"When Donald Trump’s megabill passed the Senate, consummating nearly a half-year of aggressively reactionary policymaking by the 47th president, a colleague commented that 'it’s like the Biden presidency never happened.'"

"That’s true in the sense that between Trump’s executive orders and the megabill, it’s hard to find a single stone unmoved from where he found it when he took office in January. But on reflection, it might be quite literally true. The country, and even the Democratic Party, would very likely have been in better condition today had Trump been reelected in 2020 over Joe Biden...."

Writes Ed Kilgore, in "America Would Be Better Off If Trump Won in 2020" (Intelligencer).

How many of you are getting ready to comment: What do you mean if?!

Anyway... Kilgore plunges into his fantasy. Excerpt:

"A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn."

"Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding.... But... it isn’t happening any more.... The era lasted almost exactly 10 years.... The political precondition was the giddy atmosphere that followed Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection, which appeared... to reveal a rising cohort of young, socially liberal nonwhite voters whose influence would continue to grow indefinitely. The rapid progression of causes like gay marriage seemed to confirm a one-way ratchet of egalitarian social norms....

Writes Jonathan Chait, in "How Liberal America Came to Its Senses/The period of left-wing illiberalism that began about a decade ago seems to have drawn to a close. The final cause of death was the reelection of Donald Trump" (The Alantic).

I'm not agreeing with the tale Chait tells. In fact, I find some of it hilarious. I'm presenting it for critical discussion. So let's continue. How did America "come to its senses"? Chait writes:

"Trump Allies Appear Before Judge in Wisconsin Election Interference Case/The case is one of five related to 2020 election interference that are proceeding even as Donald J. Trump prepares to return to the White House."

The NYT reports.

Three of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s allies appeared before a judge on Thursday in Wisconsin in a criminal case related to 2020 election interference.... The defendants in Wisconsin... are all expected to plead not guilty to the 11 felony charges. They include Kenneth Chesebro, a Wisconsin native who devised a plan to deploy fake electors for Mr. Trump in swing states that he lost in 2020, and Michael Roman, a former Trump campaign adviser who played a major role in carrying out the plan. The third defendant, James R. Troupis, is a Wisconsin lawyer who circulated the fake elector plan within the Trump campaign....

In Wisconsin, the three defendants were charged in June with a single count of forgery-uttering, a felony that carries a penalty of up to six years in prison and a $10,000 fine. On Tuesday, the office of Josh Kaul, Wisconsin’s attorney general, brought 10 new forgery-related charges in an amended complaint, claiming that the 10 Wisconsin residents who were recruited to be fake Trump electors in 2020 were deceived into signing an election certificate that was sent to Congress....  

Meade was on the scene and recorded this video of Troupis speaking in his own defense outside the courtroom:

"Maps Pinpoint Where Democrats Lost Ground Since 2020 in 11 Big Cities... where Kamala Harris got fewer votes compared with Joseph R. Biden Jr. and which voting blocs drove each city’s red shift."

Here's a free-access link to a detailed analysis at the NYT. Please spend some time understanding these maps. They're loaded with information, and the text makes it hard to discern what I think is the main trend: Harris generally lost ground among all non-white groups.

That article has 5 authors and no comments section.

IN THE COMMENTS HERE: There is support for the idea that the extra votes counted for Biden did not represent human beings at all, but were the fake votes of what was a stolen election in 2020. That's a notion that will not go away easily. Perhaps the new Trump administration will investigate and either uncover the fraud or prove it didn't happen, but Trump couldn't come up with much proof before January 6, 2021, and it might be a disaster for him to devote this new presidential term to questioning the legitimacy of the presidential term that escaped him. Concentrate on doing great things for the American people and ensuring that future elections are scrupulously accurate.

AND: Speaking of conspiracy theories, on another post this morning, Lem, the commenter, wrote: "Conspiracy theory Althouse is the best Althouse 😌." So if you're disappointed that I won't lean into the stolen-election theory, you can go over there and see what I had to say about Biden carrying the "Hundred Years’ War on Palestine" book.

"We expect our would-be tyrants to command a certain gravitas, to be earnest, play it straight. But Donald Trump almost never does."

