Exactly. I have come to accept Yascha Mounk’s self-anointed crusade to scold the American left into submission but that does not permit the fabrication of political nonsense.
I often get upset at Yascha, but I respect him. I think he is trying to scold the left into giving labor some bargaining power again. What is it you mean by permitting "the fabrication of political nonsense"?
Ah, okay. Well, technically, he DOES have a mandate, if not a robust one. Trump's first term was dismissed as a fluke due to the electoral college. Democrats no longer have that excuse.
Hopefully, you'll forgive me for not making the connection between Yascha's ill-chosen adjective and an excuse to dismiss the entire article as political nonsense.
Hi Eric. I appreciate your comment and I'll do my best to reply in the same spirit of reasonable inquiry I think you intended.
I'll take your second point first. When I meant by "the fabrication of political nonsense" is exactly that "ill-chosen adjective." (And I disagree that "technically, he does have amandate." LBJ had a mandate in 1964 Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984. Winning an election does not produce a mandate, unless the numbers suggest an overwhelming shift in public sentiment evidenced by at least a 10-point vote differential; 2024's did not. I'd add that none of those mandates turned out as well as voters had hoped.)
I realize Mounk hopes to attract readers from across the political spectrum, but this is, pure and simple, a misstatement of fact in favor of a Trumpist propaganda point--as though he's tossing chum into the water to attract MAGA readers. He could have framed the instead in terms of arguably viable policy goals--and I think Trumpism has some, in terms of rejuvenating American industry, rebuilding American communities, focusing on working people (which Biden's policies did as well, I might add). But the implementation by Trump has gone astray. That makes his point without conjuring a falsehood. (I'd argue the going astray was a fundamental objective all along, and the viable policy goals were a mere smoke screen, but it's his article, not mine.)
As for Mounk trying to scold the left into giving labot more bargaining power again--if he was doing that, I'd be all for it. But that's Thomas Frank, not Yashca Mounk. I've read Mounk's excellent The Identity Trap and recommend it often, but there's nothing about advocating for working people in it. (If I'm wrong, please let me know.)
And btw, again unless I'm mistaken, he's never had Thomas Frank as an interview subject. Why not? I come here for the interviews, incidentally, because the people he invites tend to be far more nuanced and less stuck on one idea than he is.
Take today, for example. His interview with Claire Lehmann once again flogs the wokeness/cancel culture horse despite his interviewee's own statement that the "horrible experiences" that peaked in 2018-2019 have "died down now, thankfully," a remark Mounk pays absolutely no attention to. To do this in the current context, where the "cancellations" of Trumpism, with the full power of the government to enforce them, and a recent EO militarizing the police and recruiting the armed forces into domestic police work despite the fact the crime is actually decreasing--why do you thik that is?--amounts to intellectual malpractice. Mounk is stuck in his own thesis, sadly. And his criticisms in the article we're talking about here struck me as weak tea.
Worse, take a look at the sheer distribution of space today between his "questions" and Lehmann's answers. The term "mansplaining" comes to mind. (Similarly, his jab at the "1619 left" occurred in his interview with Ivan Krestev--why the insinuation of race? Richard Rorty made the same point 30 years ago but employed the term "the unpatriotic left." His knee-jerk tendency to attack the core constituencies of the left in favor of some idealized liberalism is a bit too cute by half in my estimation.) And his questions so often become self-congratulatory expositions at the expense of his interview subjects that I find myself skipping over them to get to what the other person has to say.
That said, given the quality of the people he attracts, I remain onboard, and am willing to forebear.
Once again, thanks for your comment and your question. Take care--beyond this point, there be monsters.
...and "mandates" are a ridiculous concept to begin with. Biden thought he had a mandate too. If anyone had a mandate it was Ronald Reagan, but again, the US system doesn't incorporate "mandates" into how the executive branch is allowed to function.
"There was no public clamor for... throwing trans people out of the military." That's true. There was just an enormous amount of private clamor among servicemembers, which was studiously ignored by the media. Why actually gather data from actual warfighters when you can impose unworkable ideas from the top down?
The Trump administration's (early) revitalization of our military is one of the best and most important policy changes that could have been made. We take military effectiveness for granted here but we really shouldn't.
Former Marine Officer here with several friends and colleagues still on active duty. You are *way* off base in your assessment of what he's doing to the military. There was no "enormous amount of private clamor" to unceremoniously kick out these service members who were only doing their jobs. It only hurts readiness as does the efforts to politicize the military. Also, Hegseth is in waaaaaaaaaaaaay over his head. Anyone who doesn't see that is deluding himself.
There is a famous quip by Hitler that Keitel was "the brains of a sergeant in a field marshal's uniform"... Both Hegseth and Vance are basically grunts who think they are West Point grads. They may carry a common soldier's mentality, but running major militaries is basically being an executive of a massive logistics & HR concern.
The lapse of discipline with the Signal thing is a seriously bad sign.
Funny how you talk of Hegseth and Vance as being incompetent, but the best you can come up with by way of example is that a journalist was inadvertently added into the email chain.
Using external non-USG secured comms is a huge lapse of judgment and diligence. Hillary should have been prosecuted for it… Granted the scale is different. I support the swamp-draining program mind you, but objectively both boys are over their heads.
You say that, objectively they are over their heads. But, objectively you have made no case whatsoever. You have expressed an opinion, and you are welcome to it. That does not constitute objectivity.
Y'know, back in the day we used to refer to "soldiers"... y'know, professionals in military service. Now we have "warfighters" in an age when no one declares wars anymore; just seems like tacticool slang rather than something used by people in honourable service to their countries.
Back in the day there was conscription. This exposed the Blob to democratic accountability. That is no longer the case, for obvious reasons. I would like to hear how our latest foreign policy misadventures were honorable. I'm talking about the ones where we sent soldiers, and about the reasons for the wars, not the soldiers themselves.
Trump had no mandate. He had a plurality, no majority. Mandates happen when there's majority. And that bandage on his ear? The photos taken right after the shooting showed blood at the top of his ear, the very top, and two pathways of blood - one from the mouth to his ear and the other from his ear to the top part of his cheek. That "bandage" was all for show as he bragged to RFK, Jr. afterwards but before RFK Jr. signed on that his injury was less than a mosquito bite.
Electoral outcomes, when observed over time, display statistical regularities, yet these patterns are not temporally stable. While certain jurisdictions may appear structurally robust, the persistence of political equilibria is contingent on a range of economic and institutional factors. In this sense, stability is often illusory, a function of historical path dependence rather than an inherent characteristic of the system itself. It is particularly relevant to consider how shifts in political preferences can be conceptualized probabilistically, with different regimes corresponding to distinct probability distributions. Movements toward the tails of these distributions should be avoided, as they are typically dangerous and, more often than not, unidirectional.
