Truly funny to see the "cracks" in the MAGA coalition. Which aren't. Recent poll---and you guys know I don't do polls---has Trump at over 90% support of the GOP. People such as Thomas Masshole and MTG are grifter attention hounds, but don't represent anything.
We are still waiting on new voter reg data after the break. My feeling is it's going to be a continuation of across-the-board gains for Rs. Meanwhile, the economy now is as they say "poised" for a major explosion. Retail sales over Black Friday were a record, inflation continues to fall or hold, Atlanta Fed said 4.3% growth in 4th quarter. It's going to be ugly for anyone thinking that Trump's "coalition" is in trouble.
Trump won't be on the ballot in 2028, or if he is, 80% of the country will disapprove of it. The cracks start to show when you look at MAGA *without* Trump. It's a far more brittle coalition than it has been sold as without Trump's personality cult to glue it together. Certainly nothing resembling Reagan or FDR's.
The coherence of the MAGA coalition comes from a dislike for far-left Critical Theory and postmodernism, and the necessary rejection of Enlightenment principles that those theories entail. (Or as people who don't read philosophy put it: the Democrats went bat-shit insane.)That's the biggest thing that Democrats don't understand about MAGA.
Trump is an extremely weak candidate, and despite what partisans on both sides wish, presidential elections are won by appealing to moderate swing voters. The far-left will hate Vance as much as they hate Trump, if not more. But they've got a tough job to make the family man in an interracial relationship seem like a racist womanizer to moderates.
Vance doesn't have the personality cult Trump has, and he lacks the political and cultural cache required to easily step into the boots of the strongman the way Trump did. (This has always been a key weakness of strongman leadership, FWIW) Furthermore, the personnel within Trump's political organization thus far seem to view Vance as a rival, on the same level as them, not 'the boss'. Bringing the Trump machine to heel will be a difficult task. And that's before we get to the weak spots in his public image--most notably a massive dearth of charisma, a history of having literally no consistent principles, and a long-tenured enmeshment in elite finance, orbiting and rubbing elbows with Thiel, Musk, and the like. (the public is not fond of elite finance these days)
But, ultimately, it will be the economy that decides his fate--that is the iron law of presidential fortunes. No one has any idea what the economy will look like in 2028--but it better look better than it does now. If it is humming along nicely, he has a shot; if it isn't, and we're still stuck in the present stagflationary undertow, I don't think his chances are all that great.
Naw. Republicans are independent and always quarrel within. But there is vast agreement that collectivist, brownshirt, feminized Democrats suck pond water and are an existential threat to everything if allowed back in power.
Then the Democrats shouldn't have won in 2020, and the vote margins shouldn't have been so thin in 2024.
Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes. That is not 'durable coalition' territory. It's literally nothing compared to the numbers seen in true realignment elections like 1980.
I'm ex-never Trumper who was under the spell of TDS in 2016 and 2020. I voted Biden in 2020 thinking he'd be a moderate somewhere between Bill Clinton and first-term Barack Obama. 2020 showed us what the modern Democrats stand for:
- Lockdowns for a disease like the flu
- rapists in women's prisons and locker rooms
- ending national sovereignty on the theory that borders are racist
- rejecting Enlightenment universalism for DEI
- defunding the police
- an increase in Federal outlays from about $4.5 trillion in 2019 to $7 trillion in 2020 and then baked into future budgets.
- signing up as many able-bodied adults as possible for SNAP and Medicaid
Note that every single one of these was a non-factor in Obama's last term
The Democrats aren't all that united a bloc, so you're overstating the case on some things here--'Defund the police' was a (really stupid) fad taken up by members of the party's leftmost flank, but by and large actual Democratic legislators opposed it in terms of legislation, (ex: https://about.bgov.com/insights/news/democrats-reject-calls-to-defund-police-with-spending-requests/) and most of the party--including literally every member of party leadership--are on the record multiple times explicitly rejecting it.
