Which Way to Wall Street?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 20, 2024

 

If there is one thing everybody knows about Wall Street, it is that the boys in the pinstripe suits reliably support the Republican Party—the party that offers to cut their taxes and lighten their regulatory load. It is one of those things that everybody knows that isn’t true. 

 

In reality, Wall Street has been trending Democratic for decades, for reasons that are not difficult to guess. Financial services firms tend to be concentrated in big cities and staffed by college-educated professionals—and affluent urban voters today lean Democratic, as do their nearby suburban counterparts. And even though what we call “Wall Street” doesn’t really live on Wall Street anymore, the business is culturally dominated by people with big city, East Coast backgrounds. The CEOs of JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley were born in New York City, while David Solomon of Goldman Sachs came all the way from … Westchester County. 

 

Affluent urban and suburban professionals have trended Democratic only partly because of policy considerations. In the main part, their migration has been more driven by cultural and social sensibilities. As the GOP has become more southern, more evangelical, and more demonstratively boobish, people working in finance have moved into the party of Barack Obama. Considering one of the forerunners of today’s Republican populism, one Wall Street veteran told me in 2008: “Nobody is going to show up to parents’ day at Choate wearing a Sarah Palin T-shirt.” 

 

So, how’s it going? 

 

Wall Street workers still support a lot of Republicans: So far in the 2024 cycle, two of the biggest recipients of political donations by people associated with Goldman Sachs have been Dave McCormick—a Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania—and the National Republican Congressional Committee. The next three on the list are all Democrats and Democrat-aligned: Kamala Harris, the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund, and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana. Given that it is presidential elections that really touch the tribal nerve, it is worth noting that Harris’ donations from Goldman Sachs employees currently outpace Donald Trump’s by about 18-to-1. 

 

To take a random walk down Wall Street politics: At Morgan Stanley, overall donations run about 58 percent Democratic; donations to Democratic congressional candidates are double donations to Republican candidates; and the largest single recipient of donations is Kamala Harris, doubling those to Trump, who barely exceeds Nikki Haley in the tally. Kamala Harris is the No. 1 choice of campaign donors associated with Citigroup, where overall donations to federal candidates run about 70 percent Democratic. Harris leads the donation race at Bank of America, too, again taking the No. 1 spot with three times the financial support of Donald Trump.

 

It should be noted here that, as a financial matter, these donations mean approximately squat. All those B of A donations to Harris add up to $284,061, which she could replace in about 30 seconds with the help of the millions of small-dollar donors who have put hundreds of millions of dollars into her campaign. The same is true for Trump. What is interesting is not the number of dollars in play but the ratio of donations, which tells you something about where the people who actually do the daily work of Wall Street have their heads, politically—and it isn’t in the Republican Party. 

 

At the more senior level, there is a good deal more introspection about policy differences. Trump is seen as unpredictable and vindictive—because that’s what he is—and though he presents himself as a pro-business candidate, it is generally understood that Trump is pro-business only where business is pro-Trump. And Trump has made a lot of very dumb populist noise about exempting all sorts of common income from taxation—tips, overtime pay, Social Security benefits—while entrenching SALT (state and local tax) deductions that tend to favor upper-income voters in high-tax Democratic states and cities. All of that will put more pressure on Washington to find revenue from other sources, including Wall Street. Trump himself has lambasted the carried-interest treatment of private-equity income as an example of Wall Street “getting away with murder.”

 

Contrary to what you hear from demagogues such as Trump and Elizabeth Warren, high-income taxpayers already pay essentially all of the federal income tax, with those at the very top paying a share that is wildly disproportionate to their share of income. Wall Street does not want to be Washington’s cash cow, and getting milked by Republicans is no more fun than getting milked by Democrats. 

 

But then there’s Kamala Harris. Harris has made some moves in the direction of moderation, and she may even try to follow through on that. The problem is that there would be a whole Harris administration, and the matter of appointments is a sticky one. Joe Biden is not a left-wing radical, but his administration still put Lina Khan in charge over at the Federal Trade Commission and handed the SEC to Gary Gensler, empowering genuine radicals to make mischief—and mischief has been made.

 

Kamala Harris has reason not to be a crazy person when it comes to investing and investment income: Her real base is California public-sector employees, who, through their pension funds, are among the largest corporate shareholders and private-equity investors in the country—CalPERS alone has a more than $500 billion in assets. A relatively small increase—or decrease—in the investment income of these pension funds could have an enormous effect on the long-term sustainability of public-sector retirement benefits (and everybody else’s retirement savings, too!), and, in some cases, could mean the difference between solvency and insolvency for pension systems that have underfunded themselves based on unrealistic expectations about returns. 

 

If you are a demagogue, there’s a problem: There’s no good way to increase the investment income of public school teachers without also doing a solid for Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan in the process. If you are willing to forgo the demagoguery, that isn’t an issue. No demagoguery, no problem. 

 

On the dollar vote, the big guys on Wall Street currently are leaning Harris. But not without some hesitation. Harris could address that in a way that would be good for her politically and, more importantly, good for investors overall. On the other hand, she might be calculating that it’s enough not to be the guy who’s screaming about imaginary cat-eating maniacs in Springfield.

 

Which way, Wall Street? 

When Will Republicans Tire of Touching the Hot Stovetop?

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 20, 2024

 

GOP primary voters knew Mark Robinson was a terrible candidate. They just didn’t care.

 

We know how this is going to go.

 

The deadline for North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor, Mark Robinson, to drop out of the race passed last night. Robinson ignored the calls from his fellow Republicans to drop out. In November, he’ll lose. And when he loses, the loudest voices in the Republican ecosystem will insist he owes his fate not to his own characterological defects but to the fact that the GOP doesn’t have the stomach to do what’s necessary to win. Not like the Democrats do.

 

By that, this embittered sort of Republican will not mean that the GOP should avoid elementary political malpractice. They won’t be referring to the Democratic Party’s capacity to act collectively in a concerted effort to push leading lights who’ve reached their sell-by dates off to the sidelines. What they’ll be referring to is their impression that Democrats are so monomaniacally focused on securing power that they rally around even their most unfit candidates. Unlike the GOP, Democrats can muster the courage to ignore the realities to which everyone else is privy and muscle their preferred narratives into the public consciousness. If Republicans were unscrupulous enough to follow their lead, they’d be winners. But their parochial attachment to their good names, their standing among the elite-cocktail-party crowd, or their secret contempt for their own constituents prevents them from doing the dirty work that needs to be done.

 

This tiresome rationalization serves only to liberate the GOP’s primary voters from having to take any responsibility for their own bad judgement. Not only does it paint a portrait of a hypercompetent Democratic Party that no Democrat would recognize; it also deflects from the fact that Republicans knew Robinson was a problematic candidate. They just didn’t care.