He had a majority, the only majority that matters in the US: an electoral college majority. Yascha never said he had a popular mandate. In my view, every president has a mandate: a mandate to enact as best they can, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, the platform upon which they were elected. Clearly Trump missed the part about bounds, however.
You have no government now - pure chaos as the billionaires loot the place at will and have been since Elmo started that DOGE thing and rifled all gov't property. In truth, as he was not authorized to do so because there was no consent or disapproval by the Senate, he and Big Balls. etc., were vandals breaking the law. In addition, Elmo was looking to take out what's left of the safety net and he's doing that the slow way by not cutting Soc Sec, just cutting staff already stretched to the breaking point to go on record in a few months to tell you that "government doesn't work" so he can give the money to Wall Street to take its 20% off the top and subject you to the roller coaster ride that Wall Street takes. Have fun with that, anarcho boy.
Oh, and the price of food and everything we get will rise bigly in about 8 weeks when the current supply runs out and the next has the full throttle tariff thingy - government at its most ludicrous and most costly to any non millionaire living. More fun for you, anarcho boy.
I expect this is all way over your head because you don't even know what constitutes a mandate. Pay attention this year as the bottom drops out of your ability to afford the lifestyle your currently have. It's guaranteed to disappear as the stupidest, lyingest man on the face of the earth destroys every possible notion of freedom and well-being.
Know this: in a dictatorship, which is Trump & Co's wet dream, contains only one person who is not an "other" like gay, female, no-white, non-Christian. And that one person is the dictator himself. Pay attention as Trump rachets up his plan to start deporting American citizens because if you and he live long enough, you just might be on one of those outbound flights to who knows what gulag he's cooked up for you.
Where's the freedom he's promised you in all this?
Trump won just under 50% of the vote. House Republicans won a small majority. They won by a small amount despite voter anger about inflation and Biden’s & Harris’s unpopularity. Trump was less popular at his inauguration than any previous President except himself in 2016. I don’t think mandate describes this.
On the other hand, the evidence suggests that in much of the country Democrats were and have been rejected. It’s possible to win the Presidency and House by dominating population centers. But the Senate? Governors’ races and state legislatures? Not possible without a massive change in how Democrats have operated. Democrats need to compete in more places, govern better in blue states and cities, and get back to having an ideological diverse party with a few core commitments. I vote for choosing the core commitments to be 1) against $ in politics, 2) pro-democracy, and 3) a focus on improving the lives of most Americans rather than the richest.
OK. I'm kind of on board. But I am trying to raise awareness of how it is "the rule of law" with respects to foreign policy that is currently in tension with what we might think of as traditional democracy. Of course, our domestic institutions should be maintained. Left and right MUST pay attention to international "rule of law", and seek to rewrite those laws, if your values are what you stated above, Conor.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the rule of law” with respect to foreign policy that is currently in tension with what we might think of traditional democracy”.
The short version? I cannot find the spirit of what we used to call democracy in the liberal international order, even if the procedures remain (namely, elections).
I am going to copy and paste the long version, which I wrote somewhere else. I don't think it will match tonally, but, oh well :-) Feel free to read it if you're curious. Cheers.
In our world of economic interdependence, sovereignty must be ceded to coordinate the legislation of participating trading partners. Then, it is the judiciary that upholds “the rule of law,” in which, internationally, the only acceptable laws are those which expose states to the economic discipline of the global market. If the citizens of a state decide, for example, that they do not want their manufacturing to be sent to a state whose comparative advantage is cheap labor, and they attempt to become autarkic, their state is sanctioned and shunned by the international community and will almost certainly remain poor. When your choices are autarky (and poor) or economic interdependence (and great wealth for some), you might choose the latter. But then it is not the will of the people, rather the invisible [iron fist] of the global market which governs a state, and the poor plebs are left to be organized by the logic of comparative advantage.
This model used to have legitimacy, as countries were emerging from debt crises and after the Cold War there was a widespread yearning for economic growth. But it has run its course and created a whole host of new problems, the largest of which, in my opinion, is that it has created an untouchable class of global elites, who identify with one another, and generally despise the masses who stay rooted to place, to their traditions, their livelihoods, and their communities. The global elites’ capital, businesses, and, of course, their selves can float over borders, and their interest in keeping it that way are protected by the “rule of law.” Their armies of legislators and judges make it so the law is impenetrable to a pleb – or any professional who does not specialize in international law, for that matter. And they believe that their system is too important to be smashed to pieces by the will of the people, who understand that their lives are being governed by great and far away forces, even if they cannot articulate it. But, through freedom of speech, they are trying and getting closer to being able to do so. Their collective finger-pointing, once confused, is settling on the right target. Therefore, the censorship apparatuses are being constructed by the global elite to silence the plebs and protect economic interdependence. Economic interdependence is the liberal international order (LIO), or rules [of law] based order (RBO), or, as I like to call it, the empire which America has built.
But the laws which created economic interdependence were negotiated after WWII, and negotiations eventually led to neoliberalism in the 90s. Neoliberalism is no longer legitimate to the plebs. They don’t think it’s fair that their communities can be uprooted by a member of the global elite, who shares nothing in common, no tradition, no livelihood, no community, no values, who sends manufacturing across the world, because capital is electronic and can zip through the SWIFT international banking system (and, of course, it can influence elections across borders), and then the supply chain can be built from that place that has no labor laws by eliminating tariffs. How do you erect / eliminate tariffs? By LAW. These neoliberal laws were negotiated decades ago, But the sclerotic judiciaries of states participating in the LIO are still linked, and they uphold it. The elite have A LOT of interest in maintaining this neoliberal “rule of law,” because they own A LOT of wealth because of it. They conflate Trump's blatant disregard for international law as disregard for domestic institutions, and they simply say "rule of law."
Think, “judiciary = rule of LAW.” Now think, “In democracies all across the LIO, the plebs don’t like the great and far away forces that govern their lives and are saying so.” Now think, “Politicians passed speech LAWS. Political parties passed disinformation LAWS.” "Capital is allowed by LAW to cross boarders and can manufacture consent (Chomsky)." "Tariffs are eliminated by LAW so that supply chains can start from places where labor has no protection nor bargaining power." This is the LIO rule of LAW.
The rule of law means no king, dictator, or president can rule on a whim. It helps tremendously with economic stability and growth. But every now and then an executive like Trump comes along and embodies the will of (mostly) the working class, and so threatens the "rule of law" with a "popular" mandate. (Populism). Understand this tension, and you will understand our times. We have a populist, revolutionary executive, and a status quo judiciary.
