Thursday, September 19, 2024

Two Trumps -- a side by side comparison

Take a minute to watch this clip. It's well worth your time.

 CNN deserves tremendous for making a point this important this powerfully.

A big part of the story behind Trump's catastrophic performance is how badly the press underestimated Kamala Harris (a topic we've discussed before and will be getting back to), but the bigger part is how Trump has changed. The man has been in a lot of debates over the past nine years and a lot of rivals have tried to throw him off his game. We can debate how many of those debates he won, but we never saw anything like the implosion of last week. 

Marco Rubio is an interesting point of comparison. Probably the most dramatic take-down of any of the 2016 election was when Chris Christie destroyed Rubio with one exchange (a blow so devastating that Trump congratulated him after the debate). Lots of people, including Christie, went after Trump, but no one ever scored that kind of point against him. 

 It is possible that Harris is the best debater Trump has faced. She's very good, particularly when a prosecutorial approach is called for (I first started thinking about Harris as a potential candidate during the Kavanaugh hearings specifically because of how a debate might play out), but I don't think she could have been nearly as effective against the Trump on the left.

We've all aged in the past nine years, but most of us haven't almost died of covid and survived an assassination attempt. Most of us aren't approaching eighty and very few of us are looking at the possibility of spending the rest of our lives in prison. All of these things have clearly taken and continue to take, their toll. 

For reason's too complicated to go into here, Trump's decline has never gotten the attention that Biden's did, but the signs have been there for a long time, and given that Biden is steady-tempered and surrounded by highly responsible and competent people, his decline was less of a concern. Trump is erratic, prone to rage, and surrounded by sycophants, grifters, and extremists. The fact the press paid less attention to his cognitive decline under those circumstances is indefensible.


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Wednesday, September 18, 2024

This week in tech messiah news


Serious "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" vibes here.




Whenever Thiel comes up in a political discussion, I am contractually required to mention this. [Emphasis added.]

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.


I would never speak for American women, but I suspect they'll deal fairly well with Musk fanboys leaving them alone.



As the saying goes, you dance with them whut brung ya.



Variety proves more details here.








There's always a skeptic.

This is quite a thread.


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Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Ten years ago at the blog -- level 5 autonomy had been just around the corner for about three years

It's interesting what pops out at you ten or so years and look at what we were all talking about. The thing that stands out for me here is how optimistic everyone was (including us pessimists) that autonomous vehicles were about to revolutionize transportation.

This is a 2014 post that quotes heavily from another three years earlier referring to a public discussion that had been going on for years even then. 

Let's say we take this as our Kitty Hawk moment:

In 1995 Navlab 5 completed the first autonomous US coast-to-coast journey. Traveling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and San Diego, California, 98.2% of the trip was autonomous. It completed the trip at an average speed of 63.8 mph (102.7 km/h).

We could have a big and not particularly productive discussion over whether or not the comparison is fair from a technological standpoint, but in terms of public perception, this certainly looked like the problem was well on its way to being solved, arguably more so than powered flight seemed when the Wright brothers flew a few hundred yards in North Carolina.

1995 would put us almost 30 years past the breakthrough. It took airplanes about a dozen years to have a substantial impact on warfare and travel. Less than twenty for the first transatlantic flight. Eight years later Charles Lindbergh was taking a longer route and doing it solo. 30 years after the Wright brothers' first successful flight, airplanes really had changed the world. 

By comparison, technology that was supposed to be just around the corner thirteen or so years ago is generally still a novelty and is still years away from the kind of functionality and reliability needed to make a major impact. This is not because of onerous regulations, but because true full autonomy has proven to be an enormously difficult problem to solve (which smart engineers have been saying all along).

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Driverless Cars and Uneasy Riders



I had forgotten we've been having this discussion for over three years.

Tyler Cowen has a piece in the New York Times on how regulation inhibits innovation in transportation using the example of driverless cars. I'm not sure he's made his general case (that's the subject for an upcoming post), but his specific case is particularly problematic.

In case you haven't been following this story, Google has been getting a lot of press for its experiments with self-driving cars, especially after statements like this from Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun:
"Think about the car as a medium of mass transit: So, what if our highway-train of the future meant you go on the highway, and there's a train of very close-driving cars with very low wind drag, fantastic capacity, is twice as efficient as possible as today, and so there is no congestion anymore?"
Cowen is clearly thinking along the same lines:
Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers. And if you worry about the environmental consequences of packing our roads with cars, since we can’t do without them entirely, we still can make those we use as efficient — and as green — as possible.
Putting aside the question of the magnitude of these savings in time, road capacity and fuel effeiciency (which, given the level of technology we're talking about here, aren't that great), where exactly are these savings coming from?