 

The bombshell allegations that made the rounds on Thursday can only be read through the slits in your fingers. As a contributor to a message board on a pornographic website –—which should itself disqualify someone from serious contention for political office — Robinson referred to himself as a “perv.” He called himself a “black Nazi” who would “take Hitler” over the American political class. He talked about his teenage escapades “peeping” at nude women in a public gym locker room. “Slavery is not bad,” he reportedly wrote. “Some people need to be slaves. I wish they would bring it (slavery) back. I would certainly buy a few.”

 

Yeah, not great. But none of it should come as a shock to anyone who’s been paying any attention to Robinson’s record. As Jim detailed in today’s Morning Jolt, evidence of Robinson’s ill-suitedness to high office was available to anyone who hadn’t reflexively dismissed the people and institutions warning them of his unsuitability. In early 2024, Commentary’s Seth Mandel detailed the many times in which Robinson indulged in antisemitic conspiracy theories and bigoted language. The Marvel movie Black Panther is the creation of an “agnostic Jew” and a “satanic Marxist” designed to “pull the shekels out of your Schvartze [a derogatory Yiddish term for black people] pockets,” he wrote. The “goyim” produced the 1977 classic Roots to demonstrate the “weakness of the shvartze,” he later added. The “liberal media fills the airwaves” with historical presentations about the Nazis to popularize claims about “the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered,” he wrote with scare quotes.

 

Robinson proudly retailed the fictions to which Trump is partial about the 2020 election. He indulged conspiracy theories about the moon landing, the 9/11 attacks, and the Kennedy assassination. As a result of all this, he was unpopular among his own constituents. North Carolina’s GOP voters knew that nominating him as their candidate for the state’s highest office was an unnecessary risk, but they were persuaded to haul the baggage Robbinson brought with him onto their own backs because Donald Trump insisted on it. In a contested primary, Trump branded Robinson “Martin Luther King on steroids” — indeed, “I think you’re better than Martin Luther King. I think you are Martin Luther King times two,” he said. That’s all the GOP primary electorate needed to hear.

 

If all you care about is the presidential race, maybe Robinson’s imploding candidacy doesn’t matter to you. It’s hard to imagine how Robinson — who was on track to lose this race long before yesterday’s revelations became public — could hurt the top of the ticket in November. But it’s equally difficult to envision a circumstance in which Robinson’s toxicity doesn’t detract from the GOP’s totals farther down the ballot, losing the party winnable legislative races, taking talented upcoming Republican lawmakers off the board, and scuttling the prospect of conservative reforms at the state level in North Carolina. That should matter, but we have precious few indications that it does.

 

Polling has consistently indicated that the Republican Party’s most engaged voters trust Trump and his judgement above all else. The press, election results, even their fellow Republicans — nothing can compete with Trump’s perspicacity. The problem with that calculation is that Trump has consistently demonstrated comically bad judgment. His endorsements are informed by the degree to which his endorsees flatter him. So, in deference to Trump, North Carolina’s voters looked past Robinson’s obvious, knowable defects. As a result, they’re about to sacrifice yet another winnable race.

 

Republicans have made a virtue of the shallowest heuristic: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If the media, the establishment, and the whole of polite society are against him, then I’m for him. The people I hate are adamant in their opposition to this candidate, so he must be doing something right! That is the opposite of discretion. It is the sacrifice of logic and even self-interest to the demands of tribal loyalty.

 

And now that the foreseeable consequences of their imprudence are upon them, we can anticipate that the people who backed Robinson’s nomination will insist that the only problem here is that those who warned them in advance of the mistake they were making didn’t have the gumption to ignore our shared reality and stand with him.

 

It’s a con job. It has robbed Republicans of too many competent and capable stewards who might actually advance the party’s political interests in positions of authority. There should come a point at which Republican primary voters reconcile the cold comfort they appear to take from their persecution complex with the unsatisfying election results they keep voting for themselves. Perhaps after November, there will be a reckoning. But I wouldn’t hold out hope.

Next Time Cancel Me for Something I Actually Said

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, September 19, 2024

 

Everyone in my business takes lumps for things they say. That comes with the territory. What’s different is getting smeared for something you verifiably didn’t say.

 

This has been the project of malicious accounts on X the last few days that have insisted that I said a racial slur during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show last weekend.

 

These ridiculously false accusations on social media — that have been rebutted even by people who disagree with me politically — have now resulted in cancellations in the real world.

 

I was scheduled to speak at Indiana State University in a couple of weeks, but the university has scrapped my appearance “in light of recent developments and following the advice of our public safety officials regarding campus and community safety concerns.”

 

This is a classic pretext, often used by university officials to dispense with speakers they find inconvenient. They’d really love to have them, don’t you know, but it will take as much security as is required for Donald Trump to play a round of golf, so, sadly, it just isn’t possible.

 

Like all cancelers, the university wants you to believe that this is just an exception to its scrupulous fair-mindedness: “It is important to stress that this cancellation is not intended to limit our neutrality on different political viewpoints.”

 

Uh-huh. Taking the side of a woke online fringe and giving it what it wants on the basis of an almost certainly nonexistent security threat doesn’t speak to political neutrality.

 

And if there is a real security threat, what does that say about Indiana State University? If the young people under its care and tutelage are liable to storm a lecture hall if I show up, that is an indictment of them, not me.

 

It pains me to say I’ve also been canceled by the Badger Institute, the right-of-center think tank in Wisconsin. The president called on Tuesday to ask me to withdraw from an address at an upcoming dinner, and when I refused and asked him what I’d done wrong, he only said something or other about “the environment.” When I flatly asked him whether he was disinviting me, he said, “Yes.”

 

Cowardice is contagious.

 

I don’t want to suggest this is anything on the order of what other people have suffered in losing their livelihoods and reputations to cancel culture. This episode is worth dwelling on, though, because the underlying phenomenon is so pernicious and stupid, and people who don’t have gallons of ink to defend themselves the way I do and don’t work for a conservative organization the way I do are particularly susceptible to this kind of cut-rate McCarthyism.

 

Bear with me for a minute to go into a little detail.

 

On Megyn Kelly’s show, I was discussing the Springfield, Ohio, controversy, and, in the course of saying “Haitian migrants,” I started to mispronounce the word “migrants.” I began to say it with a short “i,” the way you say “immigrants,” instead of the long “i” that you use for “migrants.” I caught myself in the middle, before shifting to the correct pronunciation.

 

So, I said what you might call the “M-word.” You can try to look up the M-word, but you will fail — because it’s not a word, let alone a racial slur. It happens to rhyme with a racial slur, but that doesn’t make it one.

