I think there's an alternate universe where Clinton beat Trump in 2016 but in this one she was just the wrong candidate for that political cycle. Trump is the American expression of a global populist movement and he succeeded because of his outsider status. Clinton of course was perceived as the ultimate insider.
Desantis may have declared war on "wokism" but at core he seems like a conventional politician. I think there's an argument to be made that there is something in the water that is propelling candidates like Milei in Argentina and Wilders in the Netherlands to victory. The norms shattering candidate (Trump) versus politics as usual (Desantis/Haley)? They were the wrong candidates for the times.
If Trump loses in 2024 then he will be like Gollum (spoiler alert) in that he had a very important role to play and we just never knew what it was. So the problem with politics this century so far has been Bushes and Cheneys and Clintons, oh my!! Trump defeated them and changed the Republican Party in a positive way from a party focused on slaughtering innocent Muslims to a party focused on helping the working class. We now have two parties that are focused on making America better by helping the working class although obviously Trump was better at giving voice to the working class than actually pushing policies that helped them…but it’s better than sending their young men to slaughter innocent Muslims!?! Keep repeating it—Bushes and Cheneys and Clintons, oh my!!
The share of the college educated vote that the GOP receives has been declining for decades. The share of the working class vote that the DNC receives has also been declining over the same period of time.
Trump is the inflection point for that process. At the same time class conflict across the globe has resulted in a world wide populist movement. If Trump wins it will be against the backdrop of similar iconoclasts across the world (Milei, Polievre, Wilders) winning as well.
But Biden has actually successfully implemented much of the America First agenda as far as reshoring manufacturing jobs and energy dominance and getting out of asinine wars. His only failing grades are on the border and fentanyl both of which also got worse under Trump…so why would anyone think Trump could do a better job than Biden?? Biden is doing his best on the border and obviously everyone wants to reduce fentanyl deaths.
5) Covid deaths. Of roughly 1,000,000 US deaths due to Covid approximately 2/3 died under Biden.
6) Foreign policy. Ukraine, Gaza and so on.
7) Overdose deaths. Better under Trump
8) Homeless number. Marginally better under Trump.
9) Traffic deaths. Better under Trump.
That's all secondary to my point though, which is that a worldwide demographic shift is responsible for populists like Trump. Is Biden running against Trump or is he fighting a global populist movement?
I would normally post them up but there's 9 bullet points and providing two sources per point would be one long post.
That said all of this information is trivial to find with Google. If for some reason a web search will not suffice and you have specific questions about two or three items I could go into more detail.
I don’t blame Trump for not preventing China from unleashing a bioweapon into America that killed over a million Americans…and I don’t blame Biden for things like global inflation caused by the pandemic. You have to compare countries with similar countries and America did worse with Covid because of Trump and Republican governors and America has done better economically because of Biden’s policies. But remember America voted for Bush in 2004 when it was very obvious to me he was a failed president so who knows what Americans will believe over the next year??
There are about 6 million Covid deaths worldwide and 1 million of those are Americans. 1 out of 6 is clearly disproportionate to America's share of the global population. The bulk of those deaths occurred under Biden. Clearly if there is a failure here in terms of Covid management it is bipartisan.
In addition I would note that there is significant uncertainty as to whether Covid was a naturally occurring virus or leaked from a lab. Why? Because the Chinese government has stonewalled and refused to allow in outside investigators. Whether a lab leak is responsible is guesswork but it is absolutely undeniable that China is blocking an open investigation. Covid killed one million Americans. What has Biden done to pressure the Chinese into allowing investigators from the WHO into the country? Sanctions? Diplomatic discussions? Anything?
Finally, Larry Summers and Mohammed el-Arian both warned the Biden administration that passing the massive third stimulus package in addition to the infrastructure act would resurrect inflation. The Biden administration is responsible for runaway inflation to at least the same extent as the crisis on the southern border.
Trump as president governed like Jeb…but just like with LOTR Lizard Cheney pops back up at the end and it looks like all is lost and then her career ends. Same with George P Bush in Texas. Btw, what do Bill Clinton and Trump and AG Paxton have in common?? They were all impeached after beating a member of the Bush family.
It's weird who is and isn't perceived as an outsider though, isn't it? Trump obviously was a pillar of the establishment who had been around for decades, but the most ridiculous example has to be Emmanuel Macron, who successfully painted himself as an outsider in 2017 despite having been the finance minister for the incumbent (and extremely unpopular) government.
Also Boris Johnson in the UK. I think there's definitely a pattern where the champions of populism could be categorized as "class traitors" as Ruy Texeira might put it.
There's an alt universe where Clinton didn't force Obama to pay off her debts and make her either SoS or Veep in 2008 and Obama didn't abandon purple politics so quickly in 2009 (and added more strings to the help given to banks to get the economy going sooner) and Clinton didn't capture the DNC so it couldn't do its job and replace her when she was underperforming relative to a geriatric socialist... But yes, her baggage enabled Trump to get close enough that some love from Russia may have tipped the scales to his election (along with some friends, since it wdn't do much to simply help Trump).
Methinks, it's our winner-takes-all electoral system that is propelling dysfunction and the enabling of Trump who can credibly hurt the GOP in ways that would be multiplied in terms of loss of representation/power.
My take is that the US system of government heavily favors a two party system but there are no guarantees as to what policies and politics those two parties espouse.
Consider Bill Clinton. Once he figured out that he was out of step he gleefully pursued welfare reform and, reportedly, a plan to privatize Social Security before the Lewinsky scandal blew the government up.
In a similar vein I would speculate that a global populist movement would force both parties to the right simply to maintain electoral viability.