Regarding the lockdowns, they were first implemented by Trump, and he became critical of them only after the stock market had a meltdown that made him look bad--regardless, while I agree there's plenty to critique in terms of how they were handled, the pandemic was also a once-in-a-century, non-cyclical, exogenous shock, and there was no good precedent for how best to deal with it. (at least with Great Depression-style debt crises you have some historical guidelines to work with) Everyone was making best guesses, Republican and Democrat, and both parties made their fair share of bad guesses.
Neither party is much to write home about if you're a fiscal conservative, unfortunately. Biden favored infrastructure spending, Trump favors massive unfunded tax breaks--both of them haven't hesitated in blowing up the deficit. I think a fiscal conservative could at least admit Biden was a better steward of the currency, though--he favored a strong dollar, whereas Trump has been hell-bent on devaluation.
The Dems are certainly guilty of being far too tolerant of the illiberalism of militant wokeness and far too concerned about identity politics; but the GOP has become even *more* illiberal in its style of governance (the Dems never sent in squads of poorly-trained soldiers to terrorize red cities) and is quite identity-focused in its approach, too--just with different groups. (like the Dems, it is now discovering the hazards of that approach as well--witness the scramble to somehow manage to distance the party from literal white supremacists like Nick Fuentes, but do so without alienating adjacent constituencies, or alt-right luminaries like Tucker Carlson)
Biden did indeed have a terrible border policy, that is indisputable--but Trump has used that failure to justify huge power-grabs and police-state tactics, and hasn't really done much in the way of creating long-term solutions. IMO sensible (small l) liberals are still waiting for a leader with a truly sound border policy, focused on stemming unauthorized migration in a long-term way and solving the problem, rather than just using the problem as a rationale for authoritarian behavior. In the meantime we can at least be happy that there is an increasingly bipartisan opposition to open borders.
The far-left controls the Democratic Party. The moderates are cowards who are afraid of getting shamed, scorned and hated the way that heretics like JK Rowling are hated.
A vote for the Democrats is a vote to increase the far-left's control over the party. A vote for the Republicans is a vote for Enlightenment principles *and* a vote against the far-left's control over the party.
Trump was in office when we did not know much about the impact of the global pandemic. The Biden Democrats absolutely knew that their actions were unnecessary and destructive yet they did them for political reasons.
Calling MTG "elite" is more than a bit of a stretch. She was a Cross Fit instructor in a rural district where the largest city has fewer than 40K people. When MTG arrived in DC, she drank the water that immediately imparts the knowledge, insanity equals attention.
Dems spent nearly every waking hour after she opened her mouth, poking fun at Greene. Now she is MAGA Elite? Most people can barely recall Paul Ryan. Green will be forgotten 15 minutes after she exits the House, despite Dem attempts to morph her into a Rep Oracle in exile.
The above is correct if If Reps cannot bend at least some costs in the right direction, the midterms will be a route, but those predicting the end of MAGA, may not only be a bit premature, but too insular.
French polling shows the La Pen disciple walking away with French elections, if they were held today.
In England, Starmer had an 18% approval rating, before talk of an IMF bailout. Farage is considering Downing St. drape colors.
Last winter brought the Christmas Markets and 3 major terror attacks to German soil. Should terror reappear, the AfD will be unstoppable. The West tends to move Right or Left, at least somewhat, in concert. It was not an accident Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl governed together. Populists running Western Europe in 2028, will not aid Dems
Finally the above ignores foreign policy. If Maduro is soon counting his dollars, while watching tiny fishing boats and mega yachts play Chicken on the Bosphorus, it will be one of the greatest US accomplishments in decades. Venezuela has the world's largest oil deposits. A wealthy stable nation in South America, will enrich itself and surrounding nations, while curtailing mass migration and aiding stable oil prices.
Finally, the NYC wild card. If Mamdani takes power, and 6 months from now the US largest city has morphed into Columbia Quad post 10/7, Dems will have their own problems.
