stick next time, assuming they even fail in 2028.
I am more than willing to see the Democrats *threaten* #2 behind closed doors in pursuit of #1.
Should they do it if the GOP calls their bluff? I genuinely don't know. The GOP is bringing us closer to the brink every single goddamned time they have power and if it comes right down to it I would probably rather fuck them over first.
I threw out the requisite sheet anchor to windward with "assuming they even fail in 2028," but in all honesty, I don't think they actually *can* steal an election, assuming we can win convincingly. We just need to avoid reprising 2018 and 2020, taking their stupidity as license to sprint left, in 2026 and 2028.
I agree with you on this, but I took David's argument as "If we can't reestablish basic norms of decency and governance, then we can't count on what _you_ will do next time, and we'd better do what we can stop stop it now"
I'm not sure that they should do #2 even if #1 fails, but maybe it's ok as a credible behind the scenes threat because #1 seems like a really good thing.
Would Democratic one-party rule be a bad thing compared to a competitive electoral democracy? Definitely, no doubt in my mind.
Would it be a bad thing compared to Republican one-party rule? I don't buy that for a minute. This has been epically disastrous and it's only going to get worse, and that's with the prospect of a free and fair general election staring the GOP in the face.
If that's the choice, then yes, "do unto others before others can do unto you" needs to be the rule of the day, and your and Mathew's votes be damned.
We can worry about how to turf the Democrats back out of power in 20 years, once the GOP is a shattered husk.
#2 seems like a not-good idea, and even seems really tough.
Most blue states are basically one large blue metro area and a bunch of red rural areas (e.g. IL, CO) or already small (e.g. VT, HI). Splitting these up is a tough order. California is the only blue state that you could easily split up and end up with two or more reasonable blue states.
DC statehood seems like the only viable way to add Democratic seats.
You can absolutely split MA, WA, MD, IL, and CO in 2 each while maintaining strong current partisan leans in both parts.
And CA could yield 5 blue states easily.
With DC, that'd be 10.
This is obviously not going to happen, but I see no other way to break the populist right other than to win big and then offer the choice of the olive branch or the mailed fist.
Getting two blue states from MA/WA/IL/CO would require extremely weird obviously gerrymandered borders that go through the middle of major metro areas. That is a nakedly partisan step that would make governance worse in each of these states.
I have to think that if the Democrats get enough power to do this, they have enough power to just abolish the Senate or turn it into something like the UK's House of Lords. That seems like it accomplishes about the same goals, but better.
I don’t think the Senate is going anywhere, but hopefully they can talk enough GOP Senators and Reps into the necessary clean-up to give it a bipartisan imprimatur and the resulting legitimacy without needing to play this kind of hardball.
First things first, win the fucking elections, by margins that leave no doubt that we won and have a remit to clean this fucking mess up.
Yep. Best I have is that first-order effects (enforcing laws is good) are more important than second-order effects (enforcing laws may lead to retribution later).
I'm *really* not convinced about the whole "Trumpist deep state" thing. Outside of political appointees (who mostly turn over each change of administration anyway), what fraction of various administrative agencies' staffs have actually been replaced by/converted to hardcore MAGA supporters? I suspect it is very, very tiny and that the vast majority of people working in these places are the exact same people who were working there without complaint in 2024 and will be quite happy to get back to a more sane administration.
A lot of career people are being driven out of government, probably forever. Including a lot of experienced and competent people who had been frustrated by the kludge that isn’t being fixed in the dumpster fire.
I agree with you, but as Kenny said, the issue isn't who is leaving; it's who is being hired. I'm not aware that there's any evidence of large-scale hiring of new, let alone specifically new pro-Trump/MAGA, people to fill empty positions. This is where the entire DOGE project appears to, if anything, be actively preventing, if not sabotaging, efforts to ideologically shift the administrative state in a pro-Trump/MAGA direction -- the mass firings of the past three months appear to have made with near total disregard to the political leanings of the people who were fired and it appears there's effectively a hiring freeze for most of the federal government. The only place where there seems to be much in the way of political manipulation of non-appointees is in the military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, which is concerning, but even there it doesn't seem like the sort of activity that would fundamentally convert those parts of government into fifth columnists against a Democratic President in 2028.
There's a lot of people being driven out. I'm not sure if they've been replaced by new people being driven in, or if there's just a whole lot of empty seats and unused computers.
I'd be happy to seem some "administration officials" getting hauled off to a night in jail by U.S. Marshalls on a contempt charge: just the experience of the knock on the door, the handcuffs, and the whole jail check-in routine. Maybe the Marshalls could even use a sledgehammer on someone's car.
The way out relies on Trump's popularity being absolutely in the toilet by the tail end of '28, which seems more than plausible if he continues as he's begun. Presume that Democrats sweep the Presidency and both chambers of Congress.
Then sit down with moderate Republicans in Congress and propose:
1. A bipartisan Congressional probe, similar to January 6th, to identify the worst actors and refer them to Justice for prosecution. Moderate Republicans agree to publicly support this effort and take a leading role. Democrats agree to limit prosecution to egregious offenders and not the rank and file.
2. Reforms to limit the President's powers. The substance of these reforms will depend on Trump's worst abuses. Republicans agree to treat this seriously and make a real push to get it over the line, even to the point of Constitutional amendments. Democrats agree to support reforms even though the first President constrained by them will be the newly elected Democrat.
3. Agreement by everybody to sideline the Freedom Caucus types on the right and the activist types on the left and make Congress work again. The more Congress shirks its constitutional tasks, the more the Presidency grows to fill the vacuum; laws and courts can slow that growth but not stop it. This will probably require some fixes to how primary elections are handled, which is a good idea anyway.
On the topic of tax compliance, ordinary people, whose income is entirely or almost entirely W-2's and 1099's, don't have much opportunity to cheat - everything is already reported to the IRS and checked through automated means.
The people who do have opportunities to cheat are the people with lots of complex investments and business income. So, you end up with this two-tiered system where normal people support the country with taxes, while wealthy investors treat the IRS as a "pay what you wish" donation system - a system which is totally unfair for hard-working people that have to pay more in taxes to compensate for others paying less.
I mean kind of. Wealthy businesspeople can find ways to do things legally.
The largest group of people with opportunities to cheat and who actually do so are small businesses with tight margins. Your local restaurants are almost certainly cheating on their taxes.
You're right, but the problem with a consumption tax is that it's regressive, because the poor spend a much larger proportion of their income on consumer goods than the rich.
I'd be up for a consumption tax as a PARTIAL replacement for an income tax if it exempted some necessities, like some simple foodstuffs and, say, baby formula and diapers. And I'd be ok with higher "sin taxes" (on alcohol, cigarettes, processed sugar).
Yes that's why I was a big fan of the Fair Tax. A consumption tax that untaxed everything up the to poverty line. Basically they sent every family a check at the start of each month to cover the tax that a family their size would spend on their purchases up to the poverty line.
Ordinary people who don't follow these things with a razor-sharp eye are extremely confused, and rumors abound. My sister in Florida says a lot of people are under the impression that they didn't need to file tax returns this year. Most of them will probably lose out on refunds.
So, this is especially for those who say "Shhhh, don't talk about immigration, it's a losing issue for Democrats": Jennifer Sura, Kilmar Abrego Garcia's wife, has made a public statement:
"As we continue through Holy Week, my heart aches for my husband, who should have been here leading our Easter prayers... Our family is torn apart during this scary time and our children miss their dad so much."
A reminder that it's easy to get into strategizing and focus-group-brain and "will talking about Abrego Garcia help us win over a 29-year-old non-college-educated Rogan-pilled white man in suburban Arizona?" But we're talking about a real live human being who has suffered horrific injustice, who has a wife and children who miss him and must be terrified of what his happening to him. I think it's important to remember that.
A quote I keep coming back to is -- it takes a generation to grow a forest and a day to burn it down. What these idiots are doing is lazy. Musk craves "hard work" ... this is the opposite, this is easy, he should be embarrassed by their efforts, and somehow even worse -- they're *increasing* our debt burden as our risk premium keeps rising. Somehow our democracy has elected idiots and our elected idiots have assembled an even worse collection of below replacement-level talent than I imagined possible. I would gladly turn our government over to McKinsey tomorrow and I hate McKinsey.
Another question I keep wrestling with is whether I'm more embarrassed now to be an American or after Bush II launched his Iraq war and the whole thing turned out to be a lie. I'm still going with the Iraq war being the worst political experience of my lifetime but the scariest part is we're not even 10% of the way through this one.
I've noticed a pretty widespread aversion to the idea of "hard work" has taken root in our society. Obviously this manifests on the left as r/antiwork but on the right, the entire "grindset" mentally seems focused primarily on pump and dump schemes and passive income grifts. DOGE just cutting and burning and the documented use of ChatGPT to make policy is a piece with that.
I seem to remember you mentioned on a previous thread that several people in your family voted for the Orange One because they were pissed off at trans issues in public schools?
There’s no “somehow” about this, like, “Somehow Palpatine returned.” People chose this.
Yeap. My wife voted for him and a bunch of neighbors and a bunch of my Atlanta friends. Obviously, the "somehow" is how the democrats lost their Obama loving voters. Those are the details that matter.
One probably does but he's also lost like $70m in the past 6 weeks. The rest definitely not. This Pritzker quote was getting fired around just this morning:
“Working with Democrats in the General Assembly, we’ve made Illinois the most LGBTQ+ friendly state in the country…We brought inclusive LGBTQ+ curriculum into our schools so that all students now learn about the contributions of queer and transgender trailblazers…The State Board of Education is implementing gender-inclusive policies to ensure that our schools are welcoming and affirming.”
I think everyone I know would even cheer on loudly calling attention to books featuring two dads or two moms. That's awesome. What everyone seems aligned around is introducing gender theory to K-2nd graders is a terrible idea, no different from religious indoctrination.
The Iraq war was just stupid warmongering - happens throughout history. (Well, and Abu Ghraib, which is an indicator of the kind of worst-case cruelty and collective hatefulness that we're seeing crop up again in the way immigrants are being treated.)
"In the short term, more people will just get away with cheating on their taxes". Wealthy people, Matt. we all know this, but you need to say it clearly. This administration is going to come down hard on some random schmo underpaying taxes, but Peter Theil makes some dubious claims? Well, there's no resources to investigate that now, so he can buy Senate seats and cut his own taxes.
"Trump’s supporters know that he faces a lot of over-the-top criticism", do you mean this as "the supporters view it as 'over the top criticism'? Because all the criticism that has been directed at Trump is spot on, and understated, if anything. That obese, sundowning old man has done more damage to the Federal Government in 90 days than the USSR, CCP, or domestic terrorists could have ever hoped to accomplish.
LOL. I love how you follow "all criticism has been understated" with "Trump has done more damage than the USSR, CCP or terrorists could ever hope to accomplish"
I don't totally agree with Brian, but I don't think there's any contradiction in what he said. He's clearing giving an example of what he believes to be accurate, non-understated criticism.
This is shaping up to at least equal the level of self-harm that Joseph McCarthy inflicted, and I don’t think it’s unlikely it’ll surpass it many fold.