While it favors there being 2 parties, it need not be the same 2 parties and sometimes only the labels don't change. But there is precedent for a major party becoming not competitive as with the Whig party before the rise of the Republican party in the mid 1800s.
The GOP can't replace Trump, but Trump very well may be just seeking to maximize his leverage to get a get out of jail for free card. So, there's no certainty about him following through with running for POTUS this year. His legal problems are getting worse along with his popularity with independents. Being popular with about half of the Republicans who vote in the primaries doesn't quite cut it. The usual shortcut of voting based on whether one is better off than they were 4 years ago presumes the fundamental similarity/redundancy of the two major parties. Trump is not politics like usual and most people understand that.
Again, look at Milei in Argentina or Wilders in the NL. Or for that matter the electoral results in Finland or any of the other earthquakes we've seen in the past year. Trump is not politics as usual and that is precisely why people are voting for him.
I would also suggest that the polling currently gives the advantage to Trump.
I agree there are lots of people really hurting economically since their real income has gone down. That may make them support Trump right now, but it won't per se translate into votes in Nov, since Trump's record and lack of reliability are pretty d--n clear. We'll need other ways to tie ourselves to the mast to get s--t done, like using RankedChoiceVoting, doing away w/ the Senate super majority rule, and replacing Citizens United w/ a rule that routes $speech thru party leaders so they can set and defend brands in ways that won't enable so much political entrepreneurialism.
The polling not only shows that Biden is massively unpopular but it also shows that Trump has commanding leads in terms of who the public views as better qualified to lead on issues such as the economy, illegal immigration, etc.
There is a lot of time to go until November but in terms of the data that we do have? I would rather be Trump than Biden at this point.
The only thing I remember from that game was John Madden stating that Barry Sanders making 8 defenders miss to only make it back to the line of scrimmage on a play may have been the greatest single play he'd ever seen by a running back.
I had to watch the Panthers play for several years and there is nothing worse than watching a talented RB waste away on a crappy team. The NFL should force teams to trade talented RBs if they are still crappy a few years after drafting him.
Trump completely changed the paradigm of the Republican party. He showed that it could win with audiences that it never thought it had a chance with, but who connect with a style of low IQ leadership. Additionally, he freed many people from the chains of political correctness, especially when society is trying to tighten them more than ever. In this sense, he is a giant historical figure, and expecting the Republicans to oust him is like expecting the Conservatives in Britain to oust Churchill in the elections after World War II.
I might more generously say that he connected with a "low trust" citizen.
And this is actually quite hard to do! Virtually every other candidate has to prove themselves by coming up the ranks of government, which alienates them from the low-trusters.
Dr Oz and Herschel Walker were examples that might have followed his mold, but they could not get the magic to work for them. (Though my personal suspicion is that they did not have opponents as disliked as Hillary Clinton, similar to how Trump lost to Biden in 2020.)
The conservatives were seen as the party of appeasement. There was a national unity government during world war 2 which included Atlee. When you look at it that way, it isn’t surprising
Speaking at the level of an eight-year-old, constantly saying things that are unreasonable and inaccurate, using derogatory nicknames for his opponents, projecting an alpha male image.
Let the record show that nothing in the above definition has any relation to intelligence compared with those of like age - yet they accuse others with inaccuracies, insults, and projections of what they perceive to be the "ideal male"
Yes, that was my implication. Churchill may not have been a strong contender for the 1945 general elections, but as a historical figure, he was not someone who could lose in internal party elections.
'Trump’s various criminal trials helped him with the GOP base.' - This is stated so matter-of-factly, and we all know it, but still. What would this have looked like to someone at literally any other time in American history? What will this look like to future generations when it is history? I suppose history is written by the winners so it depends on what happens next. But none of this is anywhere remotely near 'normal'.
I think when Party X's state and federal authorities are charging Party Y's candidate for what look to be partisan reasons or on bullshit charges, that's going to get a lot of members of Party X to rally around him. You can argue whether the charges have some justification or not, but I suspect that if the situation were reversed, a whole lot of Democrats would be very convinced that the charges were an attempt to use the legal system to bypass the voters. The efforts to take Trump off the ballot or rule him ineligible for office seem the same way, to me. (How did most Democrats see Bill Clinton's legal woes? ISTM that most of them saw that stuff as lawfare by Republicans against a political opponent.)
In case it matters, I loathe Trump and wouldn't vote for him for dogcatcher. It still looks to me like at least most of the charges against Trump are about getting rid of a political opponent rather than anything like seeking some kind of impartial justice. And various people deciding he's guilty of insurrection so he isn't allowed to win an election seems similarly sketchy to me.
I'm not a lawyer or such, so maybe I can't speak to the propriety of the charges, but I would like to hope that judges and juries, being independent of the executive branch that's bringing the charges, will get it right. I definitely get the argument, but the thing is I think Trump and the Republicans do too, and so they think that they don't need to follow the law because no matter what they can always claim any accountability through the justice system is just political. That's a problem. How do we enforce the law in that situation? Is the bigger risk in prosecuting or in not prosecuting? But yes if half the people think it's justice and the other half think it's political, that means the system of government has already failed. Once a certain number of people stop accepting the legitimacy of government actions, it doesn't matter whether the government is right or wrong anymore. We may already be at that point of no return.