“The United States is experiencing a manufacturing resurgence, facilitated by a changing federal policy landscape and a shift to companies prioritizing supply chain resilience. Over the first eight months of the second Trump Administration, companies announced over $1.2 trillion in planned advancements towards expanding U.S. production capacity.1 Our analysis indicates that the majority of these investments target the reshoring of strategic industries - primarily semiconductors, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. These investments add on to the more than $750 billion in U.S. manufacturing investments announced under the Biden Administration.2 As these planned manufacturing investments make their way through the development process, we expect significant opportunities to materialize for companies throughout the U.S. infrastructure development value chain, such as construction and engineering services providers, raw material suppliers, equipment suppliers, and industrial transportation service providers. “
I don’t expect on-shoring to result in a huge shift to manufacturing jobs, due to the heavy use of automation in modern manufacturing, but the jobs created should be pretty good blue collar / skilled trade jobs. If the announced investment materializes, which will take time, it should have positive effects on the economy by 2028. Given that the Trump admin controls much of the permitting process, and given the political value of manufacturing expansion, the timeframes could potentially be faster than usual.
Meh, , It was obvious in 2015 that Trump was a corrupt self dealing sleaze, you get the good parts and the bad parts. Safe from prosecution Trump doesn't hide his crony capitalism. Other than tax breaks for billionaires Trump hasn't even attempted any legislation. When he does, those will be the parts that stick. Maybe after the midterms he can distract an impeaching congress by working on legislation, like on immigration.
I'd disagree about tariffs. People blame their declining sales on tariffs but actual prices for imported products haven't budged much as foreign manufacturers absorb the cost to maintain market share. It's certainly not showing up in inflation, and meanwhile hundreds of billions are being paid to our treasury. The NYT has been begging for stories asking any small importers to report what they have paid in increased tariffs. Typically they look for anecdotes when larger stories don't work. Turns out consumers are hardly paying and inflation didn't happen, or not from tariffs anyway.
Last week the upper middle class "affordable" types argued about what it takes to be poor in the US. Lots of dubious figures tossed around instigated by a viral substack of course. Music to my ears, the more people who feel like it's impossible to move up the ladder in the US, the greater possibility for change.
We have our own corruption scandal in Minnesota with our DFL that controls the state. Ten figures type fraud. Hariss' old running mate Tim Walz helped defer investigation. It includes 59 convictions and more snowballing revelations daily. Somali tax dollar remittances being used for Al Shabaab terrorists is a bad headline.
Trump still has 3 years, and no he won't run for a third term, he's old, he needs to make it through this one. Trump has pulled all the power into not only his branch of government but to him personally, not a great way to run the largest economy in the world. Then again, so far, there is no alternative. Good time for a third party.
Building a durable coalition in a full-fledged liberal democratic state is a process of making friends, not prosecuting enemies. The Reagan coalition was built on the mass conversion of former Democrats (the 'Reagan Democrats' were the crucial swing bloc) just as the New Deal coalition was built on cultural shifts and outreach efforts that saw huge swathes of Republicans cross the aisle.
Polarization makes this kind of coalition building extremely difficult in the best of circumstances when you are trying to secure it merely by earning votes. Both Obama and Trump had a shot at it, but the former couldn't do the footwork and the latter has no interest in making friends--since the beginning, his actions have always been about skewering his enemies, and that, plus his personality cult, is what he built his movement on top of. He hasn't done much different in his second term except turn this strategy up to 11. That may win him some more favor with his base, but it won't widen it with new converts.
Of course, without a durable coalition, you *can* lengthen your time in power if you use state repression, and we're seeing some early attempts at this. However, you need a well-honed repressive apparatus and a lot of political dexterity to make it work. Trump is trying to assemble that apparatus now, but he's clearly not as nimble as Orban or Putin or Erdogan. Vance may be better-suited to the task, but I don't think he is in command of the Trump organization--too many people in Trump's administration view him as a rival, not a leader.
As a result, I don't expect either the MAGA-fied GOP or the Democrats will be assembling a long-lasting coalition, if they simply keep on doing what they're doing now. And polarization means anyone who does will need more than just charisma to make it work.
Never incarcerate any violent criminal because they need to kill white people”
Unfortunately the GOP has perhaps a week to actually push back against its leader’s ill-chosen pardons before this must copy-pasted to their own list of policy blunders. I don’t expect them to.