"He’s always smirking, acting coy, camp, or just plain bizarre. The effect can be deflating, confusing, bathetic. Can a man this ridiculous really pose an existential threat to our democracy?... [I]n Oaks, Pennsylvania... [Trump] spent 39 minutes mostly silent, standing, rocking side to side, and occasionally dancing to his campaign playlist.... Pundits were quick to call the musical interlude inexplicable and to attribute the choice to Trump’s congenital weirdness and possible mental deterioration. They seemed to have hope that this was the type of moment that might wake up the electorate. But I didn’t find his performance particularly jarring. The sentiment he expressed — who the hell wants to keep doing this shit — brought to mind a wistful indiscretion from the grinding days of the 2020 campaign. 'By the way, nice trucks,' Trump said to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which included a contingent of Truckers for Trump. 'You think I could hop into one of them and drive it away? I’d love to just drive the hell out of here. Just get the hell out of this. I had such a good life. My life was great.'"

Writes Sam Adler-Bell, in "The Music Man/Trump’s kitschy nostalgia is the point" (NY Magazine).

Sounds like the final scene in "Five Easy Pieces":

It's October 5th, so that means 1 month until Election Day.

And maybe you think the race is really tight, almost exactly tied. But I'm looking at this...

Biden was up 6.0 points in Wisconsin in 2020 on October 5th, but he won the state with only a 0.63 margin. Clinton was up 5.5 in Wisconsin in 2016 on October 5th, but Trump won, with a 0.77 margin. How can Harris be looking at a win, when she's only up by 0.8? To believe the candidates are truly tied, you ought to see Harris up by something closer to 5 points.

Note that Harris needs Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump only needs to pick off one of those states. In all 3, Harris is far behind where Biden and Clinton were on October 5th. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 with a 0.72 margin. In 2020, Biden won it, but he had only a 1.17 margin, when the polling on October 5th showed him with a 6.6 point lead. As for Michigan, Biden won by 2.78 points, after showing a 5.8 lead on October 5th. And in 2016, Trump won Michigan — by 0.23 — after Clinton was up by 5.7 on October 5th.

Imagine if Harris were up by 5.7 in Michigan right now, 5.5 in Wisconsin, and 7.5 in Pennsylvania. The media would portray her as absolutely crushing Trump. That's what Clinton had on October 5th. Her supporters were very confident, calling those 3 states the "blue wall." And then Trump won them all.

Of course, Harris's advisers must see this. I presume that behind the scenes, there is panic, if not despair.

ADDED: Here's the headline at The Washington Post for you to read between the lines: "Harris is running a much bigger campaign than Trump. Will it matter? She spends three times as much, employs hundreds more staff and dominates the ad war. But the race is effectively tied."

"Four years ago, months before Trump launched his stolen-election conspiracy, Lessig and Seligman devised a class at Harvard law school: Wargaming 2020."

"They looked at whether it would be possible to hack the presidential election and send the losing candidate to the White House. Their conclusion was that American democracy had dodged a bullet. 'We discovered that Trump didn’t really understand what he could have done,' Lessig says. 'There were obvious moves he and his team could have made, but they didn’t take them.' The insurrection on 6 January 2021 was tragic in its loss of life, but as a method of overturning the election it was the 'dumbest thing they could have possibly done. No court would ever allow the election to be decided by force of bayonets.'..."

From "How to steal a US election: Harvard’s Lawrence Lessig on Trump’s new threat/Law professor’s new book offers a stark warning about loopholes that could let Republicans overturn the election" (The Guardian).

1. If physically taking over the building is an incredibly dumb way to try to steal the election, that's a reason to infer that there was no intent to steal. It would make more sense to say that Trump thought that a big demonstration would motivate Congress to undertake some additional process that would determine whether the votes had been accurately counted and that might legitimately change the outcome.

2. If it's obvious that different moves can be made to steal the election, why is it supposed to be so outlandish for Trump to have questioned whether the Democrats stole the election? Maybe they made some of those "obvious moves."

3. Is it too much to ask for some nonpartisan assurance that American elections are not stolen? I like the idea of a book called "How to Steal a Presidential Election" (commission-earned link), but is it just about how Trump might steal the election or does it take threats from all sides seriously? I can't believe that only Trump is tempted to cheat and that only his stupidity saved us last time. Surely, some cheating has gone on throughout American history, and democracy is always under attack, whether the orange man is afoot or finally, at long last, out of our hair.

