On Ezra Klein’s Trump Tour de Force

The New York Times columnist has written two of the most consequential articles of the 2024 election.

I am going to use one of my precious New York Times gift links for Ezra Klein’s huge article: What’s Wrong With Donald Trump? You can think of it as a bookend for the hugely controversial piece he wrote in February: Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden. In that earlier article, Klein reluctantly concluded that the Democrats should replace Biden on the ticket, and while it got huge blowback at the time, it was the correct argument. Now he’s made what will no doubt also prove to be a much-argued-about analysis with respect to Trump’s psychological fitness, as well as the basis of his appeal.

I look at Klein’s piece in two somewhat disparate ways. As an attempt at pure rhetoric and persuasion, it’s a tour de force. But in order to succeed as persuasion, it can’t fully overcome an accusation of sane-washing. Brendan and I discuss sanewashing at length in our latest podcast. One definition is “the act of minimizing the perceived radical aspects of a person or idea in order to make them appear more acceptable to a wider audience.” In the context of New York Times coverage of the 2024 presidential campaign, it’s really a bit more than that. Taegan Goddard has a piece of the subject up on Tuesday at his Political Wire site.

The Times has apparently decided that this moment in American history is not unusual. It’s just another election between a normal Democrat and a normal Republican.

And the future of democracy is just another issue — like immigration, tax cuts or inflation.

It’s a remarkable failure by the country’s most important news organization.

Goddard wasn’t referencing Klein’s piece on Trump, but we can consider it an additional piece of evidence. Without question, Klein asks us to consider Trump and his presidency in the best possible light, but only in the service of making an all-the-more devastating rejection of his candidacy for a second term. And, in fairness, Klein couldn’t be more explicit that Trump is not normal and that this election is unusual.

In fact, Klein’s thesis is that Trump’s appeal is based almost entirely on a very unusual character or personality trait, which is an off-the-charts lack of normal inhibition and self-control. This leads him to do and say things that no other politician would say or do. The first advantage of this is that his unpredictability makes him entertaining. In a sense, paying attention to him pays off in a way watching one more iteration of a standard campaign speech never will. The second advantage is that many people wish they were less inhibited in their own lives and interactions, and seeing someone act with no filter projects a kind of fearlessness that they admire. Some see it as such a sign of strength (because it contrasts with their own perceived weakness) that they feel Trump is uniquely suited to protect them. What’s new about Klein’s analysis here is that it doesn’t rely on the specific content of Trump’s message. Yes, saying racist shit that a lot of people think but are afraid to say is a key element of Trump’s repertoire that fits nicely here, but so does mocking John McCain for being captured by the North Vietnamese. In other words, what works for Trump is bigger and broader than simple white nationalism or reactionary populism. There’s a fearlessness factor that is created by his inability to control himself.

An example of Klein’s sanewashing is his treatment of Trump’s 39-minute trance-dancing at the recent rally in Oaks, Pennsylvania. While many saw it as evidence that Trump is in a steep mental decline, Klein describes the episode differently: “Trump did not freeze up on that stage; I’m not going to accept that. He did not lose where he was in the moment. If anything, he was all too present.” In Klein’s mind, it was everyone else who “really have no idea what to do,” but Trump wasn’t confused or melting down at all. He was just being his uninhibited self, and that’s part of what makes him such a beloved figure.

But if these elements of the article can be hard to swallow at face value, they aren’t meritless either as rhetoric or analysis. Rhetorically, Klein is giving the benefit of the doubt in order to keep non-Trump haters on board for what comes later. Relatedly, he asks us to consider why, if Trump is such a danger, his presidency wasn’t so disastrous. This is isn’t because Klein didn’t see disaster in Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic or January 6th, nor does he deny that Trump well deserved his two impeachments. But he’s talking to people who remember the country and world at peace and the economy humming prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. And he’s setting them up.

Because the whole lengthly lack of inhibition discussion is just a precursor for explaining why his second term won’t be like his first. In his first term, his advisors, the “Deep State,” congressional Republicans, various cabinet members, the judiciary and high-ranking members of the Pentagon routinely ignored, stalled, countermanded and otherwise thwarted many of Trump’s completely unhinged and often illegal orders. All those guardrails have been or are in the planning process of being removed for a second Trump term, meaning that his lack of inhibition and self-control will manifest in disaster.