Some can certainly be attributed to more optimal decision-making and near instantaneous reaction time, but that's not where the real pay-off is. To get the big savings, you need communication and cooperation. Your ideal driving strategy needs to take into account the destination, capabilities and strategies of all the vehicles around you. Every car on the road has got be talking with every other car on the road, all using the same language and rules of the road, to get anything near optimal results.

Throw just one vehicle that's not communicating (either because it has a human driver or because its communication system is down or is incompatible) into the mix and suddenly every other vehicle nearby will have to allow for unexpected acceleration and lane changes. Will driverless cars be able to deal with the challenge? Sure, but they will not be able to able to do it while achieving the results Thrun describes.

A large number of driverless cars might improve speed and congestion slightly, but getting to the packed, efficient roads that Cowen mentions would mean draconian regulations requiring highly specific attributes for all vehicles driving on a major freeway. The manufacture and modification of vehicles would have to be tightly controlled. Motorcycles would almost certainly have to be banned from major roads. Severe limits would have to be put on when a car or truck could be driven manually.
Based on the conversation that followed that post (check out the comment section), I should probably add that much of the benefit described by Thrun and Cowen could achieved by making special lanes and sections of road driverless-only. One the whole though, I stand by the point that much of what we've been promised (speed, fuel efficiency, road capacity) require an all driverless group of cars working together.

One point I made in passing could probably use more elaboration. Motorcycles are small, accident prone vehicles. They can accelerate very quickly, they often behave erratically, and they tend to function under a somewhat looser set of traffic laws. Their small size and low cost make them more difficult to regulate. And finally, as far as I can tell, there is no serious plan to introduce fully autonomous versions. If you want to get close to the level of performance Thrun promises, you do not want motorcycles on the road.

It's hard to see this not becoming a typical convenience-of-the-many argument for regulation. As autonomous vehicles become more common, it is pretty much inevitable that, while overall accidents and traffic jams will go down, those that still occur will be disproportionately caused by vehicles that don't lend themselves to autonomous control or those which routinely have to do things that are difficult to explain to a computer. The first group would include motorcycles and classic/antique cars. The second would include real pick-ups* or SUVs that actually leave the pavement. I would hate to see those vehicles forced off most major roads but that would seem to be the likely outcome.

* Those that do real work. Us country boys take this seriously.

 

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Monday, September 16, 2024

Loom(er)ing crisis

This is a funny story, but it might be considerably more than that.

 



Last week, Josh Marshall laid out his theory of the Trump campaign, or more accurately, the Trump campaigns.

First, there’s Donald Trump, the guy we saw in the debate, the guy we see at the rallies and the guy Trump is, mostly, on social media. (People like Dan Scavino tweet for him sometimes. But even then it’s more an impersonation of feral Trump.) This persona was really the entirety of the campaign in 2016 because there just wasn’t any campaign infrastructure around, though a bit was built up in the last couple months. This campaign is mostly about Trump’s anger and grievances and shows all the signs not only of his longstanding degeneracy but his cognitive and personal decline over the last decade. Let’s call it the Trump campaign. But then there’s an entirely distinct and relatively traditional campaign being run by Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. That campaign wants to talk about inflation and the southern border. That campaign is running a vast and complex TV air war across all the swing states. Let’s call this the “Trump” campaign.

Obviously, these operations are related. The folks running the “Trump” campaign want him to be President and they know what he’s like. His singular, final-battle-line focus on the southern border is what he shoved into the center of American politics back in 2015. They’re following innovation there. They’re just trying to do it with daily message focus. They’re part of that now decade-long story of trying to take an idea of what Trump represents and make it efficient and successful. And that means keeping the focus on the things that will win Trump the election — specifically, many people’s instinctive belief that their economic life was better before mid-2020 than it’s been since. And then, secondarily, the desire to (depending on who you are) either bring some order to the southern border or close it to all immigrants and deport everyone here.

...