4. It's not anti-democratic to be suspicious that what purports to be the result of a democratic process could be wrong. Lessig himself is expressing that suspicion. 

ADDED: There's an old saying: It takes a thief to catch a thief. That's why they have to teach theft at Harvard Law School.

"Once again, Democrats find themselves looking toward American institutions to stop Mr. Trump, whom they view as a mortal threat to democracy."

"For many, it may be more pleasant to think about a judicial endgame that stops Mr. Trump than envisioning the slog of next year’s likely rematch against President Biden. And this time, with Democrats now well aware of how easily he can bend the country’s fragile guardrails — and of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which includes three Trump appointees — their optimism is tinged with trepidation."

I'm reading "Democrats Keep Hoping It’s Curtains for Trump. He’s Still Center Stage," by Reid J. Epstein, in the NYT. Subtitle: "As Donald Trump faces a new threat to his political future, this time over the question of ballot eligibility, Democrats again find themselves looking toward American institutions to stop him."

I'd like to think that passage was written with a sense of humor: Democrats out to save democracy long for a solution to Donald Trump that is anything other than defeating him democratically. The judiciary is supposed to swoop in and rescue Democrats from the task of winning the votes of the people. But the Supreme Court isn't stacked with judges who lean in the political direction that disfavors the candidate they loathe. So their hope for a nondemocratic alternative to the next election is pre-crushed.

Is there evidence in that article that the humor is intentional? There are some quotes from Democrats that made me laugh. Especially this, from Biden: "It’s self-evident. You saw it all. He certainly supported an insurrection. No question about it. None. Zero." 

"I mean, do you know for a fact that [Trump] lost? I'm just curious," said Oliver Stone. "I just don't know all of the facts."

"I'm just asking you, I'm not an expert on the election.... I'm not a political junkie. You are.... Well, I don't know the facts.... I can't take Biden's word for it on anything.... Joe [Biden] got so many got so many votes. You know, that was what was shocking, that he did so well compared to what he was expected to do.... We believed all the East Coast media elite that he was going to fail and boom, yes, they were wrong. We would love to see them being wrong, don't we? The media elite? They went too far in hating and in dumping on Trump. And people don't like that in America.... People don't like dumping. They did it too much.... I think a lot of people liked him because he got dumped on so, so much...."

That's Oliver Stone, from a discussion with Bill Maher. Full video and transcript here, at Real Clear Politics. Clip:

"Douthat is highly skilled at addressing liberal Times readers in a manner that makes clear he is not one of them, without allowing them to think..."

"... that he actually holds views—about Donald Trump, say, or the importance of vaccines—that would render him beyond the pale...."

Writes Isaac Chotiner in "Ross Douthat’s Theories of Persuasion/At a time of distrust and polarization, the conservative Times columnist seeks to bridge the worlds of the Christian right and the secular left" (The New Yorker).

"He’s a bitchy little man.... He’s a little fussy man...."

Says Tucker Carlson after Trump brings up Chris Wallace who, he says, is "probably not a friend of yours."

From the transcript of last night's interview.

Trump says Wallace "wanted to be his father, but he didn’t have the talent." And Trump reminds us that Chris Wallace cut Trump off when he tried to ask Biden — at the first presidential debate in 2020 — "Why is it that the mayor of Moscow’s wife is allowed to give you three and a half million dollars?"

Matt Taibbi is back with another set of tweets, this time focusing on Donald Trump.

Start here.

1. THREAD: The Twitter Files/THE REMOVAL OF DONALD TRUMP/Part One: October 2020-January 6th....

4. This first installment covers the period before the election through January 6th. Tomorrow, @Shellenbergermd will detail the chaos inside Twitter on January 7th. On Sunday, @BariWeiss will reveal the secret internal communications from the key date of January 8th.

ADDED:

"I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also."

"The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge. I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it."

Said Donald Trump, about the January 6th riot, quoted in "Trump deflects blame for Jan. 6 silence, says he wanted to march to Capitol/The former president struck a defiant posture and repeated false claims in an interview with The Washington Post" (WaPo).

