The GOP now has coalitions they have to manage, just like the Democrats. The anti-DEI part of the coalition is getting what they want, as their ideas ripple through Government, academia and businesses.
But the deficit hawks -- many of whom are the mouth-breathers in the Freedom Caucus -- are the ones to watch here. They are not going to get what they want, as the math just doesn't work as Matt has repeatedly pointed out. I really do not see how they will be able to move forward. It's going to be a long 2-4 years.
Are there actually a nontrivial number of deficit hawks who will change their voting over a Republican failure to reduce deficits at this point?
Every Republican president in the past 40 years has significantly expanded the deficit; their voters’ revealed preference is not to care.
At this point, only the indirect mechanism of higher equilibrium inflation or interest rates is likely to put pressure on politicians to reduce the deficit, through the mechanism of mostly-disengaged voters who don’t understand the mechanism getting mad at whoever is in charge.
They'll cave, none of them have ever openly defied Trump when it really mattered, and it's worth remembering that corruption is in fashion. Those who can't be persuaded can be bought.
Never ceases to amaze me the few things the GOP pushes back against Trump (or at least a sufficient number of them). It's somehow invariably the few good ideas Trump has. First and foremost is vaccines (and obviously now Trump has completely flipped on this). And now debt ceiling; one of the stupidest "self destruct" buttons created by any government on the planet.
And then flipside today. Hey sure, let's approve a possible Russian asset as DNI. Cause Trump will get real mad or something about a cabinet position literally no primary or swing voters will care about except the security hawks already in the "Never Trump" camp and Democrats. Yeah sure, YOLO and of course "owning the libs" is clearly more important than protecting national security secrets.
Probably, but previously there had been at least a few seats on the ‘vote no’ lifeboat for the most truculent of the freedom caucus. Now there's like one.
Will paste in full James Carville's famous quip "“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
Yeah, I also basically think that the interest rate/inflation combo is the real budget constraint for states whose debt is denominated in a currency they control, and that some kind of bond market action like the response to the Truss/Kwarteng budget would be the catalyst for any shift to fiscal discipline in the US.
The sooner, the better, while our economy has more to it than the UK's "sell physical assets to the children of autocrats, provide financial and legal services to the children of autocrats, and occasionally pump some oil" basis.
A lot of ink has been spilled opining on Democrat's stupid coalitional politics. Sometimes I forget how stupid Republican coalitional politics are. I suspect this is all the product of a broader (civic) moral decline in this country.
Eh, historic US coalition politics were significantly more stupid and evil! Spend some time reading about Gilded Age politics, or the New Deal’s reliance on southern segregationists.
This is true, but the coalitions were overlapping and cross-partisan. The coalitions are equally stupid now but don't even have the release valve of cross-partisan compromise and cooperation (like what e.g. we saw between racist populists and sincere social Democrats or between northern Dems and the GOP on race etc)
"A lot of ink has been spilled opining on Democrat's stupid coalitional politics. Sometimes I forget how stupid Republican coalitional politics are."
So did many other voters. That's why the party out of power usually does so well. Both parties have big problems, but the problems of the party in power are always freshest in voters' minds, so that's what they focus on.
Oddly. I think Musk does. It’s probably a ketamine induced fever dream but in all his interviews he talks about the debt “crisis” as existential for the USD. He said the dollar will become “worthless”. I think he believes this. That’s why he’s being set up as the fall guy.
There have been a number of think pieces about "what's Musk up to" and it's amazing to me no one has brought up Musk's (and the VC fascists generally) holdings of crypto.
My point is, we are really underrating the possibility that Musk is trying to deliberately engineer a debt default. Because at its core is a key fact; crypto long term has basically no value if can't be an actually official currency. And reality is crypto is basically trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. Whatever issues there are with our financial system (and there are many), the ease and stability to conduct legal financial transactions is not one of them. It's basically click of button "done".
So in order for crypto long term to have any value, it essentially needs to replace the dollar as the default currency exchange. And given what I noted above, that's not going to happen...unless we have an actual debt default and the full faith and credit of the United States is completely destroyed.
Musk's entire MO is creative destruction. Break things to get progress. I truly think we underestimate the likelihood that he's perfectly fine with financial catastrophe if it means a huge financial windfall personally.
I think that’s because his crypto holdings as a % of his net worth round to zero. All his net worth is in USD denominated equities. There’s no path forward for him to shift any meaningful share of his wealth to crypto. He’s very much very worried about the long term stability of the USD.
I would first say there is a ton of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he's not exactly thinking with clean state of mind right now; Ketamine + social media rabbit hole + general rich guy delusions. Look at what's happening with Tesla. Probably not surprisingly, Tesla sales are in the tank and Tesla stock might be most overvalued stock on the stock market based on fundamentals this side of any Trump related company (the stock price for Truth Social or Tesla is essentially a bet on massive corruption. Depressingly a decent possibility this is a good bet. But based on P/E ratio, stock prices are completely detached from reality).
Point being that I'm not sure the very correct fact that crypto holdings are currently a small percentage of his net worth is relevant right now.
Crypto isn't just about financial windfall, it's about power. I would say for Peter Thiel and Musk more than anybody else, they have real aspirations for crypto personally that go way beyond just financial windfall (although there is that as well). Its essentially a bet that control of currency is control of government; which is actually correct.
I know this sounds like Marvel movie villain/Bond villain stuff right now. But seriously. Really look at everything he posts, every insane public appearance (Nazi salutes included), every utterance and everything he is actually trying to accomplish right now. Am I really that far off calling him a Marvel movie villain/Bond villain come to life?
Yes. You’re that far off. When you’re already the richest man in the world you don’t worry about that next windfall. You focus on protecting your current net worth. Musk’s bitcoin holdings is no different than Ray Dalio’s. It’s an uncorrelated asset class across a diversified portfolio. Same reason Dalio is so long gold right now. Musk’s big difference is he doesn’t have a portfolio. He’s levered long USD equities.
That's my understanding. His BTC exposure is through TSLA and SpaceX holdings of ~ 20,000 coins. But he's also famously cash "poor" right? He had to sell and then pledge his TSLA stock for the twitter acquisition.
EDIT: Just to put numbers to it the TSLA market cap is $1T and their BTC holding ending Q4 were $1B.
Its one thing to try out lots of cars and rockets, let them fail and try again. It's another to tank the world's financial market and try to put it back together. The monetary system is a fiction, a story we choose to believe. Without confidence that it will work, it's nothing but chaos.
This Democratic internal polling so feel free to take with a tad of grain of salt. But I think it seems very likely that Musk is much more unpopular than Trump himself.
My worries that Trump is determined to create a constitutional crises aside (think we are underrating real possibility he decides just ignore court rulings coming down the line. What then), Musk is likely to become a public approval albatross around his neck.
I fully expect Trump / Musk to ignore court rulings. The courts can't actually coerce an unwilling executive branch. But as John E reminded me in the comments, even the president has only so much power to coerce an unwilling executive branch. Far more than anyone else, to be sure, but the executive branch consists of vast numbers of employees, who generally started their job under the ancien regime in which the executive branch followed the law. They have some familiarity with the law, and lawyers to advise them on details. By taking their jobs, they accept a duty to defend the Constitution and faithfully carry out its laws.
Many people will disobey wrongful orders. Trump can fire them, Musk's interns can illegally halt their paychecks, he can even order the FBI to raid them and incite mobs to terrorize them. If the media are scared enough, this might not even be well-reported. But at least the ongoing resistance will wear down state capacity enough that Trump will be ineffective as a dictator. And there will be internal conflicts between people siding with Trump vs with the law. I hope it's mostly peaceful, not an outright civil war (god only knows). In the best case, enough people will just refuse to punish people for disobeying unlawful orders, and the coup will stall. If FBI agents refuse to arrest politicians and bureaucrats without evidence of a real crime, if security forces keep the mobs out, etc., then the executive branch can largely obey the law in safety.
Also, people in DC won't need the media to tell them what's happening -- they will have their neighbors and their own eyes. Being physically in a city of common people is a danger to oppressive regimes. Large enough popular revolutions, and limited enough willingness to kill them on the part of the security forces, sometimes do bring down tyrants.
Probably the most important theme going forward will be the tension between Trump the bully and Trump the coward. He loves dominance games and torturing/punishing people. At the same time, he's afraid of direct confrontation and tends to back down, even at the risk of appearing weak.
Perhaps he will ignore court orders, bully that he is. Or perhaps he'll fold like a cheap suit, and meekly given in to the courts. Maybe he will punch Musk in the mouth when he gets too big and throw him to the curb, or maybe he'll paper over everything Musk does and let Musk take him on a ride to hell and mass repugnance and rejection.
My bet is on a chaotic and random combination of the two. Because Trump's North Star is that he is an attention-fixated chaos monkey.
The state capacity issue is hugely underdiscussed in terms of the authoritarian threat here. Trump/Musk are both actively kneecapping their own ability to run a police state and win popular support through government spending programs.
Maybe, but where does that get him. The only way to meaningfully attack the deficit is to cut entitlement programs, which you really need Congress to do, and cutting taxes which they all want to do just makes it all harder. Short of just not sending out SS payments or not paying out Medicare claims the Exec branch is limited even in its illegality.
I think for Musk it's all about points on a glidepath to cut federal spending. That's why I think he's being set up as the fall guy. The rest of the GOP isn't with him. He actually really does want to cut entitlements but they don't. His first target was $2T and that he knows this will cause pain. This whole DOGE circus is just the first act. There's 3m federal employees. Maybe he can cut 500,000 or something. That's gonna create news cycles. It's gonna show action. He'll own all this and then becomes liable if anything fails. Then as Matt points out the GOP will cut taxes and increase the deficit.
As Cheney said about Reagan, deficits don't matter (to the voters). Interest rates, however, do. Huge deficits will lead to higher interest rates and, as Carville ruefully pointed out, high interest rates will destroy your legislative agenda.
Powell just took near-term rates cuts off the table too. I love this guy. Just DNGAF about Trump. That means the 30 year mortgage rate is gonna run > 7% at least through the summer home buying cycle further eroding consumer confidence. Trump has no path forward here.
Oddly if Powell or a future Fed chair caves to Trump on short term interest. I think the Fed loses credibility and10 year rates get worse and mortgage rates with them.
It's always possible to rationalize that increasing the deficit in the short run is necessary to consolidate power enough to shield your side from public opinion such that you can cut the deficit in the long run.
Trump and Musk have been saying hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud has been uncovered so I think it’s fair for deficit hawks to expect that to be cut, and frankly to see prosecutions of the fraudsters. Not really sure how Trump and Musk sneak out of that one unless the movement truly does just follow what the leaders say on any given day.
> unless the movement truly does just follow what the leaders say on any given day
That's what they've been doing so far. Trump is pure, his opponents are corrupt. The election would be fraudulent and rigged against Trump, until he won, at which point it was fine. Storming the Capitol in a failed attempt to terrorize Congress into changing the election results was a defense of democracy. (They probably don't put it in the exact same terms I would use, but many on the right support "one man, one vote," as long as that one man is their man.)
There's partisan brain on the left too, but the extent you see it among Trump's core supporters is breathtaking. I really don't think it's possible for him to lose their support, even if he wanted to, no matter what happens. Like the followers of Brian of Nazareth.
I posted this last night but their path forward is very clear. They’re just going to lie. In their minds the $600m SSP FEMA program to reimburse states for illegal immigrant expenses was “fraud” and failure to comply with a rescinded EO is “illegal”. It’s all bullshit. But this playbook certainly isn’t new.
Back in December, much was made of the conflict between the Elon Musk-led "the more H1B visas the merrier, Americans are too stupid and lazy to work in tech" faction and the Steve Bannon-led "we voted for America First, not this let's-import-a-bunch-of-foreigners bullshit" faction.
Is this going to be a problem for the GOP going forward, or are the two factions going to hold together based on their shared hatred of their common enemy, the liberal elite?
At some point, someone's going to want deliverables, particularly if (when) the economy tanks. (As I said last year, it's clear that a media bubble can make people think a good economy is bad, but I'm much more skeptical about a media bubble being able to make people think a bad economy is good.)
You mean a coalition of law-and-order voters and libertarians, union busters and union rank-and-file voters, barstool bros and social conservatives, is likely to come apart at the seams without a unifying external enemy? Color me shocked.
This is all part of the natural pendulum swing of a two-party democracy. What makes Trump's actions in his first few weeks so terrifying (and predictable) are that they are clear efforts to break the pendulum.
I don't think legislation is needed in this area, though. We already have the civil rights act. Read as written, it doesn't allow discrimination based on sex or race which would include affirmative action and most DEI activities as implemented over the past 10 years. I think this is a lasting change.
Trump made tons of changes based on EO alone. To my understanding much of it is guidelines on how to interpret the civil rights legislation. The same legislation in the name of which the whole aa regime was created since the 60s (including the dei monstrosity of the past 5-10 years). It’s possible that the conservative scotus would continue to dismantle it slowly on its own over the next few decades but to my mind it seems that clarifying the evident ambiguity in the civil rights law to make the eo settled law will be much mire effective in the short term and prevent the next dem admin from attempting to restore status quo ante
Their coalition isn't large enough to have any expendable parts.
Their only solution is to take up the mantle of entitlement cuts (or reform, depending on your perspective), but they have learned their lesson on that topic and will not touch the hot stove again. The result is going to be inflation.
There will only be (higher) inflation if the Fed allows it, which will only happen when Trump installs a crony in 2026. There will, however, be higher interest rates.
Sustainable meaning what? If the FED raises interest rates to 10%, it will almost certainly push the economy into fairly sharp recession that will do a lot to slow inflation.
It's actually somewhat interesting to think about, but if we were to pass very regressive tax cuts and Trump sequestered or Congress cut a bunch of transfer programs to the working-class and poor, would that really be very inflationary?
Even if not fully balanced... the marginal propensity to consume among the folks taking the hit is much higher than that among those whose taxes are cut, so aggregate demand would probably fall on net, and a significant fraction of the money from the latter will just end up back in Treasuries, so increased demand would bid down yields somewhat.