What no amount of data regression and analysis can clarify is the Revolutionary Spirit. The FiveThirtyEight of Weimar could not have seen it coming. Unless our radars are picking up humanity’s cyclical discontent with the world order status quo - ala The Fourth Turning - we are doomed to continue our premise errors. Past is, indeed, prologue. Left + Right extremism gripped the world in the 1930s - roiling the globe with violence. And who in the Great Gatsby Roaring 20’s saw THAT coming? Nobody. Every 80-100 years - a Trump shows up. And a Milei. And a LePen. And a Modi. Correctives to prior cycle overreach. Which is what “Progressivism” has become. A globalist fait accompli from the smug Davos set of neo-Woodrow Wilsons. Who long for a single world order that erases unique cultures, traditions, and antiquated relics like religion. So, of course those who cherish these things - rise up. Choosing political and cultural champions who fight this assault. All this - all of it - is a cultural backlash to progressive overreach. And, of course, progressives despise those who stand athwart history screaming STOP! Trump has no currency or legitimacy save this. We have created this febrile swamp from which this emerges. If we were wise enough to stop - he would be rendered pointless. But - Progressives won’t - so it will advance to its logical conclusion. And down deep, we all know it. And feel powerless to stop it.
Great comment. Re "a single world order that erases unique cultures, traditions, and antiquated relics like religion": to this list I would add human biology. The astonishing rise of transgenderism (and its almost complete capture of medical and educational authority in the West) is truly astonishing, and is the vanguard of a nascent transhumanist movement that will govern us all soon enough if the populists (who are firmly in the humanist tradition) cannot strike back effectively.
Absolutely. Good add. Another huge issue at play is the threat to Democracy from technology. The power of “mega networks” sweep us into impregnable (and global) idealogical bubbles. Geographical nation states are becoming steam train relics. Citizens everywhere rally into virtual online communities of the like minded. Why defend fellow countrymen in Duluth who disagree with new friends you Zoom with in Dubai? This shift from analog to digital communities is creating a global duality. Those who can live "anywhere" (Progressives) vs those who cherish "somewhere" (Nationalists) are the new battleground. Especially with the young who are most immersed in this new, digital reality. You can see that in their disdain for closed national borders (which don't exist in the online metaverse). So, IMHO, we are being simultaneously assaulted by both a cyclical social cycle last seen in the 1930s AND technology driving intergenerational social attitudes. I have my doubts that Democracy (as we know it) can survive this Perfect Storm. wild ride ahead. 😬
The timing of the drop-out coupled with the immediate Trump endorsement did feel weird to me. The only thing I could think of was that Trump has offered him some position in the administration, like you said -- though, like you also said, it would appear uncharacteristically generous of the former president toward a Republican who started to criticize him. Time will tell.
I think that there is a basis on which DeSantis could have attacked Trump and not appeared as a "party traitor" (or whatever) and so been able to challenge him.
He could have said that the election in 2020 was stolen, but the Democrats tried to steal 2018 and 2022 from him in Florida and he stopped them, and as the candidate, he knows how to do that in 2024, but Trump would be cheated out of the win again.
He doesn't have the sort of personality that would mean that he could actually make that stick against Trump, but it would have worked with the policy case that he was making - that he had the same policy objectives as Trump, but he understood how things worked and could deliver on them, while Trump had struggled to get things done because the deep state had worked against him.
It could have helped a little, but it’s just boring words. He lost too badly for any particular boring words like that to have helped him. It’s certainly not a response to being called “Meatball Ron”, which is what he really needed with the voters in question.
I like the Hanania idea of challenging Trump to a fistfight and mocking him as a coward when he refuses. “Yellow-Bellied Don.” Or beating the crap out of him if he, an old man, actually accepts.
You might not like it, but this is what peak democracy performance looks like.
It seems the qualities that make a good President are antithetical to those which make a good presidential candidate.
I though DeSantis made a clear case: "if you like Trump's policies but don't like Trump, vote for me." I believe he would have made a great president , but unfortunately for him, the American people still do like (or at least believe in) Donald Trump. We'll see Ron again in 2028 as part of the next generation: Hawley, Vance, Christie, Youngkin... We'll see Nikki Haley then too, as the Bush/Cheney wing of the GOP refuses to exit stage-left gracefully.
DeSantis has a terrible Covid record—he’s just another Bush that goes with the flow of the right wing echo chamber to win elections. Trump actually promoted the life saving boosters to boos at one of his rallies which shows he isn’t laser focused on polls like Bush and DeSantis. Trump as president was an example of Dunning-Kruger Effect…but the reason it worked in the 2016 campaign was because he said common sense things instead of aligning himself with the Bush Republican Party platform. DeSantis is a very typical Bush Republican that obviously supported all of the asinine things Bush was doing as president.
You're free to dislike DeSantis, and considering he's a Yale grad, he certainly lacks Trump's outsider bona-fides and may well be a DC swamp-creature. I don't think he is, as the candidate from Bush/Cheney central casting is neocon-Nikki. But I could be wrong about that.
However, saying that DeSantis as a "terrible COVID record" is just so demonstrably false as to be laughable. He literally led the way for states to refuse CDC recommendations and stop the COVID lunacy. He was one of the best governors in the country on the public health vs economic and social damage calculation.
Uh, masking and social distancing and lockdowns clearly slowed the spread enough to allow people to get vaccinated which saved lives. Florida, GA, SC, and NC all experienced the same waves at roughly the same times and NC’s Democratic governor was a little more aggressive with mitigation measures in 2020 and NC continued them longer into 2021/22 and NC has a significantly lower Covid death rate than FL and GA and SC. And NC’s economy is just as strong as those states and so the mitigation measures weren’t onerous with respect to the economy. Bottom line—DeSantis’ policies led to an additional 20,000 deaths in Florida which means he killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden!! All praise to Allah!!