This independent is not ready to bail on Trump. One can't judge the total picture in only 11 months. Many of his policy's enactments make me shudder. His blustering on social media is unpresidential at times, but apparently that's how he thinks he can influence people. Most of what he ran on needs to be addressed, but, although he has more people around him that support his views, there are still too many who can not relate to his end goals and, as in the first term, are undermining the the processes of their attainment resulting in negative half-baked solutions. The DOGE thing was disastrous for many and the follow-through seems to be nonexistent. The economy/inflation is the most important matter and what he has started won't really show up concretely until 8-9 months into next year as the tariffs and relocation of certain industries begin to take hold long term. His sellout to the billionaires, Netanyahu, and industry is very troublesome and will probably bring down Rep. upward strides and help get dems re-elected. If that happens we will go back to Obama/Biden economics. Think the duck may have broken leg.
As a child in the 1950s, my father told me that the Democrats' solution to everything was to give more money. That's what all of their solutions are now, too.
The Democrats can criticize all they want but they won't be able to do much about the economy. And then Republicans will come roaring back.
Of course, Trump's obsession with tariffs as cornerstone of economic revival was both ignorant and destructive to the US economy.
And it will be seen as a historical tragedy that the Congressional Republicans and the American business elites did not resist this madness.
Howerver, his fundamental identification with de-regulation, enforced borders, lower taxation and constraing any growth in government spending on social welfare place aligns him with the economic right. By simply not being a Democrat Trump has saved America from more economic value destruction.
But lets be intellectually honest - the Democrats and the left have nothing to offer in respect of eocnomic revival . Confisation of wealth is not wealth creation. Democratic governance results in economic irrationality. How could it not? Democrats have never come to terms that socialism is a moral hazard that no country should indulge in.
But I would challenge any Democrat - will they be proposing to implement a national single payer health care system in 2029? What could be more tranformational , more "fair"?
And underscore the "single" , no exceptions, no tolerance for parallel private systems. As idiot Sanders would say, "health care is a right", but as for service levels , innovation and access leftist bureaucrat will determine.
Ask any Canadian on the ravaages of public health care.
I would never put my eggs in a government single-payer system. There's no reason to think the gov't can manage healthcare costs. I believe the direction of reform needs to include: 1. HSAs for all through a payroll tax that can be later converted to an IRA. 2. Remove tax write-off for employers who provide insurance - eliminate employer sponsored plans over time - let employee buy a basic plan or cadillac plan if they want to pay for it out of their own pocket 3. Tax healthcare benefit that employees receive at value until they're paying on their own out of their pocket 4. Make plans portable, not tied to employers over time 5. Pay out of pocket (HSA) for care 6. Make Major Medical / catastrophic plans available to everyone, not just the young 7. Encourage supplemental insurance to cover major events 8. Work toward portability (eliminate employer-sponsored and government-sponsored plans to eliminate job lock.
Truly funny to see the "cracks" in the MAGA coalition. Which aren't. Recent poll---and you guys know I don't do polls---has Trump at over 90% support of the GOP. People such as Thomas Masshole and MTG are grifter attention hounds, but don't represent anything.
We are still waiting on new voter reg data after the break. My feeling is it's going to be a continuation of across-the-board gains for Rs. Meanwhile, the economy now is as they say "poised" for a major explosion. Retail sales over Black Friday were a record, inflation continues to fall or hold, Atlanta Fed said 4.3% growth in 4th quarter. It's going to be ugly for anyone thinking that Trump's "coalition" is in trouble.
Trump won't be on the ballot in 2028, or if he is, 80% of the country will disapprove of it. The cracks start to show when you look at MAGA *without* Trump. It's a far more brittle coalition than it has been sold as without Trump's personality cult to glue it together. Certainly nothing resembling Reagan or FDR's.