Trump, speaking Wednesday afternoon at his palatial beachfront club, said he did not regret urging the crowd to come to Washington with a tweet stating that it would “be wild!” He also stood by his incendiary and false rhetoric about the election at the Ellipse rally before the rioters stormed the Capitol. “I said peaceful and patriotic,” he said, omitting other comments that he made in a speech that day....

"An Associated Press review of every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump has found fewer than 475..."

"... a number that would have made no difference in the 2020 presidential election. Democrat Joe Biden won Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and their 79 Electoral College votes by a combined 311,257 votes out of 25.5 million ballots cast for president. The disputed ballots represent just 0.15% of his victory margin in those states. The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not. The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.... Contacted for comment, Trump repeated a litany of unfounded claims of fraud he had made previously, but offered no new evidence that specifically contradicted the AP’s reporting. He said a soon-to-come report from a source he would not disclose would support his case, and insisted increased mail voting alone had opened the door to cheating that involved 'hundreds of thousands of votes.' 'I just don’t think you should make a fool out of yourself by saying 400 votes,' he said."

AP reports.

"I’ve always said that if you want to win an election, you have to win it on election night, okay?"

"But look, I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of how every state counted mail-in ballots and how they were certified. I don’t. But I do know that when you’re running for president, you have to have these legal challenges ready to go. Much as Bush did in 2000. The Trump folks wanted to exhaust every means. But at some point I think Joe Biden’s president."

Said Laura Ingraham, answering the question "Who do you think won the 2020 election?," in an interview in The Washington Post.

That was very well put. I don't watch her show — I don't watch any of the TV news analysis shows — but I can see why she belongs on TV. It's hard to nail down such an amorphous position in short punchy sentences.

From the comments over there: "Pathetic puff piece … the only honest thing she said is that half the country hates her guts. She’s a parasite." And: "Stop giving this lying garden utensil print. She is just another lickspittle for an ignorant, incompetent liar. She has no shame. Hope she and her kids don't get covid from some mask hole."

People have gotten so ugly. I've gotten so I just stand back, observe, and wonder. I do need to give that second commenter credit for the "don't." How did that get in there? A ray of hope.

"Bring on the audits. Really. As a Republican election lawyer who has participated in more than 30 post-election recounts, contests and audits..."

"... I am extremely confident: They won’t find anything. The massive fraud that former president Donald Trump claims tarnished the 2020 election has been and will remain illusory — because it didn’t exist. But audits, I believe, can be the friend of sanity, helping everyone in the political process, especially the Republicans who understand that convincing their voters that elections are hopelessly rigged is no way to win elections.... If the audits that Trump himself has demanded keep coming up empty, maybe, just maybe, some true believers in Trump’s falsehood will recognize he’s been feeding them snake oil.... Something has to change, and the key to that change is to convince some portion of the 30 percent that Trump has failed to deliver on his bombast. Trump is hoisting himself on his petard. Let him."

"Don’t be afraid of the election audits — they may be our only ticket out of this mess" by Benjamin L. Ginsberg (WaPo).

I've read some of the comments over there, and the most common notion seems to be that it's no use producing evidence because Republicans won't believe it or will just interpret it to mean what they want it to mean.

The NYT has produced a 40-minute documentary about the January 6th incident: "Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol."

 

And here's the accompanying article, "Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation/The Times analyzed thousands of videos from the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building to understand how it happened — and why. Here are some of the key findings."

The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence.... We found evidence of members of extremist groups inciting others to riot and assault police officers. And we learned how Donald J. Trump’s own words resonated with the mob in real time as they staged the attack.

Remember when making Juneteenth a national holiday was a Donald Trump campaign promise?

From September 25, 2020: "President Donald Trump made a series of promises at a campaign event in Atlanta on Friday in a bid to woo Black voters, including establishing Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of U.S. slavery, as a federal holiday" (Reuters).

Of course, it was just "a bid to woo Black voters" when Trump promised to do it, but now that the members of Congress and the new President have actually made Juneteenth a national holiday, is anyone minimizing the achievement as pandering to black voters?

And then there was a time — just before Juneteenth last year — when Trump asserted: "I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous." If only Trump were still on Twitter — don't you think he'd be claiming credit for the new holiday? But the truth is, Juneteenth was already a holiday in 47 states (and the District of Columbia) when Trump made his campaign promise last September.