The important point there was that FL, GA, SC, NC "all experienced the same waves at roughly the same times" as did CA and everyone else -- despite doing vastly different things. The non-pharmaceutical interventions had negligible public health benefit. However they had tremendous economic and social costs (which we are still paying now.) Sans the COVID lockdowns, would the $1B forth of damage from the Summer of Saint Floyd have occurred? Would the Jan 6 riot have occurred? Here in CA, the class of kids that were 1st graders in 2021 are still significantly below their peers -- my wife teaches 3rd grade.
At the time though, the costs of the virus were real and obvious; the costs of the lockdowns were hidden, so navigating these trade-offs was hard in 2020. And Ron DeSantis made the right calls. He implemented the CDC guidelines and then changed his mind. He closed schools and then reopened them when he saw the effects. He looked at Sweden and learned from it. Maybe he just got lucky; maybe he was able to more accurately and dispassionately balance the information; maybe he's a sociopath that just wanted to play with people's lives. But his approach worked. And in hindsight, it's clear the draconian measures of the CDC and almost every other governor were not only ineffective against COVID but economically and socially disastrous for their populations.
Again, I'm not a "DeSantis is God" guy, nor am I a "Trump is God" guy. I'm am a "Biden is a disaster" guy though. I would have preferred DeSantis because I think he has the attention span and legislative experience that Trump lacks. But I'm in the minority in the GOP. That's fine. I don't like Trump personally. I don't think he will be effective. However, Biden hates people like me; that's very clear. I'm a "deplorable" and a "threat to democracy" who "clings to my guns and religion" (to amalgamate of the last 3 Democratic Presidential candidates.) Given a choice between a guy who is marginally competent at enacting policy I detest and a guy who's likely incompetent at enacting policy I might agree with... that's not a hard choice.
NPIs very clearly worked…they weren’t a silver bullet but not even the vaccines were a silver bullet that stopped Covid. With respect to your opinion of Biden—Republicans this century voted for McCain and Romney over Obama and believed two dudes getting married would destroy America and that marijuana is a dangerous drug…Republicans have a really poor track record this century.
Pangolin, I refuse to relitigate COVID with you or anyone else. If you believe 6 year olds doing school on Zoom for 6 hours a day for almost a year was a good idea, argument is pointless.
IMHO, Donald winning the Republican Presidential Nomination in 2016 does not demonstrate any particular political skill on his part of any kind.
Donald got >>more than double<< the media coverage of all the other 16 candidates combined.
If a bunch of Nannies pushing baby carriages decide to have a baby cart race, whoever wins, you can’t really attribute the victory to any one particular baby’s driving skill.
I mean, he wiped the floor with a bunch of very successful and experienced politicians with top-notch professional staffs and big campaign budgets. And while he started with a lot of name recognition, that was name recognition as a playboy and lifelong publicity hound and later a reality TV star who fired people--this isn't an obvious path to winning a presidential election. (By contrast, you can think of someone like Eisenhower, who entered politics by running for president, but he'd previously been the commanding general who won the war in Europe.)
I think that's about as much evidence for political skill/talent as you can ask for. He wasn't a very effective president, and I mostly don't care for his ideas, but I think you underrate his political campaigning talents at your peril.
"We humans could have a bright future ahead of us that lasts billions of years. But we have to survive the next 200 years first. Join Josh Clark of Stuff You Should Know for a 10-episode deep dive that explores the future of humanity and finds dangers we have never encountered before lurking just ahead. And if we humans are alone in the universe, if we don't survive intelligent life dies out with us too."
raw numbers are inherently just a math entity, spelling it out with a specific capitalization and lack of spaces produces a registerable trademark that can plausibly be defended in court. '538' is not an easy identity to protect with a TM
Like changing the spelling of someone else's baby's name, I suppose. Nate chose FiveThirtyEight for a reason, and the House of Mouse is messing with it.
Never forget that Trump got elected in 2016 because the media has a giant boner to see him as President since the day he first road down that escalator.
When he ran for the Republican nomination he was one of 17 potential Republican candidates. Democrats never saw it until it was too late but they all knew Hillary was very beatable and they all wanted to be the one who did it.
But Trump ultimately got the nomination because the media gave him >>more than double<< the media coverage as all of the other 16 candidates combined.
He disses one of the pack and 67+% of the country hears all about it. His opponent responds and less than 2% of the echo chamber even carries it.
And people are surprised he won? When he wins they’re saying what a sharp campaigner he is?
What a load of garbage.
The only thing the media loves more than building up icons is tearing them down. We’ll see what direction they ultimately go this year.
But to date there is no indication of any direction change, and so far quite a lot that indicates they never got off that 2016 track.
But all of the negatives about Trump ended up coming true and it worked out for Democrats. And a liberal might say, “what about abortion?” Well large swaths of America didn’t have abortion rights prior to Roe’s repeal and so not much changed. And I think the GOP prior to Trump was a steaming pile of manure and so I believe he changed it for the better.
I think there's an alternate universe where Clinton beat Trump in 2016 but in this one she was just the wrong candidate for that political cycle. Trump is the American expression of a global populist movement and he succeeded because of his outsider status. Clinton of course was perceived as the ultimate insider.
Desantis may have declared war on "wokism" but at core he seems like a conventional politician. I think there's an argument to be made that there is something in the water that is propelling candidates like Milei in Argentina and Wilders in the Netherlands to victory. The norms shattering candidate (Trump) versus politics as usual (Desantis/Haley)? They were the wrong candidates for the times.
If Trump loses in 2024 then he will be like Gollum (spoiler alert) in that he had a very important role to play and we just never knew what it was. So the problem with politics this century so far has been Bushes and Cheneys and Clintons, oh my!! Trump defeated them and changed the Republican Party in a positive way from a party focused on slaughtering innocent Muslims to a party focused on helping the working class. We now have two parties that are focused on making America better by helping the working class although obviously Trump was better at giving voice to the working class than actually pushing policies that helped them…but it’s better than sending their young men to slaughter innocent Muslims!?! Keep repeating it—Bushes and Cheneys and Clintons, oh my!!