The coherence of the MAGA coalition comes from a dislike for far-left Critical Theory and postmodernism, and the necessary rejection of Enlightenment principles that those theories entail. (Or as people who don't read philosophy put it: the Democrats went bat-shit insane.)That's the biggest thing that Democrats don't understand about MAGA.
Trump is an extremely weak candidate, and despite what partisans on both sides wish, presidential elections are won by appealing to moderate swing voters. The far-left will hate Vance as much as they hate Trump, if not more. But they've got a tough job to make the family man in an interracial relationship seem like a racist womanizer to moderates.
Vance doesn't have the personality cult Trump has, and he lacks the political and cultural cache required to easily step into the boots of the strongman the way Trump did. (This has always been a key weakness of strongman leadership, FWIW) Furthermore, the personnel within Trump's political organization thus far seem to view Vance as a rival, on the same level as them, not 'the boss'. Bringing the Trump machine to heel will be a difficult task. And that's before we get to the weak spots in his public image--most notably a massive dearth of charisma, a history of having literally no consistent principles, and a long-tenured enmeshment in elite finance, orbiting and rubbing elbows with Thiel, Musk, and the like. (the public is not fond of elite finance these days)
But, ultimately, it will be the economy that decides his fate--that is the iron law of presidential fortunes. No one has any idea what the economy will look like in 2028--but it better look better than it does now. If it is humming along nicely, he has a shot; if it isn't, and we're still stuck in the present stagflationary undertow, I don't think his chances are all that great.
Naw. Republicans are independent and always quarrel within. But there is vast agreement that collectivist, brownshirt, feminized Democrats suck pond water and are an existential threat to everything if allowed back in power.
Then the Democrats shouldn't have won in 2020, and the vote margins shouldn't have been so thin in 2024.
Trump won Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes. That is not 'durable coalition' territory. It's literally nothing compared to the numbers seen in true realignment elections like 1980.
I'm ex-never Trumper who was under the spell of TDS in 2016 and 2020. I voted Biden in 2020 thinking he'd be a moderate somewhere between Bill Clinton and first-term Barack Obama. 2020 showed us what the modern Democrats stand for:
- Lockdowns for a disease like the flu
- rapists in women's prisons and locker rooms
- ending national sovereignty on the theory that borders are racist
- rejecting Enlightenment universalism for DEI
- defunding the police
- an increase in Federal outlays from about $4.5 trillion in 2019 to $7 trillion in 2020 and then baked into future budgets.
- signing up as many able-bodied adults as possible for SNAP and Medicaid
Note that every single one of these was a non-factor in Obama's last term
The Democrats aren't all that united a bloc, so you're overstating the case on some things here--'Defund the police' was a (really stupid) fad taken up by members of the party's leftmost flank, but by and large actual Democratic legislators opposed it in terms of legislation, (ex: https://about.bgov.com/insights/news/democrats-reject-calls-to-defund-police-with-spending-requests/) and most of the party--including literally every member of party leadership--are on the record multiple times explicitly rejecting it.
Regarding the lockdowns, they were first implemented by Trump, and he became critical of them only after the stock market had a meltdown that made him look bad--regardless, while I agree there's plenty to critique in terms of how they were handled, the pandemic was also a once-in-a-century, non-cyclical, exogenous shock, and there was no good precedent for how best to deal with it. (at least with Great Depression-style debt crises you have some historical guidelines to work with) Everyone was making best guesses, Republican and Democrat, and both parties made their fair share of bad guesses.
Neither party is much to write home about if you're a fiscal conservative, unfortunately. Biden favored infrastructure spending, Trump favors massive unfunded tax breaks--both of them haven't hesitated in blowing up the deficit. I think a fiscal conservative could at least admit Biden was a better steward of the currency, though--he favored a strong dollar, whereas Trump has been hell-bent on devaluation.