We don't know, as I think that would be subject to all sorts of dynamic factors like the potential for productivity gains from AI, etc. I think they would be sustainable. If i were on the Fed I would sustain them as opposed to allowing another burst of inflation. Interest rates are nowhere near historic highs and getting out in front of the issue prevents the need for even higher rates down the road.
I still don’t see any paradox. An autocratic executive that neuters a dithering legislature? That’s exactly the path that every strongman has followed.
Far from being a hindrance to Trump’s power grab, the futility of Congress is an enabling condition, practically a precondition. It’s exactly because Congress is visibly ineffectual (even the liberal Yglesias is saying!) that the public will clamor to have Trump take over all of the levers of power.
I mean — you think Hitler took power because the Weimar legislature was focused and effective?
There’s no paradox here: this is the way autocrats come to power.
I say this as someone who’s generally extremely aggravated by resist libs crying wolf.
But I get the sense that even if we were in a full-blown constitutional crisis with Trump offering a blanket pardon to anyone who acts illegally on his behalf, we’d still be sitting around here saying “The real policy questions are: what is Trump going to do to child tax credits? Did tariffs make inflation 0.3pp higher than it would’ve been otherwise?”
Yeah, I agree that if we were at the point where the economic damage was going to be severe and noticeable, it would be smart to focus on those things. But I’m not sure we’re really going towards a failing economy.
The paralysis of the Weimar government helped Hitler take power, yes. When Hitler did take power, though, he got the Reichstag completely aligned with him (partly by banning opposition parties) and passed laws so that he wouldn’t need them anymore. Because for them to be capable of shutting down his agenda with a few dissenting votes would have made what he wanted to do impossible.
Like any dictator or would-be dictator, Trump needs tax revenue. Where does he get it, if he doesn’t have a compliant Congress?
Yes, it's long overdue for some serious constitutional scrutiny of the laws where Congress has apparently handed over wholesale, aka "delegated", to the President its own power to set and change tax rates on imported goods. If it's okay there, why isn't it also ok to let the President personally set and change income tax rates for groups of individuals or even specific individuals....
Prior to Trump the use of this authority went through administrative review and justification before targeted tariffs (usually in response to dumping) were used.
Trump just waived even justifying his actions and the epistemological nihilism of Republicans has them nodding along.
Sure but administrative review is still under the President's control, because delegating a task to the President's subordinates is only semantically different than delegating it to the President; my point was control by the President vs by Congress.
The challenges that Matt describes don't change if the decision making moves to the White House. Hitler took power as Germany was coming out of an economic pit. We have exited low interest rate/low inflation and are left with a series of hard budget choices with significant trade offs.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but I think there are practical limits on what Trump can do without a Congress willing to take the political pain for him. The US economy is too large and robust to be taken over in a power grab, it's going to react to stimuli in ways that Trump can't control. Break the debt ceiling and the markets will tank. Control the deficit by cutting social security and Medicare and the demand in the economy shrinks and throws us into recession. It's pretty clear that Trump does not have the ability to lead his minions in reaction to those types of crises. He's going to take what he can, and terribly for us he's going to break a lot of shit in the process.
Agree with your comment. But to be fair, Matt did say
>Of course, if Trump succeeds in setting himself up as a dictator, unconstrained by courts, Congress, or the rule of law, nobody will really care if the 2025 legislative agenda was a bust. But I don’t want to pre-concede that outcome.
So he's kind of setting that question aside for the moment
"So he's kind of setting that question aside for the moment"
And he's totally within his rights to do that.
Still, labeling it a "paradox" seems to obscure the direction of causation. If Trump succeeds in setting himself up as dictator, it will not be *despite* Congressional dysfunction, but *assisted by* Congressional dysfunction.
Doesn’t that depend on the nature of the dysfunction? Let’s say in a month it becomes clear that Congress is finding itself incapable of passing an extension of TCJA. I think that would show dysfunction and also be bad for Trump, politically and in terms of his goals.
"I think that would show dysfunction and also be bad for Trump...."
I hope that is how it will go, yes.
But given the last few weeks, it seems more likely that he'll say, "The American people demands the repeal of these unfair Democrat taxes, and Democrats in Congress are standing in their way because they hate America. So, I have directed the IRS to use the following new schedule for income taxation. You're going to love these new lower taxes. The people demand it, and I alone can get it done."
The WSJ will print an editorial lauding the president's new bold populist initiative.
That is definitely the nightmare scenario, but if we're talking about a situation where by definition a majority of Congress doesn't approve…I don't know, it's definitely not a checkmate for Trump, I'll put it that way.
“…by definition a majority of Congress doesn't approve….”
A near majority — all the Republicans minus a sincere deficit-hawk or two — will not only approve, they will shower Trump with gratitude for having spared them the ordeal of taking a vote. The insincere deficit-hawks — i.e. most of them — will be even happier, because they’ll get their precious tax-cuts and still be able to posture about fiscal responsibility.
Yes, some level of acquiescence on the part of the House will be required. But these last weeks have shown them extremely eager to acquiesce.
If they do what they say they plan, and that’s a big if, the large cuts would come from things like what has been described as unnecessary and excessive defense spending (overpayments, inefficiency, excessive costs, or just things they don’t agree with), and the proposed Medicare change to no longer allow outpatient procedures to be billed as hospital. Both, in theory, would be large cost reductions without mission reduction and in fact even Noah Smith has pointed out how much less we are getting for our defense dollars than China. (Not suggesting he endorses this approach.)
Eliminating unpopular spending is generally a big political winner and a lot of what is being cut first is not popular.
That’s why they’re highlighting what they are, before the defense contractors and hospitals start yelling. It also puts Democrats in the position of appearing to support wasteful spending and opposing an investigation into wasteful spending. It’s pretty politically sharp.
Cutting costs without reducing services (basically what they claim to be able to do with both military and medical expenses) requires surgical precision and a resistance to lobbyists/special interests that Republicans do not possess. (Honestly idk if Democrats have it in them either).
Aside, when Noah Smith talks about military spending vs China, he’s really just doing Purchasing Power Parity adjustments. Things cost less in China generally because China is in many ways still a poor country. Labor costs for Chinese soldiers and Chinese defense contractors are smaller, so stuff is cheaper. That doesn’t mean their military is any less wasteful.
They also don't commit to large unit production numbers right away, but iterate and iterate on big ticket items like ships, which might affect both actual efficiency and how the numbers look on paper.
It is indeed a big if. An if so big it should be rendered in size 96 font, bolded, underlined, and hyperlinked to all of the times Republicans have vowed to cut spending in the past.
The "waste" play is just to delete components of the federal government the Heritage Foundation nutjobs think composes the deep state. I think we're going to see some reporting in the next 24 hours that Musk took a scythe to components of HHS today, for what it's worth.
IMO, even folks who strongly want waste to get cut will have second thoughts when they see how incompetent the execution is.
For example, slowing down submarine refurbishment projects and making the Navy less capable doesn't seem like a politically robust or durable approach to me.
I haven’t seen it dropped. Medicaid and green energy cuts are major pieces, but Medicare site neutrality was still in there at that time. There are a LOT of major cuts proposed to offset the tax cut extension.
This is just listing off the full list of everything they proposed as possible on day one. More recently there was some reporting/leaks that most of the good stuff there is already out, the caucus can't agree on it.
They're basically just the pro-rent-seeking caucus at this point, even for constituencies that vote wildly for the other side like lawyers.
I hold out a very small sliver of hope that they'll prove me wrong but they never actually do.
I think part of the perception that Trump is "getting stuff done" is that some of his actions could be immediately felt, especially the drama around the loan/grant freeze that did/is illegally still doing cuts to things like headstart and shutdowns to the Medicare payment portal. There's some quotes out there from marginal 2024 Trump voters essentially saying "not crazy about this but he's doing something".
Compare that to the Biden vibe where Democrats passed a good deal of legislation (and got stimulus checks out, but that was I think the third check Americans had received at that point, and Biden didn't put his name on them) but the proceduralism of getting that legislation enacted made it feel like nothing changed (see electric vehicle charging stations and rural broadband hookups).
The lesson here is a modification of the lesson the Biden admin tried to implement around "helping the hell out of people" as a corrective to what they saw as an Obama administration that undershot things like stimulus. The lesson is yeah, pass legislation, but also, people need to *feel* impact quickly. I think people feel (or think they are feeling) Trump now and giving him credit for doing something.
I do think that will stall out soon. There's only so much runway for a purely executive agenda, and the budget and debt ceiling will force Congress back into the spotlight and reveal how brittle the GOP majority is. An opportunity for Democrats to blunt the vibe of Trump strength.
Not to put an equivalency here, but there was a ton of leftist zeal about what Biden could do with executive action. See: The American Prospect's first day plan they published back in 2020.
The left recognized early the constraints of dealing with Manchin and Sinema and wanted Biden to unilaterally do their wish list.
Ugh. And their extortion method for delivering thing always seems to entail running into the room and screaming “we’ll decorate this MAGA suicide vest and give Republicans a trifecta if you don’t do what we want!”
Sorry if I’m pointing out the obvious, but isn’t this partly because, entropy being what it is, it’s a lot harder and slower to build than to destroy?
The examples you bring up are of Biden building things: EV chargers, rural broadband. Yes, he did it inefficiently because of all the red tape and everything-bagel brain and stuff. But even in the most efficient scenario, it’s not like Biden signs a law on Monday and there’s a network of shiny new EV chargers on Friday.
Melon Husk and his merry gang of incels have been destroying things, like USAID. It’s super easy, barely an inconvenience! You can make the money go fuckety-bye in an instant, and that’s that, unless some pesky judge tries to block you. Of course it’s going to feel more efficient and impactful in the moment.
I totally agree with you. Not only does the immediacy feel like it has a big impact, but destroying things has long lasting consequences. It is a built in structural advantage people like Vought get from not actually wanting the government to work.
All the trust USAID has built up for decades around medical care and clinical trials cannot be rebuilt once they have reneged on care in the middle of a trial. Even if a judge rules it was illegal a few weeks later.
Or take the idea of making it hellish to work for the federal government. Imagine we have President Big Gretch in 2028. Even then, why would a bright young lawyer take a job with the federal government that pays less than the private sector if they know that in 3-4 yrs they could end up fired, reassigned to Nebraska, or forced to work in the "Sanctuary Cities and Gender Roles Division". I kind of hate the idea of norms because it betrays the lack of actual legal structure around things, but once a norm is destroyed, it's over, you can't get it back, and it will have real consequences. The first three weeks of Trump 2.0 has been rich with events like this that will ripple for a long time, and I think it is therefore fair to say they really have made an impact.
I think for the past few decades, the conventional wisdom was that, if people can feel the change happening, then many more people will be angry than the number that are happy. Maybe that is done, because since Covid, people are fine with rapid change?
Right and it was back online in a day. My silver lining with this whole OMB memo fiasco is it shows us how unserious and undisciplined their team is. They don’t understand what they’re doing.
This is in the class of "our people know what we're actually doing and geez can't the rest of you take a joke?" In other words, they're cowards and clowns, but they're clowns with flamethrowers, like Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.
> Renaming the Army post as "Ft. Bragg" but now naming it (ha ha, snigger snigger) after WW2 PFC Roland Bragg
ngl, I thought that was kind of a clever "have your cake and eat it" move (and someone should have thought of it before). It also shows at least some of them care about perception.
I’ll put it in the “too clever by half” category. No one in their right mind would name the post after PFC Roland Bragg, brave though I’m sure he was. Clearly they want everyone to think they’re restoring the honor to that incompetent and traitorous Confederate general but they were too cowardly to come right out and say it. But of course all the fanbois will snigger and say, “Wow, we really stuck it to the libs once again!”
They really are pathetic clowns with flamethrowers.
Renaming things doesn't happen in a vacuum - there are people who have lived in the area their entire lives calling it Bragg*. But again, it's also interesting that they thought it was politically beneficial for them to give it a patina of respectability.
(*Yes, I see the irony with the whole Gulf of Mexico/America silliness.)
Yeah if they really wanted an NC civil war guy John Gibbon was right there, someone who was actually above replacement value in their military accomplishments. I know in 1918 it was still theoretically a fort in Alaska but it's not any more.
Relatedly, while I oppose this renaming, I thought naming the thing, "Fort Liberty" instead of after a specific human being was a dumb move because it really felt like just being an invitation for Republicans to change it back to "Bragg" in the future.
“Passed appetizers”? That’s not an idiom. Is that an idiom? English is not my first language, but I’ve been here a while, and I’ve never heard that. What would it mean?
In any case: this all sounds fine. A strongman and his oligarchic sidekick are running an unchecked play to render the legislature impotent and irrelevant, which will bring us a big step closer to autocracy, but don’t worry! The legislature is already impotent and irrelevant, which will certainly rein in the ambitions of the strongman and not increase populist calls to shift all of the power to the strongman, who Gets Things Done (tm). Yup, tales of Congressional dysfunction are very reassuring.
“Passed” versus “plated” appetizers is more industry speak. Your caterer or event planner will specify because if you just say hors d’oeuvres it’s unclear what staffing or plating needs you have.
““Passed” versus “plated” appetizers is more industry speak.“
Now this is news I can use!
Okay, in that case, the attributive past participle is doing some actual work to distinguish two kinds of presentations.
And I can see why Matt had to specify, because in the political context, “plated appetizers” just would not have conveyed the same sense of trivial distractions. Ummm…..
In my previous career in trade policy, I worked with a lot of diplomats. Pretty much everyone was extremely interested in learning American slang, so I spent a lot of time parsing it.
(During this time I also fashioned myself the "Ambassador of Thanksgiving," inviting anyone without plans to experience the most American holiday at my house. Those were the best Thanksgivings!)
When I was younger I wanted so badly not to be associated with my background that I kept it to myself, but now I find that people love my grandparents’ Kentucky idioms, both domestically and internationally.
