US Politics, July 2024 - "Will you just drop out, man?"

He didn't get enough votes last time. Do you think he's become more popular since leaving office? I know Biden is unpopular. Don't waste my time with that. Do you think Donald Trump has become more popular since leaving office?

this isn't directed at me, but...yes? didn't george fucking w bush get more popular after he left office? don't americans, demonstrably and reliably, have amnesia? have we not seen this play out over and over?

things can't be reduced to a single stupid thing like this, but can i argue that the most important swing issue of our times is who is more entertaining as president? old guy joe biden or the fascist?

didn't george fucking w bush get more popular after he left office?

Bush didn't go on a crime spree. He barely even gave speeches. He went back to Texas and became a painter. People didn't like Donald Trump when he left office and Donald Trump has spent virtually every waking moment since reminding people of what they dislike about him.

the number of people who believe in either A) christian rapture/apocalypse in their lifetimes or B) end of the world / human-caused apocalypse is staggering. it's not a marginal number of people. it's like, half of the country! at least! there are like 150 million people who are standing and grabbing their coats while watching the end of the game, or some shit!

People didn't like Donald Trump when he left office and Donald Trump has spent virtually every waking moment since reminding people of what they dislike about him.

ok! but yeah, john kerry obliterated gwb in those debates in 2006, and everyone already knew that he and his administration had lied about wmd's and the entire pretext for a disastrous war. and it didn't fucking matter! because george bush swings a golf club and is painting late in life and we love that! it's dumb as fuck but you know it's true.

Trump is pretty sui generis. I believe the polls and am listening to Sarah Longwell on the Focus Group on what is making "double haters" lean one way or another (or to RFK).

But I personally don't find any of these historical precedents that persuasive. First it's kind of fallacious to believe that because something has never happened before it will not happen. But second because these historical precedents, like even the ghoul Mitch McConnell are from a completely different era of civility. It's just a completely different thing with Trump. So these historical analogies don't resound with me any more than the sports analogies.

it's dumb as fuck but you know it's true.

so many applications for this excellent line. like, just US politics applications.

He didn't get enough votes last time. Do you think he's become more popular since leaving office? I know Biden is unpopular. Don't waste my time with that. Do you think Donald Trump has become more popular since leaving office?

But he did get more votes than every candidate who has ever run besides Joe Biden, including himself in 2016. So he doesn’t really have to get more popular, just hope that Biden gets slightly less popular in a few states.

I wonder if RFK has tried to have any public presence this past week or is just laying low. Seems like his time to shine — an alternative without the necessary party mechanics.

Donald Trump also spent 4 years being a complete wreck of a President and ended up getting more votes than he did in 2016. People are fucking crazy.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/162044/history-usually-kinder-presidents.aspx

https://i.imgur.com/fsNtil3.png

there is also a whole saying about distance making the heart grow fonder. it might seem like trump has been non-stop in our faces since 2020, but that's really only true for some people, not the majority of people. he's been banned from twitter, and news hasn't carried him live in a while. he's always there in the background in a way that other presidents haven't, and i agree that he's sui generis and that no one should be asserting any sort of certainty about what will happen. it's for that reason that i see a historical outlook (analogy?) that people tend to like presidents more after they leave office, even if it doesn't make any fucking sense, combined with vast swaths of the country who are either MAGA, white evangelicals, and/or accelerationist/apocalypse-watchers and are openly seeking chaos. that combo makes things very difficult to predict, which is why i find assertions that trump's 34 felonies are some sort of gamechanger kind of completely naive

Repeating BUT TRUMP DID CRIMES ignores that everyone has known he did crimes for years, 20% of the country thinks it’s cool that he did crimes, 20% doesn’t really care that he did crimes as long as he nominates the right Justices and 2-10% of the country doesn’t like that he did crimes but also thinks Joe Biden is a walking corpse.

otm

OK, I give up. You guys are right — Trump is an invincible sun god, destined to rule over a thousand year reich, and we can either supplicate ourselves before him or crawl into the bathtub, whiskey bottle in one hand, razor in the other. See you in November!

that's not at all what i'm saying. trump fucking blooooooooooooooows and half this country hates him. i think biden is in such bad shape right now that harris would do better, this november. that's how bad it is.

I don't think many people are saying they know what's going to happen. We're saying we don't know, but the signs are not good. We're all just reading runes here. I'd be happy for some good news. The felony conviction, that was good news. Lately not so much.

Hey it’s also true that 20% of the country thinks Joe Biden is a golden god, 20% doesn’t care if he’s sundowning as long as he nominates the right Justices and 2-10% doesn’t like that he’s sundowning but prefers that to fascism.

Pretty sure everyone here think it’s going to be close.

Well, except for the two people who think every poll is a lie and Joe’s actually dominating.

lol

Aw, Hindenburg is too old said some Germans before electing a monster

— Jen "I dissent " Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) July 2, 2024

i'm used to things not going at all how i think they should go. i don't think harris is a good candidate, let alone the best, but it's probably the vice president who is next up, right?

heavily related: if biden suddenly fell ill and died tomorrow, would harris become the democratic nominee? what would the process be?

