“In an earlier iteration of Trump scandals, I would have leapt to the conclusion that his refusal to follow the Pence/Biden model is a clear sign that he’s guilty of something darker and more nefarious. Which he might be. But having seen a few of these play out now, I’m open to the possibility that he’s just a piece of shit scumbag.”
This insight reminds me of the Iraq-WMD question. For people who really cared whether Iraq actually had WMDs, it seemed really important that Hussein was trying so hard at such great cost to prevent weapons inspections. It must be because he has the weapons, right? Actually, no!
So on the same day that headlines over your bad man’s $5 million Ukraine bribes finally show up, you highlight how the other guy is bad.
The main takeaway should be that crazy times have made us embrace horrible people as our front runners, but you’re smart enough to know better than to ad hominem the opposition. Hunter Biden has never been a target, his millions of dollars in influence peddling for the “big guy” is the target. This is naked, partisan politics on full display in the Slow Boring. Next you’ll be writing yet another article on how impeaching Trump for JB’s Ukraine corruption wasn’t justified enough or some such nonsense.
Agree all around. Catharsis, lol. Except that it was ever “cringe” to call out the obvious truth, dangerous not to imo.
Ruthlessness and refusal to play by the rules are linked of course - the so-called dark triad of personality triad linked to antisocial behavior - narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These have been fairly conclusively linked to authoritarian personality in recent psychological research. These are all linked in that they psychologically justify domination and abusive behaviors.
Of course the other side of “he’s our bulldog” is that one half of the political psyche is sicking an attack dog on the other half. Hopefully the law will finally contain this man so he can’t do any more damage.
On the topic of grift, what stands in the way of the DNC at some deniable arms length creating a Trump Defense Fund that channels 99% of the amounts raised to the Biden campaign?
"the cons are much closer to the seats of power on the GOP side. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the core reason is Trump himself"
I think this gets the causality backwards. Republicans got Trump because the conservative movement* has been, at best, "grifter adjacent" as far back as William F Buckley. It's hard to call out Trump for being a grifter when your entire media apparatus is built upon gold bug scams and fake pills.
* I would argue this is distinct from the Republican party but still a substantial portion of it.
But this does come too close to messages that tell you how to "feel" rather he than information abut what to do. Maybe it is a conceit of old age, but I already know how I feel.
I'd like to know what Matt thinks about what I believe is the one good thing that can be said about Trump: namely, that he seems to be very averse to getting into a war. And that is unusual for an authoritarian. I was favorably impressed reading about one situation where the military presented Trump with a proposed retaliatory action in Iran that Trump rejected because he felt the estimated Iranian casualty number (250 or 350 if memory serves) was excessive. (Of course Trump being Trump that might not have been the real reason for his decision.)
Of course the Rump is a bad person but to say he’s bad for conservatives flies in the face of the huge corrupt tax cut he pushed through, the huge, corrupt, covid bailouts he engineered for wealthy-enough businesses and landlords who can afford professional HR staff to navigate the application processes, and the huge, corrupt judges and justices he packed into the courts.
I agree with a majority of this and think there are two important takeaways:
1) Precision. The people who will decide if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee are ultimately not NYT writers, NYT readers, someone on MSNBC, a grad student, or other people on Twitter that conservatives publicly disagree with, but *people who vote in the Republican primary.* Curiously, I notice this essay lacks any advice to the reader on how they too can become a voter in the Republican primary. I think this piece would have a stronger conclusion if it noted this odd low turnout primary process is pretty much identical between the parties, and you can in fact easily enter them in many states, sometimes requiring registering in a party ahead of time but sometimes not. Who should you consider voting for in the 2024 Republican primary? It's a good question to consider when acknowledging voters in the Republican primary will decide if Trump is the nominee. But those voters are also very easily us. So that matters to us, just as much as the correct abstract statement "Republicans will decide." Because given the actual rules of primaries, there's no clear difference between them and us.