Among its various virtues, I love that Thanksgiving is amenable to inviting people over like this (often I hear about it in the context of graduate school for international students). Like, inviting someone over for Christmas would be at least a bit odd, but it seems very in keeping with the spirit of the most American holiday(*)
(*) while I agree that Thanksgiving deserves this moniker, I am told that the American take on Halloween is relatively distinct and considered pretty awesome in countries where it has made inroads.
You know that there are lots of social levels between sod cracker and Professional/Managerial, right?
You think your local car salesperson knows what passed apps are? Her boss might. Or your local high school teacher? But I bet the principal does.
It's possible to identify the social customs of different groups as being distinct, and identifying that people can be situated inside and outside them, without that being attached to a certain politics which you seem to think I'm engaging in.
Nah, not really. Our culinary program at our Title 1 high school always asks if we want passed appetizers when they cater school events. I think it probably depends on your food service experience if you know the term or not.
I often find that PMC strivers emulate and coopt upper class mannerisms and social mores. I'm thinking of a previous boss, a regional director of an NGO who was always attending galas and x-hours and luncheons despite coming from the middle class and making probably 130k a year. She would definitely not have wasted an opportunity to mention passed apps and that the governor was there.
I've seen them a lot at weddings, and not necessarily ones that are all that swanky. Also been to some work-related events that had them (holiday parties and what not). But I'd never heard the term.
You’re probably right and I appreciate the clarification, however I would note that “hors d’oeuvres” would actually make sense here whereas dt is right that “passed appetizers” is Not A Thing (Ed.: based on sksryan’s discussion below, I should revise this claim to “Not A Linguistic Expression or Idiom.” To the extent it’s industry jargon it’s not in common usage elsewhere.) I assumed it was a typo for “past appetizers” (which also is not an expression and would have made at best marginally more linguistic sense.)
I see what you’re doing here, and approve, but I am literally claiming that the phrase “passed appetizers” is actually far more obscure and less commonly used than “hors d’oeuvres.”
(Seriously, sorry to be a pedant, I do in fact get it.)
Hors d'ouevres is probably technically different. I believe that traditionally hors d'ouevres are done ad hoc by the kitchen using pieces derived from the meal courses, not as separate planned dishes.
"not a thing"? Passed appetizers are definitely a thing at "fancy" functions. Passed appetizers are what they bring around during cocktail hour to occupy people while they make small talk until it's time to be seated for dinner. In the context of the article, Matt is using it as a metaphor for executive actions that were designed to keep the press occupied until the big legislation was ready. I understood it perfectly well.
Small bits of food on a tray carried by waiters as the guests mingle before dinner. Not the real food, just something to occupy people before the main event.
It’s overdressed, underpaid, accented wait staff navigating their way through a gaggle of middle managers wearing event ids on lanyards around their necks, hoping that with a smile and friendly offer they can offload the last few coconut shrimps so they can head to the kitchen for a quick smoke break before having to grab another tray and do it all over again. Passed appetizers is a scene.
Just for the record, as a person experiencing PMCness, I can't recall ever hearing the term, "passed appetizers" used as an idiom to describe catered food being carried around a party. It seems like something invented by people who didn't know how to spell/pronounce, "hors d'oeuvres."
I'm having trouble seeing how Democrats take advantage of Trump aggressively seizing power that doesn't belong to him.
Every swing voter grew tired of Trump being compared to Hitler, and now that Trump is actually blowing through laws and precedent in a dangerous way, I have a hard time seeing Democrats winning the argument with "See, he's doing exactly what we warned you of! It's worse than we expected!"
I just imagine these swing voters shrugging and thinking "I'm tired of hearing this from you."
It's going to take a skilled politicians to help the Democrats slice through this apathy.
There's no path for the Democrats to get power in the next two years and there's no press release the Dems can put out that sways the Trump voters that actually he's bad.
Realistically it's going to come down to Trump's willingness to violate court orders and the willingness of Republicans in Congress to stand up for their branch of government as a co-equal.
I see no issue with what Jeffries is doing. Whether you like it or not, people aren't going to care about Trump's antics unless they feel it's actively harmful to them, either through making it harder for them to afford things or making them feel less safe.
Unfortunately, nothing is going to drive general opposition until people are visibly hurt in a way that bothers Americans. Right now we’re still essentially screaming about abstractions, and we’ve been doing that virtually non-stop for a decade. I know we don’t want to wait until people are hurt, being decent kindhearted liberals, but I think that’s where we are.
Randall, if the NIH indirect cost cut goes through, that will devastate universities including the one I work at, and possibly cost me my job and the career I spent 10+ years training for. I assure you, it’s not abstract to me.
Yes, of course I know what you meant: abstractions from the perspective of The Median American Voter. Pointy-headed elitist matcha-sipping Prius-driving overeducated coastal dwellers like me don’t count.
Part of our problem is that the courts and Congress (eventually) do their job and many of the worst things don't come to pass. While it's good that the system ultimately works and the pain is muted, the constant whiplash is still exhausting.
I should really just take my own advice and not pay attention to the news anymore!
I think that voters will recognize your pain, but not until they see many of you experiencing it (not just anticipating it, even with certainty). I don’t mean to be dismissive of current pain but I think that’s where we are. You say “if it goes through”; unfortunately I don’t think it will be real for the typical person until it *does* go through and people see the aftermath. The last ten years have seen a lot of “Trump is going to X!!” that didn’t come to pass, and expectations have been adjusted accordingly.
"I think that voters will recognize your pain, but not until they see many of you experiencing it (not just anticipating it, even with certainty)."
Ok but this way of thinking is just stupid. (I know you're just describing it, not approving of it.)
I'm probably among a minority at Slow Boring for having read and enjoyed "Atlas Shrugged." This way of thinking reminds of the Taggart Tunnel debacle.
In short: there are hardly any competent people left at Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. The idiots now in charge want to send a coal-burning engine through the Taggart Tunnel in the Rockies, even though the ventilation system is suitable only for diesel engines. The few remaining intelligent people warn that this is going to be a disaster, but the higher-ups shout them down with "oh you nervous Nellies, you're always panicking, how can you know the ventilation system is inadequate? How can anyone ever really know anything?"
Spoiler: the coal engine is sent through the tunnel, smoke accumulates and suffocates everyone on board, then the engine explodes and collapses the tunnel, in the biggest manmade disaster the country had seen in years.
My point: sure, once the tunnel has collapsed and everyone on board the train has died, you can point at the wreckage and the dead bodies and say "I told you so," but wouldn't it have been loads better NOT to send the f**king train through the tunnel in the first place?
I’m in the same boat as drosophilist with the NIH funding, this is not abstract to me. But any costs of alienating people like us are entirely abstract — what are we going to do, get even less supportive of GOP? In the longer term, damaging science enterprise is likely to be a bad bet, but I would say that, wouldn’t I ?
At a risk of glib overgeneralization, the whole split is between people who buy (and sell) abstract long term arguments and those who don’t. If we call the former “elites” and the latter the common clay of the West, we get at the only sense in which Trump & co are not a part of the “elite”. T’s obvious chip on the shoulder about Ivy League and geniuses underscores this.
Democrats definitely blew their load on dictator comparisons in the first term. If Trump manages to fuck up the economy, that will give Democrats a good line of attack, but it's not currently unlocked.
One question is whether cries of "Hitler!" will hurt Democrats further. If they're already being tuned out by most people, then maybe it won't hurt to shout them while providing some catharsis to the shouters. If shouting "Hitler!" does harm Democrats, then we're in trouble because many won't be able to keep their pie holes shut.
I think this is overly focused on the big fiscal impact of some of these changes. Destroying the NTSB or the BLS or the FWS, just like he's destroyed USAID, would have way less budget impact than change to Medicare formulas. But the latter could easily be changed back in 2 or 4 or 8 years. Reconstituting the administrative state that was built between 1945 and 1975 in the next Democratic trifecta will be almost impossible.
Relatedly, fixing the US’s reputation as a reliable diplomatic partner with a strong rule of law will take generations to fix, if ever. There is a lot of ruin in a nation and the movement to make America Great appears to want to America greatly diminished.
My best hope for _that_ is that he does some really stupid things and overreaches badly in some authoritarian way, and a bunch of young people/voters who _aren't_ in his cult say "uh... maybe I need to value norms more than I thought"
On the other hand, this probably requires him to make things much worse for a bunch of people first, so it's not like this is a great outcome either.
The old Republican coalition was built around people who paid more in taxes than they received in entitlements. Yet even Reagan could not meaningfully cut entitlements. The present Republican coalition includes many net beneficiaries of entitlements. This group has swollen as a proportion of the population because the deficit is 6.5% of GDP and military spending relative to GDP is near post World War Two lows. Not only has the beneficiary class grown, it has trended R.
The Republican coalition is far more fractious than the Democratic coalition and the Trump show will get tedious soon.
He may lose popular support, but he's already president and disregarding the laws. If he can openly defy court orders, commit crimes, and prevent the prosecution of anyone on his side, merely losing support among the public would not be enough. Tyrants can cling to power as long as the people loyal to them have more capacity for violent coercion than the people opposing them.
Yes, but what happens if the commander-in-chief, who also gives orders to the FBI and DOJ and has the power of the pardon, declares "the court has made its ruling, now let them enforce it!"? (A paraphrase of Andrew Jackson's likely apocryphal declaration of defiance against a SCOTUS order concerning the Cherokee Nation. More precisely, the court ruled (Worcester v. Georgia) that the state of Georgia could not impose its laws on the Cherokee, but they were neither able to physically force them to stop, nor to prevent the president from later expelling the Cherokee to Oklahoma.)
I'm sure Trump would like the courts' permission for any given action, but can they stop him if he defies them and his appointees obey his orders? This is where we come to "people loyal to him have more capacity for violent coercion" -- if the president openly declares that he does not recognize the courts' authority over him, his subordinates in the executive branch will face a choice -- betray their boss, or betray the laws and constitutional order as expressed by the courts? You can't obey both when they are in direct conflict, which I fear Trump and his allies (Vance, Musk, the Project 2025 team) are all to willing to bring about. Generals, inspectors general, etc. will have to decide -- who has less legitimacy, the current president or the current judges? Who would win a fight? Pick the losing side, and it will not go well for you.
I want to point out that courts don't have much power to enforce the law if prosecutors don't want to -- for instance, during the term of the previous administration, there was lax enforcement of street crime or immigration law, and during the current administration, there seems to be no enforcement of conflicts of interest or the separation of power, insofar as these things would constrain the president and his friends.
A key point here is that the executive relies upon hundreds of thousands of people to enforce its will. If a court starts telling them not to do something, most of them are going to obey.
This is what Ezra Klein was talking about Trump being weak. If he were more disciplined, he would go slower, continuously move his people into the civil service and when the time was ripe initiate the confrontation with the courts. He's going much too fast and too wildly to win this. Unless the Supreme Court turns out to be more supine and uninterested in protecting its power and status than some of us might think.
These guys will do a lot of destruction but probably their ability to reshape the government (past just destroying it) is pretty limited.
Yes - the key point is that Trump has no operating organizational skills. While he is busy dismantling things that he in fact needs to meet his promises. Besides a handful of people who are more than happy to take EO at face value, the organization that is required is enormous. Finding the people who can afford to be sued or taken to court personally for following clearly illegal EO is pretty small.
If they're taken to court for breaking federal law because Trump ordered them to, won't he just pardon them? My concern is that with a deeply corrupt president and DOJ, you're more likely to be prosecuted for obeying the law than breaking it.
Edit: better than pardoning, he can just suspend proceedings as long as they keep dancing on his strings, then throw them to the wolves if they show any resistance. In Russia, Putin's friends are free to steal, and they only get charged when he no longer needs them.
I hope so -- and this sounds reassuringly believable, unlike "the courts will stop them" per se. But this is also why the admin wants to get rid of as many old employees as possible, to minimize the number of people who would resist EOs they (or the courts) object to.
I have a channel to communicate with lawyers at a government agency, and this would be an interesting subject for discussion. What would the agency do about blatantly illegal orders from the president? What if the presidentially-appointed chief puts his own weight on the orders too? And OMB/DOGE won't pay the whole agency if they haven't obeyed by this afternoon? Or what if a mob is firing bullets and Molotovs at our building? How much would it take to coerce the agency? (E.g. I might defy orders enforced by threats of firing or suspending payments to the agency, but I could be cowed by threats to my physical safety. I'd also want to buy a gun and a gun safe, a car, and look into visas before such a situation had a chance to emerge -- I hope I never need them, but if I do, it's too late.)
Also, just for fun in these trying times, in addition to discussing the legality of buying stocks as a regulator, we could discuss the legality of things like impounding legally authorized congressional payments and breaking the government's contractual obligations, if you're a rich contractor and foreign business interest. The agency's lawyers can't stop them, but it would bring a sense of solidarity to our little corner of an organization rotting from the head. I'm also against public sector unions in the abstract -- they're bargaining against the taxpayers and don't have to worry about maintaining the counterparty's viability -- but there are worse things, and we're facing them now.
Anyone whose statutory rights are violated by the administration has standing to seek an injunction.
Trump can totally try to rule as a dictator if he wants to, but there is no way a majority of Congress would go along. He would have to defy the judiciary and congress. He might (or might not) find 34 senators who would vote against removal regardless of the evidence. If Trump opposes both the judiciary and a majority of Congress, his popular support will likely collapse
“there is no way a majority of Congress would go along”
Right, Republicans in Congress have a superb track record of standing up to Trump, amply demonstrated in the aftermath of Jan 6. Look how effective they were at impeaching him and making sure he couldn’t run again after that travesty!
No president has ever been removed by the Senate, and I think it's far more likely that Trump's term ends on a bier than in the upper chamber.
In the vanishingly unlikely event that 66+ senators, many from his own party, vote against him, you can also bet that the mobs will be out for blood and the Secret Service won't stop them -- this is not my fevered imagination, I just remember what happened last time His Highness was directed to vacate the royal palace, and what happened to the criminal records of the people involved.