Nobody knows what the legislature is doing, but they can truly save democracy IF the Democratic Party elite realize that the jig is up, relinquish their grip on the judges upholding neoliberalism, stop pushing so much terrible, low-quality propaganda that’s got their activists carving swastikas in Teslas, and allow labor some bargaining power again in their party. It is in this moment that the Democratic Party will reform, many who support Trump will turncoat over to the Dems, and the political pressure will be released like opening a steam-valve. If the Democratic Party elites insist on fighting for neoliberalism, they may win, but the victory will be Pyrrhic. The tools they must use will make it evident that there can be no “true” democratic opposition, and we will lose American democracy for real.
This liberal intentional order has little to do with opposition to Trump.
Judges have not attempted to stop Trump from his foreign policy or trade endeavors. Those opposing them have been arguing that we benefit when countries trust us, when borders are respected, and when we don’t send the country into a depression on purpose.
Due process is guaranteed in our Constitution. The separation of powers is laid out in our constitution. Free speech is in the constitution’s first amendment. These aren’t artifacts of international law or the liberal international order.
Electoral outcomes, when observed over time, display statistical regularities, yet these patterns are not temporally stable. While certain jurisdictions may appear structurally robust, the persistence of political equilibria is contingent on a range of economic and institutional factors. In this sense, stability is often illusory, a function of historical path dependence rather than an inherent characteristic of the system itself. It is particularly relevant to consider how shifts in political preferences can be conceptualized probabilistically, with different regimes corresponding to distinct probability distributions. Movements toward the tails of these distributions should be avoided, as they are typically dangerous and, more often than not, unidirectional.
Trump and his peeps don’t get the difference between administrators and legit scientists, between curriculum designers trying to erase “dead white men” from the curriculum and swap in Judith Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and professors like Roosevelt Montas, Yaschas’ former podcast guest. There are many like Montas- smart, committed educators who might lean left culturally but do not agree with the latest identitarian panic on coastal college campuses. If Trump and Vance and Kevin Roberts were smart enough to surgically cut funding and restructure the rules for tuition and hiring administrators at state colleges, they could have empowered Montas and others to change direction. Instead they are seen as anti-education by most Americans.
I was also very troubled reading about Elon Musks private schools for his own children. Apparently he teaches them only math, engineering, biology… No humanities courses. Absolutely misguided. Just because many humanities courses are mistaught doesn’t mean that Adam Smith, Hamilton, Emerson, Frances Perkins, Frederick Douglass should not be passed on to the next generations. Hopefully these unis win their battle for academic independence and then reform on their own.
Trump and Project 2025 should tell Republican states to make laws limiting administrators and then stage a campaign exposing the fact that the endless growth of admins is the reason for ballooning college costs. Trump doesn’t have direct control of state budgets, but he can set the direction of the GOP and then pressure the Dems as well. Even in blue states, young people and Moms hate how much they pay for college and how labyrinthine the admissions process is. All of the Diversity offices, etc. are useless
I hold little hope that the left will pull themselves together. Many of the comments here are focused on quibbling whether trump has a 'mandate' or not. This is a good example of how incapable the left is of understanding that they have missed a clear change mandate from America's middle class for the last decade. This mandate was not to put more boys into girls sports, or renaming schools or any other far-left cultural nonsense of the past decade. The mandate was to address an economic system that for the last 40 years has not worked for most Americans.
Democrats have been deeply culpable along with Republicans in enabling the hollowing out of America's middle class with both parties no longer representing Americans but instead representing big-moneyed interests in a captured DC. trump promised to 'burn it all down' and to 'be the retribution' of middle America. At least he 'got' the issue well enough to exploit it. The left will never even 'get' the issue and will remain on the outside of power looking in for a very long time.
As for me, I am hopeless and hold so much contempt for the severely broken Democratic Party that has let us down so badly. Yes Republicans are worse, but that doesn't matter, no answers will come from them, the only answers could have come from a functional opponent truly interested in helping middle America, of which there is none.
The “national mood” was a 3 decade long project of resentment and innuendo racism on radio, tv and podcasts. Every time traditional Republicans went to cut social safety net programs, Americans said no thank you. So they pivoted and highlighted changes in demographics, social mobility, educational opportunities, and scientific data combined with fears after 9/11 and at lightening speed with covid.
This is a party of grift and opportunism - Newt, DeLay, Cheney, Romney mixed with christian nationalism by a minority for whom “its better to have a stable government under a crook than turmoil under an honest man. God wants stability” (Pat Robertson).
If the opposition is to have any chance, younger leadership that impresses younger voters to be engaged is required. A party that propagates that democracy is served by debate and evaluation of how we attain prosperity for as many as possible. Not pull up the ladder behind as the neoliberal Boomers embraced. That taxation is a means for growth and investment for everyone’s community, which is why it worked for the last 80 years. We allowed weapons and war divert our wealth and attention.
We have the power for a better future. We just have to counter the lies and cynically corrupt opportunists - every day on a national scale. Which means the burden of leadership that is honest needs to start, yesterday.
Good commentary, Yascha. But I’m afraid I have to agree with Tom, 1:44 pm.
Deficit and National Debt, which incidentally created inflation and amount to an enormous tax on the poor, seem so obvious a problem that it’s impossible to imagine what the Democrats are thinking. That alone is an “existential threat” (to coin a phrase). Where have all the brains that we need in the major political parties gone?
Similarly, how can anyone think that Iran moving toward a nuclear bomb can be “managed.” The naïveté is mind-boggling.
Inadequate, virtually fraudulent offerings by the Dems required that we elect Trump. Nobody is delighted with him, and he may be wrong about some important things. But one more term of Obama, Biden, Harris might have tipped us over the edge into REAL chaos. That crowd offers less than nothing.
What will the tariffs be tomorrow or god forbid by the end of the month?
What other private companies will be extorted like the law firms and universities?
Will any private citizens be sent to El Salvador to never be seen again?
Will Trump pardon anyone who physically harms an elected official like Jan 6 cop beaters?
Will the DOJ "investigate" other private citizens who don't support Trump?
Under Trump, the US did worse than the rest of world in regard to Covid (more deaths, more economic decline). Under Biden, the US did much better than most of the rest of the world (lower inflation, less economic decline and faster recovery). Not the mention REAL legislation to bring jobs back to the US.
More of Trump is definitely chaos. More of Biden definitely not chaos.
After seeing Catherine Fitt's recent interview with Tucker, Trump is nothing more than a bowling pin trying to avoid the oncoming bowling ball. His mandate is not freedom friendly. Most of what he is doing is done via the EO route and all EOs can be undone. It's great theater but hardly what we need to survive and save the world.
Trump has effectively been forced into doing a deal that betrays the core promises he ran on—no mass deportations, “America First” has become “Israel First,” and the border wall remains imaginary. He gained the opportunity for private gain, status and avoiding jail in exchange for being a globalist zionist puppet.
It’s honestly remarkable that you've managed to produce an article like this—the narrative is an almost complete inversion of reality.