 

If you want to go to absurd Zapruder-film lengths, you can slow down the clip and hear more clearly that what I said begins with an “m,” and that my lips are pursed, which is what you do when you are saying “m,” but not “n.”

 

None of this matters, of course, to an online mob that operates on the principle, “Shoot first, worry about discerning the truth never.”

 

Some stories said things like I “appeared” or “seemed” to say a racial slur, which is weaselly innuendo. What does “appear” have to do with it? I either said it or I didn’t. Since, upon careful listening and viewing, anyone can discern that I obviously didn’t, writing that I “appeared” to utter it is just a way to make the charge without the evidence.

 

Same with stories declaring in a gotcha tone that I “denied” saying a racial slur. Yes, of course I denied it — because I didn’t say it. But these stories apply a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” logical fallacy to imply that my denial of a completely fabricated charge implies a sort of guilt.

 

Then, there are the stories suggesting that because a bunch of people who either make a living off of dumb distortions, or just amplify them for personal enjoyment, accused me of something on X, there must be something to it. Where there’s bullsh**, there must be fire.

 

The fundamental idea behind these charges is that I suffer from a kind of racist Tourette’s syndrome: I walk around and occasionally blurt out racial slurs, and somehow this condition hasn’t been evident throughout 30-something years of speaking in public — until I happened to stumble on the word “migrants.” Then, the terrible truth was revealed.

 

It’s too risible for words.

 

Even people who don’t share my politics have stepped up to point this out — John Harwood, Tom Nichols, and Patterico, to name a few. Some others deleted or retracted their original smears, with varying degrees of remorse.

 

If you consider all these people amateurs on such a question, then there’s a highly respected linguist, John McWhorter, who also says I didn’t say it.

 

If memory serves, when NPR ran its initial story on the controversy, its headline said that I “appeared” to say a racial slur, an example of the innuendo noted above. Then, the headline changed to, “Conservative editor-in-chief says mispronunciation led to accusations of using slur.” Which is at least more accurate. Initially, the story also put “[slur]” in place of the M-word in quoting me. It then changed it to “[word],” which is better but still not quite right . . . because it was not a word.

 

Finally, NPR added a comment from its media reporter, David Folkenflik: “After watching several times, even slowing this down to 0.25 speed, I believe Lowry garbled migrants and immigrants just after saying the word ‘Haitian.'” He continued, “It is startling to hear what emerged. Nonetheless, critics can best grapple directly with the substance of what he is saying.”

 

So here is someone who is from an outfit that defines elite respectability and who doesn’t consider it his job to do conservatives any favors saying that he looked at it with extreme care and concluded — rightly — that I didn’t say it.

 

But no one, despite Folkenflik’s counsel, is going to grapple with the substance of what I said. That’s not what this game is about. The cliché about lawfare is that the process is the punishment. When it comes to cancellation, there is no process — there’s merely accusation and then punishment.

 

Again, these couple of cancellations aren’t anything like what others have gone through, and I’m proud to say NR has been robustly on the side of people who have been unjustly targeted over the years. I expect there are more cancellations in my future, though. If so, fine. Do your worst. I will call you out, and excoriate and mock you, as appropriate. But I won’t cower or apologize.

Their Problem Is That Israel Won’t Roll Over and Die

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is hardly the only lavishly credentialed critic of Israel and its efforts to exercise its right to self-defense who has exposed her ignorance on the subject of warfare. Still, she will do to illustrate the ignorant, logically fallacious thinking that is so prevalent among that cadre.

If this is the reflex to which the Biden administration is prone, you can see why the Israelis declined to inform their American counterparts in advance of the spectacularly innovative and logistically impressive acts of sabotage targeting Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon and Syria this week.

 

How precisely does this “attack” violate “international humanitarian law”? Indeed, what is international humanitarian law? The International Red Cross defines the concept as a subset of “international law,” which is itself “contained in agreements between States,” as in “treaties or conventions,” which are binding. That’s a long way of saying that there is no “international law” outside the context of laws crafted, ratified, and (most importantly) enforced by individual nations. There is no international constabulary implementing international statutes. The geopolitical environment is anarchic, particularly in times of war.

 

There are, however, laws of armed conflict (LOAC) that are derived from treaty agreements recognized by individual states. There are applicable proscriptions against “booby-traps and other devices” for use against non-military targets, but rigged devices are only “restricted” when deployed against legitimate combatants in war. Exceptions to this rule include, for example, utensils or appliances used by or in “military establishments.” It’s hard to conceive of a more apt example of one of these exceptions than encrypted communications devices, access to which is limited to fighters and commanders in a terrorist group, which are explicitly allocated for use in combat operations.

 

These LOAC protocols proscribe weapons that have “indiscriminate effects,” but what could be more discriminating than an attack on devices Hezbollah itself distributes to its most prominent members? The thinness of AOC’s indictment suggests her objections to Israeli spycraft aren’t legal but moral. Where does Jerusalem get the nerve to disable thousands of Hezbollah fighters without exposing its own people to the horrors of warfare? Dirty pool, that. But when you consider the alternatives, the framework Israel’s critics have applied to the Jewish state is exposed as a double standard.

 

Israel has been under fire from Hezbollah rockets — 5,000 of which have been fired on Israeli targets — since the October 7 massacre. Thousands of Israelis are evacuated from their homes in regions of the country bordering Southern Lebanon. To allow that condition to persist is to all but formally cede Israeli territory to an Iran-backed terror group. Those who have not evacuated, like the Druze minority in the Golan Heights, have witnessed their own people, including children, slaughtered by Hezbollah missiles. To these provocations, Israel responded not with overwhelming force — which more than a few Druze demanded — but with a campaign of pinprick assassinations of ranking Hezbollah and Hamas targets. What could be more discriminating than the equivalent of an M80 going off in the pockets of terrorist operatives who were hand-selected by their own leadership? Footage of these devices going off indicates that even bystanders who were mere feet away from these explosions experienced little more than shock.

 

That is not to say that no civilians were harmed or killed in this operation. They were auxiliary casualties, some of whom were children. That may produce less needless death than would be incurred amid a full ground invasion, which would put far more Lebanese and Israeli civilians in harm’s way, but it’s tragic, nonetheless. The responsibility for that tragedy is not on the party responding to unprovoked attacks on its people and territory. Israel is not the aggressor in this conflict. It has been aggressed against. That, too, is a meaningful distinction in the rules governing armed conflict to which Israel’s critics appeal.

 

It is a war planner’s job to perform bloodless calculations about the level of acceptable collateral damage that could be incurred as a result of one operation or another. It is not a war planner’s job to succumb to moral paralysis over the prospect of any collateral damage. If Israel were handcuffed by the prospect of unnecessary death among the civilians its adversaries hide behind, it would have long ago disappeared from the face of the earth.