The USSR, the CCP and domestic terrorists "could have EVER HOPED to accomplish" (emphasis added)? I think their hopes were pretty high in terms of damage to the Federal Government.
I guess the question you need to ask yourself is could a common enemy (i.e., the USSR, the CCP, a terrorist org.) ever push Canada to sever defense ties with the US -- which is happening right now -- because of Trump's stupid obsession with this 51st state nonsense and then the tariffs? I don't think so. Our relationship with Canada is now irreparably harmed. The USSR or the CCP could never do that.
EDIT: I just used Canada as an example since they're our #1 trading partner and we literally can't operate our cars without their heavy crude because our entire refinery network is built on it. But also read every trading partner's statement about how the US is now seen as an untrustworthy partner. Again ... the USSR or the CCP could never inflict this amount of damage.
I got it. My comment is just supporting Brian and other David R that I don't actually think they could have "ever hoped" for more. This is their *dream* scenario. We're self-imploding while severing our global alliances. I don't think this scenario was even on their strat. plan because it was too unreasonable to consider.
i think it seems reasonable to say that donald trump has done more damage to the US Federal Government than the USSR, CCP, or terrorists! it's just that i don't expect any of these entities to do very much damage to the US Federal Government...
Also and only if we're going to get wrapped around a pedantic axle with "hoped" ... they couldn't have "hoped" for "more damage" because any more damage that what we've just done in 8 weeks would be constrained by Mutually Assured Destruction. This is our democracy self-imploding. There's no way this scenario was even on the CCP's strat planning roadmap. It's their dream scenario.
I hope they're not stupid enough to have this as their dream scenario. If the global order falls apart when they haven't the clout to skin it and wear it themselves, the CCP is going to be hurls out of power within a decade as everyone walls off everyone else and their model implodes under its own internal contradictions.
I don't think that the most probable endgame here is the utter collapse of global goods trade and a bunch of continental autarky initiatives, but the Party cannot survive if it turns in that direction.
Not necessarily. It’s not that hard to fake some itemized deductions, not count a tuition benefit as income, claim a tax credit more than once, etc. You don’t need to be wealthy for any of this - I personally know how to do it myself. I just haven’t done it.
I think the Trump administration is sufficiently corrupt that they will also not mind if Joe Schmo also cheats on his taxes, but obviously a gutted IRS will only be able to go after small fry.
These observations will eventually need to filter down into the Democrats’ messaging. They need to stop calling Trump a tyrant or complaining about the existence of billionaires. The real attack line is that these people in office are utterly incompetent.
It would be nice if our Democratic representatives consisted of actually competent people with demonstrated experience running organizations, instead of the front of the class to Harvard Law to the state legislature track that most of them came from.
Like it or not, Musk and Trump get a ton of rope because they've actually run things.
The crazy thing about this answer though is that Trump hasn't really run things well. Both from an outcomes (casinos fail) and from what I could tell (prior to 2016) from his process (watching the first 2 seasons of The Apprentice).
Elon at least has had excellent outcomes in the past. I have no insight into whether that was because of or in spite of his ability to manage (vs inspire) but in his case I think it was reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt prior to 2024.
Kamala Harris ran the California Attorney Generals office, that's real experience running a big organization. Trump and Musk ran private businesses, where you can take a wrecking ball to a company and if it loses money you write it off your taxes and face zero personal consequences. Trump can get infinite do-overs no matter how many companies he bankrupts and still be a billionaire. The government doesn't work that way, which is precisely why Doge has behaved so stupidly.
If you want to compare running the CA AG's office (5K employees) to running Tesla (125K employees), you're welcome to, but I'm not sure that bolsters any subsequent argument.
Once you get above a certain number it's essentially the same. It's not like Musk is personally managing 125k employees, he's managing a room of administrators about the same size as what Harris would be managing.
They are obviously very different kinds of jobs, but my point is that someone with government experience has better qualifications because the role and function of government is nothing like the role and function of private enterprise. Companies get to make reckless decisions because they operate in a stable rules-based environment created by the government to encourage their creativity. Musk and Trump don't understand that they are now the stewards of that stability, not the creative destruction, and this is precisely why Doge and reckless tariff implementation have been (and will continue to be) so damaging. Running a government requires coalition management, stakeholder coordination, understanding the balance of competing interests, that kind of thing. It is in every way different than running a company.
But... he is a tyrant? What do you call a leader who publicly muses about sending US citizens to a shithole prison on foreign soil where habeas corpus doesn't apply? Whose DOJ tells SCOTUS to take a long walk off a short pier?
Do you trust him to only send convicted violent criminals to CECOT?
I didn't say he isn't a tyrant. I said that this messaging hasn't been working.
Dems ran with "democracy is on the line" in 2024 and then lost the popular vote. I live in PA surrounded by tons of moderate swing voter types, and during the election I didn't hear a single one of these people say anything about democratic norms or authoritarianism. When they talked about reasons not to vote for Trump, it had to do with him being a liar or an asshole, having personality traits that are unappealing in a leader. Or being too ignorant and uninformed to effectively run the government.
What quantitative indicators are there for the collapse of these government functions? I'm particularly interested in ways to measure data collection degradation and reductions in tax compliance. I don't have a strong prior on what sort of lags there are, but I think it would be very helpful to have some things to point to later this year and during the leadup to the midterms.
I agree it reflects badly on the American electorate but the raised prices from the tariffs are yet to fully arrive at the shops. Then things should get really nasty in the polls. We Australians will be watching it with popcorn and soft drinks at the ready.
The majority of GOP voters have been eating this shit and calling it salad for so long that there's no turning back for them. They are fully in the cult now. Trump won't dip below 35% no matter how bad things get in the economy. He would have to personally fly Joe Rogan to CECOT or announce a White House DEI program.
Yeah, but I’ve noticed my Republican work colleagues and FB friends going from posting pro-Trump memes and bringing up politics without prompting to no more memes, liking MY anti-Trump posts, saying things like “we should find a way to come together”, or just not responding to an obvious political prompt.
This is how it’ll go. It’ll never be a full swing.
Absolutely, and our job is to show respect and compassion for these people (the 10-15% of the electorate available to swing our way), and try to bring them into the fold.
The republicans on our management committee were really quiet today when we discussed cutting budgeted spending for 2025 by 10% as a defensive measure given the economic trajectory and suddenly dry pipeline of new business. The impacts of these meetings haven't hit the guys on the ground yet, but they will feel the canceled projects scheduled to start this summer.
It shocks me that Trump's ratings haven't fallen on a cliff, but the trend line is still encouraging. He's losing ~0.5 points week in, week out. No reason to think that won't continue. He's lost about 14 points in net approval ratings since inauguration.
I'd like it to be faster, but it does bode well for where we'll be in, say, June in time for his big birthday military parade.
If bond holders think we cannot pay back our debts for reasons such as destroying our ability to collect taxes and demanding the Fed monetize the debt (Powell's term will be coming up and Trump is going to try to appoint a sycophant in May 2026.)
I was thinking of things outside the financial markets, but I hope that people wake up when this happens (it doesn't seem like an if anymore conditional on congressional Republicans continuing to back Trump on everything).
This is my worry. I do not want to wait for Argentina/Greece level tax noncompliance to have some sort of smoking gun and am not confident that we can fix things at that point.
Not exactly. It will take more robust data, and tax filings are inherently delayed by about a year to begin with. Add in complications like capital gains being timed based on realization dates, etc., and it will take years to quantify in any meaningful, reliable way.
Surprising that the cut in science funding did not figure more prominently. Of course we cant draw a line from NSF/NIH grants and any particular productivity improvement in industry or medical but we have the sense at least that there is improvement. But is this true about educational research? Where was the research that the mayor of DC could use to push back against closing schools?
Given that mass closures during the pandemic were kind of a novel situation, I don’t think you could have had a large body of research on that. Going forward, it would have been nice to have NAEP scores for more than just half a decade post-pandemic to continue to quantify learning loss. Seems that may not happen since so much of the staff has been cut.
There ought to be information about the educational effect of closure. The reason of for the closure ought not to matter. CDC should have given schools the information on the benefits of closure and to combine with the information on costs so that mayors and school boards coud make rational decisions, not get pushed around by frightened parents and teachers’ unions.
iirc Emily Oster had exactly this problem when she was trying to get data about school closures during the pandemic. There was no national data set and some states didn’t even collect that data. She ended up calling district offices at some point just to figure out if they were opened or not. I just don’t think the idea of mass closures was on anyone’s radar in, like, 2015.
IMO it's because Democrats don't do anything that's not a reaction to Trump anymore. Biden proved that in a few ways, most glaringly and destructively with immigration policy.
I think that Democrats do things that aren't reactions to Trump all the time! It's that the media and the base just don't care. Biden passed an enormously transformative legislative agenda that almost no one even knew about. My prog friends were still talking about how the Democrats never did anything on climate change even after Biden torched almost all his political capital in one big climate change bonfire.
I don’t think Matt or Andrew J were claiming causality. Rather, Andrew is pointing to evidence refuting your claim that Biden’s climate change actions (in this case, the IRA) increased inflation. Clearly, per the timeline you cited, the IRA did not increase inflation.
Well, the point is that he didn't NEED to do that-he went much harder on that issue in reaction to Trump's complete denial of it. Likely that was an overreaction to the lefty pressure as well, but still driven into overdrive as a Trump reaction. I will never believe he "torched his political capital" over it otherwise, considering the salience of it for the average voter. It was Trump driven.
"We were really, truly spending a lot of money on the wrong things .... Most of the money, in fact, was dedicated to “other stuff.”"
An administration that looks the other way, and refuses to deal with problems like this, can't exactly be described as responsible either; it's just a more slow-motion form of irresponsibility. And as with Trump and tariffs, this is just one example; there were plenty of others like it.
I don't think they were looking the other way because they did not think it was a problem. It funneled money to the people they wanted money funneled to. Just like pretending the Iraq invasion was a failure when it was actually a stunning success in every possible way: the people who were supposed to make money from it made money from it.
Bidens lack of interest in the financial regulatory agencies and the backroom deal he cut with Warren meant you had some real ideologues coming out of the woodwork to run the agencies and it was really, really bad news. It’s probably not worth anything politically, but the appointments at FIRREA were terrible and soured the business community not just because the appointments were broadly opposed to business and did not believe in markets as a way to allocate resources (deadly serious about this), but because quite a few of the people (not Khan) were deeply stupid and adversarial.
Anyway, just an example of an own goal that was not at all a reaction to Trump, and kind of killed the dem relationship with industry.
I think Matt may have mentioned this before, but the GOP is a lot more homogenous both demographically and philosophicaly. Dems are made up of much more varied coalitions and a lot of them don't get along very well. That gives Republicans much more leeway. Unfortunately that's just the nature of things, it will never be fair.
What I’m telling myself now is that the tariff insanity is good actually(TM). As Matt points out, there is so much bad stuff happening- but what really terrifies me is the rounding people up without any due process and sending them to El Salvador. *THAT* unfortunately is probably popular in the context of a populace that really grew to hate immigration related chaos. But crashing the economy really is driving his numbers down, and he didn’t need to do it. I can imagine Earth2 where he is doing all the El Salvador stuff but hasn’t unleashed DOGE or touched the economy and he is at 60%.