For many MAGA fans, this is what they think they want. But, as Klein points out, one of the routine defenses of Trump from his supporters is that we should not look at what he says, which is often hard to defend, but instead look at the results. And if you’re willing to grant some good results, like NATO members paying more for their defense or a reduced level of border crossings, then maybe you think Trump’s unconventional ways are required to overcome the obduracy of blockheads in Washington DC. But, no, Klein argues, the lack of inhibition and self-control only worked, insofar as they did work, because others provided those functions for him while he was president. All signs are that this will not happen in a second term precisely because those who said ‘no’ the first time aren’t going to be there the second time. Hell, the Supreme Court even went so far as to rule that the president can commit crimes with impunity so long as he can argue that they were carried out while fulfilling some presidential duty.

If you think about Klein’s piece as a closing argument in front of a MAGA-friendly jury, it’s probably about as good as can be done by a left-leaning journalist. He doesn’t waste time and effort arguing about things that are ultimately unconvincing, He says, “hey, your guy has some attractive traits and he did some good things as president,” but here’s why it worked the first time and won’t work the second time. And, I think, he made the case in a way that’s pretty hard to refute. At a minimum, it should give a lot of soft Trump supporters a moment of self-doubt.

On that level, it’s an impressive effort from Klein, and a solid bookend to how he began this campaign, by giving Democrats a permission structure to force Biden out.

Episode 16 of the Progress Pondcast: Explaining the Polls and Early Voting Trends

Trump is melting down but the polls keep getting better for him. How can this be? And what do early voting trends mean?

For the 16th episode of the Progress Pondcast, Brendan and I discuss some of the many travails that have kept us both from podcasting over the last month and a half, but then we get down to business. There’s a kind of big election coming up and one of the candidates pretty clearly seems to be coming unglued. Yet, the polls say he has the momentum. How can this be?

I talk about how most pollsters are adding pixie dust to deliberately juice Trump’s numbers three or four percent, and whether or not this might actually result in a more accurate prediction than doing polls in the traditional way.

I also give a warning on thinking a high turnout election will, as has traditionally been the case, help the Democrats this time around. There are reasons to think high voter engagement and early voting are not good signs for Harris, although the opposite could also be true. Brendan and I walk through my analysis of the situation.

And what about signs? Barack Obama always reminded us that “Signs don’t vote,” but do they help create a permission structure and bandwagon effect?

You can listen on Spotify and Apple. and please join us on Patreon.

Also, please give it a listen and like, subscribe and share the pondcast. Your support is critical for us to grow our audience. We also have several guests lined up who you’ll want to hear. Thank you.

Saturday Painting Palooza Vol.1000

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo directly below. Since that time, I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now painted in most of the bare areas of the canvas. Note the light brown area to the left side. This will be the distant side of the canyon.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Trump Seems Completely Spent

The disgraced ex-president is cancelling events and interviews left and right because he’s exhausted.

After Politico reporter Eugene Daniels got wind that Donald Trump’s campaign was privately explaining interview cancellations were due to their candidates’ “exhaustion,” the campaign naturally denied it and said Trump was “running laps” around Kamala Harris. But there’s no doubt about the cancellations themselves. He was scheduled to talk to the National Rifle Association in Georgia, but it was called off. He has backed out of interviews with 60 Minutes, with NBC Philadelphia, with CNBC’s Squawk Box, and with The Shade Room, a site with a large Black audience.

This follows on his terrible debate performance and refusal to risk a repeat. It follows on his bizarre 39-minutes of trance dancing at a rally in Oaks, Pennsylvania, and his horrible car wreck of an interview at the Economic Club of Chicago.

When he has done interviews, they’ve been with friendly outlets, but they still haven’t gone well. Last Sunday, he raised eyebrows during an interview with Fox News when he avoided a question about having a peaceful election by saying, “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical-left lunatics,” and arguing that “it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by [the] National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.” It’s unclear how Trump, as a mere candidate for office, could order the national guard or military to attack people on the left, but it gives some insight into how he plans to deal with critics if reelected.