You and I live in the national media conversation where Trump himself is the dominant story — his tirades, lies, chaos. But in the swing states it’s different. That’s where the “Trump” campaign is at least trying to and may be able to hold sway. There it’s all about the 30-second ads and other kinds of paid messaging. (That’s one of the reasons I’m so interested in the mailers. Keep the reports coming in.) When I speak to people running things in the swing states, that’s their worry: that the “Trump” campaign may simply bury Harris in 30-second ads, knocking down her favorability and making her seem too risky a choice, regardless of what Trump himself might be doing on any given day.

Mind you, I’m not saying they think that is going to happen necessarily. And it’s not like Harris’ campaign and it’s allied super PACs don’t have money of their own to run 30-second ads. But that’s where they see the threat.

It’s seemed to me for a while that there is something increasingly like an arranged marriage between these two Trump campaigns. They can’t control each other. They’re both living their own lives. And that’s just how it is. You do your thing; I’ll do mine. No reason to break up. It would just upset the kids.

Even if things were to remain stable, the two campaign strategy faces serious challenges. It is an approach better suited for a candidate with a comfortable lead. That's not the case here. The Harris campaign is at least slightly ahead and in some cases is trending upward based on pretty much every metric from polls to voter registration to fund raising to crowd sizes and enthusiasm. While it is certainly possible that the Trump campaign will be successful, it is difficult to overtake even the smallest of leads while trying to keep your candidate away from the general public.

But of course, things are not likely to remain stable. There are huge inmate tensions in the situation, and as Marshall points out, it is very difficult to effectively compartmentalize these two campaigns so that messaging for one does not leak into the other. This is especially true since the two audiences are largely operating under entirely different views of reality. For people inside the bubble, immigrants are committing atrocities in the street, newborns are being killed, and, despite widespread cheating on the other side, Trump easily won the debate. More importantly, they believe that people outside of the bubble are either in denial or have been corrupted by the deep state. For those on the outside, the people in the bubble are crazy.

This is not an easy alliance to maintain under the best of circumstances, but when you start adding outside players, things can get very bad very quickly. Enter Laura Loomer.

Loomer is a product of the far right, not the diluted, Nazi-curious form represented by people like Marjorie Taylor Greene but the real thing. Greene herself called out Loomer for offensive racist  comments, and while Greene may have had some ulterior motives, Loomer really is far more extreme than any prominent Republican to date.





[Fun side note: I'll need to check the dates, but Tim Poole may have already been on Russia's payroll when he recorded this.]



I didn't expect to be retweeting Maher, but this one is certainly in his wheelhouse.

 

 

As usual, the press is divided into opposing camps over whether to go all in on baseless speculation or to avoid acknowledging even the most obvious of facts. Taking a position somewhere in the middle it is safe to say that Trump and Loomer are close, they spent a great deal of time together, they are physically affectionate, and he appears to trust her.




The details of this relationship only matter in the sense that the closer they are, the greater the risks to  the campaign. The danger is not in Loomer telling Trump crazy things; it is in her telling him not to listen to the people trying to get him to stop saying crazy things. She is very likely giving him that common but often terrible advice, "be yourself."

Assuming her enemies don't manage to lock her out, the presence of Loomer greatly increases the chances that the two campaigns described by Marshall will come into open conflict, which would probably result in multiple high-level defenestrations and the kind of chaos that can set off cascading failure with conflicting messaging, donors fleeing, and political allies backing away, all of which leads to more chaos.

Given this (and the fact that, even in 2024, most Republicans are still uncomfortable with Nazis), the conservative establishment hates this woman.




Listen to the tone of this congressman's voice as he tries to downplay Loomer's role. He does not want to be having this conversation.

I'm not saying it's going to happen or even that Loomer will still be riding Trump 1 in another week, but there's a possibility that a political career that started with reality television will be ended by an Internet troll. That might seem a bit on the nose, but this season's writers are not known for their subtlety.


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Friday, September 13, 2024

Extraordinary Republican Delusions and the Madness of MAGA (We need to talk about the pet-eating thing)

(If I lose you in the middle, go ahead and skip to the end. That's the weird part.)

I know I got a bit cute with the title, but there really is something extraordinary going on here, much of which sounds like something from Mackay.


 The past few years have been a great deal to raise the bar on abnormal, but the popular delusion about immigrants stealing and eating household pets still more than meets the standard. It's important that you hold on to that initial sense of shock because the abnormality is a key part of the story, particularly if we want to get our heads around the weirdness of the rest of it.

Even before Tuesday night's debate, this delusion was widely accepted among Trump supporters, to the extent that those who don't believe are accused of being either liars or dupes.