It really can't be overstated how much Dems fumbled the immigration issue over the past 4 years. And the real policy consequences that are now resulting from it.
Classic example of why moderation is important to protect against the extreme.
If you are up against literally complete disregard for the law, I'm not fully clear on what you think they could have done? In particular, Democrats lost by trying to get a bipartisan thing done, no? Seems pretty moderate to me. Republicans just do not care for the rule of law, anymore.
The problem is that Biden finally took executive action in 2024 and illegal crossings plummeted. I don't really think you can plausibly argue that Biden was actually interested in addressing this issue for the entirety (or even majority) of his term given the evidence we have about what he actually did and when.
Having 2024 illegal crossing levels instead starting in 2022 would have been very helpful for Democratic chances in 2024.
100%. The people that want to still argue that Biden handled immigration effectively sort of boggle my mind. Most of us were aware in real time how bad the issue was going to be for him, let alone in retrospect.
I think it improbable that the Biden administration had any interest in real border control. After three years of massive increases in illegal immigration, they did two things. First, they took half-hearted steps that made minor reductions, mainly in fear of an increasingly angry electorate. Second, they tried to sucker the Republicans into the Langford deal, which would have perpetuated high levels of illegal immigration. Neither suggests sincerity.
Yeah, that Jim Lankford. What a RINO.
Oh, I'm sorry. Were you serious?
They reduced crossings about 3x
Democrats were trying to lawfully address the concerns of immigration without throwing people under the bus.
It is notable that removals were up for all of Biden's term. You just didn't hear about it because they never flagrantly broke the law in a removal. Nor did they release gross videos bragging about it.
So your claim is that in 2024 Biden started violating the law? Or that he threw people under the bus?
No, my claim is no matter what Biden did, they were losing the immigration debate. He was already removing more people than anyone else in history. As a fun one, they had already gotten Mexico to send guards to the border. Just without threat of a trade war.
Could they have done more? I'm inclined to think so. I'm also inclined to think they would have remained on the losing side of the perception war. And, frankly, I don't see a way out for them. Not as long as the Republican framing is kept as at all truthful.
I thought it was common knowledge he was violating the law. He was turning people away without a credible fear interview, which is against the law.
"The problem is that Biden finally took executive action in 2024 and illegal crossings plummeted."
That's two more facts than the average swing voter knows. It's just more vibes bullshit.
It really isn't. I am so sick of this learned helplessness where we just endlessly pretend the mushy middle is either stupid or propagandized to hell so we can excuse our own terrible decisions.
I am aware that not everyone who does it is a rabid leftist but it is telling how rabid leftists *have* to do it in order to avoid admitting how stupid the stuff they want is, and how disastrous the electoral outcomes are when we listen to them.
But you learn the helplessness because of comment threads like this one, and because of the prevailing attitude that only Democrats have agency. The Democrats in congress negotiated an extremely conservative bipartisan border control bill, which Biden would have been overjoyed to sign, which was then undermined by Trump, whose only concern was winning the election. And it worked! And now Democrats get blamed in this comment thread for not moderating enough on immigration and losing the election! This is what leads people to think that reaching the "mushy middle" is a fool's errand, because they are either too stupid or propagandized to know that Democrats crafted a draconian, bipartisan anti-immigration bill that was torpedoed by the guy they then voted for to "secure the border."
Immigrants were flooding the border during the Biden times, weren't they at their highest level ever? And we really think Democratic policies had nothing to do with that? Democrats only started to feel the pain after the Abbott busing masterstroke, and they started talking tough and trying to do things way too late. Didn't they have a majority in Congress and the Senate in the first two years of their term, but magically didn't think there was a problem until they started belatedly noticing the polling?
Isn't this the same problem Harris had with wokeness and leftism? She tried talking centrist way too late in the game - after being tarred as illegal immigrant friendly or Wokeist, you can't just pay lip service at the 11th hour and expect to carry the day.
I really think "democratic policies" had relatively little to do with immigration being up. Most of that is that things were that much better in the US than they were anywhere else. (Which, I mean, if we want to "blame" that on democrats...)
Don't get me wrong, you can find dumb statements from Democrats. If you widen your search to look at online leftists, you can get even dumber statements on any number of things. The actual policies and work that the government was doing was far more reasonable, though.
It is funny that you using the "bussing" event as a master stroke. Again, if you are up against flagrant disregard for the law, I don't know what to do. At least, not legally.
And I really don't want the lesson that we all end up learning from this is that you should when the rhetorical war in any way possible. Laws be damned.
"New York can’t use “antiquated, unconstitutional” law to block migrant buses from Texas, judge says"
"While critics argue the busing program is inhumane and a political stunt, and some have raised concerns about potential violations of federal law or civil rights, no court has ruled that the state-sponsored busing program itself is illegal under federal law"
"New York has paid more than 35,000 migrants to leave, with Illinois, Florida and, yes, Texas among the top destinations. Denver has bought tickets for 22,000 migrants to go on to places like California, Utah and Florida."
Not sure Abbott broke any laws.
My understanding was that this was still largely in the legal discovery phase. Possibly more reckless than flat out disregard. I am behind on the current status.
Specifically, bussing people away that were awaiting asylum proceedings is not on the up and up.
Which law? Wasn’t Abbott doing what the Biden administration was doing, except to places Biden wouldn’t?
Dems could work to win elections.
How many genders are there?
Blocking this guy
Thank you for reminding me that was an option before I reached for the "reply" button.
I'm assuming this is just a troll? It does cut to the perception problem, though. Why Democrats lost is effectively a gish gallop fight against any number of framings pushed by Republicans.
Consider, the post I was responding to was about how bad their handling of immigration was, and you immediately jump to trans debate. Didn't even lose the point on immigration. Just ready to jump to another framing.
Reality is that Democrats are losing. There is no denying that. Why, though, is a much harder question. And largely it is because they are perceived to be on the wrong end of a lot of debates.
I think the comment had moved into something more like there's nothing that Dems can do as long as Republican messaging is considered true.
So I said there's plenty that can be done. My question is really easy. Of which, you wrote three paragraphs not answering the question. Maybe that's the why.
Are we voting on genders now?
Some people on Substack share the same enthusiasm for the trans debate that certain adults hold for funko pops.
Guy is a troll, I wouldn't even engage.
Are we voting on genders? Charlamagne the God ad ran constantly in Atlanta. It's very easy to call someone a troll and block. But it's also very easy to just answer how many genders you think there are.
I don't think genders are the sort of thing that can be counted. In order to count something effectively, you have to be able to say whether two instances are the same or are distinct. Is RuPaul's gender the same as Caitlyn Jenner's? I don't think there's a clear fact of the matter.
"It really can't be overstated how much Dems fumbled the immigration issue over the past 4 years. And the real policy consequences that are now resulting from it."
I feel compelled to point out that allowing high levels of migration was an excellent economic policy and had genuine benefits. And that the way Biden did it was the only real way to do it that was legal.
It also wasn't a major campaign issue until inflation fell below 4% and then Fox News decided to make it one.
And guess what? It borderline doesn't matter what the actual situation on the ground is; immigration, like crime, is something the right wing can demagogue without needing a single fact on their side.
Leftist parties in Europe are having good success against the right going harder line on immigration, so I am not sure your framing is in fact correct.
The influence and messaging ability of right wing media in the United States is unique.
Also, US leftists are totally off the rails and would rebel emphatically against overtly anti-immigration policies, so you just make yourself another hole to plug up. (I've had American leftists tell me our handling of the border is "genocide." Seriously.)
Plus highly restrictive immigration is, as Matt as pointed out extensively over the years, pretty terrible policy, from an economic and quality of life point of view. So even if it's politically gangbusters we ought to be careful with how far we follow that path.
I don’t think it’s really just the right media. Poll showed across the racial lines, comment economic backgrounds, and geography that America’s really did not like immigration that was happening over the border. It got so bad that in Chicago, Black residence sued the city over it and in New York City historically open place for immigration, there was a huge backlash. And polling started against immigration all the way back in 2021. Hell Matt even wrote a post about it.
"Plus highly restrictive immigration is, as Matt as pointed out extensively over the years, pretty terrible policy, from an economic and quality of life point of view. So even if it's politically gangbusters we ought to be careful with how far we follow that path."
Highly restrictive low skill immigration may not be terrible, though.
We need more “low skill” immigration if anything. Significant shortages in the Construction, hospitality, trades, and other “less skilled” industries.
As a European, I can say that there is absolutely no evidence that this is true.
Didn't Drumpf tank a moderate compromise immigration bill because immigration was good for his election chances?
it's not Dems that are the problem @Ben Krauss. There is a right-wing segment that only believes that the border should be _permanently_ locked down and anyone who entered unofficially should be expelled. (Really people, letting immigrants come out of the shadows, pay a fee, and get official permission is too much of an ask?)
Therefore, fee in hand anyone can live in the US. It isn’t that simple.
Look, I elided some requirements like living here for some to be determined amount of time, having family connections like being the parent of a U.S. born child, having a job, not having committed any crimes, etc.
And, isn't that what Drumpf & his lackey, Musk are doing with the "gold-plated" visa? "[F]ee in hand anyone can live in the US".
Did they though??
The asshole governor's of Florida and Texas literally shipped thousands of them to NYC and DC. What were cities supposed to do tell them to go fuck themselves?
Also if people in northern Ohio are dealing about the southern border in their town that is 92 percent white I'm not sure what to do other than to tell them to touch grass
That's the point. Bussing migrants to northern cities was their way of saying "If you want immigrants so badly, why don't you take some in?"
Funnily enough, Rob Henderson appears to have had a point. Plenty of New Yorkers were perfectly happy to support the country taking on asylum seekers when the problem would be handled by someone else, somewhere else, using other people's money. Once it became their own systems being overwhelmed, and their own state and local taxes at work, a lot of people started to sour on the concept. And that woke up people in "northern Ohio" who suddenly had to face the fact that Florida and Texas were perfectly willing to spread the burden across the country.
I really wish people's reaction to "the courts are all blocked up" was "why don't we hire some more judges?".
Pretty sure Central America can produce asylum cases faster than we can install judges.
seems odd to see the relatively recent problem of mass asylum claims from central america as some sort of fixed and unchangeable problem. traveling to the united states through mexico is not easy, and you won't do it unless you have some reasonably high expectation of benefit. the asylum claims spiked because it was a reliable way to get into the country and not be deported. the bipartisan immigration bill would have fixed it, but even just "refuse all new asylum cases until the current backlog is addressed" would have probably done the trick
Sure, but you only have to get a handle on it temporarily. Once you have a short timeline to resolve claims, the incentive to come disappears because most come on the assumption they will work until deported and that’s only worth the trip if that gives you an extended window to work.
There's an easy solution for that
You shut down the border anytime the number of asylum cases or immigrants overwhelm the number of judges
That way you stop all catching release
To be clear, by “shut down the border” you mean “zero border traffic of any kind” or am I misunderstanding you?