The Dems are certainly guilty of being far too tolerant of the illiberalism of militant wokeness and far too concerned about identity politics; but the GOP has become even *more* illiberal in its style of governance (the Dems never sent in squads of poorly-trained soldiers to terrorize red cities) and is quite identity-focused in its approach, too--just with different groups. (like the Dems, it is now discovering the hazards of that approach as well--witness the scramble to somehow manage to distance the party from literal white supremacists like Nick Fuentes, but do so without alienating adjacent constituencies, or alt-right luminaries like Tucker Carlson)
Biden did indeed have a terrible border policy, that is indisputable--but Trump has used that failure to justify huge power-grabs and police-state tactics, and hasn't really done much in the way of creating long-term solutions. IMO sensible (small l) liberals are still waiting for a leader with a truly sound border policy, focused on stemming unauthorized migration in a long-term way and solving the problem, rather than just using the problem as a rationale for authoritarian behavior. In the meantime we can at least be happy that there is an increasingly bipartisan opposition to open borders.
The far-left controls the Democratic Party. The moderates are cowards who are afraid of getting shamed, scorned and hated the way that heretics like JK Rowling are hated.
A vote for the Democrats is a vote to increase the far-left's control over the party. A vote for the Republicans is a vote for Enlightenment principles *and* a vote against the far-left's control over the party.
Trump was in office when we did not know much about the impact of the global pandemic. The Biden Democrats absolutely knew that their actions were unnecessary and destructive yet they did them for political reasons.
Wishful thinking does not persuasive analysis make.
Agreed, but if the economy doesn't improve by 2028, the Republicans will probably lose despite 4 years of realignment.
Calling MTG "elite" is more than a bit of a stretch. She was a Cross Fit instructor in a rural district where the largest city has fewer than 40K people. When MTG arrived in DC, she drank the water that immediately imparts the knowledge, insanity equals attention.
Dems spent nearly every waking hour after she opened her mouth, poking fun at Greene. Now she is MAGA Elite? Most people can barely recall Paul Ryan. Green will be forgotten 15 minutes after she exits the House, despite Dem attempts to morph her into a Rep Oracle in exile.
The above is correct if If Reps cannot bend at least some costs in the right direction, the midterms will be a route, but those predicting the end of MAGA, may not only be a bit premature, but too insular.
French polling shows the La Pen disciple walking away with French elections, if they were held today.
In England, Starmer had an 18% approval rating, before talk of an IMF bailout. Farage is considering Downing St. drape colors.
Last winter brought the Christmas Markets and 3 major terror attacks to German soil. Should terror reappear, the AfD will be unstoppable. The West tends to move Right or Left, at least somewhat, in concert. It was not an accident Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl governed together. Populists running Western Europe in 2028, will not aid Dems
Finally the above ignores foreign policy. If Maduro is soon counting his dollars, while watching tiny fishing boats and mega yachts play Chicken on the Bosphorus, it will be one of the greatest US accomplishments in decades. Venezuela has the world's largest oil deposits. A wealthy stable nation in South America, will enrich itself and surrounding nations, while curtailing mass migration and aiding stable oil prices.
Finally, the NYC wild card. If Mamdani takes power, and 6 months from now the US largest city has morphed into Columbia Quad post 10/7, Dems will have their own problems.
Quick point. It looks like, while manufacturing employment is not currently increasing, manufacturing investment is. See for example https://www.globalxetfs.com/articles/manufacturing-revival-creates-tailwinds-for-u-s-infrastructure-spending
“The United States is experiencing a manufacturing resurgence, facilitated by a changing federal policy landscape and a shift to companies prioritizing supply chain resilience. Over the first eight months of the second Trump Administration, companies announced over $1.2 trillion in planned advancements towards expanding U.S. production capacity.1 Our analysis indicates that the majority of these investments target the reshoring of strategic industries - primarily semiconductors, electronics, and pharmaceuticals. These investments add on to the more than $750 billion in U.S. manufacturing investments announced under the Biden Administration.2 As these planned manufacturing investments make their way through the development process, we expect significant opportunities to materialize for companies throughout the U.S. infrastructure development value chain, such as construction and engineering services providers, raw material suppliers, equipment suppliers, and industrial transportation service providers. “
I don’t expect on-shoring to result in a huge shift to manufacturing jobs, due to the heavy use of automation in modern manufacturing, but the jobs created should be pretty good blue collar / skilled trade jobs. If the announced investment materializes, which will take time, it should have positive effects on the economy by 2028. Given that the Trump admin controls much of the permitting process, and given the political value of manufacturing expansion, the timeframes could potentially be faster than usual.