On Friday morning, he went on Fox & Friends and seemed similarly dismissive about the First Amendment and the people’s right to free speech.

Before the former president left the show’s signature couch, he said he plans to meet Friday with [Rupert] Murdoch, the founder of Fox Corp. and the company’s longtime executive chair, and voice his displeasure with ads the network airs that are critical of him — and bringing on a myriad of guests on shows who are not supportive of him.

“I’m going to see Rupert Murdoch,” the former president continued. “I don’t know if he’s thrilled that I say it … and I’m going to tell him something very simple … don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days and don’t put on … they’re horrible people that come on and lie. I’m going to say, ‘Rupert, please do it this way.’”

It’s not just Trump trying this nonsense. On Thursday, a federal judge had to step in to stop Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida’s threats to criminally prosecute local TV stations “if they run a political ad in support of a referendum that would repeal the state’s six-week abortion ban.” This idea that political officeholders and even political candidates can silence their opponents’ right to run political advertising is new, but then the right’s full unapologetic embrace of fascism is new, too.

It’s clear that the American electorate is seriously considering fascism as an option, but I don’t think the prospect of censorship is what is tempting them. It’s not a winning message for the last three weeks of the campaign. Trump is seriously off message much of the time, and he can’t answer hard questions. This is reason enough to shield him from interviews, whether friendly or not. But Trump’s energy level has been suspect for some time. In July 2020, he responded to his pollster Tony Fabrizio warning him the American people were tired of chaos by snapping, “They’re fucking tired? Well I’m fucking tired and fatigued too.” And we all noticed that he could not remain awake during his trial for fraud in New York, in which he was convicted of 34 felony violations of state law.

The man is in the home stretch, and he needs a nap.

Should a Victorious Harris Build a Bipartisan Administration?

It would help her look moderate but would not lead to more cooperation from the other side.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but we should consider what the world will look like if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the election. In particular, we might ask how Harris should approach building a coalition for governance and maintaining public support.

In the normal course of post-presidential politics, the victors reach out a hand to the opponents and at least try to find some common ground. Even if this is futile, as it has been in recent decades, it’s kind of expected. Of course, Donald Trump did not do this, but it arguably hurt his reelection chances by preventing him from growing his coalition. It was probably essential for him considering he had lost the popular vote and basically got an inside straight in the Electoral College that would be, and ultimately was hard to repeat. But bipartisanship isn’t his style or his brand, and he decided to ride and die.

President Barack Obama chose the typical path, putting a Republican in his cabinet and making all the rhetorical moves expected of him. And he got the back of the Republican Party’s hand, as they voted as a bloc against everything he wanted to do. I’ve long argued that Obama’s success in winning over the more Eisenhower/Rockefeller type Republicans helped accelerate the rest of the GOP into its present rabid state. Any elected Republican who thought about working with him quickly discovered that the GOP base preferred the Tea Party and Trump’s Birtherism. The more Obama occupied the broad middle, the more the Republican Party responded by going over a cliff.

And if the GOP base lost its mind over a moderate black man as president, how much more unhinged will they be with a black woman?

This is what I thought about when I saw that Harris is holding an event near Washington’s Crossing, Pennsylvania with former Republican elected officials.

Vice President Kamala Harris will continue her explicit outreach to Republican voters on Wednesday at a Pennsylvania event with a phalanx of former Republican elected officials who have turned against former President Donald J. Trump, the Harris campaign said.

Ms. Harris will be joined at a campaign stop in Bucks County, Pa., by former Representatives Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Barbara Comstock and Denver Riggleman of Virginia, Chris Shays of Connecticut, Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania and Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma.

Former Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan of Georgia and former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey, among others, are also expected to attend, a Harris campaign official said.