We can also look at the history of other countries where murdering the ruler's enemies was a crime until it wasn't, but it might be more convincing to focus on what has already happened right here.
I'm guessing the courts could start tossing low-level folks in jail who don't have wealth and robust legal resources. Trump, most likely, won't help them.
People who commit federal crimes are likely to commit state crimes in the process. State prosecutors can go after them.
It will probably only be prosecutors affiliated with the Democratic party, another wound to the legitimacy of our justice system (a legitimacy that's already looking like Caesar on the Ides of March -- ironic, given that it is our Caesar who inflicted most of the wounds) -- but that's a gap in the president's power. He does not control state prosecutors.
"Trump is many things, but he is most of all a showman."
Right now, Trump is riding elephants, taming cobras and blowing smoke, and the crowd is watching with rapt attention. But how many times can he repeat these sleights-of-hand before the crowd gets bored and leaves? Eventually, a showman needs to put on an actual show.
In the same way, a snake oil salesman is revealed when people buy the snake oil and see first hand it didn't actually cure their maladies.
As a longtime marketer, I've always respected how well Trump is able to accurately assess what the masses are asking for and create a sales pitch that speaks right to it. But crafting a promise-filled commercial is the easy part (which is why it baffles me how bad Democrats are at it). But to get people to keep buying requires a legitimately good product, and this is where Trump will always fail.
It was easy to promise investors that Theranos could quickly analyze your blood with a single pinprick - Building a product that could actually deliver on that was impossible. It takes time, but the reality always bubbles up, and the public learns truth one way or the other.
What would have happened, though, if Theranos was in a position to shut down their rivals and use public funds to subsidize themselves? We don't choose our government on a competitive market -- the barriers and moats around them are not just a metaphor.
1) I am with other commentators who don't see much benefit at all in being the "responsible" party in debt-ceiling or government-funding votes. I'm not aware of any shutdown or debt-ceiling in which one party held a trifecta but the party *out of power* got the blame.
I believe Democrats have both a perfectly-valid reason - "why should we cut deals to make sure our programs will be funded, when Elon is going to cut them anyway" and an easy-to-digest public message: "you literally control every branch of government... so fund it."
I have not always taken this side - I think the problem with conservative budgetary hostage-taking is that it's pretty effective, and it relies on norms like "hostage taking is bad" which have proven pretty thin. So for example, when Biden was president and Democrats had the Senate, I thought it made sense to make deals with Johnson to make sure that government stayed open and programs got funded. Now, I see absolutely no benefit to the Democrats doing this, and lots of benefit to them letting the Republicans either shut down the government or pass terrible policies we can run against. Am I missing something? Is CNN going to gravely decry the abandonment of duty by Dems if they all vote no on a debt-ceiling bill? Or are there actual filibuster-applicable steps that Dems could take to stop these bills if they want to, and that's what we're debating?
2) I think the debate about how to resist Trump has foundered on the question of whether we have to "save our bullets" and resist overreacting to everything. But Trump's 24-hour-media circus has shown that there's no such thing as saving your bullets - if there's an issue people care about and that you're "winning" on, there's no amount of attention to it that's too much. What people are trying to do though is avoid getting energized on areas that people don't actually care about. That's why folks like Pod Save are worrying about how to defend USAID - because it's an area where popular sentiment is more on the GOP side. So you really have to find the angles where you have the popular advantage - Elon is shutting down the CFPB, Elon is putting special education at risk, Elon is cutting veteran's benefits with his govt spending freeze. And then you hammer them - again, and again, and again. AOC is good at doing this, but most Democrats are really bad, and they've shot themselves in the foot with a geriatric congressional leadership who seems awful at communication.
I also liked what Matt said on the Politix podcast last week - Dems really suffer from not having many "low-trust" media consumers or producers. The kind of stuff Trump + Elon are doing should be generating constant conspiracy theories and viral moments, but it's not. Trump took a $25 billion Chinese shitcoin bribe! Elon is shutting down the government but giving himself fat contracts! Trump is downing the planes! I think some Bluesky types are trying, but they don't have the right ecosystem to spread it. The point is to focus attention on bad things that the population agrees with us more on, and make right-wingers play the role of "well ackshually, the veteran's healthcare benefits aren't being stopped, there's a robust waiver process in place for valid programs, blah blah blah." Basically the "they're eating cats and dogs" playbook.
If Democrats provide votes for the budget, especially in the House (where there is no issue of a filibuster), then they’ll look like chumps. All of this DOGE/Impoundment stuff means that promises made to Democrats to get their votes on government funding aren’t credible.
"On the other hand, in recent political history, whichever party is seen as “wanting” a shutdown ends up taking the political blame and “losing” the battle. Democrats have to be somewhat careful about how they approach things."
Citation needed that this harmed GOP electorally. I'm well aware that in previous "shutdown" showdowns, polls showed that public blaming Republicans given they were the ones (or in some cases one person, see Ted Cruz) were responsible for the shutdown. But those polls? Honestly, how long lasting were they? Is there any indication one swing voter changed their vote a year later because of shutdown showdown?
Matt alludes to this but don't be fooled by Trump's "high" approval rating. Compared to most presidents 3 weeks into their presidency, his approval rating is actually pretty mediocre. And yet, based on punditry, you'd think his approval rating is at like 70%.
I'm sorry Matt, but you're podcast partner has this correct and has had this correct for basically two years now. I'm actually with you that "pocketbook" issues are more likely to sway swing voters. But you need to force the goddamn issue. Being passive and just saying "don't worry, voters will see eventually how bad things are for their bottom line" is not going to cut it. You need to recognize the reality of the media environment we're in.
Hard disagree. Picking losing fights isn't going to help voters view of Dems.
Instead they need to be proving they can be trusted to govern. Pushing legislation that cracks down on illegal immigration would be a great first start.
You mean like the legislation they created, and that Trump and a bunch of republicans blocked? I do not think the median voter is going to notice.
Voters are going to get mad if their lives get worse, and if that happens, they will blame [Current president's party], and they will not give two shits about whether [Current president's party] is the cause of it or not.
If democrats help Republicans make the border better, Republicans will get all the credit for it. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't vote for it, but let's not have any illusions about how the typical uninformed voter will perceive this.
I think the Democrats should negotiate to improve bills and should vote for good ones both because they're good bills and, for those democrats in competitive races, to be able to point to bipartisanship.
But that's different than going out on a limb and _proposing_ the bills, where I agree they won't, as a whole, get the credit.
(EDIT: When I was mad at McConnell for his "let's make Obama a one-term president" by obstructing everything, I didn't care that he wasn't _proposing_ bills to fix things, I cared that he was obstructing improving anything. Similarly I don't know that I need the Democrats to _propose_ bills, but I don't want them to obstruct good things)
And all the while we have to rollover federal debt from zero interest loans to real interest loans. Republicans are malicious but they are also cowards. They want to immiserate the public by ending Medicaid, ACA, SNAP, etc. but don't want to be rightfully blamed for doing so.
I'll happily sit through the taunting from the chuckleheads about "I told you Trump was a genius" if we somehow get out of this without higher interest rates, higher inflation, or regressive spending cuts, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll probably just have to settle for being vindicated... as I pay even more for eggs. Yeah, not a good trade-off.
With the recent rise in inflation it seems pretty obvious how this is going to go. The fed will have to hike rates which will trigger a recession and we’ll get a dual chamber sweep in 2026.
If the Democrats were politically savvy, truly embraced a big-tent approach, and Trump became sufficiently unpopular, then many seats could potentially become competitive (Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Florida, Ohio, Texas or a state like Kentucky if Republicans were to nominate a Roy Moore-like candidate there) and the dam could break.
Of course, I'm skeptical. My pessimistic view is that Democrats will concede the Senate and focus entirely on NC and Maine in 2026 and try to eke out a 50-50 Senate in 2029 by winning by flipping Ron Johnson's seat in WI in 2028.
I think most of those are out of reach for cultural reasons at a national level. Could a Democrat win a state election - yes. Federal election - doubtful at best.
Those "cultural reasons" will only be a factor if Democrats continue to prioritize appeasing progressive activists over winning elections, which is probably the direction Democrats will go, unfortunately.
My point is that it doesn't have to be that way. Those states are only out of reach if Democrats choose to keep them out of reach.
Sure, you could say the same thing about Republicans in the NE. If only they changed foundational parts of their politics, they would be more successful. But that's really hard to do!
Well, Republicans do have one Senator from NE, so by that logic it's not unreasonable to expect at least one Democratic Senator from the states I listed!
The idea that winning any of these states requires changing foundational parts of the Democratic Party doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Many of these states elected Dems statewide as recently as 2018 and 2022. Obama won 3 of them twice. Democrats would only need to win 2 out of the 7 for a Senate majority if they flip NC and Maine and hold Georgia and Michigan.
Matt, you mention, "Of course, if Trump succeeds in setting himself up as a dictator, unconstrained by courts, Congress, or the rule of law, nobody will really care if the 2025 legislative agenda was a bust. But I don’t want to pre-concede that outcome". If Trump becoming a dictator is even remotely a possibility, I am not clear why we are talking about anything other than how to counter that. Conversations like this feel a bit futile.
The GOP now has coalitions they have to manage, just like the Democrats. The anti-DEI part of the coalition is getting what they want, as their ideas ripple through Government, academia and businesses.
But the deficit hawks -- many of whom are the mouth-breathers in the Freedom Caucus -- are the ones to watch here. They are not going to get what they want, as the math just doesn't work as Matt has repeatedly pointed out. I really do not see how they will be able to move forward. It's going to be a long 2-4 years.
Are there actually a nontrivial number of deficit hawks who will change their voting over a Republican failure to reduce deficits at this point?
Every Republican president in the past 40 years has significantly expanded the deficit; their voters’ revealed preference is not to care.
At this point, only the indirect mechanism of higher equilibrium inflation or interest rates is likely to put pressure on politicians to reduce the deficit, through the mechanism of mostly-disengaged voters who don’t understand the mechanism getting mad at whoever is in charge.
The margin in the house is tight enough that one (1) is a nontrivial number. And historically there have been a few budget hawk refuseniks.
They'll cave, none of them have ever openly defied Trump when it really mattered, and it's worth remembering that corruption is in fashion. Those who can't be persuaded can be bought.
33 Republican members of the House voted against the first major legislation that Trump wanted - suspension of the debt ceiling during his presidency.
Never ceases to amaze me the few things the GOP pushes back against Trump (or at least a sufficient number of them). It's somehow invariably the few good ideas Trump has. First and foremost is vaccines (and obviously now Trump has completely flipped on this). And now debt ceiling; one of the stupidest "self destruct" buttons created by any government on the planet.
And then flipside today. Hey sure, let's approve a possible Russian asset as DNI. Cause Trump will get real mad or something about a cabinet position literally no primary or swing voters will care about except the security hawks already in the "Never Trump" camp and Democrats. Yeah sure, YOLO and of course "owning the libs" is clearly more important than protecting national security secrets.
Probably, but previously there had been at least a few seats on the ‘vote no’ lifeboat for the most truculent of the freedom caucus. Now there's like one.
I suspect this news matters here. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/12/us-treasury-yields-investors-anticipate-consumer-inflation-data-.html
Will paste in full James Carville's famous quip "“I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
Yeah, I also basically think that the interest rate/inflation combo is the real budget constraint for states whose debt is denominated in a currency they control, and that some kind of bond market action like the response to the Truss/Kwarteng budget would be the catalyst for any shift to fiscal discipline in the US.
The sooner, the better, while our economy has more to it than the UK's "sell physical assets to the children of autocrats, provide financial and legal services to the children of autocrats, and occasionally pump some oil" basis.
A lot of ink has been spilled opining on Democrat's stupid coalitional politics. Sometimes I forget how stupid Republican coalitional politics are. I suspect this is all the product of a broader (civic) moral decline in this country.
Eh, historic US coalition politics were significantly more stupid and evil! Spend some time reading about Gilded Age politics, or the New Deal’s reliance on southern segregationists.
This +1000. The Senate was controlled by white supremacists for a few decades in the 20th century.
Also both major parties having a major Corruptionmaxing faction during the Gilded Age.
This is true, but the coalitions were overlapping and cross-partisan. The coalitions are equally stupid now but don't even have the release valve of cross-partisan compromise and cooperation (like what e.g. we saw between racist populists and sincere social Democrats or between northern Dems and the GOP on race etc)
"More evil," I'm buying. Not so sure about, "more stupid."
The Republicans now are nihilists, during the Gilded Age the Dixiecrats were white supremacists/Nazis. Hey, at least it’s an ethos!
Why the fuck would nihilists care about money?
I dunno, but they’ll surely cut off their buddy’s toe to get it!
"A lot of ink has been spilled opining on Democrat's stupid coalitional politics. Sometimes I forget how stupid Republican coalitional politics are."
So did many other voters. That's why the party out of power usually does so well. Both parties have big problems, but the problems of the party in power are always freshest in voters' minds, so that's what they focus on.
I don't think one single Republican truly cares about the deficit and even if they do it's not going to be the thing they break with Trump over.
Oddly. I think Musk does. It’s probably a ketamine induced fever dream but in all his interviews he talks about the debt “crisis” as existential for the USD. He said the dollar will become “worthless”. I think he believes this. That’s why he’s being set up as the fall guy.
You're forgetting the crypto angle.
There have been a number of think pieces about "what's Musk up to" and it's amazing to me no one has brought up Musk's (and the VC fascists generally) holdings of crypto.
My point is, we are really underrating the possibility that Musk is trying to deliberately engineer a debt default. Because at its core is a key fact; crypto long term has basically no value if can't be an actually official currency. And reality is crypto is basically trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. Whatever issues there are with our financial system (and there are many), the ease and stability to conduct legal financial transactions is not one of them. It's basically click of button "done".
So in order for crypto long term to have any value, it essentially needs to replace the dollar as the default currency exchange. And given what I noted above, that's not going to happen...unless we have an actual debt default and the full faith and credit of the United States is completely destroyed.