States like Virginia already train potential manufacturing workers in the community college system. See for example https://sw.edu/advanced-manufacturing-skilled-trades-path/ which helps support manufacturing in southwest Virginia.
Another similar but less pithy analysis from Deloitte is at https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/manufacturing-industrial-products/manufacturing-industry-outlook.html
Meh, , It was obvious in 2015 that Trump was a corrupt self dealing sleaze, you get the good parts and the bad parts. Safe from prosecution Trump doesn't hide his crony capitalism. Other than tax breaks for billionaires Trump hasn't even attempted any legislation. When he does, those will be the parts that stick. Maybe after the midterms he can distract an impeaching congress by working on legislation, like on immigration.
I'd disagree about tariffs. People blame their declining sales on tariffs but actual prices for imported products haven't budged much as foreign manufacturers absorb the cost to maintain market share. It's certainly not showing up in inflation, and meanwhile hundreds of billions are being paid to our treasury. The NYT has been begging for stories asking any small importers to report what they have paid in increased tariffs. Typically they look for anecdotes when larger stories don't work. Turns out consumers are hardly paying and inflation didn't happen, or not from tariffs anyway.
Last week the upper middle class "affordable" types argued about what it takes to be poor in the US. Lots of dubious figures tossed around instigated by a viral substack of course. Music to my ears, the more people who feel like it's impossible to move up the ladder in the US, the greater possibility for change.
We have our own corruption scandal in Minnesota with our DFL that controls the state. Ten figures type fraud. Hariss' old running mate Tim Walz helped defer investigation. It includes 59 convictions and more snowballing revelations daily. Somali tax dollar remittances being used for Al Shabaab terrorists is a bad headline.
Trump still has 3 years, and no he won't run for a third term, he's old, he needs to make it through this one. Trump has pulled all the power into not only his branch of government but to him personally, not a great way to run the largest economy in the world. Then again, so far, there is no alternative. Good time for a third party.
Building a durable coalition in a full-fledged liberal democratic state is a process of making friends, not prosecuting enemies. The Reagan coalition was built on the mass conversion of former Democrats (the 'Reagan Democrats' were the crucial swing bloc) just as the New Deal coalition was built on cultural shifts and outreach efforts that saw huge swathes of Republicans cross the aisle.
Polarization makes this kind of coalition building extremely difficult in the best of circumstances when you are trying to secure it merely by earning votes. Both Obama and Trump had a shot at it, but the former couldn't do the footwork and the latter has no interest in making friends--since the beginning, his actions have always been about skewering his enemies, and that, plus his personality cult, is what he built his movement on top of. He hasn't done much different in his second term except turn this strategy up to 11. That may win him some more favor with his base, but it won't widen it with new converts.
Of course, without a durable coalition, you *can* lengthen your time in power if you use state repression, and we're seeing some early attempts at this. However, you need a well-honed repressive apparatus and a lot of political dexterity to make it work. Trump is trying to assemble that apparatus now, but he's clearly not as nimble as Orban or Putin or Erdogan. Vance may be better-suited to the task, but I don't think he is in command of the Trump organization--too many people in Trump's administration view him as a rival, not a leader.
As a result, I don't expect either the MAGA-fied GOP or the Democrats will be assembling a long-lasting coalition, if they simply keep on doing what they're doing now. And polarization means anyone who does will need more than just charisma to make it work.
This is your Democrat Party Platform!
