A Very Depressing Thought

It would seem that that no one -- either in the US or anywhere else -- really cares about democracy.  It is too abstract to resonate. Democracy or dictatorship, it is all the same to most people.  Only the economy matters.  It is a depressing thought.

But you know what is even more depressing?  When the Germans threw away democracy, at least they had the excuse of an unprecedented economic crisis with 25% unemployment.  And they were only a decade out from experiencing 100 million percent inflation.

We voted to throw away democracy with a strong economy, just because inflation had reached nine percent.
 

The 1970's and the Current Economy

 

The current oil shock, and the COVID shock before, have drawn comparisons with the great stagflation of the 1970's.  Over the decade, inflation never fell below six percent and often went into the double digits, topping out at 14%.  At the same time, economic growth slowed and unemployment was persistently high.  What finally broke the inflationary spiral was that the Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volker, put a severe squeeze on the economy, running interest rates as high as 20%, with predictable results to the overall economy.  This tightening caused a severe recession, with unemployment rising to ten percent.  Once the inflationary spiral was broken, the Fed lightened up and the economy quickly bounced back.  It was in full swing recovery by the 1984 election and it was "morning in America" with people convinced that recessions were gone forever.  Inflation rate when we considered the spiral broken -- about four percent.

Compare that with the post-COVID inflation.  In that case, inflation topped out at nine percent and came down, being only slightly above target of two percent on Liberation Day.  Furthermore, the Fed achieved the storied "soft landing," i.e., it managed to tame inflation without inducing a recession.  Even now, when everyone is freaking out over rising inflation with rising oil prices, the latest rate reported was 3.8% -- at or below the rate when it was "morning in America."  Yet consumer sentiment is hitting an all time low, below the rate during the 1970's stagflation, because nominal prices have not fallen to pre-pandemic levels.

This has led some to conclude we have reached an absurd paradox.  Consumer sentiment is a victim of the Fed's own success.  If nine percent inflation has persisted for years, people would have gotten used to rapidly rising prices, stopped looking for a return to the good old days, and just been grateful to see prices stabilize.  Or if the Fed had induced a recession, people would have focused on the recession instead of inflation and been so happy when it ended that they would stop worrying about nominal prices.  It would seem by this analysis that what is really needed to restore consumer sentiment is a recap of the 1970's -- prolonged inflation, followed by a severe recession to wring it out.  

Alternately, maybe we have just become a nation of spoiled brats, unwilling to endure any hardship.

A Modest Proposal That Should Make Everyone Happy

There has been a great deal of talk about this article, warning that the US is effectively checkmated in its war with Iran and left with two unpalatable options -- accept defeat and allow Iran to open the Straits of Hormuz on its own terms, or resume fighting and expect Iran to retaliate against regional oil facilities, causing a drop in production that will take years to recover.  

What is remarkable is not that the author concludes that the war is not turning out so well.  That much is obvious.  It is that the author is Robert Kagan, a well-known neocon --, a national security conservative, an extreme foreign policy hawk, especially in the Middle East, and that his conclusion is that rather than hitting them harder, our best bet is to accept defeat as quickly as possible and move on:

Unless the U.S. is prepared to engage in a full-scale ground and naval war to remove the current Iranian regime, and then to occupy Iran until a new government can take hold; unless it is prepared to risk the loss of warships convoying tankers through a contested strait; unless it is prepared to accept the devastating long-term damage to the region’s productive capacities likely to result from Iranian retaliation—walking away now could seem like the least bad option. 

 The trouble is that Trump's vanity never allows him to admit defeat, witness the 2020 election.  By contrast, JD Vance, for all his failings, seems to be willing to admit defeat and move on.  

But how to remove Trump from power?  There are usually seen to be four options.

1.    Trump dies.  Not within our control

2.    Trump has a wholly incapacitating medical event, leading Vance to take power under the 25th Amendment.  Also not within our control.

3.    Trump wigs out so badly that the Cabinet has no choice but to invoke the 25h Amendment.  But the Cabinet seems too afraid of Trump's reaction to pursue this option.

4      Impeachment and removal.  Calls for a Democratic majority in the House and a 2/3 Democratic majority in the Senate.  This would have to happen after the midterms and the chances of such a majority are effectively zero.

Reflecting pool

So let me make my own Modest Proposal for how to handle this situation.  Remove Trump under the 25th Amendment and just don't tell him about it.  Vance can leave his family out of the spotlight at the Naval Observatory and move into the White House, hoping it is big enough that he can avoid being noticed. Or, better yet, convince Trump that living in the White House is slumming and he really should stay at Mar-a-Lago.  