 

In Hezbollah’s case, Israel is being aggressed against by a terrorist organization operating from foreign soil at the invitation of its sovereign host government. We can debate whether the Lebanese and Syrians caught in the crossfire are a captive population or a responsible polity that should own the consequences of their leaders’ actions. And it should not be hard to concede that every civilian death in war is a preventable tragedy. But the standard to which Israel is being held by its critics would leave it vulnerable to foreign aggression. The only other avenue to relieve the pressure Hezbollah has put on Israel would beget more bloodshed, not less.

 

Of course, Israel’s detractors would object as vociferously to an incursion into Southern Lebanon to push Hezbollah back beyond the Litani River as they have to Israel’s use of subterfuge to disable as many individual Hezbollah fighters as possible. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the problem Israel’s critics hope to remedy is Israel’s petulant insistence upon its own existence.

Democrats Don’t Really Care about Election Interference

By Noah Rothman

Friday, September 20, 2024

 

Democrats want you to believe they are obsessively fixated on the scourge of interference in American elections by hostile foreign powers, by which they mean Russia and Russia alone. They seem incapable of acknowledging other malign actors abroad that also seek to influence American electoral outcomes, particularly when those operations are crafted for their benefit.

 

“President Joe Biden’s campaign did not reach out to law enforcement after individuals associated with the campaign received hacked material from Donald Trump’s campaign in their personal email accounts in part because they had not opened the messages,” Politico revealed on Thursday. The campaign Kamala Harris was bequeathed “did not provide a timeline of events” when asked by reporters to identify, presumably, when they received those hacked materials or the actions they took in response. “Similarly,” the report continued, “a law enforcement official familiar with the hacking incident told POLITICO Thursday that there’s no indication that the individuals associated with Biden’s campaign responded or took actions on the emails.”

 

That’s weird. Indeed, the Biden-Harris team’s inaction is rendered even stranger by the revelation several weeks ago that those unsolicited materials were pilfered from the Trump camp by agents loyal to the Islamic Republic of Iran. And it’s not just the campaign’s political principals in Iran’s crosshairs.  Trump’s “legal team” is also a target of this hacking operation, and the hackers are still pitching their stolen goods to anyone unscrupulous enough to publish them. As Puck’s Tara Palmeri reported on Thursday:

 

Like several other journalists covering the 2024 presidential campaign, I was contacted earlier this month, and again on Tuesday, by an individual peddling what appeared to be sensitive documents pertaining to Donald Trump. I alerted federal authorities, and I’m not reporting the contents, but the materials themselves confirm that the hackers, whom the Justice Department apparently suspects to be agents of Iran, have absconded with more than just the oppo files on J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum that have been disseminated to multiple news outlets. It appears that they may also have breached Trump’s legal team.

 

The Biden Justice Department is certainly on the case. The FBI and other federal investigative agencies are cracking down on Tehran’s efforts to “influence the U.S. elections process,” which extend well beyond passing opposition research to their opponents. “Hackers linked to the IRGC appear to have a broad mandate to collect data the Iranian regime might find useful for kidnapping and assassination plots,” CNN reported in August. Last week, a Pakistani national was arrested in connection with charges that he was dispatched to the U.S. by Iran to kill American political officials on U.S. soil.

 

But the Biden-Harris operation and their Democratic allies haven’t displayed the kind of apoplexy in response to Iran’s plots that we might expect given their garment-rending over similar, albeit less audacious, efforts by Moscow’s agents to influence American electoral outcomes. While his operation quietly pursues Trump’s Iranian harassers, Attorney General Merrick Garland holds press conferences warning that Russia’s state-backed media outlets are promulgating propagandistic fictions (gasp!) and corrupting agents of influence in America to promote the same. “He’s going to try to interfere in our democracy,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby says of Putin, because “he wants to sow discord and disunion here in the United States.” Hillary Clinton insists that Americans who spread, wittingly or unwittingly, Russian propaganda should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged.”

 

The imbalance is conspicuous. And all this is to say nothing — literally, in the Democrats’ case — of China’s (occasionally successful) efforts to subvert Democratic primary elections, infiltrate the offices of Democratic lawmakers, and subvert the Chinese-language information environment.

 

If Democrats were truly unnerved by the prospect of meddling in America’s elections by foreign agents, we should expect that the party’s leading lights would show as much consternation with the hostile powers working on their behalf as we would those who seek to undermine their political prospects. Perhaps our expectations are too high.

Trump’s Scattershot Policy Pandering

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

 

At this stage in the proceedings, it feels almost churlish to write earnestly about the public-policy implications of the coming presidential election. In Kamala Harris, we have a candidate who will commit to nothing lest she is subjected to a follow-up question; in Donald Trump, we have a candidate so determined to discharge his every thought that there is no time left for his auditors to speak. As an old-fashioned “issues” voter, I am not sure which is more annoying: that Kamala Harris answers every inquiry by talking distractedly about the sanctity of middle-class grass, or that Donald Trump promulgates novel positions with the fecundity of a sunfish. Irrespective, the spectacle is an unedifying one.

 

Some cynics argue that none of this matters. We have two teams in America, they observe, and what counts is which one you’re on. Politics, they insist, is painted in broader strokes than a crisp manifesto can allow. One party is For; the other is Against; the details that result from this dichotomy will be worked out in the wash.

 

At the risk of naivety, I must dissent from this conceit. All things being equal, Kamala Harris’s reticence may help her win the White House. Likewise Trump’s pandering. But it will not help either of them enact an agenda — which, lest we forget, is the purpose of securing power in the first instance. We are thoroughly modern, I’m quite sure, but there is still no alternative to a clear and deliberate agenda.

 

Alas, neither clarity nor deliberation is on display this time around. Last week, in the course of a truly pathetic interview with ABC Philadelphia, Kamala Harris proved unable to even hint at how she would go about fulfilling her routine promise to “lower prices.” “I grew up in a community of hard-working people,” Harris said, “you know, construction workers and nurses and teachers, and I try to explain to some people who may not have had the same experience — you know, a lot of people will relate to this.” Exactly to what those people were supposed to “relate” was never explained — even in outline. Nor will it be. Harris believes that she is winning, and she is aware that talking in public is the intervention most likely to change that fact. From now until November 5, she will let us eat joy.

 

Donald Trump is going for the opposite approach. Yesterday, Trump promised that, if he were to be chosen as president once again, Americans would not only end up paying “no tax on tips,” “no tax on overtime,” and “no tax on Social Security benefits,” but that he would help repeal one of the biggest achievements of his first term, the cap on the state-and-local-tax (SALT) deduction within the income-tax code. Why? Because Trump thinks that these declarations will be popular among the groups he needs to win — and hasn’t considered them beyond that. Nevada has a large number of tip-reliant service workers; Trump wants to win Nevada; therefore . . . Social Security recipients vote in higher numbers than any other group; Trump wants them to vote for him rather than for his opponent; therefore . . . Trump is speaking in New York tonight; New Yorkers want their SALT-subsidy back; therefore . . . Regrettably, there is nothing more to any of it than that. It’s Oprah Winfreyism, writ large.