So, if you’re a US citizen in San Diego and you want to drive to visit your cousin in Tijuana, but there have been too many asylum seekers recently, you’re SOL?
What about commercial traffic, do you halt that too or do you just search every truck extra thoroughly for illegal immigrants hiding in a shipping container?
From 2021-23 relatively few people were being smuggled, folks were walking right up to CBP and being detained, claiming asylum, and being released into the country with a court hearing 5-8 years away.
We would only have needed to say "if you don't have evidence of state persecution we will reject your asylum case on the spot and send you back across the nearest border crossing" to stop that entire issue from arising.
Not that that doesn't have a certain logic to it - but what evidence could be produced on the spot and verified to count?
I mean don't accept any asylum claims or any other immigration, until.therd is room/bandwidth to deal with them
Makes sense, “shut down the border” just sounds like “literally don’t let anyone or anything across the border”
Umm, shutting down the border sounds worse than anything Trump has ever done. At least he only put 90% tariffs, rather than actually blocking all flow.
People have to cross the border to make an asylum case, and you can just not let them cross the border.
You just need to arrive at the border to request asylum, and we actually have laws on the books that say that. The law also says we have an obligation to fairly evaluate that claim.
The Trump administration is in this as in many things just being lawless in their behavior, but that's not something a dem admin should emulate.
The law allows us to conclude asylum claims are made in bad faith without evidence of *state-led* persecution, and that's what we should have done from 2021 on, loudly and publicly.
We should have also flipped the burden of proof for some countries. As an example, Brazilians made up over 1% of claims in 2023. They should have all blanket rejected barring incredibly strong evidence. People fleeing actual state-led persecution frequently go to Brazil--the asylum claims in the US by Brazilian citizens were patently ridiculous.
Agreed, and no need to hire more judges than you need to process the desired number of asylum cases per year. Over time, spurious asylum claims will drop and you've solved the problem without a judicial surge.
I think independent of asylum claims which are largely handled by ALJ Immigration judges rather than Art. III judges, there is a really good case for adding more Art. III judges. Unfortunately the politics of achieving this suck cuz both parties want to get their ppl on the bench. Maybe the best way is to schedule the increase over a longer time horizon, so POTUS 48 and 49 benefit but their partisanships are not yet known.
Yeah, they tried that last year with the JUDGES Act. It passed the senate unanimously. The house only passed it *after* Trump was elected, so he would get first crack at appointing judges. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/4199/text
Isn’t a judicial surge cheaper and easier than a border patrol surge? No need to hire people for difficult and dangerous missions patrolling the desert.
Isn’t it easier to just speed up the backlog in the courts than to try to patrol thousands of miles of desert?
Oh, well, if you're "pretty sure."
That's what has been happening. They have hired almost 100 new judges each year but the backlog keeps growing. While the number of judges has more than doubled in the last ten years, the cases have more than quadrupled.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47637
The problem is that people just have absolutely zero idea how the immigration system works. You'd have to establish like ten concepts that the average voter has no clue about to get to the point where "more judges" is an obvious policy move. So if Republicans want to keep the system as chaotic as possible, because it's a 100% political winner for them, no matter how much it's their fault, it's really, really easy for them to keep that from happening. Like they did last year.
Well, it’s true that most people don’t understand the intricacies of the immigration system. They do understand people crossing the border illegally. There is no way around it, Biden let in an astronomical amount of people, historically high. Most Americans continue to support legal immigration, but I think it’s justified to want it to be orderly And contained.
Generally, increasing the number of immigration judges has been bipartisan (I can find sources if you need). What happened last year though specifically?
IIRC, "Hire more judges" was a key provision of the bipartisan immigration reform bill that Trump killed.
Does that actually work? I can't see why it wouldn't, but I rarely seen it phrased as a personell issue.
In general, and all else being equal, putting more judges on a caseload does bring processing time down. I can’t speak to immigration courts, but I clerked for a state court judge in New Jersey in the mid-2010s. At that time, judicial nominations in NJ were severely backed up because Chris Christie was in a pissing contest with the Senate President Steve Sweeney, resulting in a lot of slowdowns in the courts. Both the judiciary and the NJ Bar Association begged Christie and Sweeney to please just start approving judges because they just couldn’t get everything done. Eventually, they did, and times did in fact go down.
Similarly, in 2017 or 2018, the judges of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California wrote an open letter to Congress begging them to establish new seats on the court so they could handle their growing caseload. The letter is rather shocking both in itself—judges aren’t supposed to do political petitions like this, especially not publicly—and for the level of overwork described . So I imagine immigration courts could benefit from just having new judges, and probably do so rather quickly: they are administrative law judges, so adding more is easy (they don’t have to be confirmed by the Senate, they can just be hired), plus the administrative procedure in immigration court doesn’t have a lot of extended timelines like civil courts do.
If you went for a big expansion, you'd have to have more courtrooms - which obviously requires construction, which has its own delays. And it's not literally "more judges", they need offices to work in, clerks to manage the cases, sergeants-at-arms and all the other officers of the court and so on.
But it's certainly true that much of the backlog on straightforward cases (and this applies to criminal cases too, especially at the state level) is a shortage of hearing days in court, and the primary cause of that is a lack of judges.
Complex cases often have time problems because of the complexity, but there are plenty of straightforward cases that are just not getting dealt with because there aren't enough judges or immigration judges to deal with them.
Due process doesn't have to take forever - you just need to have an efficient, well-funded courts system that can give people a competent hearing with adequate representation.
Administrative courts don't need all the trappings of court rooms like jury boxes, witness stands, etc. They can be glorified conference rooms. These are nuts and bolts operations, yes if you increase judges you also need to increase support staff, but you could not infeasibly run a second shift in current facilities and up the number of claims processed.
Today of course we're just effectively not following our own asylum law, so I guess lawlessness was also always an option.
This is all true, but not as big a barrier as it seems:
(1) On the space question, there's two things:
(a) Courtrooms are often empty because courthouses usually run on a one-judge-one-courtroom rule and the relevant judge is working in chambers that day. (Or on vacation or golfing, but we won't get into that.) You can spin up the number of judges while waiting for a new courthouse to be built without finding new space by making judges hot-desk (hot-bench?) for a few years.
(b) Commercial real estate! Courts don't need to sit in designated courthouses, they can and do sit in rented space. The Municipal Court of Philadelphia's civil division is literally in an office building. So is the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (probably one of the most important bankruptcy courts in the country). (I did a judicial externship there in 2014. There was a Quizno's downstairs.) It's also very common for minor courts to be in a strip mall--or even a literal mall (e.g. the Municipal Court of Voorhees Township, NJ, which is in the old Echelon Mall).
(2) It's trivially true that judges need support staff, but that just means the expense is higher than just judges' salaries. Though I have to say immigration courts are pretty cheap on that front, the judges don't have much support staff.
Oh absolutely - you could easily double the numbers of ALJs without much need for infrastructure. Art III judges would need a little more work, but not that much. A lot of courthouses are very underutilised.
Also the full trappings of a court are mostly only necessary for criminal cases; we could move most civil cases into a big conference room easily enough (and there are loads of those. If you're in a real hurry, you just pay Regus or someone like that to rent you some).
But if you wanted a big expansion (5X or something), then you'd have problems, both with the pipeline - there aren't that many lawyers wanting to become judges - and with the infrastructure. But 2X the judges? Easy.
I think its important to remember that there is a perverse political incentive for parties to not solve problems that are big "winning" issues in elections.
Chaos at the border and high crime (or at least perception of high crime) are good for the GOP politically. So there is an incentive to not fully "solve" these issues (and it seems as though Trump is doing his best to erode GOP advantage at least on the former).
There is definitely I'm sure similar incentives for Dems around say health care. There a lot of practical reasons why a lot of Democrats are not pro single payer including that a lot are just not that far left on the issue. But I'm the writer of this substack notes all the time how this is Dems best issue and so there is a perverse incentive to also not "solve" the problem.
But I think the paradigm example of this is abortion. Pre Dobbs it was clearly an electoral winner since the topic was concentrated so much on "edge" cases (and also led GOP to overplay their hand. I'm positive a whole lot of state legislators in various red states signed on to super restrictive abortion restriction bills thinking it would never actually be implemented to avoid being primaried). Everything about the issue and lack of movement on a Federal level for decades tells me GOP knew it was better for them to not "solve" the problem.
Our borders have been under a DDoS attack for the past 20+ years. People who want to break the immigration system throwing literal bodies at it.
I think it's important to point that while general anti immigration sentiment is very real and that the median voter's policy views (however coherent or incoherent they are) are decidedly to the right of the median Democratic position circa 2021, it's not at all clear to me that the median voter supports this kidnapping of Juan Garcia Abrego or the kidnapping of Venezualan migrants (and let's be clear, the Kafka-esque reasoning behind not bringing Abego home and complete lack of due process for the other deported migrants is kidnapping full stop).
I know citing Joe Rogan as some avatar for all normie voters is almost certainly too reductive, but the fact that he called out these administration actions is pretty striking to me nonetheless.
I'll quote Josh Barro speaking on Tim Miller's podcast and note we need to distinguish between how issue positions poll in the moment vs how issue positions poll in practice (Josh was talking about tariffs which in theory have a decent amount of normie support but as we're seeing now are not at all popular in practice. Especially if implemented in cartoonish fashion).
So this is where I think Matt's podcast co-host has it right; Dems are being way too scared of their own shadow on this issue. Especially on Abrego. Go out there, call this criminal kidnapping by in over the heads thugs (which it is) so you can actually maybe get the attention of normie voters.
To quote one of my wife's favorite shows; step your ::Bleep:: up Dems.
"Dems are being way too scared of their own shadow on this issue. Especially on Abrego."
Chris van Hollen is on his way to El Salvador right now. Is that enough? Or should we demand all 47 Democratic Senators go there?
One of the problems is what we mean by "Democrats." It's all independent actors; the party will never act in lockstep, so demands that it do so are empty.
The other problem is that every Trump outrage seems to lead us to turning our guns on our own folks. I think this is warranted when we see Democrats cozying up to Trump in nauseating ways or the leaders of the party fail in their leadership role (e.g., Schumer's comments about his Republican colleagues). But in general, let's keep our focus on the horrors perpetrated by the Trump regime and spend less time backseat driving Democratic responses.
" Or should we demand all 47 Democratic Senators go there?"
Yes. They can go in shifts.
No, they shouldn't.
Maybe each Democratic Senator could pick just one Trump outrage to be the spokesperson on. Unfortunately, we'd need 492 Senators and not 47.
I think Trumps numbers would go down if he started sending citizens who haven’t been convicted of crimes to El Salvador. If he starts sending unconvicted citizens, I’m emigrating. I’d rather live like a grad student than worry about being put in a dungeon.
"I think Trumps numbers would go down if he started sending citizens who haven’t been convicted of crimes to El Salvador."
He already has. And, yes, it is terrifying. Right now, U.S. citizens may think they're not at risk, but using El Salvador for political prisoners, in addition to immigration prisoners is going to be all too tempting.