It should be obvious by now that Trump has no interest whatever in governing.  He just wants to do his building projects.  He wants to install marble armrests at the Kennedy Center (don't ask) build a monster ballroom, paint the reflection pool at Lincoln Memorial, put up his monstrous Arc de Trump, and so forth.  So be it.  Somewhere on Earth 2.0, some normie (of either party) is serving as President and Trump is a major campaign donor and demanding to be rewarded with some cushy job.  Norm E. President is appalled at the thought of appointing Trump as an ambassador (the usual such reward) and instead puts him in charge of the Kennedy Center on the theory that (1) it seems more like something Trump would like doing than being an ambassador and (2) he can't cause too much harm no matter what he does. If Kennedy Center doesn't but it, President Norm can give him a general job redesigning landmarks.

Trump and his ballroom design

Granted, there can be some difficulties in keeping Trump in the dark about his removal.  He would probably want to hold Cabinet meetings now and then, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.  Just have the Cabinet do their usual groveling praise and not bore him with any substantive policy discussions.  He will probably also want to do press conferences, but that shouldn't be too big a problem.  Just have reporters stick to fawning questions about Trump's latest building projects, which is all he really wants to talk about anyhow.

The next and obvious question is what about the public.  Well, there is strong evidence that Rupert Murdoch despises Trump and would be happy to keep Fox News and the rest of Murdochistan from taking about it.  Just pay non-Murdoch rightwing influencers not to mention that Trump has been removed.  Sure, the despised mainstream media will discuss the subject, but neither Trump nor any of his supporters ever follow mainstream media, so they will never know.  A more serious problem is that once Trump is no longer President, all his donor money for the projects will dry up.  But that should not be insurmountable problem.  Doners will surely find pretending to be willing to fund the projects and finding excuses and delays to be infinitely preferable to actually having to live in fear of Trump actually wielding power.

In short, if we can just get Trump to focus on his goddam building projects and quit trying to govern, we might finally begin to recover.

Another Unoriginal Thought

Not so long ago, I commented that I thought one reason Trump was focusing so much on foreign policy was that his power in the domestic sphere was slipping away.

His attempt to use the government shutdown for a power grab had failed.  The Supreme Court had limited his power to impose unilateral tariffs and deploy the National Guard domestically.  ICE failed to subdue Minneapolis and had sparked a public backlash.  The Senate refused to end the filibuster.  More and more Epstein material kept leaking.  Anthropic was taking the Administration to court.  And the midterms looked really bad.

So Trump focused on foreign policy and war, because there is very little that can be done to constrain a President in foreign policy and military matter.  Except, of course, that "very little can be done" means that little can be done domestically.  The enemy still gets a veto.

And now that Trump's overseas war is not going so well, it appears he is turning back to domestic matters, with some success.  The Supreme Court has not only authorized, but mandated Republicans to gerrymander the South in their favor.  Indiana Republicans who defied Trump have lost their primaries.  The Attorney General is pursuing indictments against James Comey (for seashells) and the Southern Poverty Law Center for using informants, with who knows what to come.  And now he is proclaiming political opponents to be terrorists.

Look, there are signs of growing push-back against Trump's power.  But he is becoming more abusive the more he feels threatened. 

Buckle up.
 

Some Obvious Points About Donald Trump

 

Trump famously embodies the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people who know very little about a field think they know much more than they actually do.  He is also the walking embodiment of H.L. Mencken's maxim that complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.

That is, of course, a major source of his appeal.  He appeals to people who don't know any more about policy questions than he does and assume that there are simple solutions out there that politicians have not adopted because they are too stupid, corrupt, or weak-willed.  Trump claims that he will cut through the red tape and fix everything by not being half-hearted about it.  Of course, when his profoundly ignorant claims run up against reality, things tend not to go so well.

In his first term, Trump appealed to people's complaints about Obamacare.  "We'll have great health care at a fraction of the cost and it will be so easy."  It was, after all, what people wanted to hear.  After working on it a while, Trump complained, "Who knew health policy was so complicated."  Not many people, Donald, just anyone who knows anything at all about health policy.  Admittedly, this is a fairly small portion of the total population.  He ended up with a plan to repeal Obamacare with no replacement and thereby strip 20 million people of their health insurance.  I think even the least informed members of the pubic would have noticed that.

Much the same applied when Trump agreed to a summit with the North Koreans.  He only cared about the pomp and pageantry and was not interested in trivial details like what agreement they might reach.

For his second term, Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in one day.  Presumably he believed that his friend Pooty, would happily end the war as a personal favor.  To the extent the Ukrainians were unwilling to agree to Putin's terms, a little arm twisting should bring them into line.  Well, this failed for much the same reason -- Trump thinks of foreign policy solely in terms of personal relationships and has no idea that countries have interests that transcend the individuals in charge.  