ADDED: I'll answer my own question — "is anyone minimizing the achievement as pandering to black voters?" — with a qualified yes. Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post is minimizing the achievement but only of the Republicans who voted for it: 

"It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear."

On November 24, 2020, on Jimmy Kimmel's TV show, James Taylor performed a song from the 1949 musical "South Pacific," "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught":

This was a daring song in its time, Wikipedia notes: 

[The song was] judged by some to be too controversial or downright inappropriate for the musical stage. Sung by the character Lieutenant Cable, the song is preceded by a line saying racism is "not born in you! It happens after you’re born..."...

James Michener, upon whose stories South Pacific was based, recalled, "The authors [of the musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein] replied stubbornly that this number represented why they had wanted to do this play, and that even if it meant the failure of the production, it was going to stay in."

I love James Taylor — the warmth, the non-corny sincerity — and I don't know why he selected that song from the set of things he put on his "American Standard" album. The album came out November 1, 2020, and the performance was shortly after the election. I imagine the choice had something to do with the idea that Americans had just voted out a President who, for many people, embodied a message of racial hatred. 

But YouTube pushed it at me the other day, as I was reading about recent efforts to teach young children about racism and thinking how sad — how immoral — it was to be teaching children that they are hated,  that they are repositories of hate, and that you need to understand — whether you can see it yet are not — that this is a world of hate.

Lyrics from 1949:

You've got to be taught to hate and fear 

You've got to be taught from year to year 

It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear 

Did Donald Trump just say that he will run for President in 2024?

"[A] Republican president will make a triumphant return to the White House. And I wonder who that will be? I wonder who that will be? Who, who, who will that be? I wonder."

Said Donald Trump, near the end of his CPAC speech yesterday (transcript). 

There's coy cuteness in the repeated "wonder" and the repeated "who": "And I wonder who that will be? I wonder who that will be? Who, who, who will that be? I wonder." It's like the old doowop song:I wonder wonder who who who who...

It's clearly a humorous locution. Check it out:

  

The "who" has got to refer to himself, don't you think? There's also the idea of making "a triumphant return to the White House." He's the only one who's been there before and can return, though it could be denied by saying it only means that Republicans have been there before and the Party can return one of its own to the place. 

Rewatching the clip, I think he's saying "who... who," pausing, and saying "who, who, who," because he wants the crowd to chant "You! You! You!" There might be some of that in the crowd noise, but I don't think it's distinct enough to meet his expectations. 

He proceeds to the last couple sentences of his remarks:

Standing before you today, I am supremely confident that for our movement, for our party, and for our country, our brightest days are just ahead. And that together we will make America prouder, freer, stronger and greater than it ever has been before.

Should we interpret to mean that he will run again? I think he's obviously teasing the idea. He gets something he wants simply by teasing a run, and why shouldn't he play that part while it's new and interesting? 

He may be looking to pass his politics on to someone new. When I listened to the speech live, I was struck that he singled out Jim Jordan — out of all the CPAC speakers. He said: 

I heard Jim Jordan did a great job.... oh, there he is... Hi Jim. I heard you were great. In fact, I hated to follow you. I want to follow other people. I could name them too. I like to follow other people. I heard you were great. 

He highlighted Jordan and diminished everyone else. But this morning, I'm looking at the transcript, and I see that's just an intro to something I've heard before. Jordan was "a great wrestler," a "college champion," who "likes to win." And that's a set up for how much Trump likes to win and how much Trump has won:

In last year’s congressional primaries, 120, listen to this, it’s crazy. 120 of 122 candidates I endorsed won, 120. That’s almost as good as Jim’s wrestling record. And the two that lost were beaten by people claiming to be more Trump than their opponent. So I like those two people very much also. In the Senate, I was undefeated in endorsements with a record of 21 and 0....

So I don't think he was passing the torch to Jim Jordan. Maybe some day he will, but I think he wants the excitement and influence of seeming to run and of having a torch to pass if he decides not to run. Singling out Jim Jordan — to the extent that it was anything more than a rhetorical device to ease into the topic of winning — is a way to put all the would-be Republican candidates on notice that he has a power to name his successor and he's going to make a big show of exercising that power. 

And his endorsements are huge — I was undefeated in endorsements.