The share of the college educated vote that the GOP receives has been declining for decades. The share of the working class vote that the DNC receives has also been declining over the same period of time.
Trump is the inflection point for that process. At the same time class conflict across the globe has resulted in a world wide populist movement. If Trump wins it will be against the backdrop of similar iconoclasts across the world (Milei, Polievre, Wilders) winning as well.
But Biden has actually successfully implemented much of the America First agenda as far as reshoring manufacturing jobs and energy dominance and getting out of asinine wars. His only failing grades are on the border and fentanyl both of which also got worse under Trump…so why would anyone think Trump could do a better job than Biden?? Biden is doing his best on the border and obviously everyone wants to reduce fentanyl deaths.
In terms of metrics
1) Crime. Better under Trump
2) Inflation: Better under Trump
3) Interest rates. Better under Trump
4) Illegal immigration. Much better under Trump.
5) Covid deaths. Of roughly 1,000,000 US deaths due to Covid approximately 2/3 died under Biden.
6) Foreign policy. Ukraine, Gaza and so on.
7) Overdose deaths. Better under Trump
8) Homeless number. Marginally better under Trump.
9) Traffic deaths. Better under Trump.
That's all secondary to my point though, which is that a worldwide demographic shift is responsible for populists like Trump. Is Biden running against Trump or is he fighting a global populist movement?
where's your sources?
I would normally post them up but there's 9 bullet points and providing two sources per point would be one long post.
That said all of this information is trivial to find with Google. If for some reason a web search will not suffice and you have specific questions about two or three items I could go into more detail.
I don’t blame Trump for not preventing China from unleashing a bioweapon into America that killed over a million Americans…and I don’t blame Biden for things like global inflation caused by the pandemic. You have to compare countries with similar countries and America did worse with Covid because of Trump and Republican governors and America has done better economically because of Biden’s policies. But remember America voted for Bush in 2004 when it was very obvious to me he was a failed president so who knows what Americans will believe over the next year??
There are about 6 million Covid deaths worldwide and 1 million of those are Americans. 1 out of 6 is clearly disproportionate to America's share of the global population. The bulk of those deaths occurred under Biden. Clearly if there is a failure here in terms of Covid management it is bipartisan.
In addition I would note that there is significant uncertainty as to whether Covid was a naturally occurring virus or leaked from a lab. Why? Because the Chinese government has stonewalled and refused to allow in outside investigators. Whether a lab leak is responsible is guesswork but it is absolutely undeniable that China is blocking an open investigation. Covid killed one million Americans. What has Biden done to pressure the Chinese into allowing investigators from the WHO into the country? Sanctions? Diplomatic discussions? Anything?
Finally, Larry Summers and Mohammed el-Arian both warned the Biden administration that passing the massive third stimulus package in addition to the infrastructure act would resurrect inflation. The Biden administration is responsible for runaway inflation to at least the same extent as the crisis on the southern border.
"A party focused on helping the working class."
Lol. Pretty much the only meaningful legislative reform Trump passed was a massive tax cut for the wealthy.
Trump as president governed like Jeb…but just like with LOTR Lizard Cheney pops back up at the end and it looks like all is lost and then her career ends. Same with George P Bush in Texas. Btw, what do Bill Clinton and Trump and AG Paxton have in common?? They were all impeached after beating a member of the Bush family.
Neither party supports the working class, pudding head, Trump least of all
It's weird who is and isn't perceived as an outsider though, isn't it? Trump obviously was a pillar of the establishment who had been around for decades, but the most ridiculous example has to be Emmanuel Macron, who successfully painted himself as an outsider in 2017 despite having been the finance minister for the incumbent (and extremely unpopular) government.
Also Boris Johnson in the UK. I think there's definitely a pattern where the champions of populism could be categorized as "class traitors" as Ruy Texeira might put it.
Yes, true, he had been Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary, and then was *already Prime Minister* when running the 2019 election campaign.
There's an alt universe where Clinton didn't force Obama to pay off her debts and make her either SoS or Veep in 2008 and Obama didn't abandon purple politics so quickly in 2009 (and added more strings to the help given to banks to get the economy going sooner) and Clinton didn't capture the DNC so it couldn't do its job and replace her when she was underperforming relative to a geriatric socialist... But yes, her baggage enabled Trump to get close enough that some love from Russia may have tipped the scales to his election (along with some friends, since it wdn't do much to simply help Trump).
Methinks, it's our winner-takes-all electoral system that is propelling dysfunction and the enabling of Trump who can credibly hurt the GOP in ways that would be multiplied in terms of loss of representation/power.
My take is that the US system of government heavily favors a two party system but there are no guarantees as to what policies and politics those two parties espouse.
Consider Bill Clinton. Once he figured out that he was out of step he gleefully pursued welfare reform and, reportedly, a plan to privatize Social Security before the Lewinsky scandal blew the government up.
In a similar vein I would speculate that a global populist movement would force both parties to the right simply to maintain electoral viability.
While it favors there being 2 parties, it need not be the same 2 parties and sometimes only the labels don't change. But there is precedent for a major party becoming not competitive as with the Whig party before the rise of the Republican party in the mid 1800s.