So too with the Iran war.  The Iranians' clear wish up until February 28 to avoid war with a much stronger country made Trump think they were pushovers and easily intimidated.  What he didn't understand was that the regime was never going to agree to its own destruction, or that it would fight fiercely when cornered, although both points should have been obvious.  He appears to have believed that Iran would be intimidated into submission by the mere presence of US forces or, failing that, that he would have been able to swap out the name at the top for someone more compliant, just the way it has worked in Venezuela.

When that failed, Trump's advisors apparently convinced him that if he blockaded the straits, pressure would build up in Iran's oil storage and threaten to blow up in a matter of days, which would presumably force their capitulation.  Well, spoiler alert, that didn't happen either.  Trump now seems to believe that if he threatens and cajoles enough the Iranians will agree to his terms in a matter of days.  He has no patience for the long, drawn-out process of diplomacy.  

In the case of Obamacare, the dying John McCain made one last appearance in the Senate to save his party from itself and vote down repeal.  No deal was reached in either Korea or Ukraine, so the situation continued -- bad, but ultimately something most Americans could live with.

Well, the war in Iran is looking to be the most intractable problem yet.  Continuing that status quo is clearly not acceptable and bound to get worse, but there is no easy out.

Maybe next time don't elect President Dunning-Kruger.

Reflections on the Gerrymanders

 

The original gerrymander

I was confused by reports on the latest Supreme Court outrage.  A decision that allows states to gerrymander to reduce minority representation but not to increase it???  How does that work?

It appears that the answer is that the Supreme Court held that states may not take race into account in drawing voting districts may may consider partisanship.  The practical effect of this was to remove the last barrier to Republican gerrymandering in southern states.  Up till now, Republican legislatures in the South were not allowed to deliberately break up Black districts.  They are now free to do so, so long as they claim to be setting boundaries for partisan, rather than racial, reasons.  Presumably Democratic states could do the opposite -- maximize minority representation so long as they claim partisan motives.

Naturally Republicans are cackling gleefully, boasting about redrawing their districts to ensure that Republicans have permanent control of Congress.

Just last week, Republicans were outraged that Virginia had redrawn its districts to move Democrats' advantage from 6-5 to 10-1.  And given the general makeup of the Virginia electorate, that move, taken by itself, would be egregiously unfair.  But Republicans are ignoring their own behavior leading up to the Virginia move, redrawing electoral maps in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, and North Carolina, with Florida next in line.  

And no, this is not two children on the playground yelling about who started it, or a game of tit for tat. This is about whether Democrats will unilaterally disarm, giving Republicans a complete free hand to draw districts to their advantage while Democrats refrain.  Last week Republicans were denouncing how unfair the Virginia gerrymander was and pointing out other Democratic states that were gerrymandered (sometimes even denouncing states with just one Representative for not having a proportionate share of Republicans!) while totally ignoring the gerrymanders in Republican states.  Now Republicans are boasting about redrawing districts so as to ensure that Democrats can never hold Congress again.  

Sigh!  I know Republicans don't read my blog.  (Neither does anyone else, really).  But simply put, the options are like this:

No one gerrymanders	Republican gerrymander Democrats don’t
Democrats gerrymander Republicans don’t	Both parties gerrymander

So far as I can tell, Democrats, given the opportunity to rank their preferences, would do it as follows:

1. No one gerrymanders	4. Republican gerrymander Democrats don’t
3. Democrats gerrymander Republicans don’t	2. Both parties gerrymander

Republicans, by contrast, appear to rank their preferences as follows:

4. No one gerrymanders	1. Republican gerrymander Democrats don’t
4. Democrats gerrymander Republicans don’t	4. Both parties gerrymander

It is not even clear to me that Republicans are able to distinguish among the other three options.

On the Other Hand

Consider:

August, 2025:  Former DOGE staffer "Big Balls" injured in a carjacking.  Trump deploys the National Guard to Washington DC and an immigration crackdown, even though the carjackers were natural born US citizens.

September, 2025:  Charlie Kirk assassinated.  Stephen Miller pledges an "all of government" crackdown on the opposition.  JD Vance and others urge people to comb the internet for criticisms of Charlie Kirk and have the people making them fired.  Talk of a "Reichstag Fire moment."

November, 2025:  Afghan National drives from Washington State to Washington, DC to shoot two members of the National Guard.  Trump Administration cuts off asylum applications from 19 Muslim countries and starts arresting lawfully present Afghan asylum seekers when they check in.

December, 2025:  Investigations of fraud by the Somali community in Minnesota lead the Trump's biggest and most brutal immigration crackdown to date.

April 25, 2026:  Attempted assassination of Donald Trump, JD Vance and much of his Cabinet at the White House Correspondent's Dinner.  Trump and his followers respond -- with an all-out push to approve the proposed White House ballroom.

Honestly, if that is the worst thing to emerge from the latest assassination attempt, I would consider that very fortunate indeed!