Musk's entire MO is creative destruction. Break things to get progress. I truly think we underestimate the likelihood that he's perfectly fine with financial catastrophe if it means a huge financial windfall personally.
I think that’s because his crypto holdings as a % of his net worth round to zero. All his net worth is in USD denominated equities. There’s no path forward for him to shift any meaningful share of his wealth to crypto. He’s very much very worried about the long term stability of the USD.
I would first say there is a ton of circumstantial evidence to suggest that he's not exactly thinking with clean state of mind right now; Ketamine + social media rabbit hole + general rich guy delusions. Look at what's happening with Tesla. Probably not surprisingly, Tesla sales are in the tank and Tesla stock might be most overvalued stock on the stock market based on fundamentals this side of any Trump related company (the stock price for Truth Social or Tesla is essentially a bet on massive corruption. Depressingly a decent possibility this is a good bet. But based on P/E ratio, stock prices are completely detached from reality).
Point being that I'm not sure the very correct fact that crypto holdings are currently a small percentage of his net worth is relevant right now.
Crypto isn't just about financial windfall, it's about power. I would say for Peter Thiel and Musk more than anybody else, they have real aspirations for crypto personally that go way beyond just financial windfall (although there is that as well). Its essentially a bet that control of currency is control of government; which is actually correct.
I know this sounds like Marvel movie villain/Bond villain stuff right now. But seriously. Really look at everything he posts, every insane public appearance (Nazi salutes included), every utterance and everything he is actually trying to accomplish right now. Am I really that far off calling him a Marvel movie villain/Bond villain come to life?
Yes. You’re that far off. When you’re already the richest man in the world you don’t worry about that next windfall. You focus on protecting your current net worth. Musk’s bitcoin holdings is no different than Ray Dalio’s. It’s an uncorrelated asset class across a diversified portfolio. Same reason Dalio is so long gold right now. Musk’s big difference is he doesn’t have a portfolio. He’s levered long USD equities.
"his crypto holdings as a % of his net worth round to zero"
Really? That seems surprising given the amount of time Musk has spent promoting cryptocurrency stuff over the years.
That's my understanding. His BTC exposure is through TSLA and SpaceX holdings of ~ 20,000 coins. But he's also famously cash "poor" right? He had to sell and then pledge his TSLA stock for the twitter acquisition.
EDIT: Just to put numbers to it the TSLA market cap is $1T and their BTC holding ending Q4 were $1B.
Its one thing to try out lots of cars and rockets, let them fail and try again. It's another to tank the world's financial market and try to put it back together. The monetary system is a fiction, a story we choose to believe. Without confidence that it will work, it's nothing but chaos.
Musk is eminently unlikeable. That is why I think HGH bloated body is being fattened for slaughter.
This is actually my real "hope". https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/02/06/congress/elon-musk-approval-rating-00202805
This Democratic internal polling so feel free to take with a tad of grain of salt. But I think it seems very likely that Musk is much more unpopular than Trump himself.
My worries that Trump is determined to create a constitutional crises aside (think we are underrating real possibility he decides just ignore court rulings coming down the line. What then), Musk is likely to become a public approval albatross around his neck.
I fully expect Trump / Musk to ignore court rulings. The courts can't actually coerce an unwilling executive branch. But as John E reminded me in the comments, even the president has only so much power to coerce an unwilling executive branch. Far more than anyone else, to be sure, but the executive branch consists of vast numbers of employees, who generally started their job under the ancien regime in which the executive branch followed the law. They have some familiarity with the law, and lawyers to advise them on details. By taking their jobs, they accept a duty to defend the Constitution and faithfully carry out its laws.
Many people will disobey wrongful orders. Trump can fire them, Musk's interns can illegally halt their paychecks, he can even order the FBI to raid them and incite mobs to terrorize them. If the media are scared enough, this might not even be well-reported. But at least the ongoing resistance will wear down state capacity enough that Trump will be ineffective as a dictator. And there will be internal conflicts between people siding with Trump vs with the law. I hope it's mostly peaceful, not an outright civil war (god only knows). In the best case, enough people will just refuse to punish people for disobeying unlawful orders, and the coup will stall. If FBI agents refuse to arrest politicians and bureaucrats without evidence of a real crime, if security forces keep the mobs out, etc., then the executive branch can largely obey the law in safety.
Also, people in DC won't need the media to tell them what's happening -- they will have their neighbors and their own eyes. Being physically in a city of common people is a danger to oppressive regimes. Large enough popular revolutions, and limited enough willingness to kill them on the part of the security forces, sometimes do bring down tyrants.
Probably the most important theme going forward will be the tension between Trump the bully and Trump the coward. He loves dominance games and torturing/punishing people. At the same time, he's afraid of direct confrontation and tends to back down, even at the risk of appearing weak.
Perhaps he will ignore court orders, bully that he is. Or perhaps he'll fold like a cheap suit, and meekly given in to the courts. Maybe he will punch Musk in the mouth when he gets too big and throw him to the curb, or maybe he'll paper over everything Musk does and let Musk take him on a ride to hell and mass repugnance and rejection.
My bet is on a chaotic and random combination of the two. Because Trump's North Star is that he is an attention-fixated chaos monkey.
The state capacity issue is hugely underdiscussed in terms of the authoritarian threat here. Trump/Musk are both actively kneecapping their own ability to run a police state and win popular support through government spending programs.
Maybe, but where does that get him. The only way to meaningfully attack the deficit is to cut entitlement programs, which you really need Congress to do, and cutting taxes which they all want to do just makes it all harder. Short of just not sending out SS payments or not paying out Medicare claims the Exec branch is limited even in its illegality.
I think for Musk it's all about points on a glidepath to cut federal spending. That's why I think he's being set up as the fall guy. The rest of the GOP isn't with him. He actually really does want to cut entitlements but they don't. His first target was $2T and that he knows this will cause pain. This whole DOGE circus is just the first act. There's 3m federal employees. Maybe he can cut 500,000 or something. That's gonna create news cycles. It's gonna show action. He'll own all this and then becomes liable if anything fails. Then as Matt points out the GOP will cut taxes and increase the deficit.
The only problem with this theory is that Musk has no power to do any of this. It all leads back to Trump.
Of course he does. USAID and DoE are all on Musk. Musk literally tweeted "The Dept. of Education no longer exists". He broke the news.
As Cheney said about Reagan, deficits don't matter (to the voters). Interest rates, however, do. Huge deficits will lead to higher interest rates and, as Carville ruefully pointed out, high interest rates will destroy your legislative agenda.
Powell just took near-term rates cuts off the table too. I love this guy. Just DNGAF about Trump. That means the 30 year mortgage rate is gonna run > 7% at least through the summer home buying cycle further eroding consumer confidence. Trump has no path forward here.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-02-11/powell-tells-congress-fed-still-in-no-rush-to-lower-rates
Oddly if Powell or a future Fed chair caves to Trump on short term interest. I think the Fed loses credibility and10 year rates get worse and mortgage rates with them.
I guarantee there are many republicans that do care about the deficit
Whether they care about it enough to defy trump, I don't know
It's always possible to rationalize that increasing the deficit in the short run is necessary to consolidate power enough to shield your side from public opinion such that you can cut the deficit in the long run.
agreed.
But really I think to make meaningful cuts you must have bipartisan buy in (see Clinton/Gingrich). That way one side isn't blaming the other side.
Of course that usually means both benefit cuts and tax increases.
Trump and Musk have been saying hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud has been uncovered so I think it’s fair for deficit hawks to expect that to be cut, and frankly to see prosecutions of the fraudsters. Not really sure how Trump and Musk sneak out of that one unless the movement truly does just follow what the leaders say on any given day.
> unless the movement truly does just follow what the leaders say on any given day
That's what they've been doing so far. Trump is pure, his opponents are corrupt. The election would be fraudulent and rigged against Trump, until he won, at which point it was fine. Storming the Capitol in a failed attempt to terrorize Congress into changing the election results was a defense of democracy. (They probably don't put it in the exact same terms I would use, but many on the right support "one man, one vote," as long as that one man is their man.)
There's partisan brain on the left too, but the extent you see it among Trump's core supporters is breathtaking. I really don't think it's possible for him to lose their support, even if he wanted to, no matter what happens. Like the followers of Brian of Nazareth.
Brian: I’m not the Messiah!
Woman in crowd: Only the true Messiah denies his divinity!
Brian: What? What chance does that give me? All right, you win, I am the Messiah!
Crowd: He is! He is the Messiah!!!
Brian: Now f**k off!
A perennial classic.
I posted this last night but their path forward is very clear. They’re just going to lie. In their minds the $600m SSP FEMA program to reimburse states for illegal immigrant expenses was “fraud” and failure to comply with a rescinded EO is “illegal”. It’s all bullshit. But this playbook certainly isn’t new.
They can lie, but at the end of the day they either have to spend the money or fight to not spend it. Both choices come with real consequences.
They can just declare that all the fraud they found has been cut and now they’re winning!
I feel like that's been the strategy so far.
Sure, but it doesn't actually cut the deficit if they do that!
They don’t actually care about waste or deficit, just about being *seen* as caring.
Back in December, much was made of the conflict between the Elon Musk-led "the more H1B visas the merrier, Americans are too stupid and lazy to work in tech" faction and the Steve Bannon-led "we voted for America First, not this let's-import-a-bunch-of-foreigners bullshit" faction.
Is this going to be a problem for the GOP going forward, or are the two factions going to hold together based on their shared hatred of their common enemy, the liberal elite?
At some point, someone's going to want deliverables, particularly if (when) the economy tanks. (As I said last year, it's clear that a media bubble can make people think a good economy is bad, but I'm much more skeptical about a media bubble being able to make people think a bad economy is good.)
You mean a coalition of law-and-order voters and libertarians, union busters and union rank-and-file voters, barstool bros and social conservatives, is likely to come apart at the seams without a unifying external enemy? Color me shocked.
This is all part of the natural pendulum swing of a two-party democracy. What makes Trump's actions in his first few weeks so terrifying (and predictable) are that they are clear efforts to break the pendulum.
Even the anti-DEI stuff cannot be seen as a lasting change unless they anchor it in legislation. I see no moves to do so thus far.
I don't think legislation is needed in this area, though. We already have the civil rights act. Read as written, it doesn't allow discrimination based on sex or race which would include affirmative action and most DEI activities as implemented over the past 10 years. I think this is a lasting change.
Trump made tons of changes based on EO alone. To my understanding much of it is guidelines on how to interpret the civil rights legislation. The same legislation in the name of which the whole aa regime was created since the 60s (including the dei monstrosity of the past 5-10 years). It’s possible that the conservative scotus would continue to dismantle it slowly on its own over the next few decades but to my mind it seems that clarifying the evident ambiguity in the civil rights law to make the eo settled law will be much mire effective in the short term and prevent the next dem admin from attempting to restore status quo ante
Aren’t they the most expendable leg of the coalition?
Their coalition isn't large enough to have any expendable parts.
Their only solution is to take up the mantle of entitlement cuts (or reform, depending on your perspective), but they have learned their lesson on that topic and will not touch the hot stove again. The result is going to be inflation.
There will only be (higher) inflation if the Fed allows it, which will only happen when Trump installs a crony in 2026. There will, however, be higher interest rates.
Do we actually know what interest rates would be needed to stave off inflation driven by crowding out of private investment finally biting down hard?
Would they be sustainable, not just politically but in the minds of the Fed's own leadership?
Sustainable meaning what? If the FED raises interest rates to 10%, it will almost certainly push the economy into fairly sharp recession that will do a lot to slow inflation.
It's actually somewhat interesting to think about, but if we were to pass very regressive tax cuts and Trump sequestered or Congress cut a bunch of transfer programs to the working-class and poor, would that really be very inflationary?
Even if not fully balanced... the marginal propensity to consume among the folks taking the hit is much higher than that among those whose taxes are cut, so aggregate demand would probably fall on net, and a significant fraction of the money from the latter will just end up back in Treasuries, so increased demand would bid down yields somewhat.
We don't know, as I think that would be subject to all sorts of dynamic factors like the potential for productivity gains from AI, etc. I think they would be sustainable. If i were on the Fed I would sustain them as opposed to allowing another burst of inflation. Interest rates are nowhere near historic highs and getting out in front of the issue prevents the need for even higher rates down the road.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS
What crowding out of private investment are you talking about?
Generally a three legged dog can stand on its own. A two legged dog has much more difficulty.
“The paradox of Trump’s first weeks”
I still don’t see any paradox. An autocratic executive that neuters a dithering legislature? That’s exactly the path that every strongman has followed.
Far from being a hindrance to Trump’s power grab, the futility of Congress is an enabling condition, practically a precondition. It’s exactly because Congress is visibly ineffectual (even the liberal Yglesias is saying!) that the public will clamor to have Trump take over all of the levers of power.
I mean — you think Hitler took power because the Weimar legislature was focused and effective?
There’s no paradox here: this is the way autocrats come to power.
I say this as someone who’s generally extremely aggravated by resist libs crying wolf.
But I get the sense that even if we were in a full-blown constitutional crisis with Trump offering a blanket pardon to anyone who acts illegally on his behalf, we’d still be sitting around here saying “The real policy questions are: what is Trump going to do to child tax credits? Did tariffs make inflation 0.3pp higher than it would’ve been otherwise?”
But maybe that wouldn’t be wrong? Failing economies are very bad for dictators.
Yeah, I agree that if we were at the point where the economic damage was going to be severe and noticeable, it would be smart to focus on those things. But I’m not sure we’re really going towards a failing economy.
I think the degree to which the economy fails is directly proportional to how much independent political power Trump acquires for himself.
The paralysis of the Weimar government helped Hitler take power, yes. When Hitler did take power, though, he got the Reichstag completely aligned with him (partly by banning opposition parties) and passed laws so that he wouldn’t need them anymore. Because for them to be capable of shutting down his agenda with a few dissenting votes would have made what he wanted to do impossible.
Like any dictator or would-be dictator, Trump needs tax revenue. Where does he get it, if he doesn’t have a compliant Congress?