Turning these types of folks into permanent parts of the Harris coalition is important. It will help her preserve a winning coalition and signal that she’s not a radical outlier. But one thing it will not do is help moderate her political opposition once she’s in office. I have spent years trying to figure out what might stop the GOP’s lurch to the right, and I have never come up with anything more convincing than repeated electoral losses. And the closeness of this election shows how much centrifugal pull there is our system towards party balance. It’s just hard to build a coalition that can dominate cycle after cycle the way FDR’s New Deal Democrats did in the mid-20th Century.And, to be honest, a half century of losing is what caused the GOP to transform from being the party of business and civil rights into a Gingrichesque populist freak show.

I suspect there is no magic fix, which means realism is called for. A Harris administration should expect no cooperation at all from the GOP, completely irrespective of anything she might try, or any gesture she might make. She should also expect the American electorate to go to the polls in the 2026 midterms intent on punishing her by electing Republicans, also irrespective of any success she might have or any outreach she might attempt.

If this doesn’t happen, it won’t likely be because of any decision Harris made, but because some big event has unified the country behind her leadership. Think Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

The irony is that the more comfortable Harris makes it for former Republicans to support her, the fewer reasonable Republicans remain in the opposition. But instead of this leading to an all-powerful majority coalition, it doesn’t work out that way. It just means that when the country wants to push back in the other direction, the only alternative is a frothing movement of religious nuts, conspiracy theorists, fraudsters and tax evaders, and outright fascist white nationalists. And the American people will eventually choose these people to lead, even if they don’t this November.

I know this is pessimistic, but it’s my honest analysis, and I think the conclusion is that Harris should choose the leaders she’s comfortable with rather than trying to signal bipartisanship for its own sake. And she should make damn sure to keep inflation down because inflation is fascists’ best friend.

Trump Quit Football Because of Stronger Players from Bad Neighborhoods

He’s a coward pretending to be brave, and I don’t understand why he fools anyone. 

I didn’t play football growing up for a simple reason. I was a late bloomer. I was too small and weak to compete at the sport until I was about 18 years old. In any case, I excelled at baseball, basketball, soccer and tennis, and that was enough for me. My brother Andrew was 10 years older and also undersized for his age, but he didn’t care. He was crazy for football. When it became clear he wouldn’t play much, he became a kicker and punter just so he could be around the sport and get on the field. After I graduated from college, he convinced me to play flag football with him, and I did that until he retired at forty. So, I spent a good part of my twenties getting up on Saturday mornings and driving to some field or another in New Jersey to bang on other adults with no helmets or pads to absorb the contact. Some of those cats played Division I football, and here I was going at it with them. Sometimes it would be Thursday before the pain went away and I could walk normally, but it was fun as hell. The best part about it beside from the time spent with my brother and the general camaraderie of the teams was the rush of trying to physically dominate other people. I don’t expect everyone to understand the appeal of this, but if you know, you know.

In this sense, American football is one of the ultimate alpha male sports. And if Donald Trump were a true alpha male, his feelings about playing football would be different. He claims that he was once on a team and played tight end. I suppose this should be verified since he lies about everything. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that he’s being truthful here. He says he could catch the football well enough, but he didn’t like playing against people from bad neighborhoods who lifted weights all day and tackled really hard.

This is probably Trumpese for he didn’t like being dominated by black people. Why couldn’t he just leave it at that he didn’t like the physical aspect to the game? Why does he always have to make it about bad people from bad neighborhoods or shithole countries?

There’s really nothing wrong with not wanting to get hit by people bigger and stronger than you. It’s actually totally normal. What’s kind of deranged is what my brother and I did, which is invite this kind of pain, and do it for no money or acclaim. In fact, we paid a small fee for this abuse. But I can tell you that it was a thrill to sack a quarterback who was being protected by an offensive tackle who went to Auburn and outweighed me by a hundred pounds. I even perversely enjoyed it when he crushed me on running plays.

I don’t consider myself an Alpha male, and I don’t act like one. But I know when I see a coward pretending to be brave. That describes Trump, and I don’t understand why he fools anyone.

Why Does Kevin Drum Blame Republicans for Trump’s Popularity?

The disgraced ex-president is running ahead of Republican Senate candidates because he’s more popular than them with independents and Democrats.

