The entirety of this interminable column by Nate Silver is dependent on two premises. The first is that the American people cannot focus on more than one story at a time. Since this is the case, the Democrats must choose one story to tell the voters. Silver attempts to justify this premise with data, some of it processed through ChatGPT, showing how few minutes per day Americans dedicate to consuming news. And then he asks us a question: should the Democrats focus on the economy or on the plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongly deported to El Salvador who the Courts have asked the Trump administration to repatriate?

His answer is that the Democrats should focus on the economy.

The reason he provides for this is both painfully simple and needlessly complex. It begins with a second premise: “Public opinion is the best mechanism to fight Trump’s excesses.” For Silver, the best constraint against Trump is low overall approval numbers, irrespective of the specific causes of that disapproval. The less popular he seems, the less deference he will receive from the Courts, Congress, the media, and even his own administration. And he provides some examples where Trump has already backed down in the face of bad polling numbers.

The problem for Mr. Abrego Garcia is that his mistreatment doesn’t drive down Trump’s approval numbers anywhere near as efficiently as Trump’s reckless actions on the economy. And since the Democrats must choose only one of these stories to discuss, they obviously should the shut the fuck up already about Garcia.

Silver goes on and on in an effort to explain why Mr. Garcia doesn’t hurt Trump the way that tariffs do, but I don’t know anyone who would argue otherwise. He looks at the trend lines of Trump’s approval and asserts that it fell precipitously in early April when he rolled out his tariffs but stabilized once national attention turned to Abrego Garcia. He shows evidence that the administration, including J.D. Vance, seems very eager to use Abrego Garcia as a distraction from the economy. And he notes that the New York Post, in particular, is willing to trash Trump on tariffs but is right behind him on wrongly deporting people.

Again, I don’t know anyone who would refute any of this, let alone be surprised by it. Adding all of these complexities to his argument does not change the simplicity of his premises. He believes the Democrats must choose one, and only one, narrative to tell the American people, and the best way to fight Trump’s excesses is to focus narrowly on driving down his public approval.

To be clear, Silver attempts to sidestep all moral considerations by saying his advice is based on “pure political strategy.” And that would be fine in a vacuum as a thought experiment. For example, if you ask which of the two stories will do more damage to Trump and thereby constrain him in some way, you’ll probably get broad agreement that the economy wins.

That doesn’t mean that the rest of Silver’s argument makes sense.

For starters, time doesn’t stand still. Every day there are new and competing stories about the Trump administration with the potential to do harm to his approval numbers. It’s possible that none of them will ever compete with the economy in potency. Does Silver really mean to argue that the Democrats should avoid discussing Elon Musk or Pete Hegseth or Greenland or academic freedom or Putin or anything else because it will distract people from inflation and tariffs? There’s a cumulative effect to the public seeing one example of cruelty, lawlessness, radicalism and incompetence after another that you can’t get by focusing on just the single most effective story for driving down Trump’s approval numbers.

Then there’s the question of what precisely Silver is critiquing. He doubts the effectiveness of Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s recent trip to El Salvador because the optics weren’t unequivocally great.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia last week. Predictably enough, with the Salvadoran government having every incentive to make Van Hollen look bad, the optics of this were not wonderful; instead, concoctions that appeared to be margaritas were mysteriously placed on the table partway through Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia.

Imagine if Van Hollen had tried to follow Silver’s advice. After meeting with Mr. Abrego Garcia’s wife, who is a U.S. citizen and his constituent, he could have told her that he’d like to provide assistance but doing so would only help Trump by distracting the American people from their declining retirement portfolios and the cost of groceries. Or maybe he could have agreed to visit El Salvador and try to meet with her husband, but only if he can be confident in complete secrecy so it will attract no media coverage whatsoever. As Silver says, any media attention would mean the “Democrats are picking the wrong fight here.”

The fight might be right in the future, Silver argues, when there is a more sympathetic victim. But the ideal time is when Trump deports a U.S. citizen to a foreign prison.

What if Trump deports an American citizen to a Salvadoran prison, as he’s threatened to do? Or what if he more clearly violates a Supreme Court order, with no plausible deniability about the daylight between “facilitate” and “effectuate”?