Your comment requires context - the context is the alternative Democrat policy: Make America great for the rich by impoverishing the poorer 92 percent. To the average person these don't look too different.
The only difference for the working class man between D & R is what heights you get shat on from. The true tax injustice is the preferential treatment of assets vs earned income - something the Dems will not touch because they are just as beholden to the business class.
Simply not true. The dems have always been better for the working guy. Look at the difference between Obamacare and Trump's No Billionaire Left Behind tax cuts, simple and clear examples of polar opposites that any person can see. Your stance is beyond absurd.
Thank you for taking the time to answer - consider this.
Wages have stagnated behind growth since 1971 or thereabouts - that is not exclusively a GOP issue (not even exclusively American issue). The entire economic consensus stinks, the main reason I believe the “left” (Dems?) betrayed working people is the sacrifice of high quality jobs for low-wage service work through globalism and mass importation of cheap labour.
I don’t necessarily claim the right is better for the working class, but I do claim the other side has failed to do the job. My stance is not absurd - it is exactly the thought pattern that drove wc voters to Trump. The left needs to see this instead of doubling down on “minoritarianism” and wokeism.
A very well-weighted article. People focus so much on Trump's grandiosity and puffery they forget that he only beat whatever opposition was put up to him. The Democratic product stinks (as does the centre/left's everywhere). The population only have a choice between neo-liberal economics with-wokeism or without. A genuine social-democratic economic program combined with receding from woke excess back to reasonable middle-ground liberalism would reclaim govt easily.
It wasn't that Trump turned out more voters than he did the last election. It was that 10 million dem voters sat on their couches when they realized that the Biden faction had duped them, and then when caught tried to substitute their own replacement at the last moment. The dems beat themselves.
How was his campaign misleading? I think the governance in the second term is much more in line with his campaign promises than his first term. He realized that from 2017-2020 he wasn't allowed to deport illegal migrants and cancel funding for left wing universities and take over the Kennedy center and stop it from staging Hamilton and the latest musical about Taransgenderism because there were all of these leftist loyalists just below him handing down the orders. This time he is just firing them and installing people who actually want change. It is good when politicians fulfill their promises. That outcome has become vanishingly rare, unfortunately.
His most important promises turned out to be lies.
1. He said he was going to bring down the price of groceries during the campaign, then the day after the election he backpedaled and said it would be "very difficult". Now he's given up on that entirely and doesn't care if his insane tariffs bring higher prices, as long as no one can clearly point to them as the cause.
The economy was his biggest selling point, so he lied about it.
2. When Project 2025 was publicized and people hated it, he said he knew nothing about Project 2025, hadn't read the documents, and strongly implied that he wasn't in favor of it. Then he hired Russell Vought, and his administration has implemented much of Project 2025 already and is clearly going to try to implement it all.
The incredibly unpopular agenda of Project 2025 was one of his biggest drawbacks, so he lied about it. Well, sort of lied. I'm sure he was telling the truth when he said he hadn't read it and didn't know what it was. But he wasted no time hiring people to implement it.
The economy needs to be made healthy and supportive of honest people again, not money lenders and welfare queen grifters. Shops that sell plastic Chinese made toys can go out of business, that is completely fine.
The "incredibly unpopular" agenda is not unpopular at all. I want to traumatize the bureaucrats. I don't want to pay for aids medicine in Africa. I don't want to pay for deconstructing the nuclear family in functioning Catholic societies like Peru and Poland. I want social security abolished and so do most people I know under 30. I want porn criminalized. I want fentanyl traffickers arrested and punished harshly and I want the Mexican government to be strangled economically until they crack down on their drug gangs.
The fact is, society was made way too open, permissive, decadent, "Inclusive." Government subsidizes absolutely everything, even disastrously bad investments and totally immoral practices (like abortion and transgender surgery). They subsidize every group, minority, whiner, except for young men. The solution is to downsize the government and recover vitality and moral standards. Project 2025 heads in that direction generally and I and all of my friends (males under 30) completely support it.
The difference between Trump and ostensibly enlightened centrists like you is that Trump genuinely wants to save the country, while what you desire is a more intellectually defensible managed decline.
Stopping the flow of cheap stuff from China that we’ve been buying on credit was always going to be difficult. Removing cheap illegal immigrants' labor was always going to be unpopular with groups whose jobs weren't being taken by said immigrants. Reforming NATO by asking nicely was never going to work, and we know that because it’s what every US president in my lifetime has tried, and none succeeded.
Trump hasn't “gone too far,” on the contrary. He hasn't gone far enough on almost any of the significant threats facing the country.
Where were you when the extremism of the Biden administration took the country to the brink of bankruptcy? I agree that Trump could have been more effective by spending his finite political capital more wisely. At a minimum, Trump provided the electric shock therapy that we need to get out of the Biden coma.
Could you please give an example of how the country was on the brink of bankruptcy? Last I checked my 401k was way up and inflation was well on its way down when he left office. Today the economy was reported to have shrunk -.3% (down from 2.4 in Q4), the core PCE is up to 3.5% (up from a forecasted 3.1%), public sentiment about the economy has sunk to its lowest level since 2011 and payroll processor ADP showed private employers added just 62,000 jobs last month vs forecasts of 125,00 and down from a revised 147,000. If this is the cure for "Biden's Coma" then I'd just a soon go back to sleep.
Trump won by 1.5% of the popular vote. I do not consider that to be a "robust mandate".
Exactly. I have come to accept Yascha Mounk’s self-anointed crusade to scold the American left into submission but that does not permit the fabrication of political nonsense.
I often get upset at Yascha, but I respect him. I think he is trying to scold the left into giving labor some bargaining power again. What is it you mean by permitting "the fabrication of political nonsense"?
A mandate, Eric, a mandate!!!
Ah, okay. Well, technically, he DOES have a mandate, if not a robust one. Trump's first term was dismissed as a fluke due to the electoral college. Democrats no longer have that excuse.
Hopefully, you'll forgive me for not making the connection between Yascha's ill-chosen adjective and an excuse to dismiss the entire article as political nonsense.
Hi Eric. I appreciate your comment and I'll do my best to reply in the same spirit of reasonable inquiry I think you intended.
I'll take your second point first. When I meant by "the fabrication of political nonsense" is exactly that "ill-chosen adjective." (And I disagree that "technically, he does have amandate." LBJ had a mandate in 1964 Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984. Winning an election does not produce a mandate, unless the numbers suggest an overwhelming shift in public sentiment evidenced by at least a 10-point vote differential; 2024's did not. I'd add that none of those mandates turned out as well as voters had hoped.)