 

This matters. His personal conduct notwithstanding, Donald Trump’s last presidency contained a great deal for conservatives to cheer. The 2017 tax-reform bill that Trump signed was well-crafted; the deregulation agenda to which he acquiesced was welcome; the federal judges he nominated were (mostly) terrific; and, having corrected the GOP’s course on immigration, his administration did some solid work in limiting the influx at the southern border. By the time he left office, Trump’s critics had been proven correct about his character but wrong about the likely policy consequences of his victory. As president, Trump did not abandon conservatism wholesale, or vanquish those whom he’d defeated; rather, he relied heavily upon the years of hard work that had preceded him. From the Federalist Society to Paul Ryan to the American Federation for Children, Trump took good advice and adopted solid ideas. In so doing, he inherited an orderly, disciplined, thoughtful agenda whose intricacies had been developed and defended over time.

 

This time around, there will be no such bequest to enjoy. Indeed, if Trump wins, he will be presented with the near-impossible challenge of pulling his many random utterings into one place and attempting to make them cohere. When he does, he will soon discover there is a good reason that no serious tax proposal tries to exclude fatally gameable categories such as “tips” or “overtime,” just as there is a good reason that conservative legislators have not focused on exempting Social Security benefits or on restoring the SALT deduction, and that reason is that, even if those changes were practically possible, they would be arbitrary, contradictory, and an impediment to superior reforms. If, in 124 days’ time, Trump finds himself back in the White House, the scattershot approach to policy that he has taken throughout this capricious campaign will guarantee that the first question he will find himself asking his office wall is, “Okay, I’m here — now what on earth am I supposed to do next?”

The Bitter and the Sweet

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

 

The “respectable” case for populist governance goes like this.

 

Yes, we’ll probably have to put up with more demagoguery than we’re used to from our political leaders, regrettably. But we’ll be rewarded for our tolerance with economic policies that prioritize the interests of the working and middle classes to a greater degree than Americans are used to.

 

A government that’s truly by and for the people will be more prone to reflect popular prejudices and more willing to make struggling American households financially great again.

 

We’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet.

 

And who knows? If the populist economic project succeeds, some of that demagogic bitterness might drain away in time. The more optimistic the average American feels about his or her financial future, the less interest they’ll take in finding scapegoats for their problems. The sweet will eventually overwhelm the bitter.

 

In theory, the two halves of the Republican ticket this year reflect the bitter and sweet sides of populism. At the top we have the strutting demagogue, ever eager to identify some new species of cultural vermin that needs eradicating. At the bottom we have the whiz kid, blessed with brains and educated about the problems of deindustrialized America by hard experience.

 

If we want to get to a sweeter populist future led by highbrow intellectual J.D. Vance, we’ve got to take the bitter populist present led by lowbrow strongman Donald Trump.

 

When Trump chose Vance as his running mate, it was easy to imagine how that bitter/sweet dynamic might play out on the trail. The man at the top would continue to practice the dark arts, offering new enemies to his base to keep them motivated to vote, while the man at the bottom would tantalize better-educated voters by making a thoughtful case for a populist economic program.

 

J.D. could be the “suburbs-whisperer.” Anyone who feared that Trump 2.0 would be a mad ride into authoritarian chaos could listen to Vance’s soft-spoken policy pitch and feel reassured that there’d be some sweetness amid all the bitterness.

 

That’s how it could have gone. As it is, we find ourselves in mid-September with a bizarre inversion. Trump more so than Vance has taken the lead on economics, and has leaned into some ideas that seem lab-designed to benefit the upper class or to harm the lower classes that populism is supposed to protect.

 

And Vance more so than Trump has taken the lead on demagoguery lately, spearheading the agitation against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and behaving so recklessly in how he’s gone about it that he’s arguably outdone his running mate.

 

There isn’t much sweetness on either end of the Republican ticket. And given Vance’s trajectory, the populist future looks to be more bitter than its respectable champions had hoped.

 

Economic incoherence.

 

Trump doesn’t have a populist economic agenda. What he has are a few policy bribes aimed at discrete working-class swing constituencies, with no rhyme or reason to those proposals beyond the anxiety he feels about losing votes to Kamala Harris.

 

“NO TAX ON TIPS, NO TAX ON OVERTIME PAY, NO TAX ON SOCIAL SECURITY BENEFITS FOR SENIORS. KAMALA WILL GIVE NONE OF THIS,” he promised on Tuesday. He wants to exempt tips from taxation because he’s desperate to win Nevada, where hospitality workers are ubiquitous. He wants to exempt overtime pay because he fears that Harris’ union endorsements will weaken his blue-collar support. And he wants to exempt Social Security income because Harris has a leg up in bribing senior citizens and he’s anxious to match her somehow.

 

If enacted, his policies would massively distort how wages are paid, choke off billions in federal tax revenue, and possibly reignite inflation, but he’s not offering them as considered policy any more than Joe Biden was when he proposed forgiving student debt en masse. Biden’s plan was a bribe. Trump’s proposals are bribes. They’re money-for-votes transactions, not elements of some thoughtful program to uplift the working man.

 

I suppose that enough bribes aimed at enough working-class blocs might amount to a populist “agenda,” but that’s the thing. Not all of Trump’s proposals are aimed at helping the average joe. To the contrary.

 

His splashiest new proposal on Tuesday was made to voters in New York, which (in a quadrennial tradition) he seems to believe is in play this year. “I will turn it around, get SALT back, lower your Taxes, and so much more,” he vowed. “Get SALT back” seems to be Trump-ese for repealing the $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) from federal income tax—never mind that it was his 2017 tax-cut law that imposed that cap in the first place.

 

The SALT cap is meaningless to most Americans, either because they don’t earn enough to owe more than $10,000 in local taxes or because they live in states with low rates of taxation. Lifting it shouldn’t be a priority for any populist who’s serious about putting the interests of the working class first. If anything, the opposite is true: Capping how much rich coastal elites can deduct from their federal taxes means more tax revenue that can be applied toward programs to help blue-collar Americans. And denying an outsized deduction to upper-class people who choose to live in high-tax blue states means less of a burden for working joes in low-tax red states to shoulder in trying to pay Uncle Sam’s bills.