She'd become president and then would have to nominated and approved at the convention. But definitely they would do that, in that scenario I don't think anyone would contest her claim to the nomination.

to be nominated

didn't george fucking w bush get more popular after he left office?

yeah because he was fucking gone at that point. its not like Trump where he spent his years out of office insisting that he should still be in office and was the very first to announce he was going to run in 2024

I get the logic, I know a president this unpopular usually doesn't get re-elected, but this is such an unusual election, I mean he's running against a literal felon who is running on straight fascism and calls the Democrats "vermin", this ain't exactly Ronald Reagan

at any rate it seems like the window for there being any other nominee is rapidly closing. if they do it in the next couple weeks it will at least be some sort of decision (albeit heavily belated). if they wait until august or september to replace him after another huge embarrassment, it will (rightly) be seen as reactive and panicked

my hunch is with two extremely unpopular candidates who are in some sense both incumbants it's gonna come down to who's NOT on the front page. like was Biden is getting hammered in the news for being old and sundowning on national TV but now it's all about this SC ruling and specifically about how Trump is going to be a king now, which by the way is something that actually does really scare swing voters

anyway, I'm betting Trump is probably gonna be the focus for most of this. and I'm hoping it reminds people of just what a fucking cancer he is.

know a president this unpopular usually doesn't get re-elected, but this is such an unusual election, I mean he's running against a literal felon who is running on straight fascism and calls the Democrats "vermin", this ain't exactly Ronald Reagan

I, too, believe those things to be disqualifying. I report sadly that many of our countrymen don't feel the same. Shit is happening all around us. My own school system, which pretty much blew off the book banners for years, is now having to go ahead and ban books anyway because the Legislature is making them. And they're just gonna go ahead and do it, because hey, what can they do. The University of Tennessee quietly deleted the word "diversity" this year from every office and department and job title that included it, because hey, what can they do.

The bad stuff is happening, and lots of people are not fighting it. Regret to inform. The immediate political landscape that I see around me has shifted much more authoritarian in the past four years than it was when Trump was in office. In a lot of red states, the terrain is even more Trump friendly than it was in 2020. My governor, both my senators, my county mayor are all enthusiastic Trump supporters, not just quiet grudging ones. Yes, things have changed in the past 4 years, and for the worse in a lot of ways politically.

My governor, both my senators, my county mayor are all enthusiastic Trump supporters, not just quiet grudging ones.

well yeah virtually every single Republican politician is an absolute lunatic because fealty to Donald Trump is the only thing that matters to the party right now. but I don't think the public feels that way, even the Trump voters I know sound like they're just sick of him

I also know lots of Republicans who are sick of him. Just saying that the actual political landscape as a whole is in many ways more Trumpy now than it was four years ago.

People didn't like Donald Trump when he left office and Donald Trump has spent virtually every waking moment since reminding people of what they dislike about him.

He constantly reminds *us* what we dislike about him because we're the kind of people who follow the news and post about politics on a message board. There are a lot of people like us, but we're not the majority.

idk I think he's really unlikeable and annoying to a lot of people as evidenced by the fact that his approval rating only goes up when he's not in the news

Donald J. Trump began an effort on Monday to throw out his recent criminal conviction in Manhattan and postpone his upcoming sentencing, citing a new Supreme Court ruling that granted him broad immunity from prosecution for official actions he took as president, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

In a letter to the judge overseeing the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought permission to file a motion to set aside the verdict, doing so just hours after the Supreme Court issued its landmark ruling involving one of Mr. Trump’s other criminal cases. The letter will not be public until Tuesday at the earliest, after which prosecutors will have a chance to respond.

The move from Mr. Trump’s lawyers came 10 days before the judge was set to sentence the former president for his crimes in Manhattan, where a jury convicted him on 34 felony counts related to his cover-up of a sex scandal in the run-up to the 2016 election. Mr. Trump’s lawyers asked the judge, Juan M. Merchan, to postpone the July 11 sentencing while the judge weighs whether the Supreme Court ruling affects the conviction.

The effort to set aside the conviction might be a long shot. The Manhattan case centers on acts Mr. Trump took as a candidate, not a president.

Yet his lawyers are likely to argue that prosecutors built their case partly on evidence from his time in the White House. And under the Supreme Court’s new ruling, prosecutors not only may not charge a president for any official acts, but also cannot cite evidence involving official acts to bolster other accusations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/nyregion/trump-sentence-hush-money.html

I genuinely dont think that argument has a shot but hey they may get another nice long delay out of it

I'm very much step-aside, but I didn't think his response tonight was too bad. Even if it does seem like all his energy goes into getting by rather than a spirited response.

Do you think Donald Trump has become more popular since leaving office?

As a few people have pointed out, that seems irrelevant. Trump won't be running against himself four years ago, he'll be running against Biden today.