I’m not sure I quite follow Kevin Drum’s reaction to the Washington Post article on a private memo from the Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC responsible for flipping the U.S. Senate to GOP control. The memo discusses internal polling in all the states where there are competitive Senate races, which overlaps somewhat with the battleground states in the presidential race. The takeaway from their analysis is that Republican senate candidates are consistently running behind Donald Trump by several points, and sometimes more.

Drum says “This is nuts. Trump is more popular than conventional Republicans,” and asks, “Do any Republicans watch his rallies and understand just how far he’s melted down since he was president? Or do they really prefer lying, ignorant, whining, vengeful, and racist to ordinary?”

A close look at the individual Republican candidates reveals that they’re almost uniformly a shitty crop. The one kinda/sorta exception is in Maryland where ex-governor Larry Hogan is the Republican candidate, and he’s actually running better than Trump. But that is not because Maryland Republicans like him better than the disgraced ex-president. It’s certainly due to Hogan being more popular with non-Republicans.

And Drum knows his question is already answered by the results of the Republican primary and caucus elections which Trump won in a walk: “I guess we already knew this since Trump won the Republican primary handily, but still.”

So, why does Drum frame the situation by suggesting Trump is “more popular than conventional Republicans” due to Republican voter preference?

Again, the only Republican Senate candidate who is running ahead of Trump is Hogan, and that’s not because Republicans prefer him to Trump. Candidates like Ted Cruz in Texas and Bernie Moreno in Ohio are badly lagging behind Trump’s numbers in their respective states, and the explanation is probably the same. They are less popular than Trump with non-Republicans.

There seems to be a widespread reluctance in the reality-based community to face the reality that Trump is a stronger candidate than “conventional Republicans” because he does better with independents and Democrats. Based on an examination of my own psychology, I think the reason is that reaching this conclusion is just damn depressing and demoralizing, and it’s less painful to just blame Republican voters for the strength of the deplorable vote. I think this is why so many on the left are also fixated on blaming the mainstream media. It allows them to avoid the painful conclusion that the American electorate is on the verge of opting for fascism with the decisive help of independents and Democrats.

The mainstream media’s coverage has its flaws, to be sure, but they have covered Trump’s crimes and flaws relentlessly and no one can fairly accuse them of not providing the American people with more than enough good information to reject Trump and Trumpism with extreme prejudice. The fact that they have not done so is not the fault of the media, but of the American people themselves.

This is not an observation Democratic candidates can or should make if they want to win, because you don’t win votes by criticizing voters.

Yet, if you want to be less depressed, it is a good thing that Republicans not named Trump are very unappealing to the voters right now. This will be important to the results in November, but also going forward. If the only thing keeping the GOP competitive is Trump and Trump loses the election, where does that leave the GOP?

The Waiting Game Is Almost Over

Will we have a future with hope or fall into an unimaginable abyss?

The last time I spoke with you, I was discussing how I hit a deer in my car. Since that time, a dear uncle of mine passed away and one of my closest friends who has been in the hospital took a turn for the worse and has been fighting for his life. It’s been a rough spell, and my efforts to find some distraction in sports haven’t been working out. The New York Giants lost another heartbreaker tonight, and this afternoon my son’s travel soccer team was robbed by poor officiating and eliminated from a tournament in the semifinals.

Whenever I’ve peaked at the political news, it has only heightened my stress level. There’s the domestic stuff related to the upcoming election and also the devastation from two huge hurricanes. Events in Ukraine and Israel aren’t showing any signs of improvement or much cause for optimism.

Maybe you can understand why I haven’t been writing over the last several days. I know it’s not just me but all of us who need a break. A lucky break. I guess we’ll get some clarity on where humanity stands in about three weeks. I’d like for the news to be good. I’m kind of invested in this whole humanity thing and it’s a little confusing and demoralizing that about half the American electorate is really only invested in bullshit.

My feelings on this really won’t change no matter who wins the election. But one way lies hope and the other some kind of unimaginable abyss.

The only solace I feel right now is that there isn’t too much more time to wait.

Saturday Painting Palooza Vol.999

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a Grand Canyon scene. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Over this I added some preliminary paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.