Massive tariffs on all imported consumer goods such that growing bananas in Nebraska is now economically feasible.
Did someone say, "tariffs on bananas"? [Sensuous Latin beat fades in . . . .] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw7PUrgU3N0
There's always money in the banana stand...
/s obviously.
That was Charles I's strategy!
I learn so much here in the comments -- I had no idea that Charles I grew bananas in Nebraska!
You win the thread.
I don’t get this one
Yes, it's long overdue for some serious constitutional scrutiny of the laws where Congress has apparently handed over wholesale, aka "delegated", to the President its own power to set and change tax rates on imported goods. If it's okay there, why isn't it also ok to let the President personally set and change income tax rates for groups of individuals or even specific individuals....
Prior to Trump the use of this authority went through administrative review and justification before targeted tariffs (usually in response to dumping) were used.
Trump just waived even justifying his actions and the epistemological nihilism of Republicans has them nodding along.
Sure but administrative review is still under the President's control, because delegating a task to the President's subordinates is only semantically different than delegating it to the President; my point was control by the President vs by Congress.
The challenges that Matt describes don't change if the decision making moves to the White House. Hitler took power as Germany was coming out of an economic pit. We have exited low interest rate/low inflation and are left with a series of hard budget choices with significant trade offs.
I don't disagree with anything you've said, but I think there are practical limits on what Trump can do without a Congress willing to take the political pain for him. The US economy is too large and robust to be taken over in a power grab, it's going to react to stimuli in ways that Trump can't control. Break the debt ceiling and the markets will tank. Control the deficit by cutting social security and Medicare and the demand in the economy shrinks and throws us into recession. It's pretty clear that Trump does not have the ability to lead his minions in reaction to those types of crises. He's going to take what he can, and terribly for us he's going to break a lot of shit in the process.
Agree with your comment. But to be fair, Matt did say
>Of course, if Trump succeeds in setting himself up as a dictator, unconstrained by courts, Congress, or the rule of law, nobody will really care if the 2025 legislative agenda was a bust. But I don’t want to pre-concede that outcome.
So he's kind of setting that question aside for the moment
"So he's kind of setting that question aside for the moment"
And he's totally within his rights to do that.
Still, labeling it a "paradox" seems to obscure the direction of causation. If Trump succeeds in setting himself up as dictator, it will not be *despite* Congressional dysfunction, but *assisted by* Congressional dysfunction.
Doesn’t that depend on the nature of the dysfunction? Let’s say in a month it becomes clear that Congress is finding itself incapable of passing an extension of TCJA. I think that would show dysfunction and also be bad for Trump, politically and in terms of his goals.
"I think that would show dysfunction and also be bad for Trump...."
I hope that is how it will go, yes.
But given the last few weeks, it seems more likely that he'll say, "The American people demands the repeal of these unfair Democrat taxes, and Democrats in Congress are standing in their way because they hate America. So, I have directed the IRS to use the following new schedule for income taxation. You're going to love these new lower taxes. The people demand it, and I alone can get it done."
The WSJ will print an editorial lauding the president's new bold populist initiative.
"And now the Democrats are trying to take me to court to RAISE your taxes"
That is definitely the nightmare scenario, but if we're talking about a situation where by definition a majority of Congress doesn't approve…I don't know, it's definitely not a checkmate for Trump, I'll put it that way.
“…by definition a majority of Congress doesn't approve….”
A near majority — all the Republicans minus a sincere deficit-hawk or two — will not only approve, they will shower Trump with gratitude for having spared them the ordeal of taking a vote. The insincere deficit-hawks — i.e. most of them — will be even happier, because they’ll get their precious tax-cuts and still be able to posture about fiscal responsibility.
Yes, some level of acquiescence on the part of the House will be required. But these last weeks have shown them extremely eager to acquiesce.
If they do what they say they plan, and that’s a big if, the large cuts would come from things like what has been described as unnecessary and excessive defense spending (overpayments, inefficiency, excessive costs, or just things they don’t agree with), and the proposed Medicare change to no longer allow outpatient procedures to be billed as hospital. Both, in theory, would be large cost reductions without mission reduction and in fact even Noah Smith has pointed out how much less we are getting for our defense dollars than China. (Not suggesting he endorses this approach.)
Eliminating unpopular spending is generally a big political winner and a lot of what is being cut first is not popular.
That’s why they’re highlighting what they are, before the defense contractors and hospitals start yelling. It also puts Democrats in the position of appearing to support wasteful spending and opposing an investigation into wasteful spending. It’s pretty politically sharp.
Cutting costs without reducing services (basically what they claim to be able to do with both military and medical expenses) requires surgical precision and a resistance to lobbyists/special interests that Republicans do not possess. (Honestly idk if Democrats have it in them either).
Aside, when Noah Smith talks about military spending vs China, he’s really just doing Purchasing Power Parity adjustments. Things cost less in China generally because China is in many ways still a poor country. Labor costs for Chinese soldiers and Chinese defense contractors are smaller, so stuff is cheaper. That doesn’t mean their military is any less wasteful.
They also don't commit to large unit production numbers right away, but iterate and iterate on big ticket items like ships, which might affect both actual efficiency and how the numbers look on paper.
If anything, there are serious questions about how much graft has weakened their military.
It is indeed a big if. An if so big it should be rendered in size 96 font, bolded, underlined, and hyperlinked to all of the times Republicans have vowed to cut spending in the past.
Agreed. It is a mistake to be more outraged about exposing the waste than about the waste.
It’s all lies though. We’ve gotten several dozen iterations of made-up stuff like “$100 million in condoms for Gaza” and nothing else.
You can choose to be this credulous, but you’ll end up holding the bag in the end.
If there is actual waste that is being discussed! I haven’t heard of any though. Just legitimately authorized spending on research and health.
The "waste" play is just to delete components of the federal government the Heritage Foundation nutjobs think composes the deep state. I think we're going to see some reporting in the next 24 hours that Musk took a scythe to components of HHS today, for what it's worth.
IMO, even folks who strongly want waste to get cut will have second thoughts when they see how incompetent the execution is.
For example, slowing down submarine refurbishment projects and making the Navy less capable doesn't seem like a politically robust or durable approach to me.
https://www.seacoastonline.com/story/news/local/2025/02/12/portsmouth-shipyard-union-no-federal-buyouts/78421659007/
Haven’t they already dropped site-neutral payments from their reconciliation plans?
Source? Here is a discussion of the McGuire Woods summary of the House reconciliation proposal. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/what-s-on-the-table-for-budget-9463596/
I haven’t seen it dropped. Medicaid and green energy cuts are major pieces, but Medicare site neutrality was still in there at that time. There are a LOT of major cuts proposed to offset the tax cut extension.
This is just listing off the full list of everything they proposed as possible on day one. More recently there was some reporting/leaks that most of the good stuff there is already out, the caucus can't agree on it.
They're basically just the pro-rent-seeking caucus at this point, even for constituencies that vote wildly for the other side like lawyers.
I hold out a very small sliver of hope that they'll prove me wrong but they never actually do.
There's no way they would drop this since it actually is a good policy idea that would offset some of their stupid tax cuts.
I think part of the perception that Trump is "getting stuff done" is that some of his actions could be immediately felt, especially the drama around the loan/grant freeze that did/is illegally still doing cuts to things like headstart and shutdowns to the Medicare payment portal. There's some quotes out there from marginal 2024 Trump voters essentially saying "not crazy about this but he's doing something".
Compare that to the Biden vibe where Democrats passed a good deal of legislation (and got stimulus checks out, but that was I think the third check Americans had received at that point, and Biden didn't put his name on them) but the proceduralism of getting that legislation enacted made it feel like nothing changed (see electric vehicle charging stations and rural broadband hookups).
The lesson here is a modification of the lesson the Biden admin tried to implement around "helping the hell out of people" as a corrective to what they saw as an Obama administration that undershot things like stimulus. The lesson is yeah, pass legislation, but also, people need to *feel* impact quickly. I think people feel (or think they are feeling) Trump now and giving him credit for doing something.
I do think that will stall out soon. There's only so much runway for a purely executive agenda, and the budget and debt ceiling will force Congress back into the spotlight and reveal how brittle the GOP majority is. An opportunity for Democrats to blunt the vibe of Trump strength.
Not to put an equivalency here, but there was a ton of leftist zeal about what Biden could do with executive action. See: The American Prospect's first day plan they published back in 2020.
The left recognized early the constraints of dealing with Manchin and Sinema and wanted Biden to unilaterally do their wish list.
Medicare for all: https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/how-biden-could-give-everyone-medicare-on-his-own/
Raising Wages:https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/how-biden-can-raise-some-wages-even-if-congress-wont/
Free college: https://prospect.org/day-one-agenda/biden-can-give-us-free-college-without-congress-but-will-he/
Ugh. And their extortion method for delivering thing always seems to entail running into the room and screaming “we’ll decorate this MAGA suicide vest and give Republicans a trifecta if you don’t do what we want!”
A competent, YIMBY-pilled Democrat dictator would have been the most desirable outcome, though. Because *reads news*
Sorry if I’m pointing out the obvious, but isn’t this partly because, entropy being what it is, it’s a lot harder and slower to build than to destroy?
The examples you bring up are of Biden building things: EV chargers, rural broadband. Yes, he did it inefficiently because of all the red tape and everything-bagel brain and stuff. But even in the most efficient scenario, it’s not like Biden signs a law on Monday and there’s a network of shiny new EV chargers on Friday.
Melon Husk and his merry gang of incels have been destroying things, like USAID. It’s super easy, barely an inconvenience! You can make the money go fuckety-bye in an instant, and that’s that, unless some pesky judge tries to block you. Of course it’s going to feel more efficient and impactful in the moment.
I totally agree with you. Not only does the immediacy feel like it has a big impact, but destroying things has long lasting consequences. It is a built in structural advantage people like Vought get from not actually wanting the government to work.
All the trust USAID has built up for decades around medical care and clinical trials cannot be rebuilt once they have reneged on care in the middle of a trial. Even if a judge rules it was illegal a few weeks later.
Or take the idea of making it hellish to work for the federal government. Imagine we have President Big Gretch in 2028. Even then, why would a bright young lawyer take a job with the federal government that pays less than the private sector if they know that in 3-4 yrs they could end up fired, reassigned to Nebraska, or forced to work in the "Sanctuary Cities and Gender Roles Division". I kind of hate the idea of norms because it betrays the lack of actual legal structure around things, but once a norm is destroyed, it's over, you can't get it back, and it will have real consequences. The first three weeks of Trump 2.0 has been rich with events like this that will ripple for a long time, and I think it is therefore fair to say they really have made an impact.
I think for the past few decades, the conventional wisdom was that, if people can feel the change happening, then many more people will be angry than the number that are happy. Maybe that is done, because since Covid, people are fine with rapid change?
Medicaid payment portal, not Medicare, I believe.
Right and it was back online in a day. My silver lining with this whole OMB memo fiasco is it shows us how unserious and undisciplined their team is. They don’t understand what they’re doing.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5111725-states-medicaid-portal-access/amp/
It's amazing how unserious these guys are. Renaming the Army post as "Ft. Bragg" but now naming it (ha ha, snigger snigger) after WW2 PFC Roland Bragg not, y'know, that Confederate guy, because the hero Roland Bragg won the SILVER STAR! (one of apparently 100,000 to 150,000 service people who have been awarded that). (https://homeofheroes.com/silver-star/#:~:text=On%20that%20date%2C%20the%20Silver,somewhere%20between%20100%2C000%20and%20150%2C000.)
This is in the class of "our people know what we're actually doing and geez can't the rest of you take a joke?" In other words, they're cowards and clowns, but they're clowns with flamethrowers, like Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.
> Renaming the Army post as "Ft. Bragg" but now naming it (ha ha, snigger snigger) after WW2 PFC Roland Bragg
ngl, I thought that was kind of a clever "have your cake and eat it" move (and someone should have thought of it before). It also shows at least some of them care about perception.
I’ll put it in the “too clever by half” category. No one in their right mind would name the post after PFC Roland Bragg, brave though I’m sure he was. Clearly they want everyone to think they’re restoring the honor to that incompetent and traitorous Confederate general but they were too cowardly to come right out and say it. But of course all the fanbois will snigger and say, “Wow, we really stuck it to the libs once again!”
They really are pathetic clowns with flamethrowers.
Renaming things doesn't happen in a vacuum - there are people who have lived in the area their entire lives calling it Bragg*. But again, it's also interesting that they thought it was politically beneficial for them to give it a patina of respectability.
(*Yes, I see the irony with the whole Gulf of Mexico/America silliness.)
Fwiw I did see one openly racist guy on Twitter complaining about how they were avoiding an open defense of their heritage.
Yeah if they really wanted an NC civil war guy John Gibbon was right there, someone who was actually above replacement value in their military accomplishments. I know in 1918 it was still theoretically a fort in Alaska but it's not any more.
Relatedly, while I oppose this renaming, I thought naming the thing, "Fort Liberty" instead of after a specific human being was a dumb move because it really felt like just being an invitation for Republicans to change it back to "Bragg" in the future.
I hadn’t heard about this. Are they changing back to Fort Benning too?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/us/politics/hegseth-fort-liberty-bragg.html
As for Fort Benning, not yet, but such a move is being promised/threatened: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-bragg-bases-renamed/
That's what I said, Medicare payment portal
“…that was really just passed appetizers.”
“Passed appetizers”? That’s not an idiom. Is that an idiom? English is not my first language, but I’ve been here a while, and I’ve never heard that. What would it mean?
In any case: this all sounds fine. A strongman and his oligarchic sidekick are running an unchecked play to render the legislature impotent and irrelevant, which will bring us a big step closer to autocracy, but don’t worry! The legislature is already impotent and irrelevant, which will certainly rein in the ambitions of the strongman and not increase populist calls to shift all of the power to the strongman, who Gets Things Done (tm). Yup, tales of Congressional dysfunction are very reassuring.