What do you mean? Trump talked about sending US citizens to CECOT in his meeting with Bukele, and that’s alarming enough, but to my knowledge he hasn’t actually sent US citizens there? Am I wrong?
Keep in mind, you might not be able to emigrate, if a lot of other people want to emigrate at the same time. The US might not let you leave, and the destination might not let you come
“The US might not let you leave’
That is not going to happen.
I can't imagine the US just broadly preventing exits from the country. That would be a real grab-the-torches moment.
I think the more plausible issue would be some sort of asset seizure against those leaving the country on the way out.
you can stay in canada for 180 days at a time and schengen for 90
Do you think those places will be as slow as Democrats at shutting down asylum if they start getting overwhelmed?
i think i have foreign exchange, speak english and even a bit of French and wouldn’t annoy people
I can't really imagine those rules remaining in place if the US continues to abuse visiting Canadian and European nationals.
More broadly, if there is a flood of US 'refugees', the world will close it's door to US refugees. At least those places that can. The price of Venezuelization of the US.
Canada will build a border wall and make Musk pay for it.
(I’m laughing so I don’t cry)
It's not obvious to me that the El Salvador deportations will prove popular. The way I think about it is that you cannot separate Trump's approval numbers on immigration (specifically border security) from the median American's wildly incorrect ideas about the immigration system. People have this vague preference for accommodating the Good Ones while cracking down on the Bad Ones, and they are constantly surprised when the administration shows no interest in this distinction.
In fact, I think it's pretty crazy that the Administration appears to be doubling down on this, up to the point of defying the Supreme Court. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a sympathetic victim (dad, union worker, married to U.S. citizen and was deported in error) and respect for the Supreme Court still runs fairly deep. But Steve Miller is a lunatic who thinks every immigrant is a policy failure, and he's taking point on this.
It wasn't so long ago (just one presidential term!) that most voters disapproved of Trump's immigration policy. There's no reason to think he can't overreach on this, and pay for it.
Another thing DOGE has cut staff and funding dedicated to the 250th anniversary celebration. MAGA is peak unAmerican. These people hate this country.
which is a shame because literally the only good thing i was hoping for out of Trump 2 was a 250th anniversary that was actually cool with pomp and circumstance and military parades and over-the-top patriotism etc. instead of whatever weird sanded off corpo stuff the democrats would have done to mollify people who hate america. but it turns out you can't even count on Trump to performatively love america anymore!
"you can't even count on Trump to performatively love america anymore!"
Did he ever love the country? Performatively or otherwise?
He did make a big point of hugging and kissing an American flag at a rally once, does that count?
I'm not hoping for it. I would just watch the ceremony with a feeling of disgust and think of how Washington and all the Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves, because their worst nightmare has come true.
This!!!
I for one am *shocked* that he would renege on his campaign promise to throw the “most spectacular” birthday party!
(In all seriousness I think this goes to the competence point - last I checked the initiative was focused on the diverse perspectives pooh-poohed by this admin, but the party aspect sounds like something he would be very interested in. This is a weird mix of first- and second-term dynamics)
Especially as an Angeleno, I find it tragic that Trump will be President* during the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. I was really looking forward to it as a wonderful advertisement for America. Now I'm not even sure it will happen or if anyone will come.
Bastard.
* We'll see. He's very old and not in good shape. Not that Vance would be an improvement.
Are you team plaque or team platelets?
Based on his hamberder consumption levels, probably team plaque, but as a scientist I know that biology is highly unpredictable.
Nothing I can say in a public forum.
I'm sure there's some Palm Beach party planner who's going to get a fat contract to do the same work at 3x the cost.
We're at 250 already!?
I watched the Tall Ships luff their way of the Hudson for the 200th.
On a somewhat related note, I'm usually not a fan of Franklin Foer, but he was really spot on with this recent piece in The Atlantic:
Trump Has Found His Class Enemy (https://archive.ph/6lAwU)
"Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia"
It seems clear that MAGA, and apparently an enormous number of Americans (hopefully not a permanent majority) share enough distrust/loathing of the PMC that they are willing to cut off their (our?) nose to spite their face. There are a number of other comments on this post wondering/lamenting why DOGE/MAGA would destroy things (like basic science research) that have no relation to DEI and are essential to American strength and/or mankind's progress. For many of the people making decisions in this regime, those producers of knowledge are PMC or adjacent and therefore class enemies, who must be destroyed no matter the collateral damage. MAGA would rather rule over the ruins than acknowledge that those they hate contribute to making America great.
ETA: I'm currently in Osaka and visited the World Expo 2025, where the USA Pavilion was beautiful, but also a bizarrely discordant and sad vision of an America before we started racing towards the new Dark Ages of corruption and ignorance. Seriously, the theme song is crafted around the word "Together" in English, Mandarin, and Japanese, and the tour features 3 of 7 rooms about NASA, focused on SLS, Artemis, and Earth Sciences (with zero mention of Space X!), as well as a section about educational and cultural exchange programs that Rubio's proposed State Department budget would eliminate entirely (Fulbright being probably the most well known), and in fact is already subjecting to impoundment/recission.
Also, surprisingly to me, it turns out that many Japanese are most interested in the moon rock on display, because there was a similar sample (very recently collected) featured at the 1970 World Expo that was also held in Osaka.
https://www.expo2025.or.jp/en/official-participant/united-states-of-america/
I agree with your core point that there is a desire to own the libs that is animating things, but I would add another component.
People just fundamentally do not appreciate that there are a lot of basic boring things that are responsible for our prosperity. They don’t think you need basic science research, soft power, consistency, or any number of other things. They believe that America is powerful and can have only the parts that they personally like.
If this keeps marching forward, it's going to really fuck up Republican vote share in the suburbs and exurbs of cities like Houston, Atlanta, Lancaster, Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City...
It's not possible to punch you in the federal bureaucracy, me in infrastructure services, others here in research science, etc... in the face economically without sideswiping folks like my engineer cousin and his consulting accountant wife out in suburban Lancaster too.
There's no way to tailor this narrowly.
To this point, 85% of federal workers live outside of the DC metro area.
Yep, and many of them are reasonably well-compansated in local terms and patronize/spur a lot of local business.
Every year in March/April I joke to my buddy that the best day of NCAA tournament is the day Duke is eliminated. Now this extreme like of Duke (widely shared by the way) is obviously mostly a function of the fact that Duke one of the most successful and arguably the most successful Men's college basketball programs in the country since 1990*. See also why the Yankees are hated, why the Brady era Patriots are hated and why there is an increasing turn against the Kansas City Chiefs. No need to overthink this too much.
But the anti Duke hatred clearly is more than just normal sports stuff. If you know anything about Duke basketball, you know that a disproportionate number of their top players are white in a sport that is famously disproportionately made up of black players. And that even among the black players they recruit, there are "controversies" (look up "Jalen Rose comments about Grant Hill"). I've long maintained that you can't understand the dynamics of the Duke rape trial without understanding the place Duke basketball holds and Duke university holds; namely the reputation that's it's an elite rich school for rich kids.
And that's because...it basically is. Same with Harvard, same with Yale. My point with all of this I'm as pro college as they come (I think I'd have to turn in my Indian card if I wasn't) and I have some major criticisms of the way elite colleges operate. It's definitely definitely not only a right wing thing to be super critical of how universities conduct themselves (I'm looking at you Columbia).
And yet, I can say with pretty great confidence that how the Trump administration is operating with universities and basically holding ransom public funds is banana pants; especially in light of the stated reasons behind it.
And the big "TLDR" of this post is I feel pretty confident that as anti elite and anti elite college as Americans in general probably are, I feel pretty confident if normie voters knew about this issue more (like everything else it's being overshadowed by trade policy right now) they'd also consider the idea of attacking universities in this manner banana pants.
It's worth reiterating this over and over again. We really mistake the popularity of Trump (and as we can see, that "popularity" was very soft outside of his hardcore base) with popularity of Trumpism. The actual "true believers" I can't emphasize enough have some truly fringe and not at all popular policy ideas which we're seeing play out. I really really hope Democrats can recognize this and attack accordingly.
"MAGA Maoism" is the new slogan. I keep seeing it.
Goes well with “desire for cheap consumer goods is a bourgeois decadence unworthy of a Real American.”
Do you read any left-leaning fashion blogs? The amount of cognitive dissonance about wanting all these cute clothes and yet believing that consumerism is evil is boggling. And I don't care if you're buying from queer, woman-owned independent shops and paying $700 for a t-shirt. You're still consuming.
But then I'm almost as bad as Kelsey Piper about "I like cheap shit and I cannot lie."
How do you know which way a fashion blog leans?
The bloggers usually tell you in almost every post. Lots of concern about the environmental impact of fast fashion, lots of concern about about not buying from Target because they backtracked on DEI, not buying from Amazon because Bezos is an evil billionaire, etc.
The fact that they are trying to take over major research universities (put them in receivership) has been the biggest indicator yet that this is their attempt at a cultural revolution.
I might have said this previously regarding the GOP’s voter suppression strategy, but “short of going full 1970s Bihar, it’s nearly impossible to keep educated upper class voters from voting”
This is where all the things like requiring a passport to vote and saying that only people who can fill out forms in triplicate can vote backfires - that's not going to suppress the people they want it to suppress.
Workers finally saw how that other half lived on social media (esp TikTok which is more likely to show random content), and decided to take them down a notch.
What's a PMC?
Professional-Managerial Class
It means, "People Wes Yang Doesn't Like."
Professional Middle Class
it's professional-managerial class
I’m not sure - it seems a lot of the animosity is toward HR folks, teachers, government workers, healthcare workers, etc. decidedly not managerial.
Nevertheless, that’s what the acronym stands for.
I don’t think the animosity is to healthcare workers who work standing up - it’s against all the workers whose job involves making other people fill out paperwork, which counts as “managerial” in the relevant sense, even if they people at the DMV or whatever aren’t literally managing workers.
"the laptop class"
Those are the "professionals"
The original essay that coined the term by the Ehrenreich's included pretty much all knowledge workers. Its originally a Marxist term looking to update Marxist classes for the 20th century but in practise people now just use it as an insult for any white collar worker to try and conflate them with middle managers.
If only we had a parliamentary system and could Liz Truss this situation.
Seriously. MY's pointed out the flaws of our Madisonian system before. It's already failed completely once, and it's held together for 160 years due to a combination of norms and the parties overlapping ideologically for most of that time.
Also, arguably for the first half of this period, the world just wasn't sufficiently dangerous and complex for a suboptimal constitution to seriously harm a big, rich country protected by oceans. And after 7 December 1941, foreign affairs concentrated minds enough to paper over the flaws for another half century.
With a parliamentary system the Civil War would have come earlier most likely since starting in 1820 the north had the numbers in the House of Representatives. Starting with passage of the Tallmadge Amendment, which would have banned slavery in Missouri, the North/South divide escalated and the southern slavery interests became obsessed with the Senate.
How would a parliamentary system have prevented the Civil War?
Gotten rid of Buchanan before he could cause further damage.