 

It’s incoherent for a populist like Trump to want to lift the cap. His reason for doing so is no grander than that he thinks it’ll help squeeze a few extra votes out of wealthy New York professionals for him and for the vulnerable local Republicans whose seats might decide the next House majority. It’s another bribe—but to the rich. And not for the first time in this campaign.

 

That might be excusable as the sort of niche pander to which all politicians occasionally stoop if he were otherwise reliably putting the interests of the working class first. But consider how he answered a question about inflation on Tuesday.

 

He was asked at a town hall how he plans to bring down grocery prices, a predictable topic for a candidate in 2024. Yet his answer was impenetrable (as usual) and somehow boiled down to tariffs (also as usual). “Our farmers are being absolutely decimated right now. And, you know, one of the reasons is we allow a lot of farm product into our country,” Trump said. “We’re gonna have to be a little like other countries, we’re not gonna allow so much … we’re gonna let our farmers go to work.”

 

He’s going to reduce the supply of foreign produce in American supermarkets, in other words, in hopes that American farmers will eventually pick up the slack. You tell me: What happens to prices when the supply of something drops while demand for it remains constant?

 

And which part of American society will be harmed more by that: the working class that Trump allegedly champions or the wealthy who don’t need to worry what groceries cost?

 

Regressive tariffs on produce isn’t an idea you propose when you’re thinking seriously about how to help “the forgotten man.” It’s an idea you propose when you’re not thinking about economics at all and have settled on tariffs “as an elixir to solve every economic problem,” in Jonathan Chait’s words.

 

In fact, Trump’s economic program is less populist than what we might call popular-ist in the sense that it’s concerned entirely with boosting his chances of reelection, with zero regard for whether it’s feasible or which class will benefit from it or what sort of trade-offs it might entail. There’s nothing new about a Republican leader gorging on tax cuts without offsetting cuts to spending, unfortunately, but at least Reaganites had theories about how that might make fiscal sense in the long run. There’s not even a pretense of caring about that in Trump’s agenda.

 

Insofar as there’s a policy vision driving him, it’s to turn America into as much of an autarky as he can in four years, a sort of Trump Juche plan. But I think his motives are simpler: He wants to do the stuff that will make people more likely to vote for him, like slashing taxes and protecting entitlements and lowering interest rates and slapping “America First” tariffs on everything, with total disregard for the economic implications. He’s prepared to saddle the children of the working class with a federal debt so massive that the interest on it alone will soon make the social safety net on which they rely unsustainable.

 

All of which is maybe just a long way of saying that he doesn’t care about (most) policy, only about his own empowerment. He’s running for president because he wants to stay out of prison and punish his enemies, not because he’s burning to play Santa with the child tax credit or stop insurers from stiffing middle-class Americans with preexisting conditions. Trump’s in it for Trump, always.

 

Vance, on the other hand, is different. He’s the substantive populist. Isn’t he?

 

The making of a demagogue.

 

Both Republicans on the ticket this year are populists but only one is an ideologue. That’s why we’d expect Vance to do the heavy lifting on policy and Trump to stick to vilifying minorities.

 

Each man should play to his strengths, no?

 

So it’s strange to watch the moral panic over immigrant pet-eating in Ohio gain and sustain altitude due mainly to Vance’s efforts, not Trump’s. Trump did place it front and center in the campaign by mentioning it during his debate with Harris but J.D. was tweeting about it before then. And J.D.’s the one who’s gone on tweeting and doing interviews about it since the debate.

 

He’s really come into his own as the sort of gutter-dweller whom Trump’s MAGA base might take a shine to in 2028.

 

On Wednesday the Wall Street Journal published a new story about Springfield, Ohio, and the demagoguery to which it’s been subjected. According to the paper, Vance and his aides knew almost from the start that there was nothing to the allegations about pet-eating by Haitian immigrants—yet proceeded to flog the story anyway. On September 9, the day before the debate, one of the senator’s staffers called the Springfield city manager to check if the rumors were true and was told no, there was no evidence to support any of it.

 

By then it was too late, though. Vance had already posted about it on social media.

 

Fact-checking a sensational, racially incendiary claim is typically something a politician would do before deciding whether to make it but I suspect J.D. has learned from his running mate that some accusations are too politically useful to let truth get in the way. In fact, I’d guess that the staffer who called Springfield did so not because he wanted the straight dope but because he hoped the city manager would provide him with some sort of pseudo-factual peg on which to retroactively hang the smear campaign that had begun.

 

Either way, Vance didn’t retreat afterward. He defended the pet-eating propaganda as (essentially) fake but accurate while his staff went about quietly trying to convince the press that he’d been right all along. Which led to this immortal passage in Wednesday’s Journal story:

 

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.

 

Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app.

 

That was decent of her but forthright apologies aren’t an option for a politician hoping to lead the movement to which she belongs. As things stand, some Haitian immigrants in Springfield are keeping their children home out of fear of harassment, with one local Haitian man who was interviewed by ABC News lamenting that he doesn’t see many of his countrymen on the streets anymore. A driver passing by allegedly yelled “Trump!” at him shortly before he spoke with the network.

 

Like his boss with respect to economic policy, Vance doesn’t seem to lose sleep over the long-term consequences of his politics.

 

Even apart from the Haitian hysteria, he’s thrown some hard punches lately that seem designed to please MAGA voters who are already locked in for Trump while potentially alienating some of those suburban professionals he should be whispering to. Last week he reconfirmed that he would have stopped the count on January 6 had he been in Mike Pence’s shoes, then mused that “if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.” On Tuesday, in an exchange with pundit David Frum, he accused center-right Trump critics of being on the same “team” as Trump’s two would-be assassins.

 

There’s no electoral logic to any of that. At best, Vance’s comments will be ignored; at worst, right-leaning voters who are leery of his running mate will have new reasons not to vote GOP this year. Doubling down on the coup and treating Mike Pence as if he’s Gen. Jack D. Ripper isn’t what you do if you’re executing a strategy to win the election. It’s what you do if you’re jonesing on your newfound stature as a prominent demagogue or if you’re already looking ahead to the next presidential cycle and keen to position yourself as the populist’s populist.

 

Whichever is true (probably both), it seems meaningful that the intellectual on the ticket has developed a taste for cutthroat demagoguery instead of cultivating a taste among voters for working-class economic policies.

 

Maybe that’s a strategic choice. Possibly Vance would prefer to talk economics but has concluded that what modern Americans really crave is hair-raising insinuations about their cultural enemies. I won’t dispute that: Among Never Trumpers (of which Vance was once famously one), there’s always been a suspicion that it’s not Trump’s immigration policies or his protectionism or even his celebrity that explains his mystique. It’s the pro-wrestling pageantry of how he operates. An unserious people wants to watch its political hero pummel the bad guys, not wonk out over how tax policy might marginally improve their quality of life. In huffing about the Haitian menace, J.D. is simply casting his line where the fish are biting.