2) Grace. While I agree with Matt that politicians who win elections regularly are effective when they are banal and polite, I think to frame it entirely in terms of ruthlessness is a mistake. Grace is its own virtue, and one of the worst developments of the Trump years is almost everyone slowly agreeing with Trump that winning in national politics is ultimately all that matters. It would be terrible if center-left people who write for politics for a living took popularism seriously and refused to share their thoughts unless it helped Democrats win elections. Thankfully, almost all of them don't. I think we should try to cultivate grace in our personal lives not for power but because it'll make us better people. Democrats are going to defend increasingly inflationary or costly in taxes Medicare spending because they believe deception is the best way to get new policy promises in a country where the public otherwise doesn't want their middle class taxes to rise. This is ruthless, and saying you're protecting grandma before you cut Medicare again for CBO scores is certainly more graceful than Trump encouraging a riot in our legislature. But that's a low bar; lying to young people to lower their future marginal income also makes you a bad person, and you should try to be a good one. That's why grace is good for its own sake; ruthlessness will have its place but fundamentally cannot give us that same reward.
I don't know enough abut politics to know when to compromise principles to achieve something good or avoid something worse. I want the representative who votes (and the activist who lobbies) to increase the deficit, who does not vote for a tax on net CO2 emissions, who will not compromise on border enforcement in order to get a merit based immigration system, etc. to do so knowing they are lowering the future incomes of today's young people. I want them to understand the tradeoffs, not to lie to themselves most of all even if they dissemble in public.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Trump effectively overturned RvW, a law in place for longer than I’ve been alive. If he wins another term, Obergefell may fall. If I were a social conservative, I would follow him to the ends of the earth. I think this piece conflates actual policy successes with GOP electoral success. It’s politically bad for the GOP to have caught the car here, but they achieved a goal fifty years in the making.
Trump is the most boring person in politics. That's because we know everything about him that we need to know. His book is written, and nothing he will ever do again could surprise us.
What is not boring is the rest of the Republican party. You know, the donors and power brokers who whisper how over Trump they are and will do anything to get someone better nominated, and all those candidates who see themselves as that person. And yet these people will never lift a finger to actually *do* anything to make that a reality. Even the candidates running to defeat him lose no time to rush to his defense when the totally predictable indictments happen.
Sure, they're all scared of Republican voters. And yes, their defense of Trump thereby signals those same voters that supporting Trump is the right thing to do, and to punish any candidate who steps out of line. Has there ever been a campaign where all the *opponents* want the guy to win? Mike Murphy can keep opining on "Hacks on Tap" that Trump is a dead man walking until the cows come home, but at some point perhaps even he will realize that the entire Republican apparatus -- from voters through leading politicians -- is too psychologically damaged to function in the real world.
Trump will be the nominee, barring a heart attack, and may even win next year, but that would only be due to exogenous events, like a recession or Biden falling and breaking his hip. But win or lose, the mental deterioration of Republicans writ large is the story of our time.
Recession! It's pretty likely and Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for having claimed to have stimulated the economy's in 2021, not pinning inflation on the Fed and not to have claimed (incorrectly) to be combatting it with a whopping tax increase on 2022. It's going to be really hard to (correctly) assign the blame for the recession to the Fed in 2024.
Yes. 2016, Democrats liked the thought of Trump winning the nom, though it seemed an impossibility at the time. I can’t believe people have managed to forget this. We’ve already run the “Trump can’t possibly win” scenario. He *can* win, and it will devastate our country. It wasn’t worth the risk the first time, and it certainly isn’t now.
"Dems secretly prefer Trump as the nominee" is the dumbest story out there. It doesn't matter who Democrats prefer; it's the Republican party that will decide.
As a Democrat, my personal preference is that Trump and DeSantis so rip each other apart over the next months that all that is left of the winner at the end will be shards of a bloody carcass.
Florida Man Throwdown! Two Floridian candidates enter, one leaves!