I realize Mounk hopes to attract readers from across the political spectrum, but this is, pure and simple, a misstatement of fact in favor of a Trumpist propaganda point--as though he's tossing chum into the water to attract MAGA readers. He could have framed the instead in terms of arguably viable policy goals--and I think Trumpism has some, in terms of rejuvenating American industry, rebuilding American communities, focusing on working people (which Biden's policies did as well, I might add). But the implementation by Trump has gone astray. That makes his point without conjuring a falsehood. (I'd argue the going astray was a fundamental objective all along, and the viable policy goals were a mere smoke screen, but it's his article, not mine.)
As for Mounk trying to scold the left into giving labot more bargaining power again--if he was doing that, I'd be all for it. But that's Thomas Frank, not Yashca Mounk. I've read Mounk's excellent The Identity Trap and recommend it often, but there's nothing about advocating for working people in it. (If I'm wrong, please let me know.)
And btw, again unless I'm mistaken, he's never had Thomas Frank as an interview subject. Why not? I come here for the interviews, incidentally, because the people he invites tend to be far more nuanced and less stuck on one idea than he is.
Take today, for example. His interview with Claire Lehmann once again flogs the wokeness/cancel culture horse despite his interviewee's own statement that the "horrible experiences" that peaked in 2018-2019 have "died down now, thankfully," a remark Mounk pays absolutely no attention to. To do this in the current context, where the "cancellations" of Trumpism, with the full power of the government to enforce them, and a recent EO militarizing the police and recruiting the armed forces into domestic police work despite the fact the crime is actually decreasing--why do you thik that is?--amounts to intellectual malpractice. Mounk is stuck in his own thesis, sadly. And his criticisms in the article we're talking about here struck me as weak tea.
Worse, take a look at the sheer distribution of space today between his "questions" and Lehmann's answers. The term "mansplaining" comes to mind. (Similarly, his jab at the "1619 left" occurred in his interview with Ivan Krestev--why the insinuation of race? Richard Rorty made the same point 30 years ago but employed the term "the unpatriotic left." His knee-jerk tendency to attack the core constituencies of the left in favor of some idealized liberalism is a bit too cute by half in my estimation.) And his questions so often become self-congratulatory expositions at the expense of his interview subjects that I find myself skipping over them to get to what the other person has to say.
That said, given the quality of the people he attracts, I remain onboard, and am willing to forebear.
Once again, thanks for your comment and your question. Take care--beyond this point, there be monsters.
Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply, David.
I was not familiar with Frank, but I googled him. I'm pretty busy, so I had ChatGPT summarize the following article in bullet points: https://jacobin.com/2024/11/democrats-trump-election-working-class
Here is the last thing ChatGPT spit out:
"What Needs to Change (...)
Frank:
Democratic Party needs internal democracy; Clintonian centrists should step down.
Abandon technocracy and wokeness.
Present a real plan for reindustrialization, especially for “sacrifice states.”
Stop telling people to 'get a degree and move to the Sunbelt' — it's politically suicidal."
Points two and four look a lot like Yascha's "scolding" to me, but what do I know? It's my introduction to the man.
Thanks again, and the same to you. Take care.
...and "mandates" are a ridiculous concept to begin with. Biden thought he had a mandate too. If anyone had a mandate it was Ronald Reagan, but again, the US system doesn't incorporate "mandates" into how the executive branch is allowed to function.
"There was no public clamor for... throwing trans people out of the military." That's true. There was just an enormous amount of private clamor among servicemembers, which was studiously ignored by the media. Why actually gather data from actual warfighters when you can impose unworkable ideas from the top down?
The Trump administration's (early) revitalization of our military is one of the best and most important policy changes that could have been made. We take military effectiveness for granted here but we really shouldn't.
Former Marine Officer here with several friends and colleagues still on active duty. You are *way* off base in your assessment of what he's doing to the military. There was no "enormous amount of private clamor" to unceremoniously kick out these service members who were only doing their jobs. It only hurts readiness as does the efforts to politicize the military. Also, Hegseth is in waaaaaaaaaaaaay over his head. Anyone who doesn't see that is deluding himself.
There is a famous quip by Hitler that Keitel was "the brains of a sergeant in a field marshal's uniform"... Both Hegseth and Vance are basically grunts who think they are West Point grads. They may carry a common soldier's mentality, but running major militaries is basically being an executive of a massive logistics & HR concern.
The lapse of discipline with the Signal thing is a seriously bad sign.
Funny how you talk of Hegseth and Vance as being incompetent, but the best you can come up with by way of example is that a journalist was inadvertently added into the email chain.
Using external non-USG secured comms is a huge lapse of judgment and diligence. Hillary should have been prosecuted for it… Granted the scale is different. I support the swamp-draining program mind you, but objectively both boys are over their heads.
You say that, objectively they are over their heads. But, objectively you have made no case whatsoever. You have expressed an opinion, and you are welcome to it. That does not constitute objectivity.
Y'know, back in the day we used to refer to "soldiers"... y'know, professionals in military service. Now we have "warfighters" in an age when no one declares wars anymore; just seems like tacticool slang rather than something used by people in honourable service to their countries.
I first saw that term a few years ago and thought it was a little kid writing.
Back in the day there was conscription. This exposed the Blob to democratic accountability. That is no longer the case, for obvious reasons. I would like to hear how our latest foreign policy misadventures were honorable. I'm talking about the ones where we sent soldiers, and about the reasons for the wars, not the soldiers themselves.
Trump had no mandate. He had a plurality, no majority. Mandates happen when there's majority. And that bandage on his ear? The photos taken right after the shooting showed blood at the top of his ear, the very top, and two pathways of blood - one from the mouth to his ear and the other from his ear to the top part of his cheek. That "bandage" was all for show as he bragged to RFK, Jr. afterwards but before RFK Jr. signed on that his injury was less than a mosquito bite.
Electoral outcomes, when observed over time, display statistical regularities, yet these patterns are not temporally stable. While certain jurisdictions may appear structurally robust, the persistence of political equilibria is contingent on a range of economic and institutional factors. In this sense, stability is often illusory, a function of historical path dependence rather than an inherent characteristic of the system itself. It is particularly relevant to consider how shifts in political preferences can be conceptualized probabilistically, with different regimes corresponding to distinct probability distributions. Movements toward the tails of these distributions should be avoided, as they are typically dangerous and, more often than not, unidirectional.
He had a majority, the only majority that matters in the US: an electoral college majority. Yascha never said he had a popular mandate. In my view, every president has a mandate: a mandate to enact as best they can, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, the platform upon which they were elected. Clearly Trump missed the part about bounds, however.
The only mandate is FREEDOM first above all else and government should be last on the list of things that are important.