 

I think that’s too charitable, though. He’s probably leaned into demagoguery for the same reason most other demagogues do: He enjoys it. It makes him feel powerful.

 

It must be a trip for a poor kid from a broken home to wake up one day and find the governor of his home state pleading with him for mercy. It must be wild to watch his claims about immigrants spreading disease be accepted uncritically by millions despite the fact that they’re untrue. I’m skeptical that Vance has legs as a MAGA leader into the future—some of his hobby horses aren’t theirs, and he’s probably already too disliked to be viable nationally—but you can see a twinkle in his eye when he talks about foreign infiltrators poisoning American communities.

 

A man given to saying things like “I think our people hate the right people” has more Trump in him than he’s been given credit for. We shouldn’t underestimate him.

 

Maybe Vance really is the future of populism, “respectable” or otherwise. He seems to understand what classical liberals—and Trump—have always intuited, that demagoguery isn’t a vehicle for a more progressive economic agenda but vice versa. You don’t take the bitter to get the sweet. You take the sweet in hopes that it’ll win you enough votes to get the bitter.

The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe

By Seth Mandel

Wednesday, September 18, 2024

 

Jews are famously self-deprecating. When we write stories about ourselves, we are depicted as the schlemiels of Chelm. When others write about us, we are mystical demigods and secret agents that put James Bond to shame.

 

This is especially true when it comes to Israeli technology. In season four of the finance drama Billions, the main firm wants to spy on the competition. The CEO’s “fixer” shows up with a camera that can see through privacy glass. As he opens the case to show the spy camera to his boss, he says simply, “It’s Israeli.” What more would anyone need to know?

 

As pagers all over Lebanon exploded yesterday simultaneously, and the apparent facts came to light, there were two reactions: What have the Israelis done? and What are the Israelis about to do?

 

The answer to the first question was that they appear to have intercepted a shipment of pagers used only by Hezbollah and planted remote-detonated explosives in each. The answer to the second was that today, a second-day wave of targeted explosions hit Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies.

 

This is an astonishingly precise operation. And if you’re a reasonable-brained person, you will interpret this to mean that Israel will always minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties when it can.

 

If, instead, you are prone to conspiracist thinking and paranoia about Jews, you will take this mean that Jews possess godlike powers and therefore any collateral damage caused by Israel in any conflict can be assumed to be elective. In this telling, the Jew—especially the Israeli Jew—is sadistic.

 

“Israel having the ability to target militant networks in this sophisticated way as well as its targeting of high level Hamas figures abroad makes its operation in Gaza look even more deliberately genocidal,” posted the liberal writer and historian John Ganz. “And suddenly my phone, our security system, my kids tablets are time bombs that detonate at the whims of one country,” wrote the Egyptian TV host Bassem Youssef. “If converting personal communications devices into IEDs isn’t an act of terrorism then I don’t know what is,” insisted law professor Heidi Matthews, who does not, in fact, know what terrorism is.

 

Ganz’s suggestion, that since Israel can manually blow up pagers it has physically handled and therefore does not need large bombs to penetrate fortified underground tunnels, demonstrates a slight misunderstanding of how anything on earth works. And I can confidently tell Bassem Youssef that his kids’ iPads are safe.

 

But it’s more difficult than you might think to talk sense into such folks because they believe strongly in the Bionic Jew theory of the universe. This goes beyond space lasers or even weather control: It’s a belief in the existence of the super-sabra. In this fantasy, Israel is a place where Jews go to have their software updated, not to learn to use weapons but to become weapons.

 

After all, if Israel can genetically engineer Egyptian attack sharks and radiation-sniffing Iranian lizards, imagine what can be done with human potential.

 

There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.

 

Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.

 

You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.

 

But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.

 

In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.

 

What’s the upper limit here? How many terrorists can Israel target before it violates the international humanitarian law known as It’s Enough Already?

 

The pager operation reportedly required a year of planning and meticulous execution, because Israel is not in fact a nation of Bionic Jews. But in the minds of Israel’s critics, the more powerful the Jews become, the more evil they automatically become. Therefore you don’t actually have to make a case against what Israel does on the merits, you merely have to assert Israel’s power and success. Which hopefully will continue to outpace that of its enemies by leaps and bounds.

For Once, Trump Can Legitimately Argue an Elite Cabal Cheated Him of a Real Win

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, September 19, 2024

 

From the write-up in the Washington Post, the Teamsters’ decision not to endorse a presidential candidate sounds like a defeat for the Kamala Harris campaign:

 

For the first time in nearly three decades, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters won’t endorse a candidate in the presidential race — a blow to the Democratic Party, which has reliably received the union’s approval for years.

 

The Teamsters confirmed the decision not to endorse Wednesday, as the union’s executive board met in Washington and voted on the endorsement.

 

The non-endorsement comes two days after union leaders and members met privately with Vice President Kamala Harris and she laid out her case for an endorsement, underscoring the current administration’s many achievements for unions.

 

“Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business,” said Teamsters president Sean O’Brien in a statement. The union had “sought commitments from both Trump and Harris” specifically about their union campaigns, core industries and right to strike, but “were unable to secure those pledges,” he added.

 

And hey, if you’re Trump, a non-endorsement is better than a Harris endorsement. But judging from the polling of its members that the Teamster Union released Wednesday, Trump was indisputably the preferred choice of the Teamsters rank-and-file. Members surveyed electronically preferred Trump to Harris, 59.6 percent to 34 percent, and members surveyed by phone preferred Trump, 58 percent to 31 percent.

 

Seriously, the Teamsters must rank among the most pro-Trump demographics in America.

 

Keep in mind, the Trump campaign already gave the union an unprecedented gift: Teamsters president Sean O’Brien gave the closing address on the first night of the Republican National Convention, serving up a 17-minute speech that spent a lot of time bragging about how effective the Teamsters are, denounced corporations for “economic terrorism,” and praised Missouri senator Josh Hawley for changing his position to oppose national “right to work” legislation. (Dominic Pino reminds us what the Teamsters Union actually is.)

 

My Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg Corombos and I spent the first segment on Tuesday discussing the rumors that the Teamsters were going to betray Trump and endorse Harris. Trump dodged the worst-case scenario, but . . . based on that poll, he earned the Teamsters endorsement, and the leadership of the union wouldn’t give it to him. A non-endorsement is a tie that really should have been a Trump win.

 

Donald Trump’s New York State of Mind

 

Yesterday was 47 days to Election Day, and Donald Trump held a rally at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale, N.Y., on Long Island.