I'm a bit skeptical of this - wasn't the main mechanism for damage that Buchanan did just continuing to stall and avoid confronting the divisive issues that Congress was torn about?
Parliamentary system would probably made it happen sooner, unless one is imagining a non-federal system. But there wasn't a path to create that in 1787.
Sorry guys, the HR lady REALLY REALLY annoyed me, and she's surely a Democrat, so I had to pull the lever for Trump this time. That'll show her!
I know this is sarcasm, but of all the reasons cited for Trump II this is the most baffling one from my experience. I've worked in tech for 15 years at companies big and small, and the only notable interactions I've had with HR are at the beginning and end of my tenure. Every HR training I've ever had has been a 15-30 minute online click thru CYA checkbox. Hell, most small businesses don't even have an HR department! What am I missing?
People are sticking it to people that they "meet" on the internet in various forms.
Yeah, I'm guessing a lot of the young pro-Trump dudes complaining about HR ladies are actually NEETs.
My experience has been that everything involving performance management or hiring everywhere I've worked has been made much worse by HR's involvement. HR departments believe in their soul that they should decide how these things are done for technical staff, so a huge amount of employee time is wasted on trying to fit a square peg into the round hole of things HR can pretend to understand.
I've never seen this as a political divide, though. I'm quite confident my median coworker is to the left of the median HR employee (easy when you work with other phd-havers).
At universities, I get the sense that the HR people are much deeper into the ineffective woke signaling than the professors are - that doesn't mean anything about who is farther left, but it does mean something about who symbolizes "leftness" more explicitly.
I've participated in a couple of HR interviews that were centered around managing problem employees, (staff vs. staff, so CYA was risky in both directions). These managers knew how to conduct an objective investigation. And then, it was an HR employee who came to tell me that a friend I had recommended for a job, and who had gotten it, had died suddenly from an unknown cardiac condition. But that was local government (some of those slacker public servants...)
We did have a diversity training session back in the day, but some of the other pre-Woke stuff was fun. I got to mentor a woman mechanic, disabled from service in Iraq, when she went to back to college.
I can see this - performance reviews can feel like a waste of time and they're always switching up the format. But I've always viewed that as HR just executing demands from the C suite, just like I wouldn't blame the HR person who lays me off.
I wouldn't advocate blaming any random line employee, but performance reviews &c are worse than they would otherwise be because of the success of HR as an institution in seizing control of things that they should not control (and the resulting need to make, or at least pretend to make, things legible to HR).
You joke, but we have definitely allowed the government to control employees through employment law
All the HR commentary is gender and class ("email jobs") resentment, captured in a pithy trend. Most people, including most of the commenters on this thread, have very limited understanding of what HR does. People at big companies associate their interactions with HR around frustrating access to benefits and/or mandatory trainings - of course they have a negative perspective on it.
Only a minor point but the self-congratulatory tweets (and public statements) that the Houthi bombings 'were a success' the day after the bombing when the measure of success was if the Houthi's would stop attacking shipping is a sign of dumbo ill-disciplined thinking. If they knew anything about the Houthis they'd have known they kept on fighting after extenisve bombing from the Saudis. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Trump has put into high positions people for whom disciplined thinking is not thier strong point.
You see this reflected in Hegseth's total pea-brained approach to rebranding the DOD. Everyone is a "warfighter". There's no room for anyone who isn't a manly white man who would make a good action star. There's no focus on strategic effectiveness. It's all just tactical -- did we kill the people we wanted to kill? Did we blow up the things we wanted to blow up? This is the problem with putting some random grunt who became a fox news host in charge, he genuinely has never thought about war in terms of political ends in his life, he has only ever thought about it in terms of carrying out specific operations with targets who need to be eliminated.
All tactics, no strategy
When someone makes a move
Of which we don't approve
Who is it that always intervenes?
UN and OAS
They have their place I guess
But first -- send the Marines
We'll send them all we've got
John Wayne and Randolph Scott
Remember those exciting fight scenes?
To the shores of Tripoli
But not to Mississippoli
What do we do? We send the Marines!
I really really hate that all of Tom Lehrer's songs are relevant again.
Basically if you took everything wrong with Robert McNamara and implemented the inverse in the dumbest possible way
I was dismayed to find Hegseth's book coming up at the very top of a Libby search (if you don't filter, the search sorts by "Most Recent") Yep, it's called "The War on Warriors".
You’d think a significant slice of the business community (and their representatives) would care about longer term threats to the American economy and market confidence. Lax SEC regulations and enforcement, degraded economic statistics and a more political central bank being among such areas of concern. I wonder what stories they’re telling themselves about this.
We are! Bond yields are going up for a reason!
Are they? Lots of noise, but 10 years have been pretty flat for a while now:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DGS10
There's a lot of movement behind that number, yields are flat despite the stock market's implosion (no flight to safety this time), and there is almost certainly insufficient liquidity to clear the market if the Admin really does something stupid and starts a stampede.
Like, for instance, blowing out the deficit by another few trillion over the next decade.
Are you assuming they don't care because they're not publicly saying "this is f---ing insane"?
My view is that the business community is probably horrified but muzzled. If you run a business that is affected by tariffs, are you obligated to brown-nose the administration and bite your tongue to try to get a carve out for your supply chain?
Also the deafening silence from their political representatives who should theoretically have more freedom to speak out.
"Deafening silence" is dead on. I think it's the same "gag incentives" problem. Republican house members mostly face _primary_ threats, and Trump can credibly screw them in the primary, which will be dominated by hardcore MAGA voters.
Right on cue https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/business/economy/trump-jerome-powell-fed.html
One of the macro-level things that really scares me is that it would seem to me that in order to disincentivize future corruption and straight-up flouting of judge's orders, some of the bad actors in the current administration need to have the hammer dropped on them, and HARD, and with polarization being what it is now, I don't see how you do that without it being seen as explicitly political retribution.
The problem with this administration's naked corruption and politicization of the various federal agencies and civil service is that the solution to fix it after he's out of office is basically to do the exact same thing. And I worry we fall into a cycle of every new administration replacing the political appointees of the previous guy or gal.
Like, Trump has created the deep state that he always bitched about, and I don't see how you get out of the doom loop.
You moderate, win a whopping victory, and then call the most reasonable part of the other side in for some private discussions, with two options:
1. We don’t do anything radical aside from raising taxes enough to close the deficit and fixing Social Security, otherwise we just try to reset things to 2024, and in exchange you enthusiastically endorse us as we go for broke trying to convict and imprison every Trump appointee and associate who did anything even remotely illegal.
2. We pass a federal redirecting package and gerrymander to the point where you’d need 60% of the popular vote to win the House, split every reliably blue state in 2-5 and readmit them, and pack the Supreme Court, *then* prosecute the entire admin and trump’s associates, not to mention looking extraordinarily closely at every business dealing and tax filing you and every one of your large donors have made.
The man ruined your party and gave us an opening to make that permanent, you hate him and want this to never happen again. We’re willing to forebear from burying you permanently… Do you want tit-for-tat authoritarianism that we’re going to play to win, or a functioning country?
#2 would ensure that I never supported your party no matter what else I agreed with.
If we don't do #1, to the fucking hilt, then the GOP is just going to do this shit again and make it stick next time, assuming they even fail in 2028.
I am more than willing to see the Democrats *threaten* #2 behind closed doors in pursuit of #1.
Should they do it if the GOP calls their bluff? I genuinely don't know. The GOP is bringing us closer to the brink every single goddamned time they have power and if it comes right down to it I would probably rather fuck them over first.
I support #1 as long as they are actual crimes, not twisting of statues to go after political enemies (see the NY prosecution of Trump)
Sure. Do we think there's a shortage of real crime to go after this time?
No, I'm sure there is plenty. I just want to make sure we aren't twisting the justice system to go after people we don't like.
This all is predicated on whether they are willing to hand over the car keys ever again.
I threw out the requisite sheet anchor to windward with "assuming they even fail in 2028," but in all honesty, I don't think they actually *can* steal an election, assuming we can win convincingly. We just need to avoid reprising 2018 and 2020, taking their stupidity as license to sprint left, in 2026 and 2028.
I agree with you on this, but I took David's argument as "If we can't reestablish basic norms of decency and governance, then we can't count on what _you_ will do next time, and we'd better do what we can stop stop it now"
I'm not sure that they should do #2 even if #1 fails, but maybe it's ok as a credible behind the scenes threat because #1 seems like a really good thing.
Would Democratic one-party rule be a bad thing compared to a competitive electoral democracy? Definitely, no doubt in my mind.
Would it be a bad thing compared to Republican one-party rule? I don't buy that for a minute. This has been epically disastrous and it's only going to get worse, and that's with the prospect of a free and fair general election staring the GOP in the face.
If that's the choice, then yes, "do unto others before others can do unto you" needs to be the rule of the day, and your and Mathew's votes be damned.
We can worry about how to turf the Democrats back out of power in 20 years, once the GOP is a shattered husk.
#2 seems like a not-good idea, and even seems really tough.
Most blue states are basically one large blue metro area and a bunch of red rural areas (e.g. IL, CO) or already small (e.g. VT, HI). Splitting these up is a tough order. California is the only blue state that you could easily split up and end up with two or more reasonable blue states.
DC statehood seems like the only viable way to add Democratic seats.
You can absolutely split MA, WA, MD, IL, and CO in 2 each while maintaining strong current partisan leans in both parts.
And CA could yield 5 blue states easily.
With DC, that'd be 10.
This is obviously not going to happen, but I see no other way to break the populist right other than to win big and then offer the choice of the olive branch or the mailed fist.
Getting two blue states from MA/WA/IL/CO would require extremely weird obviously gerrymandered borders that go through the middle of major metro areas. That is a nakedly partisan step that would make governance worse in each of these states.
I have to think that if the Democrats get enough power to do this, they have enough power to just abolish the Senate or turn it into something like the UK's House of Lords. That seems like it accomplishes about the same goals, but better.
I don’t think the Senate is going anywhere, but hopefully they can talk enough GOP Senators and Reps into the necessary clean-up to give it a bipartisan imprimatur and the resulting legitimacy without needing to play this kind of hardball.
First things first, win the fucking elections, by margins that leave no doubt that we won and have a remit to clean this fucking mess up.
Yep. Best I have is that first-order effects (enforcing laws is good) are more important than second-order effects (enforcing laws may lead to retribution later).
I'm *really* not convinced about the whole "Trumpist deep state" thing. Outside of political appointees (who mostly turn over each change of administration anyway), what fraction of various administrative agencies' staffs have actually been replaced by/converted to hardcore MAGA supporters? I suspect it is very, very tiny and that the vast majority of people working in these places are the exact same people who were working there without complaint in 2024 and will be quite happy to get back to a more sane administration.
A lot of career people are being driven out of government, probably forever. Including a lot of experienced and competent people who had been frustrated by the kludge that isn’t being fixed in the dumpster fire.
