Sunday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Sunday, November 17, 2024
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48 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
Well, looks like it’s going to be the military’s turn in the barrel:
“The Trump transition team is compiling a list of senior current and former U.S. military officers who were directly involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and exploring whether they could be court-martialed for their involvement, according to a U.S. official and a person familiar with the plan.
Officials working on the transition are considering creating a commission to investigate the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, including gathering information about who was directly involved in the decision-making for the military, how it was carried out, and whether the military leaders could be eligible for charges as serious as treason…
Howard Lutnick, one of the two advisers leading the transition, said Trump learned after his first administration that he had hired Democratic generals, and he would not make that mistake again.”
Well, live and learn – I didn’t know presidents “hired” generals.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-transition-team-compiling-list-current-former-us-military-office-rcna180489
You know, when this happens in Haiti, airlines stop flying there and travel advisories are issued.
TL;DR: A Southwest plane was struck by a bullet in Dallas.
I feel the movies have tried to warn us about it.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Everyone who holds the rank of general or admiral in the US military must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Recall sometime in the last few years when Sen. Tuberville was opposing the use of military funds in support of personnel receiving abortion care by slowing such confirmations to a near halt. As I recall, it reached the point where he was causing considerable problems with filling crucial staff positions.
@Not the IT Dept.: Can I just say that these news articles on the transition team are very loosely using the term “officials”. But then again, language is increasingly bent way out of shape these days.
This is strictly a local issue and most here could not care less but these type of articles are rampant in Texas.
However, I have stopped caring. Why? Because Texas rural voters repeatedly vote against my interest as urban/suburban voter. Is it wrong to just say screw them?
Texas’ uneven population boom is creating ghost towns in many rural counties
@Michael Cain:
*Sigh* Yes, I know that but do you think Trump does? Even now?
Scott: after Trump’s comments during the campaign about Hitler’s generals, I’m inclined to keep an eye on this story. Also there’s an actual name attached to this.
And amusing story about how easily misinformation is created and spread using the example of Jerred Goffs 4 first-half interceptions against the Texans.
https://youtu.be/SGu3hhGcstM?si=mK9NZcPo7Tq8o1cq
Thoughts about why Trump won.
IMO, the two biggest tangible reasons were inflation and Harris being a black woman
Two intangible reasons:
1. Trump is a master salesman/conman. He tells people that every problem in their life is someone else’s fault, and he will solve the problem. And go after the people whose fault it is. He will take any complaint and say he can solve it. Two perfect examples are insurance and gas prices. For a while he was saying he would cut insurance prices by 50%. The McCarran-Ferguson Act specifically delegates regulation of insurance to the states, and it gives the insurance industry and antitrust exemption that allows companies to share data. Realistically, the federal government can’t do anything about insurance. Trump, of course, never gives any details about his plans, and most people are content with the knowledge that he will fix that problem. He has repeatedly said that he will get gas prices down to $2 per gallon, which he did in his first term. The only way to gas prices will go down to $2 is if we have a recession. If oil goes below a certain price US and most other countries will lower production. Once again, he gave no details.
2. The Republican party puts party over country, and they are now at the point where the senior officials in the party don’t care about anything than winning. The Speaker withholding the Gaetz report is a prime example of this. If he will do that, there really is no limit.
Biden won in 2020 because Trump was so awful. But not so awful that by 2024 his approval rating for his presidency had gone from 35% in 2020 to 50% in 2024.
@Not the IT Dept.:
Trump has hired Generals before.
It didn’t work out too well either.
In one of yesterday’s threads I saw there were comments about certain military members having tattoos.
I spent 10 years in the Navy and never got tattooed. Because of my hospital corpsman duties I saw a lot of them.
@Bill Jempty:
How common were the sort of tattoos Peth Hegseth displays? ( Crusader Cross, deus vult etc. – white nationalist stuff).