You have no government now - pure chaos as the billionaires loot the place at will and have been since Elmo started that DOGE thing and rifled all gov't property. In truth, as he was not authorized to do so because there was no consent or disapproval by the Senate, he and Big Balls. etc., were vandals breaking the law. In addition, Elmo was looking to take out what's left of the safety net and he's doing that the slow way by not cutting Soc Sec, just cutting staff already stretched to the breaking point to go on record in a few months to tell you that "government doesn't work" so he can give the money to Wall Street to take its 20% off the top and subject you to the roller coaster ride that Wall Street takes. Have fun with that, anarcho boy.
Oh, and the price of food and everything we get will rise bigly in about 8 weeks when the current supply runs out and the next has the full throttle tariff thingy - government at its most ludicrous and most costly to any non millionaire living. More fun for you, anarcho boy.
I expect this is all way over your head because you don't even know what constitutes a mandate. Pay attention this year as the bottom drops out of your ability to afford the lifestyle your currently have. It's guaranteed to disappear as the stupidest, lyingest man on the face of the earth destroys every possible notion of freedom and well-being.
Know this: in a dictatorship, which is Trump & Co's wet dream, contains only one person who is not an "other" like gay, female, no-white, non-Christian. And that one person is the dictator himself. Pay attention as Trump rachets up his plan to start deporting American citizens because if you and he live long enough, you just might be on one of those outbound flights to who knows what gulag he's cooked up for you.
Where's the freedom he's promised you in all this?
Trump won just under 50% of the vote. House Republicans won a small majority. They won by a small amount despite voter anger about inflation and Biden’s & Harris’s unpopularity. Trump was less popular at his inauguration than any previous President except himself in 2016. I don’t think mandate describes this.
On the other hand, the evidence suggests that in much of the country Democrats were and have been rejected. It’s possible to win the Presidency and House by dominating population centers. But the Senate? Governors’ races and state legislatures? Not possible without a massive change in how Democrats have operated. Democrats need to compete in more places, govern better in blue states and cities, and get back to having an ideological diverse party with a few core commitments. I vote for choosing the core commitments to be 1) against $ in politics, 2) pro-democracy, and 3) a focus on improving the lives of most Americans rather than the richest.
OK. I'm kind of on board. But I am trying to raise awareness of how it is "the rule of law" with respects to foreign policy that is currently in tension with what we might think of as traditional democracy. Of course, our domestic institutions should be maintained. Left and right MUST pay attention to international "rule of law", and seek to rewrite those laws, if your values are what you stated above, Conor.
I’m not sure what you mean by “the rule of law” with respect to foreign policy that is currently in tension with what we might think of traditional democracy”.
Also, I edited my post to clarify “I vote for…”
The short version? I cannot find the spirit of what we used to call democracy in the liberal international order, even if the procedures remain (namely, elections).
I am going to copy and paste the long version, which I wrote somewhere else. I don't think it will match tonally, but, oh well :-) Feel free to read it if you're curious. Cheers.
In our world of economic interdependence, sovereignty must be ceded to coordinate the legislation of participating trading partners. Then, it is the judiciary that upholds “the rule of law,” in which, internationally, the only acceptable laws are those which expose states to the economic discipline of the global market. If the citizens of a state decide, for example, that they do not want their manufacturing to be sent to a state whose comparative advantage is cheap labor, and they attempt to become autarkic, their state is sanctioned and shunned by the international community and will almost certainly remain poor. When your choices are autarky (and poor) or economic interdependence (and great wealth for some), you might choose the latter. But then it is not the will of the people, rather the invisible [iron fist] of the global market which governs a state, and the poor plebs are left to be organized by the logic of comparative advantage.
This model used to have legitimacy, as countries were emerging from debt crises and after the Cold War there was a widespread yearning for economic growth. But it has run its course and created a whole host of new problems, the largest of which, in my opinion, is that it has created an untouchable class of global elites, who identify with one another, and generally despise the masses who stay rooted to place, to their traditions, their livelihoods, and their communities. The global elites’ capital, businesses, and, of course, their selves can float over borders, and their interest in keeping it that way are protected by the “rule of law.” Their armies of legislators and judges make it so the law is impenetrable to a pleb – or any professional who does not specialize in international law, for that matter. And they believe that their system is too important to be smashed to pieces by the will of the people, who understand that their lives are being governed by great and far away forces, even if they cannot articulate it. But, through freedom of speech, they are trying and getting closer to being able to do so. Their collective finger-pointing, once confused, is settling on the right target. Therefore, the censorship apparatuses are being constructed by the global elite to silence the plebs and protect economic interdependence. Economic interdependence is the liberal international order (LIO), or rules [of law] based order (RBO), or, as I like to call it, the empire which America has built.
But the laws which created economic interdependence were negotiated after WWII, and negotiations eventually led to neoliberalism in the 90s. Neoliberalism is no longer legitimate to the plebs. They don’t think it’s fair that their communities can be uprooted by a member of the global elite, who shares nothing in common, no tradition, no livelihood, no community, no values, who sends manufacturing across the world, because capital is electronic and can zip through the SWIFT international banking system (and, of course, it can influence elections across borders), and then the supply chain can be built from that place that has no labor laws by eliminating tariffs. How do you erect / eliminate tariffs? By LAW. These neoliberal laws were negotiated decades ago, But the sclerotic judiciaries of states participating in the LIO are still linked, and they uphold it. The elite have A LOT of interest in maintaining this neoliberal “rule of law,” because they own A LOT of wealth because of it. They conflate Trump's blatant disregard for international law as disregard for domestic institutions, and they simply say "rule of law."
Think, “judiciary = rule of LAW.” Now think, “In democracies all across the LIO, the plebs don’t like the great and far away forces that govern their lives and are saying so.” Now think, “Politicians passed speech LAWS. Political parties passed disinformation LAWS.” "Capital is allowed by LAW to cross boarders and can manufacture consent (Chomsky)." "Tariffs are eliminated by LAW so that supply chains can start from places where labor has no protection nor bargaining power." This is the LIO rule of LAW.
The rule of law means no king, dictator, or president can rule on a whim. It helps tremendously with economic stability and growth. But every now and then an executive like Trump comes along and embodies the will of (mostly) the working class, and so threatens the "rule of law" with a "popular" mandate. (Populism). Understand this tension, and you will understand our times. We have a populist, revolutionary executive, and a status quo judiciary.
Nobody knows what the legislature is doing, but they can truly save democracy IF the Democratic Party elite realize that the jig is up, relinquish their grip on the judges upholding neoliberalism, stop pushing so much terrible, low-quality propaganda that’s got their activists carving swastikas in Teslas, and allow labor some bargaining power again in their party. It is in this moment that the Democratic Party will reform, many who support Trump will turncoat over to the Dems, and the political pressure will be released like opening a steam-valve. If the Democratic Party elites insist on fighting for neoliberalism, they may win, but the victory will be Pyrrhic. The tools they must use will make it evident that there can be no “true” democratic opposition, and we will lose American democracy for real.
