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The Inverse Clown Car Rides Again
Nov. 13th, 2024 09:48 pmThe second Trump administration sure is getting crazy real fast. Huckabee for Ambassador to Israel and Rubio for Secretary of State seems a pretty clear signal that the Trump administration policy on the Israel/Palestine conflict will be the one they were obviously going to have. (But maybe for the American Muslims who supported him, that outcome is (at least) their second choice?) Gaetz for Attorney General and Gabbard for DNI are truly insane picks. There's a reason why Trump is demanding that potential Senate Majority Leaders allow him to sidestep the confirmation process. Musk and Ramaswamy will be heading up a "department" that I expect will be a Presidential commission and not an actual executive branch department despite the name. I can only assume be in charge of posting the dumbest memes about doing maximum-chaos layoffs government edition and cutting social security.
Trump definitely has a dramatic vision to put forward, though. Scratch-built charter cities (at the same time as broad-based tariffs), flying cars (not joking), Hoovervilles (putting it charitably) for the homeless, institutionalization for the mentally ill (this post seems relevant), stealing the (e.g.) Harvard endowment and giving it to white people who didn't get into Harvard. Half of it's nonsense or self-contradictory, a lot of it's firmly in the "won't happen and would be a disaster if it did" category, but it does make me wish Dems could articulate a vision of change that's not so damn knob-twiddling.
Now that more of the election numbers are in, it looks like Harris did better than she could have, and far outran what one could reasonably expect Biden would have. Harris outperformed her national result in swing states, plausibly saved the Dems multiple Senate seats, did better than most other incumbents globally in recent elections. Also, Biden was sitting on internal polling numbers that were just catastrophic, it really takes Biden's decision to stay in from "bad in hindsight" to "what was he even thinking?!"
It really does seem like there were a lot of voters splitting tickets for bizarre or incoherent reasons. AOC did an interesting thread about the reasoning of AOC/Trump voters. A lot of people really want a firebrand and aren't that interested in the specifics.
Trump also seems to have a unique ability to turn out voters so disinterested that they won't even bother to check a box downballot when they've already shown up to vote for him. No wonder pollsters have had an impossible time calibrating those likely voter models.
Biden is of course shaking hands with Trump and planning an orderly transition instead of drone striking Mar-a-Lago or something, concluding (correctly) that you can't save America's democratic institutions by preemptively destroying them first. If America recognizably survives the first term of the Party of Trump, it will be because its institutions are more robust (or at least more complicated) than that, and also because Trump is not that competent and will probably continue to never take the job seriously while being a spectacularly bad manager. And also because of a lot of individual decisions made along the way. We are all, of course, in for it.
Trump definitely has a dramatic vision to put forward, though. Scratch-built charter cities (at the same time as broad-based tariffs), flying cars (not joking), Hoovervilles (putting it charitably) for the homeless, institutionalization for the mentally ill (this post seems relevant), stealing the (e.g.) Harvard endowment and giving it to white people who didn't get into Harvard. Half of it's nonsense or self-contradictory, a lot of it's firmly in the "won't happen and would be a disaster if it did" category, but it does make me wish Dems could articulate a vision of change that's not so damn knob-twiddling.
Now that more of the election numbers are in, it looks like Harris did better than she could have, and far outran what one could reasonably expect Biden would have. Harris outperformed her national result in swing states, plausibly saved the Dems multiple Senate seats, did better than most other incumbents globally in recent elections. Also, Biden was sitting on internal polling numbers that were just catastrophic, it really takes Biden's decision to stay in from "bad in hindsight" to "what was he even thinking?!"
It really does seem like there were a lot of voters splitting tickets for bizarre or incoherent reasons. AOC did an interesting thread about the reasoning of AOC/Trump voters. A lot of people really want a firebrand and aren't that interested in the specifics.
Trump also seems to have a unique ability to turn out voters so disinterested that they won't even bother to check a box downballot when they've already shown up to vote for him. No wonder pollsters have had an impossible time calibrating those likely voter models.
Biden is of course shaking hands with Trump and planning an orderly transition instead of drone striking Mar-a-Lago or something, concluding (correctly) that you can't save America's democratic institutions by preemptively destroying them first. If America recognizably survives the first term of the Party of Trump, it will be because its institutions are more robust (or at least more complicated) than that, and also because Trump is not that competent and will probably continue to never take the job seriously while being a spectacularly bad manager. And also because of a lot of individual decisions made along the way. We are all, of course, in for it.