And I also remember the days when Democrats thought Trump was too clownish and implausible to win. 2016 was a horrible shock to just about all of us, and I think that has contributed to both the persistently pessimistic mindset of some Democrats, and the very weird desire among some Very Online Progressive types to have a “Trump” of our very own. They forget that most Democrats are boring normies who want boring normie politicians who get stuff done, not loudmouth populist types. (It’s no accident that Gary Peters [D-MI] has kept winning “Most Effective Senator” awards even when the Democrats were the minority party! Peters is the very soul of boring normie-dom who knows how to get things done. He must be very well liked on both sides of the aisle and have great negotiating skills to keep passing bills even when his party is not in the majority.)
On a completely unrelated note, whatever happened to dysphemistic treadmill? I haven't seen his comments for a couple of weeks now. I hope he's all right. He always had such witty comments.
Could just be taking a break. I find SB to be a genuinely constructive oasis on the often-horrible internet, but I sometimes find myself spending too much time here to the detriment of other things that need doing, and so I take breaks myself.
I could live a thousand lifetimes and not understand Matt's belief that Trump's position on entitlements is what won him the election in 2016. I have never met a Trump supporter who talks about it, or seen one on a report. I think Matt outweighs the importance of policy in national politics.
In my experience, everyone wants to get rich, or at least not have to worry about money. That is not what makes fraud victims easy targets for con men. Con men offer their targets something else: flattery, belonging, and a false sense of prestige. The same is true of Trump. His pull is psychological; policy doesn't play a role.
I think that democrat's in 2016 could NOT make social security cuts or ACA repeal weapons against Trump one of the many factors that tipped the electoral college.
Isn't the line that Trump won by 100,000 or so votes scattered across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? I can absolutely believe that him not saying he would Paul Ryan Social Security moved the needle that much. Am I bothered that it was ever that close? Sure, but those positions could easily have moved the marginal vote in close states
True, it was super close. And maybe if Trump had been more Ryan-esque, Clinton would've cruised to victory. But because it's so close, that's true of almost anything. If Clinton had picked a different running mate, if Comey hadn't sent his letter, if a rainstorm hit the Great Lakes...
I honestly think that The Apprentice is part of what helped Trump win. People were voting for this reality TV show businessman, or “businessman,” who was decisive and a leader and said “You’re Fired!” And basically would, as the eternal cliche goes, Run Government Like A Business.
I believe many Trump 2016 to Biden (or staying home) 2020 voters genuinely wanted to see things shaken up in Washington, disliked Hillary Clinton for whatever reason, and so pulled the lever for Trump because hey, why not, he can’t be that bad! (I knew a guy whose reasoning was just exactly this.) Then they saw that Trump was neither competent nor surrounded by competent staff and cabinet members once in office, so they either held their noses and voted for Joe Biden or just stayed home. They were disappointed that Reality TV Trump was nothing like Actually In Office Trump.
The number of third party voters also decreased in 2020, for what it’s worth, and I do think it is worth something.
>I have never met a Trump supporter who talks about it, or seen one on a report.<
The vast majority of Trump voters are loyal Republicans. Statistically one is more likely to meet such Trump voters than meet a member of the much smaller centrist/normie/persuadable Trump voter cohort. It's quite probable Trump would have secured far fewer such voters had he taken a traditional Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan stance on entitlements. And in this scenario he loses the election, because, while not a gigantic group, their votes were critical.
You don't win elections by getting your supporters to vote for you. Any politician can do that. You win elections by getting people who are *not* your supporters to vote for you in spite of not liking you very much.
Donald Trump to me is a lot like Al Sharpton. He is completely unserious as a leader, but his popularity among certain people is rooted in concerns that are serious that deserves respect. I used to think that the typical Trump supporter would abandon him if the other side would moderate in their direction (take their concerns seriously). I don’t know what to think of that anymore. The other side isn’t moderating, and Trump supporters might stick with him anyway.
“In an earlier iteration of Trump scandals, I would have leapt to the conclusion that his refusal to follow the Pence/Biden model is a clear sign that he’s guilty of something darker and more nefarious. Which he might be. But having seen a few of these play out now, I’m open to the possibility that he’s just a piece of shit scumbag.”