This liberal intentional order has little to do with opposition to Trump.
Judges have not attempted to stop Trump from his foreign policy or trade endeavors. Those opposing them have been arguing that we benefit when countries trust us, when borders are respected, and when we don’t send the country into a depression on purpose.
Due process is guaranteed in our Constitution. The separation of powers is laid out in our constitution. Free speech is in the constitution’s first amendment. These aren’t artifacts of international law or the liberal international order.
Oh, my sweet summer child...
Electoral outcomes, when observed over time, display statistical regularities, yet these patterns are not temporally stable. While certain jurisdictions may appear structurally robust, the persistence of political equilibria is contingent on a range of economic and institutional factors. In this sense, stability is often illusory, a function of historical path dependence rather than an inherent characteristic of the system itself. It is particularly relevant to consider how shifts in political preferences can be conceptualized probabilistically, with different regimes corresponding to distinct probability distributions. Movements toward the tails of these distributions should be avoided, as they are typically dangerous and, more often than not, unidirectional.
Trump and his peeps don’t get the difference between administrators and legit scientists, between curriculum designers trying to erase “dead white men” from the curriculum and swap in Judith Butler and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and professors like Roosevelt Montas, Yaschas’ former podcast guest. There are many like Montas- smart, committed educators who might lean left culturally but do not agree with the latest identitarian panic on coastal college campuses. If Trump and Vance and Kevin Roberts were smart enough to surgically cut funding and restructure the rules for tuition and hiring administrators at state colleges, they could have empowered Montas and others to change direction. Instead they are seen as anti-education by most Americans.
I was also very troubled reading about Elon Musks private schools for his own children. Apparently he teaches them only math, engineering, biology… No humanities courses. Absolutely misguided. Just because many humanities courses are mistaught doesn’t mean that Adam Smith, Hamilton, Emerson, Frances Perkins, Frederick Douglass should not be passed on to the next generations. Hopefully these unis win their battle for academic independence and then reform on their own.
The federal government should dictate how state universities hire administrators? Are you sure you want to go there?
I was amazed the author thought this is what the public wants.
Trump and Project 2025 should tell Republican states to make laws limiting administrators and then stage a campaign exposing the fact that the endless growth of admins is the reason for ballooning college costs. Trump doesn’t have direct control of state budgets, but he can set the direction of the GOP and then pressure the Dems as well. Even in blue states, young people and Moms hate how much they pay for college and how labyrinthine the admissions process is. All of the Diversity offices, etc. are useless
Yeah, I don't agree with that part, but I do agree with the rest of this.
I hold little hope that the left will pull themselves together. Many of the comments here are focused on quibbling whether trump has a 'mandate' or not. This is a good example of how incapable the left is of understanding that they have missed a clear change mandate from America's middle class for the last decade. This mandate was not to put more boys into girls sports, or renaming schools or any other far-left cultural nonsense of the past decade. The mandate was to address an economic system that for the last 40 years has not worked for most Americans.
Democrats have been deeply culpable along with Republicans in enabling the hollowing out of America's middle class with both parties no longer representing Americans but instead representing big-moneyed interests in a captured DC. trump promised to 'burn it all down' and to 'be the retribution' of middle America. At least he 'got' the issue well enough to exploit it. The left will never even 'get' the issue and will remain on the outside of power looking in for a very long time.
As for me, I am hopeless and hold so much contempt for the severely broken Democratic Party that has let us down so badly. Yes Republicans are worse, but that doesn't matter, no answers will come from them, the only answers could have come from a functional opponent truly interested in helping middle America, of which there is none.
The “national mood” was a 3 decade long project of resentment and innuendo racism on radio, tv and podcasts. Every time traditional Republicans went to cut social safety net programs, Americans said no thank you. So they pivoted and highlighted changes in demographics, social mobility, educational opportunities, and scientific data combined with fears after 9/11 and at lightening speed with covid.
This is a party of grift and opportunism - Newt, DeLay, Cheney, Romney mixed with christian nationalism by a minority for whom “its better to have a stable government under a crook than turmoil under an honest man. God wants stability” (Pat Robertson).
If the opposition is to have any chance, younger leadership that impresses younger voters to be engaged is required. A party that propagates that democracy is served by debate and evaluation of how we attain prosperity for as many as possible. Not pull up the ladder behind as the neoliberal Boomers embraced. That taxation is a means for growth and investment for everyone’s community, which is why it worked for the last 80 years. We allowed weapons and war divert our wealth and attention.
We have the power for a better future. We just have to counter the lies and cynically corrupt opportunists - every day on a national scale. Which means the burden of leadership that is honest needs to start, yesterday.
Good commentary, Yascha. But I’m afraid I have to agree with Tom, 1:44 pm.
Deficit and National Debt, which incidentally created inflation and amount to an enormous tax on the poor, seem so obvious a problem that it’s impossible to imagine what the Democrats are thinking. That alone is an “existential threat” (to coin a phrase). Where have all the brains that we need in the major political parties gone?
Similarly, how can anyone think that Iran moving toward a nuclear bomb can be “managed.” The naïveté is mind-boggling.
Inadequate, virtually fraudulent offerings by the Dems required that we elect Trump. Nobody is delighted with him, and he may be wrong about some important things. But one more term of Obama, Biden, Harris might have tipped us over the edge into REAL chaos. That crowd offers less than nothing.
Inflation during the Biden Administration was a worldwide phenomenon and was caused mainly by supply-chain disruptions related to Covid-19.
Under Trump, the US did worse than the rest of world in regard to Covid (more deaths, more economic decline).
Under Biden, the US did much better than most of the rest of the world (lower inflation, less economic decline and faster recovery of both).
The Republican message machine (Fox & conservative radio and social media) is phenomenal. Democrats need a new message delivery system.
I presume you think we are not in REAL chaos now.
What will the tariffs be tomorrow or god forbid by the end of the month?
What other private companies will be extorted like the law firms and universities?
Will any private citizens be sent to El Salvador to never be seen again?
Will Trump pardon anyone who physically harms an elected official like Jan 6 cop beaters?
Will the DOJ "investigate" other private citizens who don't support Trump?
Under Trump, the US did worse than the rest of world in regard to Covid (more deaths, more economic decline). Under Biden, the US did much better than most of the rest of the world (lower inflation, less economic decline and faster recovery). Not the mention REAL legislation to bring jobs back to the US.
More of Trump is definitely chaos. More of Biden definitely not chaos.
After seeing Catherine Fitt's recent interview with Tucker, Trump is nothing more than a bowling pin trying to avoid the oncoming bowling ball. His mandate is not freedom friendly. Most of what he is doing is done via the EO route and all EOs can be undone. It's great theater but hardly what we need to survive and save the world.