I agree with you, but as Kenny said, the issue isn't who is leaving; it's who is being hired. I'm not aware that there's any evidence of large-scale hiring of new, let alone specifically new pro-Trump/MAGA, people to fill empty positions. This is where the entire DOGE project appears to, if anything, be actively preventing, if not sabotaging, efforts to ideologically shift the administrative state in a pro-Trump/MAGA direction -- the mass firings of the past three months appear to have made with near total disregard to the political leanings of the people who were fired and it appears there's effectively a hiring freeze for most of the federal government. The only place where there seems to be much in the way of political manipulation of non-appointees is in the military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, which is concerning, but even there it doesn't seem like the sort of activity that would fundamentally convert those parts of government into fifth columnists against a Democratic President in 2028.
There's a lot of people being driven out. I'm not sure if they've been replaced by new people being driven in, or if there's just a whole lot of empty seats and unused computers.
There's currently a federal hiring freeze so no one can be replaced. Not sure how DOGE is getting around this.
I'd be happy to seem some "administration officials" getting hauled off to a night in jail by U.S. Marshalls on a contempt charge: just the experience of the knock on the door, the handcuffs, and the whole jail check-in routine. Maybe the Marshalls could even use a sledgehammer on someone's car.
The way out relies on Trump's popularity being absolutely in the toilet by the tail end of '28, which seems more than plausible if he continues as he's begun. Presume that Democrats sweep the Presidency and both chambers of Congress.
Then sit down with moderate Republicans in Congress and propose:
1. A bipartisan Congressional probe, similar to January 6th, to identify the worst actors and refer them to Justice for prosecution. Moderate Republicans agree to publicly support this effort and take a leading role. Democrats agree to limit prosecution to egregious offenders and not the rank and file.
2. Reforms to limit the President's powers. The substance of these reforms will depend on Trump's worst abuses. Republicans agree to treat this seriously and make a real push to get it over the line, even to the point of Constitutional amendments. Democrats agree to support reforms even though the first President constrained by them will be the newly elected Democrat.
3. Agreement by everybody to sideline the Freedom Caucus types on the right and the activist types on the left and make Congress work again. The more Congress shirks its constitutional tasks, the more the Presidency grows to fill the vacuum; laws and courts can slow that growth but not stop it. This will probably require some fixes to how primary elections are handled, which is a good idea anyway.
On the topic of tax compliance, ordinary people, whose income is entirely or almost entirely W-2's and 1099's, don't have much opportunity to cheat - everything is already reported to the IRS and checked through automated means.
The people who do have opportunities to cheat are the people with lots of complex investments and business income. So, you end up with this two-tiered system where normal people support the country with taxes, while wealthy investors treat the IRS as a "pay what you wish" donation system - a system which is totally unfair for hard-working people that have to pay more in taxes to compensate for others paying less.
I mean kind of. Wealthy businesspeople can find ways to do things legally.
The largest group of people with opportunities to cheat and who actually do so are small businesses with tight margins. Your local restaurants are almost certainly cheating on their taxes.
Which is why switching to a consumption tax is the way to go. Much harder to cheat.
You're right, but the problem with a consumption tax is that it's regressive, because the poor spend a much larger proportion of their income on consumer goods than the rich.
I'd be up for a consumption tax as a PARTIAL replacement for an income tax if it exempted some necessities, like some simple foodstuffs and, say, baby formula and diapers. And I'd be ok with higher "sin taxes" (on alcohol, cigarettes, processed sugar).
Yes that's why I was a big fan of the Fair Tax. A consumption tax that untaxed everything up the to poverty line. Basically they sent every family a check at the start of each month to cover the tax that a family their size would spend on their purchases up to the poverty line.
Also a big YES to taxes on sugar (and other high calorie sugar substitutes). That and banning junk food purchases and soda purchases with food stamps
Ordinary people who don't follow these things with a razor-sharp eye are extremely confused, and rumors abound. My sister in Florida says a lot of people are under the impression that they didn't need to file tax returns this year. Most of them will probably lose out on refunds.
So, this is especially for those who say "Shhhh, don't talk about immigration, it's a losing issue for Democrats": Jennifer Sura, Kilmar Abrego Garcia's wife, has made a public statement:
"As we continue through Holy Week, my heart aches for my husband, who should have been here leading our Easter prayers... Our family is torn apart during this scary time and our children miss their dad so much."
A reminder that it's easy to get into strategizing and focus-group-brain and "will talking about Abrego Garcia help us win over a 29-year-old non-college-educated Rogan-pilled white man in suburban Arizona?" But we're talking about a real live human being who has suffered horrific injustice, who has a wife and children who miss him and must be terrified of what his happening to him. I think it's important to remember that.
A quote I keep coming back to is -- it takes a generation to grow a forest and a day to burn it down. What these idiots are doing is lazy. Musk craves "hard work" ... this is the opposite, this is easy, he should be embarrassed by their efforts, and somehow even worse -- they're *increasing* our debt burden as our risk premium keeps rising. Somehow our democracy has elected idiots and our elected idiots have assembled an even worse collection of below replacement-level talent than I imagined possible. I would gladly turn our government over to McKinsey tomorrow and I hate McKinsey.
Another question I keep wrestling with is whether I'm more embarrassed now to be an American or after Bush II launched his Iraq war and the whole thing turned out to be a lie. I'm still going with the Iraq war being the worst political experience of my lifetime but the scariest part is we're not even 10% of the way through this one.
I've noticed a pretty widespread aversion to the idea of "hard work" has taken root in our society. Obviously this manifests on the left as r/antiwork but on the right, the entire "grindset" mentally seems focused primarily on pump and dump schemes and passive income grifts. DOGE just cutting and burning and the documented use of ChatGPT to make policy is a piece with that.
Eric Schmidt has complained about this, but I’m not sure it’s on the record anywhere
“Somehow our democracy has elected idiots”
I seem to remember you mentioned on a previous thread that several people in your family voted for the Orange One because they were pissed off at trans issues in public schools?
There’s no “somehow” about this, like, “Somehow Palpatine returned.” People chose this.
Yeap. My wife voted for him and a bunch of neighbors and a bunch of my Atlanta friends. Obviously, the "somehow" is how the democrats lost their Obama loving voters. Those are the details that matter.
Do any of them express any regrets, or was sticking it to the trans activists and illegal immigrants worth it?
One probably does but he's also lost like $70m in the past 6 weeks. The rest definitely not. This Pritzker quote was getting fired around just this morning:
“Working with Democrats in the General Assembly, we’ve made Illinois the most LGBTQ+ friendly state in the country…We brought inclusive LGBTQ+ curriculum into our schools so that all students now learn about the contributions of queer and transgender trailblazers…The State Board of Education is implementing gender-inclusive policies to ensure that our schools are welcoming and affirming.”
https://wirepoints.org/pritzker-and-johnsons-obsession-with-a-racialized-sexualized-politicized-school-curriculum-wirepoints/
I think having kids books available that, for instance, feature families with two dads or two moms _is_ a good thing.
But calling loud attention to that is probably _not_ a good idea. And marriage equality (still) enjoys majority support.
I think everyone I know would even cheer on loudly calling attention to books featuring two dads or two moms. That's awesome. What everyone seems aligned around is introducing gender theory to K-2nd graders is a terrible idea, no different from religious indoctrination.
Yes but of course the problem is using tax payer money to push that agenda in public schools.
The Iraq war was just stupid warmongering - happens throughout history. (Well, and Abu Ghraib, which is an indicator of the kind of worst-case cruelty and collective hatefulness that we're seeing crop up again in the way immigrants are being treated.)
"In the short term, more people will just get away with cheating on their taxes". Wealthy people, Matt. we all know this, but you need to say it clearly. This administration is going to come down hard on some random schmo underpaying taxes, but Peter Theil makes some dubious claims? Well, there's no resources to investigate that now, so he can buy Senate seats and cut his own taxes.
"Trump’s supporters know that he faces a lot of over-the-top criticism", do you mean this as "the supporters view it as 'over the top criticism'? Because all the criticism that has been directed at Trump is spot on, and understated, if anything. That obese, sundowning old man has done more damage to the Federal Government in 90 days than the USSR, CCP, or domestic terrorists could have ever hoped to accomplish.
The most egregious tax fraud is committed by small business owners.
LOL. I love how you follow "all criticism has been understated" with "Trump has done more damage than the USSR, CCP or terrorists could ever hope to accomplish"
Ah, yes, a master class in "understatement".
I don't totally agree with Brian, but I don't think there's any contradiction in what he said. He's clearing giving an example of what he believes to be accurate, non-understated criticism.
Is he substantially wrong?
This is shaping up to at least equal the level of self-harm that Joseph McCarthy inflicted, and I don’t think it’s unlikely it’ll surpass it many fold.
Yes, he is substantially and completely wrong.
The USSR, the CCP and domestic terrorists "could have EVER HOPED to accomplish" (emphasis added)? I think their hopes were pretty high in terms of damage to the Federal Government.
I guess the question you need to ask yourself is could a common enemy (i.e., the USSR, the CCP, a terrorist org.) ever push Canada to sever defense ties with the US -- which is happening right now -- because of Trump's stupid obsession with this 51st state nonsense and then the tariffs? I don't think so. Our relationship with Canada is now irreparably harmed. The USSR or the CCP could never do that.
EDIT: I just used Canada as an example since they're our #1 trading partner and we literally can't operate our cars without their heavy crude because our entire refinery network is built on it. But also read every trading partner's statement about how the US is now seen as an untrustworthy partner. Again ... the USSR or the CCP could never inflict this amount of damage.
The comment was not what they could have accomplished, but what they could have **ever hoped** to accomplish.
I thought it was funny following his statement that "...all the criticism that has been directed at Trump is spot on, and understated, if anything"
I got it. My comment is just supporting Brian and other David R that I don't actually think they could have "ever hoped" for more. This is their *dream* scenario. We're self-imploding while severing our global alliances. I don't think this scenario was even on their strat. plan because it was too unreasonable to consider.
As Marxists they were/are gritty realists. Not given in to utopian dreams.
I have always understood the phrase in the colloquial sense, so... I guess if you want to be very literal, you're technically correct?
i think it seems reasonable to say that donald trump has done more damage to the US Federal Government than the USSR, CCP, or terrorists! it's just that i don't expect any of these entities to do very much damage to the US Federal Government...
Also and only if we're going to get wrapped around a pedantic axle with "hoped" ... they couldn't have "hoped" for "more damage" because any more damage that what we've just done in 8 weeks would be constrained by Mutually Assured Destruction. This is our democracy self-imploding. There's no way this scenario was even on the CCP's strat planning roadmap. It's their dream scenario.
I hope they're not stupid enough to have this as their dream scenario. If the global order falls apart when they haven't the clout to skin it and wear it themselves, the CCP is going to be hurls out of power within a decade as everyone walls off everyone else and their model implodes under its own internal contradictions.
I don't think that the most probable endgame here is the utter collapse of global goods trade and a bunch of continental autarky initiatives, but the Party cannot survive if it turns in that direction.
He kinda is, though.
Not necessarily. It’s not that hard to fake some itemized deductions, not count a tuition benefit as income, claim a tax credit more than once, etc. You don’t need to be wealthy for any of this - I personally know how to do it myself. I just haven’t done it.