@charontwo:
I don’t remember any but I have forgotten lots of stuff from my Navy days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/17/us/politics/trump-signals-a-seismic-shift-shocking-the-washington-establishment.html
@Lucysfootball:
In the analysis of the 2024 election, there is an unknowable and therefore the analysis will have a huge black hole of uncertainty: namely, how many votes did Harris lose (either by not voting or voting for Trump) because she was a woman or she was black or both. No one will answer the question: Did you vote against Harris because she was black? It will always be some other reason whether consciously or unconsciously.
Trump below 50% of popular vote
https://www.cookpolitical.com/vote-tracker/2024/electoral-college
@Scott:
The rejection of Harris has many legitimate answers.
Being black or biracial no doubt is among those. However since Obama’s election, IMO that hurtle has be largely overcome.
What is “new” is the gender issue. It’s not hard for me to imagine that 2% of the electorate maintain that a woman is incapable of the job, and would vote on that criteria alone.
Musing about Trump’s Mass Deportation promise.
I’ve no doubt that federal undocumented prisoners will be easily found and deported, however I really wonder if states will voluntarily relinquish their custody of state-incarcerated prisoners.
I have no compunction about deportation of “violent” criminals that are undocumented.
But what I question is the magnitude of this group. Though out the Trump campaign I’ve heard numbers like 600,000 violent undocumented – but no real basis for that number.
What we do have is actual numbers of federally held undocumented at about 20,ooo (2023 data) with approximately 85% being incarcerated for non-violent (Immigation charges) crimes.
The numbers (and magnitude) compared with 600,000 claim are vanishing into “noise”.
(as an aside, it’s interesting to note that some of the undocumented federally incarcerated are actually extradited, that is they have been brought here by the US, and now Trump wants to deport them?)
@Lucysfootball:..test…
Lucysfootball
(Go Bears!)
@Scott: Congratulations!!!
I guess.
@Mister Bluster:
Go Bears!!! (Even though they are a hot mess right now).
You know who else was a “private citizen”? Hunter Biden
Johnson says he has not talked to Trump about Matt Gaetz report: ‘Not once’
What a little weasel Johnson is.
@CSK: It looks like the Times has decided to ride the Trump Train for a while. Today they had an article claiming that while official Washington was appalled by his nominees, the “picks thrill many of his voters,” and leading off with glowing quotes from his fans. It looks pretty overwhelming until you get to paragraph six, where it says this is based on “interviews with almost two dozen of his supporters.”
Yes, in a country of 350 million people, the Times is basing this entire article on the views of no more than 23.
What a shock they didn’t enable comments on this one…
@wr:
And in contrast, here’s Tom Nichols, who’s about one step from distraught over Trump’s prospective choices:
http://www.rawstory.com/trump-military-threats/
@Scott:
It would be a pity if media or political commentators began saying that if the report cleared Gaetz, releasing it would be the only decent thing to do. Otherwise it looks like he’ll be seen as definitely guilty. Would Jesus do that? Hardly!
I was amused by this photo https://images.app.goo.gl/kPyPsUkxsFpZymJdA
RFK, Jr eating a cheeseburger from a fast food chain!
Do you guys think that Trump Jr got paid for the product placement?
Atrios has a post today I find interesting.
A counter to “numerous pre-writes by pundits and journalists” and more than a few comments here. Did we lose (just barely) because we didn’t appeal to the median voter or because we didn’t offer much of an alternative and didn’t generate much enthusiasm? OK, I was enthusiastic, but I was going to vote for (insert name of Dem) anyway. Did we give marginal voters anything to be excited about?
I found this pic amusing https://images.app.goo.gl/kPyPsUkxsFpZymJdA
RFK, Jr eating a fast food chain meal!
Trump Jr holding up the box; I wonder if he was paid for the product placement?
@Slugger: Nothing says man-of-the-people like eating McDonalds. On a private jet.
Elon steps in it. Advice re two finalists for Treasury Secretary.
“Link”
BTW, the Airbus A321XLR (extra long range), entered service late last month with Iberia, and completed its first transatlantic flight on Nov. 14th.