I would have said "hors d'oeuvres." Matt's evoking rhe image of a fancy party, with waiters passing out small snacks before the big meal
“ I would have said "hors d'oeuvres."”
Thanks — I know what appetizers are. But who calls them “passed appetizers”? That’s like saying, “hey, let’s eat some served food!”
“Passed” versus “plated” appetizers is more industry speak. Your caterer or event planner will specify because if you just say hors d’oeuvres it’s unclear what staffing or plating needs you have.
““Passed” versus “plated” appetizers is more industry speak.“
Now this is news I can use!
Okay, in that case, the attributive past participle is doing some actual work to distinguish two kinds of presentations.
And I can see why Matt had to specify, because in the political context, “plated appetizers” just would not have conveyed the same sense of trivial distractions. Ummm…..
I took it to mean, “not the main event.”
English is my first language, and I find idioms delightful. But this tripped me up as well when I read this post - have not encountered it.
I use so many idioms that my Korean neighbor in the cube farm bought a book of American idioms back in grad school to understand me.
In my previous career in trade policy, I worked with a lot of diplomats. Pretty much everyone was extremely interested in learning American slang, so I spent a lot of time parsing it.
(During this time I also fashioned myself the "Ambassador of Thanksgiving," inviting anyone without plans to experience the most American holiday at my house. Those were the best Thanksgivings!)
“inviting anyone without plans to experience the most American holiday at my house”
You are a good person and a good American! 😊
When I was younger I wanted so badly not to be associated with my background that I kept it to myself, but now I find that people love my grandparents’ Kentucky idioms, both domestically and internationally.
Among its various virtues, I love that Thanksgiving is amenable to inviting people over like this (often I hear about it in the context of graduate school for international students). Like, inviting someone over for Christmas would be at least a bit odd, but it seems very in keeping with the spirit of the most American holiday(*)
(*) while I agree that Thanksgiving deserves this moniker, I am told that the American take on Halloween is relatively distinct and considered pretty awesome in countries where it has made inroads.
It's a stark example of the DC/PMC bubble, frankly. The audience of people who attend catered cocktail parties and galas probably read it correctly.
"It's a stark example of the DC/PMC bubble,...."
Exactly. I didn't understand it because I'm a down-to-earth workin' man with deep roots in the American soil and dirt under my fingernails.
Did I say that correctly?
You forgot "salt-of-the-Earth" and "Real American"
You know that there are lots of social levels between sod cracker and Professional/Managerial, right?
You think your local car salesperson knows what passed apps are? Her boss might. Or your local high school teacher? But I bet the principal does.
It's possible to identify the social customs of different groups as being distinct, and identifying that people can be situated inside and outside them, without that being attached to a certain politics which you seem to think I'm engaging in.
Nah, not really. Our culinary program at our Title 1 high school always asks if we want passed appetizers when they cater school events. I think it probably depends on your food service experience if you know the term or not.
Sure, I can buy that. My perspective:
I often find that PMC strivers emulate and coopt upper class mannerisms and social mores. I'm thinking of a previous boss, a regional director of an NGO who was always attending galas and x-hours and luncheons despite coming from the middle class and making probably 130k a year. She would definitely not have wasted an opportunity to mention passed apps and that the governor was there.
Same!
I've seen them a lot at weddings, and not necessarily ones that are all that swanky. Also been to some work-related events that had them (holiday parties and what not). But I'd never heard the term.
Caterers call it that to indicate the difference between appetizers on a table in the room and those that are passed around on a tray by servers.
You’re probably right and I appreciate the clarification, however I would note that “hors d’oeuvres” would actually make sense here whereas dt is right that “passed appetizers” is Not A Thing (Ed.: based on sksryan’s discussion below, I should revise this claim to “Not A Linguistic Expression or Idiom.” To the extent it’s industry jargon it’s not in common usage elsewhere.) I assumed it was a typo for “past appetizers” (which also is not an expression and would have made at best marginally more linguistic sense.)
MY may be trying to Make It A Thing! I am fully supportive
It's so fetch of him
Why is it superior to hors d’ouevres though? We have an expression to use in exactly this context.
Right. Why use a fancy, obscure term like "passed appetizers" when we have a perfectly good English term like "hors d'oeuvres"?
I see what you’re doing here, and approve, but I am literally claiming that the phrase “passed appetizers” is actually far more obscure and less commonly used than “hors d’oeuvres.”
(Seriously, sorry to be a pedant, I do in fact get it.)
"Why use a fancy, obscure term like "passed appetizers" when we have a perfectly good English term like "hors d'oeuvres"?"
Now that is funny.
Hors d'ouevres is probably technically different. I believe that traditionally hors d'ouevres are done ad hoc by the kitchen using pieces derived from the meal courses, not as separate planned dishes.
Cuz we're in America. dang it!
"not a thing"? Passed appetizers are definitely a thing at "fancy" functions. Passed appetizers are what they bring around during cocktail hour to occupy people while they make small talk until it's time to be seated for dinner. In the context of the article, Matt is using it as a metaphor for executive actions that were designed to keep the press occupied until the big legislation was ready. I understood it perfectly well.
I am talking specifically about the expression, which I believe I have seen written for the first time ever in this article, rather than the referent.
Example was not too hard to find
"Unique Passed Appetizers Guaranteed to Elevate Your Cocktail Hour"
https://www.marthastewart.com/7934853/wedding-cocktail-hour-recipes
Right. Appetizers are what we call the small snacks we get when we're already seated at the dining room table.
Small bits of food on a tray carried by waiters as the guests mingle before dinner. Not the real food, just something to occupy people before the main event.
It’s overdressed, underpaid, accented wait staff navigating their way through a gaggle of middle managers wearing event ids on lanyards around their necks, hoping that with a smile and friendly offer they can offload the last few coconut shrimps so they can head to the kitchen for a quick smoke break before having to grab another tray and do it all over again. Passed appetizers is a scene.
I don’t want passed appetizers, I want champagne!
“…I want champagne!”
No, no — you want *poured* champagne.
Apparently.
i want an entire imperial opened for me to drink my fill straight from the bottle and then it can become passed champagne
So you want passed out.
This made me snicker out loud (not quite laugh out loud, and I won’t use SOL, because that means something else entirely). Well done.
Just for the record, as a person experiencing PMCness, I can't recall ever hearing the term, "passed appetizers" used as an idiom to describe catered food being carried around a party. It seems like something invented by people who didn't know how to spell/pronounce, "hors d'oeuvres."
Top 3 passed appetizers/hors d'oeuvres:
1. Bacon wrapped scallops
2. Pigs in a blanket
3. Mini egg rolls
I'm having trouble seeing how Democrats take advantage of Trump aggressively seizing power that doesn't belong to him.
Every swing voter grew tired of Trump being compared to Hitler, and now that Trump is actually blowing through laws and precedent in a dangerous way, I have a hard time seeing Democrats winning the argument with "See, he's doing exactly what we warned you of! It's worse than we expected!"
I just imagine these swing voters shrugging and thinking "I'm tired of hearing this from you."
It's going to take a skilled politicians to help the Democrats slice through this apathy.
Let's see what Jefferies is up to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guQRCcrPt1k
We're doomed.
There's no path for the Democrats to get power in the next two years and there's no press release the Dems can put out that sways the Trump voters that actually he's bad.
Realistically it's going to come down to Trump's willingness to violate court orders and the willingness of Republicans in Congress to stand up for their branch of government as a co-equal.
So not optimistic about either.
I see no issue with what Jeffries is doing. Whether you like it or not, people aren't going to care about Trump's antics unless they feel it's actively harmful to them, either through making it harder for them to afford things or making them feel less safe.
Unfortunately, nothing is going to drive general opposition until people are visibly hurt in a way that bothers Americans. Right now we’re still essentially screaming about abstractions, and we’ve been doing that virtually non-stop for a decade. I know we don’t want to wait until people are hurt, being decent kindhearted liberals, but I think that’s where we are.
“screaming about abstractions”
Randall, if the NIH indirect cost cut goes through, that will devastate universities including the one I work at, and possibly cost me my job and the career I spent 10+ years training for. I assure you, it’s not abstract to me.
Yes, of course I know what you meant: abstractions from the perspective of The Median American Voter. Pointy-headed elitist matcha-sipping Prius-driving overeducated coastal dwellers like me don’t count.
Part of our problem is that the courts and Congress (eventually) do their job and many of the worst things don't come to pass. While it's good that the system ultimately works and the pain is muted, the constant whiplash is still exhausting.
I should really just take my own advice and not pay attention to the news anymore!
I think that voters will recognize your pain, but not until they see many of you experiencing it (not just anticipating it, even with certainty). I don’t mean to be dismissive of current pain but I think that’s where we are. You say “if it goes through”; unfortunately I don’t think it will be real for the typical person until it *does* go through and people see the aftermath. The last ten years have seen a lot of “Trump is going to X!!” that didn’t come to pass, and expectations have been adjusted accordingly.
"I think that voters will recognize your pain, but not until they see many of you experiencing it (not just anticipating it, even with certainty)."
Ok but this way of thinking is just stupid. (I know you're just describing it, not approving of it.)
I'm probably among a minority at Slow Boring for having read and enjoyed "Atlas Shrugged." This way of thinking reminds of the Taggart Tunnel debacle.
In short: there are hardly any competent people left at Taggart Transcontinental Railroad. The idiots now in charge want to send a coal-burning engine through the Taggart Tunnel in the Rockies, even though the ventilation system is suitable only for diesel engines. The few remaining intelligent people warn that this is going to be a disaster, but the higher-ups shout them down with "oh you nervous Nellies, you're always panicking, how can you know the ventilation system is inadequate? How can anyone ever really know anything?"
Spoiler: the coal engine is sent through the tunnel, smoke accumulates and suffocates everyone on board, then the engine explodes and collapses the tunnel, in the biggest manmade disaster the country had seen in years.
My point: sure, once the tunnel has collapsed and everyone on board the train has died, you can point at the wreckage and the dead bodies and say "I told you so," but wouldn't it have been loads better NOT to send the f**king train through the tunnel in the first place?
This is an apt description of how I feel about our race towards AGI extinction.
I’m in the same boat as drosophilist with the NIH funding, this is not abstract to me. But any costs of alienating people like us are entirely abstract — what are we going to do, get even less supportive of GOP? In the longer term, damaging science enterprise is likely to be a bad bet, but I would say that, wouldn’t I ?
At a risk of glib overgeneralization, the whole split is between people who buy (and sell) abstract long term arguments and those who don’t. If we call the former “elites” and the latter the common clay of the West, we get at the only sense in which Trump & co are not a part of the “elite”. T’s obvious chip on the shoulder about Ivy League and geniuses underscores this.
Democrats definitely blew their load on dictator comparisons in the first term. If Trump manages to fuck up the economy, that will give Democrats a good line of attack, but it's not currently unlocked.
One question is whether cries of "Hitler!" will hurt Democrats further. If they're already being tuned out by most people, then maybe it won't hurt to shout them while providing some catharsis to the shouters. If shouting "Hitler!" does harm Democrats, then we're in trouble because many won't be able to keep their pie holes shut.
I think this is overly focused on the big fiscal impact of some of these changes. Destroying the NTSB or the BLS or the FWS, just like he's destroyed USAID, would have way less budget impact than change to Medicare formulas. But the latter could easily be changed back in 2 or 4 or 8 years. Reconstituting the administrative state that was built between 1945 and 1975 in the next Democratic trifecta will be almost impossible.
Relatedly, fixing the US’s reputation as a reliable diplomatic partner with a strong rule of law will take generations to fix, if ever. There is a lot of ruin in a nation and the movement to make America Great appears to want to America greatly diminished.
Liberal democracy in this country is cooked for at least a generation.
My best hope for _that_ is that he does some really stupid things and overreaches badly in some authoritarian way, and a bunch of young people/voters who _aren't_ in his cult say "uh... maybe I need to value norms more than I thought"
On the other hand, this probably requires him to make things much worse for a bunch of people first, so it's not like this is a great outcome either.
The old Republican coalition was built around people who paid more in taxes than they received in entitlements. Yet even Reagan could not meaningfully cut entitlements. The present Republican coalition includes many net beneficiaries of entitlements. This group has swollen as a proportion of the population because the deficit is 6.5% of GDP and military spending relative to GDP is near post World War Two lows. Not only has the beneficiary class grown, it has trended R.
The Republican coalition is far more fractious than the Democratic coalition and the Trump show will get tedious soon.
He may lose popular support, but he's already president and disregarding the laws. If he can openly defy court orders, commit crimes, and prevent the prosecution of anyone on his side, merely losing support among the public would not be enough. Tyrants can cling to power as long as the people loyal to them have more capacity for violent coercion than the people opposing them.
The judiciary will humor Trump somewhat but has a strong interest in avoiding lawlessness.
Yes, but what happens if the commander-in-chief, who also gives orders to the FBI and DOJ and has the power of the pardon, declares "the court has made its ruling, now let them enforce it!"? (A paraphrase of Andrew Jackson's likely apocryphal declaration of defiance against a SCOTUS order concerning the Cherokee Nation. More precisely, the court ruled (Worcester v. Georgia) that the state of Georgia could not impose its laws on the Cherokee, but they were neither able to physically force them to stop, nor to prevent the president from later expelling the Cherokee to Oklahoma.)
I'm sure Trump would like the courts' permission for any given action, but can they stop him if he defies them and his appointees obey his orders? This is where we come to "people loyal to him have more capacity for violent coercion" -- if the president openly declares that he does not recognize the courts' authority over him, his subordinates in the executive branch will face a choice -- betray their boss, or betray the laws and constitutional order as expressed by the courts? You can't obey both when they are in direct conflict, which I fear Trump and his allies (Vance, Musk, the Project 2025 team) are all to willing to bring about. Generals, inspectors general, etc. will have to decide -- who has less legitimacy, the current president or the current judges? Who would win a fight? Pick the losing side, and it will not go well for you.