Well, it’s pretty simple: that’s when you pull out all the stops, call your member of Congress until her phone is ringing off the hook, and take to the streets in protest if it comes to that.

As for the idea that it’s better to stand up and fight now before a U.S citizen is snatched off the street, Silver argues, “the idea that we must take action now, or else things will get worse, is a notoriously hard sell to the public, whether it comes in the context of climate change or the national debt or the erosion of the rule of law.”

There are a variety of ways to approach Silver’s overall argument because there is so much wrong with it.

The first is that it’s simply not true that the Democrats ever stopped highlighting the economy so that we can get a clean look at the messaging impact of Abrego Garcia on Trump’s approval numbers.

The second is that even if it’s true that focus on Abrego Garcia gave the administration some respite from falling approval, that it is necessarily true that the best way to combat Trump is to narrowly focus on lowering his approval numbers.

The third is the idea that the Democrats, as a whole, ever decided on some strategy to focus on Abrego Garcia at the expense of any other issue.

The fourth is the idea that individual Democrats like Sen. Van Hollen could morally justify ignoring Abrego Garcia’s plight or should have done so based on “pure political strategy.”

The fifth is that the principle involved here is diminished in any real sense by the character of the victim.

The sixth is the idea that we shouldn’t talk about challenging issues like climate change, the national debt or the erosion of the rule of law because these threats are “a notoriously hard sell to the public.”

The seventh is the idea that we should wait until things reach a critical stage to “pull out all the stops.”

Finally, another premise of Silver’s piece is that there will be plenty more (and better) chances to attack Trump, so there’s no need to attack him now over Abrego Garcia:

Because when even Trump’s supporters call him a “bull loose in a china shop”, when he’s 78 years old and doesn’t face re-election, and when he’s surrounded by people like Hegseth rather than more competent advisors, he’s going to do any number of things that are both really bad for democracy and really unpopular, where public opinion runs 60/40 or even 80/20 against him.

But, if Trump is reliably going to supply many future opportunities to drive down his approval numbers, then why should we be so worried about a failure to optimally drive them down now?

There’s plenty more wrong with this piece, including its staggering disregard for brevity. It includes an entirely irrelevant attack on Joe Biden and anyone who ever supported his nomination for president in 2024 in which he suggests that the supporters of Abrego Garcia are identical to the people who supported Biden. And there’s a strange acknowledgment that many of his critics were correct and that he was wrong about the threat Trump presents to the country, but only to suggest that he’s not wrong about everything and we should listen to him now.

When Trump’s second term began, I issued a series of 113 probabilistic predictions for how it would go, partly as a way to calibrate my expectations. Although it will be four years before we can score those predictions officially, and while I think I’ve gotten some things right — for instance, that there would be a political backlash against Trump and that he’d implement severe tariffs on Canada and Mexico — more things than not are running in the wrong direction. The predictions column didn’t take a Pollyannish view, exactly. Nevertheless, Trump has both been a chaos agent and extremely aggressive in using and abusing the powers of the executive branch. To put this a bit clinically, on a scale from -100 to +100, where -100 is Trump’s term going much better than I expected and +100 much worse, I’d say we’re probably at a +75 or a +80 so far…

…There’s been a trope lately that what I sometimes think of as the “resistance libs” were right about everything: that America was approaching a moment of crisis, that Trump is a hard-core authoritarian, and so on. But while they’re looking smarter about this diagnosis, I’m not sure they’ve identified the right cure or have canny instincts for political strategy.

I am going to be honest here. There’s a reason why I have tread pretty lightly about criticizing Silver in the past. Many years ago, I spent an evening with him at a party in the lower east side of Manhattan and I liked him a lot. This was before he got his gig at the New York Times.  I didn’t know him well enough to call him a friend, but I was rooting for him and took some pleasure in his success.

That’s over now. This isn’t the first thing he’s written that I found both stupid and morally objectionable, but it’s the worst example I’ve seen to date. It’s embarrassing and makes be feel badly about the faith and deference I’ve shown him over a number of years.