This insight reminds me of the Iraq-WMD question. For people who really cared whether Iraq actually had WMDs, it seemed really important that Hussein was trying so hard at such great cost to prevent weapons inspections. It must be because he has the weapons, right? Actually, no!
So on the same day that headlines over your bad man’s $5 million Ukraine bribes finally show up, you highlight how the other guy is bad.
The main takeaway should be that crazy times have made us embrace horrible people as our front runners, but you’re smart enough to know better than to ad hominem the opposition. Hunter Biden has never been a target, his millions of dollars in influence peddling for the “big guy” is the target. This is naked, partisan politics on full display in the Slow Boring. Next you’ll be writing yet another article on how impeaching Trump for JB’s Ukraine corruption wasn’t justified enough or some such nonsense.
Agree all around. Catharsis, lol. Except that it was ever “cringe” to call out the obvious truth, dangerous not to imo.
Ruthlessness and refusal to play by the rules are linked of course - the so-called dark triad of personality triad linked to antisocial behavior - narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These have been fairly conclusively linked to authoritarian personality in recent psychological research. These are all linked in that they psychologically justify domination and abusive behaviors.
Of course the other side of “he’s our bulldog” is that one half of the political psyche is sicking an attack dog on the other half. Hopefully the law will finally contain this man so he can’t do any more damage.
On the topic of grift, what stands in the way of the DNC at some deniable arms length creating a Trump Defense Fund that channels 99% of the amounts raised to the Biden campaign?
"the cons are much closer to the seats of power on the GOP side. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the core reason is Trump himself"
I think this gets the causality backwards. Republicans got Trump because the conservative movement* has been, at best, "grifter adjacent" as far back as William F Buckley. It's hard to call out Trump for being a grifter when your entire media apparatus is built upon gold bug scams and fake pills.
* I would argue this is distinct from the Republican party but still a substantial portion of it.
But this does come too close to messages that tell you how to "feel" rather he than information abut what to do. Maybe it is a conceit of old age, but I already know how I feel.
I'd like to know what Matt thinks about what I believe is the one good thing that can be said about Trump: namely, that he seems to be very averse to getting into a war. And that is unusual for an authoritarian. I was favorably impressed reading about one situation where the military presented Trump with a proposed retaliatory action in Iran that Trump rejected because he felt the estimated Iranian casualty number (250 or 350 if memory serves) was excessive. (Of course Trump being Trump that might not have been the real reason for his decision.)
And the Iran deal! The Saudi proxy wary in Yemen
Of course the Rump is a bad person but to say he’s bad for conservatives flies in the face of the huge corrupt tax cut he pushed through, the huge, corrupt, covid bailouts he engineered for wealthy-enough businesses and landlords who can afford professional HR staff to navigate the application processes, and the huge, corrupt judges and justices he packed into the courts.
But it was not his Trumpiness that did that. Any republican would have done as much and maybe more competently
Tremendously based.
I'm not sure which circles think this take is cringe, but IN THIS HOUSE we have lost none of our adamance that orange man = bad
I agree with a majority of this and think there are two important takeaways:
1) Precision. The people who will decide if Donald Trump is the Republican nominee are ultimately not NYT writers, NYT readers, someone on MSNBC, a grad student, or other people on Twitter that conservatives publicly disagree with, but *people who vote in the Republican primary.* Curiously, I notice this essay lacks any advice to the reader on how they too can become a voter in the Republican primary. I think this piece would have a stronger conclusion if it noted this odd low turnout primary process is pretty much identical between the parties, and you can in fact easily enter them in many states, sometimes requiring registering in a party ahead of time but sometimes not. Who should you consider voting for in the 2024 Republican primary? It's a good question to consider when acknowledging voters in the Republican primary will decide if Trump is the nominee. But those voters are also very easily us. So that matters to us, just as much as the correct abstract statement "Republicans will decide." Because given the actual rules of primaries, there's no clear difference between them and us.