The GOP can't replace Trump, but Trump very well may be just seeking to maximize his leverage to get a get out of jail for free card. So, there's no certainty about him following through with running for POTUS this year. His legal problems are getting worse along with his popularity with independents. Being popular with about half of the Republicans who vote in the primaries doesn't quite cut it. The usual shortcut of voting based on whether one is better off than they were 4 years ago presumes the fundamental similarity/redundancy of the two major parties. Trump is not politics like usual and most people understand that.
Again, look at Milei in Argentina or Wilders in the NL. Or for that matter the electoral results in Finland or any of the other earthquakes we've seen in the past year. Trump is not politics as usual and that is precisely why people are voting for him.
I would also suggest that the polling currently gives the advantage to Trump.
I agree there are lots of people really hurting economically since their real income has gone down. That may make them support Trump right now, but it won't per se translate into votes in Nov, since Trump's record and lack of reliability are pretty d--n clear. We'll need other ways to tie ourselves to the mast to get s--t done, like using RankedChoiceVoting, doing away w/ the Senate super majority rule, and replacing Citizens United w/ a rule that routes $speech thru party leaders so they can set and defend brands in ways that won't enable so much political entrepreneurialism.
The polling not only shows that Biden is massively unpopular but it also shows that Trump has commanding leads in terms of who the public views as better qualified to lead on issues such as the economy, illegal immigration, etc.
There is a lot of time to go until November but in terms of the data that we do have? I would rather be Trump than Biden at this point.
The Detroit Lions made the NFC Championship game in 1991-92, against the Washington Redskins. It didn't go well for them:
https://www.pro-football-reference.com/boxscores/199201120was.htm
The only thing I remember from that game was John Madden stating that Barry Sanders making 8 defenders miss to only make it back to the line of scrimmage on a play may have been the greatest single play he'd ever seen by a running back.
I had to watch the Panthers play for several years and there is nothing worse than watching a talented RB waste away on a crappy team. The NFL should force teams to trade talented RBs if they are still crappy a few years after drafting him.
Trump completely changed the paradigm of the Republican party. He showed that it could win with audiences that it never thought it had a chance with, but who connect with a style of low IQ leadership. Additionally, he freed many people from the chains of political correctness, especially when society is trying to tighten them more than ever. In this sense, he is a giant historical figure, and expecting the Republicans to oust him is like expecting the Conservatives in Britain to oust Churchill in the elections after World War II.
I might more generously say that he connected with a "low trust" citizen.
And this is actually quite hard to do! Virtually every other candidate has to prove themselves by coming up the ranks of government, which alienates them from the low-trusters.
Dr Oz and Herschel Walker were examples that might have followed his mold, but they could not get the magic to work for them. (Though my personal suspicion is that they did not have opponents as disliked as Hillary Clinton, similar to how Trump lost to Biden in 2020.)
The conservatives were seen as the party of appeasement. There was a national unity government during world war 2 which included Atlee. When you look at it that way, it isn’t surprising
Define "Low IQ" leadership.
Speaking at the level of an eight-year-old, constantly saying things that are unreasonable and inaccurate, using derogatory nicknames for his opponents, projecting an alpha male image.
Let the record show that nothing in the above definition has any relation to intelligence compared with those of like age - yet they accuse others with inaccuracies, insults, and projections of what they perceive to be the "ideal male"
Yes, that was my implication. Churchill may not have been a strong contender for the 1945 general elections, but as a historical figure, he was not someone who could lose in internal party elections.
'Trump’s various criminal trials helped him with the GOP base.' - This is stated so matter-of-factly, and we all know it, but still. What would this have looked like to someone at literally any other time in American history? What will this look like to future generations when it is history? I suppose history is written by the winners so it depends on what happens next. But none of this is anywhere remotely near 'normal'.
I think when Party X's state and federal authorities are charging Party Y's candidate for what look to be partisan reasons or on bullshit charges, that's going to get a lot of members of Party X to rally around him. You can argue whether the charges have some justification or not, but I suspect that if the situation were reversed, a whole lot of Democrats would be very convinced that the charges were an attempt to use the legal system to bypass the voters. The efforts to take Trump off the ballot or rule him ineligible for office seem the same way, to me. (How did most Democrats see Bill Clinton's legal woes? ISTM that most of them saw that stuff as lawfare by Republicans against a political opponent.)
In case it matters, I loathe Trump and wouldn't vote for him for dogcatcher. It still looks to me like at least most of the charges against Trump are about getting rid of a political opponent rather than anything like seeking some kind of impartial justice. And various people deciding he's guilty of insurrection so he isn't allowed to win an election seems similarly sketchy to me.
I'm not a lawyer or such, so maybe I can't speak to the propriety of the charges, but I would like to hope that judges and juries, being independent of the executive branch that's bringing the charges, will get it right. I definitely get the argument, but the thing is I think Trump and the Republicans do too, and so they think that they don't need to follow the law because no matter what they can always claim any accountability through the justice system is just political. That's a problem. How do we enforce the law in that situation? Is the bigger risk in prosecuting or in not prosecuting? But yes if half the people think it's justice and the other half think it's political, that means the system of government has already failed. Once a certain number of people stop accepting the legitimacy of government actions, it doesn't matter whether the government is right or wrong anymore. We may already be at that point of no return.