MAGA started making sense to me when I realized that owning the libs was just about the need for attention, like a toddler breaking a favorite toy so you'll stop ignoring him.

(Johnson is both MAGA and a known Russian asset, so double points.) 

 



Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital, a CalTech physics PhD, and a big deal in Silicon Valley.

 

Draino is a big deal in Trump's world.

 







Springfield is now a part of Trump's standard stump speech along with surprise gender reassignment operations.

 

And at least one state GOP organization is spending money to brand itself with the lie. 

In what ought to be a headline in The Onion but is instead a clear reminder of the deplorable state of political discourse from MAGA world, the Arizona Republican Party has launched a billboard campaign declaring that only the GOP opposes eating kittens.

I wish this was just monkeyshines, but it’s very, very real.

The billboards, which ape the iconic Chik-Fil-A billboards featuring cows encouraging people to eat chicken sandwiches instead of hamburgers, are quite insane. The purpose, AZGOP Chairwoman Gina Swoboda crowed in a press release, is to highlight “disturbing stories” about illegal immigrants perpetrating “unthinkable behavior” in Ohio that acts as a “sobering reminder of the stakes” in the election.

It’s all hogwash.




 


 

For the people of Springfield, this popular delusion is having real and horrifying consequences.






And, as promised, here is the weirdest part of the whole very weird story. It went from being a rumor almost no one had heard of outside of that corner of Ohio to being one of the defining beliefs of MAGA in literally a matter of hours

From NewsGuard's Reality Check:


Lee’s since-deleted Facebook post first appeared in a private Springfield Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information” earlier this month (Lee could not recall the exact date). The post said: “My neighbor [Newton] informed me that her daughters [sic] friend had lost her cat. … One day she came home from work, as soon as she stepped out of her car, looked towards a neighbors house, where Haitians live, & saw her cat hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat.”

(However, Newton told NewsGuard that the connection to the acquaintance was not through her daughter.)

The claim jumped from Facebook to X on Sept. 5, when a conservative user named @BuckeyeGirrl posted a screenshot of Lee’s post, with Lee’s name redacted. 

On Sept. 9, city officials said they had no evidence of pets being stolen, injured, or eaten by the immigrant population in Springfield. In an emailed statement to NewsGuard, a city official said: “In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city, we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

Nonetheless, on Sept. 10, the story reached the national stage. “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump declared as fact during the debate. (He was fact-checked in real-time by debate co-moderator David Muir of ABC News.)


How JD Vance Turned The Conspiracy Machine On Haitians In A Small Ohio City by TPM's Josh Kovensky

Dorsainvil has lived in Springfield, Ohio, since 2020, and heads the Haitian Community Help and Support Center there, an organization that assists recent immigrants to the area. He’s part of a wave of 20,000 Haitians that, city officials say, have recently moved to the town, which had about 58,000 residents according to the 2020 census. Resentment toward the newcomers has been simmering among some longtime residents, Dorsainvil said.

But it wasn’t until Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) suggested in an X post on Monday that the Haitian community was abducting and feasting on local pets that the harassment spiraled out of control. (Springfield authorities have made clear that they have no reports that anything of the sort is happening in the town.)

“We get the threats through our telephones, people telling us get the F out of here,” Dorsainvil told TPM. “It happened since yesterday after the tweet of the vice president, the man running for vice president.”

It’s been a surreal experience for Dorsainvil, but Vance’s tweet seized on a conspiracy theory that has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chamber. The core allegation that Haitians in Springfield had “abducted and eaten” pets followed a meandering path, from local Facebook groups to the online, right-wing influencers that Vance follows, and onwards to the current vice presidential candidate.

It’s an example of the engine that drives modern right-wing politics: wild and false claims start off scattered across the internet, before being vacuumed up and boosted to mass audiences, sometimes by high-profile politicians whose status as public figures lends credence to what, only days before, had been random, unverified posts.


Just to be clear, were talking about this Monday. Before Vance's tweet, virtually no one had heard about this urban legend. Within 24 hours after that, it had become unquestioned truth for the Republican base. In an extreme and somewhat ironic example of the Mandela Effect, Donald Trump had convinced himself he had seen television interviews about a popular delusion he had first heard about the previous day.

If that's not a case for the social scientists in the audience, I don't know what is.