2) Grace. While I agree with Matt that politicians who win elections regularly are effective when they are banal and polite, I think to frame it entirely in terms of ruthlessness is a mistake. Grace is its own virtue, and one of the worst developments of the Trump years is almost everyone slowly agreeing with Trump that winning in national politics is ultimately all that matters. It would be terrible if center-left people who write for politics for a living took popularism seriously and refused to share their thoughts unless it helped Democrats win elections. Thankfully, almost all of them don't. I think we should try to cultivate grace in our personal lives not for power but because it'll make us better people. Democrats are going to defend increasingly inflationary or costly in taxes Medicare spending because they believe deception is the best way to get new policy promises in a country where the public otherwise doesn't want their middle class taxes to rise. This is ruthless, and saying you're protecting grandma before you cut Medicare again for CBO scores is certainly more graceful than Trump encouraging a riot in our legislature. But that's a low bar; lying to young people to lower their future marginal income also makes you a bad person, and you should try to be a good one. That's why grace is good for its own sake; ruthlessness will have its place but fundamentally cannot give us that same reward.
I don't know enough abut politics to know when to compromise principles to achieve something good or avoid something worse. I want the representative who votes (and the activist who lobbies) to increase the deficit, who does not vote for a tax on net CO2 emissions, who will not compromise on border enforcement in order to get a merit based immigration system, etc. to do so knowing they are lowering the future incomes of today's young people. I want them to understand the tradeoffs, not to lie to themselves most of all even if they dissemble in public.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Trump effectively overturned RvW, a law in place for longer than I’ve been alive. If he wins another term, Obergefell may fall. If I were a social conservative, I would follow him to the ends of the earth. I think this piece conflates actual policy successes with GOP electoral success. It’s politically bad for the GOP to have caught the car here, but they achieved a goal fifty years in the making.
Trump is the most boring person in politics. That's because we know everything about him that we need to know. His book is written, and nothing he will ever do again could surprise us.
What is not boring is the rest of the Republican party. You know, the donors and power brokers who whisper how over Trump they are and will do anything to get someone better nominated, and all those candidates who see themselves as that person. And yet these people will never lift a finger to actually *do* anything to make that a reality. Even the candidates running to defeat him lose no time to rush to his defense when the totally predictable indictments happen.
Sure, they're all scared of Republican voters. And yes, their defense of Trump thereby signals those same voters that supporting Trump is the right thing to do, and to punish any candidate who steps out of line. Has there ever been a campaign where all the *opponents* want the guy to win? Mike Murphy can keep opining on "Hacks on Tap" that Trump is a dead man walking until the cows come home, but at some point perhaps even he will realize that the entire Republican apparatus -- from voters through leading politicians -- is too psychologically damaged to function in the real world.
Trump will be the nominee, barring a heart attack, and may even win next year, but that would only be due to exogenous events, like a recession or Biden falling and breaking his hip. But win or lose, the mental deterioration of Republicans writ large is the story of our time.
Recession! It's pretty likely and Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for having claimed to have stimulated the economy's in 2021, not pinning inflation on the Fed and not to have claimed (incorrectly) to be combatting it with a whopping tax increase on 2022. It's going to be really hard to (correctly) assign the blame for the recession to the Fed in 2024.
Yes. 2016, Democrats liked the thought of Trump winning the nom, though it seemed an impossibility at the time. I can’t believe people have managed to forget this. We’ve already run the “Trump can’t possibly win” scenario. He *can* win, and it will devastate our country. It wasn’t worth the risk the first time, and it certainly isn’t now.
"Dems secretly prefer Trump as the nominee" is the dumbest story out there. It doesn't matter who Democrats prefer; it's the Republican party that will decide.
As a Democrat, my personal preference is that Trump and DeSantis so rip each other apart over the next months that all that is left of the winner at the end will be shards of a bloody carcass.
Florida Man Throwdown! Two Floridian candidates enter, one leaves!