What no amount of data regression and analysis can clarify is the Revolutionary Spirit. The FiveThirtyEight of Weimar could not have seen it coming. Unless our radars are picking up humanity’s cyclical discontent with the world order status quo - ala The Fourth Turning - we are doomed to continue our premise errors. Past is, indeed, prologue. Left + Right extremism gripped the world in the 1930s - roiling the globe with violence. And who in the Great Gatsby Roaring 20’s saw THAT coming? Nobody. Every 80-100 years - a Trump shows up. And a Milei. And a LePen. And a Modi. Correctives to prior cycle overreach. Which is what “Progressivism” has become. A globalist fait accompli from the smug Davos set of neo-Woodrow Wilsons. Who long for a single world order that erases unique cultures, traditions, and antiquated relics like religion. So, of course those who cherish these things - rise up. Choosing political and cultural champions who fight this assault. All this - all of it - is a cultural backlash to progressive overreach. And, of course, progressives despise those who stand athwart history screaming STOP! Trump has no currency or legitimacy save this. We have created this febrile swamp from which this emerges. If we were wise enough to stop - he would be rendered pointless. But - Progressives won’t - so it will advance to its logical conclusion. And down deep, we all know it. And feel powerless to stop it.
Great comment. Re "a single world order that erases unique cultures, traditions, and antiquated relics like religion": to this list I would add human biology. The astonishing rise of transgenderism (and its almost complete capture of medical and educational authority in the West) is truly astonishing, and is the vanguard of a nascent transhumanist movement that will govern us all soon enough if the populists (who are firmly in the humanist tradition) cannot strike back effectively.
Absolutely. Good add. Another huge issue at play is the threat to Democracy from technology. The power of “mega networks” sweep us into impregnable (and global) idealogical bubbles. Geographical nation states are becoming steam train relics. Citizens everywhere rally into virtual online communities of the like minded. Why defend fellow countrymen in Duluth who disagree with new friends you Zoom with in Dubai? This shift from analog to digital communities is creating a global duality. Those who can live "anywhere" (Progressives) vs those who cherish "somewhere" (Nationalists) are the new battleground. Especially with the young who are most immersed in this new, digital reality. You can see that in their disdain for closed national borders (which don't exist in the online metaverse). So, IMHO, we are being simultaneously assaulted by both a cyclical social cycle last seen in the 1930s AND technology driving intergenerational social attitudes. I have my doubts that Democracy (as we know it) can survive this Perfect Storm. wild ride ahead. 😬
Yes. Do you read N.S. Lyons? Highly recommended, here is one piece on real vs virtual: https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/reality-honks-back
Was it always a publicity stunt for 2028?
The timing of the drop-out coupled with the immediate Trump endorsement did feel weird to me. The only thing I could think of was that Trump has offered him some position in the administration, like you said -- though, like you also said, it would appear uncharacteristically generous of the former president toward a Republican who started to criticize him. Time will tell.
I think that there is a basis on which DeSantis could have attacked Trump and not appeared as a "party traitor" (or whatever) and so been able to challenge him.
He could have said that the election in 2020 was stolen, but the Democrats tried to steal 2018 and 2022 from him in Florida and he stopped them, and as the candidate, he knows how to do that in 2024, but Trump would be cheated out of the win again.
He doesn't have the sort of personality that would mean that he could actually make that stick against Trump, but it would have worked with the policy case that he was making - that he had the same policy objectives as Trump, but he understood how things worked and could deliver on them, while Trump had struggled to get things done because the deep state had worked against him.
It could have helped a little, but it’s just boring words. He lost too badly for any particular boring words like that to have helped him. It’s certainly not a response to being called “Meatball Ron”, which is what he really needed with the voters in question.
I like the Hanania idea of challenging Trump to a fistfight and mocking him as a coward when he refuses. “Yellow-Bellied Don.” Or beating the crap out of him if he, an old man, actually accepts.
You might not like it, but this is what peak democracy performance looks like.
Moving forward to the ultimate leader: President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho
We can only imagine what happened to the opponent that referred to Camacho as "Birdbrain"
It seems the qualities that make a good President are antithetical to those which make a good presidential candidate.
I though DeSantis made a clear case: "if you like Trump's policies but don't like Trump, vote for me." I believe he would have made a great president , but unfortunately for him, the American people still do like (or at least believe in) Donald Trump. We'll see Ron again in 2028 as part of the next generation: Hawley, Vance, Christie, Youngkin... We'll see Nikki Haley then too, as the Bush/Cheney wing of the GOP refuses to exit stage-left gracefully.
DeSantis has a terrible Covid record—he’s just another Bush that goes with the flow of the right wing echo chamber to win elections. Trump actually promoted the life saving boosters to boos at one of his rallies which shows he isn’t laser focused on polls like Bush and DeSantis. Trump as president was an example of Dunning-Kruger Effect…but the reason it worked in the 2016 campaign was because he said common sense things instead of aligning himself with the Bush Republican Party platform. DeSantis is a very typical Bush Republican that obviously supported all of the asinine things Bush was doing as president.
You're free to dislike DeSantis, and considering he's a Yale grad, he certainly lacks Trump's outsider bona-fides and may well be a DC swamp-creature. I don't think he is, as the candidate from Bush/Cheney central casting is neocon-Nikki. But I could be wrong about that.
However, saying that DeSantis as a "terrible COVID record" is just so demonstrably false as to be laughable. He literally led the way for states to refuse CDC recommendations and stop the COVID lunacy. He was one of the best governors in the country on the public health vs economic and social damage calculation.
Uh, masking and social distancing and lockdowns clearly slowed the spread enough to allow people to get vaccinated which saved lives. Florida, GA, SC, and NC all experienced the same waves at roughly the same times and NC’s Democratic governor was a little more aggressive with mitigation measures in 2020 and NC continued them longer into 2021/22 and NC has a significantly lower Covid death rate than FL and GA and SC. And NC’s economy is just as strong as those states and so the mitigation measures weren’t onerous with respect to the economy. Bottom line—DeSantis’ policies led to an additional 20,000 deaths in Florida which means he killed more Americans than Osama Bin Laden!! All praise to Allah!!