I want to point out that courts don't have much power to enforce the law if prosecutors don't want to -- for instance, during the term of the previous administration, there was lax enforcement of street crime or immigration law, and during the current administration, there seems to be no enforcement of conflicts of interest or the separation of power, insofar as these things would constrain the president and his friends.
A key point here is that the executive relies upon hundreds of thousands of people to enforce its will. If a court starts telling them not to do something, most of them are going to obey.
This is what Ezra Klein was talking about Trump being weak. If he were more disciplined, he would go slower, continuously move his people into the civil service and when the time was ripe initiate the confrontation with the courts. He's going much too fast and too wildly to win this. Unless the Supreme Court turns out to be more supine and uninterested in protecting its power and status than some of us might think.
These guys will do a lot of destruction but probably their ability to reshape the government (past just destroying it) is pretty limited.
Yes - the key point is that Trump has no operating organizational skills. While he is busy dismantling things that he in fact needs to meet his promises. Besides a handful of people who are more than happy to take EO at face value, the organization that is required is enormous. Finding the people who can afford to be sued or taken to court personally for following clearly illegal EO is pretty small.
If they're taken to court for breaking federal law because Trump ordered them to, won't he just pardon them? My concern is that with a deeply corrupt president and DOJ, you're more likely to be prosecuted for obeying the law than breaking it.
Edit: better than pardoning, he can just suspend proceedings as long as they keep dancing on his strings, then throw them to the wolves if they show any resistance. In Russia, Putin's friends are free to steal, and they only get charged when he no longer needs them.
Yes, that’s the explicit reason they are making it their #1 priority to wreck the civil service and purge the potentially disloyal.
I hope so -- and this sounds reassuringly believable, unlike "the courts will stop them" per se. But this is also why the admin wants to get rid of as many old employees as possible, to minimize the number of people who would resist EOs they (or the courts) object to.
I have a channel to communicate with lawyers at a government agency, and this would be an interesting subject for discussion. What would the agency do about blatantly illegal orders from the president? What if the presidentially-appointed chief puts his own weight on the orders too? And OMB/DOGE won't pay the whole agency if they haven't obeyed by this afternoon? Or what if a mob is firing bullets and Molotovs at our building? How much would it take to coerce the agency? (E.g. I might defy orders enforced by threats of firing or suspending payments to the agency, but I could be cowed by threats to my physical safety. I'd also want to buy a gun and a gun safe, a car, and look into visas before such a situation had a chance to emerge -- I hope I never need them, but if I do, it's too late.)
Also, just for fun in these trying times, in addition to discussing the legality of buying stocks as a regulator, we could discuss the legality of things like impounding legally authorized congressional payments and breaking the government's contractual obligations, if you're a rich contractor and foreign business interest. The agency's lawyers can't stop them, but it would bring a sense of solidarity to our little corner of an organization rotting from the head. I'm also against public sector unions in the abstract -- they're bargaining against the taxpayers and don't have to worry about maintaining the counterparty's viability -- but there are worse things, and we're facing them now.
Anyone whose statutory rights are violated by the administration has standing to seek an injunction.
Trump can totally try to rule as a dictator if he wants to, but there is no way a majority of Congress would go along. He would have to defy the judiciary and congress. He might (or might not) find 34 senators who would vote against removal regardless of the evidence. If Trump opposes both the judiciary and a majority of Congress, his popular support will likely collapse
“there is no way a majority of Congress would go along”
Right, Republicans in Congress have a superb track record of standing up to Trump, amply demonstrated in the aftermath of Jan 6. Look how effective they were at impeaching him and making sure he couldn’t run again after that travesty!
do you really think 98% plus of house republicans want to support a president in defying the courts?
I hope you're right, but I'd bet against it.
No president has ever been removed by the Senate, and I think it's far more likely that Trump's term ends on a bier than in the upper chamber.
In the vanishingly unlikely event that 66+ senators, many from his own party, vote against him, you can also bet that the mobs will be out for blood and the Secret Service won't stop them -- this is not my fevered imagination, I just remember what happened last time His Highness was directed to vacate the royal palace, and what happened to the criminal records of the people involved.
We can also look at the history of other countries where murdering the ruler's enemies was a crime until it wasn't, but it might be more convincing to focus on what has already happened right here.
I'm guessing the courts could start tossing low-level folks in jail who don't have wealth and robust legal resources. Trump, most likely, won't help them.
How, exactly, would federal courts toss people in jail?
People who commit federal crimes are likely to commit state crimes in the process. State prosecutors can go after them.
It will probably only be prosecutors affiliated with the Democratic party, another wound to the legitimacy of our justice system (a legitimacy that's already looking like Caesar on the Ides of March -- ironic, given that it is our Caesar who inflicted most of the wounds) -- but that's a gap in the president's power. He does not control state prosecutors.
"Trump is many things, but he is most of all a showman."
Right now, Trump is riding elephants, taming cobras and blowing smoke, and the crowd is watching with rapt attention. But how many times can he repeat these sleights-of-hand before the crowd gets bored and leaves? Eventually, a showman needs to put on an actual show.
In the same way, a snake oil salesman is revealed when people buy the snake oil and see first hand it didn't actually cure their maladies.
As a longtime marketer, I've always respected how well Trump is able to accurately assess what the masses are asking for and create a sales pitch that speaks right to it. But crafting a promise-filled commercial is the easy part (which is why it baffles me how bad Democrats are at it). But to get people to keep buying requires a legitimately good product, and this is where Trump will always fail.
It was easy to promise investors that Theranos could quickly analyze your blood with a single pinprick - Building a product that could actually deliver on that was impossible. It takes time, but the reality always bubbles up, and the public learns truth one way or the other.
What would have happened, though, if Theranos was in a position to shut down their rivals and use public funds to subsidize themselves? We don't choose our government on a competitive market -- the barriers and moats around them are not just a metaphor.
It was also easy to promise investors that the Trump Taj Mahal would turn Atlantic City into a global destination.
1) I am with other commentators who don't see much benefit at all in being the "responsible" party in debt-ceiling or government-funding votes. I'm not aware of any shutdown or debt-ceiling in which one party held a trifecta but the party *out of power* got the blame.
I believe Democrats have both a perfectly-valid reason - "why should we cut deals to make sure our programs will be funded, when Elon is going to cut them anyway" and an easy-to-digest public message: "you literally control every branch of government... so fund it."
I have not always taken this side - I think the problem with conservative budgetary hostage-taking is that it's pretty effective, and it relies on norms like "hostage taking is bad" which have proven pretty thin. So for example, when Biden was president and Democrats had the Senate, I thought it made sense to make deals with Johnson to make sure that government stayed open and programs got funded. Now, I see absolutely no benefit to the Democrats doing this, and lots of benefit to them letting the Republicans either shut down the government or pass terrible policies we can run against. Am I missing something? Is CNN going to gravely decry the abandonment of duty by Dems if they all vote no on a debt-ceiling bill? Or are there actual filibuster-applicable steps that Dems could take to stop these bills if they want to, and that's what we're debating?
2) I think the debate about how to resist Trump has foundered on the question of whether we have to "save our bullets" and resist overreacting to everything. But Trump's 24-hour-media circus has shown that there's no such thing as saving your bullets - if there's an issue people care about and that you're "winning" on, there's no amount of attention to it that's too much. What people are trying to do though is avoid getting energized on areas that people don't actually care about. That's why folks like Pod Save are worrying about how to defend USAID - because it's an area where popular sentiment is more on the GOP side. So you really have to find the angles where you have the popular advantage - Elon is shutting down the CFPB, Elon is putting special education at risk, Elon is cutting veteran's benefits with his govt spending freeze. And then you hammer them - again, and again, and again. AOC is good at doing this, but most Democrats are really bad, and they've shot themselves in the foot with a geriatric congressional leadership who seems awful at communication.
I also liked what Matt said on the Politix podcast last week - Dems really suffer from not having many "low-trust" media consumers or producers. The kind of stuff Trump + Elon are doing should be generating constant conspiracy theories and viral moments, but it's not. Trump took a $25 billion Chinese shitcoin bribe! Elon is shutting down the government but giving himself fat contracts! Trump is downing the planes! I think some Bluesky types are trying, but they don't have the right ecosystem to spread it. The point is to focus attention on bad things that the population agrees with us more on, and make right-wingers play the role of "well ackshually, the veteran's healthcare benefits aren't being stopped, there's a robust waiver process in place for valid programs, blah blah blah." Basically the "they're eating cats and dogs" playbook.
If Democrats provide votes for the budget, especially in the House (where there is no issue of a filibuster), then they’ll look like chumps. All of this DOGE/Impoundment stuff means that promises made to Democrats to get their votes on government funding aren’t credible.
"On the other hand, in recent political history, whichever party is seen as “wanting” a shutdown ends up taking the political blame and “losing” the battle. Democrats have to be somewhat careful about how they approach things."
Citation needed that this harmed GOP electorally. I'm well aware that in previous "shutdown" showdowns, polls showed that public blaming Republicans given they were the ones (or in some cases one person, see Ted Cruz) were responsible for the shutdown. But those polls? Honestly, how long lasting were they? Is there any indication one swing voter changed their vote a year later because of shutdown showdown?
Matt alludes to this but don't be fooled by Trump's "high" approval rating. Compared to most presidents 3 weeks into their presidency, his approval rating is actually pretty mediocre. And yet, based on punditry, you'd think his approval rating is at like 70%.
I'm sorry Matt, but you're podcast partner has this correct and has had this correct for basically two years now. I'm actually with you that "pocketbook" issues are more likely to sway swing voters. But you need to force the goddamn issue. Being passive and just saying "don't worry, voters will see eventually how bad things are for their bottom line" is not going to cut it. You need to recognize the reality of the media environment we're in.
Hard disagree. Picking losing fights isn't going to help voters view of Dems.
Instead they need to be proving they can be trusted to govern. Pushing legislation that cracks down on illegal immigration would be a great first start.
You mean like the legislation they created, and that Trump and a bunch of republicans blocked? I do not think the median voter is going to notice.
Voters are going to get mad if their lives get worse, and if that happens, they will blame [Current president's party], and they will not give two shits about whether [Current president's party] is the cause of it or not.
If democrats help Republicans make the border better, Republicans will get all the credit for it. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't vote for it, but let's not have any illusions about how the typical uninformed voter will perceive this.
I think the Democrats should negotiate to improve bills and should vote for good ones both because they're good bills and, for those democrats in competitive races, to be able to point to bipartisanship.
But that's different than going out on a limb and _proposing_ the bills, where I agree they won't, as a whole, get the credit.
(EDIT: When I was mad at McConnell for his "let's make Obama a one-term president" by obstructing everything, I didn't care that he wasn't _proposing_ bills to fix things, I cared that he was obstructing improving anything. Similarly I don't know that I need the Democrats to _propose_ bills, but I don't want them to obstruct good things)
While I agree that the senate bill was better than the status quo and I would have supported it.
It was NOT a good bill. It didn't actually fix the problem.
A good bill would have the following components
A lot more immigration judges
a lot more border patrol
a lot more detention centers
and this is the important part that was missing. If the detention centers are full then shut down the border. Stop ALL catch and release.
Any bill that allows catch and release is a poor one, even if it's better than the status quo.
And all the while we have to rollover federal debt from zero interest loans to real interest loans. Republicans are malicious but they are also cowards. They want to immiserate the public by ending Medicaid, ACA, SNAP, etc. but don't want to be rightfully blamed for doing so.
I'll happily sit through the taunting from the chuckleheads about "I told you Trump was a genius" if we somehow get out of this without higher interest rates, higher inflation, or regressive spending cuts, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll probably just have to settle for being vindicated... as I pay even more for eggs. Yeah, not a good trade-off.
With the recent rise in inflation it seems pretty obvious how this is going to go. The fed will have to hike rates which will trigger a recession and we’ll get a dual chamber sweep in 2026.
I see two reasonable pickups in the Senate. Beyond that seems increasingly difficult.
Yeah, Maine and NC.
If the Democrats were politically savvy, truly embraced a big-tent approach, and Trump became sufficiently unpopular, then many seats could potentially become competitive (Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Florida, Ohio, Texas or a state like Kentucky if Republicans were to nominate a Roy Moore-like candidate there) and the dam could break.
Of course, I'm skeptical. My pessimistic view is that Democrats will concede the Senate and focus entirely on NC and Maine in 2026 and try to eke out a 50-50 Senate in 2029 by winning by flipping Ron Johnson's seat in WI in 2028.
I think most of those are out of reach for cultural reasons at a national level. Could a Democrat win a state election - yes. Federal election - doubtful at best.
Those "cultural reasons" will only be a factor if Democrats continue to prioritize appeasing progressive activists over winning elections, which is probably the direction Democrats will go, unfortunately.
My point is that it doesn't have to be that way. Those states are only out of reach if Democrats choose to keep them out of reach.
Sure, you could say the same thing about Republicans in the NE. If only they changed foundational parts of their politics, they would be more successful. But that's really hard to do!
Well, Republicans do have one Senator from NE, so by that logic it's not unreasonable to expect at least one Democratic Senator from the states I listed!
The idea that winning any of these states requires changing foundational parts of the Democratic Party doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Many of these states elected Dems statewide as recently as 2018 and 2022. Obama won 3 of them twice. Democrats would only need to win 2 out of the 7 for a Senate majority if they flip NC and Maine and hold Georgia and Michigan.
Not to mention a possible loss in GA.
Maine and NC? Or Ohio?
The first two. Ohio seems to have moved out of the swing state category.
Matt, you mention, "Of course, if Trump succeeds in setting himself up as a dictator, unconstrained by courts, Congress, or the rule of law, nobody will really care if the 2025 legislative agenda was a bust. But I don’t want to pre-concede that outcome". If Trump becoming a dictator is even remotely a possibility, I am not clear why we are talking about anything other than how to counter that. Conversations like this feel a bit futile.
Well, we should be ready for the contingency in which it doesn’t happen, especially if that’s the more likely contingency.
I think this *is* about how to counter that. You counter that by bringing things back to the world of real politics.