 

Now, there are three competitive House races on Long Island. If you’re GOP representative Anthony D’Esposito of the fourth congressional district, GOP representative Nick LaLota of the first congressional district, or GOP congressional challenger Mike LiPetri of the third congressional district, Trump did you one of the biggest favors a presidential campaign can do.

 

But that’s about all that’s competitive in that neck of the woods. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is cruising to reelection; despite the occasional contention that she’s “vulnerable,” an August poll showed her at 63 percent. The governor’s race isn’t until 2026, and Democrats have a roughly two-to-one advantage in the New York state senate and state assembly, which are also on the ballot this year.

 

Trump is repeating a familiar — some would say tired — refrain that despite history, polling numbers, and the latest registration numbers that show 6.4 million registered Democrats and 2.9 million Republicans in New York, he’s about to pull a rabbit out of a hat:

 

“When I told some people in Washington, ‘I’m going up to New York, we’re doing a campaign speech,’ they said, ‘What do you mean, New York? You can’t ever — nobody can win. Republicans can’t win,’” Trump recounted to the cheering fans nearly filling a 16,000-seat arena. “I said, ‘I can win New York, and we can win New York.’ We’re going to win!”

 

Every four years, we go through this. It’s not just that Trump loses New York, it’s that he doesn’t even come close to keeping it close. In September 2016, speaking at the New York Conservative Party’s convention, Trump insisted he could win New York. That year, he won 36.5 percent of the vote to Hillary Clinton’s 59 percent. It was his sixth-worst performance in all the states, seventh if you count his 4.09 percent of the vote in the District of Columbia.

 

Then, in August 2020, in an interview with the New York Post, Trump insisted, “New York is in play”:

 

Trump brandished a map of New York’s 2016 presidential election results.

 

The map showed most counties in red, meaning he won them, despite losing the state by 22 points to Democrat Hillary Clinton.

 

Trump tossed the paper across the Resolute Desk toward reporters from The Post. Aides also had copies of the map and handed them out too.

 

The problem for Trump is that while he indeed wins most of the counties in the state, he wins the rural counties that have a lot fewer voters, while his Democratic opponents run up huge margins in the cities. In both 2016 and 2020, in Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, the Democratic nominee won with a margin of around a half-million votes.

 

In 2020, Trump won 37.7 percent of the vote to Joe Biden’s 60.8 percent. It was again his sixth-worst performance in all the states, eighth worst if you count D.C. and Maine’s first congressional district as separate from Maine statewide.

 

Believe it or not, the 2024 presidential election has begun. Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin have already begun mailing out absentee ballots. In Virginia and Minnesota, in-person absentee balloting, a.k.a. early voting, begins Friday.

 

If the Republicans keep the House by a narrow margin with the help of some wins on Long Island, perhaps Wednesday’s rally will be remembered as worthwhile. But if that doesn’t come to pass, and Trump loses the presidential election, many will fairly ask why he was spending a weekday in the middle of September holding a rally in a state he was just about guaranteed to lose in a landslide.

 

Trump also announced at yesterday’s rally that he would go to Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Co. in the coming weeks.

 

There may be some messaging value to holding events in those cities, but polls indicate Trump is currently winning Ohio by about nine percentage points. There’s only been one poll of Colorado since Harris became the Democratic nominee; it showed Harris ahead, 55 percent to 40 percent.

 

The Trump Campaign Is Worried about Omaha, and I Don’t Mean Steaks

 

Tuesday’s newsletter looked at the reasons Trump has the advantage as we get closer to November; Wednesday did the same for Kamala Harris. You didn’t have to look far to find commenters complaining that Tuesday’s edition was unfair or ignoring Harris’s advantages, and that Wednesday’s was one-sided and ignoring Trump’s advantages. Yes, that’s the point. Would it help if I typed slower?

 

For everyone who grumbled about yesterday’s edition and insisted Trump will win in a landslide, I will point out that the Trump campaign is not acting like it expects to win in a landslide. From KOLN in Lincoln, Neb.:

 

Sen. Lindsey Graham met with more than a dozen Republican members of Nebraska’s Unicameral at the governor’s mansion Wednesday morning, multiple state senators confirmed. Graham visited with lawmakers about the topic of winner-take-all in Nebraska.

 

“He wanted us to kind of understand the national picture,” State Sen. Tom Brewer, the head of the Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee. That’s the committee that would likely take up a winner-take-all bill if a special session gets called.

 

On Friday, Gov. Jim Pillen said that a special session to make Nebraska a winner-take-all state in the Electoral College has been in the works. But Pillen will not call a special session until he has 33 votes to ensure a bill is passed.

 

Most of the state senators who gathered at the governor’s mansion are ready to pass a winner-take-all bill, but a few holdouts remain, according to lawmakers. Senators estimate that 30 to 31 votes have been confirmed.

 

Sen. Graham spoke to the senators with the hopes of encouraging the final holdouts to change their minds.

 

“Depending on how the count comes up, it may very well decide who the next president United States is going be,” Brewer said. “And [Graham] just wanted us to understand the big picture, that this is a national issue, not just in Nebraska.”

 

If you think you’re on your way to winning in a landslide, you don’t spend time and effort trying to pass a last-minute change to ensure you win five electoral votes instead of four in Nebraska.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in my column in the Washington Post, a deeper dive into why the FBI crime statistics in recent years aren’t a particularly reliable measuring stick of whether violent crime is up or down:

 

As the Marshall Project explains, in 2021, “in an effort to fully modernize the system, the FBI stopped taking data from the old summary system and only accepted data through the new system. Thousands of police agencies fell through the cracks because they didn’t catch up with the changes on time.” That year, Miami-Dade, New York City and Los Angeles did not submit their data. Philadelphia reported nine months’ worth of data; Chicago reported seven months, and Phoenix reported only one month. For 2021, the FBI noted, “crime estimates will fill in the gaps where data is not available.”

 

In 2022, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia and Chicago got the data in, but Phoenix didn’t, and neither did New York or Los Angeles. Crime statistics that don’t include information from the two largest U.S. cities would seem to guarantee an incomplete understanding about the state of crime in America.

 

The stumbling transition to the new FBI reporting system meant big variations in the number of law enforcement agencies that participate year by year. In 2020, 16,572 of 18,641 participated (88 percent). The following year, when the new system was introduced, saw a big drop in participation: just 13,344 of 18,939 (70 percent). The next year, 2022, brought a rebound, with 16,100 of 18,930 participating (85 percent).

 

But even for 2020, the FBI was missing crime reports from about 2,000 jurisdictions. The most recent complete year in the FBI Crime Data Explorer is 2022, but the numbers in the quarter that Garland cited included data from 13,719 of 19,268 law enforcement agencies in the country — 71 percent.

It is increasingly clear that many people participating in our public debates don’t care about whether what they’re saying is true; they just want to assert that their guy is doing a terrific job.