This really resonated with me earlier today (from Goethe's Elective Affinities, which Sam Wasson's Coppola book and One from the Heart led me to):

"So all in their different fashions pursued their daily lives, thoughtfully or not; everything seemed to be following its usual course, as is the way in monstrously strange circumstances when everything is at stake: we go on with our lives as though nothing were the matter."

Biden is historically unpopular- at least in part- because he is president during a time of such political tribalism that the other party is considered evil and it’s not considered ok to support a president who does not come from your party. Remember even as recently as GWB, after 9/11, the line was, this is the President, you have to support the President. What Republican would say that now about Biden? This is a different world than the world where all of our historical data comes from. You can’t compare now to then. You can’t compare Biden’s popularity to that of other presidents. Obama, Trump, Biden- increasingly so in that order- these are the presidents of our polarized time and there is just no comparison to the past.

40% popularity these days means you have the support of most of your party, no support from the other party, and the independents aren’t quite sure about you.

In 2012, Hillary Clinton's approval rating was 66%. by 2016 it was about 40%. I have a hard time believing a quarter of the country flipped their view on her because of an email server. the scorched earth approach works.

You can’t compare Biden’s popularity to that of other presidents.

I mean, these are all just data points. Biden's vote one way or another will be another data point. It could continue certain trends, or it could break with them. Past results are no guarantee of future performance and all that. But past results are at least information, as opposed to wishes and fears. Sure I see the case for saying "But this time is different," but there is no case for "This time is so different that having a seemingly ailing 81-year-old man with low approval ratings in charge is actually a good thing."

Way xp:
So he doesn’t really have to get more popular, just hope that Biden gets slightly less popular in a few states.

To the extent there is a distinction to popularity, Trump can also use excitement or agitation to boost voting turn out among his supporters .

A federal court on Monday blocked the Biden administration’s pause on approving new facilities that export liquefied natural gas, dealing another legal blow to the president’s ambitious climate agenda.

In a decision issued late Monday, U.S. District Judge James D. Cain Jr. ruled in favor of Louisiana and 15 other Republican-led states that had challenged the move. The judge, who was appointed by Donald Trump, wrote that the pause “is completely without reason or logic and is perhaps the epiphany of ideocracy [sic].”

You want “epitome” there, champ. Combined with the spelling error is just *chef’s kiss.*

Is it a spelling error of the movie or the judge trying be witty on his own (ie government by ideology as if some other kind exists)

Hm, possibly. If so I stand corrected.

the epiphany of ideocracy

Paging prog-metal bands in need of an album title.

well yeah virtually every single Republican politician is an absolute lunatic because fealty to Donald Trump is the only thing that matters to the party right now. but I don't think the public feels that way, even the Trump voters I know sound like they're just sick of him

― frogbs, Monday, July 1, 2024 8:15 PM bookmarkflaglink

I also know lots of Republicans who are sick of him. Just saying that the actual political landscape as a whole is in many ways more Trumpy now than it was four years ago.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, July 1, 2024 8:24 PM bookmarkflaglink

The landscape may be "Trumpier" but it's a mistake to assume Trump himself will remain static. Don't underestimate him.

His wife is sick of him, Mike Pence can't stand him, none of his lawyers or judges can get him to follow directions or orders.

This came out today:

Former President Donald J. Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/us/politics/trump-liz-cheney-treason-jail.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4E0.204e.AC7KgnwMcQsv&smid=url-share

Lock up Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell? With taxpayer funds? Senator McConnell is not a well man. Trump promoting that post is bananas.

The RNC probably are freaking out, they just know not to Streisand Effect it into virality.

I wish I could find a screenshot of this newsworthy retruthed Truth Social post. Instead, the NYT runs a photo of Liz Cheney. Pathetic.

"Here's why that's bad for Joe Biden"

Locking up Cocaine Mitch is a policy that a solid 80% of the country would be fine with if not cheer outright. His willingness to shit on those seen as establishment Republicans (never mind that MAGA has been the establishment for eight years now) is a feature rather than a bug for his potential voters.

6 percent of registered voters in NH surveyed in two days after the debate said Biden won https://t.co/dQ0wg8VhgK

— Matthew Sitman (@MatthewSitman) July 1, 2024

Locking up Cocaine Mitch is a policy that a solid 80% of the country would be fine with if not cheer outright.

The interesting figure might be what percentage would be fine with if it lock up without a trial. I think collectively we use locking up and put on trial interchangeably to some degree so probably not the easiest thing to measure, but I suspect it could still be quite high

would expanding the court at the start of the Biden term have actually been possible and would it have avoided this.
I think your America is a bit broken. Is it fixable.

Remember even as recently as GWB, after 9/11, the line was, this is the President, you have to support the President. What Republican would say that now about Biden?

Interested in the most recent example of this rationale being used to boost a democrat president and republicans getting onboard with it.

I think your America is a bit broken. Is it fixable.

I mean, no, I don't think it is fixable, the justice system alone would take incredible unified political will to effect any meaningful reform and that's only one of the aspects of the brokenness, but I hear that's "doomerism," to say that things are really broken beyond repair, so I guess I will *checks notes* ...vote for Joe Biden