We can now consider the B757 replaced.
I give Boeing a lot if grief for extending the design of the 737 well past all reasonable measures, and it’s well deserved. But Airbus is following along merrily with the A320 family.
The 737 is a 60s era design and has gone through four generations (original, classic, next generation, and MAX). The A320 fates from the 80s and has only two generations (original and new engine option, or neo).
That’s not terrible, and the A320 was easier to change, but it’s also enough. Their next mainline narrow body must leave the A320 behind. It’s time for a composite fuselage, better wings, and newer engines. That’s plain impossible to do if they keep meddling with the A320.
There’s much talk of an A220-500, a stretched version of the A220-300, as there was of the C-Series 500 before Bombardier sold that program to Airbus. I don’t think so. As is, the A220 pretty much killed the A319neo’s prospects, and is even eating into A320new sales. Airbus makes less profit from the A220 line than the A320neo line. No way they develop a larger version of the former to eat into more sales of the latter, and even of the A321neo as well.
@charontwo:
Thanks for posting this. A very good piece.
@Kathy: evidently it is only racism not to see s difference between a stray bullet and risk arising from uncontrolled gang warfare, armed forces collapse, with widespread heavy assault rifle usage.
Entirely racism of course, not utterly different situations.
@charontwo:
Not universal but not uncommon. A lot of guys fell into the narrative that our ops in Iraq and Afghanistan were a war against “Muslims”. A narrative rooted in the need to motivate the US to go to war in Iraq in 2002. It was necessary to get a significant portion of the US public thinking that 9/11 had been a collective act of all Muslims. Crusader motifs are natural to this mode of thinking.
I saw so many that, for me, I can’t quite label the guy a white nationalist just for those tats, I think of them as just a mark of shallowness and ignorance, a common condition in young men. However, there has been plenty that he has said in his later career which shows he doesn’t like anything related to equal rights and opportunities for the minorities in the US.
@Scott:
I felt, from the moment Harris was front and center to take her case to people in the last 90 days, her gender and race would be a distorting factor in most polling. I do think many people would not truthfully tell a pollster that they would not for a Woman, and in particular a Black woman under any circumstance.
I figured that it was perhaps equal to at least half of the usual 4 percent margin of error. So when polling in the 7 or 8 Swing States showed toss up numbers I though the actual margins favored Trump by most of the margin of error.
Not sure what the post-mortems will show, but there will always be distortion in polling, it’s just that with the ascendancy of Trump and hyper-polarization it seems to be a larger factor.
The main reason Harris lost is because she was running as the successor to an unpopular sitting president during a time of widespread public dissatisfaction with the state of the country, particularly the economy. Period, end of story. For her to have won under those circumstances would have been historically unprecedented. Many of us hoped and believed she would defy that precedent, and there were reasons to think she might, given that the Dems did in many ways defy precedent in 2022. But it’s not hard to understand why she didn’t. If anything, she overperformed relative to the circumstances.
This explanation is so obvious, I’m a bit surprised so many people here overlook it, instead coming up with more granular explanations that may have had some impact, but at the end of the day weren’t as central.
@Kylopod: Disagree, Trump was an historically polarizing candidate who had been president and left with a very low approval rating. In a normal election the Democrat would have lost, probably convincingly. My guess is if Trump had been running against a generic white male who was qualified he would have lost in a close election. I think the underlying systemic racism/sexism accompanied by his talent for making the election into an expression of rage pushed him over the top.
Here is a piece that suggests Trump is so motivated to be the center of attention, to draw attention to himself, that his foreign policy will be chaotic and changeable.
“Link”
Perhaps the same personality traits have similar effect on domestic policy too.
It looks like the Steelers misplaced the end zone again and couldn’t find it.
@charontwo:
That’s almost like predicting the leopard last seen four years ago will still have spots when it’s seen again.
The felon’s domestic policies were about as chaotic. How many times did he criticize a bill after Congress passed it? Even in the first two years when the GQP held both House and Senate.