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Thursday, September 12, 2024

Reactions from the Day after -- UPDATED

I won't spend a lot of time on the establishment press reaction. For the most part, it is too disconnected from reality, too reluctant to face up to what we are seeing, to be of any value.

Take a minute to read this answer from Trump, keeping in mind that, though the moderator tried to steer him back to the immigration bill, this was a response to Harris pointing out that people have been observed leaving his rallies.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
Any analysis that fails to capture how bizarre Trump's statements were is a gross misrepresentation.

This isn't to say the establishment press was uniformly bad. There were multiple high points.

This observation from NPR's Domenico Montanaro was excellent.


Chait did a good job putting the Haitian rumor in context.

The term presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era, its meaning has been stretched out like a pair of pants worn around for a week by a man 20 pounds too heavy for them. Yet, even by the distended contemporary standards, Trump’s claim about the dogs was weird, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.

There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the sealed-off information ecosystem that produced and sustained his political career.

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.

The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels. Republicans seemed to think the idea gave them a potent meme.

 

CNN's Daniel Dale is consistently good.

And the Philadelphia Inquirer put things bluntly.

Silver, who we've been hard on lately, made an excellent point.


Too often, though, the news and analyses read like Pitchbot bits, so lets go to the source


The reactions on the right were also informative.


 

Though there was way too much horserace speculation, the electoral significance of one exchange seems to of gotten little attention. When Donald Trump refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win and Kamala Harris suggested that Putin would set his sights on Poland if Ukraine fell, she specifically directed the message to Polish Americans living in Pennsylvania. There are quite a few of them, almost 6% of the population, and there are substantially higher percentages in Wisconsin and Michigan. We have no way of knowing how likely Polish Americans are to be influenced by the specter of Russian aggression back in Europe, but we are talking about nontrivial numbers in at least three swing states.

On a related note, some of the most interesting reactions came from people on Russian payrolls, either here...



Or in Russia itself.


There is shock and dismay on Russian state television, since Moscow’s true preferred candidate Donald Trump was no match for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s debate. Now, Putin’s top propagandists are eating crow, having walked into a trap of their own creation, after weeks of dismissing Harris as a weak, feeble-minded contender.

In the run-up to this presidential debate, Russian state TV propagandists constantly predicted that the “charismatic” Trump—previously described as “our Donald”—would resoundingly defeat his opponent. They’ve consistently described Harris as a stupid, inexperienced newcomer, who simply cannot function without a teleprompter, even citing ridiculous conspiracy theories from the likes of Alex Jones to assert that the Vice President has a severe “performance anxiety” and would show up to the debate high on drugs.

The coverage of the U.S. presidential race on Russian state TV was jam packed with compilations of Harris laughing or select quotes they repeatedly claimed no one could understand. Many of their clips came straight from Fox News, in which various hosts roundly mocked Harris and praised Trump.

On the night of the debate, this approach was still in use. During the broadcast of the show At Dawn on the Solovyov Live channel, immediately preceding the airing of the debate, host Kristina Busarova said that an “experienced politician” like Trump would most certainly steamroll Harris, describing the Vice President as “not smart and not savvy.” As she watched translated clips of the debate live on-air, Busarova looked deflated and confused.

Likewise, hosts and pundits on Russian state television struggled to explain the disparity between the way Kamala Harris was smeared in their relentlessly dismissive coverage, and the way she performed during the debate.

...

Despite their disappointment, Putin’s propagandists did find a bright spot for Moscow in the devastatingly disappointing debate. Trump’s refusal to say that he wants Ukraine to win in its battle against Russia’s invasion seemed to make them feel warm and fuzzy. Solovyov asked Simes to elaborate as to how Trump is planning to quickly end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump’s former adviser said that the ex-president would simply tell Ukraine to concede to Putin’s demands, and cut off all U.S. aid if the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky refuses to do so.

  

UPDATE: Remember what we were saying about Poland and swing states?

 

 

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Wednesday, September 11, 2024

September 9th, 2024... the day the New York Times found out Donald Trump was running for president

 September 9th, 2024... the day the New York Times found out Donald Trump was running for president

Well, that was unexpected.

In the span of 24 hours, the New York Times posted more substantial criticism of Donald Trump than they have over the past three months.

Here's a good write up from Cheryl Rofer of Lawyers Guns and Money. (Rofer has become the essential LGM blogger. Definitely a follow.)

If this had been one or two articles or if the jump in tone had been less dramatic, it wouldn't demand explanation, but this is a big jump and it caught lots of people's attention.