Trump has effectively been forced into doing a deal that betrays the core promises he ran on—no mass deportations, “America First” has become “Israel First,” and the border wall remains imaginary. He gained the opportunity for private gain, status and avoiding jail in exchange for being a globalist zionist puppet.
It’s honestly remarkable that you've managed to produce an article like this—the narrative is an almost complete inversion of reality.
God Bless The Trump Administration in their pursuit to Make America Great for All Americans…….
The Golden Age will soon be upon us! All Glory to our benevolent leader Donald J. Trump! May MAGA reign for a thousand years!!
Are we GREAT AGAIN yet?
https://WeDidntWantThis.com
God appears - figuratively not literally as God doesn't appear to just anyone - to be sitting this one out.
I think you meant to say, Make America great for the rich by impoverishing the poorer 95 percent.
Your comment requires context - the context is the alternative Democrat policy: Make America great for the rich by impoverishing the poorer 92 percent. To the average person these don't look too different.
Not true.
The dems aren't on board with adding $7 trillion to the national debt by cutting taxes to the wealthiest and corporations. Try again.
The only difference for the working class man between D & R is what heights you get shat on from. The true tax injustice is the preferential treatment of assets vs earned income - something the Dems will not touch because they are just as beholden to the business class.
Simply not true. The dems have always been better for the working guy. Look at the difference between Obamacare and Trump's No Billionaire Left Behind tax cuts, simple and clear examples of polar opposites that any person can see. Your stance is beyond absurd.
Thank you for taking the time to answer - consider this.
Wages have stagnated behind growth since 1971 or thereabouts - that is not exclusively a GOP issue (not even exclusively American issue). The entire economic consensus stinks, the main reason I believe the “left” (Dems?) betrayed working people is the sacrifice of high quality jobs for low-wage service work through globalism and mass importation of cheap labour.
I don’t necessarily claim the right is better for the working class, but I do claim the other side has failed to do the job. My stance is not absurd - it is exactly the thought pattern that drove wc voters to Trump. The left needs to see this instead of doubling down on “minoritarianism” and wokeism.
A very well-weighted article. People focus so much on Trump's grandiosity and puffery they forget that he only beat whatever opposition was put up to him. The Democratic product stinks (as does the centre/left's everywhere). The population only have a choice between neo-liberal economics with-wokeism or without. A genuine social-democratic economic program combined with receding from woke excess back to reasonable middle-ground liberalism would reclaim govt easily.
AOC seems to have got the message a bit.
It wasn't that Trump turned out more voters than he did the last election. It was that 10 million dem voters sat on their couches when they realized that the Biden faction had duped them, and then when caught tried to substitute their own replacement at the last moment. The dems beat themselves.
Two fundamentals:
1. Trump did not win a "genuine mandate." He won an election by 1.5 points and did so with a campaign that was misleading, at best.
2. When you calculate 2 * 0, you get 0. When you combine chaos with competence, you still have chaos.
How was his campaign misleading? I think the governance in the second term is much more in line with his campaign promises than his first term. He realized that from 2017-2020 he wasn't allowed to deport illegal migrants and cancel funding for left wing universities and take over the Kennedy center and stop it from staging Hamilton and the latest musical about Taransgenderism because there were all of these leftist loyalists just below him handing down the orders. This time he is just firing them and installing people who actually want change. It is good when politicians fulfill their promises. That outcome has become vanishingly rare, unfortunately.
His most important promises turned out to be lies.
1. He said he was going to bring down the price of groceries during the campaign, then the day after the election he backpedaled and said it would be "very difficult". Now he's given up on that entirely and doesn't care if his insane tariffs bring higher prices, as long as no one can clearly point to them as the cause.
The economy was his biggest selling point, so he lied about it.
2. When Project 2025 was publicized and people hated it, he said he knew nothing about Project 2025, hadn't read the documents, and strongly implied that he wasn't in favor of it. Then he hired Russell Vought, and his administration has implemented much of Project 2025 already and is clearly going to try to implement it all.
The incredibly unpopular agenda of Project 2025 was one of his biggest drawbacks, so he lied about it. Well, sort of lied. I'm sure he was telling the truth when he said he hadn't read it and didn't know what it was. But he wasted no time hiring people to implement it.
The economy needs to be made healthy and supportive of honest people again, not money lenders and welfare queen grifters. Shops that sell plastic Chinese made toys can go out of business, that is completely fine.
The "incredibly unpopular" agenda is not unpopular at all. I want to traumatize the bureaucrats. I don't want to pay for aids medicine in Africa. I don't want to pay for deconstructing the nuclear family in functioning Catholic societies like Peru and Poland. I want social security abolished and so do most people I know under 30. I want porn criminalized. I want fentanyl traffickers arrested and punished harshly and I want the Mexican government to be strangled economically until they crack down on their drug gangs.
The fact is, society was made way too open, permissive, decadent, "Inclusive." Government subsidizes absolutely everything, even disastrously bad investments and totally immoral practices (like abortion and transgender surgery). They subsidize every group, minority, whiner, except for young men. The solution is to downsize the government and recover vitality and moral standards. Project 2025 heads in that direction generally and I and all of my friends (males under 30) completely support it.
The difference between Trump and ostensibly enlightened centrists like you is that Trump genuinely wants to save the country, while what you desire is a more intellectually defensible managed decline.
Stopping the flow of cheap stuff from China that we’ve been buying on credit was always going to be difficult. Removing cheap illegal immigrants' labor was always going to be unpopular with groups whose jobs weren't being taken by said immigrants. Reforming NATO by asking nicely was never going to work, and we know that because it’s what every US president in my lifetime has tried, and none succeeded.
Trump hasn't “gone too far,” on the contrary. He hasn't gone far enough on almost any of the significant threats facing the country.
NATO members increased spending when Russia attacked Ukraine. They gave lip service to increasing spending prior to Ukraine, including to Trump.
Immigrants pay for Social Security and Medicare.
Trump got 49.9% of the popular vote. In what statistical universe is that a "mandate"?
Where were you when the extremism of the Biden administration took the country to the brink of bankruptcy? I agree that Trump could have been more effective by spending his finite political capital more wisely. At a minimum, Trump provided the electric shock therapy that we need to get out of the Biden coma.
Could you please give an example of how the country was on the brink of bankruptcy? Last I checked my 401k was way up and inflation was well on its way down when he left office. Today the economy was reported to have shrunk -.3% (down from 2.4 in Q4), the core PCE is up to 3.5% (up from a forecasted 3.1%), public sentiment about the economy has sunk to its lowest level since 2011 and payroll processor ADP showed private employers added just 62,000 jobs last month vs forecasts of 125,00 and down from a revised 147,000. If this is the cure for "Biden's Coma" then I'd just a soon go back to sleep.
Happy dreams :)
Facts, please. Got any?