The important point there was that FL, GA, SC, NC "all experienced the same waves at roughly the same times" as did CA and everyone else -- despite doing vastly different things. The non-pharmaceutical interventions had negligible public health benefit. However they had tremendous economic and social costs (which we are still paying now.) Sans the COVID lockdowns, would the $1B forth of damage from the Summer of Saint Floyd have occurred? Would the Jan 6 riot have occurred? Here in CA, the class of kids that were 1st graders in 2021 are still significantly below their peers -- my wife teaches 3rd grade.
At the time though, the costs of the virus were real and obvious; the costs of the lockdowns were hidden, so navigating these trade-offs was hard in 2020. And Ron DeSantis made the right calls. He implemented the CDC guidelines and then changed his mind. He closed schools and then reopened them when he saw the effects. He looked at Sweden and learned from it. Maybe he just got lucky; maybe he was able to more accurately and dispassionately balance the information; maybe he's a sociopath that just wanted to play with people's lives. But his approach worked. And in hindsight, it's clear the draconian measures of the CDC and almost every other governor were not only ineffective against COVID but economically and socially disastrous for their populations.
Again, I'm not a "DeSantis is God" guy, nor am I a "Trump is God" guy. I'm am a "Biden is a disaster" guy though. I would have preferred DeSantis because I think he has the attention span and legislative experience that Trump lacks. But I'm in the minority in the GOP. That's fine. I don't like Trump personally. I don't think he will be effective. However, Biden hates people like me; that's very clear. I'm a "deplorable" and a "threat to democracy" who "clings to my guns and religion" (to amalgamate of the last 3 Democratic Presidential candidates.) Given a choice between a guy who is marginally competent at enacting policy I detest and a guy who's likely incompetent at enacting policy I might agree with... that's not a hard choice.
NPIs very clearly worked…they weren’t a silver bullet but not even the vaccines were a silver bullet that stopped Covid. With respect to your opinion of Biden—Republicans this century voted for McCain and Romney over Obama and believed two dudes getting married would destroy America and that marijuana is a dangerous drug…Republicans have a really poor track record this century.
Pangolin, I refuse to relitigate COVID with you or anyone else. If you believe 6 year olds doing school on Zoom for 6 hours a day for almost a year was a good idea, argument is pointless.
IMHO, Donald winning the Republican Presidential Nomination in 2016 does not demonstrate any particular political skill on his part of any kind.
Donald got >>more than double<< the media coverage of all the other 16 candidates combined.
If a bunch of Nannies pushing baby carriages decide to have a baby cart race, whoever wins, you can’t really attribute the victory to any one particular baby’s driving skill.
I mean, he wiped the floor with a bunch of very successful and experienced politicians with top-notch professional staffs and big campaign budgets. And while he started with a lot of name recognition, that was name recognition as a playboy and lifelong publicity hound and later a reality TV star who fired people--this isn't an obvious path to winning a presidential election. (By contrast, you can think of someone like Eisenhower, who entered politics by running for president, but he'd previously been the commanding general who won the war in Europe.)
I think that's about as much evidence for political skill/talent as you can ask for. He wasn't a very effective president, and I mostly don't care for his ideas, but I think you underrate his political campaigning talents at your peril.
RIP Meatball Ron, the Berenstein* Bears of political flameouts.
This has been a very depressing time in US politics.
Nate (and anyone else interested in risks to humanity's fate):
In the event you are not already aware of it, I give my highest recommendation to a podcast called "The End of the World with Josh Clark." Link below.
(Josh is best known in the podcasting world as a long-time co-host of the "Stuff You Should Know" podcast.)
https://podcasts.apple.com/bg/podcast/the-end-of-the-world-with-josh-clark/id1437682381
"We humans could have a bright future ahead of us that lasts billions of years. But we have to survive the next 200 years first. Join Josh Clark of Stuff You Should Know for a 10-episode deep dive that explores the future of humanity and finds dangers we have never encountered before lurking just ahead. And if we humans are alone in the universe, if we don't survive intelligent life dies out with us too."
Why don't you like the name “538”?
raw numbers are inherently just a math entity, spelling it out with a specific capitalization and lack of spaces produces a registerable trademark that can plausibly be defended in court. '538' is not an easy identity to protect with a TM
Okay, but he doesn't have to worry about the trademark any more. My sense was that his feeling was aesthetic, not corporate.
Like changing the spelling of someone else's baby's name, I suppose. Nate chose FiveThirtyEight for a reason, and the House of Mouse is messing with it.
I agree ! Endurance is the key to life. Resistance and resilience.
Never forget that Trump got elected in 2016 because the media has a giant boner to see him as President since the day he first road down that escalator.
When he ran for the Republican nomination he was one of 17 potential Republican candidates. Democrats never saw it until it was too late but they all knew Hillary was very beatable and they all wanted to be the one who did it.
But Trump ultimately got the nomination because the media gave him >>more than double<< the media coverage as all of the other 16 candidates combined.
He disses one of the pack and 67+% of the country hears all about it. His opponent responds and less than 2% of the echo chamber even carries it.
And people are surprised he won? When he wins they’re saying what a sharp campaigner he is?
What a load of garbage.
The only thing the media loves more than building up icons is tearing them down. We’ll see what direction they ultimately go this year.
But to date there is no indication of any direction change, and so far quite a lot that indicates they never got off that 2016 track.
But all of the negatives about Trump ended up coming true and it worked out for Democrats. And a liberal might say, “what about abortion?” Well large swaths of America didn’t have abortion rights prior to Roe’s repeal and so not much changed. And I think the GOP prior to Trump was a steaming pile of manure and so I believe he changed it for the better.