And I also remember the days when Democrats thought Trump was too clownish and implausible to win. 2016 was a horrible shock to just about all of us, and I think that has contributed to both the persistently pessimistic mindset of some Democrats, and the very weird desire among some Very Online Progressive types to have a “Trump” of our very own. They forget that most Democrats are boring normies who want boring normie politicians who get stuff done, not loudmouth populist types. (It’s no accident that Gary Peters [D-MI] has kept winning “Most Effective Senator” awards even when the Democrats were the minority party! Peters is the very soul of boring normie-dom who knows how to get things done. He must be very well liked on both sides of the aisle and have great negotiating skills to keep passing bills even when his party is not in the majority.)
I would laugh so hard if that were to come true. The sweet smell of schadenfreude!
On a completely unrelated note, whatever happened to dysphemistic treadmill? I haven't seen his comments for a couple of weeks now. I hope he's all right. He always had such witty comments.
Could just be taking a break. I find SB to be a genuinely constructive oasis on the often-horrible internet, but I sometimes find myself spending too much time here to the detriment of other things that need doing, and so I take breaks myself.
I could live a thousand lifetimes and not understand Matt's belief that Trump's position on entitlements is what won him the election in 2016. I have never met a Trump supporter who talks about it, or seen one on a report. I think Matt outweighs the importance of policy in national politics.
In my experience, everyone wants to get rich, or at least not have to worry about money. That is not what makes fraud victims easy targets for con men. Con men offer their targets something else: flattery, belonging, and a false sense of prestige. The same is true of Trump. His pull is psychological; policy doesn't play a role.
I think that democrat's in 2016 could NOT make social security cuts or ACA repeal weapons against Trump one of the many factors that tipped the electoral college.
Isn't the line that Trump won by 100,000 or so votes scattered across Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? I can absolutely believe that him not saying he would Paul Ryan Social Security moved the needle that much. Am I bothered that it was ever that close? Sure, but those positions could easily have moved the marginal vote in close states
True, it was super close. And maybe if Trump had been more Ryan-esque, Clinton would've cruised to victory. But because it's so close, that's true of almost anything. If Clinton had picked a different running mate, if Comey hadn't sent his letter, if a rainstorm hit the Great Lakes...
I honestly think that The Apprentice is part of what helped Trump win. People were voting for this reality TV show businessman, or “businessman,” who was decisive and a leader and said “You’re Fired!” And basically would, as the eternal cliche goes, Run Government Like A Business.
I believe many Trump 2016 to Biden (or staying home) 2020 voters genuinely wanted to see things shaken up in Washington, disliked Hillary Clinton for whatever reason, and so pulled the lever for Trump because hey, why not, he can’t be that bad! (I knew a guy whose reasoning was just exactly this.) Then they saw that Trump was neither competent nor surrounded by competent staff and cabinet members once in office, so they either held their noses and voted for Joe Biden or just stayed home. They were disappointed that Reality TV Trump was nothing like Actually In Office Trump.
The number of third party voters also decreased in 2020, for what it’s worth, and I do think it is worth something.
Agreed. I think Trump's positions on entitlements were one of the least important and least remarked upon elements of the 2016 campaign.
>I have never met a Trump supporter who talks about it, or seen one on a report.<
The vast majority of Trump voters are loyal Republicans. Statistically one is more likely to meet such Trump voters than meet a member of the much smaller centrist/normie/persuadable Trump voter cohort. It's quite probable Trump would have secured far fewer such voters had he taken a traditional Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan stance on entitlements. And in this scenario he loses the election, because, while not a gigantic group, their votes were critical.
Correct. You have to look at Obama voters who disapproved of both Trump and Hillary Clinton.
These are the voters who decided the 2016 election, and they hate the GOP's traditional position on entitlements.
You don't win elections by getting your supporters to vote for you. Any politician can do that. You win elections by getting people who are *not* your supporters to vote for you in spite of not liking you very much.
Donald Trump to me is a lot like Al Sharpton. He is completely unserious as a leader, but his popularity among certain people is rooted in concerns that are serious that deserves respect. I used to think that the typical Trump supporter would abandon him if the other side would moderate in their direction (take their concerns seriously). I don’t know what to think of that anymore. The other side isn’t moderating, and Trump supporters might stick with him anyway.