What’s different this time is the old establishment is either gone or neutered, and the felon very likely thinks he can do as he wants and face no consequences (thank you, Merrick Garland!) So I expect the chaos to be even worse. I expect a domestic atrocity as well. This next term won’t lack for protesters.
@Lucysfootball:
It’s true that Trump showed the greatest performance ever of any historically polarizing candidate who had been president and left with a very low approval rating. But then, he showed the worst performance ever of any historically polarizing candidate who had been president and left with a very low approval rating. Which is to say, he’s literally the only such example in history (Grover Cleveland doesn’t really fit that description, though it’s hard to know as there was no public polling at the time), so it’s hard to draw generalizations.
What we do know is that the party of an unpopular incumbent president almost never wins. (The only possible exception I can think of might be Truman in 1948, but that’s got a load of caveats which I don’t think apply here.) It seems that elections are fundamentally referendums on the incumbent party rather than assessments of the challenger, and historically it’s always been an uphill battle for an unpopular incumbent or their successor to convince voters the challenger is too incompetent or deranged to fix the problems people are upset about.
That’s why I’m saying she overperformed relative to historical precedent.
It’s possible. But such a generic white male would still have to overperform relative to historical precedent.
Those are undoubtedly factors for any candidate who isn’t a white male. But they aren’t absolutes, and they have to be measured against other factors, including the surrounding circumstances and the candidate’s individual qualities. Otherwise, Obama wouldn’t have stood a chance, as many people assumed he wouldn’t.
That talent has to be measured against his inability to sound sane or competent, which I think turns off more voters than it brings in. I think Nikki Haley likely would have crushed Harris. Frankly, I think she’d have crushed that hypothetical generic white male as well. Of course, there’s no way to know.
@dazedandconfused:
Almost inevitable. But not necessary. Even W made a statement or two that we weren’t at war with Islam, although possibly just to inoculate himself against criticism. There are about 2 billion Muslims in the world. I’d as soon not go to war with all of them.
As to Hegseth, his chest and arm look like the back window on a III%er’s pickup. “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Here is Tim Snyder on how prevalent fake Harris ads created by Musk’s people were used to damage Harris. Snyder thinks this was a major factor.
“Snyder“
The Snyder piece contains a link to WaPo, here is a gift link:
“Gift”
etc. etc.
Trump is calling for Ann Selzer to be investigated for election fraud on the grounds that she predicted Iowa would go for Harris.
@CSK: This is why I’m keeping my head down for the next 4 years. I can’t leave, I am bound to my land and cattle, and the way he’s sounding, I really would not be surprised if, after they get bored with deporting immigrants, they set up a “truth and patriotism” commission, a la the way they rounded up Japanese people and took all their assets.
If I could leave, I’d go on the Skip Forward cruise. 4 years out of the country. Never been a fan of boats, but I’ve never thought I might get sent to a camp and my assets seized for not supporting the biggest con man in the history of con mans, either.
That’s where we’re at.
It’s the third week of November, and we still have 2024 election ads in Pennsylvania. In the US Senate race between Casey (D) and McCormick (R), the McCormick side is running ads calling Democrats “sore losers” and Bob Casey an “election denier”.
You see, Casey had the audacity to not waive his right to the automatic statewide recount that was triggered by the vote margin of less than 0.5 percent. Probably more importantly, the original vote count isn’t finished and McCormick’s lead has been cut in half over the last week to about 17 thousand votes. Still not a good position for Casey at this point, but perhaps the small percentage of remaining ballots, including provisional and mail-in ballots that were set aside for various reasons, could move the needle. Lots of litigation, of course, so the courts will have something to say about which ballots must be and cannot be counted.
But for now, more campaign ads and name-calling. What’s that say about the McCormick side. Are they bracing for a possible loss? Are they exploiting the situation to try to normalize and/or both-sides election denial?
@gVOR10:
Yes, it had to be a carefully laid out psy-op. A “war on terror”, but everybody knew who those guys were.