I think the Trump administration is sufficiently corrupt that they will also not mind if Joe Schmo also cheats on his taxes, but obviously a gutted IRS will only be able to go after small fry.
These observations will eventually need to filter down into the Democrats’ messaging. They need to stop calling Trump a tyrant or complaining about the existence of billionaires. The real attack line is that these people in office are utterly incompetent.
It would be nice if our Democratic representatives consisted of actually competent people with demonstrated experience running organizations, instead of the front of the class to Harvard Law to the state legislature track that most of them came from.
Like it or not, Musk and Trump get a ton of rope because they've actually run things.
The crazy thing about this answer though is that Trump hasn't really run things well. Both from an outcomes (casinos fail) and from what I could tell (prior to 2016) from his process (watching the first 2 seasons of The Apprentice).
Elon at least has had excellent outcomes in the past. I have no insight into whether that was because of or in spite of his ability to manage (vs inspire) but in his case I think it was reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt prior to 2024.
Musk, yes. The biggest thing Trump has run is a make-work scheme for bankruptcy lawyers.
Sure, but as we know, the Apprentice made a him into a fake successful businessman in the eyes of many.
...into the ground.
Kamala Harris ran the California Attorney Generals office, that's real experience running a big organization. Trump and Musk ran private businesses, where you can take a wrecking ball to a company and if it loses money you write it off your taxes and face zero personal consequences. Trump can get infinite do-overs no matter how many companies he bankrupts and still be a billionaire. The government doesn't work that way, which is precisely why Doge has behaved so stupidly.
If you want to compare running the CA AG's office (5K employees) to running Tesla (125K employees), you're welcome to, but I'm not sure that bolsters any subsequent argument.
Once you get above a certain number it's essentially the same. It's not like Musk is personally managing 125k employees, he's managing a room of administrators about the same size as what Harris would be managing.
They are obviously very different kinds of jobs, but my point is that someone with government experience has better qualifications because the role and function of government is nothing like the role and function of private enterprise. Companies get to make reckless decisions because they operate in a stable rules-based environment created by the government to encourage their creativity. Musk and Trump don't understand that they are now the stewards of that stability, not the creative destruction, and this is precisely why Doge and reckless tariff implementation have been (and will continue to be) so damaging. Running a government requires coalition management, stakeholder coordination, understanding the balance of competing interests, that kind of thing. It is in every way different than running a company.
agreed. But for that to actually work, you need to get Democrats to demonstrate themselves actual competence in governing.
So blue cities and states where they have absolute power (see CA) need to get their shit together.
Probably need to pair that attack line with an example of resulting corruption to make it break through
But... he is a tyrant? What do you call a leader who publicly muses about sending US citizens to a shithole prison on foreign soil where habeas corpus doesn't apply? Whose DOJ tells SCOTUS to take a long walk off a short pier?
Do you trust him to only send convicted violent criminals to CECOT?
[ThisIsThePartWhereWeThrowBackOurHeadsInLaughter.gif]
I didn't say he isn't a tyrant. I said that this messaging hasn't been working.
Dems ran with "democracy is on the line" in 2024 and then lost the popular vote. I live in PA surrounded by tons of moderate swing voter types, and during the election I didn't hear a single one of these people say anything about democratic norms or authoritarianism. When they talked about reasons not to vote for Trump, it had to do with him being a liar or an asshole, having personality traits that are unappealing in a leader. Or being too ignorant and uninformed to effectively run the government.
Por que no los dos?
What quantitative indicators are there for the collapse of these government functions? I'm particularly interested in ways to measure data collection degradation and reductions in tax compliance. I don't have a strong prior on what sort of lags there are, but I think it would be very helpful to have some things to point to later this year and during the leadup to the midterms.
The craziest thing is Trump is only at minus 5 in approval. I think he’s now ahead of where he was at this point in his first term.
The most reassuring thing is the fall in Trumps approval has been concentrated among young voters.
I agree it reflects badly on the American electorate but the raised prices from the tariffs are yet to fully arrive at the shops. Then things should get really nasty in the polls. We Australians will be watching it with popcorn and soft drinks at the ready.
The majority of GOP voters have been eating this shit and calling it salad for so long that there's no turning back for them. They are fully in the cult now. Trump won't dip below 35% no matter how bad things get in the economy. He would have to personally fly Joe Rogan to CECOT or announce a White House DEI program.
Yeah, but I’ve noticed my Republican work colleagues and FB friends going from posting pro-Trump memes and bringing up politics without prompting to no more memes, liking MY anti-Trump posts, saying things like “we should find a way to come together”, or just not responding to an obvious political prompt.
This is how it’ll go. It’ll never be a full swing.
Absolutely, and our job is to show respect and compassion for these people (the 10-15% of the electorate available to swing our way), and try to bring them into the fold.
The republicans on our management committee were really quiet today when we discussed cutting budgeted spending for 2025 by 10% as a defensive measure given the economic trajectory and suddenly dry pipeline of new business. The impacts of these meetings haven't hit the guys on the ground yet, but they will feel the canceled projects scheduled to start this summer.
This stuns me given how hard cutting FDA funding loans have hit farmers
There just aren't that many farmers.
That’s very true, and most are pretty rich.
It shocks me that Trump's ratings haven't fallen on a cliff, but the trend line is still encouraging. He's losing ~0.5 points week in, week out. No reason to think that won't continue. He's lost about 14 points in net approval ratings since inauguration.
I'd like it to be faster, but it does bode well for where we'll be in, say, June in time for his big birthday military parade.
Wealthy Boomer retirees are going to ride pretty no matter what. People in their twenties can surely see they're about to run out of road.
If bond holders think we cannot pay back our debts for reasons such as destroying our ability to collect taxes and demanding the Fed monetize the debt (Powell's term will be coming up and Trump is going to try to appoint a sycophant in May 2026.)
I was thinking of things outside the financial markets, but I hope that people wake up when this happens (it doesn't seem like an if anymore conditional on congressional Republicans continuing to back Trump on everything).
Nixon tried this it… didn’t go well
But that’s kinda good news, it happened in living memory and not like in 1828
You mean it happened in the “late 1900s?”
Im not sure that’s living memory.
That’s a big part of the problem-the cuts are to the methods of data collection. E.g., we won’t know much about reduced tax compliance for years.
This is my worry. I do not want to wait for Argentina/Greece level tax noncompliance to have some sort of smoking gun and am not confident that we can fix things at that point.
We will if there’s a drop in revenue out of step with GDP and tax rates.
Not exactly. It will take more robust data, and tax filings are inherently delayed by about a year to begin with. Add in complications like capital gains being timed based on realization dates, etc., and it will take years to quantify in any meaningful, reliable way.
How do we even know what total revenue is, let alone GDP?
Agreed, but it will take time to see many of the effects, probably years.
Surprising that the cut in science funding did not figure more prominently. Of course we cant draw a line from NSF/NIH grants and any particular productivity improvement in industry or medical but we have the sense at least that there is improvement. But is this true about educational research? Where was the research that the mayor of DC could use to push back against closing schools?
Given that mass closures during the pandemic were kind of a novel situation, I don’t think you could have had a large body of research on that. Going forward, it would have been nice to have NAEP scores for more than just half a decade post-pandemic to continue to quantify learning loss. Seems that may not happen since so much of the staff has been cut.
There ought to be information about the educational effect of closure. The reason of for the closure ought not to matter. CDC should have given schools the information on the benefits of closure and to combine with the information on costs so that mayors and school boards coud make rational decisions, not get pushed around by frightened parents and teachers’ unions.
iirc Emily Oster had exactly this problem when she was trying to get data about school closures during the pandemic. There was no national data set and some states didn’t even collect that data. She ended up calling district offices at some point just to figure out if they were opened or not. I just don’t think the idea of mass closures was on anyone’s radar in, like, 2015.
The difference between Republican and democratic voting bases feels so big.
Like democrats get in power and they can’t be liberal enough. Republicans can’t be too reckless.
IMO it's because Democrats don't do anything that's not a reaction to Trump anymore. Biden proved that in a few ways, most glaringly and destructively with immigration policy.
I think that Democrats do things that aren't reactions to Trump all the time! It's that the media and the base just don't care. Biden passed an enormously transformative legislative agenda that almost no one even knew about. My prog friends were still talking about how the Democrats never did anything on climate change even after Biden torched almost all his political capital in one big climate change bonfire.
Turns out fighting climate change increases inflation. I mean, it doesn’t have to, but it does under the Democratic Party’s preferred policies.
As Matt always accurately points out inflation fell after the Inflation Reduction Act (climate change bill) was passed.
Per Wikipedia, the law took effect in August, 2022. Inflation peaked in June 2022. The Fed started increasing interest rates in Q1 2022.
If Matt was claiming causality, he was lying. If he was eliding the truth for political propaganda purposes, whatever.
I don’t think Matt or Andrew J were claiming causality. Rather, Andrew is pointing to evidence refuting your claim that Biden’s climate change actions (in this case, the IRA) increased inflation. Clearly, per the timeline you cited, the IRA did not increase inflation.
Well, the point is that he didn't NEED to do that-he went much harder on that issue in reaction to Trump's complete denial of it. Likely that was an overreaction to the lefty pressure as well, but still driven into overdrive as a Trump reaction. I will never believe he "torched his political capital" over it otherwise, considering the salience of it for the average voter. It was Trump driven.
"We were really, truly spending a lot of money on the wrong things .... Most of the money, in fact, was dedicated to “other stuff.”"
An administration that looks the other way, and refuses to deal with problems like this, can't exactly be described as responsible either; it's just a more slow-motion form of irresponsibility. And as with Trump and tariffs, this is just one example; there were plenty of others like it.
I don't think they were looking the other way because they did not think it was a problem. It funneled money to the people they wanted money funneled to. Just like pretending the Iraq invasion was a failure when it was actually a stunning success in every possible way: the people who were supposed to make money from it made money from it.
Bidens lack of interest in the financial regulatory agencies and the backroom deal he cut with Warren meant you had some real ideologues coming out of the woodwork to run the agencies and it was really, really bad news. It’s probably not worth anything politically, but the appointments at FIRREA were terrible and soured the business community not just because the appointments were broadly opposed to business and did not believe in markets as a way to allocate resources (deadly serious about this), but because quite a few of the people (not Khan) were deeply stupid and adversarial.
Anyway, just an example of an own goal that was not at all a reaction to Trump, and kind of killed the dem relationship with industry.
And thus the stock markets tanked and profits went through the floor under the horrific Biden/Warren regime.
As we found under Obama, rich businessmen will *always* hate it when Democrats are in power. You can't satisfy them.
Eh, this is too reductive. Biden actually wasn’t even all that anti-Trump.
He continued not just the China tariffs but also some of the Canada ones!
Anti-China trade is probably now the only bipartisan consensus issue in the US. It's like the USSR defense threat in the 80s.
I think Matt may have mentioned this before, but the GOP is a lot more homogenous both demographically and philosophicaly. Dems are made up of much more varied coalitions and a lot of them don't get along very well. That gives Republicans much more leeway. Unfortunately that's just the nature of things, it will never be fair.