Destroy cities by refusing to fight crime
Hand out free drug kits to homeless drug addicts
Never incarcerate any violent criminal because they need to kill white people
Tell the military to disobey presidential orders
Censor speech
Raise taxes so high that people will never be able to run their small business or own a home
Never allow single family homes to be built
Let massive fires destroy entire cities and never allow them to be rebuilt
Force schools to teach students to hate America
Let foreigners invade your country and offer them free housing, education, healthcare
Pay illegal aliens welfare
Let illegal aliens vote
Fight all attempts to ensure voter integrity
Allow riots to destroy entire sections of cities
Violently attack federal law enforcement officers that enforce federal law
Tell young women to not have babies and encourage them to have abortions when they get pregnant
Attack parents at every turn so the government can raise children
Attack women for not letting men pretend to be women in locker rooms
Poison the population through the food supply and government healthcare system
Ignore veterans and ensure they suffer with mental illness and high suicide rates
Attack Christians and Jews and encourage churches to be burned down
Encourage and support government fraud through NGOs
Assassinate political rivals
“Destroy cities by refusing to fight crime
Hand out free drug kits to homeless drug addicts
Never incarcerate any violent criminal because they need to kill white people”
Unfortunately the GOP has perhaps a week to actually push back against its leader’s ill-chosen pardons before this must copy-pasted to their own list of policy blunders. I don’t expect them to.
https://apnews.com/article/honduras-trump-election-hernandez-pardon-9cd64d1055c3a60bca9390f4474efdd2
This independent is not ready to bail on Trump. One can't judge the total picture in only 11 months. Many of his policy's enactments make me shudder. His blustering on social media is unpresidential at times, but apparently that's how he thinks he can influence people. Most of what he ran on needs to be addressed, but, although he has more people around him that support his views, there are still too many who can not relate to his end goals and, as in the first term, are undermining the the processes of their attainment resulting in negative half-baked solutions. The DOGE thing was disastrous for many and the follow-through seems to be nonexistent. The economy/inflation is the most important matter and what he has started won't really show up concretely until 8-9 months into next year as the tariffs and relocation of certain industries begin to take hold long term. His sellout to the billionaires, Netanyahu, and industry is very troublesome and will probably bring down Rep. upward strides and help get dems re-elected. If that happens we will go back to Obama/Biden economics. Think the duck may have broken leg.
As a child in the 1950s, my father told me that the Democrats' solution to everything was to give more money. That's what all of their solutions are now, too.
The Democrats can criticize all they want but they won't be able to do much about the economy. And then Republicans will come roaring back.
It's all so very boring.
Why was the phrase drug smugglers placed in quotes?
Of course, Trump's obsession with tariffs as cornerstone of economic revival was both ignorant and destructive to the US economy.
And it will be seen as a historical tragedy that the Congressional Republicans and the American business elites did not resist this madness.
Howerver, his fundamental identification with de-regulation, enforced borders, lower taxation and constraing any growth in government spending on social welfare place aligns him with the economic right. By simply not being a Democrat Trump has saved America from more economic value destruction.
But lets be intellectually honest - the Democrats and the left have nothing to offer in respect of eocnomic revival . Confisation of wealth is not wealth creation. Democratic governance results in economic irrationality. How could it not? Democrats have never come to terms that socialism is a moral hazard that no country should indulge in.
But I would challenge any Democrat - will they be proposing to implement a national single payer health care system in 2029? What could be more tranformational , more "fair"?
And underscore the "single" , no exceptions, no tolerance for parallel private systems. As idiot Sanders would say, "health care is a right", but as for service levels , innovation and access leftist bureaucrat will determine.
Ask any Canadian on the ravaages of public health care.
I would never put my eggs in a government single-payer system. There's no reason to think the gov't can manage healthcare costs. I believe the direction of reform needs to include: 1. HSAs for all through a payroll tax that can be later converted to an IRA. 2. Remove tax write-off for employers who provide insurance - eliminate employer sponsored plans over time - let employee buy a basic plan or cadillac plan if they want to pay for it out of their own pocket 3. Tax healthcare benefit that employees receive at value until they're paying on their own out of their pocket 4. Make plans portable, not tied to employers over time 5. Pay out of pocket (HSA) for care 6. Make Major Medical / catastrophic plans available to everyone, not just the young 7. Encourage supplemental insurance to cover major events 8. Work toward portability (eliminate employer-sponsored and government-sponsored plans to eliminate job lock.