 


I suspect the most obvious and likely explanation is that the pressure finally got to upper management. The criticism was no longer something they could dismiss as sour grapes from Democrats who wanted the New York Times to be the Fox News of the left. Questions about what was going on at the paper had become to widespread and the people behind them, such as Margaret Sullivan, too respectable.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the very establishment public radio program On the Media ran this segment two days before the sudden course correction.

The Media Are Going Easy On Trump and Russia is Going All In On Right-Wing Media

At a town hall event hosted by Fox, Donald Trump shared a number of falsehoods, and appeared to confuse who he was running against. On this week’s On the Media, how mainstream outlets fail to hold the Republican candidate accountable. Plus, meet the right-wing American pundits who’ve received payouts from the Kremlin.

[01:00] Host Brooke Gladstone speaks with Daniel Drezner, professor of International Politics at Tufts University. Drezner discusses how the political press continues to struggle to cover Trump, and his campaign against Vice President Kamala Harris. 

[12:34] Host Brooke Gladstone interviews Dan Froomkin, editor of presswatchers.org. Froomkin explains why fact checkers at legacy outlets are too often adding to political confusion.

 

I don't want to make this sound like a road to Damascus moment. The New York Times still has entrenched institutional problems and even its recent efforts at moving beyond false balance and sane washing have been somewhat mixed.

This excellent MSNBC clip (well worth your time) explains how even in a supposedly hard-hitting article, the reporter effectively rewrites Trump's statements so that something that was nonsensical appears to be a bad but not absurd policy suggestion.

What's worse, we are already seeing some definite signs of backsliding in the past few hours, particularly with respect to the paper's coverage of the debate.

But let's look on the bright side and celebrate what progress we can find at the moment including this quote from Michelle Goldberg which, in addition to being apt and direct, also comes close to criticizing her paper's official position, something that only one or two of her peers have the guts to do.



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Tuesday, September 10, 2024

How did a debate that hasn't happened yet become the biggest story of the month?



 

News, analysis, and speculation about a debate that hasn't happened yet has become THE political story of the past few days despite there being nothing interesting or informative to say before the actual event. At best we get some indirect relevance like the NYT article above that hits on Trump's misogyny. Mostly though we get trivia...

And in some cases, misreported trivia.

While the press wasted countless hours on this, here are political stories which are receiving little oxygen despite being far more consequential.

1. Russia -- Some of the most important pundits and social media figures in the conservative movement were revealed to be on the Russian payroll, part of a massive effort to influence the 2024 election in favor of Trump. Much of the press, particularly the NYT, treated this as a 24-hour story. Briefly of interest then quickly dropped. 

2. Egypt/Trump bribery investigation.

3. Surprise gender reassignment surgeries -- Trump has not added these pizzagate-level crazy accusations to his stump speech, combining QAnon style conspiracy theories with raging transphobia.

4. "Bloody" mass deportations -- Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric and imagery is far more extreme, violent, and overtly racist that it was in 2016.

 5. Trump's cognitive decline. 

6.  Increasingly outrageous maneuvers to keep abortion off the ballot.

 

 

7. This


and if we have to play the what's-really-going-on-in-the-campaign game...

8. Quiet quitting -- in a tight race, one of the candidates has scaled back rallies and swing state appearances and when questioned about this has either avoided the question or given completely nonsensical answers.

 

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Monday, September 9, 2024

"What did you do at school today, Jimmy?"

Just to recap, Donald Trump said this at the Moms4Liberty event.

Trump: But, eh, the transgender thing is incredible. Think of it, your kid goes to school and he comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs [sic] fifteen years later say, “What the hell happened? Who did this to me?”

 This was an addled and exaggerated version of the rhetoric M4L has been pushing ...

 
 

... so it appeared that a confused Trump was just trying to repeat what his hosts had told him.

Now it seems to be part of the standard stump speech

As far as I can tell, the Independent is the only paper  that considered Trump's rants about Jimmy's operations worthy of more than passing mention.

Trump falsely claims children being forced into gender transition ops at school in rambling fantasy-filled rally speech by Gustaf Kilander

Donald Trump falsely claimed yet again that children are the subject of “brutal” gender operations at schools across the US.

“Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operations, take them away from their parents, perform sex change operations, and send them back home,” Trump said in Mosinee, Wisconsin on Saturday afternoon.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” he added. “Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?”

 For comparison, here was the headline in the NYT:

Trump Lays Out Vision for Bending the Federal Government to His Will

While the tone of the article is critical (considerably above average for the paper), it captures none of the craziness, treating most of the speech as actual policy suggestions, albeit rambling and ill-considered.

CNN did the same:


Though Meidas Touch clearly has an agenda, they do a better job capturing just how bizarre these events are.

 

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Friday, September 6, 2024

This may not be 1964 but it's certainly not 2008

Probably because it is so recent, 2008 seems to be most people's favorite go to comparison for the current election, but other than crowd sizes, it's a really poor analog. For a historical analogy to work, the significant relationships have to match up, particularly the causal relationships. 

Consider the fundamental components of the race.

1. Barack Obama was one of the most charismatic politicians of the past 50 years. The only other two I would put on his level are Reagan and Clinton. (Trump certainly has something, but I suspect his cult leader hold on MAGA has more to do with him being the perfect candidate for a generation of Republican voters kept in a constant state of anger and anxiety by conservative media than it does on personal charisma. That is also consistent with his losing the popular vote twice.)

2. Obama was still very much a new face 16 years ago. Before his convention speech in 2004, he was virtually unknown. The day after that speech, a lot of people, myself included, called up acquaintances and told them "I think I just saw the first black president of the United States." That newness was a key part of the Obama persona.

3. Republicans were the incumbents and were saddled with the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. This was very much top of mind for voters that November.

4. You can't seriously discuss a presidential election without looking at both candidates. John McCain was a formidable candidate who came into the race with considerable appeal across party lines. Although less charismatic than his opponent, he did have above average stage presence. He was also, despite some notable flaws, a man of great character.


Now let's look at this year.

1.  &  2. Kamala Harris is a very good politician. Nate Silver and almost everybody at the New York Times editorial board needs to admit they were wrong on this one and apologize both to Harris and to their readers. The longer they wait, the more embarrassing it's going to be for them.

That said, in terms of charisma, Harris is simply not on the level of Obama, Clinton, or Reagan. This is not damning with faint praise – – that is the most exclusive of clubs – – but it is important to be clear about what is driving the Harris phenomenon. She is consistently solid in rallies and on the campaign trail, but not nearly exceptional enough to explain the phenomenal crowds and enthusiasm. In terms of star power, she is often outshone by the folksy charm of her running mate (which, it should be noted, does not seem to bother her in the slightest).

Harris is uniting and invigorating a party that desperately wanted to be united and invigorated. It is difficult to express how demoralized Democrats had gotten, ironically in large part because of what had gone right. It is one thing to see your party blamed for policy disasters particularly disasters due to bad luck rather than incompetence, but it absolutely sucks see your party have major, expectation-exceeding successes only to have them ignored or even framed as failures. Though the press has memory-holed much of this, if you go back and check what was being written at the time, the overwhelming consensus was that Biden would not be able to pull off a soft landing, the unification of NATO, holding off Russia in Ukraine, bringing together South Korea and Japan, jumpstarting American manufacturing, or getting substantial climate change legislation through congress plus at least one or two more I can't think of at the moment, but nothing seemed to count.

Part of the remarkable success of the handoff to Harris was the way it allowed Democrats to keep what they liked about the Biden presidency and yet still have a fresh and amazingly chaos-free start. No more old jokes or snide New York Times articles about cognitive decline (which have conspicuously disappeared now that the most obvious example is the Republican candidate). It is entirely possible that this couldn't have happened if Harris had been a fresh new face. Democrats were able to keep a candidate they had voted for explicitly in 2020 and implicitly in 2024 while shedding most of the baggage.

3. This year we're seeing lots of rather silly analyses about Kamala somehow making Trump the incumbent with the issue further confused by the GOP candidate being the previous president, but Harris is the incumbent in the same sense that Bush was in 1988 and Gore was in 2000, making the reaction to her all the more exceptional.

And putting aside all the vibecession bullshit, this is very much not 2008.



4. Perhaps the biggest difference between this campaign and that of 2008 is the opponent. With the possible exception of the despicable Matt Taibbi, I don't recall ever hearing anyone say "we can't have a man like that in the White House" about John McCain. Donald Trump gives this race an urgency and a moral clarity both because of his positions and his character. Harris and Walz have struck exactly the tone that Trump's opponents needed to hear, happy and optimistic while at the same time aggressive. This is proven and extraordinarily fortuitous combination.

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